Shenk David - Skeleton key: a dictionary for Deadheads

Trademark Grateful Dead Merchandising, Inc.
Used with permission.

Copyright 1994 by David Shenk and Steve Silberman

All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Broadway Books, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.
www.crownpublishing.com

Broadway Books and its logo, B \ D \ W \ Y, are trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

Deadheads and Grateful Dead are registered trademarks of Grateful Dead Productions and Grateful Dead Merchandising, Inc.
Used with permission.

Originally published in slightly different form in the United States by Main Street Books, an imprint of Doubleday, a division of Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishing Group, Inc., New York, in 1994.

Often I Am Permitted to Return to a Meadow by Robert Duncan from The Opening of the Field , copyright 1960 by Robert Duncan, reprinted by permission of New Directions Publishing Group.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Shenk, David, 1966
Skeleton key : a dictionary for deadheads / David Shenk and Steve Silberman.
p. cm.
A Main street book.
Includes bibliographical references (p.).
1. Grateful Dead (Musical group) Dictionaries. 2. Grateful Dead (Musical group) Humor. I. Silberman, Steve, 1957 . II. Title.
ML421.G72S5 1994
782.421660922dc20
[B] 94-9192
CIP

ISBN: 978-0-385-47402-3
eBook ISBN: 978-1-101-90563-0

For Charley Wilkins,
dear friend and crispy critter

CONTENTS

Of the trips Ive known, most getting long now, and a few exceeding strange, among the fattest is the curious cult(ure) that you Deadheads have spun up out of music and adversity.

Well into his eighties, the late mythologist Joseph Campbell became one of you, by his own description, and called Deadheads the most recently developed tribe on the planet.

I know what he meant by that. Never mind that most of you are straight from the heart of Generica and were brought up about as far from oogum-boogum bone-in-the-nosedness as JudeoChristianity could coerce you. Never mind that a lot more of you are writing writs than fashioning crafts from animal parts. Never mind your BMWs or cumulative SATs in the middle teens. Deadheads are as tribal as the Tasaday.

You have your own codes (most of them sweetly old-fashioned), myths (most of them astonishing to those on my side of the Laminated Curtain), and totemic gestures (though I still sometimes wonder if those people with their fingers in the air arent just waiting for doughnuts from Heaven).

You appear to have your own divination system buried somewhere in your obsessive scrutiny of concert play lists. (It looks to me like a cross between the I Ching and baseball statistics the solace of a found Order in the Cosmos abstracted from an arbitrary data set.)

Somewhere in that vicinity, you even have what I consider one of the most positive developments in the history of spirituality: a religion without beliefs.

Well, thats not quite true. There are a few beliefs in there, but they are so benign and diffuse that someone used to the linear architecture of conventional religious practice might miss them altogether. It seems most of you believe that people are inherently good and to be trusted, that strangers are friends and friends brethren.

Indeed, it seems most of you are what I call pronoids , believing, as I do, that the universe is a conspiracy on your behalf. If you didnt, how could so many of you willingly fling yourselves into the terra incognita of a month on the road, setting out with little more than eighteen dollars in change, three working cylinders in the Microbus, a quarter ounce of killer bud, and faith in your goofy hearts?

But thats the key. You know the most important thing. You know that faith is all you really need. That, and a willingness to use the synchronicity that seems as common in your lives as causality is in everyone elses. Because of this, you get to enjoy the essential human experience so central to the life of tribes and so rare in America: The Quest. The Walkabout. The Road.

So arises from this shared experience your lingo, the core of whose lexicon can be found in this helpful book. I think of tribes as mind-fields. Collective organisms. Coral colonies of thought. Coursing through their organic structure, like shared nutrients, are bundles of special meaning and belonging, wrapped in words which others may use, but not in the same way . By these signs, ye shall know us, they say.

Im sure many of you will contest some of the definitions and lore found between these covers. You will write (or as likely, e-mail) the authors with your own versions, and the collective story will grow and weave into itself with even more energy and complexity. This object in your hands will come alive. And you know its gonna get stranger.