My Grateful Dead Story

I was never a Deadhead. In the fall of 1985, while a junior at the University of South Carolina, I suppose I had probably heard "Truckin,'" but likely nothing else. (The Dead's only bona fide hit single, "Touch of Grey," was still a couple of years away.) Meanwhile, my roommate and best friend Ken was a casual fan at best; he had a few Dead albums, but his real musical passion was David Bowie.

But when we heard that the Dead would be playing at the Carolina Coliseum on October 31, Ken decided we should go. I wasn't all that interested, but it sounded like a fun way to spend an evening. Perhaps more importantly, seeing the Grateful Dead play live -- on Halloween, no less -- sounded like an experience worth having, just so I could say I did it. (It's worth noting that concert tickets were much, much cheaper in those days, so it was also something a couple of college students could do more or less on a whim.) And so on October 31, as kids everywhere were heading out for trick-or-treating, Ken and I walked from our dorm to the coliseum less than half a mile away.

I ended up enjoying the concert more than I expected to, although it was certainly unlike any other I'd ever attended (and indeed unlike any I've attended since). There was a festival atmosphere, the coliseum overrun with legions of Deadheads (some of whom were the obsessed fans who literally followed the band around the country). Many were dressed in outlandish hippie costumes, but it was not at all clear to me to what extent that was due to it being Halloween. But the feeling was genial and laid-back. For lack of a better word, mellow.

And the performance itself was not at all what I expected. Given the band's massive reputation, I was surprised by their understated approach. There was no elaborate stage production, no pyrotechnics, no overblown showiness. At showtime, the band members simply walked out, picked up their instruments, and began to play. There was no banter between songs; in fact they did not speak to the audience at all during the entire show, except to say "Thank y'all; we'll be back in a little bit," at the end of the first set, and "Thanks" again at the end of the show.

But what surprised me most was how good they sounded. At every rock concert I'd been to before, the PA system was cranked up to high volume, emitting a powerful sound, but which made it hard to hear anything clearly. The Dead didn't do that. They kept the volume reasonable. Loud enough to be heard clearly, but no louder. The sound was clean and clear, sounding more like an intimate living-room concert than a coliseum show.

Neither Ken nor I recognized a single song they played during the show. But there was one song that we both later agreed had been our favorite; judging by the lyrics (which we could hear clearly), we guessed that the song was called "Looks Like Rain." I liked it enough that I wanted to hear it again, and in the days after the concert I tried to track it down.

This was no simple matter in 1985. The only way I knew to find a song by title was to look it up in Phonolog, a massive directory of recorded music that you could find in record stores. If the store didn't stock something you wanted, you could find it in Phonolog and have the record store order a copy. Based on what I found, there was no song called "Looks Like Rain" on any of the Dead's albums, but I did find that it was a track on an album called Ace, a solo project by Dead guitarist Bob Weir.

It wasn't available as a single, though, and while I wanted to hear the song again, I wasn't prepared to special-order an entire album by an artist I knew so little about. I dropped it there and did not pursue the matter any further. But I never forgot the song, which had made such an indelible impression on me that even years later I could remember what it sounded like — based on that one performance I heard in 1985.

I figured that was the end of the story. But it seems that if you wait long enough, the Internet will eventually enable you to find whatever you want.

Unlike most bands, the Grateful Dead always encouraged fans to record their shows and trade (but not sell) the recordings. It was inevitable that those vast collections of recorded Dead shows would eventually be available online. So sometime in 2005, twenty years after Ken and I attended that concert, it occurred to me to look at the collection of Grateful Dead concert recordings at archive.org, and sure enough, I found multiple recordings of the Halloween 1985 show. I found an MP3 of "Looks Like Rain" and downloaded it.

Twenty years earlier, I had trouble merely identifying a song I'd heard in a concert, and I'd given up on acquiring a recording of some version of it. Now, effortlessly — and at no cost — I was able to acquire not only a recording of the song, but a recording of the exact performance of the song I'd heard all those years ago. All I had to do was wait twenty years, and then click my mouse a few times.

Today it's even better: on YouTube I can find a video of that performance with high-quality audio. This is what Ken and I saw and heard on that evening in 1985:

I still like the song, and I think this live version is better than the studio version on Ace. I particularly like the use of the echo effect on the vocals as the song builds to a climax. But I'm not sure it's really the song itself that I'm responding to. Watching and listening now, forty years later, I can still hear the energy of the crowd, the crowd that Ken and I were a part of; and I suspect it was that energy -- the warmth, the party atmosphere, the general goodwill of what was after all a very mellow audience -- that contributed to what I felt when I first heard it. There was magic in the air that night. (Magic, or maybe some kind of second-hand smoke.)

My Grateful Dead story has a curious epilogue.

In 1991, six years after that Halloween concert, I was at the University of North Carolina, laboring away on a master's thesis called Free Speech In Cyberspace: The First Amendment and the Computer Hacker Controversies of 1990. At one point I found myself trying to track down the full version of a quote I'd seen excerpted in a magazine article. So I e-mailed the author of the article to see if he could point me to his source. The author was John Perry Barlow, a co-founder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation and a prominent "cyberlibertarian" free-speech activist during the early days of what became the Internet. I exchanged a couple of e-mails with Barlow, who was obliging and helpful.

What I didn't know at the time was that John Perry Barlow, before he became a free-speech activist, had for many years been a lyricist for the Grateful Dead. And he had worked with Bob Weir on many of the songs on Ace, including "Looks Like Rain."

My correspondence with Barlow was brief and professional, confined entirely to the question of sourcing a quote. It was probably best that way. But if I had known who he was at the time, I wonder if I would have had the nerve to add a postscript telling him that he had co-written a song that had made such an impression on me.