The Last Word
Mayer, Milton
An Aged Deadhead t was the end of the wretched '60s and I was the speaker at a Quaker college in southern Indiana. I expected an audience of half a dozen—the students had done away with...
...My son the manager...
...The Dead family band, the family band that plays together and stays together, have somehow captured and transmitted the devotion and constancy that characterizes their changeless personnel...
...They communicate to the second generation of Deadheads the same innocence they communicated when they drifted together in the Hashbury...
...Why are they white-collar...
...Baby Mayer, the companion of my sorrows, was a true-blue Deadhead...
...Maybe—like phenomena generally—it goes nowhere and goes to seed and leaves its alumni indistinguishable from the buttoned-down alumni of the junior establishment...
...The family Dead and their family extended around the world are what is left of the counterculture that was turned off in the '50s and the '60s, turned off by a patriotism that turned out to be a bloody, bullying battle-rag, by a winners-vs.-losers freeenterprise system that tightened the chains on the already enchained, by the ideal of thrift that turned out to be greed, by the ideal of frugality that turned out to be meanness, by a work ethic that turned out to be rapacity and a coronary, by a faith that became a hard sell, by a purpose that became a trample...
...The Grateful Dead are the band that wears no costumes when it plays...
...Why do they do nothing at a Dead concert but enjoy themselves unconfined...
...The poster read: The Dead had packed them in at a Quaker college in southern Indiana...
...They are able to let themselves go, and not just harmlessly...
...Inhaling the marijuana, I wander around the half-jumping half-hushed hall and raise the average age of the audience by fifty years or so...
...Is it because the blue-collars are busy buying the American counterfeits and forgeries and phonies...
...They grew, and grow, no different...
...Why are they mannerly...
...Rock-'n'-roll—at least the Dead's rock-'n'-roll—is a shining instant in a painful passage...
...A reader-into like me doesn't want to read too much into this perennially astonishing phenomenon...
...I'm a Deadhead because I've seen ten, twenty, or fifty thousand people assembled to shout no curses, see no one beaten, howl no one down Milton Mayer is the Roving Editor of The Progressive...
...When I asked the dean afterward how come, he showed me a poster and said the campus had been covered with them...
...Why are the Deadheads different from all hordes that ever were...
...Look, mom, no sequins...
...They are white-collar...
...Innocent...
...Why are they white...
...I didn't cotton to the thunderous tom-tom of the music...
...The Dead have marshaled the truants, piping them, if to no lasting good, at least to no immediate wickedness—and that, in an immediately wicked world, is super-great stuff...
...I see, and hear, and feel, a whole second generation now of young people carried up and away by the mystique of Dead...
...They are white...
...The answer has got to be a magic chemistry that produced the Grateful Dead and says something to a world stoned on suspicion, hostility, war, and woe...
...When they began, the Dead were going to be finished when they got to be, well, thirty-five...
...They are having a good time in a badtime world...
...Harmless...
...The Deadheads, oh, my, have no social doctrine...
...I'm a Deadhead despite my dread of seeing ten, twenty, or fifty thousand people assembled anywhere, any time...
...They are marching to a different tomtom...
...Innocence of having bought the counterfeits and the forgeries and the phonies their elders were selling the natives...
...They are having a goodnatured hour—three hours—on a badnatured planet...
...Why don't they fight and brawl and trash and tear the place apart and make miserable mischief in the streets...
...I don't cotton to the music, but I cotton to what it evokes (or responds to) in the auditorium, the stadium, the amphitheatre, the playing field in the park...
...Baby said that you had to hear the Dead live, in the flesh, to understand, not them, but the hundreds of thousands of Deadheads who followed them everywhere with an unparalleled fidelity...
...Their acceptance is consummate...
...In a pig's eye they have no social doctrine: Without proclaiming one, they exude anti-materialism, anti-militarism, anti-nationalism, anti-intolerance...
...So I heard them live...
...The truants are not dropouts from the rat race, they are non-droppers-in...
...Is it because the blacks already know how to reel and writhe...
...But they grew, and grow, no older...
...An Aged Deadhead t was the end of the wretched '60s and I was the speaker at a Quaker college in southern Indiana...
...I've talked to the swarms of police, in Springfield, M A , in Santa Cruz, C A , and in between, who are sent out by the Fearful Fathers (fathers like me) on riot control at the concerts, and they are amazed to tell me uniformly in their uniforms that there is nothing to control...
...They are having the nearest thing we see these parlous days to good clean fun...
...Their friendliness is consummate...
...Their openness is consummate...
...The Deadheads are the part-time grasshoppers, dancing while the full-time ants, here, there, everywhere, make industrious headway making bigger and better means of inflicting indiscriminate pain...
...And by having to crawl under school desks to be saved from the atomic bombs that only a barbarous people like the Russians would think of dropping...
...I had heard all the rock-'n'-roll I wanted to—and more, much more—on records, since Ms...
...I was the genteel Dixieland/Mozart type...
...I go on hearing them live...
...I expected an audience of half a dozen—the students had done away with compulsory attendance— but the place was mobbed...
...Their whole social behavior is consummate, if reeling and writhing (but not arithmetic) don't bother you...
...But for the nonce I'm a sort of wrongside- of-the-blanket Deadhead, an old square who doesn't cotton to the thunderous thumping—though I have come to recognize the masterful and hardwrought musicianship...
Vol. 47 • May 1983 • No. 5
