Why grateful dead

Exhibit Guide. Join Corporate Partner Virtual Events. The Grateful Dead. Year: Bruce Hornsby Inducts the Grateful Dead. The Grateful Dead Acceptance Speech. Hall of Fame Essay.

Davin Seay. The Dead has always been about artistic curiosity and freedom. Bruce Hornsby. Tom Constanten Shirt, Photography: Kevin Mazur, WireImage. Class of The Animals Performers. The Band Performers. Willie Dixon Early Influences.

Duane Eddy Performers. Elton John Performers. John Lennon Performers. Bob Marley Performers. Years later, when the power of radio diminished and people stopped buying music, the Dead were uniquely positioned to keep on truckin. This was Spotify before Spotify. Now, you can simply download the Relisten app on your phone and voila, instant access to good and frequently great sounding recordings of virtually every concert more than 2, of them that the Dead ever played over the course of 30 years.

Even if you could get past the baggage of Dead fans, would Dead fans actually accept you? Looking back, these worries and prejudices seem quaint. If we believe national polls, the world absorbed Dead culture. Or, maybe, Dead culture absorbed the world. After dabbling a bit in the Dead in my 20s, I turned the corner and became a devotee in my early 30s, which coincided with so many Dead shows being available for download on Live Archive.

So technology certainly had a lot to with it. But I had also grown disillusioned with the persistent taste politics endemic to conversations about contemporary pop and indie music. I might have also been a little insecure. As a music critic in a youth-obsessed industry, I was no longer young.

From the outside, getting into the Dead seemed like a vacation from all of that fashion-obsessed stuff I loathed about mainstream music. After all, who likes the Dead to be cool? Becoming a Deadhead, therefore, felt like a way to liberate myself. Now, obviously, this was all a naive fantasy. The Dead scene, like any scene, is rife with extremely judgmental people. But to some extent it does stand apart.

Some of the holes you could poke in that view are the aforementioned Grateful Dead shoes and deodorant, among hundreds of other band-related merchandise. This, more than anything, explains why I and perhaps others have been drawn into this world relatively late in life. Getting into the Dead replicates the feeling I had as a kid learning about music for the first time, when all artists were new and classic albums I had never heard were blowing my mind every day.

Your mind never stops being blown. You put a Dead tape on, and time stops.