© 2003 Brian Hodges - Please do not remove the copyright from this essay

: What do Grateful Dead fans say when they’re not smoking dope?

: Dude, this music sucks.

I was seventeen the day my girlfriend and her sister said they wanted to get drunk and mourn the death of Jerry Garcia. To which I replied, "The baseball player?" The "Dead" was a band that I’d heard about, yet never actually associated with any particular music. I’d always just assumed that that red and blue skull was some kind of satanic symbol.

Actually, I’m kind of surprised that I somehow missed the Grateful Dead boat when you consider where I grew up. While every other teenager in the country was shopping at The Gap, listening to Marky Mark and TLC, the kids in my rural Maine school were wearing flannel and blasting Bob Dylan, Led Zeppelin, and Pink Floyd out of the trunks of their cars. The girls donned hemp jewelry and the guys left their hair long and greasy. This was in 1995 mind you. And I swear I’m not making this up, while every other senior class was picking out truly sentimental quotes by Maya Angelou, Mark Twain and Jesus, we graced our yearbook with "What a long, strange trip it’s been." Even in the midst of this perfectly Grateful environment, the Dead somehow passed me by.

It wasn’t until years after I’d left my roots that I finally decided to see what all the fuss was about. I bought the Dead’s "American Beauty" album and set aside a distraction-free hour to take it in uninterrupted. From what I’d heard, this was the quintessential Grateful Dead album. I turned off all the lights, lit a candle, some incense and a cigarette. I hit play and lay down between the speakers on my living room floor – awaiting what was to surely be a magical experience.

The magic dissipated about halfway through the first song "Box of Rain" as I began wondering, "Is it just me, or can these guys not sing at all?" I quickly shook the thought away. I would not be one of those punks who casually dismisses legendary bands as "sucky" simply because they don’t have a pulsating bass on every downbeat. So I pressed on.

Halfway through the CD, I moved farther from the speakers. The joke from the top of this story started running through my head. Unfortunately, I had no dope, so I started taking deeper drags off the cigarettes. The lack of oxygen buzz was nice, but did nothing to improve the acoustics in my living room. After two more songs, I got up and took a Tylenol. When the last few chords of "Truckin" finished up the CD, I took another.

I was so disappointed. Not in the band, but in myself. I desperately wanted to be culturally cool, but how was that possible if I couldn’t even sit through one Grateful Dead album? I tried again a week later, this time just leaving the CD on in the background while I cleaned. I figured, maybe if I wasn’t inundating all my senses with Deadness, I’d be okay. I ended up turning off the CD halfway through and popping another Tylenol.

In the three years since my first self-induced Grateful Dead experience, I have tried and tried and tried to get through the "American Beauty" album without a headache. I’m so sorry Jerry, but I just can’t do it. And I feel terrible every time. I want so much to be a Dead Head, but I just don’t have it in me. The best I’ve been able to manage is to burn the song "Ripple" to Mp3. I feel like such a failure.

I used to love Ben & Jerry’s "Cherry Garcia" flavor, but now I feel like I don’t deserve to eat it. I worry that real Dead Heads are going to look at me and scoff, "Poser." But no, if there’s one thing I have learned about the Dead, it’s that loving them means loving everybody – no matter what. They wouldn’t look down on me. In fact, maybe they could even help me. So, if some gracious Dead Head would be willing to take me under his or her wing and reveal what I have not been able to discover on my own thus far, please contact me through this website. Though I should warn you, I stopped smoking dope over a year ago.