dancing deadhead babies

My parents were Deadheads. Being a Deadhead wasn’t merely *liking The Grateful Dead* it was a lifestyle.

Every Friday night there was ‘Dead Hour’ (or was it Dead Hours??) on the radio and they would tape it. My mom bought these special (or maybe she made them??) tape jackets with little dancing bears around the borders. They were in these strange pastel colors (I mean really, could they not be tie-dyed?). She’d write the names of each song on the tape jackets, and in the Grateful Dead stickered car they’d go. Ninety percent of our driving music for at least seven or eight years of my life was Dead music. By the time I was eight I think I started making a fuss about it.

I had my own organic relationship with The Grateful Dead. When I was five or six a friend of mine came over and witnessed the inundation of hippyness at my home. My mom didn’t really ‘look’ like a hippy Monday through Friday, eight to five. It was really her afterhours genuine self that lived and breathed the Dead. I remember being somewhat embarrassed about it, but I wasn’t quite sure why. You know that feeling when you know that your parents aren’t *quite* like the other parents…I had that feeling a lot. When I was young I felt fairly sheepish about it. By the time I was 7 or 8 had pretty much stuck my nose up at my parents’ preferred music and tried to get them to listen to Madonna or the Culture Club. I did have some success with Michael Jackson! My mom quickly bought Thriller on cassette telling me that she had listened to him sing since he was a little boy. When I got to high school, and realized that even some normal(ish) people listened to the Grateful Dead I reconsidered my distance. I dug out a pair of my mom’s tie-dyed pants and started rocking them at school. You know me…I can rock it all – it’s just a costume, right? Once I reintegrated it into my life I honestly felt like I accepted my parents more, and understood some of the hippyness I had witnessed.

I think I usually say I’ve been to dozens of shows, but my dad doesn’t think I made it to more than a six or so, but that just can’t be right. Regardless, they were all special times. The shows that I have the fondest memories of were the ones where camping was involved! The atmosphere at these campouts was amazing. My brother (three years older) and I would run around buying $1 friendship bracelets and 50¢ burritos. I’d make friends with people and they’d let me play their bongos or let me draw on their feet. I knew even then, that under normal circumstances, we never would have had as much freedom as we did amongst Deadheads, but there was something extraordinarily safe and comforting about these people, and loving and understanding.

When the next song came on (which often happens towards the end of the previous song in an amazing blendy way) my father would try to guess the song within the first two or three notes. You could see amongst the sea of wild dancers who the hardcore nerdy ones were because they would be scribbling with a pencil in those first few moments. It would take the rest of us a much longer time before we could even throw out a possibility. Once I found out that they usually alternated between “Jerry songs” and “Bobby songs” my accuracy increased! Guessing the songs was never as fun as watching the mass of crazy dancers though.

The peculiar wild Deadhead dances epitomize the essence of being your own person, unabashedly. I think that freedom of inhibition, even if it was primarily drug induced for most of the crowd impacted me. It’s probably stayed with me and given me the ridiculousness that allows me to shamelessly dance on chairs! I remember laughing at both kinds of dances and then more or less mimicking them myself. There’s the cosmic-slow-flowy dance where your arms are out and smoothly flying through the sky…with your head cocked to a 45 degree angle, your eyes closed, and you just sway in a daze. Then there’s the wild-flowery-bouncy-jig! That’s the one where you’re all bobble-heady, and your arms are all over the place, your wrists turn around this way and that, and your knees never stop bouncing. Some of the wilder ones throw in some little kicks as well.

Dancing is ingrained, you see? It’s in my blood like cards and baseball!