Dead Heads

The ultimate of the subcultures I referenced in yesterday's post has got to be Dead Heads.

 The loyalist of fans they followed their favorite band around the country and world for nearly three decades. Many of them made a living traveling from venue to venue selling shirts, veggie burritos, and many other things that we won't talk about in this blog. It was a way of life. When the band packed up and left a city there must have been a caravan of VW buses following closely behind. The band encouraged this by allowing fans to record their concerts legally and sell these boot leg recordings. The band also regularly changed their song list from night to night knowing that a good percentage of the audience watching them in Portland tonight were at the Seattle concert the night before. On XM radio there is a station dedicated the the Grateful Dead. It plays many of the bootlegs recorded on the 60's and 70's. It is fun to hear the the various hosts reference the drum solo in the second set of the May 14th 1974 show in Tacoma. And the scary things I bet a lot of the fans listening know the exact solo he is talking about. Now those are fans. Sadly the death of Jerry Garcia in August 1995 brought the end of the band but not the end of the fan base. I can say that my generation...people in the late 30's and early 40's...were the last to experience seeing the band live. I have several friends that lived the life and spent a Summer on tour. I never attended a concert and back when they were still touring I never had the desire. Now I wish I had just to say I had experienced it. Before wrapping up I needed to mention the coolest thing about being a dead head....the clothes. If I could wear tie die every day I would be a happy guy.

Until tomorrow,

Dave