Velociworld

DEADHEAD

I've been listening to Skull and Roses tonight. That's not the real name of the CD, of course, it's A White Album thing. But the point is, the music scene was so bad in the late seventies you were either a Disco-Dick or a Deadhead. We were starting to listen to punk then, but it was an uncertain thing. Not quite sure about this Ramones, Talking Head shit. That didn't fully fire the synapses until about '79.

So you listened to the Dead. And brothers and sisters, when you're a Deadhead, there is no other music. Oh, sure, you might put on some Hot Tuna after 6 sides of Jerry just to break things up a bit, but we all knew Tuna was just sweet filler for the Dead.

So sad, but so cool, in its own way. I tell you, Gentle Readers: Sitting in the Fox Theater in Atlanta in 1978 at one of the Dead's Christmas shows, at 21 years of age, smacked on all four of a four-way-hit of Donald Duck blotter acid was Nirvana. Bad craziness, sure, but when are you going to be there again?

Things changed soon after that. The Dead did their Atlanta Christmas shows at the abominable Omni (now gone), and they chased the t-shirts sellers off the streets, blah blah blah. The scene moved to Athens. The music world went good again. But I'll defer to Rankin' Rob and Jack Straw for those details. I lived the REM, B-52's, Jason and the Scorchers days full-bore then. But I was an Emory grad student then, in Atlanta with a New Bride and no pot to piss in. Those boys experienced the paradigm shift in hyper drive. I only got the weekends. Take it away, guys.