Soon after, guitarist Bob Weir and drummers Bill Kreutzmann and Mickey Hart connected with John Mayer in Dead & Company, which quickly became the most successful version of the Dead since Garcia’s passing. This “Dead bump” can be traced back to 2015, when the “core four” surviving members reunited that summer for the Fare Thee Well concerts in California and Illinois. Even tribute bands to the Dead, like the well-regarded Joe Russo’s Almost Dead, have graduated to headlining large outdoor venues like Red Rocks Amphitheatre in Colorado. If there were a normal year, the post-Jerry incarnation of the Dead, Dead & Company, would be in the midst of a stadium tour this month.
(There are dozens of other Dead podcasts as well, including a medium-popular one co-hosted by yours truly.) There’s also a massive new Vinyl Me, Please box set repackaging several of the Dead’s best albums that includes liner notes written by a wide cross-section of young musicians, ranging from country singer Margo Price to indie rockers like Jim James of My Morning Jacket and MC Taylor of Hiss Golden Messenger. (Who ever thought people would want to smell like the Dead?) One of the summer’s most popular new music podcasts, Good Ol’ Grateful Deadcast, is officially sanctioned by the band and details the making of their classic album, Workingman’s Dead, which turns 50 this year. This year, there have been new Grateful Dead sneakers and new Grateful Dead edible deodorant. There are other, less statistically driven signs of the Dead’s widespread acceptance. And Republicans dug them slightly more than Democrats and independents. In fact, the groups you might expect to like the Dead less actually liked them more - in the poll, they had a higher favorability rating among people ages 18 to 44 than it did with the baby boomers who grew up in the band’s prime. In 2015, a poll found that the Dead was loved across all demographics, regardless of age or political persuasion. But in recent years, the Dead have emerged as one of the most broadly popular American rock bands right now, even as the 25th anniversary of Garcia’s death in August looms.
In the late 20th century, back when Jerry Garcia was still alive, the Grateful Dead was discussed in the mainstream primarily as a phenomenon that was popular among a small segment of fanatical Deadheads who famously followed the band from gig to gig, dispensing grilled cheese sandwiches and cheap acid in parking lots from Jersey City to Eugene, Oregon. I believe, based on anecdotal evidence, that this band is the Grateful Dead.īefore we talk about the “Mid-Life Dead Phase,” however, let’s recognize that people of all ages are embracing the Dead now more than ever before.
But what about when you hit your early 30s? Is there a band that corresponds with graying beards and an encroaching sense of mortality? Chuck Klosterman once observed that every straight American man “has at least one transitionary period in his life when he believes Led Zeppelin is the only good band that ever existed.” Typically, this “Zeppelin phase” occurs in one’s teens, when a band that sings lasciviously about squeezing lemons while contemplating hobbits aligns with the surging hormones of the listener.
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