![]() That was 15 years after our “Ripple” conversation, and today, there are hundreds of Dead songs on my phone and dozens of live recordings in playlists, even a nod when I see a Deadhead sticker on a car. Eventually, through years of conversations, we made it, song by song, through the entire American Beauty album. Maybe I cringed, but he insisted we listen to it right then, so we did. “Oh oh oh oh!” Steve said, in the way he always did, “don’t you love the song ‘Ripple?'” And somehow we got on the topic of the Grateful Dead. Steve was in his 50s, but he could talk to anyone, from 18-year-old freshmen to emeriti faculty in their 70s and 80s. One afternoon, desperate for advice, I went to the office of my colleague Steve Tollefson, and we had one of those long, rambling conversations about teaching that inevitably forks into other topics. In my late 20s, I was lost in the sea of 40,000 students from all over the world. When I began teaching at University of California at Berkeley, getting to know my mostly older colleagues was sometimes a challenge. It also meant giving the Grateful Dead another chance. For me, that meant re-examining and eventually returning to Catholicism. You begin to reach for deeper things, to consider changing the world in ways other than mocking it. Rebellion is fun when you’re 15, but by the time you hit your thirties, rebellion in the form of mindlessly jeering at what other people love gets a bit tedious. The things I hated as a teenager-Catholicism, camping, sports, and the Grateful Dead-also were things that were important to the people who cared about me, including my parents, friends’ parents, and teachers. There is plenty of evidence that they also are cruel. It goes without saying that teenage girls lack maturity. ![]() Play “Sugar Magnolia” and they’d all start spinning. Sometimes, I’d be out in Berkeley at night, coming out of a punk show in some basement or garage, and I’d hear the tail end of a Dead set drifting down from the Greek, always, always, always with the same finale: “Sugar Magnolia.” My friends and I would start roaring with laughter at that “doo doo-doo” chorus, occasionally passing a pedestrian in tie dye or flowy skirts who couldn’t get a ticket, and we’d keep laughing as that person started his or her ridiculous spinning dance in middle of the street. East Bay punks were aggro and in your face about social justice, feminism, human rights Deadheads, in our eyes, were too stoned and obsessed with their god Jerry to care. I hated their noodly, shuffling music hated, in my nascent angry young feminist way, the glazed-eyed girls who swayed through those parking lots asking for change, and the “mamas” and “old ladies” minding the camp stove while 60-something-year-old Deadhead guys hit on my teenage friends by offering them tickets to shows.ĭeadheads were anathema to my chosen subculture of socially conscious punks. There was just one problem: I hated the Dead. In other words, being a Dead fan, for someone like me, would have been the easiest thing in the world. Like a lot of Bay Area Gen X kids, many of my friends’ parents were of the original generation Deadheads, with deep ties to the band and its mobile subculture, including a girl from my high school whose mother supplied enough acid to Dead parking lots to pay her kids’ private school tuition. A special series on religion and culture produced in collaboration with the Office of Religious Life at the University of Southern California
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