Of Deadheads, Sceneheads, and the Whitmanian Republic

1. I have been a fan of the Grateful Dead since 1970. I was only 10 years old in that fateful year, but I have an older brother 10 years my senior. A friend of his was traveling cross country that summer and he stopped at our house to crash for several days. As it turns out, he was carrying in his rucksack several newly released record albums. The two I recall most vividly were the Dead's Workingman's Dead and Stage Fright by the Band. The rockified American roots music that these albums exemplified struck me as urgent dispatches from what Greil Marcus would later dub the "invisible republic"--that old weird America of folkies and proto-hippies who seemed always to operate outside accepted channels and who represented something not only authentically American but something good, true, and beautiful about this country.

2. Workingman's Dead quickly became one of my favorite records. In High School (mid-1970's) I bought a copy of it on 8-track so that I could stick it in the stereo and let it play continuously (no doubt to the dismay of my parents). In college (late '70's, early 1980's), I began to encounter my first Deadheads. I found them a rather queer folk, insofar as their appreciation of the Grateful Dead struck me as cultic and exclusivist. Espousing a non-conformist ethos, I detected an oppressively high degree of conformism within the confines of the GD community. Tie-dye, SYF, dancing-bears, and the cultivated "great-unwashed" look prevailed among this overwhelmingly white, middle-class crowd. Had they no sense of irony? Despite this, I never lost my love of the music or the "don't tread on me" sensibility that lived on in many of the band's lyrics. I was a Deadhead, but not a Scenehead.

3. The Sceneheads were those who, in my opinion, mistook the Deadhead "scene" for their final destination in life. By slipping on the uniform, they felt that they had arrived: the scene was an end in itself. But to my way of thinking, the scene was a "dead end"--not a proper Dead end. It was as though a group of people who were honestly seeking something of value in their lives had happened upon the entranceway to the journey that they longed to take...and then stopped, propped up their feet and announced, "We're home." Would that it were that easy. Being around Sceneheads was like being caught in a congested doorway where no one seemed to enter or exit fully; instead, folks just hung out and blocked the path for those who would enter the room. I was one of those who would enter the room.

4. I did enter the room, but not through the Sceneheads' passage. I entered the room with Bob Dylan, mainly, and the Band, and Woody Guthrie, Josh White, Cisco Houston, Pete Seeger--and Bruce Springsteen, who has always been one of Dylan's most attentive students. Indeed, I would often chide Sceneheads that, since the Dead were "the world's greatest Bob Dylan cover band," why didn't they ever stop, think, and really spend some time listening to Dylan? I was often shocked to discover how little the average Scenehead understood about the deep roots that descend from the Grateful Dead's music into the Invisible Republic that Dylan haunts and mines for the very notes he plays and the words he sings.

5. I am hard on the Sceneheads when, I suppose, I should be "kind." But sometimes one must be cruel to be kind. A lifetime spent "making the scene" rather than penetrating the scene to the reality that lies through the doorway is, in my view, misspent. What lies in the entrance is an ersatz tribalism; through the doorway is an authentically American spirituality and invisible polity whose founding prophet was none other than Walt Whitman. Ever since the good, gray poet gifted this country (and, indeed, the world) with his cosmopolitan vision of a new way of being in the world--a distinctively American way, yet one purged of the taints of jingoism and militarism--successors have risen up to summon the Whitmanian angels. In the wake of the spiritual crisis and moral blindness that our use of nuclear weaponry in the 1940's has visited upon us, Kerouac and the Beats resurrected Whitmanian song. During the folly of Viet Nam, ambassadors of the Whitmanian republic emerged from the woodwork. Among those sent forth was the jug-cum-jazz band that called itself the Grateful Dead. The majority of Sceneheads I have known were always too busy waiting on a miracle to attend to the true prophet who was calling them through the Dead to an older American consciousness and sensibility.

6. In the dozen years that have elapsed since Jerry Garcia's passing, the Deadhead scene appears to have grown thin. I do not know what the Sceneheads are up to. Maybe some, like the "Sceneheads" of first century C.E. Palestine, are waiting for the return of the Messiah. Others, I hope, have let lessons of love and loss sink deep into their consciousness and are itching (not for another scene but) to conjure the Whitmanian angels that reside within themselves and to discover the power to bring to visibility the republic that lives on even in the heart of the Empire. This republic is composed of true non-conformists--not scene-makers--who, like the Dead themselves, understand how to work and play together in a way that makes room for internal diversity and, at the same time, challenges others to do the same. Such a republic is not an exercise in nostalgia, but a vision of the future that the Dead's approach to music and the making of it modeled with greater consistency and clarity than the Deadhead scene ever did or could.