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The news that surviving members of the Grateful Dead are set to tour again--as "The Dead"--prompts us to haul Michael Goldberg's reappraisal of the Haight-Ashbury jam-meisters out of the RBP vaults...--Barney Hoskyns, Editorial Director, Rock's Backpages

In my dream, my high-school buddy Toby was working at a record store, in what appeared to be the present. (Toby never worked in a record store, and these days he produces documentary films and books about jazz and blues artists.)

He was behind the counter, and we were talking about the Grateful Dead, a band we had both liked when their first album, The Grateful Dead, was released in 1967. We went to see them perform in San Francisco on a number of occasions in the late '60s and early '70s--including a concert at the Carousel Ballroom and a free show in Golden Gate Park.

In the dream, Toby had re-listened to the group's music (I guess because The Golden Road box set was just released) and found it wanting. He told me that now, all these years later, it didn't sound so good.

I was surprised. I started to make excuses for it. I defended The Grateful Dead. Toby persisted, telling me that, well, they weren't a very good band.

I haven't spoken to Toby in a few years, so I don't know what he really thinks about the Dead at this point in his life (since the early '70s he's become an expert on jazz and blues, two genres that he truly loves). I do know that I've begun dipping into The Golden Road, and have thus far listened to four of the set's 12 CDs. In real life, as in my dream, I dig the music of the Grateful Dead. I always thought that the Dead didn't get the credit they deserved for their '60s and early-'70s studio recordings (which I've always loved), and I think this box really demonstrates their contribution to the culture as a recording band. I think the music contained in this set--recordings made between 1965 and 1973--represents the best of the group's recordings. That may have something to do with more than just the music.

I probably first heard of the Grateful Dead when I saw their name on the psychedelic dance posters advertising shows at the Avalon Ballroom and Fillmore Auditorium. These posters, some made by the San Francisco-based (at the time) artists Wes Wilson, Stanley Mouse and Alton Kelley, were fresh, adventurous, and in some cases almost magical. They implied a new world, one I'd been reading about in newspaper and magazine articles.

This underground, bohemian world--Victorian apartments, longhaired dudes in mod-cowboy garb and women in antique gowns or outfits evocative of another era--was one of extreme creativity, tied together by new and untried social experiments, drugs that could transport you to another zone and the experimental rock music of the day. As a young kid just entering my teens, that was my view at that time of the mid-to-late '60s counterculture.

The Grateful Dead's debut album, with its cover art by Mouse and Kelley, allowed me, in my middle-class suburban bedroom in Marin, to actually feel some of this new world that I yearned to enter (but couldn't, as a 14-year-old). I think that for both Toby and myself, the music of the San Francisco bands--the Dead, Big Brother and the Holding Company, the Quicksilver Messenger Service and others--was our way out of a boring middle-class life that we didn't want in our futures.

These days, when I start talking to someone about the Dead, I usually preface my remarks by saying, "Now I'm not a Deadhead, but...." In other words, I'm saying, it's not that I'm obsessed with the Grateful Dead like all those folks who used to follow them around. No, I can coolly, objectively, speak of their music. Which is not really true. How can I really speak objectively about music and a band that had such a profound impact on me? When I listen to their music, I experience more than just the music.

The Dead, ultimately, were as D.I.Y. as any punk band that came before or after them. They ended up with their own label, and probably had more success with it than any other artist. They did things their way from the start, and were both unconventional and antiestablishment. Their albums made no concessions to the marketplace. It is no surprise that Greg Ginn of Black Flag was a huge fan--he once told me in the mid-'80s that he thought Black Flag should open for the Dead.

Why, in my dream, was Toby so adamant about the Dead's music--the music they made 30 years ago, when I was still a kid--not cutting it any more? Perhaps Toby, in the dream, represents the part of me that thinks I should "grow up", that I should have outgrown the music of my youth by now. Why do I think that'll never happen?

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