Deadhead Cyclist Archives
Deadhead Cyclist Archives
This Week in Grateful Dead History: Week 11 - March 9-10, 1981
A little bit further than you gone before
The 1968 Otis Redding tune, Hard To Handle, famously covered by the Grateful Dead in the late ’60s and early ’70s (and twice in 1981 with Etta James on lead vocals), featured the lyric, “Actions speak louder than words.” This contention is supported by researchers and scholars, dating back to Charles Darwin’s 1872 work of evolutionary theory, “The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals,” in 1872. In the present tense, conventional wisdom suggests that NVC (Non-Verbal Communication) accounts for as much as 70-percent of human communication.
This Week in Grateful Dead History: Week 12 - March 19, 1977
You‘ll never find another honest man
During a speech in Charlotte, VA on August 18, 2016, presidential candidate Donald Trump stated (in his classic subliterate style), “But one thing I can promise you this: I will always tell you the truth.” But after being inaugurated as president on January 20, 2017, the man who promised to always tell the truth told ten lies on his first day in office and five more the following day. By the end of his term, four years later, Trump had spread such consequential falsehoods as that the COVID-19 pandemic would disappear “like a miracle,” and the 2020 presidential election had been stolen, due to fraud, inspiring his supporters to attack the Capitol on January 6, as the results of the election were being certified by Congress.
This Week in Grateful Dead History: Week 13 - March 23, 1974
Comic book colors on a violin river
A few weeks ago we explored the seemingly oxymoronic nature of Grateful Dead as a band name. “Upon scrutiny” we came to the conclusion that the words, “grateful” and “dead,” are not the strange bedfellows they appear to be, but actually complement each other to perfection if considered in the context of the psychedelic-inspired “ego death” experience the band and most Deadheads were engaged in during the Acid Test years (and, of course, well beyond). Still, if there were a Jeopardy category called, “Strange band names of the Sixties,” Grateful Dead would most likely be the “Daily Double.” And there are plenty of other band names that came out of that same period that appear to defy logic, regardless of how hard you try to spin them.
This Week in Grateful Dead History: Week 14 - March 28, 1981
Left-hand monkey wrench
For musicologist Michael Steven Hartman, music is a direct reflection of the rhythms of the universe and the lifeforms that inhabit it. While his interests in polyrhythmic and exotic percussion are plainly evident during the Drums and Space portion of any Dead concert, many Deadheads are unaware of the lifelong dedication Hartman, A.K.A. Grateful Dead drummer Mickey Hart, has shown in exploring the cosmic common thread that music, and particularly drumming, represents in human consciousness.
This Week in Grateful Dead History: Week 15 - April 5, 1971
Goin’ down the road
Deadheads invariably have a great story about the moment they knew they were a Deadhead. For most, it was the first time they saw the band live, but for me the magic moment arrived a full four months before my first show. It was the Summer of ’74, and I had returned home from my sophomore year at UCLA, ready to spend the summer working at a day camp, saving money, and partying with my high school friends who had scattered to various colleges in a virtual teenage diaspora.