Reading the Grateful Dead

Nicholas G. Meriwether studied history at Princeton and Cambridge and archival practice at the University of South Carolina. He is the Grateful Dead Archivist at UC Santa Cruz.

In addition to the remarkable variety of contents and approaches represented in the main articles, the collection is framed by a handful of poems, anecdotes, and addenda to enhance the whole package. But it would underestimate this collection’s importance to think of it as a feast for Deadheads. This offering does more than show the intrinsic interest of the Dead as a musical phenomenon; these essays establish their significance as a watershed in the development of American counterculture, not as a mega-influence (in the manner of the Beatles), but as a microcosm of the many cultural threads that came together in the sixties and continue to weave their way through the very different decades that followed.

• Acknowledgments“Halloween Costume Party” Bob CoopermanIntroduction: “The Secret of This Tie That Binds”: The Interdisciplinary Discourse of Grateful Dead Studies Nicholas G. MeriwetherPART 1: STUDYING THE DEAD1. The Education of a Deadhead: A Letter from a Novelist Matthew Armstrong 2. The Grateful Dead in the Academy Dennis McNally3. Thinking About the Dead: Amateur Anthropology, the Human Comedy, and Making Good Ancestors John Perry Barlow4. “The Thousand Stories Have Come ’Round To One”: Studying the Grateful Dead Phenomenon Nicholas G. Meriwether5. Mapping the Deadhead Social Science Trip Natalie DollarPART 2: MUSIC AND LYRICS, MEDIUM AND MESSAGE6. How the Grateful Dead Learned to Jam Michael Kaler7. “Terrapin Station,” Postmodernism, and the Infinite Jon Ney8. A Super-Metacantric Analysis of “Playing in the Band” Robert H. Trudeau9. “And Closed My Eyes To See”: Buddhist Resonances in the Lyrics of the Grateful Dead Ryan Slesinger10. The Dead Play Egypt, Thirty Years Later: Myt