I grew up in Missoula, Montana. It is an oasis of liberal thought and attitude in the state. It would be such an oasis in most states. Montana tends to be libertarian with a small “L.” You may do what you like, as long as you don’t have to cross my land to do it. Missoula adds a healthy (nay, overwhelming) dose of laissez-faire liberalism. It’s laid-back even for a college town: a crossroads and a flytrap for grizzled drifters, shiftless kids, burnouts young and old, and people with their shit more together who just want to get off the rest of the world for, like, ever, man.
The last time I was in Missoula, it was absolutely covered with marijuana. The town’s noted laxness, collegiate population, and strategic importance (on I-90 and an easy schlep to Canada) have made it a popular lay-by for the drug trade, but recent legalization by referendum of ‘medical marijuana’ opened the floodgates. Dispensaries were everywhere. In-house doctors, myriad strains per place. The works, potsmoker near-Nirvana. A heretofore more-or-less suppressed aspect of the town’s personality had been allowed to take the wheel and drive the place pretty far out there, and quickly. I am no prude and would just as soon see pot legal as not, but I was stunned. Every local to whom I commented, my parents, old friends, parents of friends, friends of friends, just shrugged. It’s not on my land, I can overlook it, not in a position to care about it one way or the other.
Growing up in Missoula, I was surrounded by an awful lot of music typical of this kind of environment. Hippie standbys of shitty electric blues, any boogie varietal, absolutely anything with a reggae upstroke. And most assuredly anything that conjured up, mimicked, aped slavishly the creaky meanderings of the Grateful Dead.
The Dead were a mystery to me. I felt like I understood the rest of it. I liked an awful lot of reggae, understood weed especially when cocktailed with its Missoula sidecar of any kind of beer, got how it kind of flattened everything out to the point where something like Buju Banton or Burning Spear completely phoning it in wouldn’t sound terrible. I saw the line from Elmore James to Son House to BB King to Robert Cray (who played Missoula constantly early in his career) to whatever fossil or playactor was at the Top Hat on a given weekend. Boogie is boogie; it’s never good and any variety of it is going to make a hippie dance, and let’s try to pretend it doesn’t exist beyond that. But the Dead. Bafflement. The slippery playing felt lazy, not relaxed. Are they really polyrhythms when you’re just playing whatever the hell you want? The sounds they created were so tiny and dorky. The songs were occasionally OK, often pointless, occasionally so stupidly diffuse that they were almost not there but there sure enough, no matter how you wished they weren’t. I didn’t get it.
I worked at used record stores during my formative years, good ones, and filing records one day, I realized we had copies of every single Warner Brothers/Arista-issued Grateful Dead record in the store. In the Dark had just been released; as I recall the total was 18 records, which I only remember because I was 18yrs old at the time. I apprised my friend Tom Kipp of these facts. Tom is a few years older than me, enough to have a head start as a student of music and far more obsessive about it than I have ever been (and I have always been somewhat obsessive about it). I suggested we spend the weekend, Friday evening through however long it took into Sunday, working our way through the entire catalog. Tom agreed immediately, as expected.
Wake of the Flood was all right, American Beauty was all right, and Workingman’s Dead was actually a pretty decent album. The other records had their moments. I figured ten or fifteen minutes of notable guitar playing, some singing that was appealingly broken, and a very occasional turn of phrase that was interesting. Over eighteen records, several of them double albums. The rest of it ranged from pedestrian to foggy-headed to annoyingly lame, and I figured I’d figured it out.
When you buy a car, especially today, chances are very good that you are going to get more technology on it than you need or want. They all come crammed with backup cameras and shitty electronic compasses and self-leveling headlights and navigation systems that will be out of date in two years. You can’t work on them, you need a computer to do a tune-up, but they have zoned heating and rain-sensing headlights. Such is automotive life in the modern age. A couple of years ago, we bought a new family car, and one of the seemingly unnecessary things it had on it was satellite radio.
Satellite radio is one of those things you don’t need until you have it, at which point access to the Andrew Loog Oldham and Kim Fowley shows on the Garage station seems pretty important. Access to the Margaritaville station, not so much, and I found myself for kicks landing on the Grateful Dead station with some frequency. Remarkable to hear my lovely wife evince such immediate disgust. A casual musician in her youth, yet so viscerally affected by the offensiveness of that particular guitar sound. My lovely daughter whining, instantly, literally the moment the pitter-pat of multiple drum kits plus hand percussion came spilling from the speakers. It was better than playing the I’m Going to Change My Name game or the What is your Favorite Billy Joel Song game or any other thing I had ever done to annoy my loved ones intentionally.
[to be continued]