Last year, I took the occasion of a family drive to Lake Tahoe to share my love of the Grateful Dead’s 1977 album Terrapin Station with my kids.
We listened to much of the album, including the almost 17-minute title track, and I felt confident that its stunning arrangement of strings, horns and choirs — a departure for the band, and vastly different from their other music I’d shared — would win them over.
My family sat in what I imagined was awed silence for some time before I gently inquired what they thought.
My wife, it turned out, was nauseated, even angry about the experience. Too “jammy,” she said, a complaint I’d heard before. (Many months later I overheard her on a Zoom with colleagues, deriding the Dead, and Terrapin specifically, as “insufferable.” I love my wife.) My daughter, then 13, was more charitable; she liked that the songs told a story, but I could tell she was being nice. My son Malcolm, then nine years old, expressed a cool indifference.
As Jerry Garcia was fond of saying, The Dead, like licorice, is an acquired taste. Apparently no one in our old Audi would be acquiring it that weekend.
But later the same day, I heard Malcolm humming “Estimated Prophet” from the second side of the album. The Dead seed was planted, my job as a father done.
I decided to take Malcolm, now 10, to Dead & Co. at Golden Gate Park this weekend, reasoning that I’d deepen his interest and, possibly, share a love of the music with him for decades to come. After I bought the tickets (more than $300 each), I played more albums for him, even going so far as to print out lyrics of certain songs for him to follow along with in the back seat of the car or at home.
Entering the Polo grounds, we were assailed on all sides by vendors selling corn dogs ($15), jalepeño and cheese pretzels ($17), and fried Oreos ($17 for 7). Was this a concert or a carnival? For a carnival, there weren’t many kids, though the promotions clearly invited them.
“It’s a lot of old people, and they all look like hippies,” Malcolm told me. “It’s not my style, personally.” That many of them were lighting fat, pungent joints didn’t seem to bother him.
As the opening act, a thirty-something kid from Michigan named Billy Strings, got started, I felt some relief. Here, at least, was a hint of authenticity: live bluegrass. As if on cue, a barefoot guy in overalls and a straw hat bounded by singing along. Now, I thought to myself, this feels more like a Dead show.
We made our way closer to the stage, threading and cutting our way through the hippie forest and thick smoke. After we found a patch of grass big enough for Malcolm to sit, I checked in with him. He said he was multiplying the ticket price by the headcount, sizing up the estimated profit. (I didn’t have the heart to tell him about the Golden Road Super VIP tickets: $2,175 a day.)
“I just want it to start,” he said. “I want to hear Dead & Company.”
As Strings finished, Malcolm told me he hoped they would play “Estimated Prophet.” I could tell he was fatigued. He had just spent an exhausting week at a sports camp, and I worried about the secondhand smoke. Frankly, the kid was probably stoned. He agreed to stay for at least eight songs but, he said “Terrapin Station” would count as three.
Dead & Co. came on, everyone got to their feet and cheered. I put Malcolm on my shoulders so he could see the stage. The giant screens showed closeups of the band members, focussing mostly on Bob Weir. Dressed in brown smock and Birkenstocks, he looked like a cross between Obi-Wan Kenobi and Gandalf, a wizened elder presiding over his clan. Malcolm was unimpressed. “It looks like he can barely move his arms.”
Personally, I was impressed. Weir seems to me to be the driving force behind Dead & Co. His voice is frazzled at times but he still sings with the same glare I remember from 40 years ago, back when he was the clean-cut, sometimes preppy one, especially compared to his rumpled bandmates who looked like they’d picked their outfits entirely from laundry found on the tour bus floor.
As the show went on, the band played some standards, including “Tennessee Jed” and “Mississippi Half-Step Uptown Toodeloo.” As Malcolm began to fade, I was hoping for his favorite song, or at least mine. He sat down at my feet, and I let him scroll on my phone. I knew I’d lost him when from above I noticed him Googling Brawl Stars. I made him stop, looked up the lyrics for “Althea,” a great song played before the break between sets. We read and sang along together.
When the song ended, we agreed to split. After we got home, and I put him to bed, I looked up the complete setlist. In the second set, long after we had left, Dead & Co. played “Estimated Prophet.” And “Terrapin Station.” I was too tired to be disappointed.
