Deadhead Word Jam: The Second Annual Grateful Dead Mini-Conference

Nicholas Meriwether

When it comes to the Dead, everyone — fans and mystified onlookers alike — always mentions the sense of community that characterized their fans. Since the demise of the band, that sense of community has taken a beating, emerging only infrequently from the cultural woodwork for shows and gatherings that promise something of the old magic. Most Deadheads have been delighted to see that promise occasionally fulfilled, whether for Furthur shows or performances by newer bands that hearken back to the Dead’s pioneering spirit of small group improvisation. But those events can also underscore the sad fact that the vast audience that Deadheads once comprised has fragmented. This was expected; indeed, towards the end, part of what drove older Heads was a sense of the fragility of the experience, that every show could be the last chance to quest for the magic alchemy of communal artistic ecstasy.

And no one familiar with that vibrant subculture would have predicted that in the wake of the demise of the band, new communities would emerge from those embers. One community has, though: Deadhead scholars, as this year’s conference of the Southwest / Texas Popular Culture Association proved. Some came for the Popular Culture conference as a whole, but most of the presenters at the Dead panels were here for us — other Deadhead scholars, though we weren’t quite sure what that meant, yet. Most were just curious: who were these other voices asking questions, thinking about answers, of that phenomenon turned entity that still has such a capacity to intimidate, mystify, and even outrage outsiders?

For that was the promise all these enticing paper titles held — that the Dead were explainable, or at least worthy of the try accorded all such worthy challenges; that scholars, teachers and critics could begin the process of figuring out what this phenomenon was that cast such a long shadow in America’s vast, chaotic and cartographically difficult cultural terrain.

This was the second gathering of Deadhead scholars. Like last year’s meeting, Deadheads comprised a series of panels within the broader framework of the conference, a three-day affair of ninety-nine panels devoted to everything from film criticism to creative writing. There were seven panels devoted to the Dead, up from four last year. As only the second year the Dead have been featured, it was inspiring to see how many scholars in so many disciplines had been thinking about the Dead phenomenon, from the music to the lyrics to the sociology. Papers ranged from highly theoretical, such as Mark Tursi’s semiotic analysis of Deadheads to Shaugn O’Donnell’s musicological exposition on Weir’s "Victim or the Crime" and its sophisticated "borrowings" from Stravinsky and Bartok.

There were a number of literary assessments, including Christian Crumlish’s critical biography of Bobby Petersen and Horace L. Fairlamb’s philosophical "Deadly Beauty." Revell Carr’s "Deadhead Tales of the Supernatural" had the audience laughing out loud in several places at his witty but serious look at the sociology of Deadhead folklore. Mary Goodenough discussed the Dead phenomenon in terms of the anthropology of myth in her "Grateful Dead New Year’s: Reenactment of the Myth of Eternal Return." On the more purely creative side, there were three memoirs — all published here — and a series of poems inspired by and about the Dead by Robert Cooperman (one of which is published in this issue). Like the Dead, the panels were an eclectic mix of everything from the contemporary — such as business and communications theory — to the traditional, including philosophy and biography.

While the panels were engaging, with some particularly spirited discussions of lyrics — just what is "Jack Straw" about, anyway (we had five separate dissenting analyses) — what really made the conference a success was the camaraderie: that despite differences in age, profession, field, and interpretation, all were Deadheads, and all committed to figuring out what this magnificent phenomenon had been. At the two informal parties on Friday and Saturday night, a number of conference participants sat around in wonder at the dimensions and implications of this disparate and diverse little group.

At the end, all agreed that it had been a resounding success — and a tribute to the vision and persistence of Rob Weiner, who hosted most of the panels, encouraged everyone to come, and has worked tirelessly to put the Dead on the scholarly map. His Deadheadish spirit of inclusiveness fostered representation by a commendably wide range of disciplines and occupations, both within the academy — from undergraduate to tenured professor — and without, from publishers to the unemployed.

All had one thing in common: the belief that the Dead should be considered a proper, challenging, even necessary subject for serious scholarship — and we were right. But we didn’t expect to also find an echo of that old-fashioned, wonderful Deadhead feeling of community in our conventicle in the desert. Rob put it best when he said, at the end of a panel on the last day of the conference, "This is it, the life after the Dead — and we’ve got it."

The Second Annual Grateful Dead Mini-Conference At the 20th Annual Meeting of The Southwest/Texas Popular Culture Association

February 25 — 27, 1999 / Sheraton Old Town, Albuquerque, NM

Papers Presented:

Stephen Allen, "‘Farewell to You Old Southern Skies.’"

Barry Barnes, "Deadhead: Logistics of a Rock ’n Roll Legend."

Vaughan Black, "The Grateful Dead and American Legal Culture."

Revell Carr, "Deadhead Tales of the Supernatural: A Folkloristic Analysis."

Robert Cooperman, "Grateful Dead Poetry."

Christian Crumlish, "‘And I Done Some Time:’ Bobby Petersen’s Influence on the Drifter Mystique in Grateful Dead Texts."

Horace L. Fairlamb, "Deadly Beauty."

William Gillespie "The Grateful Dead Aesthetic: Hyper-Reality in Hyper-Space."

Mary Goodenough, "Grateful Dead New Year’s: Reenactment of the Myth of Eternal Return."

David Habbel, "The Grateful Dead and Mass Organization of Personal Ecstasy and Transcendence."

Alan R. Lehman, "‘If I knew the Way:’ A Grateful Dead Potpourri."

Mark Lewandowski, "The Outsider’s Journey in the Lyrics of Robert Hunter."

Timothy Lynch, "‘Half a Mile From Tucson by the Morning Light:’ Images of the American West in the Music of the Grateful Dead."

Mary Ann Martinez, "‘Dupree Come Out with a Losing Hand:’ Fate and Fatalism in the lyrics of Robert Hunter."

Nicholas Meriwether, "Robert Hunter and William Faulkner: Inspiration, Influence, and ‘Must Have Been the Roses.’"

Chris Norden, "Gone Are the Days: Neo-Orality and the Restoration of Community in Native American Novels and the Grateful Dead: An Ecological Perspective."

Shaugn O’Donnell, "Bobby, Bela, and Igor: Borrowings in ‘Victim or the Crime.’"

Dale Osofsky, "The Resacralization of American Culture: Lord Buckley, Jerry Garcia, ‘the Naz,’ and ‘Ripple.’"

Daphne Shafer, "Fire Motifs in the Music of the Grateful Dead."

Lans Smith, "Remembering the Dead."

Shan Sutton, "The Deadhead Community: Popular Religion in Contemporary American Culture."

Mark Tursi, "Deconstructing Deadheads."