I Wish I Was A Headlight

A Semester Spent At Deep Thoughts JP

Deep Thoughts is a record store located in Jamaica Plain, a neighborhood in southeast Boston. Deeply influenced by the Grateful Dead and jamband-hippie culture, its owners Alaina and Nick have created a musical scene surrounding their Friday night party: Dead Night. I had heard about these nights, but for my first year frequenting the record store it was only to shop for records. Given this, the first time I attended Dead Night, I could have been characterized as a newbie. I had explored the Grateful Dead in the past, but only on the surface level, listening to the classic studio albums like American Beauty and Workingman’s Dead while dabbling slightly in the live albums. Something seemed to draw me to the Dead’s psychedelic style of Americana, along with the band’s almost mythological history and prolific touring throughout the latter half of the 20th century. I had been wanting to go deeper into it for a couple years, but really getting into the Grateful Dead is a serious commitment and I had not been up to the task. Becoming a Deadhead takes listening to thousands of hours of live bootleg tape recordings, learning the band’s extensive catalog of songs, and learning the dynamics of a social structure surrounding a musical sub-culture that has existed for more than fifty years. With my other musical interests, I never fully put the effort in for a band that does not exist anymore.

So, as I walked in on my first Dead Night, I could tell there was a different atmosphere from the record store I had visited before. The first difference was that the place was absolutely packed, while I had never seen more than three people in the shop at once. Being alone and generally uneducated on the ways of the Dead, I dove into the record bins and began digging. The store has a great selection for both budding and experienced record enthusiasts, specializing in psychedelic rock but well stocked in jazz, house, techno, progressive rock, blues, and the works. As I was digging, people began talking to me unprompted, making positive comments on my record selections and being generally curious about me, a new face to an established scene. Easily, I began talking to people and letting them know my intentions to study and participate in the scene.

Simple riffs gave way to funky jam-outs, which gave way to blistering guitar solos and harmonica solos, driving the crowd absolutely mad. After reaching impressive peaks, the band would know when to fade out through a series of head nods, dissolving into a sometimes dissonant jam that could almost be described as mellow free-jazz. There was a particular moment, where a stranger in his mid 20s with long hair handed me a free beer. This was during one of those dissonant sections, and he was in the middle of telling me about how much he appreciates having these moments to connect with the music he loves so much. Looking around at the group of people around us, I imagined that everyone else was in agreement. As the band started to ascend into the last song of the night, “I Know You Rider”, the lead guitarist gave a speech thanking everyone for coming out. He stated that it was the music that keeps everyone coming back (including the musicians), claiming that he and his bandmates were just vessels for the music. The was just before going into his best solo of the night. I was hooked. Next Friday, I brought the free beer.

As a record shop in Jamaica Plain, Deep Thoughts is located on the main street amidst an eclectic mix of local businesses. The neighborhood offers a wide array of vibes that suit the hippie ethos, from vegan arepas to grocery stores focusing on only local produce. Naturally, Nick and Alaina do a great job of catering to the musical desires of its surrounding community. On their long street of ice cream shops, barber shops, travel agencies, bakeries, and pubs, Deep Thoughts has been its location since April 1st, 2013 when Alaina and Nick opened it up and transformed the blank storefront into a hippie paradise by filling the walls with Dead memorabilia, records, and merchandise. The inspirations for the store came from many directions, the main ones being Strange Maine in Portland, a record store completely full of hippie memorabilia and decorations, and the DIY house venue scene in Boston. Alaina and Nick were deeply involved within the DIY scene in both New York City and Boston leading up to 2013, and eventually opened the official store after seeing too many house venues get closed down by noise complaints and gentrification. Much of the wild decorations and pieces in the store also come from a more cluttered house that got shut down.

The Dead Night was created naturally as well, as Nick is a bassist and has been a Deadhead for years, forming various cover bands in Boston. Using the basement of the record store, Nick began closing the store on Friday nights and using the basement to practice with his band, the Owsley Owls. The band would practice every Friday night and then have a show about once every other month. Eventually, Nick said, “You know what? Why don’t we just stop having band practice and start letting people in on Friday? We’ll get better over time” (Interview). So just like that, the Dead Night was born. Deep Thoughts was able to tap into a healthy community of Deadheads in and around Boston and the greater musical community.

To guide my research, I have looked to further understand the structure of Dead Night by studying the music and the communities surrounding both the original Grateful Dead and the Owsley Owls, as well as how each of those factors is related. Every Friday from January 25th until March 29th, I have attended all but one of the Dead Nights, taking fieldnotes, pictures, and speaking with the attendees looking to understand what powers the scene. In addition, I have interview the owners Alaina and Nick, hoping to gain insight into their hopes, aspiration, and vision behind the store and its Dead Night. To explain my findings, I’ll walk through the music and the communities for both.

The music of the Grateful Dead is one of the great musical revolutions of the 20th century, created by a group of musicians deeply talented in contemporary rock, blues, bluegrass, jazz improvisation, and folk, who mixed it with the powder keg of psychedelics in the 60s that inspired the Americana they created. The Dead initially started out as a cover band themselves, looking for songs that contained “two basic elements… : 1) a “framework” for developing ideas and 2) powerful lyrics” (Reeder 200). From this framework came the improvisation, which is something that Dead fans deeply latched onto and spawned a whole greater genre of jam bands. The idea that no single show or solo would be the same is what pushed people to disregard their jobs and responsibilities to follow the Dead on tour, for hundreds of shows. This, combined with taping culture, generated a devotion that is largely uncommon among bands that play the same setlist and arranged songs every night. Nicolas Reeder describes the devotion as “appealing to millions of fans, but also an expanding community built around the experience of live music. This community shares in an extended musical “conversation” that is at once technologically mediated by the most advanced instruments and sound systems, and governed by traditional “roots” values such as musical ability, humility, honesty, transparency, and participation… [taking] place within a complex participatory network that is available to a wide range of people pursuing many levels of involvement” (Reeder 29). This is largely true for participants of the Dead Night, as they continue to speak the same language of the Dead even though the original band is not even present. Though the Dead created the framework for this structure for social and musical interaction, the fans are carrying it forward within themselves and feeling the same connection. The fans, both interviewed by Reeder and I, describe the music as being “vehicles for a higher form of energy and/or a level of experience that transcends the impact of the music and the experience of a collective high, but nevertheless becomes ineffable through a combination of these things” (Reeder 31). Similarly, Alaina mentioned to me that the tracks were vehicles as well, which is in line with Mickey Hart’s comments that the Grateful Dead were “in the transportation industry” (Long Strange Trip).

The community surrounding both the Dead and Deep Thoughts are complex, interrelated, and different at the same time, as Deep Thoughts subscribes to many Deadhead social values but due to its time and place, there are bound to be differences. The first thing to understand is that the Deadhead community is always evolving while also being deeply established within society. Much like the larger Deadhead sub-culture, Deep Thoughts’ community greatly defies stereotypes, which Rachel Adams defines as the media generally depicting “Deadheads as lazy, unwashed throwbacks to the 60’s who used illegal drugs, dressed unconventionally, and valued collective experiences more than material success” (Adams). Adams’ sociological research of studies in 1987, 1992, and 1994 provides evidence that Deadheads are above the national average of education, with a median age of 32 and healthy careers. This seems to be largely true for Dead Night, as the attendees come from wildly different walks of life and many of them would be unidentifiable on the street as a deadhead. Melvin Backstrom’s critique on Deadhead idealism is valid here too, who pointed out that Deadheads are largely middle and upper-class white people, and are not representative of the American population. Even if it is attractive to paint a picture of “facilitated transformative experiences between participants by enabling them to step outside of their structural roles” (Dana), it is important to note that this has little relevance to Deadheads being defined as fans instead of “being defined by differences of class, gender, ethnicity, sexual orientation” (Backstrom).

The social structure at a Grateful Dead show is well defined, with Mickey Hart describing it as similar to a Hindu or Buddhist mandala, with the band in the middle, the Jerry people on one side, the Phil people on the other side, the deaf people front and center with balloons feeling the vibrations, the twitters on the hill having ‘religious’ experiences, the wharf rats on the 12 step path, and the tapers with their varying equipment in their own area. Everyone knew how it functioned and almost everyone fit into a sub-category (Long Strange Trip). I have come to realize that Deep Thoughts has their own sub-categories and communities it interacts with, with a people who have varying degrees of attachment to the music and interact with the scene in various ways. First, and arguably the most important, are the original Deadheads who are there almost every week. These are the older people who saw the Dead live in the 70s and 80s and had to actually get over the initial hump of “getting used to someone besides Jerry play” (Interview). Looking into the Dead’s history in Boston, the older Deadhead community is deeply established, with the Dead performing 53 times in Boston between 1967 – 1995 (Setlist). For the Grateful Dead’s first show ever in Boston at the Psychedelic Supermarket in 1967, they were one of the first bands to get people to dance (The Tech 6). The band sees the older community’s presence as an absolute honor and a symbol of respect. Then, there are the local Jamaica Plain people that might not be into the Dead but enjoy having somewhere where they can go on a Friday night and connect with their neighborhood. Alaina told me that a number of people have been “turned into hippies by the Dead Night, being introduced to the music for the first time” (Interviews).

Then there are the younger hippies, deep into the music and the cultural aspects of the Dead. These are the people there every week, the ones trying to find an escapist alternative to modern mainstream life. After these two main groups, there is a long tail of record enthusiasts, college students, and music lovers who discover the event, some of them becoming indoctrinated into the hippie ethos. Alaina explains that “Jamaica Plain is where you can be a freak and no one says anything to you. There’s very little street harassment, lots of respect… at the end of the day, it’s supposed to be a party. We’re so lucky that brings people and it’s our favorite type of music. We win all these ways” (Interview).

Dead Night allows both its performers and the audience to have a transcendental experience in the basement of a record shop, tapping into the existing complex social and musical structures that evolved around the Grateful Dead and combining it with the culture of their local community. Participating in the sub-culture, years after Garcia’s death, one can still feel like they are part of a community that is after something; that something being a deeper connection with the human experience, unremembered nostalgia for a less mediatized culture, or perceived musical authenticity. Through their shared values, the community surrounding Deep Thoughts shares this experience by adopting Deadhead characteristics and diving completely into the music together.

Bibliography

Adams, Rebecca G. “Stigma and the Inappropriately Stereotyped: The Deadhead Professional.” Sociation Today 1, no. 1 (Spring 2003). Accessed February 14, 2019. http://www.ncsociology.org/sociationtoday/deadhead.htm.

Backstrom, Melvin. Review of The Grateful Dead In Concert: Essays on Live Improvisation, edited by Jim Tuedio and Stan Spector. Critical Studies in Improvisation 6, no. 2 (December 1, 2010). Accessed April 1, 2019. https://doi.org/10.21083/csieci.v6i2.1310.

East Boston Community News (Boston, MA). “Boston Concerts.” May 1974, Arts & Events, 10. http://hdl.handle.net/2047/D20200928.

Grant, Steve. “Talking Rock.” The Tech (Cambridge, MA), December 12, 1967, 6. http://tech.mit.edu/V87/PDF/V87-N52.pdf.

Long Strange Trip. “Dead Heads.” Episode 5, season 1. Amazon Prime. February 2, 2019 (originally aired June 2, 2017). Directed by Amir Bar-Lev. Accessed February 15, 2019. https://www.amazon.com/Long-Strange-Trip/dp/B071DPRB9M.

Madhu Lundquist. “Boston.” The Setlist Program. Accessed February 14, 2019. http://www.setlists.net/?city=Boston.

Reeder, Nicholas Clark. “The Co-Evolution of Improvised Rock and Live Sound: The Grateful Dead, Phish, and Jambands.” PhD diss., Brown University, 2014. https://doi.org/10.7301/Z0FT8JDD.