Nick Paumgarten’s “Deadhead,” in this week’s issue, is a
glorious, compelling, highly original exploration of the Grateful Dead’s
“transformation, over time, from living thing to library.” I think it’s likely
to become a classic for its remarkable description of Deadhead obsession with
the band’s vast recorded legacy. The absorbing opening section is about the
recovery of a batch of old Dead tapes called Betty Boards (“tapes made by Betty
Cantor-Jackson, a longtime recording engineer for the Grateful Dead”) from a
barn in Petaluma, California. The second section is a series of Paumgarten’s
early “Grateful Dead” memories, including a recollection of attending his first
Dead concert (“In the pavilion, the tapers had set up a cityscape of microphone
stands, like minarets, and through them there was the sight of Jerry Garcia,
fat and hunched, virtually immobile in a haze of his own cigarette smoke”). The
writing in the second section is bravura; Garcia comes alive on the page (“But
he played in long, convoluted paragraphs and snappy banjo blurts. Torrents of
melody poured out of his stubby, tarred hands, chiming and snarling into the
night”). The piece moves from strength to strength. It consists of fourteen
unnumbered sections, each one a different facet of the world of tapeheads and
geeks “who approach the band’s body of work with the intensity and the
attention to detail that one might bring to birding, baseball, or the Talmud.”
Section 11, in which Paumgarten and the Dead’s current archivist, David
Lemieux, are driving from Burbank to the Bay Area, is my favorite. It contains
a number of inspired sentences, including this arresting beauty: “The jam
finished with a piano flourish, and I gave Lemieux a look of holy smokes, which
he returned with one of that’s my girl, as though the choice flattered him.”
“Deadhead” is a masterpiece. Reading it is bliss!
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