Top Ten Nick Paumgarten Pieces: #1 "Deadhead"

The Grateful Dead (Photo by Robert Altman)

Nick Paumgarten’s "Deadhead" (The New Yorker, November 26, 2012) is a deep, funny, perceptive, stylish consideration of his obsession with the rock band Grateful Dead. A bumper sticker quoted in the piece – “Who are the Grateful Dead, and why do they keep following me?” – could stand as its epigraph. 

Paumgarten approaches his subject from at least five angles:

1. The tapes (“Even the compromised sound quality became a perverse part of the appeal”);

2. The music (“The music, even in the standard verse-chorus stretches, often had a limber, wobbly feel to it that struck many listeners as slovenly but others as sinuous and alive, open to possibility and surprise”);

3. The band (“The musicians were not virtuosos, in the sense of technical skill. But each was unique, peerless, sui generis”);

4. The fans (“There is a silent minority, though, of otherwise unobjectionable aesthetes who, as “Grateful Dead” has become a historical record, rather than a living creative enterprise, have found themselves rekindling a fascination with the band’s recorded legacy. These are the tapeheads, the geeks, the throngs of workaday Phil Schaaps, 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”);

5. The shows (“No two shows were the same, although many were similar. Even on good nights, they might stink it up for a stretch, and on bad ones they could suddenly catch fire—a trapdoor springs open. Then, there were the weird inimitable gigs, the yellow lobsters. Variation was built into the music. They played their parts as if they were inventing them on the spot, and sometimes they were”).

But, most of all, it’s about the tapes. Paumgarten is a tapehead. He writes,

Each tape seemed to have its own particular note of decay, like the taste of the barnyard in a wine or cheese. You came to love each one, as you might a three-legged dog.

Later in the piece, he says,

So a drug-addled, rehearsal-averse, error-prone band of non-virtuosos perfected a state-of-the-art sound system that created a taping community that distributed a gigantic body of work that often came to sound as sloppy as some of the performances. Each had a character and odor of its own, a terroir. Some combination of the era, the lineup, the set list, the sound system, the recording apparatus, its positioning in the hall, the recorder’s sonic bias, the chain of custody, and, yes, the actual performance would render up a sonic aura that could be unique.

Paumgarten’s obsession takes him places. In the company of the Dead’s archivist, David Lemieux, he visits Warner Music Group’s giant warehouse, near Burbank, where the Dead’s vault of recordings is located (“There was a smell of vinegar—the disintegration of old magnetic audiotape. We wandered the aisles, tunnelling through music”). He interviews the band’s bass guitarist, Phil Lesh (“Lesh walked in alone. He’s a spry seventy-two, thin as a branch of manzanita, with fierce, appraising eyes, a quiet speaking voice, and the poor hearing of a guy who’s spent half his life standing in front of a stack of amps. He got a liver transplant in 1998. He was wearing jeans and an untucked button-down. He ordered beets”). He attends the performance of a Grateful Dead tribute band called Dark Star Orchestra (“It was embarrassing and pathetic, perhaps, to be going to see a tribute band unironically—my wife calls them the Dork Star Orchestra—yet it was a thrill to hear the music played well in a small room”). He seeks out the Dead’s longtime recording engineer, Betty Cantor-Jackson, and finds her working as a sound technician at a Methodist church in San Francisco (“She had on a hooded sweatshirt and jeans, and a pair of reading glasses propped on her head. She has long brown hair parted in the middle, a warm melancholic smile, and an air of broad-mindedness tinged with resentment”).

“Deadhead” brims with inspired sentences. (When I read, I underline noteworthy passages. Almost three-quarters of “Deadhead” is underlined.) I think my favorite is “On one shelf, I found a bunch of hand-labelled cassettes arrayed chronologically on a Stroh’s beer flat, as in the back seat of a Deadhead’s Datsun.”

You don't have to be a fan of the Grateful Dead to appreciate "Deadhead." You can read it, as I do, for the sheer pleasure of its writing.