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Jerry Week
From his birthday on August 1 to the anniversary of his death on August 9 in 1995, along with other Deadheads and fellow travelers, I celebrate the life, art and inspiration of Captain Trips, The Nine Fingers From Hell, a songwriter and the lead guitar player for the Grateful Dead, Jerry Garcia.
I never really got into what was initially, nor what became, Heavy Metal: Deep Purple, Black Sabbath, UFO. Never really warmed up to any of it. Never hated it. Never believed that it ought to be banned. Some of my best friends were and remain metalheads. I just never felt the need for the emotional, physical or financial investment. For the longest time, I labored under the assumption that the Grateful Dead was a heavy metal band. Just because of their name! (And the ubiquitous skulls and bones.) So, I simply avoided them. As the seventies went on, it was easy, too. The Grateful Dead was never the kind of outfit that tried to make it in any commercial mainstream sense. They had no Billboard Top 40 hits and they didn’t seem to really care. They didn’t really have to, because they had their tribe to follow them on tour and tape their shows and trade their tapes.
My first real brush with the Grateful Dead was quite indirect. I was a fan and subscriber to National Lampoon. And when the magazine started a radio show, I became a proselyte of the National Lampoon Radio Hour, which ran weekly on WSDM, “Smack Dab…