I admit that I probably, unusually perhaps for a dedicated blues-rock fan, picked up a lot of the middle-brow vibes on the Dead over the years.

You know, the kind of jokes where Johnny Carson only had to say “The Grateful Dead” as a punchline and the crowd, and especially Ed McMahon, roared on cue.

California as the “land of fruits and nuts,” all that stuff.  More often than not, the wariness and anxiety that the half of the country east of the Mississippi felt towards California — the harbinger of trends eventually heading to the Atlantic seaboard — could be channeled through a reference to Jerry Garcia and The Grateful Dead.

The name of the band alone struck fear in middle America.  I wouldn’t be surprised if people mixed up the heavily bearded pictures and video of Jerry walking amongst the hippie fans with the terrifying news images of Charles Manson and his “family” from the late 60s.

I remember terms like “acid rock” and “psychedelia” being thrown around as examples of the extremes of youth culture.  And the number one exemplar of those genres was said to be the Dead.  Those guys who were Grateful about being Dead (how disrespectful!)  As I thought about it more, the popular characterization didn’t jibe at all with the acoustic-sounding folky, country and jug band-sounding tunes like U.S. Blues I recalled from my high school days in D’s car.

In retrospect, from a musical standpoint, with my present limited but quickly expanding knowledge of the band’s catalog, it is clear to me that the Grateful Dead did more to revive understanding and awareness of “cosmic American music” (phraseology credit to Gram Parsons, no?) than anyone.  Alt-Country as a modern genre would have been impossible without the Dead.  And Alan Lomax (who chronicled the great bluesmen mid-century for the Smithsonian, I think) could not have done more to preserve these forms of American popular music than did the Dead.

What a disconnect with public understanding.

But I have to think the Grateful Dead wanted to be hip to their generation, and they were happy for their revival of the music of their fans’ grandparents to be seen as somehow radical and rebellious.

I guess in a few years my grandkids will be listening to Sinatra lookalikes and plotting revolution with cigarettes and martinis in hand.

But I digress again.

So it was then as a fully-formed adult with a couple of deacdes in the workforce under my belt that I finally began to answer the stirrings of my calling to learn more about the Grateful Dead.