You know I hung with the wrong people when I recount that I had little to no exposure to the music of the Grateful Dead in my college and grad-school years.  No roomies, hallmates or girlfriends into the Dead.  Other than the occasional entreaties to join a crowd looking to camp out for tickets or do a Dead road trip, I had little awareness of how significant the music was that they were making at those shows as they incessantly toured college campuses, including my own, nearly every year or two.

I had no sense at the time that I was missing out on anything musically significant from the Dead.  It all seemed so over already, and hey, it was the age of Reagan.  It was before any real nostalgia for the 60s would emerge.

But it was a lousy time for music.  My record collection from those years is sparse, just the releases from my dinosaur bands, those that hadn’t broken up yet.  As a side note, in the mid-80s, students were mostly too poor to own a new-fangled CD player, so we were buying cassettes rather than vinyl.  Cassettes would play in our new-fangled SONY Walkmans.

It would be after our first real paying jobs that we made the leap into CD players — and re-purchasing all of our old favorite albums again on CD at exorbitant prices.  The change to the new format and the ability to resell the same old wine over and over again probably caused the record industry to under-invest in new acts for at least a decade if not more.  But I’m getting side-tracked.