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There’s a short period when a teenager is learning to drive where they describe the sensation as the world rushing at them and admit, in a very un-teenager like way, that driving is harder than it seems.

Of course, this admission is never repeated. The human brain, it is said, may be best at filtering out unnecessary information rather than gathering it or even processing it.

Within minutes, the overwhelming onrush of data gets filtered down into a managable stream of only the most pertinent bits.

For me, jumping into the Grateful Dead with both feet at this late date in their career and in my extended adolescence has felt much like the young driver feels at first.

The sheer volume, thousands of shows, over four decades, often three hours long, over several dozen songs typically played at each, never a repeated set-list, nearly every show available online for downloading or streaming, in various incarnations, soundboards, audience and matrix, from various sources (board mixes from Betty Cantor, Bear, Dan Healy and others), it’s just total overload.

There’s just no way to stick to an organized dive through the pile, and no fun in resisting the natural urges to follow hunches and personal peccadilloes. I tend to like repetition. If I like a song or a specific performance, I want to play it to death before moving on.

Having struck a rich vein in the May 1977 shows, I have moved laterally amongst them.

Urges abound, such as to become a reviewer, a teacher, a polemicist, a scold. Urges to be resisted.

In retrospect, I think my fear as a teenager — that my personality would not allow me to be a reasonable part-time Grateful Dead fan while maintaining other passions — was well-founded. My decision to defer exploring was a wise one, if only from the perspective of a guy now listening to the Dead the entire 18 hours he is awake, whether by iPod, computer, car or sometimes computer and laptop simultaneously (playing a download while surfing the Internet Archive for specific points of comparison).

Since it is impossible to be unaware of the archivist’s dream that is the Grateful Dead live canon, I wonder whether those coming to the band post-Jerry (and post-Internet age) are all self-selecting obsessive-compulsive completists?

In other words, are we attracted by the data structure or by the music? Not to say the music isn’t keeping me here, it is way beyond my expectations and brings repeated and great joy, but is the obsession fueled by the fact that the music is there in such overwhelming volume to be surmounted?

As I have never attended a Grateful Dead show, or any show of an affiliated band or performer, when I listen to the “tapes” — now wholly in digital format — I am truly listening to the music.

Unlike those shows of other bands that I actually saw in person, where my mind can wander to the excitement of the night in question, the cost of tickets, the company I kept, the pre- and post- show routines or the striking visuals, I have no reference point for the Grateful Dead other than a few minutes of video (so far).

So I am actually listening to the music, and I imagine many others are too.

This fascinates me, because even though I have been involved as an enthusiast with other bands and other fans over the years, I have come to the conclusion that I am an extremist as far as listening to the music is concerned.

I have been a member of large online groups who discuss one band every day for a decade, and you can count the posts on two hands where the actual music has been discussed.  Something more than “great show”, or “awesome set list”, or “wow, two hour show” — but actual comments on the playing or singing as compared to other shows or even the official recording.

Perhaps it is an affliction, to hear bum notes in an otherwise beautiful improvisational solo, an uninspired tempo, a singer talk-singing through an overplayed tune, a guitar lost in the mix, a keyboard with a cheesy tone.

To even understand that a solo was played at all.  To watch the musicians rather than the videos played on the backdrop behind the stage.  To notice a keyboard player causing a change in direction for the rest of the band.

I might sound judgmental, and I don’t want to be holding the way I experience music up as the only way, but given the amount of live music resources available to Grateful Dead fans, there must be an unparalleled number of fans of the band who actually listen to the music closely, compared to most other bands.

And I would bet it is still a relatively small percentage of total GD fans.

It occurs to me that some Dead fans may be using the tapes to reenact a concert scene, with all of the recreational elements that that entails.  Imagining each of the three sets as distinct endeavors, each with a different purpose in the overall experience.

The customary long length of the shows is striking to me, and helps me understand the lifestyle aspect a bit better.  Both band and audience were making a large commitment to each other, and that doesn’t even begin to include the time other than performance time on stage required to attend and put on a show.

It is dawning on me that the multi-set approach, the languid jams, the sheer elements of drone and repetition were all to be expected each performance — and that the shows had their own circadian rhythm, something predictable, unpredictable and reassuring all at once.

Listening to a whole show, for me, means sitting at my computer or on my sofa, doing something else, for a stretch of the day or night.  I don’t have to stand in a large crowd, there is no weather, nothing unpredictable really happens, I am not at the mercy of food, drink or other inputs of perhaps unknowable provenance or effect, there are no travel worries or scheduling worries, no friends to inject something unexpected.

The volume is reasonable if not downright quiet, given the other tasks in progress and need not to disturb those nearby.

My own listening experience may be as peculiar as anyone else’s approach to attending a show — and I want to remember that.  The person who judges a show based on the parking lot scene or the activities conducted during intermission is no different from a guy listening 30 years later to a soundboard tape while performing some other task in a placid and controlled environment, listening for how the bass player goads the guitarists into something new.

It’s all absolutely meaningful to me, as an individual, while being perhaps non-representative or even antithetical to someone else.

I have been surprised and somewhat comforted by the commenters to this blog thus far, who largely are folks who keenly enjoy listening to these musical artifacts.  I have been waiting for someone, or many someones, to come along and tell me I am not seeing the forest for the trees, or am missing the spirit intended by the band, or of the scene at large.

It hasn’t occurred yet.  But when it does I hope to receive it with an open mind.