Deep Cuts From Covering Vermont's Grateful Dead Scene

Melvin Seals & JGB at the Dead of Summer Music Festival Credit: Courtesy of Anderson English

I hate the fucking Eagles, man.

Ah, you think I’m quoting The Big Lebowski? Please. I’ve been hating on the Southern California ’70s rock band since the day I was born. A born hater, if you will. I have it on suspect authority that my first words were “Glenn Frey sucks.”

(No, no, please don’t start writing in to defend the band — I am unmovable in my hate — or to agree, which is like calling me to say you like sandwiches. This won’t be a column about the Eagles, I promise.)

So believe me, no one was more surprised, and maybe grossed out, than me when I not only watched the epic History of the Eagles documentary but also became obsessed with the two-part 2013 film.

To be fair, I have a lifelong obsession with music docs, but up until that point, I only watched films about music that I, you know, actually enjoy. That all changed after the Eagles film. It wasn’t a hate-watch either; I was legitimately fascinated by the story of this group of men, clearly brimming with ego and intent, who created a cultural institution, even while intermittently suing one another. What a bunch of assholes! I couldn’t look away.

This opened the floodgates. Suddenly I was streaming docs from just about every band or artist I previously didn’t waste a minute on, whether it was Rush: Beyond the Lighted Stage (so good) or Wham! (even better).

I recently reminded myself of my love for the Eagles film as I was taking on the massive August 6 cover story about the Grateful Dead tribute scene in Vermont. I’m not a Deadhead, never have been, and have largely kept the jam-band community at arm’s length as a listener. As I prepared to spend more than a month immersed in the world of Dead tribute acts, I told myself: Relax, Chris. This will be just like watching the Eagles doc.

And in a strange way, it was. Did I uncover a secret love for the music of the Dead? Not really. Though I’ve always had plenty of admiration for what the band achieved, I still don’t have the mental patience for drum solos or Phil Lesh‘s sprawling, I’ll-never-land-on-the-one bass lines.

But I wasn’t looking to get into the Dead. I was trying to find out why the band, which has been defunct for 30 years, is still such a force in the Green Mountains. As I started talking with a wide assortment of local fans, it became increasingly clear that I had underestimated just how connected the Dead and Vermont are.

I found one of the clearest examples of that connection when I spoke with former Vermont U.S. senator Patrick Leahy about his long love affair with the Dead. While the senator didn’t speak much about the local tribute acts, his decades-long relationship with the band — particularly with singer and guitarist Jerry Garcia and drummer Mickey Hart — made for some incredible stories.

From left: Patrick Leahy, Mickey Hart and Tom Daschle in Washington, D.C. Credit: Courtesy of Patrick Leahy

Like the time Leahy invited Garcia and Hart, who were playing a concert nearby in Maryland, to the U.S. Capitol building for lunch. As the rockers sat down to eat with Leahy, South Carolina senator Strom Thurmond, who infamously filibustered against the Civil Rights Act of 1957, strode to the table.

As Leahy recalled, Thurmond seized Garcia by the shoulders and lifted him out of his chair.

“I say there, boy,” Leahy remembered Thurmond saying, putting on a pretty decent impression of the South Carolinian’s deep Southern drawl, “I hear you’re a rock star. When you get back to Texas…”

“California,” Garcia corrected him.

“Wherever,” Thurmond continued. “When you get back, you tell them you met Strom Thurmond. People will want to know you met Strom Thurmond, you hear?”

On another occasion, while waiting for the band to play a show in Washington, D.C., Leahy received a phone call from Warren Christopher, president Bill Clinton’s secretary of state.

“Pat, can you turn that radio down for a second?” an annoyed Christopher asked Leahy, who was stage-side as opener Sting was playing his set.

“Now, Warren was a brilliant guy but very serious,” Leahy told me. “When I told him it wasn’t the radio and that I was at a Dead show, he sort of bristled and said, ‘I see. While you’re at your rock and roll concert, do you have time to speak with the president?'”

Leahy had Dead stories for days. And he wasn’t the only local with surprising connections.

While mulling ideas for the cover story’s art, Seven Days freelance photographer Luke Awtry suggested I look into artist Maria Dichiappari. A quick glance at her work was all it took for me to be convinced. She had a perfect aesthetic balance of retro-psychedelic and modern that would fit the story wonderfully. And, bonus, she had already done some Dead-adjacent work.

Turns out, Dichiappari, a native Californian who moved to Vermont in 2002 to study graphic design at Champlain College, didn’t just work in the style of the Dead. She literally worked for them — well, Dead & Company, the Bob Weir-led official offshoot. She has also designed posters for the late Lesh and his project Phil Lesh & Friends, as well as for jam-band titans Phish and Umphrey’s McGee.

Dichiappari absolutely nailed it, crafting one of my favorite cover images ever for the paper, full stop. The fact that the artist designing tour posters for Dead & Company was already living here in Burlington rubber-stamped the connection I was writing about.

It all crystallized for me as I stood inside the Jam Tent at the Dead of Summer Music Festival in Manchester — an entire weekend devoted to Dead tributes and adjacent acts — watching a gaggle of kids frolic to an acoustic version of “Eyes of the World.” I’d expected to be weirded out, or at least snarky, being surrounded by tribute bands and thousands of Deadheads. But watching the next generation of Dead fans make some of their formative memories alongside older fans who saw the band at Woodstock in 1969 felt like a perfect encapsulation of what all the Deadheads had been telling me: The music never stops. It was like the perfect ending to a music doc I’d never seen.

By the end of my reporting, I had essentially lived my own Grateful Dead tribute band documentary. Two weeks after the story dropped, I’m still listening to podcasts and reading books about a band I don’t even really like. Say what you will, but that didn’t happen with the Eagles.

The original print version of this article was headlined “Dead Reckoning”