Paula Routly: My Introduction to the Grateful Dead

Grateful Dead fans dancing to Dobbs’ Dead at Einstein’s Tap House in Burlington Credit: Luke Awtry

“Rock ‘n’ roll” music was prohibited in my house growing up. I remember watching news coverage of the Beatles’ first U.S. tour on our family’s black-and-white television. My parents — especially my dad — were horrified by the footage of young women screaming, crying and, in some cases, passing out during the concerts. Nothing like that was going to happen to their girls.

Somehow my older sister got hold of the White Album, and we secretly listened to it on a record player that looked like a toy. I got a palm-size transistor radio, too, through which I grooved in private to the sounds of Herman’s Hermits, Petula Clark and the Monkees.

I remember hearing the Doors’ “Light My Fire” before a show of fireworks at Princeton Stadium — performed by a cover band, no doubt — while my dad fumed and tried to cover our ears.

Meanwhile, the living room “hi-fi,” which he alone was allowed to touch, played only classical music — and, occasionally, Herb Alpert. His Whipped Cream album came out in 1965, the same year the Warlocks became the Grateful Dead.

Because of my strict upbringing, and almost a decade studying ballet, I didn’t actually hear their music until I got to college, in 1978. By then I had discovered Joni Mitchell, Bonnie Raitt, Neil Young, Tom Waits. The summer before my freshman year, I worked as a chambermaid in Wyoming’s Grand Teton National Park. I brought a tape player with me from cabin to cabin. As long as I had my music, I didn’t mind making beds and cleaning toilets.

I would have another half century to learn to love Jerry Garcia’s loose and lazy guitar licks and ponder their siren appeal.

I adored these musical artists. But my devotion paled in comparison to that of my classmates at Middlebury College who followed — nay, worshipped — the Grateful Dead. These 19-year-olds had been to hundreds of the band’s shows all over the country — how was it possible? — and some had recorded the live concerts, assembling massive collections of cassette tapes. Listening to them talk ecstatically about venues and songs and jams and dates was like deciphering a foreign language — though not the kind for which Middlebury is known.

Attaining some fluency seemed very important at the time. Little did I know that I would have another half century to learn to love Jerry Garcia’s loose and lazy guitar licks and ponder their siren appeal.

I saw the band once — in Highgate — in June 1995. Frankly, the music sounded better emanating from vehicles in the epic traffic jam en route to the show than at it, and Garcia died two months later.

But experiencing the scene did clarify the attraction, and like so many, over time I came to equate the band’s blood pressure-lowering groove with carefree youth, road trips and endless summer. That is to say: the soundtrack of happier times. A sonic madeleine.

Weirdly, the Dead seem to have the same effect on younger listeners who never saw the original band and associate their music with cultural milestones other than the Summer of Love or the Vietnam War.

My memories of the Grateful Dead were starting to fade when my partner, Tim, rediscovered the band around 2010. He had been to Highgate, too, though we didn’t yet know each other. Fifteen years later, he started playing the band obsessively — at home in the morning, in the car, on his earbuds during long runs. When my late mom lived in Burlington, she’d come to our house for dinner. Tim liked to drive her back to the Converse Home, Grateful Dead blaring (usually “Bertha” or “Terrapin Station,” he recalled). Ever tolerant, Mom never complained. I could hear him returning to our place, singing along with his windows open, long before the crunch of his tires in our dirt driveway.

Following his bliss, Tim went to live shows in Vermont featuring members of the original band, and two summers ago we watched the video of what was supposed to be the all-time final concert of Dead & Company — a configuration of the band with vocalist and guitarist John Mayer — in San Francisco. As I write, Dead & Company are playing in Golden Gate Park in celebration of the band’s 60th year.

The next best thing? Tribute acts. In this week’s cover story, music editor Chris Farnsworth examines the growing number and popularity of bands seeking to replicate one that, despite its morbid name, won’t die. Or fade away.

“Thirty years after Jerry Garcia and Grateful Dead played their final concert, rock music’s first jam band is living a robust afterlife in Vermont and elsewhere,” Farnsworth writes. Of some 800 Dead cover bands across the country, at least 15 are in the Green Mountain State. His piece, “Dead-icated,” aims to find out why. As the band sings in “Scarlet Begonias”: “Once in a while, you get shown the light / in the strangest of places if you look at it right.”

Correction, August 12, 2025: An earlier version of this story misstated the year of the “final” Dead & Company tour. The three-night run of shows in San Francisco’s Oracle Park happened in July 2023.