A good place to start narrowing it down is the previous night’s setlist-they rarely repeat a song back to back. There’s a lot of waiting around, between the travel time and the intermissions, so we try to guess which songs they’re going to play each night. It makes us do crazy things like follow them on tour and road-trip in a cramped car for full days at a time. And my family members become friends, too-talking about the Dead makes us so much closer. Sometimes the band tours in the fall, but the summer tour is better-outdoor venues more easily facilitate bandanas as tops, laying in grass, and passing hand-rolled joints between friends and strangers who by the end of the show become friends. It’s easy to fall down a hole of researching the lyrical Easter eggs or subcultures-but even on just the surface, the music is fantastic. Being a Deadhead very much feels like a bigger-than-yourself, amorphous, historic thing. In many ways, the shows are a time capsule-a window into a different time, kept slightly cracked only by the music and the people who love the music. With my whole family-two parents and two brothers. It went well with the pot-smoking, Cherry Garcia loving parts of myself-but that’s not quite enough to justify why I’ve taken planes, trains, and automobiles (yes, really, all of them) to 16 Dead and Co. I got into the Dead via my dad, but grew into it in college. The band consists of three-out-of-four living members of the Dead, and three additions-if you’re into John Mayer, you’ll be delighted to learn that he’s on guitar. We may be hanging on to the last weeks of summer, but my summer ended when Dead and Co., the greatest Grateful Dead cover band of all time, played its last show.
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