An apophany is defined as a moment where someone sees a connection that doesn’t literally exist. This is a column about the connections between literality. 

I’ll give you the facts first. On 4/21/2025, my partner made a post about rock band Twenty-One Pilots. It was not exactly nice about the band, who are, in our opinion, bad. At risk of sounding like a Democrat wine mom, I would call it a read. 

In response, someone randomly searching “Twenty-One Pilots” found my partner, and threatened to punch them in the face. 

The Twenty-One Pilots fans are stressed out, in a word. One of them qted my partner, I ended up trying to be reasonable with them by telling them, “Nobody is really mad you guys like Twenty-One Pilots, threatening to punch an openly non-binary person in the face over a music opinion is the issue.” (My partner is also 6’1, so, have fun.) Nobody learned anything, I muted them all after I called them all children.

Some people said this was bullying. Bullying really requires a target. Making a post about a band you don’t like should not result in stans brigading you. I could make this about the vicissitudes of fandom, but I don’t want to. I actually want to reflect on something else.

Throughout my twenties, two things were true. Most of my friends were punk or punk adjacent. I didn’t really grow up in an environment with punk as a countercultural current. It was sold to me as Good Charlotte, Blink-182. As a teenager, I tried to dig deeper, weirder. I did enjoy The Stooges and such, but I really liked Television. Being a teenage Allmans head, I could get the twin guitar playing and long (good) songs (though Television only really had one or two “Whipping Post” style numbers). That was a lineage I could follow easily into Pavement, Sonic Youth, even Dinosaur Jr. Here, the twain meets with me and my punk friends, but I spent a lot of time in my youth listening to Bob Dylan, Neil Young, and the Band. I loved jazz as well. My late twenties were built on a framework that started with my love of Miles Davis and John Coltrane (who I got to through Duane Allman and Dickey Betts). When I started understanding punk, it was understanding it through an almost cultural dissonance delivered through pop song structures. The Ramones are inspired by girl-groups, but the dissonance is that these sweet melodies are used for songs about sniffing glue. This is to create a more accurate picture of teenage life. This is quite a bit different from hearing “Longview” and getting hype. I am just not that personality. 

Sonic Youth is where the trouble started, I suppose. I could embarrass myself further and really reveal the source for our title, but Sonic Youth’s endorsement precipitated a journey that lead to the second truth, thanks to the help of Archive.org and the fandom of Lee Ranaldo: I became a twenty year old Deadhead. 

This is not really surprising in this day and age. In fact, with the endless touring of The Dead, fronted by human mop John Mayer working to smooth all the rough edges off of Jerry Garcia, there are more Grateful Dead fans now than probably ever. (Without revealing too much, it’s my dim estimation of their current fan-base that lead me to walk away from Terrapin Station, and not entirely for music related reasons). In fact, many of the prior shibboleths punk tilted at seemed to get their resurgence, ironically or otherwise. It would be unthinkable to unironically enjoy Steely Dan. The Dead received something of a critical bump in their reputation in the 2010s, a decade wherein I turned twenty. 

What was it? The Grateful Dead are a band you find yourself accidentally liking. I would potter around the archives, trying out years like shoe sizes. I would hear something I recognized as fine but not mind blowing, and then one day I found myself an adherent. What was that date that turned me from a person who was appreciative into a fan? 

I can’t say. I can’t point to any moment. I can tell you that I think for the first five years or so they were together, they were best understood as a garage band that occasionally found some outer edge of the atmosphere to explore. This is well-trodden territory, even for hip bands. You could say something similar about the 13th Floor Elevators– arguably America’s greatest rock band– or even Can. Arthur Lee’s Love were also a garage rock band made good, albeit with more Burt Bacharach. I am not going to throw my copy of Live/Dead into the sea; even if you turn a cocked eye to dancing bears and ice cream cone smashing men, I think the intensity on that album would stand up as a great document of psych-rock done live. As for the random vicissitudes of the calendar, 1972 was the moment the band peaked with a form of cosmic American music and may have actually split the difference between a rock band and an old revue of troubadours. There’s nothing wrong with the two obvious selections as to their “great albums”. For my money, Workingman’s Dead smashes American Beauty if only for not having hippie rizz anthem “Sugar Magnolia” on there.

If you know anything about the Grateful Dead, you’ll know I’m handwaving the periods that are commonly accepted as the band’s best: the 1977 period. Due to the constant touring and some line-up stability, the Dead were a road machine come 1977. Yet that music doesn’t really interest me. It’s too anti-septic, clean, missing risk.

Here’s the dirty secret of the Grateful Dead. For all of their instrumental prowess, they were inarguably sloppy, especially regarding singing. There’s nothing like being shocked out of an instrumental passage by frequent offender Donna Godcheuax’s caterwauling. Jerry’s voice was thin, a quality that I think lends itself better to ballads (and if there’s a single thing that band did that was an argument for their existence, it would be those Jerry Garcia ballads) that also feels more like a personal evocation of Jerry’s recurring tribulations than actual mastery. Bob Weir is not a bad singer, but not a great one either. Do you have to be a great singer to be a great rock singer? I don’t think so; I would rather listen to any Bob Dylan live show with the Hawks than any Grateful Dead show, and that’s the peak of Bob Dylan’s overdriven kazoo singing. Yet voices have an edge to them, they communicate something specific. A lot of singers of the Dead have voices that seem to not carry a multiplicity with them. When Bob Dylan’s voice cuts you, you can see how in ten years this was going to be Joe Strummer. The Grateful Dead are singing because otherwise, every song would be instrumental. Here is where the old saw was sharpened: “They’re better live than they are on record.” The live shows traded perfection for instrumental fancy. As long as Bob and Jerry could hit notes and push the band, the reason people showed up was intact. But when you begin looking at their contemporaries, this becomes less satisfactory. Lowell George and Gregg Allman both could sing their asses off, for instance. 

In fact, if any band deserves credit for knocking me out of the orbit of The Dead, it would be Little Feat. Little Feat was a band that was, for all intents and purposes, an off-shoot of the Mothers of Invention. To keep things in the Zappa-verse, if Captain Beefheart weren’t using CIA torture tactics to get Trout Mask Replica made, he may have resembled Lowell George: a hiruste megalomaniacal band leader with real chops and vision of an off-kilter Americana, more twisted than any of the technicolor daydreams the Dead were having. A truly underrated figure in rock music whose band gets relegated to being a Southern rock also-ran despite being stocked almost entirely with Californians, Lowell George was also an adept side-man, adding slide guitar to the Meters “Just Kissed My Baby” and John Cale’s Paris 1919. That doesn’t even get into their musical omnivorousness. The Grateful Dead might have combined all the strands of American music into their own, but Little Feat were altogether better at playing second-line rhythms, country songs, and blues rave-ups. Driving around the Research Triangle, lightly toasted, with a live cut of “Fat Man in the Bathtub” blaring in my Subaru Outback that had not yet started overheating yet, I had a better sense of the vast strangeness of here more than any Dead song. John Mayer has never been a member of Little Feat, either. 

Looking back on this now, I see my Deadhead period as my nascent interest in experimentation. How long can a song be? Can you tease out the connections between jazz and country by playing banjo licks on a guitar made out of an opium bed? In the end, it all became conventional. I saw a group of hippies dancing at the Sphere show and I saw in them a world that no longer existed for me. It may mean I’m perpetually in the corner thinking of the musicographical qualities instead of twisting in a drug rug, but there’s some things even I can’t defend. 

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