Episode Transcript
[00:00:23] Speaker A: Greetings everyone. What a great crowd today. We're so happy to see you. We are kicking off a new program year for adult education and I was before I came over with my mic live, I was asked to remind you there are Terhune Orchard cider donuts in the back.
Don't fall over, don't run over anybody on your way to get them. And every Sunday, Tom.
Yes, yes, every Sunday you go and buy them.
What a wonderful idea. Thank you. Thais, our greeter and member of the adult education committee will be coming to your seat. I hope you have your tray tables up because it could be a bumpy ride.
All right, here we go. Today we have a very special guest kicking off the program year Tom Coogan, who is the author of this book, Deadheads and Christians.
You will know them by their love. It just came out in the summertime and if you haven't read it, it is just awesome. And I will introduce him in a moment. He has left actually the space. Oh, there he.
I feel like I may be back at a Deadhead concert. I'm not sure. I'm not sure. Anyway, but first, before I introduce him, let's pray. Please pray with me. Gracious God, thank you for our friends who are with us today.
Thank you for those who are listening later at home or as they travel. Thank you for the multitude of heavenly hosts who have helped build this beautiful space so that we may learn from each other.
Thank you for our speaker, Tom Coogan, who lives for you and shares his faith with so many.
And thank thanks for the Grateful Dead, Deadheads and baseball.
Amen.
Thomas A. Coogan holds degrees from Washington University in St. Louis and the University of Wisconsin in Madison. He has been a member of Nassau church in Princeton, New Jersey for 20 plus years, serving as elder deacon and softball coach.
I don't think they ever won a game.
Equal parts Deadhead and student of the Bible he laments the misunderstanding that persists between these communities and is attempting to bridge that dividend by documenting meaningful similarities between the Deadheads and the earliest decades of the Jesus movement. Please give a warm welcome to Tom Coogan.
[00:03:25] Speaker B: Thank you, Marshall, and thank you to the committee for inviting me to do this. I thank you all for turning out on this beautiful day.
This talk is a sequel to a talk I gave here eight years ago about a group of people called the Deadheads.
They're the particularly devoted fans of a rock and roll band called the Grateful Dead, which you may have heard of some not.
This is Zheng Ching's first introduction to the Grateful Dead. But that's all right.
The point of that presentation was Deadheads and Christians have a lot in common. And mainline churches should try to make friends among the Deadheads because they can be valuable allies in this cold, cruel world of ours.
So since I gave that presentation, Mark Edwards has been bugging me to turn it into a book, which I did. And I don't get tired of saying, at age 63, I have published my first book, which Marshall has told you about.
So one of the most immediate prompts for me to take on the project, to write the book was this headline, June 21st of 2023. Easy date to remember. I'll refer to summer 23. A couple times Fed Chairman Jerome Powell was being asked about whether he had attended a Dead End Company concert in 2023. Dead and Company is a successor band to Grateful Dead that I'll talk more about.
And this came up when a congressman was asking him if he had been to that show. And that congressman then made this blanket statement.
I like people who like the Grateful Dead, which could have been an adequate title to the book. The point is, Deadheads have a lot of common attributes and in General they are favorable 1.
And part of my motivation in this is also to deal with, I would say, associated stigma hidden in this headline that Powell admits to being a Deadhead.
So I'm going to show you what Chairman Powell's reaction was to this blanket statement from Congressman Nichol. I'll repeat it. I like people who like the Grateful Dead. And if all you take away from this talk is that headline, I like people. The Grateful Dead I will live. See.
So here's Chairman Powell's reaction. You can tell me if you feel like he's admitting to anything here on. Is that showing up okay? Looks good.
I know it's another reason to be on Chairman Powell's side.
So this is one measure of the mainstreaming of the Grateful Dead phenomenon. Here's another one. Major League Baseball is trying to make friends among the Dead heads.
Half of all Major League Baseball teams have held Grateful Dead nights. More every year. Many teams have done it more than once.
It's a growing phenomenon that a handful of minor league baseball teams have held Grateful Dead nights. A handful of National Hockey League teams will hold Grateful Dead nights in the coming year. And there'll be one college football game when Wisconsin visits Oregon. It'll be a Grateful Dead tie dye event in that stadium, which the Grateful Dead played many times.
So I go on at length in the book about commonalities between baseball fans And Deadheads. I won't belabor that here. I'll just point out a little bit about imagery. See this? I need a pointer.
You can look up there as well. So those who are familiar with Grateful Dead imagery will recognize on this Kansas City royals jersey, the 11 pointed lightning bolt.
It can't make it out. Well, here I'm pointing out, only because it'll become significant later, a cartoon sketch of a skull with that lightning bolt in it.
And then I'll blow up a little bit so you can see there within the Royals, a dancing or marching teddy bear kind of character and a dancing skeleton complete with top hat and cane.
I talked a lot about when I gave that talk eight years ago about imagery of the Grateful Dead imagery. I won't belabor that here, but we'll show examples as I go along. Like this. So I'll just show examples and then return to the topic at the end. The thousand variations on these themes.
A cartoon sketch of a skull with a cavity containing another cartoon sketch of a skull. And the cavity is the lightning bolt. So I won't talk more about it, but show examples as I go along.
So I said, baseball is pursuing great Deadheads as a target market. Which begs the question, how big a target market is this?
And I'll go back to that summer of 2023. Deddon Company's last big summer tour sold 845,000 tickets. I reason that there's somewhere north of 600,000 active Deadheads.
I'm only belaboring this because I went searching when I was doing this to find a good estimate.
I will tell you this is the best estimate in writing of the most rigorous estimate there is in writing of the number of Deadheads. Nobody else did it.
So I say there's about that many active Deadheads.
How many is that? Well, if spread evenly across this land, that would be 2 per thousand American adults. But they're very much more concentrated in certain geographic and demographic segments.
Sorry, Deadhead.
Such that in certain areas, this number instead of two per thousand, would be two per couple hundred.
So in an area like this, anybody with a couple hundred acquaintances knows a Deadhead, like all of you.
But this analysis saying certain number of people at the. Are you asking a question?
[00:08:56] Speaker C: I am. What is an active dead?
[00:08:59] Speaker B: Yeah, you got to read the book.
But this kind of analysis suggests that people who were at those concerts were a Deadhead or were not a Deadhead, kind of binary, black or white. I don't believe that. There are certainly degrees of being a Deadhead much as there's degrees of depth of faith in those who share the pews with us, that's to be expected.
But the question of what are Deadheads is an important one.
And most people, a lot of people's imagery of that is this sort of person.
This picture came from the COVID of the New York Times Magazine again in the summer of 2023, when Dead and company came to New York after they had been down in D.C. where Chairman Powell saw them.
So kind of a difference between this person and Chairman Powell. And a lot of people still think Deadheads were just those people who travel from town to town on a shoestring to see the band. There were a lot of them. Clearly this person wasn't traveling from town to town in the 70s and 80s to see the band. Those people have moved along and a new cadre of people have taken their place. And there is still a substantial subpopulation of people who live in this manner, which reminded me of Jesus instruction to his followers, which was, take no bag with you, take no shoes, take no money.
That sort of parallel is what originally got me on this topic, that there was a movement of people that began as itinerants, living hand to mouth at the fringe of society, referring to each other and brother and sister. And that movement continued to grow. Now, 30 years after the death of the leader, that being Jerry Garcia, the founder of the Grateful Dead, it's remarkable that this movement persists and in my opinion, grows. It's hard to prove, but that's the case.
So I'm drawing parallels between the Deadheads and the earliest stages of the Jesus movement, which I'll keep saying, as opposed to Christianity, which came later, as a church, which came much later. Jesus movement in the earliest days, the earliest decades.
But in no way am I suggesting it's a one to one correspondence between the way Deadheads behave and the principles of Christianity, any more than Christianity has a unique lock on what we would call religion. We call these things religion because they have something in common, though I don't recognize half the symbols on that chart.
But I want to make the point that in no way am I saying it's exclusive, because there have been so many Jewish Deadheads from the earliest days. One of the first academic publications, I think 98, 97 98, included a chapter titled why are there so Many Jewish Deadheads?
And an article in the Jerusalem Post just a couple years ago about Deadhead subculture in Israel used this statement. Like Judaism, the Dead were all about joy, love, family and togetherness, which could apply to any religion. And you could say, is that true of all Judaism? Is that true of all Christianity? We might like that.
My goal, though, was to go below the level of the platitudes, say peace and love is peace and love, which is good.
But what more explicit comparisons can we make?
The point of the book is to draw a comparison between the Dead and Company time period to the Acts of the Apostles time period in that Dead and Company is a successor to the Grateful Dead. And the Acts of the Apostles describes the successive movement of the Jesus movement. And so the book is structured with in each chapter is bracketed by a passage from the Book of Acts that relates to parts of the Deadhead phenomenon. This one I'll come back to. The Spirit fell on them as it had on us at the beginning.
It was Peter referring to preaching outside the confines of his Jewish world. When he went outside the confines of his Jewish world, he found these people were moved by the Gospel message as much as those people who had seen the miracles themselves.
So Acts is a lot of facts and figures on this side. Each chapter also has passages from epistles like this one from James. That wisdom from above, that is first pure, peaceful, gentle yielding, filled with mercy and good actions, fair and sincere, could apply to lots of religions.
Very much applies to the Deadhead world. Every Deadhead would respond to that as something they feel in response to the Grateful Dead phenomenon.
But how do I say that about Deadheads? So each chapter also has a characteristic of Deadheads, which I can't really prove to anybody. And so the working title of the book was Ask a Deadhead. And the premise was, I say all these generalizations are true of Deadheads. You have to prove it by go out and meet someone, talk to them.
I'm grateful to Jonathan and Cynthia Yoder for talking me out of using Ask a Dead Head as the title of the book. I think I'm better off for that.
So in some audiences, I would have to explain what is act of the Apostles as opposed to explaining what are Deadheads. And the short answer is it's the sequel to the Gospel stories.
Acts of the Apostles is specifically thought to relate to the gospel called Luke.
We call it Luke. We don't know the names of any of the gospel writers. We call it Luke specifically because it's thought to be by process of elimination. The person who also wrote Acts, because the first line of Acts has the same dedication to Theophilus and says in the first book. So Acts is saying, this is a successor to that Gospel, which we call Luke.
Now, if you don't tell anybody I said this, I have my doubts about this theory because after the first verse of Acts, it never again mentions those gospel stories.
It never says, as you will remember, or this story came from so and so.
For my money, if you took this first verse off of Acts, you wouldn't connect it to this gospel any more than any other.
But don't tell anybody I said that.
So to me, this is the short version of the book of Acts and one of the only passages of Acts we read in our lectionary. The Pentecost story that people from all over the known world would hear in their own language what was being said by the apostles.
It spread outside its confines, and people heard and responded to the gospel message in the same way as the original hearers.
Going to take a brief diversion.
That Pentecost story we reenact a lot of times by having people who speak different languages speak the same passage in the church, which is not exactly what that passage said.
That passage said we hear it in our own language.
That's different.
So this led me to one of my hobbies, which is to probe a little deeper.
Look into the original language. I use a website. I'm going to do another plug like the last time I spoke for. Look into the original languages. Biblos.com the website I use, they changed the name of the website, but I still remember it because it sounds like Bible. It's Greek for book.
It is the first word in the New Testament in Greek.
Matthew 11 is the book of the genealogy of Jesus Christ. So Biblos.com provides this interlinear analysis in which you have the original language here of that passage, transliteration above it.
And then a word for word translation into English, but in the original Greek word order. And you hear that they were hearing in their own language what they were speaking. A nice cognate here, dialecto for the Greek for language. So it says they were hearing their own language.
But there is something in the Pentecost story about what they were speaking. What were they speaking two verses before?
They were speaking in tongues.
Anybody who had ever learned physics formulas might recognize the Lambdas here. Lambda lambda is the same as this speaking up here. Different ending, different part of speech. But this number tells it's the same root word, lala, for speaking in Greek, but they were speaking in tongues.
Tongues. Tongues. There's something else in Pentecost about tongues. Oh, yes, the verse before that.
Tongues of fire.
Nice cognate. Pyros for fire.
But the tongues is the same There were first tongues of fire, which led to speaking in tongues, which led to hearing languages.
This goes back and forth two times and it depends on the active verb. What was spoken was tongues. What was heard was languages.
Okay, that's the end of the diversion of my hobby. But my add again to poke around in the original languages. It brings the Scriptures more to life than to me than just reading it as it is.
Okay, back to the main line. The story of Acts and the timeline of Acts.
And I don't put exact dates here, just relative position. It says Acts was written after Luke.
That's what it says in the first line. And Luke, Luke 1:1 says, I'm basing this on other writings. There are other writings out there. So Luke says, this is a later Gospel and there were lots of other writings before that.
And Acts comes after that. And as you go across here, the writing is more about the movement than the events in Galilee.
To me, you know, Revelation has nothing to do with the events in Galilee. Everything to do with how the movement was interacting with the Spirit, Roman civil authority. And I mark one marker here, Tertullian, one of the first to write in Latin. This was all written in Greek.
And then it breaks into the wider European world, the Latin speaking world, and you're onto the Church replacing Roman civil authority.
So Acts is written as that process is going on. Acts is written about a successful movement, but it describes the various early events.
It describes events before any of these writings happen because it never mentions them.
And of course, Paul's a star of these activities, but never mentions his writings either.
This is just slightly awkward.
So Acts is writing about the process by which the movement grew and outside its original confines from Galilee, Judea, the whole Eastern Mediterranean, on its way to the entirety of the Roman world.
Describes very early events, but describes it from the perspective of a successful movement. The writer of Acts knew the outcome, which was a peaceful coexistence with the Roman civil authority.
And that's important. The story is how it succeeded and spread.
So now I'll go back to one of that expression I pulled out of there. The Spirit fell on them as it did on us at the beginning, which is what is happening to an extent, I'll say limited thus far in the Deadhead world in that. This is a photo of a crowd at a 2015.
It wasn't even dead in Company yet. Dead related concert.
Not a lot of these people were there to see Jerry Garcia play in the 70s or 80s. Maybe this guy.
The point is the same spirit is breaking out of its original cultural context. And these people are becoming Deadheads absent Jerry Garcia and, you know, outside the original cultural context, I might say, of broadly the hippie lifestyle.
So these people. The same spirit is falling on these people as did in the early hippie days, and makes a point. Here's an important phrase from Acts, a speech about. By Gamaliel about whether the Jesus movement was different than all the others, because he said, there's been lots of movements that looked like this, and they all. The movement dissipated and scattered when the leader was gone.
And there were lots of hippie bands in the 60s and 70s, and they're not filling stadiums today. There's something different about this one in that it transcended that original cultural context.
And a second point, this crowd, you might think, looks just like a Springsteen concert or any other big band these days.
People say, well, isn't it kind of like Jimmy Buffett? He has a very loyal fan base that always turns out and identifies with that activity.
But I would say the test of that is, ask me if people are turning out like this to see Jimmy Buffett music 30 years after his death, to be determined. I don't have to answer it. Or Bruce Springsteen. How many people will fill a stadium to hear Bruce Springsteen music 30 years after his death? We don't know. It is certainly happening 20 and 30 years after Jerry Garcia's death. So it has transcended the original cultural context. There's something else going on.
So here's a little comparable timeline for the Grateful Dead world. And here, the hinge point. Oh, it's something I forgot to mention back in that other time point, the hinge point of the end of the Second Temple.
The end of the Second Temple was the end of Second Temple Judaism, and anything that happened after that was outside that original cultural context.
I'm saying something comparable here. The hinge point is Jerry Garcia's death.
The Grateful Dead performed for 30 years with Jerry Garcia, and it's now been 30 years since Jerry Garcia's death. And if anything, the movement is as big, if not bigger than ever.
And I put it all on one timeline because to me, it is a continuous phenomenon. There are Deadheads being made all the time comparable to the way Deadheads were made in these early periods. I broke it into different phases of their performance career, during which time people had lots of arguments about what constituted the real Grateful Dead and what constituted a real great Deadhead.
Were a lot of animosity between the different time periods, which has kind of gone to the past because there's so much more now that has happened since then. And clearly there are Deadheads being made that have nothing to do with these early time periods.
After Garcia's death, the original band members performed in various combinations. And there was the spawning of the phenomenon of jam bands. Jam bands filled the void left by the end of the Grateful Dead's biggest stadium crowds they ever drew were right before Garcia's death.
When he disappeared, there was lots of other bands to fill that void.
These original surviving members performed in various combinations, but then Dead and Company formed with the addition of John Mayer.
I use the term John Mayer's conversion there. It's a little bit loaded, but I hope I'll justify it to you. If you don't know who John Mayer was as a young man and as a solo act, he was very successful.
Won lots of Grammy awards, platinum, multiple platinum albums, and had nothing whatsoever to do with the Grateful Dead world. Had disdain for it.
Knew some Deadheads in high school and didn't like what the world looked like, but didn't know much about the music and was changed.
Stopped him in his tracks.
Heard some music on the radio that he didn't identify, Was entranced by it, and changed his life, as he described in many, many interviews in detail how the music stopped him in his tracks.
So there's three reasons to probe a little bit deeper on him as a particular Deadhead. One, he's so important to the development of Dead and Company and what's going on since then.
Second, he's a very knowledgeable, very articulate guy. So when he describes Deadhead, what he's describing is not different than other Deadheads, but he's good at describing it and has a credibility as a very knowledgeable music person.
And third, his becoming a Deadhead was, again, outside that original cultural context. You could say that stadium crowd is just like people used to get Deadheads. The thrill of a rock and roll band in a big stadium crowd is thrilling. His was completely different from that. Heard music on the radio, stopped him in his tracks. He became a Deadhead just listening to it on his own.
There's 10,000 hours of recorded Grateful Dead music that anybody can access for free. And that's what he did.
So some of his statements are good case studies of what Deadheads are and his importance for what came later. So he said, I listen to the music every day. Grateful Dead music has a whole extra dimension for me.
There's books, movies, theater, music, art, comedy, Grateful Dead, a completely different lobe of my brain, which is true of lots of Deadheads. Deadheads are not narrow in their interests or taste. Deadheads have lots of interests, enjoy lots of kinds of music, but it's something different. It's an extra dimension for me in my list. I would substitute sports for theater, but the common attributes of Deadheads.
And he said Grateful Dead music for me was, I want nothing to think about, talk about it. I knew it had taken some deeper sort of purchase on me at a deeper level than anything else.
So let's talk about what is that deeper level.
Oh, first, the analogy within the analogy.
If Acts of the Apostles and Dead in Company are comparable, then John Mayer is comparable to the role of Apostle Paul in the New Testament in that never met the Founder in the flesh. John Mayer was oblivious to the Grateful Dead world as a public person. He was a very public person.
Suddenly, reorient, stopped in his tracks by the music coming over the radio, developed a new understanding of a movement he had just misjudged. He had disdained the Grateful Dead world as a youth.
After intense study, John Mayer was recovering from vocal cord surgery and had to do nothing but rest for a long time and listen to Grateful Dead music. And that is how his conversion is different than that of anybody else at the thrilling environment of a big stadium rock concert.
Through his exposition of the founder's work, he stimulates growth in new audiences.
He is bringing a lot of people to listen to Grateful Dead music who otherwise would not have done so. The conversion was unguided, in isolation. Nobody said, I'm going to go make a convert out of John Mayer. It just happened in isolation. But he then becomes a close collaborator of the original cadre. He's working with Bob. Weird. Paul eventually works with Peter.
So what is that deeper level? I have my theory about what that deeper level is, and it's a sequence.
You're looking at the clock, Marshall. Yeah, I saw that.
You're good.
Thank you.
There's a sequence of songs in Grateful Dead concerts and Dead and Company concerts, in which there's a period called space, which is not really a song, not really music.
It's the sounds that come out of the electric instruments, followed by what I call a sorrowful song, followed by a rousing rocker.
I don't mean to make light of the rousing rocker. This band is very good at the rock and roll crescendo that brings the crowd to their feet every time.
And what's happening?
Set my timer.
Hmm.
Like people who like roller coasters. You might have your favorite roller coaster, you know, every twist and turn in. But when you get that final drop, it makes you giddy every time. Or a big Broadway show. A big Broadway show that is an all singing, all dancing climax that brings people to their feet no matter how many times they've seen it. Similar to that.
Those same shows might have a poignant song in the middle. And if that poignant song is well performed, it can bring tears to your eyes no matter how many times you've heard it. These are the sorrowful songs that are essential part.
Songs that deal with the deepest questions in life. And death is always included in these shows. Garcia particularly took great care in bringing the whole crowd to silence in the environment of a rock and roll band that could raise the roof. He also had a song in which the only sound was his voice, maybe the tap of a snare drum, for him to deliver the most important message from these songs. These are the songs that had the messages. And he took great care in bringing the whole crowd to absolute silence so he could deliver those messages. And Bob Weir follows that practice very well.
A lot of people get tired of hearing those slow songs, but they don't skip it.
So this is an analogy I made when I first gave this presentation to me. This is like in a Christian liturgy where you go through a period of an examination of conscience and a confession and then a declaration of pardon, and people come out redeemed. And I think this is why. A part of the deeper level of Grateful Dead shows is people come out with a feeling of redemption because they think about their life.
Oh, boy.
Fixed it.
Talk amongst yourselves.
So this isn't the when.
So this isn't the only way to interpret this. This isn't the only thing that gives it meaning. But I'll tell you that Dead and Company has adhered to it. So all the things that might have changed between Dead and Company performances and Grateful Dead performances, this has not changed.
So this is my analysis to prove that Dead and Company adheres specifically to this sequence, as if they were saying this is the essential element of a Dead concert, is to go through that sequence.
Passing down to you that which I received.
Paul's words about the institution of sacraments, I would say Dead and Company has adhered to. So this is a list of songs the Grateful Dead played that I called the Sorrowful songs. And where they fell in the concert, they're always in the last three quarters of the concert and the number of times they played it. This is Dead and Company, and the asterisks mark the songs that Dead and Company still performs in the last three quarters of the show with themes like Knocking on heaven's door, Death don't have no Mercy. Black Peter is a man who believes he's on his dying bed. Warf Rat is a character whose history is as colorful as his name.
So Dead and Company has adhered to that sequence. To me as the essential element of what a Grateful Dead show does, or a Dead and Company show, Dead broadly.
But that is not the only consistent theme in their songs, those sorrowful songs. I'm not going to go into the lyrics, which I did eight years ago. You all remember that, right?
There's other songs that are thematically coherent, like songs about songs and songs about Deadheads, which I call self referential songs as the title of the chapter in the book.
Which is an old and venerable tradition in lots of art forms.
There's lots of movies about movies. Sunset Boulevard is one of my favorite. There's lots of TV shows about TV shows. 30 Rock, Dick Van Dyke show would come to mind right away.
And there's lots of songs about songs.
Classic example has to be Billy Joel sitting at a piano singing a song about a guy sitting at a piano singing a song about a crowd demanding to hear its favorite song. Songs about songs is a rich and venerable tradition which the Grateful Dead used very well.
This is all different songs in their catalog which refer specifically to songs. Not just background music, but songs about the meaning and power of songs.
They did lots of other covers of other music. There's lots of songs about it. And they covered Chuck Berry's classic, Johnny B. Goode, the man who could play his guitar, just like ringing a bell. Very self referential, but not their song. These are all their own songs. So a substantial part of their song catalog makes reference to songs.
And these are different songs that make reference to just playing music, musical instruments, without referencing song and songs that refer to a band. These are all different songs referring to a band playing music and songs.
I think there's a substantial part of this because the person who wrote all these lyrics, Robert Hunter, wrote almost all these lyrics. Robert Hunter wrote all the lyrics for Jerry Garcia's songs and was regarded as a member, was an integral member of the band as listed on lots of albums and as a member of the band album covers. He's listed as a member of the band, but he was a non performing member of the band.
So he was somewhat anonymous. He could and did go out and mingle in the crowd unrecognized during the concerts and then go backstage and collaborate with the band again and write about the phenomenon that was going on. He observed the phenomenon from the outside and wrote songs about what the band was doing, that particular band was doing, and what the crowd was like. So I don't go into it, but there's a whole other set of songs that you could interpret as being specifically about Deadheads. He was writing about the phenomenon as it was going on, which, uh. Oh, oh, sorry.
There's a highlight. For example, the song written in 1972, this song ain't never gonna end.
Not every song ends. So what could this mean to write in 1972? This song ain't never gonna end.
They were perceiving something in the phenomenon.
And for them to sing that song 50 years later and say this song ain't never gonna end means something different now. And it means there's movement is not gonna end, in my opinion.
Oh, come on. Which brings us to 2025.
Dead and company is going strong. I will tell you, these are not nostalgia shows. This is cutting edge stuff.
This is at a venue called the Sphere in Las Vegas. Anybody heard of this or familiar with it?
My wife. Thank you. Drag me there kicking and screaming.
This is the band on a stage in front of a 4 acre video screen. Video screen doesn't describe it. 16,000 by 16,000 light elements, exquisitely computer controlled, can generate. This is a 5,000 seat auditorium engulfed by this video screen. Doesn't describe it can generate the most realistic illusions you can believe or show you things you have never seen before.
All exquisitely timed to the performance of the band in front of it. They are making something all new there, I will tell you.
And their theme is clearly that this is going on. This movement is growing, not declining.
[00:37:32] Speaker C: I think it's 18,000.
[00:37:34] Speaker B: I beg your pardon? 18,000 seat on a venue.
I should have previewed this.
And that's not all.
Just a few weeks ago, the band had a party in Golden Gate park in San Francisco where they started to mark the 60th anniversary of the founding of the band.
It was a three night event.
Some of you may or may not be aware. The band never repeats a set list across those three nights. They never repeated a song. It was all a continuous performance. A three night celebration. And the last song on the last night ended with this refrain.
This is the only image I'll admit to having manipulated. I stuck this phrase on here because that's what all this crowd is chanting. Because all the crowd knew this song. All the crowd knew the importance of this song.
All the crowd knew this was the first song Garcia performed When he returned from his near death coma.
All the crowd knows this is the first song that Dead and company performed when they returned from COVID Anybody remember Covid?
There was a time during which we thought these kind of events wouldn't happen again, where people were jammed elbow to elbow listening to rock and roll music. But we did, and we do.
And here's the return of that image I pointed out from the beginning and gave you so many examples of.
So the crowd is chanting, we will survive. Because that's the culmination of the song.
It doesn't mean the performers on stage are saying, we will survive.
Everybody's painfully aware the performers on the stage will not survive. The we survive is the community out here.
We will survive because all those many variations I showed you on this image in which all the Deadheads poured all their color and experience into that frame.
Now we just see the frame, and all the color and experience of the Deadheads is out here saying, we will survive. That movement will survive.
And it's manifest by themselves. Deadheads will survive when they keep showing up and they keep getting rewarded for doing so by events like that.
All right. Oops. Oh, shoot. Here's everybody's favorite part. In conclusion, I'll just show you all the. All the examples of this artwork that couldn't fit into the presentation to give you an idea of the manifold manifestations there are of the expression of Deadheads. So you.
Which one are you pointing out?
That one. Orange. Orange. And the skull turned into a butter.
Just search for Deadhead art, Grateful Dead art, or stele art. These are termed steelies. I won't go into why it's called a stele, but S T A L I E. Search for steely art. You will be amazed.
All right, Marshall, I think I am done.
[00:40:34] Speaker A: Wow. Thank you, Tom Coogan.
[00:40:41] Speaker B: I will take questions.
[00:40:43] Speaker A: I don't know about you, but I feel like I just had a spiritual gummy.
Thank you so much.
[00:40:51] Speaker B: I don't know what you're talking about.
[00:40:54] Speaker A: That's okay. Neither do I. Neither do I. I hope you all come back next week because we're going to have Ned Walthall here. He'll talk about his amazing photography and spiritual journey to arrive at the talent and the output that he has had. And for those of you who aren't aware, a lot of the folks that he has worked with through small groups, Tim Brown among them, have now their artwork on display in the gallery right next door. So make sure you get over there to take a look at it before you check out of course, you know, you can check out anytime, but you can never leave.
[00:41:35] Speaker B: Right?
[00:41:36] Speaker A: Oh, that's the Eagles. I'm sorry.
I'm sorry. That's a different band. That's a different presentation.
But thank you all for coming. We'll see you next week. Bye. Bye.
[00:41:48] Speaker B: Do we can do questions?
[00:41:51] Speaker A: Oh, you want questions?
[00:41:53] Speaker B: I don't want questions. They want questions.
[00:41:55] Speaker A: Okay.
[00:41:56] Speaker B: No questions, no answers.
[00:41:57] Speaker A: We actually have time for five minutes of questions.
Bill. Bill Kreger.
Hold on, I'm gonna get you the.
[00:42:09] Speaker D: I'm a little bit.
I'm a little bit in the John Mayer camp.
Just because I never started early with a dad and I have a little. I've got other things to listen to.
There's a phenomena when there's such a rich cultural movement that there's a hurdle to ever getting into it.
[00:42:30] Speaker B: I wouldn't know where to start.
[00:42:32] Speaker D: It's kind of like if I wanted to join the Catholic Church. There's just too much to understand.
[00:42:37] Speaker B: And I'm wondering if there's a beginner's.
[00:42:41] Speaker D: Guide, not just a beginner's guide to the get to the dead, but is there. Is there also a cultural. For a cultural hurdle for people becoming Christians? And if so, are there any lessons from the great. From people, from the growth of the dead, the new Deadheads, that we could learn from to help people overcome the hurdle of there just being too much Christianity to ever feel welcome in it?
[00:43:05] Speaker B: Wow, that's a good one. Krieger, you're saying is the phenomenon. Is the path to people becoming deadhead something that Christianity could learn from to making new Christians?
Probably. I haven't thought about it. I'll tell you, my favorite suggestion was back when we had the. What was it? Community. Something like that. Have the choir stand on the steps and just start singing out, give a little witnessing song from the steps of the church. I think we got to do that every Sunday morning, start the service with the choir using those steps as an amplification.
That's my one answer to that.
Nothing deeper than that. I haven't thought about it coming over, Professor.
[00:44:00] Speaker C: You know, but there is a different perspective, and I was looking at Matthew the other day, where it says, the gate is white to easy life and the gate is narrow to difficult life. So an alternative perspective is why should Christianity or why should the Deadheads be an easy, accessible experience?
I mean, why do we assume that it has to be public?
After all, elite forces throughout the world consider that difficulty in joining a group as a rite of passage. Just another perspective.
[00:44:47] Speaker B: Yeah. I was struck by the many called few chosen.
There'll be a lot of wailing and gnashing of teeth.
To me, it's apparent that not everybody's going to get the gift of faith, and neither will.
There are whole family groups. Some have very different degree of religious devotion. All had the same upbringing and those same families. Some become Deadheads and some don't.
You can see it in my, you know, Grace's cousins.
Some got it and some didn't. Grace not. No, she's. Not yet. Not yet.
You got another one.
[00:45:35] Speaker A: The double drum solo hasn't started yet, so we have time for a couple more questions.
[00:45:40] Speaker E: Thank you. I love the Dead. Actually played in the Grateful Dead cover band in college.
[00:45:46] Speaker B: No way.
[00:45:46] Speaker E: Yeah. So have thought a lot about this. One of the things that strikes me that's almost unique, or it's not unique anymore, but it was at the time about the Dead, when they started to tour and started to improv, was the excitement of the audience to try to record and capture the moment, but that the moment was always improvisational, or at least after a certain point in their career. Right. So, like the improv, right, this occasional moment, it's going to come, it's going to go, but also like the. The people want to capture it.
[00:46:16] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:46:16] Speaker E: And pass it on.
[00:46:17] Speaker B: Yep.
[00:46:18] Speaker E: And it strikes me that it's a little bit like the Christian impulse, Right. With the Incarnation, this occasional moment, it comes, it goes, it's one life, it happens.
There's an improvisational kind of aspect to Jesus's life. He shows up and engages people.
But the early Christians want to capture it using this new technology, Right. The codex or the writing. And they want to pass this on, this occasional moment. And it strikes me it's a little bit like Paul, too, with these occasional letters scrawled off and sent to the Galatians and so on, that people imagine has some kind of universal import, like the particular moment that is improvisational, that nevertheless is. There's. There's something for everyone in this moment that needs to be passed on.
Like, I wonder, is there.
Yeah. Something about the recording. Yeah, the desire to record. What do you make of that?
[00:47:11] Speaker B: Fascinating.
It is odd that the most improvisational band has the largest record of recordings made of it that you can preserve. I, when I gave this talk eight years ago, said these people are evangelistic that want to record it because they wanted to record it and pass it on to everybody they could.
Why?
I don't get people who know more about this than me, I would think would.
I don't know to what degree Paul said everything. This is for everybody or this is for those few who get turned on when they hear the letter, when they read his letter to a congregation who got turned on and who fell asleep.
So I don't know if he stated, you could ask the smart guy next to you does Paul's theology said it's for everybody or just some people? I guess there's elect. Oh, sorry, I won't get into that. Next question.
How do you think Garcia himself got this message that he's passing on?
[00:48:13] Speaker C: What was his.
[00:48:14] Speaker B: Wow. Did he know he was saying it or he just. Oh yeah, oh yeah, oh yeah.
And that's why I talked about all the self reference. They knew very well that this was something that other bands were not experiencing. There was a phenomenon going on. That's why they wrote songs about the power of these songs. That's why they wrote songs about the band.
A lot of it is very autobiographical without giving their own name because it is always about what they saw out there happening.
I tried to get it, I couldn't pin down the exact quote. But he said something like the Deadheads made us more than we made them.
There was a population out there they were playing to. And they very much altered what they were doing based on the crowd. They played to the crowd. They saw what was happening and played to it. So they saw there was a phenomenon that was, you know, nobody knew there would be a cadre of people that would travel the country to see one band over and over and over. It didn't exist before.
Who would have known?
Yeah.
[00:49:13] Speaker F: Tom is my elder. I never thought he is so eloquent.
[00:49:19] Speaker B: I know I hide it well, don't I?
Okay.
[00:49:23] Speaker F: So I keep on asking myself during the lecture, during the presentation, isn't he inspiring?
[00:49:30] Speaker B: Pardon me?
[00:49:31] Speaker F: I keep on asking myself during the presentation, is he inspiring? I think it's very, you know, for my answer is a very is yes. I think you are connecting dots.
So when you talk, I do not know anything about it. It's the first time heard I heard that in the Grateful Dead. I think you are connecting dots. It's just reminding me that line by.
By Andrew Lloyd Weber, Jesus Christ is super smart.
So that's the line just reminding me. And also brought me a question I want to ask is it possible we can find excitement and magnetic force on our faithful path? So that's my question.
[00:50:19] Speaker B: Yes, is the question.
Can or one be excited about the gospel message as much as this? Absolutely.
I think we tend to discourage it, frankly. You know, back in Covid days, I said my next church is going to be a church where people dance.
It ain't this one. I say that.
