Box of Rain

/ Jeff Cann

Can we all finally agree that the on-going cultural relevance of Nirvana far exceeds that of the Grateful Dead?

August 9, 1995, I showed up at Dean’s Arlington, Virginia house for book club. No, I can’t remember what we read, and in fact this may have been my last month as a participant. My decades-long battle with double vision was starting, and I had trouble getting through the book in daily twenty-minute reading binges before my vision split. The two things I remember about that evening are that I was surprised that Dean could afford such a beautiful house in this pricey Arlington neighborhood, and Jerry Garcia* died earlier that day.

In my circle of friends in college, I was the outlier. We were the tie-dyed, burn-out crowd, far more likely to be found listening to Dark Side of the Moon than Thriller, Michael Jackson’s blockbuster release which came out my junior year. But by far, the most common music at the parties I attended was the Grateful Dead. Someone would bring a live tape from, say, The Fillmore East 1970 or The Great American Music Hall 1975 and drop it in the stereo. Everybody looked to me for the obligatory groan. They knew I’d rather be listening to the Clash. Then we gelled out to the jams for the next ninety minutes.

Despite my all-punk-all-the-time personal playlist, I didn’t necessarily dislike the Grateful Dead, I just thought they were too self-masturbatory. Nobody needs a twenty-five-minute unscripted jam when a thirty second guitar solo will do just fine. Besides, shortening their songs would let them play more of the audience favorites during their three-hour concert. Regardless, to this day, I list the studio versions of a few of their poppier songs—Friend of the Devil, Uncle John’s Band, Ripple—as some of my favorite tunes.

My ex-girlfriend Tiffany, also a member of the book club, arrived after I did. We joined the club separately and became a couple along the way. When we broke up, neither of us wanted to drop out. She identified as a Dead Head, although I viewed her as a Ginny-come-lately, finally latching onto the band along with a million other fans after the Dead’s smash hit A Touch of Grey was finally released on an album in 1987. “Hey, Tiff. Just wanted to say I’m sorry to hear about Jerry Garcia. I remember how terrible I felt the day Kurt Cobain** died.”

Tiffany gasped. “You aren’t trying to suggest that Kurt Cobain holds anything remotely near parity with Jerry Garcia, are you?” (Kurt Cobain is italicized because Tiffany veritably spit out the words).

“No, Tiffany, Cobain died at the height of his creativity, Garcia has just been an entertainer for years.” (I did some spitting of my own).

~ ~ ~

Phil Lesh, the bass player and one of the founding members of the Grateful Dead, died last week. At almost the exact same time I learned of Phil’s death, I was dropping off an old couch at the Adams Rescue Mission, a local thrift shop with a booming used furniture sales business. As I pulled into the drop off zone, I noticed a one of the A.R.M. workers sitting on a concrete wall sporting a replica of Kurt Cobain’s greasy, lank, blonde bob. When he walked over to help me carry the couch, I saw he wore a Nirvana t-shirt. Nearly thirty years later, these two bands are still mysteriously linked in my universe.

Shortly after graduating from college, I attended my one and only Grateful Dead concert. My college roommate Scottie and I traveled to Newport News, Virginia where my brother David (a Dead Head since his mid-teens) was stationed in the Navy. Before the three of us headed off to the Hampton Coliseum, we drank beers in my brother’s apartment. I delayed our departure to the preconcert parking lot party by taping David’s copy of the jangly, sharp-edged album, Entertainment! by post-punk rockers Gang of Four. Only I could start my evening as a Grateful Dead fan with a memorable punk rock moment.

Midway through the concert, as a new song started up, the crowd exploded into mayhem. People screamed and cheered and jumped up and down as if their baseball team just won the Super Bowl a split-second before the final buzzer.

Scottie and I stared at each other blankly, “Uh, David, what’s happening?”

“Phil is going to sing!” And for the first time in thirteen years of nonstop touring, Phil Lesh sang Box of Rain in a concert. A moment that, thirty-eight years later, still prominently pops up when you google Hampton Coliseum 1986. The folk lore around this song is that Phil wrote it as a gift to sing to his father as he suffered through the end stages of a drawn-out cancer death. A loving act that resonates with me just one month after my own father died. It’s a pretty song, but one that never caught my attention before that night.

I don’t deny the Grateful Dead’s importance in rock history. They made a deep mark on a burgeoning musical style during its formative years, and they kept legions of Dead Heads grooving for decades. I won’t pretend to know enough about the band to comment on Phil Lesh’s impact on the group, but my sense is that true fans see him as an unsung hero worthy of celebration. His death made front page news, even though I suspect most people have never heard of him.

I fully acknowledge my immature desire to win my argument with Tiffany thirty years after Jerry Garcia’s death, but around my town, in the library where I work, at the gym where I work out, seeing a Nirvana shirt is a regular occurrence. Ask any high school student about Jerry Garcia’s and Kurt Cobain’s legacy, nine times out of ten the answer will be ‘Jerry who?’ Still, that won’t stop me from playing Box of Rain as a tribute to Phil Lesh in my spin class tonight.

* Jerry Garcia: Principal songwriter, lead guitarist, and a vocalist with the rock band Grateful Dead.
** Kurt Cobain: Principal songwriter, lead guitarist, and a vocalist with the rock band Nirvana.

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22 thoughts on “Box of Rain”

  1. Your recollections here drive home to me the fact that I completely missed my youth. I may be wrong, but I think you were having a much better time than I was during that period. I enjoyed reading this, even though I have only scant familiarity with the Grateful Dead and NIrvana.

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    • Sigh, there has to be a happy medium between my experience and yours. I look back on those days as mostly a waste of time. *All* I did was party. I was a horribly unserious student, and you would have been disgusted with me as my English professor. I’ll say this though, if I didn’t spend all of my time sitting around thinking about rock & roll, I’m not sure what I would do with my time. 70% of the reason I got back into being a spin instructor is I missed the connection it gave me with music.

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      • A little late to this one, Jeff. Other stuff going on, I guess.

        I won’t attempt to engage with the Nirvana or Dead comparison, any more than I would blueberries vs semi-dried tomatoes. But I will share that I was a late convert to the Grateful Dead. They weren’t that big in Australia, and I was attending more to other styles of music. Over the years, however, my respect for them has grown significantly. For songs and song-craft, the studio albums are mostly very good (particularly Wake of the Flood, Blues for Allah and the early Aoxomoxoa) while for a laid-back live trip filled with genial jazz-inflected noodling, you can’t beat the massive live archive.

        I’m off to play American Beauty. I could use some of that today.

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      • Growing up, I kept silent about how I didn’t really “get” the Grateful Dead. They were admittedly before my time, but peers who knew music revered them so I would nod along listening at college gatherings but never really feeling moved. (Granted, I never gave a thorough, deep listen beyond these experiences.) Nirvana’s power was not only more accessible to me (I had more opportunities to hear it on the radio in the 90s) but the power was undeniable. Which is why your opening statement was so validating, as you clearly “get” the appeal of both.

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  3. I agree with you about Grateful Dead, those drawn out jams get annoying. It’s one of the reasons I can only listen to The Doors for a little while at a time.

    I still don’t see Nirvana or Cobain as the “Greatest”. There were so many great bands, and great songs. I’ll take Vedder or Cornell (RIP) over Cobain any day.

    The only musician’s death that had a real effect on me was Tom Petty. It caught me by surprise how sad I was when he died.

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    • Nirvana has lost their luster for me, but I sure was bummed out at the time. I think Kurt/Nirvana has become an icon exclusive of the music at this point, sort of like Che Guevara, and people wear the t-shirts to say ‘I’m cool’ even if they aren’t necessarily into the music. Joe Strummer (Clash) and Tommy Ramone (last living original Ramone) caught me off guard. Cobain was hard because I still loved the music that he was creating. It felt like true loss. One day “Tiffany” will read this and think ‘that guy really needs to get a life.’

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  4. I understand how you want a connection to music. Music touches the heart. I have never really connected with the whole “Dead Head” thing. But when I was much younger, I would cruise around in my car, playing the radio way too hard, just to listen to music. I favored songs from Bob Dylan, Bob Seger, and even some country songs. I don’t listen to music as much anymore, but some nights, I still google some old favorites on my phone. But it was much more fun listening to music on a car radio.

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  5. What a beautifully reflective tribute to Phil Lesh and the legacy of the Grateful Dead. It’s interesting to think about how musical legacies evolve over time and how some artists become iconic while others are less known to younger generations. As a cabinet painter, I often have music playing in the background while I work, and there’s something timeless about playing classic tracks like ‘Box of Rain.’ Thanks for sharing this thoughtful perspective—I’ll have to revisit some of their music in honor of Phil!

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  6. I love the Grateful Dead. I would have married Jerry Garcia-I never met him and saw the band only twice that I remember. Feel the same about Nirvana as you do about GD. I was really sorry when Kurt Cobain died tho. IAddicts.

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