When I’m off my ADHD meds, I’m dangerously, infuriatingly scatterbrained, yet also capable of “hyperfocusing” on a particular obsession for weeks or months at a time, turning it inside out with my mind and researching it to the ends of human knowledge. Unfortunately, I don’t get to decide what these obsessions are going to be. I first noticed this when I was 13 and I tried to get into the Grateful Dead.

The Deadheads I knew were mostly pleasant, docile sorts, but also included my cousin Elizabeth, one of my favorite people on earth and one I very much wanted to have something in common with besides Dameron mutt DNA. After an all-consuming two-year Beatles fixation and another year spent listening to The Dark Side of the Moon and little else, I was psyched to try psychedelic drugs, I wanted to eat handfuls of all of them as soon as possible, and being a Deadhead seemed like an easy on-ramp for that. They were associated with R. Crumb and the seedier side of ‘70s culture, which made them seem slightly dangerous, but not on the level of N.W.A, the 2 Live Crew, or Geto Boys, whose albums I actually wanted to listen to but had to be very discreet about owning. One Sunday night in autumn, I put on a syndicated radio show called the Grateful Dead Hour and waited for my new life to begin.

After the first 20 minutes of a live jam on “Fire on the Mountain,” I’d given up. Compared to what the Brits were up to in the ‘60s and ‘70s, most American “psychedelic rock” sounded like shitty blues to me, and this was the shittiest I”d heard. (Seriously, compare this to the Soft Machine or Barrett-era Floyd and explain to me what’s “psychedelic” about it. Use diagrams if you need to.) And it had country mixed in, which, as an increasingly surly teenager growing up in a mountain town in Western North Carolina, was my most loathed genre, the antithesis of rebellion. 

I gave it a few more minutes and went back to reading about Watergate.

The Dead aren’t for everyone. Almost everyone who loves them agrees you can’t get the full Dead experience unless you see them live, which, if you don’t already love them, is a risky commitment. For a band as prolific and culturally influential as they are, they have very few crossover hits. (“Touch of Grey” is the exception that proves the rule, as it essentially celebrates their irrelevance.)

“Ripple” was the B-side to “Truckin’” (another one of the handful of Dead songs that could be called hits) and features on the 1970 album American Beauty, one of their most commercially successful studio albums and, perhaps not coincidentally, one of their most countryfied. Yee haw, brother!

It’s a song about the joys of playing and listening to music. With lyrics by Robert Hunter and music by Jerry Garcia, it’s about finding lessons and laughter in all your life’s adventures, making peace with what you can’t control, and finding strength in your “family of choice,” consisting entirely of other Deadheads. 

In South American countries where ayahuasca has long been a traditional ceremonial sacrament, near the end of the trip, when minds are about as receptive to new insights and ideas as they’re ever going to be, the facilitators sometimes speak practical advice about being ethical, responsible, and compassionate. Basic 101 take-care-of-yourself, don’t-be-a-dick stuff. I suppose if you’re at a similar stage of an acid trip, you could do worse for that than the lyrics to “Ripple.” (You could queue up Andrew Tate, for instance.)

Many Deadheads rank “Ripple” among their all-city, tippy-top Dead tracks. The Dead stopped playing it live for many years, and fans were delighted when…

Oh, fuck. What time is it? AM or PM? I must have dozed off there. I was researching “Ripple” by the Grateful Dead and now it’s three hours later. I hope you had fun without me.

Like everything I’ve heard by the Dead, “Ripple” has a certain self-congratulatory emptiness to it. Every musical genre has its own language for anger, except for the Dead and its jam band offspring, who, if they connect with the baser emotions and desires of the human experience, do so in a way to which I’m thoroughly oblivious. I’ve given them many, many chances, too, about which, more later.

A few months after I flunked my Deadhead audition, I was listening to a fairly liberal-minded top 40 station from Charlotte in the middle of the night, since I lacked to focus to devise a strategy for running away to score drugs in the Bowery. A song I’d never heard before came on, and I was captivated and stunned by how gloriously creepy it sounded. It was sinister, paranoid, and very frank and adult in its ruminations on the most intimate sort of betrayal, which I sensed on an intuitive level was a subject very close to home. 

The singer sounded British to me, and the sound was identifiably “dream pop,” if not as dramatic and surreal as Cocteau Twins or crunchy like My Bloody Valentine, bands one of my other older cousins, who had great taste in ‘80s music and would have been my favorite if he’d seemed to like me at all, had introduced me to. So I had context for this music I was hearing, but not for the effect it was having on me, which felt like an introduction to certain darker sensibilities previously latent in my psyche.

“What is that?” I thought, wide awake.

I called the radio station three or four times the next day. No one had the overnight playlist or had any clue what I was talking about. But I’d become hyperfocused, so I quickly determined I’d heard “Ripple” by the stalwart Australian college-rock band the Church, from their album Priest = Aura, which was coming out in a month or so. 

I requested “Ripple” until I finally got a chance to tape it off the radio, then bought Priest = Aura and burned the laser through it for months. “Ripple” was one of several highlights, which also included “Paradox” (similarly sinister and cynical about the relationship at its center, yet utterly gorgeous, a study in contrast worthy of the Smiths or even the Sundays) and “Chaos,” a nearly ten-minute noir-fest that breaks down into a jammy mess that feels utterly appropriate and primed me to love “The Diamond Sea” and “Sister Ray” years later, when I could finally score drugs.

The Church may be big in Australia, but by now, most Americans know them for “Under the Milky Way” and consider them a certain sort of ’80s one-hit wonder (of the Donnie Darko variety), which could be true if you have a strict definition of “hit.” (When the always on-brand singer and bassist Steve Kilbey, whose seriousness is offset somewhat by the playful eclectism of guitarist and singer Marty WIllson-Piper, got busted for heroin a few years ago, he said something to the effect of, “yeah, this is what rock stars do,” so he’s a rock star to at least one person other than me.) They have a fairly rich and rewarding (if frustratingly uneven) back catalog, which my cousin with good musical taste let me borrow for months because he’d gotten over them. Maybe he liked me more than I’d thought.

I found a few more favorites, but aside from their 1988 breakout album Starfish (the one with “Under the Milky Way” on it), nothing sucked me in like “Ripple” and Priest = Aura had. I was getting regular visits from the Depression Kitty, and anything more peppy than Black Celebration and Swans felt like settling. I was nonplussed by 1994’s bloated mess Sometime Anywhere, and the obsession had cooled, which is fine. Not every fun six-month fling needs to become a miserable eight-year marriage.

A few years after that, I dropped out of high school. Thanks to the good offices of an English teacher who thought she saw a light shining under my shaggy Ramones cut and cologne by Marlboro, I was given a chance to take my senior year of high school and freshman year of college concurrently. 

I lived in the dorms for a year, with the ravages of my depression at their absolute worst. Anything you liked, I hated. Everyone loved the Dead (classes began a mere week after Jerry Garcia’s death), and I came to despise them more than Friends, Hootie, and magic-eye posters combined. The two most ruthless scumbags I knew were both Deadheads, and I began to see their hideous paraphernalia as representative of the all-around smug uselessness of ‘60s revolutionaries who became Reagan Democrats. (Nevertheless, I never hated them the way the SF punk band NOFX did.)

At this point, I’ve made peace with the Dead. After continuing to tour for nearly 30 years post-Garcia, they’ve shut down as an institution, leaving me to ponder their largely positive cultural influence. They’re very much a product of California, and now that I’ve lived here for ten years, I better appreciate the San Francisco milieu they emerged from (especially now that it’s been decimated by NIMBYs and tech douchebags). I can safely ignore most of their progeny — I was exposed to a lot of Widespread Panic when I moved to Athens (they’re very cool people) and still get a taste of Phish sometimes (not for me, but unlike the Dead, they have a discernable sense of humor). I’m glad I don’t live in a world without Poolside’s cover of “Shakedown Street.”

“Hey Emerson,” you might interject, after trying to get my attention for the last five minutes. “This is all about you. It’s not about the music. I care about the music, not you.”

You don’t need consumer-guide music journalism. You can listen to anything you want, right now, for yourself. And writers always tell on themselves. It’s smarter to do so deliberately. 

Objectivity is a lie. (As a writing style, it served newspapers well enough, decade after decade, until finally losing its credibility when journalists discovered Twitter and Facebook drove everyone else full-moon-howling insane.) Critics who fail to interrogate themselves have no standing to cast judgment and are doomed to humiliating acts of unintended self-revelation. 

The longer I hang around, the more I realize that people love music not just because it scratches an emotional itch they can’t quite reach themselves, but because the experience is profoundly personal. Intimate. A unique chemical combination of the skills and passions of the artists and the peculiar pain and sensitivities of the listener. Certain music is inarguably more culturally important and of higher aesthetic aspirations and achievements than certain other music. There’s a difference between “Ode to Joy” and “Moves Like Jagger.” But, up against personal preference, it will never be a dealbreaker. Give Maroon 5 fans Beethoven instead and they’re going to feel alienated and confused.

The Dead is the classic example of something that’s obviously not “bad,” although it’s obvious to me why I don’t dig it. If they changed your life and made you feel like you belonged, mazel tov! That sounds nice. 

The Church came along at the perfect time in my life to brace me for the claustrophobic rage and shame of grown-up love gone sour — because you can’t spell “adultery” without “adult!” — and I prefer to feel alienated and bad, thanks. 

This isn’t a democracy, so The Church wins. If you’re a Deadhead, I hope the drugs never wear off long enough for you to notice how smug, vapid, and mediocre their music is. 

But, dig this, bodhisattva. You’re entitled to whatever hyper-focused obsessions you want. If you have the luxury of deliberately selecting them, please let me know how that works. I’ll be busy ordering the same breakfast burrito and smoothie for the fourth time this week, burning through every erotic thriller ever produced, and wondering why I didn’t ask that woman with the icy, mesmerizing blue eyes, the one who invited herself to sit at my table and thoroughly charmed me for the next 90 minutes, for her number when I had the chance, which was in 2009. 

I don’t know. Don’t really care. Let there be songs to fill the air. Not Dead songs, though, thanks. I’ll get the indica to go.

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