Garcia remarked, “When I sing that song…I say to myself, ‘Am I really a Presbyterian minister?’” (D. In another, Uncle John’s Band, a reference to Garcia, he plays beside the water and comes “to take his children home.” Ripple imagines a “fountain not made by the hands of men,” echoing Mark 14:58 and Hebrews 9:11. We depart this broken world to find eternal rest beneath a willow on a mythic, verdant river bank. Literary critic Northrup Frye observed that the Bible’s central myth is deliverance: “Adam and Eve…are expelled from Eden, lose the tree and water of life, and at the very end of the Bible it is the tree and water of life that are restored to redeemed mankind” ( The Great Code: The Bible and Literature, pp. Sung as a lullaby, it holds a key to the band’s ageless popularity. The anniversary shows were dubbed “Fare Thee Well,” a line from Brokedown Palace, a paradigmatic Dead song. In Wharf Rat, a derelict sings with surprising brightness, “I know that the life I’m leading is no good/I’ll get a new start/I’ll get up and fly away, fly away.” Doubt and yearning for a promised land are constant themes: “So many roads…All I want is one to take me home” ( So Many Roads). While their songs tell of misfits and outsiders, loners and drifters, the music is often lilting and transcendent. The ancient story saturates their lyrics. Even the shape and direction of their storied live performances traced this story musically from wilderness to paradise. Plucking these themes from traditional American music, they spoke to deeply held aspirations and worries. The Dead formed a lasting, spiritual connection with its fans by adapting for contemporary audiences the biblical story of exile and promise of a return home. The real part was the spiritual part,” which helps explain the band’s peculiarly enduring legacy. Garcia said, “For me, the lame part of the Sixties was the political part, the social part. They explore an ancient but internal dream. But the Dead were firmly apolitical, distancing them from contemporaries who sang of a new, external American dream (pacifism, collectivism, free love). Others saw lingering paragons of a long-gone counterculture. To some, the Dead were faded troubadours of freewheeling drug use, even if only two of their nearly two hundred songs mention drugs. This massive popularity puzzled casual observers.
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