Was remembering some of the interesting people I roomed with while doing campaign work after college. There was one guy who only listened to the Grateful Dead and it was nonstop, 7 am and I’m wanting coffee and not wanting to hear about someone riding that train high on cocaine!! I think he has more Dead tapes than clothes.
Thankfully it only lasted a few weeks, he wasn’t a great campaign worker and last time I saw him, he was trying to hitchhike across the country.
My college roommate was a big fan, but he played many other groups, too. Most notably he turned me on to the Allman Brothers, playing an album that wasn’t officially released until 20 years later.
My college fraternity was full of Deadheads, of whom there were one or two who never listened to anything but their (shitty) live tapes. But most of them were willing to listen to decent music also.
That describes the guy I lived with briefly, he had so many live tapes and his Deadhead buddies would all come over and discuss the intricacies between the Denver 1977 show and the 1978 New York show
I’ve known a few people who used to follow the band and never miss a performance. I don’t remember any of them constantly listening to the Dead at home. In my youth, the unwritten rule was that you didn’t listen to the band you were about to see for several days ahead of the show. Listening to them in the car on the way to the show was particularly taboo. And may you be struck by lightening if you wore the band’s t-shirt to the show!
My supervisor at a place I interned at was a guy that only listened to Rush. Every morning, he’d show up with a case of about 25 CDs, jewel cases & all, and pop in one after another for the whole shift. Then, pack them up and bring them home to repeat the next day. He was a really nice guy and didn’t try to evangelize us or anything. It was just all he listened to. Now I like Rush as part of the Classic Rock catalog but after a couple weeks, it got to be a bit much.
I used to manage a record store in the early 1980s. Our store was burglarized one night, and the perp simply smashed the front glass, ran in and scooped up the entire Grateful Dead bid (maybe 40 or so LPs), and ran out the door. There were literally Grateful Dead LPs leading away on the sidewalk, so we knew which direction he went.
Never heard their live tapes but they allowed fans to plug right into the sound system so the quality must be pretty good. They sold tickets for that called taper tickets.
I used to know a Deadhead, back in the '90s – he was the one-time husband of one of my wife’s friends (who was decidedly not a Dead fan).
I don’t know that he only listened to the Dead, but I think it was close. He had hundreds of concert tapes (most, I think, Nth-generation tapes of tapes), and I never knew him to listen to anything else.
When he and my wife’s friend got married, he prevailed upon her to have their first dance be a Dead song (I don’t know which one; I wasn’t there). She later told me that, while she didn’t have an issue with having their first dance be to a Dead song, she was rather annoyed that he picked an 8-minute-long song. :smack: