When the Grateful Dead play at Laguna Seca Raceway, near Monterey, California, on a weekend in May, the legion of nearly 35,000 fans that attends the performances is largely the same sort of audience that some folks have enjoyed poking fun at for nearly two decades now: in part a crowd of middle-aged sentimentalists but mainly forever-young hippie types, wearing vivid, gorgeous tie-dyes and flowing, free hair and dancing as restlessly and haphazardly as only impenitent tribalists can. Yet as anomalous or naive or plain hilarious as many modern pop fans may find this scene, there's also something undeniably homey and heartening about it. This is a crowd of folks for whom blitheness is not just a bond but also an act of social dissent: a protest against both the resurgent straightness of our times and the meanness and trendiness that seem to characterize much of today's pop music. And for this audience, one of the most meaningful acts of affirmation it can make is to cheer the genial music of the Grateful Dead.

Perhaps it's this sense of shared good humor that helps make the Dead's performances seem so spirited on this weekend. Or perhaps it's simply the experience of witnessing a once-considerable band as it actively reasserts its skill and force, and a bit of its vision as well. In any event, in their best moments, the Grateful Dead are still as eloquent and alluring as in their go-for-broke heyday. More remarkably, they still sound like a unit without any fixed center: the melodic focus still shifts somewhere between Jerry Garcia's restive guitar lines and Phil Lesh's nervy bass runs; the rhythmic impulses pull back and forth between Bill Kreutzmann's swinglike tempos and Mickey Hart's edgier attack; and the harmonic action veers between Bob Weir's fitful rhythm-guitar chords and keyboardist Brent Mvdland's passion for soulful dissonance. In short, though the lineup may be slightly different, in practice, this is the same band that made "Dark Star" and "Uncle John's Band" count for so much a generation ago: a band that needs all its members working and thinking together to keep things moving and balanced.

But the Grateful Dead are never more impressive than in those moments when they make it plain that, above all, they need the audience to keep things purposeful. This idea comes across with special force toward the end of Sunday's show, when Bob Weir leads the band into a hard-pushing, rough-around-the-edges version of Buddy Holly's "Not Fade Away." After a few minutes, the guitars, bass, drums and keyboards drop out of the sound, and there is only the band and the audience shouting those old and timeless lyrics: "Love is love and not fade away/Love is love and not fade away."

"Not fade away," the crowd shouts to the band.

"Not fade away," the band sings back.

"NOT FADE AWAY!" the crowd yowls, leaning forward as one.

It keeps going like that, two bodies staring hard at one another, shouting and beaming, bound up in the promise that as long as one is there, the other holds a hope.

[Excerpt From Issue 504/505 — July 16, 1987]