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I have signed on to teach a Grateful Dead class for Stanford Continuing Studies. It’ll be six Monday evenings, starting in mid-January (skipping one week in February). You can find out more, and/or sign up for the class, here: continuingstudies.stanford.edu/gratefuldead

The sessions will be recorded, and students will be able to watch later. This will be helpful to people on the east coast!

From the syllabus: Grateful Dead music is collaborative and improvisational. Accordingly, I have invited guest speakers to join me in at least five of the classes. I’ve been an oral historian and a radio interviewer for more than 40 years; I have learned that conversation is a vastly more effective mode of presentation than lecturing. Regardless of the stated keyword for the session, each of the speakers will have things to say about multiple topics, so we won’t really be confined to the nominal theme. Instead, students will benefit from the experiences of many experts, each of whom is also a life-long Deadhead with personal stories and perspectives as well as historical and critical knowledge. For each session I will consult with the guest to create a playlist of, say, 60-90 minutes – reflecting various aspects of the band’s musical and cultural development. We’ll trace the Dead’s trajectory from private parties and pizza joints to theaters and hockey rinks and stadiums, examining their achievements and struggles. We’ll see how this music and this culture affected the lives of thousands of fans; we’ll take a look at a tribe that has grown over the decades and now features Deadhead families four generations deep. We’ll hear how the music changed over time, as the dialogue among these musically diverse characters inspired growth both individual and collective; we’ll see how the Grateful Dead invested in high-quality audio tools and sound systems to deliver maximum creativity at maximum quality from the Summer of Love to the summer of ’95.