The Grateful Dead: “Friend Of The Devil” (American Beauty, 1970)
When I was five, in 1985, I was a Tiger Cub. For those who don’t know, this is a precursor to being a Cub Scout, and ultimately a Boy Scout. You don’t do any camping or crazy knot-tying, but you do get to visit air museums and spend one night a week in someone else’s wood-paneled, wool-carpeted raised ranch basement doing crafts with a bunch of other hyperactive five-year-olds.
The particular wood-paneled basement we had meetings in belonged to the Kaplans. Rory Kaplan and I were friends from school, and his dad was the den leader (they had three kids in all: Faith, Hope and Rory. I suppose if Rory had been a girl, he’d have been either Glory or Charity.).
I remember three things about Mr. Kaplan: 1. His beard. It was a friendly beard, the kind of beard cool dads had in the 80s. My dad had one, too. 2. He had the first personal computer I ever saw. 3. He was a huge Deadhead.
It seems weird to think about today, but we were all enthralled by this computer. It had a black and orange display, and he’d fire up the screen saver, which was a very early version of what would later be referred to as “warp” in a lot of screen saver packages, where a bunch of stars stretch out as you fly through them. it blew our minds.
I think our minds were honestly a lot less blown by the Grateful Dead concert videos he used to show us. We were a little young to understand the band’s improvisatory prowess, though I do vividly recall one video that tickled us quite a bit where the band played behind a fake stage with a bunch of miming plastic skeletons on it. The performance went awry when a dog jumped on stage and stole the tibia of Skeleton Jerry Garcia.
Still, I think it was my first brush with a really passionate music fan, and back home, my father had an old LP copy of American Beauty. I don’t know that I ever really listened to the lyrics of “Friend of the Devil” growing up, though I know I was vaguely weirded out by how casually he espouses kinship with the personification of all evil, but it’s hard for a kid to deny the kind of flowing, bouncy energy that runs through this song.
I remember some time in high school, talking about music in the car with my dad after I’d become very much absorbed in classic rock, and this song was on the radio. As a recently minted music nerd, I wasn’t yet re-sold on the Dead—part of it was the singing, which didn’t impress me. My dad, though, loved the singing—to him, these people just sounded real, and the kind of harmony they sing on “Sugar Magnolia,” where it’s not a studied, four-part harmony so much as guys singing together like you might around a fire, really appealed to him. He’s not a singer, but I think he felt like he could join in any time he wanted.
As happens when you’re in your teens, my opinion changed instantly and irrevocably. I started to hear that humanity in unstudied singing and started to like the Dead and the Band, and though it took a little longer, Dylan, too. I had a lot of moments in my teens where a conversation revealed to me that my worldview was far more limited than I though it was, and that was definitely one of them.
