He started seeing the band later that same year.

Yeah, I think of that as being the real glory days of Shakedown Street.

And by that, I simply mean that it was before Touch of Gray flooded Shakedown with clueless tourists.

Shakedown Street was just magnificent and magical.

For me, what really appealed to me since I was born and raised in the South, my parents had both a sort of local culture orientation, but also a profound scholarly appreciation for vernacular culture.

And that extended to Gullah culture, Appalachian folk crafts, all of that.

They had fine art taste, but they also very much had vernacular taste.

We've posted a link at dead.net/deadcast.

It featured a Revolutionary War minuteman posed in front of a giant American flag, gripping Jerry Garcia's tiger guitar.

To focus on the massive, wonderful backdrop is, that's a real statement by Griffin, A, that sort of says now, you know, metaphoric, artistic, graphic reach is, is extending back to, you know, the dawn of, of the country, but also deliberately recasting that in the age of Reagan and saying, "No, there's this contrary theme.

The counterculture is every bit as patriotic and every bit as much a part of the tapestry of American history and experience and culture as anything that, that passed for the Reagan '80s mainstream deprecation and dismissal of the '60s." So I think that's absolutely essential and critical, and the idea of a minuteman holding a, a guitar, that's also a deliberate statement that, in fact, the minuteman is a symbol of national spirit, but it's also defiance, and it's also militaristic.

Having a guitar as what the minuteman is holding is nothing more than a statement of, yeah, well, um, music and art are their own statement, and that is the Dead.

Last episode, we heard about how David Leopold had reacted negatively to the Minuteman art at first, until an older head had reminded him that even in 1985, the Stars and Stripes could still be a freak flag, too, an attitude that every generation of American freaks probably has to discover for themselves.

If you went to college in the, in the early '80s, the '60s colored everything, and Reagan comes to power because he is inveighing against the '60s, and yet every, all of the evidence around you, especially if you went to a Dead show, suggests the opposite, suggests that the '60s were, in fact, pretty wonderful in a lot of ways.

They certainly were empowering, and they certainly pointed to a narrative that the mainstream was actively ignoring or suppressing or distorting.

So you go to a Dead show, and then Shakedown Street is kind of that idea reified and writ large.

Please welcome back to the Deadcast, Nicholas Meriwether, founder of the Grateful Dead Studies Association, who wrote the liner notes for the new Summer Magic box, who we'll hear lots more from next time.

The Dead were not about calling attention to themselves.

Every aspect of that press conference that they held at the Greek, which was just a masterful stroke of publicity on Dennis McNally's part.

But all of that, if you look at the tone, if you look at the, the, the jocularity, all of that The whole point is this is a band that shambles on stage as if they've just rolled out of bed.

The whole idea is to focus on the art.

The idea of celebrating a milestone is just kind of like, ew.

It's so contrary to what they're thinking of.

Here's Bobby Weir from the press conference earlier in the day.