My friend’s description of his summer in Europe gave me a killer idea for a band name:

Ostensibly Dissertation Research

If we’re really good, maybe we can score a Fulbright.

Photo: Cover art, The Velvet Underground, The Velvet Underground

This post continues where this one left off, as an homage to another really rad old-school band. It’s dedicated to Grimes, with whom I listened to the Velvet Underground on repeat through most of high school.

Here’s the sample song drill:

Go to the iTunes store.
Enter beginning underground in the search box.
Click on one of the versions of “Beginning To See the Light”.

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This post has a soundtrack. I would include a link to the song, but I am trying to be good and not do things that are illegal. The second best option is this:

• Open the iTunes store.
• In the search box, enter this: “grateful dead” ripple. If you don’t enter the “grateful dead” part of the equation, you will find, among other things, the Jane’s Addiction version of this song. While that version is admittedly cool, it’s not the right one for this post.
• Click on one of the search results. The 30-second sample will give you an idea of where I’m coming from.

My object today is to describe my unexpected and undying love for the Grateful Dead. I own (well, possess, as my compliance with laws is haphazard) exactly 16 Dead songs. However, each and every one is indelibly burned in my heart thanks to the 800,000 times I’ve listened to them.

My friend Dave made me a Grateful Dead compilation CD last year before I moved to Oakland. I was supposed to make him a copy of the Rancid And Out Came the Wolves album, but because I suck, I didn’t. Nonetheless, his generous gift of time and music has altered my life such that I now know why people in my high school were crying after Jerry Garcia died. The music is just so perfect and versatile. It’s good music for driving, setting up an apartment, calming scaredy cats during a cross-country drive, and other activities ad infinitum.

Why, you ask, did I become curious about the Dead in the first place? I rented Freaks and Geeks, an amazing show that saw just one season, probably because it mocked George Bush the Elder and played way too much classic rock. In the last episode, the main character, Lindsey, is feeling conflicted about the fact that she is a closet smartypants trying to live the burnout life. Her counselor’s idea of guidance is to give her a copy of the American Beauty album. The end result is that she skips out on an Academic Summit to follow the Dead with newly acquired hippie friends, one of whom describes American Beauty this way:

That album is so good that I wish I never heard it, just so I could hear it again for the first time.

If that’s not a testament to genius, I don’t know what is.