Shedheads and Deadheads
Our group has a name, plus my weekly shareables: a testy Q&A, a brilliant tribute to hip-hop, and the afterlife of a former Greatest of All Time
You may have followed the gripping saga of the past seven days where I suggested a name for those of us who occupy this space, and then was immediately trumped by a much better suggestion from my friend Ethan.
I put it to a vote—Friends of the Newsletter (my original pick), Shedheads (suggested by Ethan), or a write-in candidate of your choosing. I heard from more than 50 of you, either in the comments or directly through email. Polls are fun when there’s nothing major at stake, aren’t they?
The results are in, and the winner is: Shedheads, in a landslide. That’s the correct decision. Great job, everybody.
A couple of you raised fair concerns, the main one being that Shedheads sounds a little too close to “shitheads.”* My only advice is this: Enunciate. To paraphrase the legend Crash Davis, when you speak of this newsletter, speak well.
*My friend Diane used to have a cat named Shithead. She pronounced it “shi-THEED.” That was a lot of fun at the vet’s office.
A couple of you Shedheads have already sent in ideas for logos. If anyone else has ideas, send them along. I promise we will come up with something. There appears to be a bit of a clamor for Shedhead T-shirts. I have never been in the T-shirt business and have no idea how it works. But I’m about to learn. Again, any of y’all who have insights, I’d love to hear them.
The big picture, for me, was that so many of you care about this little community we’re building. This is exactly what I’d hoped for when I started this newsletter a year ago. We’re all Shedheads now. And I can’t thank you enough.
In the newsletter the other day, when I was talking about the echo between Shedheads and Deadheads, I mentioned that I have a little Grateful Dead story. So here it is.
In March 1995, when I was the music writer for the Charlotte Observer, the Dead played a three-night stand at the Charlotte Coliseum. My job was to cover the first night’s show. I’d never been to a Dead show so I went early, hung out with the Deadheads in the parking lot, turned down many offers of various powders and herbs. (I was on the clock.)
When I went inside I found Dennis McNally, the Dead’s longtime PR guy. He handed me my credential and welcomed me to come backstage at intermission. (The Dead almost always played two sets with a break in the middle.) Backstage with the Grateful Dead? Hell yes and thank you.
So as the first set ended, I made my way to the back. I was led into a big open room where the band members (except for Jerry Garcia) were hanging out with, I assumed, friends and family and members of the crew. It was dark and moody and people were talking in little clumps of twos and threes. I wasn’t about to go over and introduce myself. I was there for the vibe.
After a minute or two I noticed that people kept grabbing stuff out of a big cooler off to the side. It was too dark to see what they were getting. This, I thought, must be the giant drug stash. I pictured tea steeped from specially curated mushrooms, LSD on tabs the size of paper towels. I wasn’t going to partake, but I had to see. I waited until it seemed like everybody else had gotten what they wanted. Then I walked over and opened the lid …
Oat milk and orange juice. Maybe a couple of beers. That’s what was in the Grateful Dead’s magic cooler.
I was disappointed and somehow relieved at the same time.
I mentioned that Jerry Garcia was not around in the backstage room. He died five months later of a heart attack at a drug rehab facility. I suspect, on that night in Charlotte, he had made arrangements of his own.
As you probably know, the Dead or their fans recorded most of their shows. Here’s a recording from that night. I’ve never been a huge Dead fan. But I’m glad I got the full experience at least once.
Well, almost the full experience. (I was on the clock.)
10 things I wanted to share this week:
My weekly for WFAE was about a disturbing trend: every time Black History Month rolls around, somebody else is trying to erase black history.
Patricia Lockwood—the weirdest great writer I know, or maybe the greatest weird writer I know, or possibly both—writes about life and death with her husband on a plane.
I think Wright Thompson’s greatest gift is his field of vision. When Tom Brady retired as the greatest quarterback of all time, Wright had already been talking for months to Joe Montana—the man who once held the crown. Montana has feelings about Brady and lots of other things. It adds up to a fantastic profile that is the perfect story for the moment.
Walter Mosely is so salty and smart in this Q&A with David Marchese. If the Times ever does one of those By the Book interviews with me, and asks me the three writers I’d want to have dinner with, I’m now tempted to say “Walter Mosely, three times.”
DOG NEWS: While I work on my book, I’m devoting this slot to dog stories. This week: Bobi, the 30-year-old dog.
I laughed out loud at the idea that the CEO of Goldman Sachs moonlights as a DJ. (DJ D-Sol!) But as you might expect, there’s more to it than that.
Austin is still weird … but not like it used to be.
After we enjoyed the LONGMIRE TV series, we bought my mother-in-law a box set of Craig Johnson’s first four LONGMIRE books. I finally got the first two out of her clutches and devoured both (THE COLD DISH and DEATH WITHOUT COMPANY) this week. The characters are a little different than on TV, but it tracks pretty close.
It looks like CBS has blocked most of the full-length videos from the Grammys hip-hop tribute. This one seems to be working at the time I write this:
50-year anniversary of hip-hop performance at the #GRAMMYs by some of the greats including RunDMC, LL Cool J, Salt N Peppa, Ice T, Queen Latifah, Wu-Tang, Big Boi, Busta Rhymes, Missy Elliott, Nelly, Too Short, GloRilla, The Roots, and more...Questlove deserves a Nobel for putting the whole thing together. Maybe we should give him a chance with the Israelis and Palestinians.
RIP Burt Bacharach, who wrote so much of the soundtrack for so many lives. His biggest muse was Dionne Warwick, but the song I thought of first was Luther Vandross singing TO Dionne.
Damn, do I miss Luther. See y’all next week, everybody.
Stickers...you need Shedhead stickers to compete with The Rabbit Hole's shameless marketing approach. It would receive a place of honor on my laptop lid...
Hey Tommy, sorry to weigh in so late in the game. I agree that Shedhead is the best choice and a damn good brand. Problem is that I now have a serous identity crisis on my hands. See, I've been a Shedhead for decades. I was born in Santa Fe and still count it as my home, even from my current address here in the People's Republic of Portland, (I always hesitate to say "Santa Fe native" for obvious reasons.)
We Northern New Mexicans - my grandfather homesteaded in the NM Territory, so we go back aways - are mighty picky about our chile, mostly preferring Hatch, the real stuff grown in Hatch, NM not the counterfeit stuff snuck across the border from Texas and relabeled. And for my dineros, the best restaurant in Santa Fe for authentic Northern New Mexico cuisine is El Shed, on East Palace ave. We aficionados of the joint are, as you will have guessed by now, Shed Heads. I have a mighty fine T-shirt too. And I order my chile, Shed Red, by FedEx whenever I'm out.
Interesting historical fact: Today's Shed Restaurant in located inside a quiet courtyard, at 113 1/2 East Palace Ave, just a few steps from another quiet, sunny courtyard that contains the door to 109 East Palace Avenue. It was to this door that every scientist recruited to the Manhattan Project was instructed to report, in great secrecy, and knowing little or nothing about what they would be asked to do, or where, or for how long. Los Alamos had long been the location of a private boys school, situated high above San Ildefonso Pueblo, on an almost inaccessible mesa north of Santa Fe. Oppenheimer had gone there often to ride horses and camp in the high mesa country and thought it would be an ideal location to build the bomb. The physicists, mathematicians, and chemists, and their wives, and the soldiers who would guard them all were taken from 109 E. Palace Ave up the arduous switchbacked dirt track to Los Alamos, there to unleash the power of the atom.
I don't imagine that many tourists dining out at The Shed today know how close they are to that consequential piece of American history, to the literal doorway to the Atomic Age, to the beginning of the Age of Nuclear Anxiety.
I was born just after the war. My dad was a returned POW, a "survivor" of the Bataan Death march and almost four years in a succession of brutal Japanese prison camps. There was still much mystery surrounding Los Alamos in those days, a byproduct no doubt of the postwar Red Scare. The joke about the place in those days was that it was a top secret Navy base.
There's another story set at Los Alamos, aching to be told, and I hope to tell it some day soon, while I still can. It's the story of a couple of dozen Mexican land grant farmers working their land on the mesa who were driven from their homes by the army to make way for the Manhattan Project. Forced off their land utterly without compensation, their livestock slaughtered in place, their houses bulldozed. As a New Mexico boy, for me it's a story that ranks right up there with Wounded Knee as one of the most shameful episodes among so many shameful episodes in American History.
Which of course means that you can't talk about it in a Florida classroom.
Anyway, I've got my Shed Red, and I've got my t-shirt, and now I'm a Shedhead squared. When do I get my new t-shirt?