The Grateful Dead first entered my musical listening orbit in 1981, when out drinking with friends, someone had mentioned they had seen the ‘Dead live on BBC2’s ‘Old Grey Whistle Test’, they had said it was really great, but very much acoustically based, no heavy kerangging noisy guitar solos,(or is it ‘soli’?).

The guy who said this was an old biker up at the bar we were drinking in, saying he was old probably meant that he was about 30, as me and my pals of the time, were 18 going 19, and 30 was ‘ancient’ to us then. Anyway, this guy had said that the Grateful Dead were great when ‘you were stoned’.

Strangely, that stuck with me for years, and once I decided that there was more to life than loud guitar music, I learned to appreciate the subtleties of the folk, blues , and country guitar sounds.

Which band captured those three styles so well for me, yes ladies and gentlemen, step forward -The Grateful Dead!

I bought ‘Reckoning’, the Grateful Dead acoustic double album from a record fair in 1987, around the time that the ‘Dead were enjoying a resurgence in popularity due to their hit with ‘Touch of Grey’, and the album ‘In The Dark’. I was listening to a lot of the new Americana based bands of the era, and it was time for me to explore the roots, by listening to Neil Young, CSNY, The Byrds and the Grateful Dead, music I had previously dismissed when younger, as ‘hippy music’.

Anyway, I already had a massive collection of Dylan cds, albums, and cassettes, and was going for those musicians and songwriters, who, as I saw it were similar to Dylan in style, lyrics, etc.

‘Reckoning’ recorded in 1980, is a great album , with Grateful Dead classics ( my favourites being ‘Ripple’ and ‘Bird Song’) alongside traditional folk ballads (‘On The Road Again’, and ‘Jack-a-Roe’) and country classics(‘The Race is On’ by George Jones) On these two discs, we are treated to some stunning acoustic guitar playing, in an album which to me is the forerunner to the ‘Unplugged’ era, when many rock bands played acoustic sessions on MTV. Its a really laid back affair, some which folk might refer to as ‘mellow’, and indeed poles apart from the lengthy improvisational psychedelic passages of the live versions of ‘Dark Star’, which they were renowned for.

I revisit this album and ‘Working Man’s Dead’ a lot, and once I have the bug, I usually play a couple of tracks from the tribute album’ ‘Dedicated’ from 1991 , which features Elvis Costello, Lyle Lovett, Suzanne Vega, and the Cowboy Junkies. As I often say, I would heartily recommend these to you!

I wrote to ‘The Wire’ magazine in 1998 in the pre-Internet age, praising the Grateful Dead, their continuing influence, and the Wire’s recent ‘Primer’ on the ‘Dead’s music-my comments are below.

I received a copy of the Space Ghost cd, featuring Sonny Sharrock for my efforts, and it was nice having a letter printed in ‘The Wire’, a magazine I still buy all these years later. Oh, and I still have a copy of the letter typed upon my first desk top pc!

Where has the time gone?