one of my favorite musical sounds ever is funk bass guitar.

i mean, i love guitars, i love percussion and a nice throbbing bass, but really, funk bass is one of the best developments ever. it gets in you and if you don’t at least want to bop your head along you are sincerely broken somehow.

hich brings me to today’s topic of self-indulgent rumination: the grateful dead.

i used to dislike the grateful dead. i thought it was annoying hippie crap. then, in ’87, they released the single “touch of grey,” which i not only liked immediately but continued to like a whole lot. as a kid, i didn’t have an allowance and therefore never had any money to buy albums (a contributing factor to my modern-day insatiable music-buying lust? no doubt), so i never bought in the dark, but i’d call and request KZ93 to play it for me and dance and sing along every time it came on the radio. i still disliked the dead, but i really liked that song. the contradiction of the relentlessly cheerful music and the way jerry sang the song with the apparent insouciant pessimism of the actual lyrics was always hugely appealing to me, and it still is. (it’s the same reason that i really love outkast’s “unhappy,” which i think is a brilliant fucking song. it’s probably just coincidence that both songs take a ridiculously perky cliche and make it snarky, but i do dig the snark, it must be said.)

a few years later a friend — when i got annoyed at being told of all the things i “should” know about, and demanded that he give me a list to work through (i still have it, incidentally, and i believe that i’ve accomplished nearly everything on it except watching Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer, which just never really sounded interesting to me) — made me a mixtape (remember mixtapes? i miss mixtapes.) which had “ripple” on it. and then i discovered that i liked that song too.

around that time i finally had a music budget, so at some point i ended up picking up american beauty, which i of course now acknowledge as one of my favorite albums. okay, yes: annoying hippie crap, but it’s a good album.

don’t get the wrong idea. i haven’t entirely reversed my position. i have no dancing bears stickers on my car or tie-dyed grinning skull banners on my walls, i’m not particularly sorry jerry’s dead or that i never got to stalk the dead from hallucinogenic stop to stop, and truth be told i still tend to listen to what might be charitably characterized as “less-than-perky” music most of the time, but there are a number of occasions which, quite frankly, call for one to put on a dead cd and just chill out for a little bit. it’s not going to change the world or anything, but it might make your day a little better, and that’s cool.

this morning was a good time to break out shakedown street. now, shakedown street is not my favorite dead album (of the three i own — the last is workingman’s dead, which is pretty decent), but it features another favorite dead song, the title track. the funk comes in to play around here a little bit, since it was the seventies — god bless the seventies — and even muzak came served with funk standard in the seventies, but that’s all right. it’s a silly little song that never changed the face of music, but that ba da da dat dat WOO! bit gets me every time. i am physically incapable of not singing along. seriously, if they played it at jewel while i was grocery shopping after work, surrounded on all sides by bitter hipsters and bitchy trixies i’d still be going “WOO!” at all the appropriate times, smirking gleefully at the people who stared at me, and also kinda surreptitiously boogying with my basket of groceries. it wouldn’t even matter if i’d had a shitty day at work or if it was a full-on blizzard outside; the bass would eat my good sense and leave nothing behind but a crazy white girl dancing around in the yogurt section.

and so that’s what i’m up to this morning. relaxing, drinking a cup of coffee, and singing along with the grateful dead on “don’t tell me this town ain’t got no heart; y’just gotta poke around.” ‘cos that’s the sort of day today is, and the sort of song the sunshine and breezes coming in my windows are crying out for. it’s hippie crap, but maybe it turns out that i’m a hippie crap kind of girl, sometimes, after all.