![]() In our Land Rover, we had the album American Beauty, and a 1988 best-hits anthology called Skeletons from the Closet, and one of the volumes of Dick’s Picks, curated anthologies of some of the best live versions of Dead songs, though as a child I found live Grateful Dead music perplexing and even vaguely terrifying. My mom insisted on having a few other CDs in the car - I remember Joni Mitchell and Norah Jones - but mostly it was the Dead. This was San Francisco in the 1990s, so he was in good company. ![]() My dad was a fairly casual Deadhead in the ’70s and early ’80s and retained an above-average enthusiasm for the band into my childhood. I came to like the Grateful Dead in one of the usual ways: by osmosis. I am, to my occasional chagrin, one of the Deadheads Big Steve addresses with love at the beginning of his show. Big Steve said something like, “Man, I remember the Holiday Inn there.” With that, I was hooked. Things apparently got a little wild, as they were wont to do. The caller and Steve discussed the show and what happened afterward. This is another common theme almost any region of the country will prompt him to reflect on how many great Deadheads live there because there are great Deadheads everywhere. “A lot of Heads in South Attleboro,” he said, or something like that. When I first tuned in, the caller was talking about a show he’d attended in the ’80s, somewhere in Massachusetts (maybe Foxboro, 7/2/89?) and Steve was reminiscing. “It’s George from Georgia,” his assistant will say, delighting Big Steve. Sometimes Steve plays songs, but his show is mostly about the callers. The structure of his show is simple: Someone calls in, and they chat about the good old days. But this time it wasn’t music it was Big Steve’s deep voice, in the middle of a call with a listener. The rental car had SiriusXM, and I turned it to the SiriusXM Grateful Dead Channel, which is a reliably good channel if you, like me, are content to listen exclusively to the Dead for hours at a time. I first encountered Big Steve a few years ago, when I was in a rented Nissan driving from Boston to New Haven. (A common theme in Steve’s stories is smoking weed, often in places where it is frowned upon.) Big Steve is also promoting a new line of cannabis that he calls “Egyptian Kush,” born out of the Dead’s visit toEgypt in 1978, where Big Steve says he was given some “mystery cannabis seeds from the locals” that he has been planting in small batches ever since. He can talk in great detail about the mechanics of the percussion sets Mickey Hart used in the early ’70s, and the collection of seashells Steve used to have to hang for him. Steve can tell us stories about a girl named Geraldine who used to visit Jerry in the dressing room of the Capitol Theatre in Passaic, New Jersey, and how she would bring him cookies “because that’s the kind of girl she was.” Big Steve’s worship of Jerry as a kind of doomed saint is not so unusual for a hardcore Deadhead, but Steve had unusual access to the man himself, in all his wonder and banality. Much of Steve’s life is now dedicated to reliving these experiences with the Grateful Dead and especially with Jerry. He was the best man at one of Jerry’s weddings and, he notes on the personal section of his website, was the last friend to see Jerry before he died. He went on to be the manager of the Jerry Garcia Band, one of Jerry’s side projects, which usually toured when the Dead was taking breaks. He handled equipment and helped assemble and disassemble the band’s infamous sound system, a three-story behemoth of hundreds of speakers, dubbed “the Wall of Sound.” He partied with the band. Even if it’s not - sometimes he alludes to “challenging times” - everything will be recast in the golden light of the past, at least for the next hour.īig Steve, or Steve Parish, was on the road with the Grateful Dead more or less from 1969 until 1995. It is almost always a beautiful day where Big Steve is. He is sitting in a room that he calls “Grizzly Peak Studio,” which is also the name of a line of cannabis products he launched. “Hello to all my beautiful Deadhead brothers and sisters out there,” he might begin, in a gravelly voice. ![]() ![]() On Wednesday mornings, Big Steve takes calls.
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