The 2024 death of Grateful Dead bassist Phil Lesh reminded me: I discovered the Grateful Dead and the Velvet Underground at the same time. The bands still exist as a unity in my mind, even after I figured out they were polar opposites.

My 1980s high school girlfriend was from the Northeast around Connecticut and New York City. She fused goth, punk, and hippie vibes. When we were 18, we took acid in her Austin, Texas shack. That’s where she DJ’d for me, on vinyl, the Grateful Dead and the Velvet Underground.

I’d heard the bands but never listened. She played the 1970 Dead tune “Box of Rain,” written by Lesh about the death of his father. Then we listened to “Rock & Roll,” the 1970 VU tune by Lou Reed about music as refuge, with Sterling Morrison on lead guitar. It all sounded like sheer Americana to me.

In the 1990s I became more of a Velvet Underground guy, from the band’s proto-punk stuff. But then I dated a Deadhead in Berkeley, and she took me to some Dead shows. That’s when I really got what the Dead fuss was about. I enjoyed my first show plenty, just for the carnival atmosphere, not having a deep knowledge of their discography. But then they covered “Johnny B. Goode” and the top of my skull lifted off. The secret of Dead shows is they piled crescendo on crescendo until you hit peak bliss, then they kept climbing. Yes I was on mescaline.

After my Deadhead, I married a goth in Santa Cruz. My wife gave me the VU box set and I went all the way down the rabbit hole. Their first demos sounded like Bob Dylan, I could not believe it and I still can’t.

One day in 1995, Jerry Garcia died. The VU’s guitarist Sterling Morrison died shortly after, emphasizing the bands’ mysterious inter-relatedness. I wrote the below about this in a story I read from the stage, first in Santa Cruz, then in Duluth, after we’d moved here with our infant daughter:

The Most Ironic Death in Rock n’ Roll History

Wherefore art thou, Sterling Morrison, famed guitarist for the Velvet Underground? My friend Joel and I got hammered and air-guitared furiously to the Velvet Underground. Front man Lou Reed liked to say about his bandmate, “His name is like his guitar playing: Sterling.”

Sterling, your sudden death from non-Hodgkins lymphoma made me sad. It was the most ironic death in rock n’ roll history.

You see, the Grateful Dead’s Jerry Garcia had died not a month before, and everyone freaked out. Santa Cruz when Jerry died was Ground Zero of hippie mourning — open wailing on street corners. My brother in San Francisco said he heard some guy saying, “Man, when Jerry died, the mother ship came down, man, and they took him away…”

I saw Jerry play and it was great. I even saw a few Jerry Garcia Band shows at the Warfield, felt like I was touching history.

But he didn’t mean anything to me compared to Sterling Morrison. So when Sterling died, and it was barely a blip on the radar screen of popular culture, it got me down. Rolling Stone put out a whole book about Jerry, but Sterling only got one page in that month’s issue. It quoted Sterling about himself: “There are two things you can say about me: I never was a hippie, and I never sold out.”

The article said when the Velvet Underground ended in 1970, Sterling went back to school at the University of Texas at Austin to get a Ph.D. in Medieval literature. His former bandmates were all, “No way.” He played locally. Then he drove a tugboat in Houston for a while, supporting his family.

There is great irony with Sterling’s death so close to Jerry’s. Each guy played guitar in legendary bands from 1965-1970, with the Dead lasting a lot longer than that. They represented the most experimental bands on their respective coasts. The Dead dominated the West Coast scene, right there with Kesey and everybody. And the Velvet Underground was the coolest thing in New York City, with Warhol and everybody. In the words of the Velvet’s box set liner notes, they “had no peers, no rivals, and no one to answer to.”

The guitarists’ roughly synchronous deaths approaches a grand coincidence. The synchronicity levels were off the charts for me personally because I, like Sterling, had lived in New York City, Houston, and Austin, attending the University of Texas. Sterling’s spirit had possessed me in my air-guitar sessions.

Imagine my surprise when I discovered both the Dead and the VU had formerly called themselves “the Warlocks.” They’d each changed this name when they discovered another band already had it. Could they have been thinking of each other? I can’t confirm it. It’s a second or third level synchronicity as it is.

A short while after Sterling’s death, I saw some guitar magazine had a “top 100 guitarists of all time.” (#1 of course was Hendrix: “Jimi had it all.”) I checked it out, fully expecting to see Sterling make the grade, but they passed him up for Lou Reed. I was hurt, but after some thinking I guess it’s okay. They had to pick someone from the Velvet Underground, and Lou Reed had stayed in the public eye, and was still playing relevant guitar. Sterling captured lightning in a bottle just once, from 1965-1970. These words are dedicated to him.

I wanted to name any firstborn son of mine Sterling, but my wife said no. “But sweetie,” I said, “Everyone would call him ‘Sterl,’ like Lou Reed called Sterling Morrison!”

That’s when I knew I’d taken this guitar thing a little too far. When you want to name your kids after your guitar hero, it’s getting pretty bad.

The Bands Cross Paths

After writing the above, I spent decades wondering if the bands ever met. Recently I found passages on that topic in the biography Lou Reed: King of New York by Will Hermes.

For one thing, Hermes notes the Grateful Dead’s “musical echoes” in the Velvet Underground, like I thought I’d noticed in 1987 on acid:

“Both bands were informed by folk and free jazz and devoted to transcendental guitar jams. Both had connections to the classical avant-garde — the Velvets through Cale […] the Dead through its bassist, Phil Lesh […] pushing the boundaries of new music. Both bands had poet-lyricists. Both were briefly named the Warlocks. And both were at the top of their game as live performers.”

The bands were on the same bill only once, a two-night run in Chicago:

“The Dead and the Velvets agreed to alternate their sets each night, so each got to headline. According to Doug Yule, the Dead went long [on the first night], cutting into the Velvet’s time; one fan recalled Reed coming onstage and gesturing for them to wrap it up, to which Pigpen, the Dead’s burly keyboardist, responded with a middle finger. The next night, the Velvets retaliated. ‘We did “Sister Ray” for like an hour,’ he recalled. ‘Lou was out to prove he could do it.’”

The best part of the book is a quote from actor-artist Mary Woronov, about when she traveled with Andy Warhol’s crew and the VU to California. There she saw the bands’ scenes clash, at the VU show at the Fillmore — Grateful Dead territory. It was a study in opposites. According to Woronov:

“We spoke two completely different languages. We were on amphetamine and they were on acid. They were slow to speak with these wide eyes — ‘oh, wow!’ — so into their ‘vibrations’; we spoke in rapid machine-gun fire about books and paintings and movies. They were into ‘free’ … and going back to the land and trying to be some kind of true, authentic person; we could not have cared less about that. They were homophobic; we were homosexual. Their women, they were these big round-titted girls; you would say hello to them and they would just flop on the bed and fuck you; we liked sexual tension, S&M, not fucking. They were barefoot, we had platform boots. They were eating bread they had baked themselves — and we never ate at all!”

An index of Jim Richardson’s essays may be found here.