Confessions of a Deadhead Music Educator
The following is an excerpt from my chapter in the amazing publication, Places and Purposes of Popular Music Education: Perspectives from the Field, edited by Bryan Powell and Gareth Dylan Smith. If you’d like to read the full chapter, pick up a copy on Amazon.
For many music educators there are two distinct musical worlds that brought them from an avid middle school and high school musician and music lover to taking the big step on deciding to major in music education. Those two worlds are what I would call the academic music world and the popular music world. For me, these two worlds were both very important to me and completely separate. Throughout my childhood I played piano as well as a variety of brass instruments – starting on trumpet in fourth grade, moving to baritone horn in seventh grade, and finally the tuba in eighth grade. At the same time, my piano skills shifted to the synthesizer/keyboard world in ninth grade after I had saved up enough money to buy my first synthesizer – the Roland Juno 106. I made the shift when I realized that it was infinitely more fun for me to play the keyboard parts from the music I loved (The Beatles, Pink Floyd, Rush and Yes) rather than the classical piano canon that I dreaded practicing. Right around ninth grade the divide between academic music and popular music became quite distinct to me. One world was what I did in school (tuba), and the other was what I did the second I got home from school (synthesizer). Reminiscing on that time in my life I can remember vividly separating the two – never discussing with my high school band director what music I liked, and never discussing with my popular-focused keyboard teacher what I did in school. My band director had no idea I played keyboards, and my keyboard teacher had no idea I played the tuba. At the time I probably didn’t think anything of that, but looking back I think that many, many other music students and future music educators may have had that same experience.
In tenth grade I got introduced to the Grateful Dead. While my path to becoming a full-fledged Deadhead took a little while, I know the reasons why I liked them the second I heard them – the music was amazing and the people who listened to them were really cool. I wanted to be one of those people. I went to my first Dead show and was absolutely floored by the community that followed the band around and the carnival-like atmosphere of the shows. This was my tribe. Meanwhile, my entire social existence in high school revolved around the music program. I was a quintessential band geek during the day and at football games and parades. The marching band program was my other tribe. My outward transformation from a band geek to a tie-dye wearing patchouli smelling Deadhead took about a year. By the time I was in eleventh grade, I was a full-on Deadhead – a long haired, peace loving, crystal wearing hippy. Even still, my two musical worlds were totally separate. Around that time, I started taking tuba lessons with Don Butterfield, a very well-known tuba player and teacher. Between Don and my high school band director they probably judged me on my tuba playing first, and my sense of fashion second. In all the years I studied with Don, he never asked me about the music that I liked – he only focused on my learning the standard tuba repertoire and my technique in lessons. I was also well aware of the stigma surrounding Deadheads – largely that they smoked pot and did psychedelic drugs. Regardless of whether that stigma was true or not, I got the impression that I could not be open about my own musical taste with my teachers because I wouldn’t have been taken seriously as a musician. I didn’t think that any of my music teachers even liked popular music – that was certainly the impression that they gave me. Until very recently, I never shared the fact that I am a Deadhead with the tens of thousands of educators to whom I have presented sessions at conferences, nor the thousands of educators that I have trained – probably for the same reasons as when I was high school. This prompted me to ask several important questions of myself and of my profession: Why is it that we compartmentalize these two worlds? Isn’t all music worthy of being taught? Shouldn’t music educators be interested in what their students listen to? When you become a music educator do you have to stop liking popular music and plunge head first into the academic music world to be considered a serious music educator? What is it about popular music that makes it seem like it can’t be taken seriously in formal music education? Is it the sex, drugs and rock and roll? Or something more sinister?
Me in 1987 - note the hippy bracelets and the ever-so-faint mullet.
These questions all came into focus for me in 2010 when I gave a talk at a university music education program on my predictions for the future of music education. As part of the talk, I predicted that popular music would be not only included in general and performance based methodologies, but would eventually become the primary direction of curriculum in order to remain relevant to the students. I made the bold claim that if Jimi Hendrix were alive at the same time as J.S. Bach, they would more than likely have been good friends, and would probably have partied together. I remember distinctly that the students clapped and cheered at this, but some of the faculty members openly bristled – folded arms, stern looks, shaking heads, and audible gasps . At the time I chalked it up to maybe being too progressive for the institution. Since then I have come to realize that this attitude is very common at the university level. I have also realized that not only are the musical aspects of why I love the Grateful Dead the exact same five reasons why I am a musician, they are also fundamental to who I am as a music educator.
Some of my Grateful Dead inspired art. I used to sell Psychedelic Coloring Books to pay for my shows.
That’s all for now. The rest of the chapter covers the five connections between being a great musician and music educator, and the Grateful Dead. What a long strange trip it’s been….