Afropop Worldwide

Midway through showcase action at the Brooklyn Bowl during New York’s most happening live music weekend, when the nation’s arts presenters gather for a feast of entertainment, an image of Bob Weir appeared on all the club’s screens. My first thought was that Weir was coming to play the venue soon. But no. The image was the club’s way of telling us that an American musical legend had just passed, joining fellow Grateful Dead founders Jerry Garcia, Phil Lesh and Ron McKernan (Pigpen) in the beyond.

For those of us who negotiated the trippy waters of American rock music in the 1960s and ‘70s, this felt like a landmark moment, truly the end of an era. Any future “Dead”-branded tours or projects will now feel more like tribute efforts than revivals.

Speaking personally, I can say that my own early love of Grateful Dead music was a significant part of my journey to a life in African music. This may seem counter-intuitive. I’ve often told the story of my one meeting with Garcia outside a Boston hotel in the early 1990s. I had a cassette of African guitar music, which I handed to him with a brief explanation. “Oh, yeah,” Garcia replied. “Henry Kaiser is always getting me to listen to this stuff. But I don’t hear them doing anything American guitarists weren’t doing in the ‘40s.”

I hope I had the sense to say, “Keep listening!” And I hope he did. But no matter. For me, the intricate, linear, melodic interplay between Garcia, Weir and Lesh in their characteristic jams truly did set me up to fall in love with the clean, rhythmic guitar interplay I later discovered in guitar-band music from Congo, Zimbabwe, Kenya, Tanzania…

Beyond that, the Dead opened my ears to all sorts of Americana, an enduring fascination. How many times have I heard an old American folk recording and said, “Oh yeah. I know that song from the Dead.” For all their flaws—and there were flaws—the Grateful Dead have been an entirely unique contribution to popular music, one that will surely outlive us all.

A couple of years ago, I heard about a project out of Barcelona called Afro-Dead. Sensing that this might validate my own sense that the Dead had helped lead me to Africa, I reached out. And the result was a Planet Afropop podcast exploring that connection.

In tribute to Bobby Weir, and all the late Dead (Can you be both late and Dead?), we offer this podcast for you today.