14-
Expert: Play an album by a band who picked their name from a novel/poem.
Grateful Dead "American Beauty" (1970 Warner; 2024 Rhino HF)
The official story on the Grateful Dead, as related by Jerry Garcia in the book Playing in the Band, is as follows: “We were standing around in utter desperation at Phil [Lesh]’s house in Palo Alto [trying to think up a name for the band]. There was a huge dictionary, big monolithic thing, and I just opened it up. There in huge black letters was `The Grateful Dead.’ It … just cancelled my mind out.”
I’ll say — how often does the phrase “grateful dead” pop up in the average dictionary? But it turns out Garcia may not have hallucinated the whole thing after all. In the Funk & Wagnalls Standard Dictionary of Folklore, Mythology and Legend, we find a page headed “GRATEFUL DEAD” in big type. Beneath this is an entry to the effect that the “grateful dead” is a motif figuring in many folktales.
Further investigation has turned up a rare volume of folklore entitled The Grateful Dead by G.H. Gerould (1908),
THE STRAIGHT DOPE
June 9 1989
www.straightdope.com
SCORE = 132 canadian points
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