If you wanted to come up with a cynical definition of what we now think of as “the ’60s,” you could call it five years of middle-class kids slumming. Obviously, there was more to the counterculture than that. But that was a big part of it — and the middle-classness of it all, the fact that so many kids “dropped out” because they could afford to drop out, should not be forgotten. (The revolution was about protest, but it was also about selling designer psychedelic candles.)
If you wanted to come up with the cynical definition of a Deadhead, the term that describes those blissed-out nomad followers of the Grateful Dead, you could call them middle-class kids dropping out to cosplay the ’60s. They’ve been doing it for quite a while, and Mischa Richter’s rambling Deadhead documentary “Summer Tour” reminds us that they’re still at it.
The movie, which counts Chloë Sevigny as one of its producers, unveils the 2023 version of Deadheads, who are seen following the national tour of Dead & Company (whose members include key remnants of the Dead), in what was billed as the group’s final tour. (Now that Bob Weir has passed away, the nail is most definitely in that coffin.) As the documentary captures, we are currently in the third generation of Deadheads. The first were the original hippie followers of the Dead. The second were their self-consciously blissed-out 1980s and ’90s inheritors (a tidal wave of fandom you can date roughly up through Jerry Garcia’s death, in 1995). The third generation are the shaggy Zoomers we see in “Summer Tour,” notably the two central figures, Jeremiah Pierce and Annabelle Dunne, known as Jerry and Annie.
