Johnny Case in Wonderland . . . hopelessly adrift in popular culture

… have in common?  A: An unabashed love of the Grateful Dead.  This amazes me!  I discovered this strange factoid while reading Michael Azerrad’s “Our Band Could be Your Life: Scenes From the American Indie Underground (1981-1991),” which is one of the three best books about music I’ve ever read (interestingly, all three are about a specific era of punk rock).  When I was in high school and college during the 1980s, I LOVED Ginn’s Black Flag, Hüsker Dü, T.S.O.L., The Ramones, The Dead Kennedys, The Replacements, The Minutemen, and any number of other punk and post-punk bands.  I was also a hard core Deadhead (100+ shows).  And when living first in the San Francisco Bay Area and later in my beloved Chico—which had both Vomit Launch, its very own awesome punk(ish) band, and Mother Hips, a still extant Dead influenced band that I used to see at backyard keggers when they were called The Keystones—that somehow never seemed incongruent to me.  Indeed, the Bay Area may well have been the only place in the world where you could go see a punk show at the Mabuhay Gardens while wearing a tie-dye one night and a Dead show at the Berkeley Community Theatre while wearing a Black Flag shirt the next and not catch crap for it in either venue.  In a lot of other places around the country that sort of behavior at punk shows could well have resulted in a beating, but not in the Bay Area.  I always just kind assumed I was a bit weird in really loving such divergent kinds of music, but now I find out Ginn, founder of one of the hardest of all early SoCal punk bands, also loves the Dead.  For some reason this delights me beyond all reason.