By Mike McGuirk

I'LL TELL YOU one thing I hate about San Francisco. Whoever is making all the sandwiches needs to get something straight: the lettuce and tomato go on the slice of bread that has mayo on it and the cheese goes on the side with the mustard. Not the other way around. Does anyone agree with me? Lettuce with mustard on it is stupid enough, but Jesus Christ, cheese with mayonnaise on it tastes like something you scrape out of your wound after your plane goes down in the jungle and you spend six weeks eating your friends to survive. But since I am not a native of this great city, and am in fact free to move somewhere else, I should probably shut up about how annoying sandwiches are in these parts. (But I mean, really, Italian subs with American cheese instead of provolone? Come on.) Not that I'm not moving. The point is, when I think of California, this is one of the things I think about. The other thing I think about is music, sweet, sweet music. Californian music, to be specific. Is there anything better? Probably, but this issue of Noise is all about Californian music, so deal with it.

To me, Californian music boils down to two things: One is the Beach Boys, and Will York writes about them in this very issue in Family band. In fact, Will York has done tons of research, an important component of journalism, and I haven't done much. So if you care about keeping journalism from descending to the level of mediocrity that I wallow in, then turn the page to York's piece. Back to the point. The other thing that screams Californian music to me, speaking of mediocrity, is the Grateful Dead.

I say "mediocrity" because if you average out the good music from the amount of music the Dead produced, then you get a pretty large heap of awful, for-Deadheads-only doo-doo and a smallish pile of quality material. The important thing, as far as this article is concerned, is that what is left behind, the good stuff, is far from mediocre and really cannot be overlooked, and anyone who takes the usual stance that the Dead and their minions all suck is denying him- or herself some very essential moments, which can be found mostly on a few cuts scattered here and there, but in one case fill up an entire record.

The thing is, people (especially the alternative rock generation) react to the Dead with a recoil and across-the-board distaste that is the inverse of the blanket acceptance of, say, London Calling or whatever fart squeaks from between Yo La Tengo's ass cheeks, which these same people regard as the apex of human creativity. Don't get me wrong. I believe in London Calling still, and even Yo La Tengo now and then, but you get my point, right? There's a critical solidarity against the Dead, brought on by their fans, and how a person might feel about them, and the glut of bad records they've flooded the market with over the years. Still, I'm going to stand up against conformist attitude by marching to the beat of my own drummer.

By the way, I know I'm not the first supposed non-jam rock dude to say I like the Grateful Dead (not that I do, really); in fact I'm sure Steve Malkmus has either covered some Dead tune or referenced a song title on his new record, but that guy's trapped by his own irony, and as a lowly freelance writer for a local weekly, hopefully I don't have that particular millstone hanging round my neck just yet. Maybe I do. I don't know.

I grew up hating the Grateful Dead. First of all, they turned my sister into some kind of excitable No Nukes sermonizer who wore a headband and called our father (who was pissed off enough to begin with) "man" (pronounced "mee-ann") all the time. Years later I went to an all-boys Catholic high school called St. John's Prep, just outside of Worcester (pronounced "Wistah") in Massachusetts, where I was forced to wear a suit jacket and tie every day and was surrounded by kids like Mark McManus, who always brayed in his Northboro accent about how mint the Dead were and then showed up to the SATs high as a kite and spent the entire test staring straight ahead, never even picking up his pen or responding to the proctor's waving hands. "Touch of Grey" was on the radio every second of every day, and a guy I worked with at a doughnut shop in my hometown would play bootlegs from shows in Weymouth, Mass., where Jerry aimlessly soloed for 30 minutes on the riff from "Good Lovin.' " Being the complex alterna-punk that I was, I just wanted to listen to the Violent Femmes, but Mr. Wanna-Give-You-Every-Inch-of-My-Love-with-the-Zoso tattoo wouldn't let me.

Not long ago Dead drummer Mickey Hart collaborated with Sammy Hagar (also known as the Red Rocker) on a song that was called "Party 2K Style" or something. What the fuck? Do they think the public is that stupid? Another reason to hate the band.

The last example of Dead-Deadhead treachery-stupidity I have is a story I only heard through friends. When Jerry died, they had a parade down Haight Street of course, which was fitting. Some hippies made a sign to show their grief. It read, "We Love You Jerry Garica." Please read that closely. Coincidentally, at that time I was working at a barbecue place in Cambridge, Mass., where someone (not me) put up a picture of Jerry and wrote "I Love Pork" on his stomach, angering roughly two-thirds of our customers.

So the Dead represented many things to me, most of them ugly, none of them positive. But one day I heard this voice that said, "Go get your sister's copy of American Beauty from Ma and Dad's house this weekend." So I did, and for three days I pretended to enjoy "Ripple," but I had to give up eventually, because as much as I didn't want to, I hated the music.

A year or so later, I stole my brother's copy of Workingman's Dead, the group's masterpiece. After a handful of listens, I gave that record the middle finger. They were as bad as all my friends who never listened to them said they were.

But the voice did not go away, and finally I brought home a copy of Aoxomoxoa.

First of all, that's a great album name, and the cover is indecipherable, two pluses. At the end of side two, there's a tune where Jerry wails and moans from the furthest reaches of what sounds like someone's melted brain ("What's Become of the Baby"). Even in the daylight that song is fucking scary, a long way from the friendly hippie crapola that everything else by them seems to be. Following this creepfest, "Cosmic Charlie" bubbles up and bursts in a giant psychedelic crash of cymbals hit just right. As usual the lyrics ruin everything (you can't say "Dum-dee-dum-dee-doo-de-lee-doo" ever, unless you are Lee Dorsey or something), and eventually there's a section where they sing in whimsical falsettos (dumb) and the notes jump in a total twirl-dance meter that nearly kills it all, but thankfully the multicolored LSD-peak drum-and-guitar break is repeated and you have what this genuinely passionate rock music enthusiast considers to be the most awesomely psychedelic tune America ever produced.

Not long after this discovery, I was breathlessly explaining to a friend of mine that the Dead had a truly amazing tune and check me out for listening to the Dead I'm so open-minded, when he one-upped me, directing me to check out the real Dead masterpiece, Anthem of the Sun. The band's second record, released in 1968, it features a four-part first side that runs almost 13 minutes and jumps from studio material to live material and back again. In between changes, there are sections that preview the weird shit Royal Trux would get into, and there's even one part that sounds like that laptop doodling that's all the rage, I swear. Also, the song "Alligator" is great even though it has kazoos on it. The band spent two years putting it together, and the idea was to somehow recreate their totally outta-hand live show of the time. I think they probably succeeded, because most people hate this record. It sounds dense and cluttered; there's nothing easy about it. I think that's why it holds up 30 years later. Plus the live sections really cook.

Maybe this is the important detail I've been missing all these years. I never saw them live. I'm not talking about the In the Dark tour; I'm talking about seeing them here, in California, in 1966 or something, before their records came out, when all the Angels were hanging out and Pig Pen was the coolest guy and the band carried guns and were total badass biker toughs. That must have been cool.