Four years ago, I was asked to assign a color to concerts. The week prior, I’d been to my first stadium show. It was also the first time a large crowd hadn’t terrified me. We were all singing the same song, and that felt revolutionary. Even from my spot in the nosebleeds, it felt as if the speakers had tore into my ears and built a home for themselves. “Forbidden settlers,” I called them in writing, preferring to think of myself as the invaded rather than the invader. Confetti rained down from above. I was fourteen, and deliriously happy. When I returned back to regular life, I explained to my therapist, it seemed a dull gray in comparison.

She nodded, and wrote something down that I’ll never read. “So if the real world is gray, what would be the color of the concert?”

“Purple,” I answered. I didn’t think about it much.

My life then was very malleable, full of non-events and brief obsessions. I barely spoke to anyone, yet was sick of myself. I didn’t think I had any intrinsic value, and would only be interesting as long as I was attached to interesting things. Concerts provided something to latch onto, so I did. I was the girl who skipped P.E., but learned to stand in a line for hours at a time. To sprint to the bathroom during a song I disliked, and come back to the barricade in time for the next. I’ve never gone to a single school dance. In the pit, my rules changed.

There are several slang terms for what I became. “Fangirl” is the most broad. I don’t mind it. Though it’s sometimes used demeaningly, I fit its literal definition. I’m a fan of many artists, and I’m a girl. With “Punisher,” the scope narrows. This word, and its obsessive connotations, is the subject of an entire Phoebe Bridgers album. A “punisher” is a fan who feels as if they know their favorite artist personally. “Punisher” activities might include asking the artist to sign twenty different pieces of merch, or talking to them for too long at a meet and greet. Phoebe sings from the perspective of the punisher on the album. She dissects her obsession with Elliott Smith, calling him the “way to my heart.” When I saw her last year, the roles were reversed.

Halfway through the titular track, Phoebe fell to her knees. As she sang the lines “What if I feel like I know you / But we never met” the crowd rushed forward, pressing themselves against the stage. I found myself caught in the swell, gripping my bag tightly. Staring at Phoebe’s nearly-blank face. Punisher had been the album that sent her to the mainstream. We weren’t a rowdy crowd, necessarily, but at the time we were the biggest she’d ever played. More people reaching for her hands, her hair, than ever before.

It reminded me of the first time I’d met one of my heroes. It was 2018. I’d waited in the cold for hours, stamping my feet, for a $100 meet and greet. Objectively, the event was a concert for the various artists performing under the umbrella term, “Dead End Kids.” Subjectively, it was a chance for newly teenaged girls to meet their favorite recluse: former Panic At the Disco member Ryan Ross. Panic split in 2008, and he’d rarely been seen, let alone performed since. I hugged him within a second of meeting him. Once the show was over I’d followed him outside, shivering. Hugged him again and tried to memorize every breath of that October air. I told him his songs saved my life, and that I loved him. That I had loved him for years. He thanked me, signed my poster, and then disappeared into the night.

Phoebe wrapped up the song. As with every song that night, it was met with rapturous applause. I felt then that I had been a punisher, but I should try not to be. That everything I could possibly say to my idols, had already been said, a hundred times before. I wondered what it must’ve been like for Ryan, to emerge from such a long break to hear the same shouts from new faces. Phoebe’s show was great. I left during the encore.

Still–that was hindsight. The third slang term, I learned about after I became one. It was a month ago, when my mom took me to visit her old friend, Elizabeth. A former ballerina, Elizabeth also spent a lot of her youth in concert halls. Now she lives alone with her austere pet cat, Calliope. After eating some chocolate cake, mom mentioned my recent barricading. “Sarah, she’s like you. She doesn’t just want to go to the concert. She wants to be right in the pit. And I’m fine being in the back, but not her.”

“Ah,” Elizabeth cackled. “A railrat.”

She proceeded to give me the kind of concert advice that’s hard earned. Form alliances with those next to you. Ask for them to save your space when you go to the bathroom. Don’t wear huge fancy outfits, wear sneakers and comfortable clothing. Bring earplugs. Promise to save spots for other people in return. Sitting in her white-tiled kitchen, I got to hear stories about a life she no longer lives. “Sometimes, I would sneak down to the pit, with no ticket, and try and see if I could weasel my way in. People would let me, if I promised to save their spot in return. Granted”--a snort–”it didn’t hurt that I had the best weed.”

My mom and Elizabeth met on opposite sides of the ticket booth. From 1990 to 1995, my mom worked as a ticket seller for the Grateful Dead. And for much longer, Elizabeth had followed them from town to town. The Grateful Dead only have one top 40 single to their name (1987’s “Touch of Grey”), but their tours earned millions. They rose to fame in the 1960’s, becoming icons of the hippie, “peace and love” scene. The Grateful Dead remain a California staple, as essential to the state as a lack of snow. Certain California corners (Haight and Ashbury) are famous merely because the band spent a lot of time there. Their work has been described as psychedelic. Genreless. Experimental. Most commonly: weed music.

When I asked my mom about her time working for them, she scoffed at the associated drug use. “It was really an incredible business,” she said. “People marveled at how we never lost a ticket. We all lived together in one big house–it was really nice.”

From the other room, my dad shouted: “Tell Sarah what Calico said!”

After some sighs, she relayed the quote. “Some kids were just hanging around, not doing their jobs. Calico–she was one of my coworkers, she was a little catty, she went by Calico–she didn’t like that. So she told them, ‘if you can’t do LSD and work, then don’t work.’”

I emailed Elizabeth later, and asked her to tell me more about the Grateful Dead concert experience. She said she’d been fifteen when she first saw them, and didn’t know any of the songs. “Nevertheless, it was one of the most life-changing experiences I've ever had. I'll never forget the moment I looked around and saw people from so many different walks of life, all smiling, moving to the music, and feeling for the first time in my life like I was home,” Elizabeth wrote. “It may be that I had nothing else in common with all those strangers around me, but the music—the shared experience—brought us together.”

My mom has never played a single Grateful Dead song for me. She insists they’re best experienced live. By her own count, my mom has been to hundreds of Grateful Dead concerts. A booklet from a Grateful Dead box set lists her as an honorary band member. When I was little, I taught myself to read by sounding out the book titles on my parents’ shelves. They were all memoirs of former beatniks, photo albums chronicling the “Summer of Love.” I taught myself to find by rooting through the plastic bins in my mother’s closet. They were full of Grateful Dead memorabilia. Green felt G’s and skull iconography.

It’s easy to say I’m living inside my mother’s past. But my mother is one of many former devotees. I am living inside a thousand suburban mothers’ recollected 1960’s. I think of a line from Sylvia Plath’s poem “Stings.” ”I stand in a column / Of winged, unmiraculous women, / Honey-drudgers / I am no drudge.” Sylvia sought identity by escaping tradition. Her father, the beekeeper, the subject of many scalding verses. She invented what she could not grasp. I did the opposite. Step by step, I built my own personhood off secondhand history.

Until I couldn’t. Lockdown came, and my concerts stopped. I watched tickets I’d saved up for be delayed, and then rescheduled, and then canceled. I was sad, then ashamed of my sadness. Alone in my house, my lack of victimhood couldn’t be more apparent. I had the luxury of sleeping through online classes, making myself breakfast while the sky turned red. My parents at first tried to make quarantining fun, then we kept to ourselves. Childhood friends stopped checking up on me, one by one. Soon there was nothing left to dissect but myself.

So I did. I found poems I’d written years ago, about purple lights and rockstars. I deleted them, took down every band poster in my room. Lockdown saw a lot of high-profile celebrities sin, publicly. People were reevaluating the privilege rich people had in comparison to the masses. Pedestals shook. The word “parasocial” found frequent use. Once again, I was caught up in it all. The concept of “killing your idols” became gospel to me. I wrote new poems, where I casted the night I’d been to that first stadium show as a tipping point. The stadium was over a hundred feet tall. I pictured myself climbing up to the roof, and jumping off.

Still, I never stopped writing about music. I couldn’t. Whether it was binge-reading reviews of Taylor Swift’s reputation or trying to enhance the photo I’d taken with Ryan Ross, I never stopped thinking about music. My senses narrowed, to only being able to tolerate a single sound at a time. If two people talked over each other, I would plug my ears. My world had never been smaller. But I huddled in blankets, watching concerts on TV, and I felt intergalactic. I could escape the four walls, if only for a few bars. All alone, I closed my eyes and imagined painting my room a stunning shade of lavender.

The first concert I went to after lockdown ended was appropriately catastrophic. It was a festival, and I didn’t know any of the bands except the headliner. I’d been a fan of the headliner for years though, enough to recite their very long name (I Don’t Know How But They Found Me) and not abbreviate (iDKHOW). So I stood in the sun for hours, armed with a sunhat, sunscreen, and not much else. The band was great–coming onstage to robotic voices and staying late to meet fans after. I screamed myself raw, and woke up in a suit of sweat. For the next two days I was an invalid, lying in bed, unable to speak. I went to my doctor, who told me I didn’t have COVID, but there was blood on my eardrum. I hadn’t protected myself enough. I’m still learning how.

The Grateful Dead, despite their constant police raids, have a reputation for chill and laid-back concerts. Their fans, “deadheads,” are known for their unofficial fan markets and deep loyalty. According to Jerry Garcia, the band’s semi-frontman, “We didn't really invent the Grateful Dead, the crowd invented the Grateful Dead, you know what I mean? We were sort of standing in line, and uh, it's gone way past our expectations, way past, so it's, we've been going along with it to see what it's gonna do next." He’s been called one of the most recorded guitarists in history, due to the band’s leniency towards live recordings. You can find photos of him, mid-strum, scattered throughout our neighborhood. On our fridge, on the Filmore walls, on bumper stickers.

You can’t see the Grateful Dead live anymore. The band ended when Jerry Garcia died, in 1995. Nine years before I was born. They’ll occasionally do reunion tours, under the names Dead & Company, Furthur, or The Other Ones. Still, as my dad put it, “they’re so old now.” All the versions of them that got famous are encased in black and white. Everyone including Danny Rifkin, the band’s manager since the start. Elizabeth talked of him in hushed tones–”Danny’s legendary,” she said. I met him last week.

Our meeting was preceded by my mom sending him the first piece I’d ever gotten paid to write. It was a review of a Mitski concert, naturally. Mitksi had come on stage dressed like a Greek goddess, in a whiter-than-white tunic. I tried to convey the contrast between her lilted vocals, and a crowd that yelled “I love you” intermittently. Danny said the piece was “good” but “since I don’t know this artist, your music taste could be rubbish for all I know.” My mom insisted this was the highest compliment he could possibly give.

We met at an ice-cream place, a sort of mini-garden hidden in a mini-mall. One of Berkeley’s many attempts to be tasteful. My mom had coached me a bit before, telling me not to ask about Jerry. Still, sitting next to an artificial brook, I felt unprepared. He asked me about the most recent article I’d written. “You’re writing a review of Charlie now, yes?”

“A Charli XCX concert, yeah. At the Fox Theater.”

“Well what does she sing about? What does she write about?” I looked at this old man, and I stalled. Her show had been glittery, plastic on purpose. Full of short raps about boys and getting what you want. Big, poppy choruses and heavy autotune that the Grateful Dead would never touch.

I exhaled. “Well, boys and drugs mostly. And…partying.”

He laughed. “You’re sure she’s not a hippie?”

The conversation flowed easily after that. We ate different flavors of chocolate ice cream, and I tried to explain what “hyperpop” was. The sun beat down on us from above, so we found a better spot beneath a fake tree. My mom interjected at random, sometimes to emphasize a good grade I’d gotten, or to gush about the Beatles. At one point, I mentioned that no instruments were onstage for the entirety of Charli XCX’s performance.

“No instruments?” He gasped.

“A vocal track, too.”

“So it’s karaoke!” He laughed again.

I rushed to defend Charli XCX’s honor. “Well–it’s the performance of it. She dances to the music, she sings, and she ad-libs, and like, the performance of the music is kind of the art itself. It’s purposefully artificial.”

He nodded. “No instruments! That’s very interesting to me.”

Halfway through our conversation, Danny admitted he didn’t know the lyrics to a single Grateful Dead song. This man, who spent years backstage, managing this band’s every move, didn’t know a single lyric. My mom was shocked. “I would beat myself up for being a fake fan when I forgot a line! It’s very comforting to hear you say that. Wow.”

“It was just about the music for me,” he said. “The musicality of it, that’s all I listened to.”

Danny shocked my mom again when he couldn't remember a Beatles song, “The Long And Winding Road.” I sang a short snippet to him, and he just shook his head. When my mom asked him about the time he met the Beatles, he offered a sentence. “They were nice guys, they had some nice songs.” As my mom went on a tangent about falling back in love with Paul Mccartney, he finished up his ice cream cup.

I found out where his true passions lie a little later. He asked me if I’ve seen In The Heights, the movie based on Lin-Manuel Miranda’s musical of the same name. I told him I had. “Oh, it was wonderful,” he said. “I watched it, and I had this sensation of wanting to be young again, to fall in love again like the characters do. It’s just done so well. And I looked up this Lin Manuel Miranda guy, and he must be a genius to be so prolific. He just keeps releasing these projects. It made me wish I’d seen Hamilton–his more famous play–when it was in theaters.”

“You can watch Hamilton on Disney Plus,” I said. “They released one of those pro-recordings and it did really well.”

He frowned. “These pro-recordings…what do you think of them?”

“They are a way for more people to see plays they usually wouldn’t. I think the Hamilton recording in particular was really well done.” Back during its original Broadway run, tickets for Hamilton could easily cross the thousand-dollar barrier. I was ten years old then, and I still boggled at the price.

“I agree,” Danny hesitated. “But there’s something about recordings, I don’t think they translate. There’s something lost. Some stuff, it doesn’t show up on film.”

I found myself agreeing. There are hundreds of videos of concerts in my camera roll. I rarely rewatch them, and when I do, I wince at all the background noise. My own screams, louder than the music. I’ve now watched dozens of recorded Grateful Dead concerts. The band’s Youtube channel uploads them dutifully, and with impressive quality for how old they are. In one video from 1987, the band plays a laid-back version of their mid-sized hit, “Truckin’.” It lasts seven minutes, and it’s perfectly lovely. The band takes turns in being lit in red and violet light. I’m glad these videos exist, for people to rewatch and rediscover. But Elizabeth’s life-changing experience, of finding a family, a home, is forever lost to time.

Lately, I’ve found myself watching concerts from the balcony. I still love to shout along to lyrics, but I wish I’d told my younger self it’s okay to sit back. Still, there’s no concert I regret going to. For years, I didn’t know how to feel that strongly without hurting myself. All I could handle were extremes, a brief flash of sensation then nothing at all. An hour of purple, then months of gray. I’m glad I learned how to deal with the emotions rather than try to make them interesting. The lessons live music has taught me are immeasurable, even if I one day forget them.