Over the weekend I read a few articles about the Grateful Dead. I guess they’ve finally called it quits or something. I was never a big Deadhead, and even when I give the old Haight-Ashbury gang a spin I don’t see what all the fuss was about. (I think it might have had to do with drugs…)

There’s something powerful about music that gets into your chemistry, though, so I can see why The Dead hit someone else just right. There must be something organic and molecular about music. Maybe it gets your cells all vibrating at the same frequency, but I think it’s also a matter of when you encounter particular music. There’s no reason, for instance, that I should get all choked up over the second movement of Maurice Ravel’s Piano Concerto in G more than, say, Schubert’s “Death And The Maiden,” except that I first heard the…