In the beginning, before I'd seen sixty Grateful Dead shows in four countries, before my hair had grown halfway down my back and sported beaded and string-wrapped dreadlocks-before the Grizzly Adams beard, the multiple earrings, the Winnie the Pooh T-shirts and the clown pants , all I knew was that the lifestyle of the authentic Head was the only one for me. So in 1988, when I left home for college, still a clean-cut kid sporting short hair and a pair of Nikes, I set out to imitate the look and style exhibited by the charismatic young Heads who lit up the campus-and the parking lots outside the shows I'd been attending more and more frequently-with their flowing Day Glo garb and their seeming lack of any inhibitions or hang-ups. Taking inspiration from David Crosby's "Almost Cut My Hair," I decided to grow a flying freak flag of my own. Things kind of escalated from there, until one day I found myself standing in front of a full-length mirror, earnestly trying on dresses. Skirts really, since I was testing them out as part of an overall look that didn't call for a shirt. Or shoes for that matter. Just the thin, Batik-drenched, vaguely subcontinental skirts worn by approximately half of the women Heads one might meet on tour.

You see, the kind of Heads to whom I initially looked for model behavior—the ones who went on tour four times a year and were always immediately identifiable as hippie types—opt for all the widely-known, politically correct sensitivities as a matter of course. Nonjudgmentalism, or, more accurately, a knee-jerk respect for difference, is a holy precept for Touring Heads. The Gaia-centric worldview, with a firm yet forgiving Earth Mother at its core, has no room for cocksure young bucks prancing about the fairgrounds being, well... cocksure. Which is why Touring Heads, particularly Touring female Heads, hold a special place in their hearts for those men among them who manage to transcend the bourgeois gender roles ingrained during their cookie-cutter suburban upbringings-by wearing skirts. For the chance to get laid more, if for no other reason, it seemed worth a try.

But the implications of choosing such an image for myself made me more than a little uneasy. Wearing a skirt might help you score with the lovely young Heads, but it also marks you as a person who has bought into a certain kind of rebellion-let's call it the Rainbow Rebellion. In '88 I was just beginning to discover what now seems so obvious: Not all countercultures are created equal. For while I'm a big fan of the (quite sufficiently reported, I know) Burning Man festival-which embraces the Gordian knot that is our culture's current relationship with technology by covering dried-up desert lakebeds with sprawling masses of cables, bright neon lights, and a host of other assorted gadgets, all whirring in an electro-charged paean to a hoped-for age of techno-paganism-there's something distinctly off-putting about one of Burning Man's ancestors, the Rainbow Gathering. The first of these post-Woodstock convocations of all that is peaceful and groovy was held in Colorado in 1972; each year since, tens of thousands of stalwart hippies have gathered in some national forest or other to build ecologically sound temporary cities and smoke an awful lot of extremely potent marijuana. Nowhere else, incidentally, will you find as high a percentage of skirt-clad males (with the possible exception, I guess, of Scotland). The Rainbow Gathering is more-much more-than a weekend campout with friends, as the "Rainbow Family" spends as much time cooking up quasi-religious, backward-looking rituals as it does beating drums.

Don't these folks realize that their unilateral and self-righteous deference to everything that is not steeped in the "patriarchal Western tradition" is just a product of the media's coverage of all things countercultural since the mid-'60s? The image of a tie-dyed Head with tousled locks and a fondness for bean curd and reefer has been a caricature of the counterculture for thirty years-so why are so many well-off and seemingly happy young people still hell-bent on transforming themselves into one of the Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers? Besides, if there is any definitive psychic landscape conjured up by the Dead's oeuvre, it's one populated mainly by grizzled characters who'd seem more at home in a spaghetti western than at a Rainbow Gathering. Lots of Dead songs-"Jack Straw," "Loser," "Brown-Eyed Women" and "Dire Wolf" spring to mind-spin tales of whisky-swilling, shotgun-toting drifters and outlaws, chasing lost loves and lighting out for the territories. Your run-of-the-mill collegiate Deadhead's attitude of remote high-mindedness doesn't really find much expression in or validation from the Dead's kick-back-we-want-to-party-and-screw-going-to-work vibe. The hypersensitized, empathic, mutual-respect-filled utopia these budding communitarians perceive in Dead lyrics like, "Wake up to find out that you are the eyes of the world" is the product of wishful thinking.

The authenticity-craving, warm-and-fuzzy, middle- or upper-class collegiate Touring Heads universally fear, or at least despise, the band's diehard fans, the ones who get what the Grateful Dead are all about. I'm talking about the studded-leather-jacket-wearing, JD-chugging, Marlboro Red-chaining, Harley-riding, shit-kicking motherfuckers who've been a significant planet in the Dead solar system since its Big Bang. For a group whose core principle is purportedly tolerance, the touchy-feely Rainbow Heads can be shockingly intolerant when it comes to Budweiser-loving, pool-hustling bikers. They don't really want to touch or feel you unless you're just like them.

Take for example Dan, a guy I lived with in a dorm basement during college, who was a lot closer to being a Biker Head than a Rainbow Head. Dan had feathered, prematurely graying hair, was never not wearing jeans, drank grain-alcohol punch prodigiously, and smoked weed all the time. He was also a sports fanatic, capable of memorizing and instantaneously analyzing and combinating all sorts of statistical arcana. Dan had, hands-down, the most ass-kicking collection of Dead bootlegs I've ever seen-well over two hundred tapes, at least half of which I copied for myself. Want to know when and exactly where the Dead bestowed upon their fans the very first "Terrapin Station"? Better ask Dan, because the patchouli-dabbing, sprout-eating would-be freaks upstairs didn't have a fucking clue. Yet somehow they managed to make Dan feel like an outsider, because he wasn't inclined to deck himself out in the gaudy trappings of "true" Headness.

Maybe it was thanks to Dan's no-bullshit influence that I found myself incapable of making the conceptual leap over to that stage of higher evolution where the skirt-wearing Touring Heads no longer seemed like wusses. One day, as I lounged on my girlfriend's bed, waiting for her to get out of the shower, I noticed one of her skirts-frayed and brown, patterned with big white rings shaped like scallop shells-lying on the floor. Naked, except for a cigarette, I approached it, cautiously. The next thing I remember, I'd pulled it on. I'd done it! I was wearing a skirt.

Eyeing myself in the mirror, I wondered if was really right for me. Could I take this final logical step toward transcendingŠ whatever it was I was supposed to be transcending? Would I ever feel comfortable wearing a skirt in front of seventy thousand people in a stadium? But not even the manliest of gestures-flexing my muscles or dangling the cigarette out of the corner of my mouth-could alleviate the pangs of personal inauthenticity I felt. I chastised myself: Such a frat-boy, pick-on-the-sissies kind of attitude would be about as acceptable to the Touring Heads I was hanging around with as the thought of the world's entire supply of tofu turning into a gargantuan heap of ground beef would be. But the spectacle of my hairy torso emerging from an article of clothing I'd much rather pull off a girl's waist than don myself was just too much to take. I took it off.

My attempt to become one of the inner circle of Deadhead authentics ended not long after I tried on the skirt. I joined the hundreds of Heads who flew to Europe to see the band's legendary Continental performances. Because of the logistical details involved with an overseas, multi-country tour-and because of the cost-only the most committed or wealthiest fans made the trip. Among them were a small but extremely noticeable contingent of Rainbow Heads-a well-defined subgroup known as The Family, or The Spinners (after those Sufi dancing masters whose spiraling these Heads emulated during shows). The Family's spiritual schtick also drew on the sex-and-animal-flesh-eschewing ethic of commune-living Hare Krishnas. In fact, the group of American Heads "studying" abroad at the same English university where I was staying got along famously with The Family. They even adopted The Family's practice of holding a morsel of food or drink of water up to their foreheads for a moment immediately prior to consumption, during which moment they'd utter a breathy mantric homage to the all-seeing godhead.

During the London shows at Wembley arena, at the end of October that year, The Family spent each intermission in a beer-splattered, garishly lit concrete stairwell, sitting in a circle with the new recruits from our student body, eating prayed-over orange slices, holding hands, and engaging in a sort of slow and subtle group massage. I would've been open to eating a slice of orange to alleviate my dancing- and smoking-induced cottonmouth, but I was in no position-pupils dilated, scribbling down a set-list on a napkin-to have to pray beforehand. (I was wearing, by the way, a cape made out of an American flag, and had ingested a walnut-sized chunk of hallucinogenic fudge earlier that evening. I had a fierce hankering for some french fries.) For me, set breaks weren't sacred time, they were halftime.

Even after the Dead left town, the praying continued. One day, I was relaxing in my dorm room with an ultra-PC female American Touring Head and two Spinners who'd lagged behind the migrating fans. I was packing some hash into a bong I'd fashioned out of a plastic Evian bottle and part of a Bic pen. Someone made toast and brought it into the room. One of my guests took the bong, and the rest of us grabbed some toast off the plate. Everybody caught each other's gaze. Then, simultaneously, everybody-everybody but me, that is-raised either toast or bong to their foreheads. They looked at me, waiting for me to join in giving thanks for this, umŠ not so bountiful harvest. I sat on the edge of the bed, looking out the window into the chilly, wet English November, feeling pretty damn uncomfortable.

"No way," I said summarily into the stillness that had filled the room. "I'm not praying to the fucking toast."

My room cleared out in an awkward shuffle of half-hearted good-byes. They were going to go over to the other dorm, they told me, to chill out. I closed the door behind them, feeling like my long-standing hope of getting along with all manner, shape, and form of Deadhead had been irrevocably dashed. I slid a cassette into the tape deck and pressed "Play"; out rolled the strains of the only song I could stand to hear at that moment: "Sugar Magnolia." The Dead's ode to that perfect Head girlfriend, the one who "grabs the wheel when I'm seeing double, pays my tickets when I speedŠ and waits backstage while I sing to you." The one with whom you "can discover the wonders of nature down by the riverside." You know, I told myself, trying desperately to picture that very riverside, Sugar Mag never would have wanted me to wear a skirt.