Interview with Steve Silberman
Steve Silberman is a writer and the author of NeuroTribes: The Legacy of Autism and the Future of Neurodiversity.
Remain in Light and Rabbis
Max Raskin: Everyone wants to talk to you about the Grateful Dead specifically, but how do you listen to music generally? What do you use to listen to music?
Contents
Steve Silberman: I had a major revolution in my home-listening life about four years ago. I'd been an audiophile in college, and I took great pride in the quality of sound in my dorm room at Oberlin. But I had gone down the Internet-audio rabbit hole to mp3s. I was listening to low-res files on tiny, tinny speakers, and it sounded like crap. I think I got those speakers for $29 from Amazon or something. And I realized my music sounds so much worse than it did 50 years ago. That’s not how technology is supposed to work.
So my husband Keith did a very wonderful thing and got me a pair of excellent speakers for my birthday a few years ago. They’re called ELAC speakers, and were created by a renowned designer of high-end audio, but they're quite affordable. And I finally got a decent amp, an Onkyo amp.
Oh my God, I remember the first time I hooked it all up. I was still listening to mp3s – I’m not one of those serious Deadheads who only trades lossless files and is allergic to mp3s. But when I put my mp3s through this good sound system, it was a revelation. I remember suddenly seeing like a three-dimensional image of the Talking Heads in the studio.
MR: What was what was the first thing you listened to on it?
SS: Remain in Light by the Talking Heads, which was a seminal album for me.
MR: Why does Phish love the Talking Heads?
SS: Um . . . because it's awesome. Because Phish loves funk and Phish loves rhythm. And the Talking Heads at that point in their career were very influenced by the music of Fela Kuti in Africa. It’s just rhythmically complex music, and one reason why I chose that to listen to with my new sound system was that it had both absolutely volcanic bass and very high-end trebly percussion sounds. Not only did I hear all that, but with the new amp and speakers, I saw a three-dimensional image of the band in the studio standing there.
MR: Is this what Phil Lesh talks about when he talks about standing waves?
SS: Exactly. I experienced those standing waves, because the second Dead show I ever went to was 8/6/74, where I really became a Deadhead. The Dead had their quadrophonic sound system at that point, and I could remember Phil moving his bass notes around the stadium in three dimensions so you could actually feel the waves. I used to try to stand in the Phil Zone as much as I could whenever I went to shows. I loved that. It was like haptic feedback.
MR: One of the coolest things that I think you ever said was when you compared Melville, Burroughs, and Thelonious Monk. Their sense of humor.
SS: Oh wow, I don’t remember that.
MR: You forget the gems.
SS: What's funny is that all the great artists and heroes of mine that I got to know – they’re all like that. David Crosby is one of my best friends, and I'll say, “Well, David, remember that incredible concert you played in 1974? I was there!” And he’s like, “What are you even talking about?”
MR: It’s like the Hasidic rabbis – it’s called shirayim – the leftovers of their food is a great honor to eat. In the Polish Hasidic courts it was an honor to drink the rebbe’s leftover wine or eat his crumbs.
SS: I remember some old Hasidic story about someone asking a young student if they're going to study Torah with the rebbe. He says, “I'm going to tie his shoes.”
MR: Did you ever study Judaism formally?
SS: No, because my parents were communists. They were reacting against the superficial suburban Jewish observance of my father's parents.
MR: Were you ever into Shlomo Carlebach?
SS: Not that much. I really dug what he was doing, but I didn't get deeply into it or anything. I did go through a period in college where I read the short stories of Isaac Bashevis Singer. You can smell the perfume of Jewish mysticism in Singer’s stories, which led me to Hasidic folk tales. There's a famous anthology.
MR: Martin Buber’s Tales of the Hasidim?
SS: Exactly. I love those stories. By that point, I was already practicing Zen Buddhism. What appealed to me about the Hasidic folktales and Buber’s anthology was that they were very much like Zen koans, or collections of Zen stories. The most famous one is “The Blue Cliff Record.” You actually cannot puzzle out the meaning of these stories by using brute-force rational mind. You have to intuit your way to new ways of thinking.
The Law Firm of Crosby, Stills & Nash
MR: Do you think about the afterlife?
SS: No, I don't. My father, Z”L, used to say, “I will be annihilated.” And I think he was correct. But I always try to be slightly open minded – though not so much that I'm a fool.
My mother, my sister, and I all had very significant dreams about my late father, Donald, two nights ago. We all ended up telling each other these heavy dreams. There are some experiences I've had that cannot be explained by science or by rational thinking. I know I've had them, but I don't use them to build out this huge superstructure of beliefs. I can live with the ambiguity.
MR: Do you take dreams seriously? Were you ever in analysis?
SS: I never did psychoanalysis. Did you know that Oliver Sacks saw the same psychoanalyst for nearly 50 years? Oliver’s shtick used to be, “I think we're finally getting somewhere.”
MR: Do you believe in providence?
SS: I am of several minds about that. I would say, without making a big thing about it, that I do kind of believe in destiny. When I meet people, I get a sort of a basic take on who they are and who they might become. And that usually persists for decades.
Can I give you a clear example of destiny? It must have been 1969 or 1970. I walked into a sandal shop in Provincetown and heard the most beautiful music I've ever heard in my life. I went up to the guy at the counter and I said, “What is this music?” And he told me a name that sounded like a law firm. Crosby, Stills & Nash.
MR: The law firm of Crosby, Stills, and Nash.
SS: He was playing David Crosby’s Guinnevere.
MR: I love that song. Helplessly Hoping is my favorite song of theirs.
SS: Yes, that’s a Stills song. So I fell in love with David Crosby's music to the max. I was an extreme fanboy – I took buses hundreds of miles to see his shows and collected as many rare tapes as I could. David’s music was the soundtrack to my inner world, and still is in many ways. Anyway, now he's one of my best friends. I talk to him every other day, and we did a podcast series called "Freak Flag Flying" on Osiris Media just before the pandemic hit that was great fun for both of us.
If I could have told my 11-year-old self that guy on that record would end up being one of my best friends – it would seem both completely implausible and completely inevitable.
MR: Do you recommend meeting your heroes?
SS: Yes. But can I add something?
I've met many of my heroes, and it's usually worked out really well. But it's not always simple. For instance, I don't feel like I really got along well with Allen Ginsberg for the first three months after we met, though he tolerated having me around because I was working for him. But I didn't feel that there was much of a personal connection between us until later. I felt like he was more attentive to guys he actually wanted to sleep with. That’s a problem for men in general with both genders. I've been disillusioned by meeting a couple of my heroes.
But one of the heroes I met was a poet named Philip Whalen, who was also in the Beat group. I said I was disillusioned after meeting Allen, and he said, “What's so good about illusions anyway?”
Distractions and Neurotypical Bullshit
MR: Do you have like a writing ritual?
SS: I do, but I’m struggling. I just read an article about Robert Caro’s way of working. He says he has nothing but a coffee machine and a pencil sharpener in the room because he doesn’t want anything that's not related to writing to distract him. We live in a 24/7 360-degree wraparound matrix of distraction right now. My iPhone is next to my bed. I wake up to read the tweets. So, unfortunately, I can no longer remember what it's like to be undistracted.
The 20 minutes a day that I meditate are virtually the only waking moments I have when my attention is not totally divided between a million competing inputs.
MR: Have you ever taken Ritalin or any performance enhancers as a writer?
SS: Just coffee and marijuana – coffee for energy, and marijuana for editing. It fine-tunes my bullshit filter.
MR: In NeuroTribes, you say when you spend a bunch of time with autistic people, and as the only non-autistic person what you noticed most was they don’t bullshit one another.
SS: Right. So I have to avoid saying any sentence that begins “all autistic people. . .” But there is much less “happy talk,” mutual stroking of egos to keep everybody pleasant and unguarded. Some autistic people can strike some neurotypicals as harsh or brutally honest, but I’ve learned to really prize their lack of bullshit. They don't need to make small talk.
MR: What do you write on?
SS: An iMac.
MR: Do you use Microsoft Word?
SS: I do. I'm still pathetically low tech in terms of book writing.
Dark Star and Pérotin
MR: What was the last Dead concert you listened to fully through?
SS: I don't remember. But I listen to something almost every day.
Yesterday, I listened to a three-hour version of Dark Star compiled from various versions of Dark Star circa 1973/1974. Thank you to whoever created that mix because it is the bomb. I can’t write with someone singing a lot of lyrics – I can’t hear my own words clearly enough.
MR: I love listening to Gregorian chants when I work.
SS: I do too. If you like that you might like a piece by Pérotin called “Viderunt Omnes” which is Latin, I don’t know what it means.
MR: It means, “Get off my lawn.”
SS: It’s medieval polyphony.
In NeuroTribes, there’s a chapter about the Holocaust, and it was such difficult material to emotionally process that I was crying almost every day. So what I ended up listening to was a modern composer named Steve Reich who did a piece called the Daniel Variations, based on the forced last statement of Daniel Pearl, the young Wall Street Journal reporter who was beheaded in a propaganda video. His last words were, “My name is Daniel Pearl. I'm a Jewish American from Encino, California . . . My father's Jewish, my mother's Jewish, I'm Jewish.” And Reich turned Pearl’s statement in the ugliest of circumstances into a triumphant chorus of angels. That helped me get through writing that dark chapter.
MR: Ed Koch has that quote on his tombstone.
The Maxwell House Haggadah and “Nardis”
SS: Can I jump to something unrelated but something I think you'll find interesting? Easily one of the major influences on my writing style is Passover. When I was seven or so, I loved reading from the Haggadah at the Seder – specifically the rhetorical power of the translation in the Maxwell House Haggadah. I loved it. It would sort of flow into me, and I still have echoes of that. It’s one of the biggest secrets about my writing that no one ever notices, but I think they notice it subconsciously. I have these Haggadah-like rhythms running through my paragraphs even if they're not about Judaism.
The last words or phrases in my paragraphs often have a rhyme or off-rhyme. As if they were long poems. That comes from reading the Haggadah aloud.
MR: That’s so funny because when I read your piece “Broken Time” about the song “Nardis” – it’s one of the best things I’ve ever read. You are channeling Bill Evans. It’s so special.
SS: That piece is definitely one of my favorites of my own writing.
MR: What’s your favorite version of the song?
SS: I have four favorite versions. I'll be very quick about it. The first one is Bill Evans' original version on the album Explorations. My second favorite version is Ralph Towner version for solo classical guitar on an album called Solo Concert. My third favorite version is by a pianist who I interviewed for that piece named Richard Beirach on an album called Eon because it's very different from the others.
And then, you know, my fourth favorite version (these are all of equal of equal stature) was the version that Bill Evans played just days before he died. He was launching himself into a future vision of his own creativity that he never got to follow up on. There was just that one last performance at that level, and it's titanic. It's almost hard to listen to. It's frighteningly intense.
MR: What was your most listened-to song last year?
SS: Composition-wise, probably Dark Star.
But for the last month – it’s a very unlikely answer. About a month ago, I got an email forwarded to me by David Crosby from one of his bandmates, the singer-songwriter Becca Stevens. It was just a Bandcamp link to some guy from Spain named Abraham Rivas. He was singing in Catalan, which I don’t speak a word of, and there’s this one song called L’estima creix. The whole album is great. He recorded it in quarantine on an old computer in his house. And it's some of the most beautiful and infectious music I've ever heard. It reminds me somewhat of David Crosby's music, which is why Becca sent it to her friends probably. But it's amazing. I've listened to that song maybe four times a day for the last month.
MR: Were you ever into fashion?
SS: No, dude. I was a scruffy Deadhead long past the time it was okay. I was wearing t-shirts and shorts into my 30’s. Obviously once I had a book that became an international bestseller and had to practically live on book tour for like a year, I had to look professional.
MR: Is a book tour like following the Dead around on tour? Did you get flashbacks to living out of suitcases?
SS: I'll tell you the secret that I figured out that I wish someone had told me before I started. The secret of having a really great book tour is to arrange friends to meet you in every destination city. Because otherwise it's exhausting. You're constantly chatting up strangers or having strangers chat you up. You're having dinner with the donors. It's bloody excruciating. Even though I play a neurotypical on TV, I'm kind of an introvert. I certainly wouldn't say that I’m autistic, but I’m kind of an introvert.
MR: Me too.
SS: But I know how to put on behavior to disarm people, and make people feel comfortable. It’s so much work when I'm with strangers. If I can get into town the day before, and meet somebody I love or like, then it turns it into an extended vacation.
March 29, 1990
MR: What’s the smallest hill you’re willing to die on? What are you a prima donna about?
SS: I like to think that I can tell the difference between music of lasting value and crap. And, you know, most music is crap. Certainly, popular music.
When I was dating guys many years ago, music was one of my trick questions because it would reveal too much. I’d ask the person what kind of music they liked, and the worst answer was “whatever's on the radio.”
MR: Where does this trope come from, “I like everything. Just not country. But I like Johnny Cash.”
SS: Because Rick Rubin waved his hipster wand over Johnny Cash, who was always great. But now it’s okay for hipsters to like him.
MR: On our first date my ex-girlfriend told me her phone password was her three favorite Dead years. It was like ‘72, ‘74, and either ‘78 or ‘80.
SS: Those are well-chosen.
MR: She always knows what she’s talking about. My favorite concert is either London 5/25/72 or 3/29/90 on the Album Wake Up to Find Out.
SS: That’s where they play with Branford Marsalis.
MR: Yes, that’s the concert that made me fall in love with the Dead.
SS: Yeah, that “Eyes of the World.”
MR: I think that’s their best “Eyes of the World.”
SS: Well, we can have a discussion about that. But I think that version is the highest peak of the Grateful Dead in the last part of their career. It was basically downhill after that.
MR: What version matches that?
SS: Well, the 10/19/74 that my fellow co-producers and I put on a box called So Many Roads.
MR: The Watkins Glen Soundcheck Jam is on that album, right?
SS: Yeah, because I was there. They appeared with the Band and the Allman Brothers. That was my first Dead show. That track was just a freestanding piece of music, so I knew it didn't have a prayer of ever getting on an official vault release unless I did it. So when me and David Gans and Blair Jackson were asked to produce the box set and career retrospective, my first thought was the Watkins Glen Soundcheck because it's one of the most beautiful pieces of music they ever played.
MR: Can you tell me about the only time you met Jerry?
SS: I met Jerry at a press screening of the So Far video. I got there an hour early. It was on Market Street, and I considered just killing time on the sidewalk. But instead I walked into the room, and Jerry Garcia is sitting there by himself rolling a joint. I looked into his eyes to see if it was okay for me to be there. He made a motion inviting me to have a seat and we got high. We’re talking, we’re having a great time. And after the screening, Jerry found me afterwards to continue the conversation.
MR: What did you talk about?
SS: Oh, the history of cinema and certain types of imagery used in the video and lots of stuff. He was a very learned and sophisticated and cosmopolitan man.
Crosby told me he thinks Jerry and I would have been friends. But it’s like -- who wouldn’t want that? Everyone wanted to be friends with the Beatles, but thinking you could actually have done it would be naïve.
And it's sad because the heroin proved to be an insurmountable obstacle. The next time I saw Jerry, he was being shepherded down a hall. The halls were cleared out before he walked down them, so nobody would get in his face and he could be in his heroin bubble. It was very, very sad to me.
MR: Can we end on the transition between China Cat and Rider? I must have listened to hundreds and hundreds trying to find the best one.
SS: Listen to one thing for me, okay? Listen to the China Cat Sunflower from Europe ’72. In the middle of the transition, Weir takes the lead. People think it's Jerry or something. But you'll be able to tell.
MR: I think the transition on 10/17/74 (7:48 in this video) is the winner. It’s these beautiful descending chords. It’s the best, it’s so good.
SS: Cool.