Michael Broerman

Reflections of a Gen Z Deadhead. Being born in 1997, there’s a pervasive feeling you missed out. Seeing Bob Weir live made us feel like we were still part of the Grateful Dead history we looked up to with such reverence and longing. It wasn’t the same as with Jerry, but it was ours. When I started really getting into the Dead in college, I was reading all the books and listening to the shows. For about an entire year, it was the only thing I listened to, putting on the ‘Today in Grateful Dead History’ show from each day. As I learned and listened to all I could, I had the gnawing feeling that I was filling my head with absolutely useless information. “When am I ever going to use this in life?” Fast forward a few years, and I use that knowledge regularly basis at my dream job writing for a niche publication that would not exist without the Grateful Dead. I get to interact with and interpret that legacy every day and am trusted with a platform on which to do it. And the flame has still not gone out. While my taste for jam bands has faltered in recent years, the Grateful Dead remain a constant. Even if I’m not listening to the show of the day every day, it remains the foundation of my personal and artistic personality. There was of course tremendous (self-applied) pressure to write about somebody who meant so much to me. There have been so many beautiful pieces and reflections on Bobby from social media to colleagues in other music outlets all the way to The New York Times. How can I, who never saw Jerry and only saw Bobby a half-dozen or so times, have anything meaningful to say on the matter? As I read this piece over, I came to accept that I wasn’t going to write the best Bob Weir tribute on the internet. But, what I can do, is write the tribute that’s the most honest to me and the way I feel. Even after more than 3,000 words in the article and a few hundred more here (thank you if you’re still reading), it still feels like there’s still so much more to say while, simultaneously, I’m at a loss for words. Fare thee well now Let your life proceed by its own design Nothing to tell now Let the words be yours, I’m done with mine 🌹 Tribute @ linkinbio & L4LM

My three interviews with Todd Snider from 2021 to 2024 were the high points of my journalistic career, even before his sudden death earlier this month. Talking to Todd proved (to me) I had “made it” as a professional music journalist and quelled some of my imposter syndrome. Beyond that, it gave me faith that there was still something in the music industry I worried had been lost long before I got started. Todd was real, he was who he said he was, and he wasn’t after manicured quotes to plug the latest album. One of my favorite moments was when he asked me if his own album was out yet (it wasn’t). In a world of social media content and a fading line between PR and music reviews, Todd got on his landline phone and had actual conversations with me. And I will cherish those hours for as long as I’m at it. “I didn’t know him as well as I tell everyone I did Hell he was nearly fifty and I was only a kid But even way back in those missing years when he was still just catching on There was nobody better than Handsome [Todd]” 📸: @david_a_schools Full tribute at link in bio.

It’s a concert, it’s a hockey game, it’s another excuse to get something with bears and skulls on it.

Hampton, PhshHampton.

The Storm happened one year ago today. I’ve made few public comments on Helene and its effect on Asheville outside of some concert reviews for @liveforlivemusic . This isn’t because I don’t care about the death and destruction or because I don’t feel a part of the community I’ve lived in for going on 5 years now. It’s because I really don’t feel like it’s my story to tell. Somehow I slept through the worst of the storm, only for my roommate & survival shaman Seth Barot to wake me up and tell me it’s probably safer for me to move into the basement where he’d prepared a cot for me, rather than stay in my bedroom in the direct path of a tree. I obliged and went back to sleep, still believing this was just another overhyped “Storm of the Century” like the many I’d lived through in Cleveland as a kid. When I woke up, this is the worst of what I saw. A branch fell and crunched the roof of a shed in the backyard of the house I don’t even own. That’s all the damage that occurred where I live. In the hours and days that followed, I saw houses only a street away crushed by trees, roads turned to rivers, and the roots of those whose families lived here for generations completely ripped from the Earth. I also saw an inescapable air of kindness and compassion, something even more profound considering the looming presidential election. But for months in Western North Carolina, none of that mattered. It didn’t matter who you were voting for or what state you were from. People arrived from all over the country to help us. It was a level of love on a massive scale I’ve never seen before or likely will ever again. There’s things from The Storm that will be never made right, people who lost everything including their lives, and (I know this word is overused today but I believe this is a warranted a time to use it as any) shared trauma that will last long past the tide of transplants who come and go from the region on a regular basis. But with that pain and loss, something I hope we hold onto—something I still see in WNC on a regular basis—is that communal love for every person in this region, whether you’re staying for a weekend or the rest of your life.

Smell my shit eating grin on the skin of my world, Six-hundred sixty-six miles per hour.

Lost a few pounds in London.

Old Man of Storr. Lots more in store.

Last night was the best concert I’ve seen all year (tied with Phish Mondegreen night 3, for very different reasons) and an instant Lifetime All-Timer. Joe Talbot is the greatest frontman I’ve ever seen, an imposing figure that stalked the stage between pugnacious barking that left him red in the face. Go see @idlesband . Get in the pit. Love is the fing.

Yosemitme & Emmy

Keep me in your heart for a while.

Love is real not fade away. 🌹💀🌹