Friends Phil Collison and Darrell Lea are longtime Grateful Dead fans, and both have attended many of the legendary rock band’s concerts.

Jerry Garcia

The Dead, formerly The Grateful Dead, perform earlier this month at the Forum in the Inglewood section of Los Angeles.

Ask Phil Collison how many times he’s seen The Grateful Dead, and he’ll tell you he stopped counting at 35.

He first saw the band in 1977, more than 10 years after the band started out as the prototypical hippie band, at Memorial Hall in Kansas City, Kan. The band was good that night, but he really got hooked a few months later when he and some friends drove from Lawrence to Cedar Falls, Iowa.

“They were really on that night,” Collison says.

So on, in fact, that the band later released a recording of the show as part of a three-CD set.

The next morning, he had breakfast at the same place where Jerry Garcia, lead guitarist and bearded icon for the band, was dining.

“We told him, ‘Great show,'” Collison recalls. “He said, ‘Yeah, we tried to pop the bubble,'” referring to the air-inflated dome where the concert was held.

Since then, Collison, a Lawrence resident, has traveled from coast to coast to see the band live, catching New Year’s Eve shows in San Francisco, summer shows in Maine and lots of shows and cities in between.

And he’s continued following the band in the 14 years since Garcia died. Earlier this month, he flew to Los Angeles to see the surviving members, now known simply as The Dead.

Collison isn’t alone in his fanaticism. The Dead sold out nearly all of the 22 concerts on their recent tour, with most of the tickets going for $100, despite the recession. And if the forum comments on various fan sites are any indication, a lot of those concert-goers traveled great distances.

I was one of them.

And as I drove from Chicago to Denver a few weeks ago, en route to my third Dead concert in four days, I kept asking myself, “Why?”

For some, no doubt, it’s all about the party. The Dead earned its reputation as a psychedelic rock band honestly. So the concerts can be a way to relive the ’60s, so to speak.

But for Deadheads like Collison, and me, it’s all about the music.

“It’s different every night,” Collison says of the Dead’s concerts. “It’s spontaneous, and that makes you want to come back for more, where you want to catch that moment, where it transcends …”

His voice trails off.

“It’s improvisation,” he says, trying to put it into words. “I don’t want to say it’s a primal instinct, but it’s that music can impact people in a way that that normal, day-to-day activity can’t.”

I got into the Grateful Dead a few years after Collison did. Its music, and especially Garcia’s guitar playing, was weird, authentic, unpredictable, exquisite — the opposite of my life in the suburbs in the ’80s.

Like Collison, I traveled far and wide to see the band — even when I couldn’t afford to do so.

One time I went to California for a five-show run with just $50 and a box of food. Upon arrival, I spent most of the 50 on something that’s technically edible but is typically inhaled. I wound up stranded in Palo Alto and calling my mom to bail me out.

So maybe it wasn’t all about the music.

It was also about escape.

It still is, judging from the psychedelic vagabonds I saw hanging out in the parking lots in Chicago and Denver. In addition to Grateful Dead stickers, their VW vans boasted ones for other “jam bands” like Phish, String Cheese Incident and Railroad Earth — groups that have figured out how to tap into the partying nomad market.

But I’m 40 now. Collison is in his 50s, as are most of his Deadhead friends.

We’re both hard-working pillars of society.

Before this tour, I hadn’t seen any of the post-Garcia versions of the band. In fact, I’d stopped listening to their music almost entirely. But earlier this year, I dusted off some of the old live recordings and fell in love with the music again.

When I found out the members were touring again, I decided I had to go to as many shows as I could. That turned out to be two in Chicago and one in Denver.

I went with high hopes, and I liked what I saw — at least in Chicago. In the Windy City, the band played more of their bluesy, rock-and-roll numbers, and that suited Garcia’s replacement, Warren Haynes of Gov’t Mule.

Maybe it was the thin air of the Mile High City that made me long for some of that “primal” magic Collison talks about.

I left disappointed.

Collison, on the other hand, said the show he caught in L.A. was “very good,” one of the best he’s seen without Garcia. The band played “Dark Star,” a transcendent improvisational vehicle that’s always a rare treat for any Deadhead.

But still, he concedes, “They’re missing that element that made you hang on the edge of your seat, wanting to hear that next note.”

Collison’s longtime friend and fellow Lawrence Deadhead Darrell Lea, who first saw the Grateful Dead at that same 1977 Memorial Hall show, says this missing element is enough to keep him from going to the lengths he once did to see the band.

“You know, without Jerry Garcia in the band, it’s kind of a different deal,” he says. “I’m not going to see them until Jerry rejoins them.”

Sadly, I have to say that I agree.