Listening for the Secret. Ulf Olsson

seem to have engaged in that kind of activity. In “Foolish Heart,” when Robert Hunter writes, “sign the Mona Lisa with a spray can, call it art,” he is ironically distancing himself (and the band, it seems) from that kind of antagonistic artistic practice.⁴⁸ But we must also remember the violent practice of using instruments and sound systems in unintended ways, producing distortion and noise—the Grateful Dead was not bereft of this avant-gardist impulse, rather it was a central aspect of the band’s improvisations. In his third characteristic, Poggioli even sees the avant-garde as engaged in a “transcendental antagonism” that he calls its “nihilistic” moment—but the Grateful Dead never were iconoclasts. They once did play a benefit for the Black Panther Party, but the Black Panthers were radicals and revolutionaries, not nihilists.⁴⁹ Finally, Poggioli raises the stakes even more with his fourth characteristic, which he calls “agonism” or the “agonistic moment”: the avant-garde, according to Poggioli, does not heed even “its own catastrophe and perdition.” Together, these four moments form what Poggioli calls the “dialectic of movements” of the avant-garde.⁵⁰

      According to this established (but, as we also shall see, problematic) view of avant-gardism, it is obvious why a band such as the Velvet Underground—or even the Sex Pistols—might seem more radical, more subversive, and more avant-gardist than the Grateful Dead. It does not help that there are interesting or at least tantalizing connections between the historical avant-garde and the Grateful Dead. When Jerry Garcia found the name “Grateful Dead” while browsing a dictionary at random, he is echoing the way that pioneering Dada artist Tristan Tzara found the word “dada” while browsing a dictionary at random. What we have here are different varieties of the same myth of origins, however true the stories might be. Additionally, members of the band did once perform—together with a symphony orchestra in the United States—a classical (yes!) avant-gardist piece of art, John Cage’s 4’33” or “the silent piece.” We also know, however, that when Garcia and Mickey Hart sent Cage a tape with music for the composer’s 75th birthday, Cage wrote back: “Thank you very much, I took your two minute tape and played it back at half-speed. It was beautiful, it was marvelous, thank you so much.” Cage here displays, I would say, a truly avant-gardist attitude in this appropriation of someone else’s work—and perhaps Garcia did the same, when smiling approvingly at Cage’s reply.⁵¹

      There is at least one moment—on the best Grateful Dead album the band never made—when the Grateful Dead welcome their own perdition, and that is on John Oswald’s Grayfolded (1994–95), when he at one point stacks more than a hundred different live versions of “Dark Star” on top of each other, which results in a crescendo of white noise, erasing every trace of the musical material it is based on. Having Oswald manipulate all these versions of “Dark Star” displays an avant-gardist attitude: the tune is not given, no single version is sacred or canonical, and when the band was done with it, it could be handed over to someone else. That the band commissioned Oswald to do something with its music is typical of the way the Grateful Dead did things. Oswald had so successfully applied his “plunderphonics” to Michael Jackson’s “Bad” that he was sued and sentenced to destroy all existing copies of the album. The Grateful Dead, however, apparently interested in how Oswald aimed to create or construe new music out of existing music, and instead welcomed him to “plunder” their music, and providing Oswald with essentially free access to the band’s famed “Vault,” which contains soundboard tapes of most of their shows. Initially, Oswald intended his project to include not only “Dark Star” but also two other staples of the band’s repertoire, “China Cat Sunflower” and “The Other One,” but the work process apparently made him change his mind.⁵²

      The point of Oswald’s “plunderphonics” is, as Chris Cutler writes, threefold: “Thus plunderphonics as a practice radically undermines three of the central pillars of the art music paradigm: originality (it deals only with copies), individuality (it speaks only with the voice of others), and copyright (the breaching of which is a condition of its very existence).”⁵³ The band’s openness to Oswald’s use of its music can be seen as related to Garcia’s oft-repeated viewpoint that once the band was done with the music, the audience could have it.⁵⁴ In his discussion of Oswald, Cutler emphasizes the importance of the medium, stating that it is “only what is not recorded that belongs to its participants while what is recorded is placed inevitably in the public domain”—which of course is what has happened to the Grateful Dead’s music, with so many of the band’s performances available on the Internet in both audio and video. This sharing has one of its roots in the avant-gardist project of erasing the borders separating “art” from “life,” and Grayfolded, as well as Ned Lagin’s and Phil Lesh’s project Seastones (released as an album in 1975), contribute to what Cutler maintains is happening: a “general aesthetic convergence at the fringes of genres once mutually exclusive—and across the gulf of high and low art.”⁵⁵

      Another example of what Poggioli sees as typical of the avant-garde is that it often chooses to use “an enemy’s insult as one’s own emblem: we need cite only the decadents and the Salon des Refusés.”⁵⁶ We can think of the first call for contact with the audience made on the 1971 eponymous live album, nicknamed “Skull and Roses”: fans were addressed as “Dead Freaks,” soon to be dubbed “Deadheads,” even though the first meanings of that word in Webster’s online dictionary still are “one who has not paid for a ticket” and “a dull or stupid person.”⁵⁷

      These examples, however, suggest that the Grateful Dead might have something to do with the avant-garde, even though the band itself really does not fit very well with Poggioli’s emphasis on the avant-garde as antagonistic. When Greil Marcus in his Lipstick Traces discusses—or rather hails—the Sex Pistols, relating them both to the historical avant-garde in the form of Dada, as well as to the political avant-garde of the 1960s in the form of the left-wing French Situationists, he wholeheartedly (and without critical discussion) accepts a definition of the avant-garde like Poggioli’s precisely for its emphasis on antagonism, which in Marcus’ view suits that band perfectly, though others might say superficially.⁵⁸

      Yet, it is easy to see that this type of analysis is highly problematic and, moreover, that the energy feeding the Sex Pistols flares up briefly—only to evaporate just as quickly. The Grateful Dead might seem less politically revolutionary than the Sex Pistols, and less aesthetically radical than the Velvet Underground, but it is the Dead that actively resist the same culture industry that produces, distributes, and exploits the Velvet Underground as well as the Sex Pistols—and forms or shapes both these bands. It is Jerry Garcia, and not Lou Reed or John Lydon, or Sid Vicious, who criticizes what he calls the “fascist” aspects of rock’s crowd control in live performances.⁵⁹ Indeed, both Reed and the Sex Pistols exploited those aspects of the mass audience. The lack of theatrics and of rock-and-roll poses was a central point of the Dead’s enduring appeal and, for outsiders, their mystery.⁶⁰ This problem, or contradiction, might be at least partly resolved if we look at the avant-garde from a different angle. For that angle, I use the German theoretician Peter Bürger’s Theorie der Avantgarde (1974), a study that to some degree serves as a critique of Poggioli’s work.

      When Duchamp painted a moustache on the “Mona Lisa,” was he really attacking da Vinci, or was his target tradition? With Bürger, one must note that Duchamp did not paint on da Vinci’s original painting in the Louvre museum in Paris, rather he used a cheap reproduction. In that way, anyone can sign the “Mona Lisa” and call it art—and that is precisely what the avant-garde is about, it radically changes the relation between art and beholder, between book and reader, between music and listener, and ultimately between artist and artwork. The Grateful Dead taking part in a performance of 4’33” is then logical, as that piece involves the audience as much as the performers. It does so not by attacking individual works of art such as the “Mona Lisa,” but by questioning and attacking art as institution. Duchamp can be seen as criticizing the isolation of this painting to a museum, the distance between it and the life outside the museum walls, and that art has become synonymous with these isolated, individual, but ultimately reified works, and he mourns that art no longer is an activity,