In a 1993 interview, Jerry Garcia talked about his youthful ambitions, “I used to have these fantasies about ‘I want rock & roll to be like respectable music.’ I wanted it to be like art… I used to try to think of ways to make that work. I wanted to do something that fit in with the art institute, that kind of self-conscious art—‘art’ as opposed to ‘popular culture.’ Back then they didn’t even talk about popular culture—I mean, rock & roll was so not legit, you know.”62 In a way, young Garcia’s wish was fulfilled: rock music is now the object of musicological as well as aesthetic analysis. But rock music reached that position at least partly by not becoming “respectable,” displaying a remarkable capacity to renew itself in forms such as punk, grunge, rap, electronica, noise—forms often exploited by the industry, but momentarily opening up a space of potentialities. If rock music is “art,” and not only “popular art” or a “mass product,” it is not only because musicians have managed to produce meaning within the forms they find inside rock music, but also because their audience has acknowledged the consecration of rock into art. There is a dialectic between the artist and the audience, between production and reception, that results in the acknowledgment of a work as art.
It is here that an understanding of the avant-garde according to Bürger becomes productive for any discussion of the Grateful Dead. For Bürger goes on, in his Marxist discourse, to state that what the avant-garde “negated is not an earlier form of art (a style) but art as an institution that is unassociated with the life praxis of men.”63 Under capitalism, art loses its former social functions, such as representing power, and instead becomes autonomous—meaning that it becomes isolated as art, and as different kinds of art, and its new social function is actually, if we follow Bürger, to keep this institution working, isolated from everyday working life. The work of art is reified, takes on the commodity form, and functions in its isolation only as self-reflection and entertainment. This was of course what the Sex Pistols once attacked—a rock music that had become totally commercialized and vacuously technical—and they wanted to bring it back to its basic three chords, potentially played by anyone. Yet, they did it in a highly marketable form. Today, even “Anarchy in the UK” has been reduced to Muzak….
The Grateful Dead did it in a different way but, yes, Bob Weir once remarked that the Dead had been called “punk’s old lance.”64 It is not only a question of the Dead forming their own record company, or organizing their own ticket sales, though such institutional forms are important and created a material foundation for the music. What is most central here remains the music, and most of all the concert or show. If band members’ public deprecation of their studio releases was as much rhetoric as reality, that attitude did describe the primacy they all placed on the concert, or rather, the “show.” The term is significant, for “show” implies a more-inclusive concept and that must be emphasized. Today, we can go to museums and scrutinize avant-gardist sculptures, or buy avant-gardist music on CDs—Ben Lerner is basically right in saying that the “problem is that these artworks, no matter how formally inventive, remain artworks. They might redefine the borders of art but they don’t erase those borders; a bomb that never goes off, the poem remains a poem.”65 Lerner, however, is talking about literature and literature’s inclination to take on the form of the work. Another way to look at the avant-garde is offered by Bürger in saying that “[i]nstead of speaking of the avant-gardist work, we will speak of avant-garde manifestation. A dadaist manifestation does not have work character but is nonetheless an authentic manifestation of the artistic avant-garde.”66
The same goes for the Grateful Dead concert: it was, in all its different aspects, “an authentic manifestation” of what the band really was about; fundamentally music, as Lesh says, but also something more. This “something more” has to do with what Bürger calls “life praxis.” Bürger does not really elaborate on this concept, but we can infer from his discussion what he means. The Dead’s music, then, somehow changed—or at least influenced—the ways of living for many of its listeners. This goes to the heart of what Mickey Hart has said: “People come to be changed, and we change ’em.”67 He is not alone; there is an enormous mass of testimony from Deadheads, both newcomers and seasoned concertgoers, who went to a concert, or a series of shows, and came out altered. As Peter Conners put it, summarizing his first Dead show, “[W]hen I walked out of Kingswood Music Theatre in 1987, I had been profoundly changed by what I’d just experienced.”68 The fans’ experience does not occur in isolation, the musicians’ lives are also involved. For them, their “life praxis” takes form in the tension between tradition and avant-gardism, between popularity and exclusivity. Here, the band once again displays a hybrid character: it resisted or opposed the culture industry in many ways, but the band’s popularity and status is at the same time an inextricable aspect of the culture industry. In this, I believe, as Andreas Huyssen writes, that it “was the culture industry, not the avant-garde, which succeeded in transforming everyday life in the 20th century.”69 As a part of the culture industry, but by stretching and bending the ways that industry worked, the Grateful Dead sought to achieve what might seem impossible: creating and disseminating avant-garde art on a mass scale. How that happened, how it was possible for precisely this band to do that, is a topic about which Phil Lesh has much to say.
III
A few years ago, Phil Lesh published his memoir, Searching for the Sound, which offers an informative text for considering the relationship between the Dead and the avant-garde. Lesh draws an image of a conventional middle-class upbringing, but also of what could be considered a quite representative trajectory for how to become an experimental rock musician. The key, in Lesh’s representation of this complex, is how the individual, in its different appearances, could be combined with the collective. What Lesh’s story tells us is that the avant-garde is not certain techniques, not certain styles; it is a culture, composed of many different aspects—aesthetic, political, and social—and if that culture had not been there, no drugs in the world would have created the Grateful Dead.
Each player who has been part of the Grateful Dead has his or her own story to tell, and it is obvious that the band gelled only after very hard work during long rehearsals as well as performances. The point is that the diversity of traditions the different players came from is wide. Those were of course rock and roll, but also big band jazz, rudimental drumming, folk music, blues, gospel, bluegrass, rhythm and blues, classical music, avant-garde music, and more. To become a rock band, the players almost had to force these different parts together, as if assembling parts of a machine or juxtaposing them in a montage form. The eclecticism that is so tangible in the Dead’s music has one source in this diversity. At the same time, however, this music cannot be dismissed only as eclectic, because the Dead managed to fuse the musical types and make that synthesis their own. Ultimately, that triumph has to do with the appropriation of tradition and the simultaneous stylization of these traditions, guided by an insight Lesh had when listening to a young Garcia perform a traditional folk song. Watching the young guitarist at a party, Lesh felt a hush fall over the room as Garcia mesmerized—and Lesh understood that folk music, too, “could deliver an aesthetic and emotional payoff comparable to that of the greatest operatic and symphonic works.”70
It was by trying to extract aesthetic value from simple rock music that the Grateful Dead came into their own, and that is how Garcia’s vision of rock as art came about—not by imitating existing “art music” but through the extraction of aesthetic pleasure and meaning from jamming on one chord or through interpretations of old ballads and folk songs. It was not so much the result of conscious intention, as much as the effect of the combination of artistic practice and the mentality of the times, of dislocations going on both generally and concretely. Jerry Garcia intimated as much in a 1988 interview, saying, “The world out there created the Grateful Dead as much as we did. We just agreed to do it and be pushed along by it.”71 Garcia also pointed out that he felt that he was not an “artist in the independent sense, I’m part of dynamic situations.”72 There is also