Listening for the Secret. Ulf Olsson

already a force in the Bay Area in the mid-sixties, and the Grateful Dead. For some time, the Grateful Dead and, for instance, a typical avant-garde project such as the San Francisco Tape Music Center—typical in that it generated a sort of loose-knit, collectively based art community—had some interaction: both Phil Lesh and Tom Constanten participated in the Tape Center scene, which extended to the San Francisco Mime Troupe. But the worlds of electronic and rock music, respectively, never really coalesced. The mid-sixties, in Stewart Brand’s view, marked “the beginning of the Grateful Dead and the end of everybody else.”⁷³ Meanwhile, other future band members were also searching for other traditions to partake in and belong to—and tradition here also means precisely community.

      IV

      Long before joining the Grateful Dead, the individuals who were later to make up the band were searching for viable traditions—traditions that could still maintain relevance and carry authority. The most obvious example is Jerry Garcia and his early interest in bluegrass music. Garcia performed with his banjo in bluegrass groups around the San Francisco Bay area, but he also—together with mandolin player Sandy Rothman—went searching for the original source, in the form of a 1964 pilgrimage to bluegrass hero Bill Monroe in Bean Blossom, in southern Indiana. Rothman would later play with Monroe, but Garcia never got the chance. Rothman and Garcia carried with them a tape recorder, and they were far from alone in doing that; this experience of being a taper later informed Garcia’s attitude towards the tapers in the Grateful Dead audience.⁷⁴

      The attraction of bluegrass for a bunch of urban musicians was probably many-layered. Bluegrass must be described as a form of music that rapidly came to privilege virtuosity. Still, it had contacts with its roots in old-time string band music—often with obvious Christian overtones. Bluegrass is most of all instrumental music, however, and as bluegrass historian Neil Rosenberg writes, “occasionally used for dancing, it is most frequently performed in concert-like settings, and sound media—radio, records, television—have been important means of dissemination for the music. Bluegrass depends upon the microphone, and this fact has shaped its sound.”⁷⁵ This technological dissemination of course meant that bluegrass was accessible, and could be listened to and learned even in California—at the same time as migration brought both players and their music to California, inspiring young Californians to take part in traditions, but also encouraging them to put a twist to those traditions. Modern technology also produced Harry Smith’s seminal Anthology of American Folk Music, a collection of enormous importance for a generation of artists such as Bob Dylan, and for the Grateful Dead.⁷⁶

      As Rosenberg emphasizes, however, bluegrass still has festivals at its core,⁷⁷ and these festivals include both concert-like performances as well as widespread playing among those present, offering participants a chance to learn from the masters. The festival culture made pilgrimages like Garcia’s necessary, and they were also part of the tradition. Folklorists, anthropologists, and ethnomusicologists traversed America, searching for and recording traditional music wherever they found it. As Rosenberg notes, famed folklorist Alan Lomax “furnished a model for those interested in finding such performers. Young revivalists followed his path in making ‘field trips’ into the South and Afro-American communities….”⁷⁸ Jerry Garcia was one of them, carrying that tape recorder with him when searching for the bluegrass grail. What bluegrass taught Garcia was, I would suggest, how music is dependent upon a community, and how it can shape and build that community; how music and community could form a dynamic unit, at least momentarily, but perhaps also how such communities could be closed to outsiders such as Garcia himself and Sandy Rothman. A Latino and a Jew from the West Coast were not allowed immediate access to Midwestern cultures—a lesson that would come to good use with the Grateful Dead. Bob Weir apparently also was an early taper, and recorded performances by Jorma Kaukonen and others.⁷⁹

      Later, another member of the band would engage even more profoundly with what was to be called “World Music.” Mickey Hart worked with musicians of very different backgrounds, such as Nubian oud-player Hamza El-Din and Nigerian master drummer Babatunde Olatunji. Hart produced a series of World Music–genre albums for the Rykodisc label, and he has worked with scholars from the Smithsonian Institute and the American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress to collect and archive indigenous and endangered music from around the planet. The research Hart has conducted and sponsored has informed several books on drumming and percussion instruments, including his coauthored volumes Planet Drum, with musicologist Fredric Lieberman (1991), and Drumming at the Edge of Magic, with Jay Stevens (1990).

      When considering the culture of bluegrass, it is obvious that the Grateful Dead were far from the first artists to engage in a closer interaction with their audience. Jazz promotes audience involvement as well, but with a different aim, and in a different genre context. Probably more strongly than bluegrass musicians, jazz players understood that to make their music possible they must organize themselves. Ajay Heble even states that jazz is about precisely “building purposeful communities of interest and involvement, about reinvigorating public life with the magic of dialogue and collaboration.”⁸⁰ Both jazz and bluegrass can be seen as having strong roots in America’s underclass, although neither form can be reduced exclusively to an expression of the oppressed. Although the bluegrass community in part was based on a somewhat conservative endeavor to keep the music within a traditional form, jazz musicians of the sixties organized to perform and develop their music beyond tradition. The examples are abundant, and include pianist and composer Horace Tapscott forming the Pan Afrikan Peoples Arkestra in 1961, with the double aim of both preserving and remodeling African-American music. The Arkestra soon evolved into the Underground Musicians Association, which became the Union of God’s Musicians and Artists Ascensions, but the Arkestra seems to have remained at the center of the organization: “Fusing art with social activism, the Arkestra developed and preserved black music and art within their community, performing on street corners, in parks, schools, churches, senior homes, social facilities and gathering spots, and arts centers, and at political rallies.”⁸¹ Other examples include the record company Debut, formed in 1952 by bassist and composer Charles Mingus, his wife Celia, and drummer and composer Max Roach; an artist-controlled company, it was devoted to producing new jazz. Similarly, the Jazz Composer’s Guild—an organization formed in 1964 by trumpeter and composer Bill Dixon—was dedicated to the promotion of the new, so called free jazz. Still active today is the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM) in Chicago, formed at the initiative of pianist/composer Muhal Richard Abrams in 1965 and dedicated to performing and teaching what the Art Ensemble of Chicago, one of its member ensembles, called “Great Black Music.” The importance of the AACM must be emphasized; its members have continued to produce some of the most vital music of the last fifty years, and at the same time the AACM has worked locally to provide training to aspiring young musicians, forming a vital part of the local community.⁸²

      These examples of self-organization might have inspired the Grateful Dead. Their importance is not so much in their possible status as role models for the band, but rather in their demonstration of a type of margin at the peripheries of the culture industry, and at the outer borders of (white) middle-class America, in which self-organization and a different kind of music were made possible. As Jacques Attali remarks, free jazz might have displayed its “inability to construct a truly new mode of production” but all the same it “was the first attempt to express in economic terms the refusal of the cultural alienation inherent in repetition, to use music to build a new culture.”⁸³ Composers and performers of written (notated) Modernist and avant-garde music also have tended to a sort of community building, as exemplified by the San Francisco Tape Music Center, but this music has had a strong academic patronage—illustrated by the Tape Music Center moving to Mills College in Oakland. While the Grateful Dead engaged directly with their local community in their early days, the ways in which they did it differed from the ways jazz musicians did it; they did not engage in teaching, for example, although they did perform for free in parks and streets. They were a neighborhood band—but they did not have to fight against racist structures in addition to the culture industry. Still, their music was radical enough to demand a certain measure of self-organization to be able to grow and expand, a self-organization that connected them to an avant-garde tradition. The Grateful Dead were part of the famed Acid Tests,