Listening for the Secret. Ulf Olsson

than only imagined, and the Grateful Dead carefully built this foundation for themselves. Now, in the post-Dead era, both Phil Lesh and Bob Weir are taking on a mission as elderly statesmen, teaching younger musicians how to play Grateful Dead music, and to improvise collectively, at their respective sites, Weir’s TRI studios and Sweetwater Music Hall, and Lesh’s Terrapin Crossroads.

      V

      Tradition is a problematic word. What does it mean to be in a tradition, to be traditional? Or to be outside of tradition? Traditions are basically ambiguous; they can imprison the musician but they also provide a well from which musicians can draw ideas. Tradition can be understood as a type of collective memory or archive that contains what can no longer be formulated in language. In music, Adorno writes, “survives what is otherwise forgotten and is no longer capable of speaking directly.”⁸⁴ We find a similar point in Attali’s Noise; music “repeats the memory of another society … a society in which it had meaning.”⁸⁵ Tradition, for the Grateful Dead, seems to have worked precisely as a well for the musicians to go to, find ways to play in. Through tradition the band could memorize, or imagine, a long-lost Western landscape, or perhaps Romantic English poetry, a ballad tradition, with memory then taking on both lyrical or literary form as well as musical, concretized in, for instance, Robert Hunter’s translations of Rainer Maria Rilke’s poetry.⁸⁶ But the band also formed its own tradition: Those 613 performances of “Me and My Uncle”—is that not a type of imprisonment within, or at least a both remarkable and problematic fealty to a tradition that the band by and by made into its own?

      Tradition can be seen as an archive, containing repertoires of songs, techniques, and gestures; but more importantly it is an attitude, a relation between musician, music, and audience. Yet, tradition remains alive and meaningful only if generating new varieties of expression and updating old ones; and tradition becomes even more problematic and ambiguous under the commodification that late capitalism generates. In that system, tradition runs an acute risk of ossification, of becoming an object of mere academic interest, left behind by the culture industry and commodified into albums, CDs, and other formats. This risks killing tradition and in its place inserting a law: This is the authentic version, this is the canon that every musician must observe; all else can and should be ignored—the criticism directed against Bob Dylan for “going electric” comes to mind. Tradition, however, also can be commodified as material for new products, new hit songs, new styles in popular music. Tradition remains a source only if it remains part of a community, only if it is shared, and therefore part of transformative and dynamic practices. As Walter Benjamin emphatically stated, “Every age must strive anew to wrest tradition away from the conformism that is working to overpower it.”⁸⁷ What Benjamin points to is the urge, generated by modernity, to rescue some form of tradition to which one could belong. John McCole points out that “tradition” for Benjamin was “less a particular canon of texts or values than the very coherence, communicability, and thus the transmissibility of experience.”⁸⁸

      The Grateful Dead phenomenon is one such example of a more or less coherent tradition: It is very much about sharing experience, about forming a collective body—but not by just reproducing traditional music. The question of tradition becomes of decisive importance because, as Paul Ricoeur emphasized, he “who is unable to reinterpret his past may also be incapable of projecting concretely his interest in emancipation.”⁸⁹ Not the passive reproduction of tradition, then, but the active reinterpretation of it—if imprisoned within tradition, music risks being reduced to serving non-musical ends, and Adorno maintains that with the development of the culture industry, the “autonomy of music is replaced by a mere socio-psychological function. Music today is largely a social cement.” The culture industry destroys tradition, imprisoning music but in the commodity form; this gives it a superficial mobility and variety, which actually is its exchangeability. Adorno further sees two basic types of mass behavior in relation to music—“the ‘rhythmically obedient’ type and the ‘emotional’ type.”⁹⁰ This of course is a very rough division, but it is still worth asking whether we—an entire arena moving to the Grateful Dead—are not “rhythmically obedient.”

      The kernel of musical tradition is its repeatability, but commodified it becomes nothing but repetition—such as 613 performances of “Me and My Uncle,” all sounding very much like each other, always already identified, despite superficial variations in tempo, coloration, or set-list placement. As Attali writes, contemporary music heralds “the establishment of a society of repetition in which nothing will happen anymore.” Music, Attali claims, was once an “instrument of differentiation” but has become a “locus of repetition.”⁹¹ Therefore, music tends to be “too often only a disguise for the monologue of power.”⁹² Attali might seem extreme in his verdict, but he does have a point—and he acknowledges that music not only performs power, but also heralds what he calls “the emergence of a formidable subversion.”⁹³ The breakthroughs in audio technology during the twentieth century—including radio, gramophone, and tape recorder—pave the way for commodification and repetition. Therefore, as Attali points out, “performance becomes the showcase for the phonograph record, a support for the promotion of repetition.”⁹⁴ But here the Grateful Dead differs: although there normally is an obvious relation between records and touring—an industry norm the band ignored—the band produced fewer records over time, privileging the live concert instead, which gained an independent value.

      Technological transformations change the conditions for tradition—often drastically. If we look at tradition as some kind of belonging, a sense of being part of something bigger than the individual, then technological development and commodification breaks tradition apart. Here, as Benjamin pointed out, it is “as if a capability … has been taken from us: the ability to share experiences.”⁹⁵ Instead of the shared, collective experience, music turns into an individualistic enjoyment of a substitute product, illustrated by everyone listening with earphones—as if we are all connected to the same source, listening to the same monologue but individually, separated from each other. Attali points to how audio technology promotes repetition, which “requires the ongoing destruction of the use-value of earlier repetitions, in other words, the rapid devaluation of past labor and therefore accelerated growth.”⁹⁶ This is the logic of capital and commodification, and no musician—or anyone else—escapes it. It is a dismal perspective that Attali offers us, yet he sees possibilities for challenging power through “the route of a breach in social repetition and the control of noisemaking.”⁹⁷

      In its own way, even a rock-and-roll band like the Grateful Dead tries to subvert power structures. Self-organization, the dialectic of tradition and avant-garde, the focus on live performances, the careful cultivation of craftsmanship, the forming of and reliance upon a community—these are factors that combine to generate what Attali (naturally without referring to the Dead) calls “a music produced elsewhere and otherwise.”⁹⁸ Another word for that is, of course, marginalization—but it is in the margins that possibilities sometimes appear.