Through performing often—and often playing for free—the band soon won a local following, although it never had the commercial success of other San Francisco bands, such as Jefferson Airplane and Big Brother and the Holding Company, which had Janis Joplin on vocals. A rigorous touring schedule generated an audience of “Deadheads,” as the fans came to call themselves—fans that often caught not one but several shows, because the repertoire never was the same twice. There also was a certain unevenness to the band’s performances. Performing for thirty years—up until the death of Garcia in 1995 and the dissolving of the band—the Grateful Dead formed tight relations to its audience, until commercial success—the hit single “Touch of Grey,” along with a video on MTV, and other publicity—in 1987 definitely changed the conditions for both band and audience. The culture surrounding the band, epitomized in the (in)famous parking lot scene surrounding the shows, where food, clothes, jewelry, and drugs were sold and bought by thousands of fans and curious passers-by, I in the following call, “the Grateful Dead phenomenon.”
This book is not one more history of the band—several band histories already exist, and a couple of them are outstanding: Dennis McNally, A Long Strange Trip: The Inside History of the Grateful Dead (2002); and Peter Richardson, No Simple Highway: A Cultural History of the Grateful Dead (2015). Also useful—with an interesting combination of personal as well as political angles—is Carol Brightman’s Sweet Chaos: The Grateful Dead’s American Adventure (1998). Longtime journalists David Gans and Blair Jackson have contributed significant works as well. Invaluable is the Grateful Dead Archive at McHenry Library, University of California, Santa Cruz, and the work by its guardian, Nicholas G. Meriwether. There is a wealth of material on the band, and what I have found useful can be found in footnotes and in the bibliography. Instead of trying to write the band’s history anew, my aim is to try and understand what was at stake in this band’s music and in the culture it generated. My way of doing that is by looking at the band, listening to its music, and engaging with the audience, through aesthetic and critical theory—theory that is perhaps not normally thought of as aiming at a simple rock and roll band, but which to me is an indispensable tool for understanding social and cultural phenomena also of a “popular” kind.
The three chapters that comprise the book are tightly interrelated. The first chapter assesses the band’s history, although not as a chronological or linear trajectory. Instead, my focus is on the dialectic of tradition and avant-gardism in the band’s music, and how the aesthetic forms of bluegrass and jazz inform the surrounding culture as well as the music of the Grateful Dead. This chapter, then, touches upon the focus of Chapter 2: community building and politics. The Grateful Dead always imagined themselves an “apolitical” band, but if politics is understood not only as party politics and ideology, then the Dead and their surrounding culture gain political significance. The band and the surrounding culture can be looked upon as generating temporary and mobile forms of counter-conduct and resistance against mainstream culture and normativity—a resistance that ultimately had political implications. Central to my argument is subject formation, as generated within the Grateful Dead phenomenon. The band was part of, and partly created, a space where the audience could try out who they were, and what they wanted to be. Drugs of different kinds are a well-known part of this culture, and I try—via a digression into the status of drugs in critical theory—to give a nuanced view on this complex issue. My discussion of tradition, avant-gardism, and politics is of course based on the music, and Chapter 3 examines how musical practices and different forms of improvisation are focused and related to the politics of the Grateful Dead. Improvisation was always an important part—or even the central dimension—of the band’s music, and I try to show the strong interrelatedness between musical improvisation and forms of social, cultural, and political resistance.
The Grateful Dead as well as the surrounding culture are complex phenomena, and that complexity opens the opportunity for different perspectives and different approaches in the analytic work. I have tried to look at this complexity from a prismatic perspective, allowing for a diverse set of theoretical inspirations and lenses. My aim is to contribute to an existing discourse, an ongoing discussion, rather than to try to pin down the “one and only truth” about the band and its audience.
My analytic approach has been informed by very different sources although, with few exceptions, I have limited my discussion of the band’s music to “official” recordings, and then especially the many live albums the band has released. Many of those live albums have been released in serial formats—Dick’s Picks, Dave’s Picks, Road Trips, From the Vault—and references to these albums is given with the title of the series and the number of the volume. For complete information on songs and albums, see the discography at the end of this book. My arguments could have been strengthened—or perhaps weakened—if I had engaged more with the enormous amount of fan-recorded and unreleased concert recordings available on the Internet. More than two thousand concerts (of varying sound quality) are available at www.archive.org as well as on other sites. Many performances can be watched on YouTube, and there also are other sources. This wealth is a blessing but, of course, also is a problem: Trying to listen to all the live CDs released by the band itself is time consuming; engaging with all the Web material also is beyond an essay of this scope. The official releases provide a sufficiently clear and deep impression of the Dead’s development and history, and of members’ own profound understanding of their project.
It is my hope that my discussion will mean something both to Deadheads and to those still unconvinced about the significance and achievement of this band: The faithful and the non-believers might have something to gain from listening more closely, with ears wide open—and from a critical discussion. Thus, this study engages in close listening and close reading—but perhaps there was no secret to be disclosed. Maybe there was only hard work, again and again, year after year. Yet, the music of the Grateful Dead, like all art of any validity, seems to carry a secret with it: At its best, it produced also something that language cannot formulate, something seemingly beyond discourse. Still, the challenge for critics is to confront this difference that art produces, and that this rock band produced, and we must try to understand the premises by which rock music can become a force never seen or heard before. There is a signal that the Grateful Dead and the culture surrounding the band emitted, a signal that doubtless will slowly fade. Yet, today, that signal remains vibrant; it is still traversing space, and it challenges us—daring us to listen and decipher it. It is a signal of hope and despair, of dark and light.
Berkeley, California, and Stockholm, Sweden, January, 2017
1.Popular Avant-Garde? Renegotiating Tradition
When studying the Grateful Dead—both the band and the wider cultural phenomenon—one should not be surprised if the image discovered is mixed or even contradictory: Was the Grateful Dead a rock band at all? If not, what was it? Jerry Garcia early on could claim that the band was not for “cranking out rock and roll” but “to get high.”1 Bob Weir stated that “we’re a jazz band. I won’t say we’re nothing but a jazz band, because our basic premise is rock ‘n’ roll. We just approach it from a jazz point of view.”2 Phil Lesh talked about the music that the band played as “electric chamber music,”3 emphasizing that