This hesitancy about the identity of the band (even the FBI files on the Grateful Dead are uncertain: “It would appear that this is a rock group of some sort”7) also could be turned into insider references or, later, commercially quite viable slogans, for instance: “There is nothing like a Grateful Dead concert,” or “They’re not the best at what they do; they’re the only ones that do what they do.”8 These catchphrases, as well as others, point to the Grateful Dead as an alternative type of act, as something else—something different, something perhaps even unique. The band “grew up” as part of a San Franciscan, bohemian culture, for which commercial success was not crucial, or at least was not openly sought, and it became part of what Ellen Willis called the “San Francisco countercultural ‘rock-as-art’ orthodoxy.”9 But, as Mary Harron comments on this era of rock music, the “paradox (and the profits) lay in the fact that rock’s anticommercialism became the basis of its commercial appeal.”10 Harron emphasizes how “quickly and easily the new hippy culture fitted into the existing commercial structure” and states that “the new counter-culture simply found different strategies for selling sincerity.”11 We must, then, remember a simple fact, bluntly put forward by Ellen Willis: “basically rock is a capitalist art”12—meaning also that moralisms about “selling out” should be avoided. Or as Jerry Garcia chuckled: “We’ve been trying to sell out for years—nobody’s buying.”13 If we would do what Harron did, browse the lists of gold records, singles, and albums in Billboard magazine, then the Grateful Dead would long be absent. There was no commercial success from the start, even though the band did land a recording contract with Warner Bros. early on. With time, their albums would sell enough to go “gold.” During its existence, the band also changed and adapted to different conditions, most of all to a growing popularity. That and other factors—both within and outside of the band—naturally influenced how band members looked at themselves and at the band, and pushed them to define themselves in an era of political, social, and cultural upheavals. The Grateful Dead of 1995 was not the same group that it was in 1965, but I claim that the band worked on keeping its roots, and an original creative impulse, alive throughout the groups’ career.
Harron’s argument is much too general, but she does have a point in this paradoxical success of the anti-commercial: The Grateful Dead did become a mega-phenomenon, partly because they seemed to ignore the conventions of the music industry. Still, this resistance against the culture industry was to some degree a myth cultivated by band members, as when Garcia maintained that the band worked outside the music industry: “we’re really not quite in that whole world as it’s presently constructed. We’re like the exception to every rule.”14 A perhaps more nuanced standpoint is articulated by Phil Lesh: “Although we had to be a ‘business’ in order to survive and continue to make music together, we were not buying into the traditional pop music culture of fame and fortune, hit tunes, touring behind albums, etc.”15 Reading the many different touring contracts that the band signed with different promoters, and that now are collected in the Grateful Dead Archive at the University of California, Santa Cruz, there are some recurrent paragraphs, which inform us of a band working within the heart of capitalism but still trying to do things its own way, trying to formulate and control its own working conditions—even though contracts are a formalized genre, its standards dictated by the Union and promoters. For instance, contracts state that the band “shall have the unqualified right to perform at least four (4) hours. Employer understands and agrees that Artist’s reputation will be substantially and materially damaged if Artist is prevented from performing for said full four hours.”16 Other and older contracts, such as one contract from 1976, stated the band’s performing time was up to five hours, and these formulations had to do with the fact that the band was fined for playing too long—which of course sometimes happened.17 The contract with Bill Graham Presents, for a concert at the Greek Theatre in Berkeley in 1987, also states that the band must not “be sponsored or in any manner tied with any commercial product or company” and the band “shall not be required to appear and perform before any audience which is segregated on the basis of race, color, creed or sex.” This latter paragraph might seem surprising, because audiences were not segregated in the United States in the 1980s, but one can perhaps assume that this formulation was inserted into contracts after the so called “Sun City boycott”—Sun City being a South African “Bantustan” to which artists were lured to come and perform during the apartheid regime.
The contracts in general are very careful to define the security measures that the employer must observe on behalf of the band and the crew, as well as the audience and anyone working at the arena. Most contracts also state that vending of alcohol at the arena is not permitted, and in later years, they also stipulate that ticket buyers be provided with information about “campsites, inexpensive restaurants and hotels, hospitals and medical facilities, and other social services in the area”—this, of course, to try and ease any tensions caused in a local community from the invasion of “Deadheads” (defined as Grateful Dead devotees and fans). The last contract rider, from 1993, includes a paragraph about the band wanting to “provide speakers in the lobby area to give the fans a place to dance without blocking the aisles.” What the band here also does is an act of remembering: they began as a band to dance to. As Garcia once emphasized, “We feel that our greatest value is as a dance band and that’s what we like to do.”18 The Grateful Dead remained a dance band for the whole of their career—and the surviving members even played, as The Dead, at one of President Obama’s inauguration dances in 2009. Dance was one of the more or less ritualized practices that held the community together; therefore, even though Theodore Gracyk claims that the band’s emphasis on dance “did not last,”19 I think he is wrong. The point is that even when the music was not really what some people would expect dance music to be, Deadheads still managed to dance, albeit in their own, inimitable free-form style.
This resistance towards “selling out”—which is how I interpret aspects of these contracts—did help to guarantee the band a special position during an era when the music industry became more and more industrial, even if it at the same time produced margins for both experimental and political music. We may call the Grateful Dead “unique” if we compare their survival to the early deaths of most other San Francisco bands from the same time. Although the machinery of the music industry at large kept grinding on, the Grateful Dead became this touring unit on the outskirts of the soundscape of the culture industry. Their uniqueness can be disputed; they did after all work with the major record companies and the most successful promoters, and a rock band cannot really be run at this level of commercial success without being part of the industry. The crucial problem is the effects that integration within the culture industry has on the music. And, not least, can one ask whether music as eclectic as that performed by the Grateful Dead should be discussed in terms of uniqueness? Often coupled with the emphasis on uniqueness is the notion of authenticity—as if the singularity of the unique guaranteed the authenticity of this singular end product. I do think that the band was unique, or rather became or grew to be unique, and not because this idea legitimizes this book. Rather, the Dead’s uniqueness must be scrutinized carefully to avoid a solely and overtly ideological celebration