Listening for the Secret. Ulf Olsson

Dead; several of his most important writings stem from the sixties. He seems to try and come to grips with new forms of resistance and refusal, forms that the Grateful Dead, among others, practiced and lived, but he was at the same time very critical of “white” rock music, which he saw as false.³³ His Essay on Liberation (1969) is a meditation on the new social movements of the sixties and it has apparent relevance for a discussion of the Grateful Dead. Dedicated to “the rebels,” Essay on Liberation forms into a plea for an “aesthetic ethos,” and “a universe where the sensuous, the playful, the calm, and the beautiful become forms of existence and the Form of the society itself.”³⁴ This vision—whether we want to call it naively utopian or not—Marcuse finds embodied in the rebels to whom he dedicated his book: “Today’s rebels want to see, hear, feel new things in a new way: they link liberation with the dissolution of ordinary and orderly perception.”³⁵ The Grateful Dead were part of a creative rebellion, they remained part of it although the forms it took had to be constantly renegotiated, and their rebellion, which had one source in the experimentation with perception, formed into an aesthetic ethos—as Lesh said (quoted above), the band was always “fundamentally music.” Marcuse denied that the hippies could be called a revolutionary class, and the Grateful Dead certainly were no political revolutionaries, but the rebellion in which they participated hinted, as Marcuse writes, at “a total break with the dominant needs of repressive society.”³⁶ In his seminal study of the sixties, Todd Gitlin thinks that it is better to talk of “dissidents” than of revolutionaries: What could be seen as originating as “teenage difference or deviance” soon turned into a more pervasive dissidence.³⁷ But Gitlin sees a strong duality within the counterculture, a tension between an “individualist ethos” and “communality,” between “hip collectivity and the cultivation of individual experience.”³⁸ It even can be said that the Grateful Dead, as Ryan Moore put it, “personified the dueling musical responses to modernization—folk and experimentalism—but also the promise that a youthful counterculture was poised to transcend this duality in an alternative vision (or hallucination, if you prefer) of modernity.”³⁹

      This opening up of a space seemingly filled with possibility, a space where a transvaluation of values, a disruption of normativity, was at stake, allows the first incarnation of the band, the Warlocks, to transform into the Grateful Dead; it allows that same Grateful Dead to move from the elementary and sometimes embarrassingly imitative rock and roll on their self-entitled debut album, The Grateful Dead (1967), into an avant-gardist and experimental second album, Anthem of the Sun, only a year later (1968). These larger social and cultural dislocations, however, also would generate a growing need to hold on to something, to a tradition more solid than contemporary pop and rock music, a tradition not totally commodified and therefore not directly subjected to the culture industry’s policies. There is—and this is the basic hypothesis of this chapter—an interesting dialectic of tradition and avant-garde at the heart of the Grateful Dead’s music, a dialectic that might be generated by the larger dislocations taking place on a worldwide scale, but enacted within a community, forming around a group of musicians, that would gradually grow until it became a national, and to some degree even an international, phenomenon, albeit one limited predominantly to the Western world. Improvisation is one form of intentional dislocation, a musical one, of course, but one that also works on a more general cultural scale, if understood as a non-programmatic approach to trying out of different ways to gain control over one’s life. Humans improvise constantly, in adjusting to all different aspects of everyday life, but improvisation might also be a specifically cultural and political attitude, a way of relating to the world—and not only a minute navigation of one’s daily existence.

      An early example in the Grateful Dead world of this dislocating or displacing force of improvisation is “Caution (Do Not Stop on Tracks)” from the band’s second release, Anthem of the Sun. A big step from the debut album, Anthem contains music that combines many of the influences that the band brought together, but still without really melding them into one, or making the sound their own. In this song, we can hear at least some of the different parts that made up the hybrid, tension-filled whole. The title, quoting a common road sign warning drivers about railway crossings, suggests a railroad song, rooted in the tradition of the Blues and of American folk music, and in some versions underscored by the band playing a chugging rhythm, almost in unison—in many performances, the percussionists stick to this rhythm, even when the other players go into outer space. But the lyrics actually tell another clichéd story, that of a visit with the “gypsy woman,” a fortune-teller. The singer, Pigpen, belts out the lyrics in typical rhythm and blues fashion, and some versions take the song into an apparent call-and-response form, with the response performed either by the lead guitar or by backup vocals. The music really serves as a starting point for improvisation, however, with no apparent relation to the lyrics.

      On Anthem of the Sun as well as in many other performances, the band takes the song into atonal regions, including tape effects as well as distortion. Thus, popular culture—in the form of the improvising rock band—at once displaces and relocates its sources. Here, the blues meets the improvisational practice of John Coltrane and the collage technique of Charles Ives and contemporary electronic music—but in the form of rock music. “Caution” might also be considered a collage, or montage, its different parts still audibly distinct.⁴⁰ The montage form signals that the music is a construction, something made, even though tradition tends to make its products appear as natural (or as “second nature”). This tendency to naturalize, or harmonize, the music is balanced by the still unreconciled parts which make up a whole, searching for and striving to form. In his memoir, Phil Lesh looked back to Anthem of the Sun as the band’s “most innovative and far-reaching achievement,” seeing it as an “attempt to convey the experience of consciousness itself, in a manner that fully articulates its simultaneous, layered multifarious, dimension-hopping nature.”⁴¹

      The montage form also is clearly audible in what became something of the band’s signature song, “Dark Star,” its different components not always part of every performance. Slowly, with the years, the montage form—so acclaimed by the avant-garde because it juxtaposes rather than hierarchizes—takes on a different function for the band. Finally, the concert or show as a whole would take on the collage form, and the different tunes, respectively, were given a more fixed identity. Here we could add that the Grateful Dead were neither the only nor the first band to experiment with collage forms and different forms of manipulating sound. On the contrary, the band is part of a powerful “culturalization” of rock music, which enters an experimental phase in the mid-sixties, with bands as diverse as the Beatles, the Beach Boys, the Mothers of Invention, and the Velvet Underground—all investigating what the potential for aesthetic expression and form that rock music allowed or even invited. Artists such as Frank Zappa and Captain Beefheart explored montage forms in different, elaborate forms. What sets the Grateful Dead apart from their peers and contemporaries is that, from this perspective, improvisation had such a prominent role in the band’s music, and that dancing remained a favored activity, honored by both band and audience.

      The band’s musical montages are more reminiscent of Don Cherry’s Organic Music Society or the music played by the Art Ensemble of Chicago, both of which combine free jazz with different forms of black music and “World Music,” as opposed to the carefully controlled montages of rock music. The Dead could also be compared to Pink Floyd, another group with psychedelic credentials, which likewise explored the montage form, most interestingly perhaps on the album Ummagumma (1969), made up of both live recordings and studio cuts. On subsequent albums, however, Pink Floyd strived for more of a coherent whole, though that meant that the band became a kind of ideology machine. The title track on Atom Heart Mother (1970) is a symphonic piece of music that includes a choir, alluding to the kind of search for an origin found in, for instance, Carl Orff’s Carmina Burana (1935–36): the pieces making up the montage are not kept separate, and bringing them together erases their respective character for them to be able to build this master whole. The result is suggestive, but eerily authoritarian in a way that is radically opposite to what the Dead tried to accomplish. It is a question of form: Pink Floyd’s music tended to be an expression of something preconceived and exterior to the music as it