Listening for the Secret. Ulf Olsson

rock and roll band did not have a wide range of traditions to draw from. The big exception, of course, was the blues, which handed down to rock music not only musical forms but also an attitude, an intensity, and a close relation to its audience. Aside from the blues, however, there wasn’t much of a rock tradition. Jerry Garcia, for instance, talks about listening to doo-wop and rhythm and blues, realizing that “there is the black version of stuff that’s good and then there’s the lame white version of stuff sometimes.”⁴² Rock music was still young, albeit growing rapidly both commercially and artistically. The situation made it possible for an ambitious rock band like the Grateful Dead to invent its context, expressed by the quite impressive move from the conventional album The Grateful Dead to the experimental Anthem of the Sun. This expansion also generated a type of displacement, with, for instance, the blues inserted in an experimental soundscape. Or perhaps it is the other way around: pieces of music quite foreign to rock music are inserted within a blues-based frame. It simultaneously meant that alternative traditions could be acknowledged and recognized, musically and ideologically. For the Dead, bluegrass is perhaps the best example.

      Twentieth-century art can be said to be marked by its dislocations or “déplacement.” Key words for characterizing twentieth-century art in general probably could include categories such as “Modernism,” “Experimentation,” “Avant-Garde,” “Culture Industry,” “Exile,” and “Improvisation.” These categories, of course, all are related to each other; they all also are situated within in a process of dislocation: their meanings are not given definitively. The Dead improvised, and with time improvisation became the form that experimentation took in their music. They were not expelled from their (musical) “home country,” but sought a form of voluntary, interior exile, an active rejection of mainstream America as well as of the culture industry. But were they modernists? There is no doubt a strong Modernist impulse at work both in the music itself and in the band’s understanding, and even mythologizing, of itself. When Phil Lesh, as quoted above, talks about Anthem of the Sun as an attempt to “convey the experience of consciousness itself,” he is articulating a quite typical Modernist agenda, formulated again and again throughout the history of Modernism, but often attributed to French poet Charles Baudelaire, whose description of his new art form, the prose poem, can be used as a description also of large parts of the Grateful Dead’s music: “musical without rhythm or rhyme, supple enough and striking enough to suit lyrical movements of the soul, undulations of reverie, the flip-flops of consciousness.”⁴³

      Although assigning a Modernist identity to the band is accurate and productive, we perhaps should remind ourselves of the 613 performances of their most frequently performed tune—the cover of John Phillips’ cowboy song, “Me and My Uncle.” I have heard only a few of these performances, but none of the versions I have listened to differ very radically from the others, even though Jerry Garcia often does his best to vary his accompaniment and his ornamentations of Bob Weir’s vocals. Perhaps the band’s coercive emphasis on the Modernist project to “Make it new!” should thus be balanced by a “stick to the tradition” attitude, which emphasizes the crafting of a song and includes a search for the ultimate, definitive, and perfect version of certain songs.

      Another aspect of including cover songs in the shows is, of course, that of memory and history. Performing Marty Robbins’ “El Paso” or Johnny Cash’s “Big River,” as well as Reverend Gary Davis’ “Death Don’t Have No Mercy” or Elizabeth Cotton’s “Oh Babe, It Ain’t No Lie,” for instance, is a way of remembering the roots of the band, as well as being a tribute to history, to the forerunners. These cover songs sometimes were done rather traditionally, but this musical material also could be tried and tested, stretched out: the band could set Cash’s “Big River” on fire, or they could slow down Merle Haggard’s “Sing Me Back Home” to an exquisite and almost unbearable tempo. Also, when seemingly performing the most traditional music, such as bluegrass, Jerry Garcia and his mandolinist partner David Grisman would, like true avant-gardists, stretch and bend on that form’s unwritten rules, as when dedicating most of an album (So What, 1998) to music by Miles Davis and Milt Jackson.⁴⁴ Hence, it is no coincidence that there is actually an album featuring some of the Dead’s sources, original or traditional versions of the Dead’s most frequently performed cover songs: The Music Never Stopped: The Roots of the Grateful Dead (1995).

      Against this backdrop, it might sound a bit odd to ask if the Grateful Dead also were avant-gardists. “Popular” the Grateful Dead were and are, in the sense of having a huge audience, in their refusal to deny or reject their popular heritage, and in their adherence to a popular tradition that incorporates both roots music and commercial products. It might seem contradictory or even absurd to call something that has such a mass basis “avant-garde.” The question of the Dead as avant-gardists must be asked, however, and eventually be answered in the positive: avant-gardists with a mass audience. This was what so attracted pianist Tom Constanten to the Dead that he joined them, and performed with them for some time. Having studied with avant-garde composers Luciano Berio and Karl-Heinz Stockhausen, Constanten observed that the Grateful Dead “had something that avant-garde art music didn’t have, and probably never will: a vast audience. You almost have to be a graduate student to enjoy some of these experimental pieces, but rock music attracted a larger audience, so you could say things from a platform and there would be people there to listen.”⁴⁵

      To understand how avant-garde aspects could survive within mass culture, under the auspices of the culture industry, we must look at the meaning of “avant-garde,” a concept or category having a definition that is far from clear. The concept of avant-garde also might seem problematic here because we might think of avant-garde as having to do with different extreme forms of art, of provocation, perhaps even including violence—and the Grateful Dead, with its “fundamental lyricism,” as Blair Jackson formulates it,⁴⁶ does not seem to have much in common with such characteristics of the avant-garde. Even if we do remember avant-gardist aspects of the band, especially during its early history, then we, along with Michael Kaler, might say that the Grateful Dead were not as radical as the Velvet Underground or LaMonte Young: “Chaos is represented, but not enacted,” Kaler writes.⁴⁷ But I am not so sure that Kaler’s characteristic is accurate; many parts of “Dark Star” seem to be more enactments than representations. “Dark Star” would for many years serve as the band’s signature melody, its status comparable to that of Coltrane’s many renditions of “My Favorite Things” and, just as that song did for Coltrane, “Dark Star” served as a vehicle for improvisation—meaning that it never sounded the same, not even twice. The same goes for “Space” and “Drums,” which became centerpieces of Grateful Dead shows in the seventies.

      II

      There is an often-reproduced photograph taken by Jim Marshall in the late sixties of the Grateful Dead in performance. The band members have their backs to the audience, instead turning towards the amplifiers and loudspeakers, holding their guitars to or scratching them against the equipment to produce distortion and noise, using their instruments in a way that they apparently were not originally intended to be used. This is a classic avant-gardist gesture—and it does, of course, also imply an act of violence. This photograph, then, suggests that maybe the Dead were not only into peace, love, and understanding, that there might be something other than harmonizing pastorals inside the band’s music.

      The long-dominant view of the avant-garde is represented by Renato Poggioli’s study The Theory of the Avant-Garde, originally published in Italian in 1962. Poggioli’s examples of avant-garde art are, at least by today’s standards, rather conventional—what we today often call the “historical avant-garde,” meaning Dadaism, Futurism, Surrealism, and others. Poggioli first emphasizes that the avant-garde is a movement, meaning that it cannot be isolated to certain individuals, certain countries, or certain works—any concept of the avant-garde must be flexible. But Poggioli still distinguishes certain traits that he sees as defining entities for the avant-garde. The first is that the avant-garde is always an “activist” movement: it wants something; it is goal-oriented and does not remain passive—which could be said of the Grateful Dead as well, the band wanting more than just mere survival. Secondly, however, Poggioli sees the avant-garde as always agitating “against