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 something or someone,” and this is what he calls the “antagonistic” aspect of the avant-garde. A typical example is Marcel Duchamp’s “L.H.O.O.Q” (1919), in which the artist put a moustache on da Vinci’s “Mona Lisa.” The Grateful Dead never seem to have engaged in that kind of activity. In “Foolish Heart,” when Robert Hunter writes, “sign the Mona Lisa with a spray can, call it art,” he is ironically distancing himself (and the band, it seems) from that kind of antagonistic artistic practice.48 But we must also remember the violent practice of using instruments and sound systems in unintended ways, producing distortion and noise—the Grateful Dead was not bereft of this avant-gardist impulse, rather it was a central aspect of the band’s improvisations. In his third characteristic, Poggioli even sees the avant-garde as engaged in a “transcendental antagonism” that he calls its “nihilistic” moment—but the Grateful Dead never were iconoclasts. They once did play a benefit for the Black Panther Party, but the Black Panthers were radicals and revolutionaries, not nihilists.49 Finally, Poggioli raises the stakes even more with his fourth characteristic, which he calls “agonism” or the “agonistic moment”: the avant-garde, according to Poggioli, does not heed even “its own catastrophe and perdition.” Together, these four moments form what Poggioli calls the “dialectic of movements” of the avant-garde.50
According to this established (but, as we also shall see, problematic) view of avant-gardism, it is obvious why a band such as the Velvet Underground—or even the Sex Pistols—might seem more radical, more subversive, and more avant-gardist than the Grateful Dead. It does not help that there are interesting or at least tantalizing connections between the historical avant-garde and the Grateful Dead. When Jerry Garcia found the name “Grateful Dead” while browsing a dictionary at random, he is echoing the way that pioneering Dada artist Tristan Tzara found the word “dada” while browsing a dictionary at random. What we have here are different varieties of the same myth of origins, however true the stories might be. Additionally, members of the band did once perform—together with a symphony orchestra in the United States—a classical (yes!) avant-gardist piece of art, John Cage’s 4’33” or “the silent piece.” We also know, however, that when Garcia and Mickey Hart sent Cage a tape with music for the composer’s 75th birthday, Cage wrote back: “Thank you very much, I took your two minute tape and played it back at half-speed. It was beautiful, it was marvelous, thank you so much.” Cage here displays, I would say, a truly avant-gardist attitude in this appropriation of someone else’s work—and perhaps Garcia did the same, when smiling approvingly at Cage’s reply.51
There is at least one moment—on the best Grateful Dead album the band never made—when the Grateful Dead welcome their own perdition, and that is on John Oswald’s Grayfolded (1994–95), when he at one point stacks more than a hundred different live versions of “Dark Star” on top of each other, which results in a crescendo of white noise, erasing every trace of the musical material it is based on. Having Oswald manipulate all these versions of “Dark Star” displays an avant-gardist attitude: the tune is not given, no single version is sacred or canonical, and when the band was done with it, it could be handed over to someone else. That the band commissioned Oswald to do something with its music is typical of the way the Grateful Dead did things. Oswald had so successfully applied his “plunderphonics” to Michael Jackson’s “Bad” that he was sued and sentenced to destroy all existing copies of the album. The Grateful Dead, however, apparently interested in how Oswald aimed to create or construe new music out of existing music, and instead welcomed him to “plunder” their music, and providing Oswald with essentially free access to the band’s famed “Vault,” which contains soundboard tapes of most of their shows. Initially, Oswald intended his project to include not only “Dark Star” but also two other staples of the band’s repertoire, “China Cat Sunflower” and “The Other One,” but the work process apparently made him change his mind.52
The point of Oswald’s “plunderphonics” is, as Chris Cutler writes, threefold: “Thus plunderphonics as a practice radically undermines three of the central pillars of the art music paradigm: originality (it deals only with copies), individuality (it speaks only with the voice of others), and copyright (the breaching of which is a condition of its very existence).”53 The band’s openness to Oswald’s use of its music can be seen as related to Garcia’s oft-repeated viewpoint that once the band was done with the music, the audience could have it.54 In his discussion of Oswald, Cutler emphasizes the importance of the medium, stating that it is “only what is not recorded that belongs to its participants while what is recorded is placed inevitably in the public domain”—which of course is what has happened to the Grateful Dead’s music, with so many of the band’s performances available on the Internet in both audio and video. This sharing has one of its roots in the avant-gardist project of erasing the borders separating “art” from “life,” and Grayfolded, as well as Ned Lagin’s and Phil Lesh’s project Seastones (released as an album in 1975), contribute to what Cutler maintains is happening: a “general aesthetic convergence at the fringes of genres once mutually exclusive—and across the gulf of high and low art.”55
Another example of what Poggioli sees as typical of the avant-garde is that it often chooses to use “an enemy’s insult as one’s own emblem: we need cite only the decadents and the Salon des Refusés.”56 We can think of the first call for contact with the audience made on the 1971 eponymous live album, nicknamed “Skull and Roses”: fans were addressed as “Dead Freaks,” soon to be dubbed “Deadheads,” even though the first meanings of that word in Webster’s online dictionary still are “one who has not paid for a ticket” and “a dull or stupid person.”57
These examples, however, suggest that the Grateful Dead might have something to do with the avant-garde, even though the band itself really does not fit very well with Poggioli’s emphasis on the avant-garde as antagonistic. When Greil Marcus in his Lipstick Traces discusses—or rather hails—the
