wholeheartedly (and without critical discussion) accepts a definition of the avant-garde like Poggioli’s precisely for its emphasis on antagonism, which in Marcus’ view suits that band perfectly, though others might say superficially.58
Yet, it is easy to see that this type of analysis is highly problematic and, moreover, that the energy feeding the Sex Pistols flares up briefly—only to evaporate just as quickly. The Grateful Dead might seem less politically revolutionary than the Sex Pistols, and less aesthetically radical than the Velvet Underground, but it is the Dead that actively resist the same culture industry that produces, distributes, and exploits the Velvet Underground as well as the Sex Pistols—and forms or shapes both these bands. It is Jerry Garcia, and not Lou Reed or John Lydon, or Sid Vicious, who criticizes what he calls the “fascist” aspects of rock’s crowd control in live performances.59 Indeed, both Reed and the Sex Pistols exploited those aspects of the mass audience. The lack of theatrics and of rock-and-roll poses was a central point of the Dead’s enduring appeal and, for outsiders, their mystery.60 This problem, or contradiction, might be at least partly resolved if we look at the avant-garde from a different angle. For that angle, I use the German theoretician Peter Bürger’s Theorie der Avantgarde (1974), a study that to some degree serves as a critique of Poggioli’s work.
When Duchamp painted a moustache on the “Mona Lisa,” was he really attacking da Vinci, or was his target tradition? With Bürger, one must note that Duchamp did not paint on da Vinci’s original painting in the Louvre museum in Paris, rather he used a cheap reproduction. In that way, anyone can sign the “Mona Lisa” and call it art—and that is precisely what the avant-garde is about, it radically changes the relation between art and beholder, between book and reader, between music and listener, and ultimately between artist and artwork. The Grateful Dead taking part in a performance of 4’33” is then logical, as that piece involves the audience as much as the performers. It does so not by attacking individual works of art such as the “Mona Lisa,” but by questioning and attacking art as institution. Duchamp can be seen as criticizing the isolation of this painting to a museum, the distance between it and the life outside the museum walls, and that art has become synonymous with these isolated, individual, but ultimately reified works, and he mourns that art no longer is an activity, a practice. Something similar could be said of Cage; he, too, searched for ways to make art legitimate again. The avant-garde is also attacking the commodification of art in late capitalism. Bürger writes that the “category art as institution was not invented by the avant-garde movements…. But it only became recognizable after the avant-garde movements had criticized the autonomy status of art in developed bourgeois society.”61
In a 1993 interview, Jerry Garcia talked about his youthful ambitions, “I used to have these fantasies about ‘I want rock & roll to be like respectable music.’ I wanted it to be like art… I used to try to think of ways to make that work. I wanted to do something that fit in with the art institute, that kind of self-conscious art—‘art’ as opposed to ‘popular culture.’ Back then they didn’t even talk about popular culture—I mean, rock & roll was so not legit, you know.”62 In a way, young Garcia’s wish was fulfilled: rock music is now the object of musicological as well as aesthetic analysis. But rock music reached that position at least partly by not becoming “respectable,” displaying a remarkable capacity to renew itself in forms such as punk, grunge, rap, electronica, noise—forms often exploited by the industry, but momentarily opening up a space of potentialities. If rock music is “art,” and not only “popular art” or a “mass product,” it is not only because musicians have managed to produce meaning within the forms they find inside rock music, but also because their audience has acknowledged the consecration of rock into art. There is a dialectic between the artist and the audience, between production and reception, that results in the acknowledgment of a work as art.
It is here that an understanding of the avant-garde according to Bürger becomes productive for any discussion of the Grateful Dead. For Bürger goes on, in his Marxist discourse, to state that what the avant-garde “negated is not an earlier form of art (a style) but art as an institution that is unassociated with the life praxis of men.”63 Under capitalism, art loses its former social functions, such as representing power, and instead becomes autonomous—meaning that it becomes isolated as art, and as different kinds of art, and its new social function is actually, if we follow Bürger, to keep this institution working, isolated from everyday working life. The work of art is reified, takes on the commodity form, and functions in its isolation only as self-reflection and entertainment. This was of course what the Sex Pistols once attacked—a rock music that had become totally commercialized and vacuously technical—and they wanted to bring it back to its basic three chords, potentially played by anyone. Yet, they did it in a highly marketable form. Today, even “Anarchy in the UK” has been reduced to Muzak….
The Grateful Dead did it in a different way but, yes, Bob Weir once remarked that the Dead had been called “punk’s old lance.”64 It is not only a question of the Dead forming their own record company, or organizing their own ticket sales, though such institutional forms are important and created a material foundation for the music. What is most central here remains the music, and most of all the concert or show. If band members’ public deprecation of their studio releases was as much rhetoric as reality, that attitude did describe the primacy they all placed on the concert, or rather, the “show.” The term is significant, for “show” implies a more-inclusive concept and that must be emphasized. Today, we can go to museums and scrutinize avant-gardist sculptures, or buy avant-gardist music on CDs—Ben Lerner is basically right in saying that the “problem is that these artworks, no matter how formally inventive, remain artworks. They might redefine the borders of art but they don’t erase those borders; a bomb that never goes off, the poem remains a poem.”65 Lerner, however, is talking about literature and literature’s inclination to take on the form of the work. Another way to look at the avant-garde is offered by Bürger in saying that “[i]nstead of speaking of the avant-gardist work, we will speak of avant-garde manifestation. A dadaist manifestation does not have work character but is nonetheless an authentic manifestation of the artistic avant-garde.”66
The same goes for the Grateful Dead concert: it was, in all its different aspects, “an authentic manifestation” of what the band really was about; fundamentally music, as Lesh says, but also something more. This “something more” has to do with what Bürger calls “life praxis.” Bürger does not really elaborate on this concept, but we can infer from his discussion what he means. The Dead’s music, then, somehow changed—or at least influenced—the ways of living for many of its listeners. This goes to the heart of what Mickey Hart has said: “People come to be changed, and we change ’em.”67 He is not alone; there is an enormous mass of testimony from Deadheads, both newcomers and seasoned concertgoers, who went to a concert, or a series of shows, and came out altered. As Peter Conners put it, summarizing his first Dead show, “[W]hen I walked out of Kingswood Music Theatre in 1987, I had been profoundly changed by what I’d just experienced.”68 The fans’ experience does not occur in isolation, the musicians’ lives are also involved. For them, their “life praxis” takes form in the tension between tradition and avant-gardism, between popularity and exclusivity. Here, the band once again displays a hybrid character: it resisted or opposed the culture industry in many ways, but the band’s popularity and status is at the same time an inextricable aspect of the culture industry. In this, I believe, as Andreas Huyssen writes, that it “was the culture industry, not the avant-garde, which succeeded in transforming everyday life in the 20th century.”69 As a part of the culture industry, but by stretching and bending the ways that industry worked, the Grateful Dead sought to achieve what might seem impossible: creating and disseminating avant-garde art on a mass scale. How that happened, how it was possible for precisely this band to do that, is a topic about which Phil Lesh has much to say.
III
A few years ago, Phil Lesh published his memoir, Searching for the Sound, which offers an informative
