an image of a conventional middle-class upbringing, but also of what could be considered a quite representative trajectory for how to become an experimental rock musician. The key, in Lesh’s representation of this complex, is how the individual, in its different appearances, could be combined with the collective. What Lesh’s story tells us is that the avant-garde is not certain techniques, not certain styles; it is a culture, composed of many different aspects—aesthetic, political, and social—and if that culture had not been there, no drugs in the world would have created the Grateful Dead.
Each player who has been part of the Grateful Dead has his or her own story to tell, and it is obvious that the band gelled only after very hard work during long rehearsals as well as performances. The point is that the diversity of traditions the different players came from is wide. Those were of course rock and roll, but also big band jazz, rudimental drumming, folk music, blues, gospel, bluegrass, rhythm and blues, classical music, avant-garde music, and more. To become a rock band, the players almost had to force these different parts together, as if assembling parts of a machine or juxtaposing them in a montage form. The eclecticism that is so tangible in the Dead’s music has one source in this diversity. At the same time, however, this music cannot be dismissed only as eclectic, because the Dead managed to fuse the musical types and make that synthesis their own. Ultimately, that triumph has to do with the appropriation of tradition and the simultaneous stylization of these traditions, guided by an insight Lesh had when listening to a young Garcia perform a traditional folk song. Watching the young guitarist at a party, Lesh felt a hush fall over the room as Garcia mesmerized—and Lesh understood that folk music, too, “could deliver an aesthetic and emotional payoff comparable to that of the greatest operatic and symphonic works.”70
It was by trying to extract aesthetic value from simple rock music that the Grateful Dead came into their own, and that is how Garcia’s vision of rock as art came about—not by imitating existing “art music” but through the extraction of aesthetic pleasure and meaning from jamming on one chord or through interpretations of old ballads and folk songs. It was not so much the result of conscious intention, as much as the effect of the combination of artistic practice and the mentality of the times, of dislocations going on both generally and concretely. Jerry Garcia intimated as much in a 1988 interview, saying, “The world out there created the Grateful Dead as much as we did. We just agreed to do it and be pushed along by it.”71 Garcia also pointed out that he felt that he was not an “artist in the independent sense, I’m part of dynamic situations.”72 There is also a certain perceptible and problematic tension in the relation between the avant-garde culture, already a force in the Bay Area in the mid-sixties, and the Grateful Dead. For some time, the Grateful Dead and, for instance, a typical avant-garde project such as the San Francisco Tape Music Center—typical in that it generated a sort of loose-knit, collectively based art community—had some interaction: both Phil Lesh and Tom Constanten participated in the Tape Center scene, which extended to the San Francisco Mime Troupe. But the worlds of electronic and rock music, respectively, never really coalesced. The mid-sixties, in Stewart Brand’s view, marked “the beginning of the Grateful Dead and the end of everybody else.”73 Meanwhile, other future band members were also searching for other traditions to partake in and belong to—and tradition here also means precisely community.
IV
Long before joining the Grateful Dead, the individuals who were later to make up the band were searching for viable traditions—traditions that could still maintain relevance and carry authority. The most obvious example is Jerry Garcia and his early interest in bluegrass music. Garcia performed with his banjo in bluegrass groups around the San Francisco Bay area, but he also—together with mandolin player Sandy Rothman—went searching for the original source, in the form of a 1964 pilgrimage to bluegrass hero Bill Monroe in Bean Blossom, in southern Indiana. Rothman would later play with Monroe, but Garcia never got the chance. Rothman and Garcia carried with them a tape recorder, and they were far from alone in doing that; this experience of being a taper later informed Garcia’s attitude towards the tapers in the Grateful Dead audience.74
The attraction of bluegrass for a bunch of urban musicians was probably many-layered. Bluegrass must be described as a form of music that rapidly came to privilege virtuosity. Still, it had contacts with its roots in old-time string band music—often with obvious Christian overtones. Bluegrass is most of all instrumental music, however, and as bluegrass historian Neil Rosenberg writes, “occasionally used for dancing, it is most frequently performed in concert-like settings, and sound media—radio, records, television—have been important means of dissemination for the music. Bluegrass depends upon the microphone, and this fact has shaped its sound.”75 This technological dissemination of course meant that bluegrass was accessible, and could be listened to and learned even in California—at the same time as migration brought both players and their music to California, inspiring young Californians to take part in traditions, but also encouraging them to put a twist to those traditions. Modern technology also produced Harry Smith’s seminal Anthology of American Folk Music, a collection of enormous importance for a generation of artists such as Bob Dylan, and for the Grateful Dead.76
As Rosenberg emphasizes, however, bluegrass still has festivals at its core,77 and these festivals include both concert-like performances as well as widespread playing among those present, offering participants a chance to learn from the masters. The festival culture made pilgrimages like Garcia’s necessary, and they were also part of the tradition. Folklorists, anthropologists, and ethnomusicologists traversed America, searching for and recording traditional music wherever they found it. As Rosenberg notes, famed folklorist Alan Lomax “furnished a model for those interested in finding such performers. Young revivalists followed his path in making ‘field trips’ into the South and Afro-American communities….”78 Jerry Garcia was one of them, carrying that tape recorder with him when searching for the bluegrass grail. What bluegrass taught Garcia was, I would suggest, how music is dependent upon a community, and how it can shape and build that community; how music and community could form a dynamic unit, at least momentarily, but perhaps also how such communities could be closed to outsiders such as Garcia himself and Sandy Rothman. A Latino and a Jew from the West Coast were not allowed immediate access to Midwestern cultures—a lesson that would come to good use with the Grateful Dead. Bob Weir apparently also was an early taper, and recorded performances by Jorma Kaukonen and others.79
Later, another member of the band would engage even more profoundly with what was to be called “World Music.” Mickey Hart worked with musicians of very different backgrounds, such as Nubian oud-player Hamza El-Din and Nigerian master drummer Babatunde Olatunji. Hart produced a series of World Music–genre albums for the Rykodisc label, and he has worked with scholars from the Smithsonian Institute and the American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress to collect and archive indigenous and endangered music from around the planet. The research Hart has conducted and sponsored has informed several books on drumming and percussion instruments, including his coauthored volumes Planet Drum, with musicologist Fredric Lieberman (1991), and Drumming at the Edge of Magic, with Jay Stevens (1990).
When considering the culture of bluegrass, it is obvious that the Grateful Dead were far from the first artists to engage in a closer interaction with their audience. Jazz promotes audience involvement as well, but with a different aim, and in a different genre context. Probably more strongly than bluegrass musicians, jazz players understood that to make their music possible they must organize themselves. Ajay Heble even states that jazz is about precisely “building purposeful communities of interest and involvement, about reinvigorating public life with the magic of dialogue and collaboration.”80 Both jazz and bluegrass can be seen as having strong roots in America’s underclass, although neither form can be reduced exclusively to an expression of the oppressed. Although the bluegrass community in part was based on a somewhat conservative endeavor to keep the music within a traditional form, jazz musicians of the sixties organized to perform and develop their music beyond tradition. The examples are abundant, and include pianist and composer Horace Tapscott forming the Pan Afrikan Peoples Arkestra
