Association, which became the Union of God’s Musicians and Artists Ascensions, but the Arkestra seems to have remained at the center of the organization: “Fusing art with social activism, the Arkestra developed and preserved black music and art within their community, performing on street corners, in parks, schools, churches, senior homes, social facilities and gathering spots, and arts centers, and at political rallies.”81 Other examples include the record company Debut, formed in 1952 by bassist and composer Charles Mingus, his wife Celia, and drummer and composer Max Roach; an artist-controlled company, it was devoted to producing new jazz. Similarly, the Jazz Composer’s Guild—an organization formed in 1964 by trumpeter and composer Bill Dixon—was dedicated to the promotion of the new, so called free jazz. Still active today is the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM) in Chicago, formed at the initiative of pianist/composer Muhal Richard Abrams in 1965 and dedicated to performing and teaching what the Art Ensemble of Chicago, one of its member ensembles, called “Great Black Music.” The importance of the AACM must be emphasized; its members have continued to produce some of the most vital music of the last fifty years, and at the same time the AACM has worked locally to provide training to aspiring young musicians, forming a vital part of the local community.82
These examples of self-organization might have inspired the Grateful Dead. Their importance is not so much in their possible status as role models for the band, but rather in their demonstration of a type of margin at the peripheries of the culture industry, and at the outer borders of (white) middle-class America, in which self-organization and a different kind of music were made possible. As Jacques Attali remarks, free jazz might have displayed its “inability to construct a truly new mode of production” but all the same it “was the first attempt to express in economic terms the refusal of the cultural alienation inherent in repetition, to use music to build a new culture.”83 Composers and performers of written (notated) Modernist and avant-garde music also have tended to a sort of community building, as exemplified by the San Francisco Tape Music Center, but this music has had a strong academic patronage—illustrated by the Tape Music Center moving to Mills College in Oakland. While the Grateful Dead engaged directly with their local community in their early days, the ways in which they did it differed from the ways jazz musicians did it; they did not engage in teaching, for example, although they did perform for free in parks and streets. They were a neighborhood band—but they did not have to fight against racist structures in addition to the culture industry. Still, their music was radical enough to demand a certain measure of self-organization to be able to grow and expand, a self-organization that connected them to an avant-garde tradition. The Grateful Dead were part of the famed Acid Tests, they co-owned the Carousel Ballroom together with other bands, and in 1973 the band formed its own short-lived record companies, Grateful Dead Records and Round Records, the latter dedicated to musical offshoots from the Grateful Dead. The band tried to be in control of its touring, organizing mail-order ticket sales; it also engaged in the development of audio technology. Every community needs a material basis for it to be something more than only imagined, and the Grateful Dead carefully built this foundation for themselves. Now, in the post-Dead era, both Phil Lesh and Bob Weir are taking on a mission as elderly statesmen, teaching younger musicians how to play Grateful Dead music, and to improvise collectively, at their respective sites, Weir’s TRI studios and Sweetwater Music Hall, and Lesh’s Terrapin Crossroads.
V
Tradition is a problematic word. What does it mean to be in a tradition, to be traditional? Or to be outside of tradition? Traditions are basically ambiguous; they can imprison the musician but they also provide a well from which musicians can draw ideas. Tradition can be understood as a type of collective memory or archive that contains what can no longer be formulated in language. In music, Adorno writes, “survives what is otherwise forgotten and is no longer capable of speaking directly.”84 We find a similar point in Attali’s Noise; music “repeats the memory of another society … a society in which it had meaning.”85 Tradition, for the Grateful Dead, seems to have worked precisely as a well for the musicians to go to, find ways to play in. Through tradition the band could memorize, or imagine, a long-lost Western landscape, or perhaps Romantic English poetry, a ballad tradition, with memory then taking on both lyrical or literary form as well as musical, concretized in, for instance, Robert Hunter’s translations of Rainer Maria Rilke’s poetry.86 But the band also formed its own tradition: Those 613 performances of “Me and My Uncle”—is that not a type of imprisonment within, or at least a both remarkable and problematic fealty to a tradition that the band by and by made into its own?
Tradition can be seen as an archive, containing repertoires of songs, techniques, and gestures; but more importantly it is an attitude, a relation between musician, music, and audience. Yet, tradition remains alive and meaningful only if generating new varieties of expression and updating old ones; and tradition becomes even more problematic and ambiguous under the commodification that late capitalism generates. In that system, tradition runs an acute risk of ossification, of becoming an object of mere academic interest, left behind by the culture industry and commodified into albums, CDs, and other formats. This risks killing tradition and in its place inserting a law: This is the authentic version, this is the canon that every musician must observe; all else can and should be ignored—the criticism directed against Bob Dylan for “going electric” comes to mind. Tradition, however, also can be commodified as material for new products, new hit songs, new styles in popular music. Tradition remains a source only if it remains part of a community, only if it is shared, and therefore part of transformative and dynamic practices. As Walter Benjamin emphatically stated, “Every age must strive anew to wrest tradition away from the conformism that is working to overpower it.”87 What Benjamin points to is the urge, generated by modernity, to rescue some form of tradition to which one could belong. John McCole points out that “tradition” for Benjamin was “less a particular canon of texts or values than the very coherence, communicability, and thus the transmissibility of experience.”88
The Grateful Dead phenomenon is one such example of a more or less coherent tradition: It is very much about sharing experience, about forming a collective body—but not by just reproducing traditional music. The question of tradition becomes of decisive importance because, as Paul Ricoeur emphasized, he “who is unable to reinterpret his past may also be incapable of projecting concretely his interest in emancipation.”89 Not the passive reproduction of tradition, then, but the active reinterpretation of it—if imprisoned within tradition, music risks being reduced to serving non-musical ends, and Adorno maintains that with the development of the culture industry, the “autonomy of music is replaced by a mere socio-psychological function. Music today is largely a social cement.” The culture industry destroys tradition, imprisoning music but in the commodity form; this gives it a superficial mobility and variety, which actually is its exchangeability. Adorno further sees two basic types of mass behavior in relation to music—“the ‘rhythmically obedient’ type and the ‘emotional’ type.”90 This of course is a very rough division, but it is still worth asking whether we—an entire arena moving to the Grateful Dead—are not “rhythmically obedient.”
The kernel of musical tradition is its repeatability, but commodified it becomes nothing but repetition—such as 613 performances of “Me and My Uncle,” all sounding very much like each other, always already identified, despite superficial variations in tempo, coloration, or set-list placement. As Attali writes, contemporary music heralds “the establishment of a society of repetition in which nothing will happen anymore.” Music, Attali claims, was once an “instrument of differentiation” but has become a “locus of repetition.”91 Therefore, music tends to be “too often only a disguise for the monologue of power.”92 Attali might seem extreme in his verdict, but he does have a point—and he acknowledges that music not only performs power, but also heralds what he calls “the emergence of a formidable subversion.”93 The breakthroughs in audio technology during the twentieth century—including radio, gramophone, and tape recorder—pave the way for commodification and repetition. Therefore, as Attali points out, “performance becomes the showcase for the phonograph record, a support
