self-organization. In that sense, we can talk of a politics of improvisation. Self-organization is a key concept here, although I would hesitate to give it too fixed a definition, as self-organization spans so much of my argument here.1 In the background to my use of the concept is both the workers’ movement from the late 19th century and onwards, as well as looser forms of trying to gain control over one’s own life and working conditions in the 1960s. In both these traditions, self-organization meant both a care of the self and the material conditions under which different aspects of everyday life were formed. My hesitancy to give “self-organization” a firmly fixed definition arises from the fact that self-organization here encompasses both the individual and the collective. The care of the self—the forming of the self—in a refusal to adjust to handed-down, normative patterns of individuality and instead, through improvisational acts, trying out new forms of subjectivity, is one aspect of self-organization. Improvisation is the fundamental musical form of self-organization, with the musician inventing the music while it is happening. And the Grateful Dead were forming themselves as a kind of self-supporting machinery, and were generating a culture of self-organizational practices surrounding the band. Self-organization here, then, covers very different forms of resistance to hegemonic power relations and subject formation.
That is one way of describing the Grateful Dead. There are others, partly made possible by the music’s many different roots, dimensions, and faces, and already early in the band’s history, public writing about the Dead and their environment tended to become polarized: either celebratory or dismissive. Interestingly, the band attracted and even generated forms of writing that negotiated the borders between fiction and nonfiction, between reality and the representation of reality—perhaps because the band’s music encompassed the nitty-gritty of traditional blues and Bakersfield country as well as the strange, surreal world of free improvisation. Two texts in particular—both originally published already in 1968—exemplify this polarization as well as the hybrid form of writing: Tom Wolfe’s The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Trip, and Joan Didion’s “Slouching Towards Bethlehem,” in her collection of essays of the same title. Both texts seem to have generated if not a tradition, then at least plenty of followers.
Wolfe, writing in a style that became known as “New Journalism,” lets what he learns, sees, and observes infect his language, turning his novel/report into a hip, almost “turned-on” account of the Acid Tests, public parties organized by The Merry Pranksters and the writer Ken Kesey, in which the Grateful Dead played an important part. Here, the “hippie culture” is depicted as Dionysian, ecstatic:
… then the Dead coming in with their immense submarine vibrato vibrating, garanging, from the Aleutian rocks to the baja griffin cliffs of the Gulf of California. The Dead’s weird sound! agony-in-ecstasis! submarine somehow, turbid half the time, tremendously loud but like sitting under a waterfall, at the same time full of sort of ghoul-show vibrato sounds as if each string on their electric guitars is half a block long and twanging in a room full of natural gas, not to mention their great Hammond electric organ, which sounds like a moviehouse Wurlitzer, a diathermy machine, a Citizen’s Band radio and an Auto-Grind garbage truck at 4 a.m., all coming over the same frequency….2
Peter Conners’ Growing Up Dead joins the celebration, and the ecstasy, twenty years later, in a narrative both novelistic and autobiographical—but now, forty years after Wolfe, there is a touch of melancholy and loss in the story. Interestingly, Conners uses “confession” in his subtitle, “The Hallucinated Confessions of a Teenage Deadhead”—as if this identity of being a “Deadhead,” with its connotations of drugs and excess, must be confessed before his readers, and before power.3 Didion delivers the opposite. Her writing is more of an accusation than a confession: a view of the Dionysian as misery, combined with a dystopian vision of America that the writer uses as starting point for her reportage: “All that seemed clear was that at some point we had aborted ourselves and butchered the job, and because nothing else seemed so relevant I decided to go to San Francisco.”4 Didion’s imagery is telling: we read about people that seem to have aborted their reason, kids that have butchered what life they had—as if they are performing acts of violence, of abortion and butchering, on what is, or should be, only normal and natural. And throughout Didion’s walk through the hippie ghetto of Haight-Ashbury, the Grateful Dead is playing—and American society seems to be facing an early death. Almost three decades later, Douglas Coupland published his Polaroids from the Dead in 1996, a collection of texts that once again balances between fiction and report, and has striking affinities to Didion’s work. Here, some of the lost and deserted kids, as if picked out from Didion’s San Francisco, show up at a Grateful Dead concert across the San Francisco Bay, in Oakland. Almost thirty years have passed, but the same band is playing, and we once again meet teenagers without a language of their own, dosing on LSD instead of formulating intelligible lines. But we also meet survivors, who now have respectable professions, families, and social standing.5 The polaroid snapshots of the Grateful Dead show are not celebratory, the band’s Dionysian aspects seem futile, but neither are they totally dystopian or dark. Something has happened—and now, writing more than twenty years after the dissolution of the Grateful Dead, what was really the meaning of this music, what was at stake in this culture?
This is a book about a rock band, its music, and its audience, listened to and viewed through the lens of critical and aesthetic theory: not so much another narrative of the band, because there already are so many good stories on the band circulating, but more of a discussion and a critical assessment. Its basic presupposition is that even rock music can generate not only sensual pleasure but also aesthetic fulfillment. Yes, this is a lover’s discourse—but love is not always blind, nor deaf. If critique is to be meaningful, however, then the Grateful Dead, the rock band in question, must be granted agency: that is, I will try and look at the band not as merely reflecting or articulating the conditions it existed under, but as actually negotiating and even actively resisting those conditions. It also means that I claim (and I am of course far from the first to make this claim) that rock music can be viewed through the lens of a perspective, informed by a tradition of critical theory, which in its original versions resolutely opposed any thought of granting popular music, whether jazz or dance music, any aesthetic relevance—which might seem a far too heavy a burden to place on a simple rock and roll band.
Although rock music in general often has been granted an oppositional function as a socio-psychological vehicle, a repertoire of attitudes and gestures for youth’s search for identity and acknowledgment, my ambition is to go a little further. I believe that the Grateful Dead is a band worthy of a discussion that is both aesthetic and political. The roots of this theoretical perspective go back to the 1920s and to Critical Theory as produced by the Frankfurt School. If desired, this tradition could be traced back even further and it might seem outdated, at least in its condemnation of mass culture. And aspects of this critique might be ready for retirement—a certain moralism, for instance—but we do live under basically the same conditions as when these left-wing critics formulated their ideas: capitalism is even more dominant and hegemonic, the commodity form covers everything with its appeal to consumption, the Western world remains a class society—and the extreme right and Fascism once again are growing stronger in several European countries, as well as in America.
In combining mass culture and aesthetic theory, there are several risks: idealization of the band, pretentiousness, or a mismatch in the form of too grand a theoretical discourse applied to a simple rock band. A line from the Grateful Dead’s only hit single, “Touch of Grey” (lyrics by Robert Hunter) seems to capture perfectly the spirit of mismatching: “the shoe is on the hand it fits.”6 Yet mass culture is today triumphant, reaching into every part of the world, and every part of our lives. It is a form of “culture” that continually rids itself of any burden of the past to intensify the now of the moment—its dominant practice is that of consumption. As a social practice, consumption transforms its objects to waste products, to leftovers, ruins of what they once were, for the consumer’s desire to be directed toward a new object. Modernity transforms, in a grotesque way, the slogan of Modernism—“Make it new!”—into a constant consumption of new objects.
Putting
