One is that the listener and interpreter is allowed to demand something from the band in question, as for instance that the music puts something at stake, that the musicians risk something when walking out on that stage—and I would think that walking out in front of fifty thousand people and trying to improvise is a way of really putting something, both music and musician, at stake, at least when you work with a certain musical looseness and openness. The Grateful Dead has something to say not only as a phenomenon within the history of popular culture in America, but also musically—and if the band didn’t have that musical edge to it, then they would not be a very compelling object for the type of discussion that I propose.
In one of his aphorisms in Minima Moralia, Theodor W. Adorno writes that “knowledge must indeed present the fatally rectilinear succession of victory and defeat, but should also address itself to those things which were not embraced by this dynamic, which fell by the wayside—what might be called the waste products and blind spots that have escaped the dialectic. It is in the nature of the defeated to appear, in their impotence, irrelevant, eccentric, derisory.”7 The Grateful Dead can be seen as such a waste product. For a short time—a few years around 1970—the band appears to have been what the culture industry privileged and invested in, only to soon substitute it with the next big thing. The Grateful Dead and their audience have so often been ridiculed, dismissed, and derided, as pathetic left-overs from the Sixties, as something better left at the roadside: a waste product. Being a fan of the band, a serious “Deadhead,” did include finding oneself the object of an othering, a stigmatization, which even, as Nicholas Meriwether and others have pointed out, extended to scholars researching on the band.8
But is it accurate to talk about the Grateful Dead as being a “waste product”? As this book was being written, the surviving members of the band—together with some newer recruits—performed a series of concerts called “Fare Thee Well: Celebrating Fifty Years of the Grateful Dead.” The band first filled Levi’s Stadium in Santa Clara, California, for a couple of nights, then moved on to Soldier Field in Chicago, Illinois, where they attracted seventy thousand people for three consecutive nights. Media attention was enormous, the amount of money generated by and circulated around the events even more enormous. Is that really something that can be characterized as a waste product? Did not the unexpected commercial success from 1987 to 1995 transport the band out of its time warp, making it into an obviously contemporary and very commercial phenomenon? The consequences of success were problematic—fans cringed at the unabashed marketing of products for them to buy. Is this really the band that we learned to love and cherish, the band that thought of the audience as a vital part of the music, and almost of the band itself?
Yes and no. Jerry Garcia once likened society’s increasing acceptance of the band to the situation of “the town whore that’s finally become respectable.”9 That respectability probably was quite provisional and conditional and, for most of its trajectory, the Grateful Dead was looked upon as something rather ragged, something left over from the sixties, attracting a sad group of fans as drugged out as the band members. When the band in 1987 finally had its commercial breakthrough of the standard type—a hit single, “Touch of Grey”—its status had slowly changed, the audience had been building up, and now success erupted. Suddenly, this group of misfits (which is how band members often described their band) was topping the business magazine Forbes’ charts of the highest-earning artists. Celebrities flocked to the Dead, academics adorned their books with allusions to their songs, and new generations and new types of fans attended shows, filling the biggest arenas.
It is this dialectic of “victory and defeat,” and the band’s position outside of or on the margin of that dialectic, that makes the Grateful Dead such a promising object for any analysis of the culture industry. The band as well as its traditional audience certainly did seem “irrelevant, eccentric, derisory.” It is not, however, because the Grateful Dead so perfectly exemplifies (and to some degree resists) a logic constantly produced by late capitalism that justifies one more book on the band adding to what is already an impressive array of studies. It is rather because this band also seems to negate any view of the culture industry as absolutely dominant and hegemonic that makes it so interesting: The band played another music, a music different from that privileged by the culture industry—but did so from the inside of that industry, although applying other business strategies than those of mainstream business. Within a stereotypical form of expression—and rock music certainly has its stereotypes—the Grateful Dead (at least, in the band’s better moments) searched for a different music.
Here another risk makes itself known, and it is once again Adorno that points it out: “Radical reification produces its own pretense of immediacy and intimacy.”10 Mass culture, which is reified culture, produces an appearance or Schein of authenticity—as if its products were the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings. Did the Grateful Dead not invest in this kind of authenticity—performing in shabby old clothes, having no stage show, and pretending to be themselves and not stars or celebrities, even in front of sixty thousand people? It would be facile, all too facile, to maintain simply that one cannot escape commodification that easily. Listening to this music, however, one hears something else: a music that is at work, a music trying out different directions, constantly reformulating itself, formulating a world other than the one both musicians and listeners find themselves in, and—at its best—testing how music, under these circumstances summarized as the machinations of the culture industry, is able to sound at all, to make any kind of noise. That point also is made by Adorno: “Only individuals are capable of consciously representing the aims of collectivity.”11 Jazz musician and composer, Ornette Coleman (who later would perform with the Dead and record with Garcia), once gave a beautiful formulation of this idea: “That’s how I have always wanted musicians to play with me: on a multiple level. I don’t want them to follow me. I want them to follow themselves, but to be with me.”12 That could also be an accurate description of the Grateful Dead at their best: a collective of individuals. Any claim that the individual actually can formulate, or be in command of, his or her own music also within popular culture would probably be seen by Adorno as an example of the “self-denunciation of the intellectuals.”13
Even if Adorno is right, however, in that all—all—contemporary music is produced under the commodity form, music today does seem to negate Adorno’s determinism here. This is because the traffic between different forms of music is intense, perhaps more so than ever, and artists constantly are finding ways to control their own work, to minimize their dependence on the culture industry, and thereby create spaces where subjective freedom is produced—at least momentarily. Even so, no one else has with the same precision formulated the complex and contradictory character of culture under late capitalism as Adorno, and even a discussion of the Grateful Dead has something to profit by Adorno’s critique. James W. Cook, in a very nuanced evaluation of Adorno’s relevance today, writes “Precisely because he [Adorno] wanted to condemn the culture industry for its ‘totalizing’ tendencies, he often engaged in obvious forms of hyperbole. ‘All mass culture,’ we are told, is ‘identical’—a calculated overstatement which immediately flattens the media-specific characteristics and year-by-year-changes that concern most historians.”14 Although provoked and stimulated by precisely Adorno’s overstatements—which signal his deep-rooted attachment to Western art as the high-mark of individuality—my aim is to understand also the Grateful Dead as a cultural phenomenon as well, conditioned by factors that were constantly changing; thus the Dead were not, and could not be, the same in 1995 as they were in 1980 or 1967.
Adorno here then serves as the provider of a general perspective on the culture industry under late capitalism, and as a general inspiration for what I intend as a dialectical analysis of a phenomenon that Adorno himself never commented upon—and probably would have had nothing positive to say about. Perhaps what is most valuable in Adorno is the critical impulse itself, mediated in his immanent critique; after all, one could say that it was Adorno who came to fulfill what Marx had called a “ruthless criticism of the existing order.”15
French literary theorist Roland Barthes
