straightforwardly—it must always be possible to criticize the mass work in terms of the major human themes of alienation and reification,” but this must be combined with the effort to “understand a modernity” through the work of mass culture.16 Barthes is talking about a pedagogical situation and the teaching of literary analysis in the beginning of the 1960s, but this combination of commodity critique along with the effort to make use of popular culture is of fundamental importance still today, when “mass culture” must not be delimited as only “youth culture.”
Even popular music sometimes can transcend its confinement in the commodity form and formulate itself in a strange beauty. Strange, because this transcendence demands some form of dissonance—beauty can only be formulated as a digression from the norm, from the given. This has political significance: If we acknowledge that rock music can have an aesthetic value of its own, then it also has what Herbert Marcuse calls “political potential,” and which “lies only in its own aesthetic dimension.”17 The aesthetic effect is a transformation of reality into what Marcuse calls the “truth of art,” which is “that the world really is as it appears in the work of art.”18 Therefore even popular music can become a preparation for freedom.
It is that possibility that this book seeks to make audible. It is a possibility embedded in the actual musical language that the Grateful Dead developed. This should not be a surprise. “All music,” Swedish author Lars Norén states in one of his fragments, “strives to become what it is not.”19
A few basic facts might help readers who are not familiar with the music or the culture discussed here. Formed in 1965, on the peninsula south of San Francisco, the band which was called the Warlocks became the Grateful Dead after finding a record put out by another band performing as the “Warlocks.” The basic line-up of musicians whose names figure prominently in the following discussion is Jerry Garcia, lead guitar and vocals; Bill Kreutzmann, drums, percussion; Phil Lesh, bass and vocals; Ron “Pigpen” McKernan, keyboards, percussion, and vocals; and Bob Weir, guitar and vocals. The band soon added Mickey Hart, on percussion and drums, to its line-up. McKernan passed away in 1973, and a row of players have sat down on the piano bench: Tom “TC” Constanten, Keith Godchaux (d. 1980), Brent Mydland (d. 1990), Vince Welnick (d. 2006), and, on a looser basis, Ned Lagin and Bruce Hornsby. Donna Godchaux, on vocals, performed from 1972 to 1979. The main lyricists were treated as vital, one of whom—Robert Hunter—was sometimes credited as a full member of the band. His efforts were augmented by John Perry Barlow and, to a lesser extent, Robert M. Petersen.
Through performing often—and often playing for free—the band soon won a local following, although it never had the commercial success of other San Francisco bands, such as Jefferson Airplane and Big Brother and the Holding Company, which had Janis Joplin on vocals. A rigorous touring schedule generated an audience of “Deadheads,” as the fans came to call themselves—fans that often caught not one but several shows, because the repertoire never was the same twice. There also was a certain unevenness to the band’s performances. Performing for thirty years—up until the death of Garcia in 1995 and the dissolving of the band—the Grateful Dead formed tight relations to its audience, until commercial success—the hit single “Touch of Grey,” along with a video on MTV, and other publicity—in 1987 definitely changed the conditions for both band and audience. The culture surrounding the band, epitomized in the (in)famous parking lot scene surrounding the shows, where food, clothes, jewelry, and drugs were sold and bought by thousands of fans and curious passers-by, I in the following call, “the Grateful Dead phenomenon.”
This book is not one more history of the band—several band histories already exist, and a couple of them are outstanding: Dennis McNally, A Long Strange Trip: The Inside History of the Grateful Dead (2002); and Peter Richardson, No Simple Highway: A Cultural History of the Grateful Dead (2015). Also useful—with an interesting combination of personal as well as political angles—is Carol Brightman’s Sweet Chaos: The Grateful Dead’s American Adventure (1998). Longtime journalists David Gans and Blair Jackson have contributed significant works as well. Invaluable is the Grateful Dead Archive at McHenry Library, University of California, Santa Cruz, and the work by its guardian, Nicholas G. Meriwether. There is a wealth of material on the band, and what I have found useful can be found in footnotes and in the bibliography. Instead of trying to write the band’s history anew, my aim is to try and understand what was at stake in this band’s music and in the culture it generated. My way of doing that is by looking at the band, listening to its music, and engaging with the audience, through aesthetic and critical theory—theory that is perhaps not normally thought of as aiming at a simple rock and roll band, but which to me is an indispensable tool for understanding social and cultural phenomena also of a “popular” kind.
The three chapters that comprise the book are tightly interrelated. The first chapter assesses the band’s history, although not as a chronological or linear trajectory. Instead, my focus is on the dialectic of tradition and avant-gardism in the band’s music, and how the aesthetic forms of bluegrass and jazz inform the surrounding culture as well as the music of the Grateful Dead. This chapter, then, touches upon the focus of Chapter 2: community building and politics. The Grateful Dead always imagined themselves an “apolitical” band, but if politics is understood not only as party politics and ideology, then the Dead and their surrounding culture gain political significance. The band and the surrounding culture can be looked upon as generating temporary and mobile forms of counter-conduct and resistance against mainstream culture and normativity—a resistance that ultimately had political implications. Central to my argument is subject formation, as generated within the Grateful Dead phenomenon. The band was part of, and partly created, a space where the audience could try out who they were, and what they wanted to be. Drugs of different kinds are a well-known part of this culture, and I try—via a digression into the status of drugs in critical theory—to give a nuanced view on this complex issue. My discussion of tradition, avant-gardism, and politics is of course based on the music, and Chapter 3 examines how musical practices and different forms of improvisation are focused and related to the politics of the Grateful Dead. Improvisation was always an important part—or even the central dimension—of the band’s music, and I try to show the strong interrelatedness between musical improvisation and forms of social, cultural, and political resistance.
The Grateful Dead as well as the surrounding culture are complex phenomena, and that complexity opens the opportunity for different perspectives and different approaches in the analytic work. I have tried to look at this complexity from a prismatic perspective, allowing for a diverse set of theoretical inspirations and lenses. My aim is to contribute to an existing discourse, an ongoing discussion, rather than to try to pin down the “one and only truth” about the band and its audience.
My analytic approach has been informed by very different sources although, with few exceptions, I have limited my discussion of the band’s music to “official” recordings, and then especially the many live albums the band has released. Many of those live albums have been released in serial formats—Dick’s Picks, Dave’s Picks, Road Trips, From the Vault—and references to these albums is given with the title of the series and the number of the volume. For complete information on songs and albums, see the discography at the end of this book. My arguments could have been strengthened—or perhaps weakened—if I had engaged more with the enormous amount of fan-recorded and unreleased concert recordings available on the Internet. More than two thousand concerts (of varying sound quality) are available at www.archive.org as well as on other sites. Many performances can be watched on YouTube, and there also are other sources. This wealth is a blessing but, of course, also is a problem: Trying to listen to all the live CDs released by the band itself is time consuming; engaging with all the Web material also is beyond an essay of this scope. The official releases provide a sufficiently clear and deep impression of the Dead’s development and history, and of members’ own profound understanding of their project.
It is my hope that my discussion will mean something both to Deadheads and to those
