Thus, this study engages in close listening and close reading—but perhaps there was no secret to be disclosed. Maybe there was only hard work, again and again, year after year. Yet, the music of the Grateful Dead, like all art of any validity, seems to carry a secret with it: At its best, it produced also something that language cannot formulate, something seemingly beyond discourse. Still, the challenge for critics is to confront this difference that art produces, and that this rock band produced, and we must try to understand the premises by which rock music can become a force never seen or heard before. There is a signal that the Grateful Dead and the culture surrounding the band emitted, a signal that doubtless will slowly fade. Yet, today, that signal remains vibrant; it is still traversing space, and it challenges us—daring us to listen and decipher it. It is a signal of hope and despair, of dark and light.
Berkeley, California, and Stockholm, Sweden, January, 2017
1.Popular Avant-Garde? Renegotiating Tradition
When studying the Grateful Dead—both the band and the wider cultural phenomenon—one should not be surprised if the image discovered is mixed or even contradictory: Was the Grateful Dead a rock band at all? If not, what was it? Jerry Garcia early on could claim that the band was not for “cranking out rock and roll” but “to get high.”1 Bob Weir stated that “we’re a jazz band. I won’t say we’re nothing but a jazz band, because our basic premise is rock ‘n’ roll. We just approach it from a jazz point of view.”2 Phil Lesh talked about the music that the band played as “electric chamber music,”3 emphasizing that the “Grateful Dead is more than music, but it has always been fundamentally music … this ongoing experiment in collective creativity.”4 The three band members apparently agree that they did not form your average rock band, but at the same time they formulate rather different visions of what the band is about. Even within the band, opinions differ on what must have been a central issue—but that issue could not be settled outside of the music, it could only be worked out, resolved in music. In that practice, positions could shift, often in just a few bars—Garcia searching for an Apollonian exactness and clarity, the definitive CD version or interpretation of a song, and Lesh pushing the music into the ecstatic unknown, promoting improvisation and madness, the Dionysian version of the Dead. Or, as Mickey Hart put it, the band “is in the transportation business. We move minds.”5 Dennis McNally, band publicist and historian, claims that “the point is the Grateful Dead is not a rock ‘n’ roll band. They use rock modalities, but to evaluate them purely as a rock ‘n’ roll band, they’re not. They are a twenty-first century American electronic string band.”6 McNally might risk making the band too traditional, but he is right in suggesting that the Dead cannot be looked upon squarely as a rock band, although the “rock modalities” must form part of the horizon that frames the band’s work.
This hesitancy about the identity of the band (even the FBI files on the Grateful Dead are uncertain: “It would appear that this is a rock group of some sort”7) also could be turned into insider references or, later, commercially quite viable slogans, for instance: “There is nothing like a Grateful Dead concert,” or “They’re not the best at what they do; they’re the only ones that do what they do.”8 These catchphrases, as well as others, point to the Grateful Dead as an alternative type of act, as something else—something different, something perhaps even unique. The band “grew up” as part of a San Franciscan, bohemian culture, for which commercial success was not crucial, or at least was not openly sought, and it became part of what Ellen Willis called the “San Francisco countercultural ‘rock-as-art’ orthodoxy.”9 But, as Mary Harron comments on this era of rock music, the “paradox (and the profits) lay in the fact that rock’s anticommercialism became the basis of its commercial appeal.”10 Harron emphasizes how “quickly and easily the new hippy culture fitted into the existing commercial structure” and states that “the new counter-culture simply found different strategies for selling sincerity.”11 We must, then, remember a simple fact, bluntly put forward by Ellen Willis: “basically rock is a capitalist art”12—meaning also that moralisms about “selling out” should be avoided. Or as Jerry Garcia chuckled: “We’ve been trying to sell out for years—nobody’s buying.”13 If we would do what Harron did, browse the lists of gold records, singles, and albums in Billboard magazine, then the Grateful Dead would long be absent. There was no commercial success from the start, even though the band did land a recording contract with Warner Bros. early on. With time, their albums would sell enough to go “gold.” During its existence, the band also changed and adapted to different conditions, most of all to a growing popularity. That and other factors—both within and outside of the band—naturally influenced how band members looked at themselves and at the band, and pushed them to define themselves in an era of political, social, and cultural upheavals. The Grateful Dead of 1995 was not the same group that it was in 1965, but I claim that the band worked on keeping its roots, and an original creative impulse, alive throughout the groups’ career.
Harron’s argument is much too general, but she does have a point in this paradoxical success of the anti-commercial: The Grateful Dead did become a mega-phenomenon, partly because they seemed to ignore the conventions of the music industry. Still, this resistance against the culture industry was to some degree a myth cultivated by band members, as when Garcia maintained that the band worked outside the music industry: “we’re really not quite in that whole world as it’s presently constructed. We’re like the exception to every rule.”14 A perhaps more nuanced standpoint is articulated by Phil Lesh: “Although we had to be a ‘business’ in order to survive and continue to make music together, we were not buying into the traditional pop music culture of fame and fortune, hit tunes, touring behind albums, etc.”15 Reading the many different touring contracts that the band signed with different promoters, and that now are collected in the Grateful Dead Archive at the University of California, Santa Cruz, there are some recurrent paragraphs, which inform us of a band working within the heart of capitalism but still trying to do things its own way, trying to formulate and control its own working conditions—even though contracts are a formalized genre, its standards dictated by the Union and promoters. For instance, contracts state that the band “shall have the unqualified right to perform at least four (4) hours. Employer understands and agrees that Artist’s reputation will be substantially and materially damaged if Artist is prevented from performing for said full four hours.”16 Other and older contracts, such as one contract from 1976, stated the band’s performing time was up to five hours, and these formulations had to do with the fact that the band was fined for playing too long—which of course sometimes happened.17 The contract with Bill Graham Presents, for a concert at the Greek Theatre in Berkeley in 1987, also states that the band must not “be sponsored or in any manner tied with any commercial product or company” and the band “shall not be required to appear and perform before any audience which is segregated on the basis of race, color, creed or sex.” This latter paragraph might seem surprising, because audiences were not segregated in the United States in the 1980s, but one can perhaps assume that this formulation was inserted into contracts after the so called “Sun City boycott”—Sun City being a South African “Bantustan” to which artists were lured to come and perform during the apartheid regime.
The contracts in general are very careful to define the security measures that the employer must observe on behalf of the band and the crew, as well as the audience and anyone working at the arena. Most contracts also state that vending of alcohol at the arena is not permitted, and in later years, they also stipulate that ticket buyers be provided with information about “campsites, inexpensive restaurants and hotels, hospitals and medical facilities, and other social services in the area”—this, of course, to try and ease any tensions caused in a local community from the invasion of “Deadheads” (defined as Grateful Dead devotees and fans). The last contract rider, from 1993, includes a paragraph about the band wanting to “provide speakers in the lobby area to give the fans a place to dance without blocking the aisles.” What the band here also does is an act of remembering: they began as a band to dance to. As Garcia once emphasized, “We feel that our greatest value is
