even played, as The Dead, at one of President Obama’s inauguration dances in 2009. Dance was one of the more or less ritualized practices that held the community together; therefore, even though Theodore Gracyk claims that the band’s emphasis on dance “did not last,”19 I think he is wrong. The point is that even when the music was not really what some people would expect dance music to be, Deadheads still managed to dance, albeit in their own, inimitable free-form style.
This resistance towards “selling out”—which is how I interpret aspects of these contracts—did help to guarantee the band a special position during an era when the music industry became more and more industrial, even if it at the same time produced margins for both experimental and political music. We may call the Grateful Dead “unique” if we compare their survival to the early deaths of most other San Francisco bands from the same time. Although the machinery of the music industry at large kept grinding on, the Grateful Dead became this touring unit on the outskirts of the soundscape of the culture industry. Their uniqueness can be disputed; they did after all work with the major record companies and the most successful promoters, and a rock band cannot really be run at this level of commercial success without being part of the industry. The crucial problem is the effects that integration within the culture industry has on the music. And, not least, can one ask whether music as eclectic as that performed by the Grateful Dead should be discussed in terms of uniqueness? Often coupled with the emphasis on uniqueness is the notion of authenticity—as if the singularity of the unique guaranteed the authenticity of this singular end product. I do think that the band was unique, or rather became or grew to be unique, and not because this idea legitimizes this book. Rather, the Dead’s uniqueness must be scrutinized carefully to avoid a solely and overtly ideological celebration of the band. Any evaluation of what the band was about and what its significance is must be based on a dialectical analysis that moves between the actual music and the social conditions under which it was performed.
Therefore, this first chapter suggests different ways of understanding the Grateful Dead as a kind of hybrid aggregate, assembled from different and sometimes even conflicting parts. Taking as a starting point the Western political and cultural dislocations of the sixties and the counterculture they generated, the discussion focuses on the role of tradition and avant-garde respectively. Framing this discussion is the problem of the public sphere in which a rock band also must work: What happens to the public sphere under the conditions defined by the culture industry? Was it even possible for a counter-sphere to exist? This discussion, which the Grateful Dead substantially contributes to in different ways, provides a foundation for the rest of the book, and for a discussion of the Grateful Dead as the nucleus in a form of resistance.
I
Dennis McNally suggests that the “dislocations of race, class, gender, and culture that defined the 1960s and generated the Dead can … be best understood by looking at them through the lens of improvisation—through the Dead itself”20 I take his lead, both in using improvisation as my guide, and in hinting at the band’s dependence on and contributions to those “dislocations” McNally that points to: improvisation is a relation or attitude to the world, and therefore it can at times, and under special conditions, function as precisely a type of dislocation, and then not only of a musical composition.
These dislocations were far from isolated to popular music, and it is impossible to understand even the Grateful Dead without taking the larger, social dislocations of the 1960s into consideration. Those dislocations can be seen on a global scale, but their immediate effects also could be felt by every individual—the American war on Vietnam was broadcast to every home around the world that could afford a television set. Other dislocations settled in the individual body but were effects of collective movements in the society of late capitalism, such as black liberation, women’s liberation, and the beginning of gay liberation. Here, “hippies” must be included as well, along with student protests around the globe. Fredric Jameson gives us an important reminder, however, by noting that “the 60s, often imagined as a period when capital and First World power are in a retreat all over the globe, can just as easily be conceptualized as a period when capital is in full dynamic and innovative expansion, equipped with a whole armature of fresh production techniques and new ‘means of production.’ ”21 This expansion of capital—which the music industry exemplifies—momentarily generated what Jameson calls “an immense freeing or unbinding of social energies, a prodigious release of untheorized new forces,” forces that Jameson exemplifies rather conventionally as different political movements—the counterculture is not included, unless it is covered by the suggestive formulation, “movements everywhere.” But Jameson also warns that this “sense of freedom and possibility” of the sixties is a “historical illusion”: while this freedom was enacted and enjoyed, society transitioned “from one infrastructural or systemic stage of capitalism to another.”22 One consequence for the analysis of a historical era is that it must dialectically include both power and resistance, both capital and labor. Stephen Paul Miller offers—using Foucauldian terms—a view of the “episteme” or “epistemological horizons” of the sixties as “derived from consumer culture and was in fact immediately merchandised. But in itself it was something else. The forces of the marketplace helped bring sixties culture together and then sold that culture, but the phenomenon of the sixties was a kind of Frankenstein monster that defied the commercial codifications that helped constitute it.”23
Jameson’s rather negative view, perhaps limited by his academic orthodoxy, cannot perceive the kind of community that the counterculture generated and that was forming around the Grateful Dead. Yet a dialectical analysis must be more flexible, and there are other theoreticians who are more open to the potential political significance of countercultural phenomena like the Grateful Dead. In Empire, Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri seem to imagine a potential Deadhead in what they call a “massive transvaluation of values.”
“Dropping out” was really a poor conception of what was going on in Haight-Ashbury and across the United States in the 1960s. The two essential operations were the refusal of the disciplinary regime and the experimentation with new forms of productivity. The refusal appeared in a wide variety of guises and proliferated in thousands of daily practices. It was the college student who experimented with LSD instead of looking for a job…. The entire panoply of movements and the entire emerging counterculture highlighted the social value of cooperation and communication.24
Hardt and Negri, being much more open to the diversity of the resistance to disciplinary regimes, agree with Jameson about the expansion of capital, which they see as subsuming “all aspects of social production and reproduction, the entire realm of life,” an absolute and totalizing tendency in capitalism observed already by Marx and emphasized by the Frankfurt School, as when Herbert Marcuse talks about how the dynamic character of capitalism means that it can “join and permeate all dimensions of private and public existence.”25 This dynamic, and its resulting penetration of every aspect of everyday life, is observed also by non-Marxist thinkers, as for instance Hannah Arendt in her description of Modernity as “the rule by nobody”—that is, a bureaucratic rule that could become tyrannical. Arendt also sees how society, in its varying historical forms, imposes “innumerable and various rules, all of which tends to ‘normalize’ its members, to make them behave, to exclude spontaneous action or outstanding achievement.”26 Hardt and Negri observe how “production processes and economic structures” were being redefined by “cultural relations”: a “regime of production, and above all a regime for the production of subjectivity, was being destroyed and another invented by the enormous accumulations of struggles.”27 I think the key issue is the “production of subjectivity”: the culture industry of Adorno and Horkheimer is still shaping consciousness, subjectivities are still being produced and stylized by impersonal apparatuses, by power relations. The concept of “culture industry” refers to “the entire network by means of which culture is socially transmitted, in other words, it refers to the cultural goods created by the producers, and distributed by agents, the cultural market and the consumption of culture.”28 What this industry produces is ultimately “conformism
