would take on the collage form, and the different tunes, respectively, were given a more fixed identity. Here we could add that the Grateful Dead were neither the only nor the first band to experiment with collage forms and different forms of manipulating sound. On the contrary, the band is part of a powerful “culturalization” of rock music, which enters an experimental phase in the mid-sixties, with bands as diverse as the Beatles, the Beach Boys, the Mothers of Invention, and the Velvet Underground—all investigating what the potential for aesthetic expression and form that rock music allowed or even invited. Artists such as Frank Zappa and Captain Beefheart explored montage forms in different, elaborate forms. What sets the Grateful Dead apart from their peers and contemporaries is that, from this perspective, improvisation had such a prominent role in the band’s music, and that dancing remained a favored activity, honored by both band and audience.
The band’s musical montages are more reminiscent of Don Cherry’s Organic Music Society or the music played by the Art Ensemble of Chicago, both of which combine free jazz with different forms of black music and “World Music,” as opposed to the carefully controlled montages of rock music. The Dead could also be compared to Pink Floyd, another group with psychedelic credentials, which likewise explored the montage form, most interestingly perhaps on the album Ummagumma (1969), made up of both live recordings and studio cuts. On subsequent albums, however, Pink Floyd strived for more of a coherent whole, though that meant that the band became a kind of ideology machine. The title track on Atom Heart Mother (1970) is a symphonic piece of music that includes a choir, alluding to the kind of search for an origin found in, for instance, Carl Orff’s Carmina Burana (1935–36): the pieces making up the montage are not kept separate, and bringing them together erases their respective character for them to be able to build this master whole. The result is suggestive, but eerily authoritarian in a way that is radically opposite to what the Dead tried to accomplish. It is a question of form: Pink Floyd’s music tended to be an expression of something preconceived and exterior to the music as it unfolded; and the scream of anguish in the Dead’s music was generated from inside the song—at least in the band’s best moments.
In the mid-sixties, an aspiring rock and roll band did not have a wide range of traditions to draw from. The big exception, of course, was the blues, which handed down to rock music not only musical forms but also an attitude, an intensity, and a close relation to its audience. Aside from the blues, however, there wasn’t much of a rock tradition. Jerry Garcia, for instance, talks about listening to doo-wop and rhythm and blues, realizing that “there is the black version of stuff that’s good and then there’s the lame white version of stuff sometimes.”42 Rock music was still young, albeit growing rapidly both commercially and artistically. The situation made it possible for an ambitious rock band like the Grateful Dead to invent its context, expressed by the quite impressive move from the conventional album The Grateful Dead to the experimental Anthem of the Sun. This expansion also generated a type of displacement, with, for instance, the blues inserted in an experimental soundscape. Or perhaps it is the other way around: pieces of music quite foreign to rock music are inserted within a blues-based frame. It simultaneously meant that alternative traditions could be acknowledged and recognized, musically and ideologically. For the Dead, bluegrass is perhaps the best example.
Twentieth-century art can be said to be marked by its dislocations or “déplacement.” Key words for characterizing twentieth-century art in general probably could include categories such as “Modernism,” “Experimentation,” “Avant-Garde,” “Culture Industry,” “Exile,” and “Improvisation.” These categories, of course, all are related to each other; they all also are situated within in a process of dislocation: their meanings are not given definitively. The Dead improvised, and with time improvisation became the form that experimentation took in their music. They were not expelled from their (musical) “home country,” but sought a form of voluntary, interior exile, an active rejection of mainstream America as well as of the culture industry. But were they modernists? There is no doubt a strong Modernist impulse at work both in the music itself and in the band’s understanding, and even mythologizing, of itself. When Phil Lesh, as quoted above, talks about Anthem of the Sun as an attempt to “convey the experience of consciousness itself,” he is articulating a quite typical Modernist agenda, formulated again and again throughout the history of Modernism, but often attributed to French poet Charles Baudelaire, whose description of his new art form, the prose poem, can be used as a description also of large parts of the Grateful Dead’s music: “musical without rhythm or rhyme, supple enough and striking enough to suit lyrical movements of the soul, undulations of reverie, the flip-flops of consciousness.”43
Although assigning a Modernist identity to the band is accurate and productive, we perhaps should remind ourselves of the 613 performances of their most frequently performed tune—the cover of John Phillips’ cowboy song, “Me and My Uncle.” I have heard only a few of these performances, but none of the versions I have listened to differ very radically from the others, even though Jerry Garcia often does his best to vary his accompaniment and his ornamentations of Bob Weir’s vocals. Perhaps the band’s coercive emphasis on the Modernist project to “Make it new!” should thus be balanced by a “stick to the tradition” attitude, which emphasizes the crafting of a song and includes a search for the ultimate, definitive, and perfect version of certain songs.
Another aspect of including cover songs in the shows is, of course, that of memory and history. Performing Marty Robbins’ “El Paso” or Johnny Cash’s “Big River,” as well as Reverend Gary Davis’ “Death Don’t Have No Mercy” or Elizabeth Cotton’s “Oh Babe, It Ain’t No Lie,” for instance, is a way of remembering the roots of the band, as well as being a tribute to history, to the forerunners. These cover songs sometimes were done rather traditionally, but this musical material also could be tried and tested, stretched out: the band could set Cash’s “Big River” on fire, or they could slow down Merle Haggard’s “Sing Me Back Home” to an exquisite and almost unbearable tempo. Also, when seemingly performing the most traditional music, such as bluegrass, Jerry Garcia and his mandolinist partner David Grisman would, like true avant-gardists, stretch and bend on that form’s unwritten rules, as when dedicating most of an album (So What, 1998) to music by Miles Davis and Milt Jackson.44 Hence, it is no coincidence that there is actually an album featuring some of the Dead’s sources, original or traditional versions of the Dead’s most frequently performed cover songs: The Music Never Stopped: The Roots of the Grateful Dead (1995).
Against this backdrop, it might sound a bit odd to ask if the Grateful Dead also were avant-gardists. “Popular” the Grateful Dead were and are, in the sense of having a huge audience, in their refusal to deny or reject their popular heritage, and in their adherence to a popular tradition that incorporates both roots music and commercial products. It might seem contradictory or even absurd to call something that has such a mass basis “avant-garde.” The question of the Dead as avant-gardists must be asked, however, and eventually be answered in the positive: avant-gardists with a mass audience. This was what so attracted pianist Tom Constanten to the Dead that he joined them, and performed with them for some time. Having studied with avant-garde composers Luciano Berio and Karl-Heinz Stockhausen, Constanten observed that the Grateful Dead “had something that avant-garde art music didn’t have, and probably never will: a vast audience. You almost have to be a graduate student to enjoy some of these experimental pieces, but rock music attracted a larger audience, so you could say things from a platform and there would be people there to listen.”45
To understand how avant-garde aspects could survive within mass culture, under the auspices of the culture industry, we must look at the meaning of “avant-garde,” a concept or category having a definition that is far from clear. The concept of avant-garde also might seem problematic here because we might think of avant-garde as having to do with different extreme forms of art, of provocation, perhaps even including violence—and the Grateful Dead, with its “fundamental lyricism,” as Blair Jackson formulates it,46 does not seem to have much in common with such characteristics of the avant-garde. Even if we do remember avant-gardist aspects of the
