The Grateful Dead

views updated

The Grateful Dead

The Grateful Dead, with its notorious founding member Jerry Garcia, was a band that epitomized the psychedelic era of American rock 'n' roll music from the 1960s to the 1990s. Even after Garcia's death in 1995, members of the band continued to tour, in part to satisfy the yearnings of the most dedicated group of fans ever to bind themselves to a musical group, the so-called Dead Heads.

Garcia and friends Bob Weir, Ron "Pigpen" McKernan, Bill Kreutzmann, and Phil Lesh formed the band in the San Francisco Bay Area in 1965 after various incarnations as a blues and bluegrass influenced jug band (Mother McCree's Uptown Jug Champions) and a blues/rock ensemble (The Warlocks). The various members, especially keyboard players, who were to come and go, included Tom Constanten, Donna and Keith Godchaux, Brent Mydland, Bruce Hornsby, and Vince Welnick. Mickey Hart joined the band shortly after its inception, complementing Kreutzmann as a second drummer, left for a while after his father ripped off the band, and later rejoined them. Pigpen died and the band kept on playing, but with the death of Jerry Garcia the remaining members finally disbanded. They kept playing in their various individual bands, however, and in a combined band called The Other Ones, which approximated the Grateful Dead and continued the Dead's summer tour tradition.

According to Garcia, he found the name "Grateful Dead" by randomly opening a book and coming upon a dictionary entry describing the legend of those who, returned from the dead, reward a living person who had unwittingly aided them. The folk derivation of the name was fitting, since it summed up the roots of the founding members in the bluegrass, blues, and folk music that was performed in the early 1960s by artists such as Bob Dylan and Joan Baez. The Dead continued to play folk classics like "Peggy-O," "Jack-a-Roe," and "Staggerlee" until the end. The grounding of the Grateful Dead in the American folk tradition contradicts its image as a corrupt purveyor of hallucinatory drugs, but their roots can also be traced to free-spirited Ken Kesey's Merry Pranksters and Beat figures like Neal Cassady. Jerry Garcia acknowledged this very explicitly in a 1991 interview with Rolling Stone : "I owe a lot of who I am and what I've been and what I've done to the beatniks of the Fifties and to the poetry and art and music that I've come into contact with. I feel like I'm part of a continuous line of a certain thing in American culture…." Like the Beats, the hippies and their house band the Grateful Dead continued the rebellion against the conformist 1950s and the middle class culture that had by and large given birth to them.

Some of the Grateful Dead's first concerts were known as the Acid Tests of the San Francisco Bay area where psychedelic music, visuals, and hippies all came together as harbingers of the raves of the 1990s and the Dead's concerts between the 1970s and the 1990s. They spawned bands like Phish, which recreated the Dead's spontaneity in improvisation, and in its nomadic fans and epic tours that extended across America and sometimes Europe.

The Grateful Dead cult started after a call to fans, "Dead Freaks Unite—Who Are You? Where Are You?" was published in the 1971 album Grateful Dead (also known as Skull and Roses). The Dead fans who answered received concert updates and news that would eventually result in the band's formation of Grateful Dead Ticket Sales, which successfully bypassed music company and corporate control by selling up to half the tickets to concert venues by mail. From 1973 to 1976 the band also had its own recording company, Round Records/Grateful Dead Records. However, this collective thumbing of noses at the recording industry came at a price, costing them the respect of critics who saw the band as an aberration and a throwback.

There was another downside to the burgeoning Grateful Dead industry. In his last few years Garcia occasionally wearily commented on the fact that a whole group of people—not just the traveling circus of Dead Heads and unauthorized vendors, but the Grateful Dead ticketing and merchandising industry controlled by the band—were dependent on the Dead. Ironically, as the Dead found more popular success after issuing In the Dark (1987), problems abounded with unruly fans who crashed the concert gates and participated in uncontrolled vending, sometimes even of controlled substances.

The Grateful Dead's cult following was almost religious in its intensity. Dead Heads, as they were known, showed their loyalty (or perhaps obsession) by watching Dead-TV, a television cable program that first aired in 1988; hitting Grateful Dead-related computer online groups like Dead-Flames, DeadBase, and Dead.net; reading Dead theme magazines like Relix and Golden Road and the compendium of Dead statistics known as DeadBase ; tuning into the nationally broadcast Grateful Dead radio hour, aired weekly from the San Francisco Bay Area's KFOG radio station by long-time fan and Dead historian David Gans; buying the recordings that continued to be issued even after Garcia's death from the band's own master sound board tapes of concerts in the "Dick's Picks" series; and trading the "bootleg" tapes of Dead concerts recorded by fans almost from the beginning, a practice the band in the end condoned. Garcia didn't make the mistake John Lennon made of comparing his band's popularity to that of Jesus Christ, but he did remark on the ritualistic nature of its concerts in Rock and Roll: An Unruly History: "For some people, taking LSD and going to a Dead show functions like a rite of passage…. Each person deals with the experience individually; it's an adventure that you can have that is personalized. But when people come together, this singular experience is ritualized. I think the Grateful Dead serves a desire for meaningful ritual, but it's ritual without dogma. "

Also unlike the Beatles, fans were allowed this great road adventure because the band preferred making its money by touring (or perhaps was forced to tour because of the lack of conventional success) rather than by recording studio albums. Garcia explained in an interview published in Rock Lives, "Mostly we're always on the road, because we earn our living by playing. So we haven't had much of the luxury where you just go into the studio for no particular reason to screw around." At the time of Garcia's death, the band was in its 30th year.

In a 1989 Rolling Stone interview, Jerry Garcia talked about the last adventure in America that touring with the band allowed. Asked why the fans kept coming back, he answered:

They get something. It's their version of the Acid Test, so to speak. It's kind of like the war-stories metaphor. Drug stories are war stories, and the Grateful Dead stories are their drug stories, or war stories. It's an adventure you can still have in America, just like Neal [Cassady] on the road. You can't hop the freights any more, but you can chase the Grateful Dead around….You can have something that lasts throughout your life as adventures, the times you took chances. I think that's essential in anybody's life, and it's harder and harder to do in America. If I were providing some margin of that possibility, then that's great. That's a nice thing to do.

Though Garcia was certainly the charismatic spokesman for the band in its later years, early on Pigpen was the draw for the band. The son of a San Francisco Bay area disc jockey, Ron McKernan was steeped in the blues, playing organ and harmonica, and singing in a harsh, anguished voice perfect for the medium. It was Pigpen who largely set the tone of albums like Workingman's Dead and American Beauty, classic Dead recordings. It wasn't until 1970 with Live/Dead and Workingsman's Dead that the band's records really began attracting a sizable number of fans outside of the San Francisco Bay area, and the band toured extensively. Pigpen sang many of the tunes that characterized the Dead at that time, and some which they kept playing until the end—covers such as "Good Morning Little School Girl," "Viola Lee Blues," "In the Midnight Hour," "Beat It On Down the Line," and "Cold Rain and Snow." His death at 27 in 1973 from liver damage was a serious blow, although before his death his absence from gigs due to deteriorating health had begun to lessen his influence on the band. After Pigpen's death, Donna and Keith Godchaux joined the band as keyboard player and vocalist, respectively. As William Ruhlmann points out in The History of the Grateful Dead, both events caused the band to diversify its repertoire and approach. Hank Harrison puts it differently in The Dead, claiming that the old band also died with Pigpen.

Other neglected de facto "members" of the band included their frequent lyricists, Robert Hunter and John Barlow. Hunter collaborated with Jerry Garcia, while Barlow worked with Bob Weir, and, while he was in the band, Brent Mydland. Robert Hunter, himself a musician, was a member of the San Francisco scene from the beginnings of the Grateful Dead. He never played with them, but penned several of their trademark songs, including "Terrapin Station," "Touch of Grey," "Jack Straw," "Tennessee Jed," "It Must Have Been the Roses," "Playing in the Band," and "Truckin'." Most of the time Hunter collaborated with Garcia in composing songs. In a 1988 interview with David Gans, published in Conversations with the Dead, Hunter was asked why he didn't collaborate with other members of the band more often. He replied that "Garcia makes it easy. You know, he makes himself available to do it, and when I give him a piece of material he'll either reject it or set it, and he gives me changes, which I will set, generally—he doesn't give me anything I don't like … he's a genius, he's got an amazing musical sense, and no one else makes themselves available or particularly easy to work with."

Hunter was probably referring to the Dead's other primary singer, Bob Weir, who could be difficult to work with. John Barlow, a childhood friend of Weir, referred to himself in interviews with David Gans as "the Grateful Dead's word nigger," but explains that although sometimes Weir may abuse him, he is "only that way when he's feeling a bit uptight and overworked. Then he gets very head-strong about certain creative decisions, and I'm not in a position to gainsay him because he's got to get out in front of a whole bunch of people and sing that stuff." Barlow, an active member of cyberspace by the late 1990s, started out as a poetry and fiction writer, but Weir persuaded him to try his hand at song lyrics after Weir joined the Dead. Barlow's patience was in evidence when the very first song he wrote, "Mexicali Blues," was transformed into a polka number by Weir, something that Barlow hadn't envisioned. As with those lyrics, Barlow often infuses a Western flavor into his songs; they include "Estimated Prophet," "Looks Like Rain," "Cassidy," "Hell in a Bucket," "Heaven Help the Fool," and "Black Throated Wind." Collaborations with Brent Mydland include "Easy to Love You," and "Just a Little Light," while "Throwing Stones" was a Barlow, Weir, and Mydland effort. Mydland's death in 1990 of a drug overdose ended what had promised to be a fruitful collaboration.

Studio albums present polished versions of the Dead's songs, but the concert experience was the essence of the Dead. Improvisation was their chosen method; they claimed never to perform with a set list (although drummers Hart and Kreutzmann admitted practising the famous extended drum solo features known as "Space" that were a capstone of a Dead show's second set). This is one reason why, perhaps, the Dead could keep filling large stadiums on their tours, even in the early 1990s when the live concert industry hit a slump. In 1991 they were the top grossing concert band in the United States. The Dead never had a number one hit—in 1987 the Hunter/Garcia song "Touch of Grey" went only to number nine—but their music was being listened to, and no one knows how many bootleg tapes were trading, and continue to trade, hands.

Every former member of the Grateful Dead, except Bill Kreutzmann, formed a separate band with which they performed, toured, and recorded. Lesh, the only classically trained musician in the group, played on occasion with the San Francisco symphony until he underwent a liver transplant in 1998; upon his remarkable recovery from this operation, Lesh immediately began performing occasional gigs with a roving cast known as "Phil and Friends." Mickey Hart, the most eclectic member of the band, went on to compose and perform experimental pieces, even contributing a composition used in the opening ceremony of the 1996 Olympic Games in Atlanta. He also composed music for Francis Ford Coppola's film Apocalypse Now (1979).

At the end of the twentieth century, members of the Grateful Dead were continuing as an industry unto themselves. The band is the most complete and longest lasting representation of the San Francisco counterculture, begun in the 1950s with the Beats and flowering in the 1960s with the hippies. The band helped to propagate and preserve the spirit of 1960s America at home and abroad with its recordings and tours. That it was never in need of reviving, and continues to thrive in various guises, attests to a thread of continuity in fast-paced American pop culture.

—Josephine A. McQuail