All things must pass, and with the coming senescence of the Boomers, we may finally be able to lay the legacy of the 1960s to rest. And yet, by all appearances, one part of that legacy is still going strong – one might even say truckin’ – in the popular imagination. I’m speaking of course of the Grateful Dead, the cult band from San Francisco who have retained an elusive cultural cachet up to the present day. Whence the popularity?
These are really two questions: first what accounts for the cultlike devotion the Dead inspired during their touring days, and second why does intense fandom persist years after the party ended and the music stopped? I myself did not become a Dead fan until after Jerry Garcia’s passing and the end of the band as a formal entity. Which is to say that my own appreciation is untainted by the Dancing Bear iconography; or the ersatz mysticism of the spinners, those mainstays of every show, who mistook rotating aimlessly for dancing; or the use of grilled-cheese sandwiches as a staple diet.
What accounts for the cultlike devotion the Dead inspired during their touring days, and why does intense fandom persist years after the party ended and the music stopped?
I mention this because it indicates my lack of qualification to address the first question, which retains a certain mystery, but also because my experience mirrors the larger emergence of Grateful Dead fandom as an independent phenomenon from that of the original Deadheads. And this has involved some fairly unexpected figures, including Elvis Costello and Patti Smith, members of Black Flag and Sonic Youth, and, judging by the Day of the Dead extravaganza, just about every indie rock artist of the past 30 years. (Also, though it remains unconfirmed of the band Television, at least someone who played on Marquee Moon had to have listened to the Dead).
In sum, one didn’t have to be a drug-addled hippie or an impressionable youngster seduced by the scene to like the music. But what is it about the music that to this day has the power to attract (and in some cases alienate) in such measure?
Garcia himself remarked: “We’re like licorice. Not everybody likes licorice, but the people who like licorice really like licorice”. But even that doesn’t quite capture it. For it is not exactly correct to call the Dead an acquired taste, given their substantial cultural footprint. Getting into the Dead isn’t like getting into Krautrock or the 1970s New York loft jazz scene.
It is not exactly correct to call the Dead an acquired taste, given their substantial cultural footprint. Getting into the Dead isn’t like getting into Krautrock or the 1970s New York loft jazz scene.
And yet, in comparison with the case of most of their classic rock peers, the listener’s attachment is likely to be a more touch-and-go thing – and this is true even against associated acts. Cue up “Statesboro Blues”, or “The Weight”, or “Suite: Judy Blue Eyes”, and you will pretty quickly know whether you like (respectively) the Allman Brothers Band, or The Band, or Crosby, Stills & Nash. But you can return to the Dead nine times out of ten and Just Not Get It.
Part of this is due to their uncommon longevity: over 30 years, their roster, their songs, and even their sound changed substantially. Almost every serious Dead fan has a preferred era or eras, and there are, for example, older Heads for whom the band’s downshift from lysergic madness into folk and country at the end of the ’60s represented the beginning of the end. I myself can rarely tolerate Dead music after 1978 or so, which cuts out approximately half of their original lifespan.
But part of it is also due to the fact that, thanks to their famed improvisatory approach to music, they rarely played the same song the same way over thousands of nights. It’s not just that lightning could strike, but that it could happen in subjectively meaningful ways. There is something almost personal about how these unexpected moments come together. It might never happen for you, but when it does, it sticks. This is the paradox of Grateful Dead fandom – that it arises from experiences at once ephemeral and lasting.
They rarely played the same song the same way over thousands of nights. It’s not just that lightning could strike, but that it could happen in subjectively meaningful ways.
But why do they endure where so many once-popular acts fell by the wayside? Allan Bloom memorably wrote that the principle lyrical concerns of all rock music are “sex, hate, and a smarmy, hypocritical version of brotherly love”. None of this description could be fairly applied to the music of the Grateful Dead. And to that I would add that despite their strong association with hippiedom – indeed with the font and origin of hippiedom, Haight-Ashbury in the mid-1960s, when they served as the house band of Ken Kesey’s Acid tests (recorded for posterity by Tom Wolfe in The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test) – they never wrote songs about drugs, Vietnam, or any of the other themes common to the era.
Despite their strong association with hippiedom – indeed with the font and origin of hippiedom, Haight-Ashbury in the mid-1960s –they never wrote songs about drugs, Vietnam, or any of the other themes common to the era.
For this, we have to thank one Robert Hunter, the band’s curious non-troubadour resident songwriter. This is a man whose lyrics were printed on countless bumper stickers but who also translated the poetry of Rilke. He brought an almost Bellovian mix of high and low registers to the Dead, such that in his songs gamblers and grifters and murderers will jostle against allusions to Shakespeare, and the King James Version. And in tracks like “Brown Eyed Women” and “Here Comes Sunshine” you’ll get a tuneful grand tour of American history that never descends into Schoolhouse Rock (Hunter may be the most natural songwriter in the American vernacular next to Townes Van Zandt).
When you hear Gillian Welch and David Rawlings cover “He’s Gone” or Lyle Lovett sing “Friend of the Devil”, you realize this is a kind of Great American Songbook now – a bit rougher and less urbane than the one featuring George Gershwin and Cole Porter, to be sure. But as with them, the songs have achieved a certain degree of independence from their creators, particularly now that the sociological phenomenon of the Deadheads has increasingly become disentangled from the music itself. And that music is now embedded in the same American musical tradition as the one that inspired them.
When you hear Gillian Welch and David Rawlings cover “He’s Gone” or Lyle Lovett sing “Friend of the Devil”, you realize this is a kind of Great American Songbook now.
For me, I will continue to have little truck with unwashed dropouts. But then you listen to the alchemical collaboration on a ’73 “Eyes of the World” or a ’77 “Mississippi Half Step,” and, lord, but how did they do that?
