Listening for the Secret: The Grateful Dead and the Politics of Improvisation 9780520961760

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ROTH FAMILY FOUNDATION

Music in America Imprint

Michael P. Roth and Sukey Garcetti have endowed this imprint to honor the memory of their parents, Julia and Harry Roth, whose deep love of music they wish to share with others.

The publisher gratefully acknowledges the generous support of the Music in America Endowment Fund of the University of California Press Foundation, which was established by a major gift from Sukey and Gil Garcetti, Michael P. Roth, and the Roth Family Foundation.

Listening for the Secret

studies in the grateful dead Edited by Nicholas G. Meriwether, Center for Counterculture Studies Editorial Board Graeme M. Boone, Ohio State University • Wai Chee Dimock, Yale University David Farber, University of Kansas • Michael J. Kramer, Northwestern University • James M. Williams, University of Chicago Advisory Board Mickey Hart • Bill Kreutzmann • Phil Lesh Bob Weir • David Lemieux • Alan Trist 1. Listening for the Secret: The Grateful Dead and the Politics of Improvisation, by Ulf Olsson

Listening for the Secret The Grateful Dead and the Politics of Improvisation

ulf olsson

University of California Press

University of California Press, one of the most distinguished university presses in the United States, enriches lives around the world by advancing scholarship in the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences. Its activities are supported by the UC Press Foundation and by philanthropic contributions from individuals and institutions. For more information, visit www.ucpress.edu. University of California Press Oakland, California © 2017 by The Regents of the University of California “Blues for Allah” by Robert Hunter and Jerome Garcia, Ice Nine Publishing Co., Inc. adm. by Universal Music Corp. “Comes a Time” by Robert Hunter and Jerome Garcia, Ice Nine Publishing Co., Inc. adm. by Universal Music Corp. “Dark Star” by Robert Hunter and Jerome Garcia, Michael Hart, William Kreutzmann, Philip Lesh, Ronald McKernan, Robert Weir, Ice Nine Publishing Co., Inc. adm. by Universal Music Corp. “Foolish Heart” by Robert Hunter and Jerome Garcia, Ice Nine Publishing Co., Inc. adm. by Universal Music Corp. “Liberty” by Robert Hunter, Ice Nine Publishing Co., Inc. adm. by Universal Music Corp. “Ramble on Rose” by Robert Hunter and Jerome Garcia, Ice Nine Publishing Co., Inc. adm. by Universal Music Corp. “Scarlet Begonias” by Robert Hunter and Jerome Garcia, Ice Nine Publishing Co., Inc. adm. by Universal Music Corp. “The Music Never Stopped” by John Barlow and Robert Weir, Ice Nine Publishing Co., Inc. adm. by Universal Music Corp. “Touch of Grey” by Robert Hunter and Jerome Garcia, Ice Nine Publishing Co., Inc. adm. by Universal Music Corp. “U.S. Blues” by Robert Hunter and Jerome Garcia, Ice Nine Publishing Co., Inc. adm. by Universal Music Corp. “Unbroken Chain” by Philip Lesh and Robert Petersen, Ice Nine Publishing Co., Inc. adm. by Universal Music Corp. “Uncle John’s Band” by Robert Hunter and Jerome Garcia, Ice Nine Publishing Co., Inc. adm. by Universal Music Corp.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Olsson, Ulf, author. Title: Listening for the secret : the Grateful Dead and the politics of improvisation / Ulf Olsson. Description: Oakland, California : University of California Press, [2017] | Series: Studies in the Grateful Dead ; 1 | Includes bibliographical references, discography, and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2016050507 (print) | LCCN 2016052201 (ebook) | ISBN 9780520286641 (cloth : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780520286658 (pbk. : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780520961760 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Grateful Dead (Musical group) | Improvisation (Music)—Social aspects. | Rock music—Social aspects— History—20th century. Classification: LCC ML421.G72 O47 2017 (print) | LCC ML421.G72 (ebook) | DDC 782.42166092/2—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016050507 Manufactured in the United States of America 26 25 24 23 22 21 20 19 18 17 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

We make the noises we can, and that’s all. samuel beckett

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Contents

Series Foreword

ix

Acknowledgments

xi

introduction

1

1. popular avant-garde? renegotiating tradition

13

2. wave that flag: an apolitical band

52

3. crashes in space: aspects of improvisation

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coda: listening for the secret

128

Notes

137

Discography

163

Bibliography

165

Index

179

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Series Foreword

From the band’s inception, the Grateful Dead attracted critical attention ranging from insightful to sensationalistic. Often obscured by the media fanfare was the seriousness of the group’s project, although some of that early attention was thoughtful, appreciative, and even scholarly. As early as 1966, academics gravitated toward the band, attracted by the intelligence and accomplishment they heard. What was also clear was the depth of the band’s commitment, which became one of the hallmarks of the Dead, especially noteworthy in an industry substantially defined by brevity, novelty, and shallowness. Over the course of their thirty-year career, the Dead managed to build a remarkably devoted audience and earn an enviable critical reputation, in part by defying industry norms and expectations; they were often cited as an exception to almost every rule that defined popular music as a commercial enterprise. Yet the band’s artistic and musical ambitions made a deeper kind of sense, creating a perennial appeal that made the Dead one of the most durable concert draws and consistently one of the top touring acts in the country in their final years. Their caliber as songwriters, their commitment to improvisation, the breadth of their repertoire, and their enduring success made them exemplars, and helped to establish the band as a unique voice in American popular music and culture. These attributes also have made the Grateful Dead one of the most studied bands in the academy. In addition to its depth and extent, the interdisciplinary discourse on the band is distinguished by the range of perspectives it encompasses, principally in the humanities and social sciences but extending into engineering and the sciences. The Dead were known for their live performances, thus it is fitting that much of the scholarly discussion about the band began with conference presentations, though many of the hundreds of those have been developed into articles, chapters, and books. ix

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That work has achieved a level that now merits and can sustain more detailed and focused exegeses, which this series provides. The increasing sophistication of the scholarship on many of the contexts that the Dead’s achievement informs and entails—from the 1960s and the counterculture to many of the genres of music that the Dead’s work incorporates— highlights the band’s significance and makes plain the utility, and even centrality, of its example. Academic work on rock music traditionally has challenged scholars on a number of levels, from basic issues of definition and demarcation to fundamental critical issues. Scholars continue to investigate a range of questions—from tradition and artistic intent to production and audience reception to cultural and historical dissemination—all framing an art form and informing a literature that show no signs of diminishing, even as they both continue to undergo drastic changes. The volumes in Studies in the Grateful Dead participate in and often directly address these contexts, offering readers a unique lens for illuminating and exploring the wealth of issues raised by one of the most enduring and significant phenomena in popular culture. Nicholas G. Meriwether

Acknowledgments

This book has been prepared, researched, and written in both close vicinity to and at a certain distance from its object. Closeness was granted me by the University of California, Berkeley, and the Grateful Dead Archive at the University Library of the University of California, Santa Cruz: Closeness both to the sources and to the air that the Grateful Dead breathed. But critical writing seems to also depend on a dialectic of closeness and distance: My employer, the Department of Culture and Aesthetics, Stockholm University, as well as the National Library of Sweden, Stockholm, have made my reading and writing from a distance possible. The life and times of a rock band can be documented in different ways, and the Grateful Dead must be one of the most (if not the most) documented bands ever. Still, there is much detailed knowledge and atmosphere that can only be relayed orally. I am honored by the hard work as well as the friendship of Nicholas G. Meriwether, Grateful Dead Archivist at UC Santa Cruz, and a living source on the history of the band, written and oral. Nicholas is a historian, an utterly careful writer in his own right, as well as the most generous scholar. The work he has done for the Archive is what makes this and future studies on the band possible. Other scholars, fans and skeptics alike, also have contributed—probably more than they realize. Peter Richardson (lecturer at San Francisco State University), who himself has written a splendid book on the band, generously read and commented on my manuscript. So did a few Swedish friends: Johan Fornäs (professor of Media Studies, Södertörn University College) offered a meticulous reading of my manuscript, as did my colleague at Stockholm University, Bosse Holmqvist (professor of the History of Ideas), and Erling Bjurström (professor emeritus, Linköping University). Johan Petri (Gothenburg University) shared his knowledge of the literature on xi

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improvisation. Stefan Helgesson and Frida Beckman, both of the English Department at Stockholm University, invited me to try out a few ideas in the form of lectures. Two readers of the manuscript, unknown to me, generously shared their obvious insights and knowledge about the band in their respective peer reviews. My San Francisco friend, “music industry veteran,” entrepreneur, free spirit, Jewish activist, and editor, David Katznelson, took me to different shows in San Francisco so that I could hear something other than just Dead music—and to have some “gris-gris” along the road. While on the left coast, I have enjoyed the discussions and the erudition of the Frankfurt School Working Group, University of California, Berkeley, with Erin Greer and Megan O’Connor as its unifying center. My editors at the University of California Press, first Mary Francis and after her Eric Schmidt, have believed in and supported the writing of this book. Early ideas for this book have been discussed at different conferences. The open-minded and generous intellectual climate of the Grateful Dead Scholars Caucus and its annual congregations at the Southwest American/ Popular Culture Association meetings in Albuquerque, New Mexico, have been of a fundamental importance: those gatherings showed to me that perhaps I could have something to say about a band, whose music I listen to and always will listen to. I hope this book fulfills that promise and indeed says something about the Grateful Dead that has not been said before. My wife, Linda Haverty Rugg (professor of Scandinavian Studies, UC Berkeley), patiently corrected my English and drove me to Santa Cruz and San Rafael, Mountain View and Santa Clara, for archival or field studies. But Linda not only took the wheel when I was seeing double, her critical mind was always open to discussions on how to do things with words, and how to find out ways to make writing generate a shared understanding. Her probing questions, her deep understanding of language—written and spoken—and her demands for clarity drove me on, even when I found myself lost in writing. Sometimes one loses oneself in writing—as well as in music. The Grateful Dead’s music has been and remains a deep well, one in which I find myself transformed, lost, renewed—or just happily smiling. The art, example, and work that define and inform the Grateful Dead phenomenon are the wellspring that nourished this volume and will continue to do so, for many others, for many years.

Introduction

On February 24, 1974, the Grateful Dead played at Winterland in San Francisco, California. The show, presented by Bill Graham, also was introduced by the promoter, who said “Whatever is going on in the rest of the world, if it’s war or kidnappings or crimes, this is a peaceful Sunday night with the Grateful Dead.” Indeed; this was just one of the fifty-nine shows that the Grateful Dead played at Winterland; one more night, then, in the life of a hardworking rock and roll band. And, could we add, perhaps one more night protected from the evils of society? Maybe. The band played what could be called its standard repertoire, including “Dark Star,” probably their most requested song and their most frequently used vehicle for improvisation; and still, at that time, often performed live. This night, they feel their way into “Dark Star,” trying different sound figures, until they find a groove sixteen minutes in. When the music gels, the playing takes on an obvious jazz feel—and this Sunday evening is transformed into something special, turning (I imagine) an audience of a few thousand people into one dancing body. The Grateful Dead created that magic innumerable times during the band’s thirty-year career. Moreover, this transcending of the merely mundane was an aesthetic feat, and was not the effect of drugs. I did not attend that show. I listened to it on a CD (Dave’s Picks 13), and I am absolutely sober. This twenty-nine-minute interpretation might not be the most spectacular or aesthetically radical “Dark Star” the band ever played—they do not take it out to absolute atonality and distortion—not until twenty-four minutes have passed, when Jerry Garcia suddenly, and for just a short time, generates a formidable noise out of his guitar, while the rest of the band suggests something of a Spanish or Latin groove. But still, the music played this evening touches me, hits me with its power: the music cuts through the body, torments it, 1

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reminds it of another life that is at hand—in the music itself. Perhaps this music wasn’t so much about withdrawing from society; on the contrary, even now it seems intended to intensify the experience of contemporary life. It is in improvisation that the Grateful Dead found and formed itself, even though the song, and the song format, grew more and more important with time. Improvisation meant that the band had to invent its music while performing it, but improvisation here also had a wider significance: it was the center of a continuous struggle for self-organization. In that sense, we can talk of a politics of improvisation. Self-organization is a key concept here, although I would hesitate to give it too fixed a definition, as selforganization spans so much of my argument here.1 In the background to my use of the concept is both the workers’ movement from the late 19th century and onwards, as well as looser forms of trying to gain control over one’s own life and working conditions in the 1960s. In both these traditions, self-organization meant both a care of the self and the material conditions under which different aspects of everyday life were formed. My hesitancy to give “self-organization” a firmly fixed definition arises from the fact that self-organization here encompasses both the individual and the collective. The care of the self—the forming of the self—in a refusal to adjust to handed-down, normative patterns of individuality and instead, through improvisational acts, trying out new forms of subjectivity, is one aspect of self-organization. Improvisation is the fundamental musical form of self-organization, with the musician inventing the music while it is happening. And the Grateful Dead were forming themselves as a kind of selfsupporting machinery, and were generating a culture of self-organizational practices surrounding the band. Self-organization here, then, covers very different forms of resistance to hegemonic power relations and subject formation. That is one way of describing the Grateful Dead. There are others, partly made possible by the music’s many different roots, dimensions, and faces, and already early in the band’s history, public writing about the Dead and their environment tended to become polarized: either celebratory or dismissive. Interestingly, the band attracted and even generated forms of writing that negotiated the borders between fiction and nonfiction, between reality and the representation of reality—perhaps because the band’s music encompassed the nitty-gritty of traditional blues and Bakersfield country as well as the strange, surreal world of free improvisation. Two texts in particular—both originally published already in 1968—exemplify this polarization as well as the hybrid form of writing: Tom Wolfe’s The Electric

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3

Kool-Aid Acid Trip, and Joan Didion’s “Slouching Towards Bethlehem,” in her collection of essays of the same title. Both texts seem to have generated if not a tradition, then at least plenty of followers. Wolfe, writing in a style that became known as “New Journalism,” lets what he learns, sees, and observes infect his language, turning his novel/ report into a hip, almost “turned-on” account of the Acid Tests, public parties organized by The Merry Pranksters and the writer Ken Kesey, in which the Grateful Dead played an important part. Here, the “hippie culture” is depicted as Dionysian, ecstatic: . . . then the Dead coming in with their immense submarine vibrato vibrating, garanging, from the Aleutian rocks to the baja griffin cliffs of the Gulf of California. The Dead’s weird sound! agony-in-ecstasis! submarine somehow, turbid half the time, tremendously loud but like sitting under a waterfall, at the same time full of sort of ghoul-show vibrato sounds as if each string on their electric guitars is half a block long and twanging in a room full of natural gas, not to mention their great Hammond electric organ, which sounds like a moviehouse Wurlitzer, a diathermy machine, a Citizen’s Band radio and an AutoGrind garbage truck at 4 a.m., all coming over the same frequency. . . .2

Peter Conners’ Growing Up Dead joins the celebration, and the ecstasy, twenty years later, in a narrative both novelistic and autobiographical—but now, forty years after Wolfe, there is a touch of melancholy and loss in the story. Interestingly, Conners uses “confession” in his subtitle, “The Hallucinated Confessions of a Teenage Deadhead”—as if this identity of being a “Deadhead,” with its connotations of drugs and excess, must be confessed before his readers, and before power.3 Didion delivers the opposite. Her writing is more of an accusation than a confession: a view of the Dionysian as misery, combined with a dystopian vision of America that the writer uses as starting point for her reportage: “All that seemed clear was that at some point we had aborted ourselves and butchered the job, and because nothing else seemed so relevant I decided to go to San Francisco.”4 Didion’s imagery is telling: we read about people that seem to have aborted their reason, kids that have butchered what life they had—as if they are performing acts of violence, of abortion and butchering, on what is, or should be, only normal and natural. And throughout Didion’s walk through the hippie ghetto of Haight-Ashbury, the Grateful Dead is playing—and American society seems to be facing an early death. Almost three decades later, Douglas Coupland published his Polaroids from the Dead in 1996, a collection of texts that once again balances between fiction and report, and has striking affinities to Didion’s work. Here, some of the lost and deserted

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kids, as if picked out from Didion’s San Francisco, show up at a Grateful Dead concert across the San Francisco Bay, in Oakland. Almost thirty years have passed, but the same band is playing, and we once again meet teenagers without a language of their own, dosing on LSD instead of formulating intelligible lines. But we also meet survivors, who now have respectable professions, families, and social standing.5 The polaroid snapshots of the Grateful Dead show are not celebratory, the band’s Dionysian aspects seem futile, but neither are they totally dystopian or dark. Something has happened—and now, writing more than twenty years after the dissolution of the Grateful Dead, what was really the meaning of this music, what was at stake in this culture? This is a book about a rock band, its music, and its audience, listened to and viewed through the lens of critical and aesthetic theory: not so much another narrative of the band, because there already are so many good stories on the band circulating, but more of a discussion and a critical assessment. Its basic presupposition is that even rock music can generate not only sensual pleasure but also aesthetic fulfillment. Yes, this is a lover’s discourse—but love is not always blind, nor deaf. If critique is to be meaningful, however, then the Grateful Dead, the rock band in question, must be granted agency: that is, I will try and look at the band not as merely reflecting or articulating the conditions it existed under, but as actually negotiating and even actively resisting those conditions. It also means that I claim (and I am of course far from the first to make this claim) that rock music can be viewed through the lens of a perspective, informed by a tradition of critical theory, which in its original versions resolutely opposed any thought of granting popular music, whether jazz or dance music, any aesthetic relevance—which might seem a far too heavy a burden to place on a simple rock and roll band. Although rock music in general often has been granted an oppositional function as a socio-psychological vehicle, a repertoire of attitudes and gestures for youth’s search for identity and acknowledgment, my ambition is to go a little further. I believe that the Grateful Dead is a band worthy of a discussion that is both aesthetic and political. The roots of this theoretical perspective go back to the 1920s and to Critical Theory as produced by the Frankfurt School. If desired, this tradition could be traced back even further and it might seem outdated, at least in its condemnation of mass culture. And aspects of this critique might be ready for retirement—a certain moralism, for instance—but we do live under basically the same conditions as when these left-wing critics formulated their ideas: capitalism is even more dominant and hegemonic, the commodity form covers everything with its

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appeal to consumption, the Western world remains a class society—and the extreme right and Fascism once again are growing stronger in several European countries, as well as in America. In combining mass culture and aesthetic theory, there are several risks: idealization of the band, pretentiousness, or a mismatch in the form of too grand a theoretical discourse applied to a simple rock band. A line from the Grateful Dead’s only hit single, “Touch of Grey” (lyrics by Robert Hunter) seems to capture perfectly the spirit of mismatching: “the shoe is on the hand it fits.”6 Yet mass culture is today triumphant, reaching into every part of the world, and every part of our lives. It is a form of “culture” that continually rids itself of any burden of the past to intensify the now of the moment—its dominant practice is that of consumption. As a social practice, consumption transforms its objects to waste products, to leftovers, ruins of what they once were, for the consumer’s desire to be directed toward a new object. Modernity transforms, in a grotesque way, the slogan of Modernism—“Make it new!”—into a constant consumption of new objects. Putting the Grateful Dead before the test that critical theory offers also has its gains. One is that the listener and interpreter is allowed to demand something from the band in question, as for instance that the music puts something at stake, that the musicians risk something when walking out on that stage—and I would think that walking out in front of fifty thousand people and trying to improvise is a way of really putting something, both music and musician, at stake, at least when you work with a certain musical looseness and openness. The Grateful Dead has something to say not only as a phenomenon within the history of popular culture in America, but also musically—and if the band didn’t have that musical edge to it, then they would not be a very compelling object for the type of discussion that I propose. In one of his aphorisms in Minima Moralia, Theodor W. Adorno writes that “knowledge must indeed present the fatally rectilinear succession of victory and defeat, but should also address itself to those things which were not embraced by this dynamic, which fell by the wayside—what might be called the waste products and blind spots that have escaped the dialectic. It is in the nature of the defeated to appear, in their impotence, irrelevant, eccentric, derisory.”7 The Grateful Dead can be seen as such a waste product. For a short time—a few years around 1970—the band appears to have been what the culture industry privileged and invested in, only to soon substitute it with the next big thing. The Grateful Dead and their audience have so often been ridiculed, dismissed, and derided, as pathetic left-overs

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from the Sixties, as something better left at the roadside: a waste product. Being a fan of the band, a serious “Deadhead,” did include finding oneself the object of an othering, a stigmatization, which even, as Nicholas Meriwether and others have pointed out, extended to scholars researching on the band.8 But is it accurate to talk about the Grateful Dead as being a “waste product”? As this book was being written, the surviving members of the band— together with some newer recruits—performed a series of concerts called “Fare Thee Well: Celebrating Fifty Years of the Grateful Dead.” The band first filled Levi’s Stadium in Santa Clara, California, for a couple of nights, then moved on to Soldier Field in Chicago, Illinois, where they attracted seventy thousand people for three consecutive nights. Media attention was enormous, the amount of money generated by and circulated around the events even more enormous. Is that really something that can be characterized as a waste product? Did not the unexpected commercial success from 1987 to 1995 transport the band out of its time warp, making it into an obviously contemporary and very commercial phenomenon? The consequences of success were problematic—fans cringed at the unabashed marketing of products for them to buy. Is this really the band that we learned to love and cherish, the band that thought of the audience as a vital part of the music, and almost of the band itself? Yes and no. Jerry Garcia once likened society’s increasing acceptance of the band to the situation of “the town whore that’s finally become respectable.”9 That respectability probably was quite provisional and conditional and, for most of its trajectory, the Grateful Dead was looked upon as something rather ragged, something left over from the sixties, attracting a sad group of fans as drugged out as the band members. When the band in 1987 finally had its commercial breakthrough of the standard type—a hit single, “Touch of Grey”—its status had slowly changed, the audience had been building up, and now success erupted. Suddenly, this group of misfits (which is how band members often described their band) was topping the business magazine Forbes’ charts of the highest-earning artists. Celebrities flocked to the Dead, academics adorned their books with allusions to their songs, and new generations and new types of fans attended shows, filling the biggest arenas. It is this dialectic of “victory and defeat,” and the band’s position outside of or on the margin of that dialectic, that makes the Grateful Dead such a promising object for any analysis of the culture industry. The band as well as its traditional audience certainly did seem “irrelevant, eccentric, derisory.” It is not, however, because the Grateful Dead so perfectly exemplifies

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(and to some degree resists) a logic constantly produced by late capitalism that justifies one more book on the band adding to what is already an impressive array of studies. It is rather because this band also seems to negate any view of the culture industry as absolutely dominant and hegemonic that makes it so interesting: The band played another music, a music different from that privileged by the culture industry—but did so from the inside of that industry, although applying other business strategies than those of mainstream business. Within a stereotypical form of expression— and rock music certainly has its stereotypes—the Grateful Dead (at least, in the band’s better moments) searched for a different music. Here another risk makes itself known, and it is once again Adorno that points it out: “Radical reification produces its own pretense of immediacy and intimacy.”10 Mass culture, which is reified culture, produces an appearance or Schein of authenticity—as if its products were the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings. Did the Grateful Dead not invest in this kind of authenticity—performing in shabby old clothes, having no stage show, and pretending to be themselves and not stars or celebrities, even in front of sixty thousand people? It would be facile, all too facile, to maintain simply that one cannot escape commodification that easily. Listening to this music, however, one hears something else: a music that is at work, a music trying out different directions, constantly reformulating itself, formulating a world other than the one both musicians and listeners find themselves in, and—at its best—testing how music, under these circumstances summarized as the machinations of the culture industry, is able to sound at all, to make any kind of noise. That point also is made by Adorno: “Only individuals are capable of consciously representing the aims of collectivity.”11 Jazz musician and composer, Ornette Coleman (who later would perform with the Dead and record with Garcia), once gave a beautiful formulation of this idea: “That’s how I have always wanted musicians to play with me: on a multiple level. I don’t want them to follow me. I want them to follow themselves, but to be with me.”12 That could also be an accurate description of the Grateful Dead at their best: a collective of individuals. Any claim that the individual actually can formulate, or be in command of, his or her own music also within popular culture would probably be seen by Adorno as an example of the “self-denunciation of the intellectuals.”13 Even if Adorno is right, however, in that all—all—contemporary music is produced under the commodity form, music today does seem to negate Adorno’s determinism here. This is because the traffic between different forms of music is intense, perhaps more so than ever, and artists constantly are finding ways to control their own work, to minimize their dependence

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Introduction

on the culture industry, and thereby create spaces where subjective freedom is produced—at least momentarily. Even so, no one else has with the same precision formulated the complex and contradictory character of culture under late capitalism as Adorno, and even a discussion of the Grateful Dead has something to profit by Adorno’s critique. James W. Cook, in a very nuanced evaluation of Adorno’s relevance today, writes “Precisely because he [Adorno] wanted to condemn the culture industry for its ‘totalizing’ tendencies, he often engaged in obvious forms of hyperbole. ‘All mass culture,’ we are told, is ‘identical’—a calculated overstatement which immediately flattens the media-specific characteristics and year-by-year-changes that concern most historians.”14 Although provoked and stimulated by precisely Adorno’s overstatements—which signal his deep-rooted attachment to Western art as the high-mark of individuality—my aim is to understand also the Grateful Dead as a cultural phenomenon as well, conditioned by factors that were constantly changing; thus the Dead were not, and could not be, the same in 1995 as they were in 1980 or 1967. Adorno here then serves as the provider of a general perspective on the culture industry under late capitalism, and as a general inspiration for what I intend as a dialectical analysis of a phenomenon that Adorno himself never commented upon—and probably would have had nothing positive to say about. Perhaps what is most valuable in Adorno is the critical impulse itself, mediated in his immanent critique; after all, one could say that it was Adorno who came to fulfill what Marx had called a “ruthless criticism of the existing order.”15 French literary theorist Roland Barthes neatly sums up the doublesidedness of using critical aesthetic theory to understand a phenomenon of mass culture: “problems of values will have to be faced straightforwardly— it must always be possible to criticize the mass work in terms of the major human themes of alienation and reification,” but this must be combined with the effort to “understand a modernity” through the work of mass culture.16 Barthes is talking about a pedagogical situation and the teaching of literary analysis in the beginning of the 1960s, but this combination of commodity critique along with the effort to make use of popular culture is of fundamental importance still today, when “mass culture” must not be delimited as only “youth culture.” Even popular music sometimes can transcend its confinement in the commodity form and formulate itself in a strange beauty. Strange, because this transcendence demands some form of dissonance—beauty can only be formulated as a digression from the norm, from the given. This has political significance: If we acknowledge that rock music can have an aesthetic value

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of its own, then it also has what Herbert Marcuse calls “political potential,” and which “lies only in its own aesthetic dimension.”17 The aesthetic effect is a transformation of reality into what Marcuse calls the “truth of art,” which is “that the world really is as it appears in the work of art.”18 Therefore even popular music can become a preparation for freedom. It is that possibility that this book seeks to make audible. It is a possibility embedded in the actual musical language that the Grateful Dead developed. This should not be a surprise. “All music,” Swedish author Lars Norén states in one of his fragments, “strives to become what it is not.”19 A few basic facts might help readers who are not familiar with the music or the culture discussed here. Formed in 1965, on the peninsula south of San Francisco, the band which was called the Warlocks became the Grateful Dead after finding a record put out by another band performing as the “Warlocks.” The basic line-up of musicians whose names figure prominently in the following discussion is Jerry Garcia, lead guitar and vocals; Bill Kreutzmann, drums, percussion; Phil Lesh, bass and vocals; Ron “Pigpen” McKernan, keyboards, percussion, and vocals; and Bob Weir, guitar and vocals. The band soon added Mickey Hart, on percussion and drums, to its line-up. McKernan passed away in 1973, and a row of players have sat down on the piano bench: Tom “TC” Constanten, Keith Godchaux (d. 1980), Brent Mydland (d. 1990), Vince Welnick (d. 2006), and, on a looser basis, Ned Lagin and Bruce Hornsby. Donna Godchaux, on vocals, performed from 1972 to 1979. The main lyricists were treated as vital, one of whom—Robert Hunter—was sometimes credited as a full member of the band. His efforts were augmented by John Perry Barlow and, to a lesser extent, Robert M. Petersen. Through performing often—and often playing for free—the band soon won a local following, although it never had the commercial success of other San Francisco bands, such as Jefferson Airplane and Big Brother and the Holding Company, which had Janis Joplin on vocals. A rigorous touring schedule generated an audience of “Deadheads,” as the fans came to call themselves—fans that often caught not one but several shows, because the repertoire never was the same twice. There also was a certain unevenness to the band’s performances. Performing for thirty years—up until the death of Garcia in 1995 and the dissolving of the band—the Grateful Dead formed tight relations to its audience, until commercial success—the hit single “Touch of Grey,” along with a video on MTV, and other publicity—in 1987 definitely changed the conditions for both band and audience. The culture surrounding the band, epitomized in the (in)famous parking lot scene surrounding the shows, where food, clothes, jewelry, and drugs were sold and

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bought by thousands of fans and curious passers-by, I in the following call, “the Grateful Dead phenomenon.” This book is not one more history of the band—several band histories already exist, and a couple of them are outstanding: Dennis McNally, A Long Strange Trip: The Inside History of the Grateful Dead (2002); and Peter Richardson, No Simple Highway: A Cultural History of the Grateful Dead (2015). Also useful—with an interesting combination of personal as well as political angles—is Carol Brightman’s Sweet Chaos: The Grateful Dead’s American Adventure (1998). Longtime journalists David Gans and Blair Jackson have contributed significant works as well. Invaluable is the Grateful Dead Archive at McHenry Library, University of California, Santa Cruz, and the work by its guardian, Nicholas G. Meriwether. There is a wealth of material on the band, and what I have found useful can be found in footnotes and in the bibliography. Instead of trying to write the band’s history anew, my aim is to try and understand what was at stake in this band’s music and in the culture it generated. My way of doing that is by looking at the band, listening to its music, and engaging with the audience, through aesthetic and critical theory—theory that is perhaps not normally thought of as aiming at a simple rock and roll band, but which to me is an indispensable tool for understanding social and cultural phenomena also of a “popular” kind. The three chapters that comprise the book are tightly interrelated. The first chapter assesses the band’s history, although not as a chronological or linear trajectory. Instead, my focus is on the dialectic of tradition and avant-gardism in the band’s music, and how the aesthetic forms of bluegrass and jazz inform the surrounding culture as well as the music of the Grateful Dead. This chapter, then, touches upon the focus of Chapter 2: community building and politics. The Grateful Dead always imagined themselves an “apolitical” band, but if politics is understood not only as party politics and ideology, then the Dead and their surrounding culture gain political significance. The band and the surrounding culture can be looked upon as generating temporary and mobile forms of counter-conduct and resistance against mainstream culture and normativity—a resistance that ultimately had political implications. Central to my argument is subject formation, as generated within the Grateful Dead phenomenon. The band was part of, and partly created, a space where the audience could try out who they were, and what they wanted to be. Drugs of different kinds are a well-known part of this culture, and I try—via a digression into the status of drugs in critical theory—to give a nuanced view on this complex issue. My discussion of tradition, avant-gardism, and politics is of

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course based on the music, and Chapter 3 examines how musical practices and different forms of improvisation are focused and related to the politics of the Grateful Dead. Improvisation was always an important part—or even the central dimension—of the band’s music, and I try to show the strong interrelatedness between musical improvisation and forms of social, cultural, and political resistance. The Grateful Dead as well as the surrounding culture are complex phenomena, and that complexity opens the opportunity for different perspectives and different approaches in the analytic work. I have tried to look at this complexity from a prismatic perspective, allowing for a diverse set of theoretical inspirations and lenses. My aim is to contribute to an existing discourse, an ongoing discussion, rather than to try to pin down the “one and only truth” about the band and its audience. My analytic approach has been informed by very different sources although, with few exceptions, I have limited my discussion of the band’s music to “official” recordings, and then especially the many live albums the band has released. Many of those live albums have been released in serial formats—Dick’s Picks, Dave’s Picks, Road Trips, From the Vault—and references to these albums is given with the title of the series and the number of the volume. For complete information on songs and albums, see the discography at the end of this book. My arguments could have been strengthened— or perhaps weakened—if I had engaged more with the enormous amount of fan-recorded and unreleased concert recordings available on the Internet. More than two thousand concerts (of varying sound quality) are available at www.archive.org as well as on other sites. Many performances can be watched on YouTube, and there also are other sources. This wealth is a blessing but, of course, also is a problem: Trying to listen to all the live CDs released by the band itself is time consuming; engaging with all the Web material also is beyond an essay of this scope. The official releases provide a sufficiently clear and deep impression of the Dead’s development and history, and of members’ own profound understanding of their project. It is my hope that my discussion will mean something both to Deadheads and to those still unconvinced about the significance and achievement of this band: The faithful and the non-believers might have something to gain from listening more closely, with ears wide open—and from a critical discussion. 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

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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. 13

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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

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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

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band to dance to. As Garcia once emphasized, “We feel that our greatest value is as a dance band and that’s what we like to do.”18 The Grateful Dead remained a dance band for the whole of their career—and the surviving members 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

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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

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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

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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 through stereotypes, obedience through identification, intolerance through normalization”; it is, Adorno and Horkheimer writes, “enlightenment as mass deception.”29 Although this analysis basically rings true, it leaves out the simple fact of resistance: every power relation also generates resistance within these relations. Many small, independent record companies issue albums with music of every noncommercial type; rock bands producing noise music are being formed every day; and rappers appropriate a language that has been distorted by power. Even under an all-encompassing capitalism there always is a margin where other divergent voices are being formulated. This resistance, in its many diverse forms, must not be idealized—but neither should it be neglected. It might not be anti-capitalist but rather anti-commercial, anti-bureaucratic, anti-authoritarian: an opposition against power, consumer society, or simply the boredom of modern life—even if it might be “untheorized,” as Jameson complained. Herbert Marcuse (from whom Hardt and Negri must have taken their lead) tried to theorize this situation, in which the oppositional finds him- or herself immersed in an “affluent” society which, Marcuse says, could “develop and satisfy material and cultural needs better than before.”30 Against this integration into capitalist society, Marcuse posits “the emergence of new needs, qualitatively different and even opposed to the prevailing aggressive and repressive needs: the emergence of a new type of man, with a vital, biological drive for liberation, and with a consciousness capable of breaking through the material as well as ideological veil of the affluent society.”31 Marcuse went on to include “the Hippie” in the resistance against “efficient and insane reasonableness,” seeing hippies partly as demonstrating “an aggressive nonaggressiveness which achieves, at least potentially,

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the demonstration of qualitatively different values, a transvaluation of values.”32 In other words: what is so wrong with “peace, love, and understanding”? The alternative values generated within the counterculture did not endure, though, and one can wonder what impact they actually had—on both general and more local levels—if they became mere ideology or materialized in different forms of life praxis. Marcuse is roughly contemporaneous with the Grateful Dead; several of his most important writings stem from the sixties. He seems to try and come to grips with new forms of resistance and refusal, forms that the Grateful Dead, among others, practiced and lived, but he was at the same time very critical of “white” rock music, which he saw as false.33 His Essay on Liberation (1969) is a meditation on the new social movements of the sixties and it has apparent relevance for a discussion of the Grateful Dead. Dedicated to “the rebels,” Essay on Liberation forms into a plea for an “aesthetic ethos,” and “a universe where the sensuous, the playful, the calm, and the beautiful become forms of existence and the Form of the society itself.”34 This vision—whether we want to call it naively utopian or not—Marcuse finds embodied in the rebels to whom he dedicated his book: “Today’s rebels want to see, hear, feel new things in a new way: they link liberation with the dissolution of ordinary and orderly perception.”35 The Grateful Dead were part of a creative rebellion, they remained part of it although the forms it took had to be constantly renegotiated, and their rebellion, which had one source in the experimentation with perception, formed into an aesthetic ethos—as Lesh said (quoted above), the band was always “fundamentally music.” Marcuse denied that the hippies could be called a revolutionary class, and the Grateful Dead certainly were no political revolutionaries, but the rebellion in which they participated hinted, as Marcuse writes, at “a total break with the dominant needs of repressive society.”36 In his seminal study of the sixties, Todd Gitlin thinks that it is better to talk of “dissidents” than of revolutionaries: What could be seen as originating as “teenage difference or deviance” soon turned into a more pervasive dissidence.37 But Gitlin sees a strong duality within the counterculture, a tension between an “individualist ethos” and “communality,” between “hip collectivity and the cultivation of individual experience.”38 It even can be said that the Grateful Dead, as Ryan Moore put it, “personified the dueling musical responses to modernization—folk and experimentalism—but also the promise that a youthful counterculture was poised to transcend this duality in an alternative vision (or hallucination, if you prefer) of modernity.”39 This opening up of a space seemingly filled with possibility, a space where a transvaluation of values, a disruption of normativity, was at stake, allows

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the first incarnation of the band, the Warlocks, to transform into the Grateful Dead; it allows that same Grateful Dead to move from the elementary and sometimes embarrassingly imitative rock and roll on their self-entitled debut album, The Grateful Dead (1967), into an avant-gardist and experimental second album, Anthem of the Sun, only a year later (1968). These larger social and cultural dislocations, however, also would generate a growing need to hold on to something, to a tradition more solid than contemporary pop and rock music, a tradition not totally commodified and therefore not directly subjected to the culture industry’s policies. There is—and this is the basic hypothesis of this chapter—an interesting dialectic of tradition and avant-garde at the heart of the Grateful Dead’s music, a dialectic that might be generated by the larger dislocations taking place on a worldwide scale, but enacted within a community, forming around a group of musicians, that would gradually grow until it became a national, and to some degree even an international, phenomenon, albeit one limited predominantly to the Western world. Improvisation is one form of intentional dislocation, a musical one, of course, but one that also works on a more general cultural scale, if understood as a non-programmatic approach to trying out of different ways to gain control over one’s life. Humans improvise constantly, in adjusting to all different aspects of everyday life, but improvisation might also be a specifically cultural and political attitude, a way of relating to the world—and not only a minute navigation of one’s daily existence. An early example in the Grateful Dead world of this dislocating or displacing force of improvisation is “Caution (Do Not Stop on Tracks)” from the band’s second release, Anthem of the Sun. A big step from the debut album, Anthem contains music that combines many of the influences that the band brought together, but still without really melding them into one, or making the sound their own. In this song, we can hear at least some of the different parts that made up the hybrid, tension-filled whole. The title, quoting a common road sign warning drivers about railway crossings, suggests a railroad song, rooted in the tradition of the Blues and of American folk music, and in some versions underscored by the band playing a chugging rhythm, almost in unison—in many performances, the percussionists stick to this rhythm, even when the other players go into outer space. But the lyrics actually tell another clichéd story, that of a visit with the “gypsy woman,” a fortune-teller. The singer, Pigpen, belts out the lyrics in typical rhythm and blues fashion, and some versions take the song into an apparent call-and-response form, with the response performed either by the lead guitar or by backup vocals. The music really serves as a starting point for improvisation, however, with no apparent relation to the lyrics.

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On Anthem of the Sun as well as in many other performances, the band takes the song into atonal regions, including tape effects as well as distortion. Thus, popular culture—in the form of the improvising rock band—at once displaces and relocates its sources. Here, the blues meets the improvisational practice of John Coltrane and the collage technique of Charles Ives and contemporary electronic music—but in the form of rock music. “Caution” might also be considered a collage, or montage, its different parts still audibly distinct.40 The montage form signals that the music is a construction, something made, even though tradition tends to make its products appear as natural (or as “second nature”). This tendency to naturalize, or harmonize, the music is balanced by the still unreconciled parts which make up a whole, searching for and striving to form. In his memoir, Phil Lesh looked back to Anthem of the Sun as the band’s “most innovative and far-reaching achievement,” seeing it as an “attempt to convey the experience of consciousness itself, in a manner that fully articulates its simultaneous, layered multifarious, dimension-hopping nature.”41 The montage form also is clearly audible in what became something of the band’s signature song, “Dark Star,” its different components not always part of every performance. Slowly, with the years, the montage form—so acclaimed by the avant-garde because it juxtaposes rather than hierarchizes—takes on a different function for the band. Finally, the concert or show as a whole 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

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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

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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,

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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 band, especially during its early history, then we, along with Michael Kaler, might say that the Grateful Dead were not as radical as the Velvet Underground or LaMonte Young: “Chaos is represented, but not enacted,” Kaler writes.47 But I am not so sure that Kaler’s characteristic is accurate; many parts of “Dark Star” seem to be more enactments than representations. “Dark Star” would for many years serve as the band’s signature melody, its status comparable to that of Coltrane’s many renditions of “My Favorite Things” and, just as that song did for Coltrane, “Dark Star” served as a vehicle for improvisation—meaning that it never sounded the same, not even twice. The same goes for “Space” and “Drums,” which became centerpieces of Grateful Dead shows in the seventies.

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ii There is an often-reproduced photograph taken by Jim Marshall in the late sixties of the Grateful Dead in performance. The band members have their backs to the audience, instead turning towards the amplifiers and loudspeakers, holding their guitars to or scratching them against the equipment to produce distortion and noise, using their instruments in a way that they apparently were not originally intended to be used. This is a classic avantgardist gesture—and it does, of course, also imply an act of violence. This photograph, then, suggests that maybe the Dead were not only into peace, love, and understanding, that there might be something other than harmonizing pastorals inside the band’s music. The long-dominant view of the avant-garde is represented by Renato Poggioli’s study The Theory of the Avant-Garde, originally published in Italian in 1962. Poggioli’s examples of avant-garde art are, at least by today’s standards, rather conventional—what we today often call the “historical avant-garde,” meaning Dadaism, Futurism, Surrealism, and others. Poggioli first emphasizes that the avant-garde is a movement, meaning that it cannot be isolated to certain individuals, certain countries, or certain works— any concept of the avant-garde must be flexible. But Poggioli still distinguishes certain traits that he sees as defining entities for the avant-garde. The first is that the avant-garde is always an “activist” movement: it wants something; it is goal-oriented and does not remain passive—which could be said of the Grateful Dead as well, the band wanting more than just mere survival. Secondly, however, Poggioli sees the avant-garde as always agitating “against something or someone,” and this is what he calls the “antagonistic” aspect of the avant-garde. A typical example is Marcel Duchamp’s “L.H.O.O.Q” (1919), in which the artist put a moustache on da Vinci’s “Mona Lisa.” The Grateful Dead never seem to have engaged in that kind of activity. In “Foolish Heart,” when Robert Hunter writes, “sign the Mona Lisa with a spray can, call it art,” he is ironically distancing himself (and the band, it seems) from that kind of antagonistic artistic practice.48 But we must also remember the violent practice of using instruments and sound systems in unintended ways, producing distortion and noise—the Grateful Dead was not bereft of this avant-gardist impulse, rather it was a central aspect of the band’s improvisations. In his third characteristic, Poggioli even sees the avant-garde as engaged in a “transcendental antagonism” that he calls its “nihilistic” moment—but the Grateful Dead never were iconoclasts. They once did play a benefit for the Black Panther Party, but the Black Panthers were radicals and revolutionaries, not nihilists.49 Finally,

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Poggioli raises the stakes even more with his fourth characteristic, which he calls “agonism” or the “agonistic moment”: the avant-garde, according to Poggioli, does not heed even “its own catastrophe and perdition.” Together, these four moments form what Poggioli calls the “dialectic of movements” of the avant-garde.50 According to this established (but, as we also shall see, problematic) view of avant-gardism, it is obvious why a band such as the Velvet Underground— or even the Sex Pistols—might seem more radical, more subversive, and more avant-gardist than the Grateful Dead. It does not help that there are interesting or at least tantalizing connections between the historical avantgarde and the Grateful Dead. When Jerry Garcia found the name “Grateful Dead” while browsing a dictionary at random, he is echoing the way that pioneering Dada artist Tristan Tzara found the word “dada” while browsing a dictionary at random. What we have here are different varieties of the same myth of origins, however true the stories might be. Additionally, members of the band did once perform—together with a symphony orchestra in the United States—a classical (yes!) avant-gardist piece of art, John Cage’s 4’33” or “the silent piece.” We also know, however, that when Garcia and Mickey Hart sent Cage a tape with music for the composer’s 75th birthday, Cage wrote back: “Thank you very much, I took your two minute tape and played it back at half-speed. It was beautiful, it was marvelous, thank you so much.” Cage here displays, I would say, a truly avant-gardist attitude in this appropriation of someone else’s work—and perhaps Garcia did the same, when smiling approvingly at Cage’s reply.51 There is at least one moment—on the best Grateful Dead album the band never made—when the Grateful Dead welcome their own perdition, and that is on John Oswald’s Grayfolded (1994–95), when he at one point stacks more than a hundred different live versions of “Dark Star” on top of each other, which results in a crescendo of white noise, erasing every trace of the musical material it is based on. Having Oswald manipulate all these versions of “Dark Star” displays an avant-gardist attitude: the tune is not given, no single version is sacred or canonical, and when the band was done with it, it could be handed over to someone else. That the band commissioned Oswald to do something with its music is typical of the way the Grateful Dead did things. Oswald had so successfully applied his “plunderphonics” to Michael Jackson’s “Bad” that he was sued and sentenced to destroy all existing copies of the album. The Grateful Dead, however, apparently interested in how Oswald aimed to create or construe new music out of existing music, and instead welcomed him to “plunder” their music, and providing Oswald with essentially free access to the band’s famed “Vault,”

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which contains soundboard tapes of most of their shows. Initially, Oswald intended his project to include not only “Dark Star” but also two other staples of the band’s repertoire, “China Cat Sunflower” and “The Other One,” but the work process apparently made him change his mind.52 The point of Oswald’s “plunderphonics” is, as Chris Cutler writes, threefold: “Thus plunderphonics as a practice radically undermines three of the central pillars of the art music paradigm: originality (it deals only with copies), individuality (it speaks only with the voice of others), and copyright (the breaching of which is a condition of its very existence).”53 The band’s openness to Oswald’s use of its music can be seen as related to Garcia’s oft-repeated viewpoint that once the band was done with the music, the audience could have it.54 In his discussion of Oswald, Cutler emphasizes the importance of the medium, stating that it is “only what is not recorded that belongs to its participants while what is recorded is placed inevitably in the public domain”—which of course is what has happened to the Grateful Dead’s music, with so many of the band’s performances available on the Internet in both audio and video. This sharing has one of its roots in the avant-gardist project of erasing the borders separating “art” from “life,” and Grayfolded, as well as Ned Lagin’s and Phil Lesh’s project Seastones (released as an album in 1975), contribute to what Cutler maintains is happening: a “general aesthetic convergence at the fringes of genres once mutually exclusive—and across the gulf of high and low art.”55 Another example of what Poggioli sees as typical of the avant-garde is that it often chooses to use “an enemy’s insult as one’s own emblem: we need cite only the decadents and the Salon des Refusés.”56 We can think of the first call for contact with the audience made on the 1971 eponymous live album, nicknamed “Skull and Roses”: fans were addressed as “Dead Freaks,” soon to be dubbed “Deadheads,” even though the first meanings of that word in Webster’s online dictionary still are “one who has not paid for a ticket” and “a dull or stupid person.”57 These examples, however, suggest that the Grateful Dead might have something to do with the avant-garde, even though the band itself really does not fit very well with Poggioli’s emphasis on the avant-garde as antagonistic. When Greil Marcus in his Lipstick Traces discusses—or rather hails—the Sex Pistols, relating them both to the historical avant-garde in the form of Dada, as well as to the political avant-garde of the 1960s in the form of the left-wing French Situationists, he wholeheartedly (and without critical discussion) accepts a definition of the avant-garde like Poggioli’s precisely for its emphasis on antagonism, which in Marcus’ view suits that band perfectly, though others might say superficially.58

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Yet, it is easy to see that this type of analysis is highly problematic and, moreover, that the energy feeding the Sex Pistols flares up briefly—only to evaporate just as quickly. The Grateful Dead might seem less politically revolutionary than the Sex Pistols, and less aesthetically radical than the Velvet Underground, but it is the Dead that actively resist the same culture industry that produces, distributes, and exploits the Velvet Underground as well as the Sex Pistols—and forms or shapes both these bands. It is Jerry Garcia, and not Lou Reed or John Lydon, or Sid Vicious, who criticizes what he calls the “fascist” aspects of rock’s crowd control in live performances.59 Indeed, both Reed and the Sex Pistols exploited those aspects of the mass audience. The lack of theatrics and of rock-and-roll poses was a central point of the Dead’s enduring appeal and, for outsiders, their mystery.60 This problem, or contradiction, might be at least partly resolved if we look at the avant-garde from a different angle. For that angle, I use the German theoretician Peter Bürger’s Theorie der Avantgarde (1974), a study that to some degree serves as a critique of Poggioli’s work. When Duchamp painted a moustache on the “Mona Lisa,” was he really attacking da Vinci, or was his target tradition? With Bürger, one must note that Duchamp did not paint on da Vinci’s original painting in the Louvre museum in Paris, rather he used a cheap reproduction. In that way, anyone can sign the “Mona Lisa” and call it art—and that is precisely what the avant-garde is about, it radically changes the relation between art and beholder, between book and reader, between music and listener, and ultimately between artist and artwork. The Grateful Dead taking part in a performance of 4’33” is then logical, as that piece involves the audience as much as the performers. It does so not by attacking individual works of art such as the “Mona Lisa,” but by questioning and attacking art as institution. Duchamp can be seen as criticizing the isolation of this painting to a museum, the distance between it and the life outside the museum walls, and that art has become synonymous with these isolated, individual, but ultimately reified works, and he mourns that art no longer is an activity, a practice. Something similar could be said of Cage; he, too, searched for ways to make art legitimate again. The avant-garde is also attacking the commodification of art in late capitalism. Bürger writes that the “category art as institution was not invented by the avant-garde movements. . . . But it only became recognizable after the avant-garde movements had criticized the autonomy status of art in developed bourgeois society.”61 In a 1993 interview, Jerry Garcia talked about his youthful ambitions, “I used to have these fantasies about ‘I want rock & roll to be like respectable music.’ I wanted it to be like art. . . I used to try to think of ways to make that

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work. I wanted to do something that fit in with the art institute, that kind of self-conscious art—‘art’ as opposed to ‘popular culture.’ Back then they didn’t even talk about popular culture—I mean, rock & roll was so not legit, you know.”62 In a way, young Garcia’s wish was fulfilled: rock music is now the object of musicological as well as aesthetic analysis. But rock music reached that position at least partly by not becoming “respectable,” displaying a remarkable capacity to renew itself in forms such as punk, grunge, rap, electronica, noise—forms often exploited by the industry, but momentarily opening up a space of potentialities. If rock music is “art,” and not only “popular art” or a “mass product,” it is not only because musicians have managed to produce meaning within the forms they find inside rock music, but also because their audience has acknowledged the consecration of rock into art. There is a dialectic between the artist and the audience, between production and reception, that results in the acknowledgment of a work as art. It is here that an understanding of the avant-garde according to Bürger becomes productive for any discussion of the Grateful Dead. For Bürger goes on, in his Marxist discourse, to state that what the avant-garde “negated is not an earlier form of art (a style) but art as an institution that is unassociated with the life praxis of men.”63 Under capitalism, art loses its former social functions, such as representing power, and instead becomes autonomous— meaning that it becomes isolated as art, and as different kinds of art, and its new social function is actually, if we follow Bürger, to keep this institution working, isolated from everyday working life. The work of art is reified, takes on the commodity form, and functions in its isolation only as self-reflection and entertainment. This was of course what the Sex Pistols once attacked—a rock music that had become totally commercialized and vacuously technical—and they wanted to bring it back to its basic three chords, potentially played by anyone. Yet, they did it in a highly marketable form. Today, even “Anarchy in the UK” has been reduced to Muzak. . . . The Grateful Dead did it in a different way but, yes, Bob Weir once remarked that the Dead had been called “punk’s old lance.”64 It is not only a question of the Dead forming their own record company, or organizing their own ticket sales, though such institutional forms are important and created a material foundation for the music. What is most central here remains the music, and most of all the concert or show. If band members’ public deprecation of their studio releases was as much rhetoric as reality, that attitude did describe the primacy they all placed on the concert, or rather, the “show.” The term is significant, for “show” implies a moreinclusive concept and that must be emphasized. Today, we can go to museums and scrutinize avant-gardist sculptures, or buy avant-gardist music on

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CDs—Ben Lerner is basically right in saying that the “problem is that these artworks, no matter how formally inventive, remain artworks. They might redefine the borders of art but they don’t erase those borders; a bomb that never goes off, the poem remains a poem.”65 Lerner, however, is talking about literature and literature’s inclination to take on the form of the work. Another way to look at the avant-garde is offered by Bürger in saying that “[i]nstead of speaking of the avant-gardist work, we will speak of avantgarde manifestation. A dadaist manifestation does not have work character but is nonetheless an authentic manifestation of the artistic avant-garde.”66 The same goes for the Grateful Dead concert: it was, in all its different aspects, “an authentic manifestation” of what the band really was about; fundamentally music, as Lesh says, but also something more. This “something more” has to do with what Bürger calls “life praxis.” Bürger does not really elaborate on this concept, but we can infer from his discussion what he means. The Dead’s music, then, somehow changed—or at least influenced—the ways of living for many of its listeners. This goes to the heart of what Mickey Hart has said: “People come to be changed, and we change ’em.”67 He is not alone; there is an enormous mass of testimony from Deadheads, both newcomers and seasoned concertgoers, who went to a concert, or a series of shows, and came out altered. As Peter Conners put it, summarizing his first Dead show, “[W]hen I walked out of Kingswood Music Theatre in 1987, I had been profoundly changed by what I’d just experienced.”68 The fans’ experience does not occur in isolation, the musicians’ lives are also involved. For them, their “life praxis” takes form in the tension between tradition and avant-gardism, between popularity and exclusivity. Here, the band once again displays a hybrid character: it resisted or opposed the culture industry in many ways, but the band’s popularity and status is at the same time an inextricable aspect of the culture industry. In this, I believe, as Andreas Huyssen writes, that it “was the culture industry, not the avant-garde, which succeeded in transforming everyday life in the 20th century.”69 As a part of the culture industry, but by stretching and bending the ways that industry worked, the Grateful Dead sought to achieve what might seem impossible: creating and disseminating avantgarde art on a mass scale. How that happened, how it was possible for precisely this band to do that, is a topic about which Phil Lesh has much to say.

iii A few years ago, Phil Lesh published his memoir, Searching for the Sound, which offers an informative text for considering the relationship between

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the Dead and the avant-garde. Lesh draws an image of a conventional middle-class upbringing, but also of what could be considered a quite representative trajectory for how to become an experimental rock musician. The key, in Lesh’s representation of this complex, is how the individual, in its different appearances, could be combined with the collective. What Lesh’s story tells us is that the avant-garde is not certain techniques, not certain styles; it is a culture, composed of many different aspects—aesthetic, political, and social—and if that culture had not been there, no drugs in the world would have created the Grateful Dead. Each player who has been part of the Grateful Dead has his or her own story to tell, and it is obvious that the band gelled only after very hard work during long rehearsals as well as performances. The point is that the diversity of traditions the different players came from is wide. Those were of course rock and roll, but also big band jazz, rudimental drumming, folk music, blues, gospel, bluegrass, rhythm and blues, classical music, avantgarde music, and more. To become a rock band, the players almost had to force these different parts together, as if assembling parts of a machine or juxtaposing them in a montage form. The eclecticism that is so tangible in the Dead’s music has one source in this diversity. At the same time, however, this music cannot be dismissed only as eclectic, because the Dead managed to fuse the musical types and make that synthesis their own. Ultimately, that triumph has to do with the appropriation of tradition and the simultaneous stylization of these traditions, guided by an insight Lesh had when listening to a young Garcia perform a traditional folk song. Watching the young guitarist at a party, Lesh felt a hush fall over the room as Garcia mesmerized—and Lesh understood that folk music, too, “could deliver an aesthetic and emotional payoff comparable to that of the greatest operatic and symphonic works.”70 It was by trying to extract aesthetic value from simple rock music that the Grateful Dead came into their own, and that is how Garcia’s vision of rock as art came about—not by imitating existing “art music” but through the extraction of aesthetic pleasure and meaning from jamming on one chord or through interpretations of old ballads and folk songs. It was not so much the result of conscious intention, as much as the effect of the combination of artistic practice and the mentality of the times, of dislocations going on both generally and concretely. Jerry Garcia intimated as much in a 1988 interview, saying, “The world out there created the Grateful Dead as much as we did. We just agreed to do it and be pushed along by it.”71 Garcia also pointed out that he felt that he was not an “artist in the independent sense, I’m part of dynamic situations.”72 There is also a certain perceptible

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and problematic tension in the relation between the avant-garde culture, already a force in the Bay Area in the mid-sixties, and the Grateful Dead. For some time, the Grateful Dead and, for instance, a typical avant-garde project such as the San Francisco Tape Music Center—typical in that it generated a sort of loose-knit, collectively based art community—had some interaction: both Phil Lesh and Tom Constanten participated in the Tape Center scene, which extended to the San Francisco Mime Troupe. But the worlds of electronic and rock music, respectively, never really coalesced. The mid-sixties, in Stewart Brand’s view, marked “the beginning of the Grateful Dead and the end of everybody else.”73 Meanwhile, other future band members were also searching for other traditions to partake in and belong to—and tradition here also means precisely community.

iv Long before joining the Grateful Dead, the individuals who were later to make up the band were searching for viable traditions—traditions that could still maintain relevance and carry authority. The most obvious example is Jerry Garcia and his early interest in bluegrass music. Garcia performed with his banjo in bluegrass groups around the San Francisco Bay area, but he also—together with mandolin player Sandy Rothman—went searching for the original source, in the form of a 1964 pilgrimage to bluegrass hero Bill Monroe in Bean Blossom, in southern Indiana. Rothman would later play with Monroe, but Garcia never got the chance. Rothman and Garcia carried with them a tape recorder, and they were far from alone in doing that; this experience of being a taper later informed Garcia’s attitude towards the tapers in the Grateful Dead audience.74 The attraction of bluegrass for a bunch of urban musicians was probably many-layered. Bluegrass must be described as a form of music that rapidly came to privilege virtuosity. Still, it had contacts with its roots in old-time string band music—often with obvious Christian overtones. Bluegrass is most of all instrumental music, however, and as bluegrass historian Neil Rosenberg writes, “occasionally used for dancing, it is most frequently performed in concert-like settings, and sound media—radio, records, television—have been important means of dissemination for the music. Bluegrass depends upon the microphone, and this fact has shaped its sound.”75 This technological dissemination of course meant that bluegrass was accessible, and could be listened to and learned even in California—at the same time as migration brought both players and their music to California, inspiring young Californians to take part in traditions, but also

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encouraging them to put a twist to those traditions. Modern technology also produced Harry Smith’s seminal Anthology of American Folk Music, a collection of enormous importance for a generation of artists such as Bob Dylan, and for the Grateful Dead.76 As Rosenberg emphasizes, however, bluegrass still has festivals at its core,77 and these festivals include both concert-like performances as well as widespread playing among those present, offering participants a chance to learn from the masters. The festival culture made pilgrimages like Garcia’s necessary, and they were also part of the tradition. Folklorists, anthropologists, and ethnomusicologists traversed America, searching for and recording traditional music wherever they found it. As Rosenberg notes, famed folklorist Alan Lomax “furnished a model for those interested in finding such performers. Young revivalists followed his path in making ‘field trips’ into the South and Afro-American communities. . . .”78 Jerry Garcia was one of them, carrying that tape recorder with him when searching for the bluegrass grail. What bluegrass taught Garcia was, I would suggest, how music is dependent upon a community, and how it can shape and build that community; how music and community could form a dynamic unit, at least momentarily, but perhaps also how such communities could be closed to outsiders such as Garcia himself and Sandy Rothman. A Latino and a Jew from the West Coast were not allowed immediate access to Midwestern cultures—a lesson that would come to good use with the Grateful Dead. Bob Weir apparently also was an early taper, and recorded performances by Jorma Kaukonen and others.79 Later, another member of the band would engage even more profoundly with what was to be called “World Music.” Mickey Hart worked with musicians of very different backgrounds, such as Nubian oud-player Hamza El-Din and Nigerian master drummer Babatunde Olatunji. Hart produced a series of World Music–genre albums for the Rykodisc label, and he has worked with scholars from the Smithsonian Institute and the American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress to collect and archive indigenous and endangered music from around the planet. The research Hart has conducted and sponsored has informed several books on drumming and percussion instruments, including his coauthored volumes Planet Drum, with musicologist Fredric Lieberman (1991), and Drumming at the Edge of Magic, with Jay Stevens (1990). When considering the culture of bluegrass, it is obvious that the Grateful Dead were far from the first artists to engage in a closer interaction with their audience. Jazz promotes audience involvement as well, but with a different aim, and in a different genre context. Probably more strongly than

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bluegrass musicians, jazz players understood that to make their music possible they must organize themselves. Ajay Heble even states that jazz is about precisely “building purposeful communities of interest and involvement, about reinvigorating public life with the magic of dialogue and collaboration.”80 Both jazz and bluegrass can be seen as having strong roots in America’s underclass, although neither form can be reduced exclusively to an expression of the oppressed. Although the bluegrass community in part was based on a somewhat conservative endeavor to keep the music within a traditional form, jazz musicians of the sixties organized to perform and develop their music beyond tradition. The examples are abundant, and include pianist and composer Horace Tapscott forming the Pan Afrikan Peoples Arkestra in 1961, with the double aim of both preserving and remodeling African-American music. The Arkestra soon evolved into the Underground Musicians Association, which became the Union of God’s Musicians and Artists Ascensions, but the Arkestra seems to have remained at the center of the organization: “Fusing art with social activism, the Arkestra developed and preserved black music and art within their community, performing on street corners, in parks, schools, churches, senior homes, social facilities and gathering spots, and arts centers, and at political rallies.”81 Other examples include the record company Debut, formed in 1952 by bassist and composer Charles Mingus, his wife Celia, and drummer and composer Max Roach; an artist-controlled company, it was devoted to producing new jazz. Similarly, the Jazz Composer’s Guild—an organization formed in 1964 by trumpeter and composer Bill Dixon—was dedicated to the promotion of the new, so called free jazz. Still active today is the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM) in Chicago, formed at the initiative of pianist/composer Muhal Richard Abrams in 1965 and dedicated to performing and teaching what the Art Ensemble of Chicago, one of its member ensembles, called “Great Black Music.” The importance of the AACM must be emphasized; its members have continued to produce some of the most vital music of the last fifty years, and at the same time the AACM has worked locally to provide training to aspiring young musicians, forming a vital part of the local community.82 These examples of self-organization might have inspired the Grateful Dead. Their importance is not so much in their possible status as role models for the band, but rather in their demonstration of a type of margin at the peripheries of the culture industry, and at the outer borders of (white) middle-class America, in which self-organization and a different kind of music were made possible. As Jacques Attali remarks, free jazz might have

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displayed its “inability to construct a truly new mode of production” but all the same it “was the first attempt to express in economic terms the refusal of the cultural alienation inherent in repetition, to use music to build a new culture.”83 Composers and performers of written (notated) Modernist and avant-garde music also have tended to a sort of community building, as exemplified by the San Francisco Tape Music Center, but this music has had a strong academic patronage—illustrated by the Tape Music Center moving to Mills College in Oakland. While the Grateful Dead engaged directly with their local community in their early days, the ways in which they did it differed from the ways jazz musicians did it; they did not engage in teaching, for example, although they did perform for free in parks and streets. They were a neighborhood band—but they did not have to fight against racist structures in addition to the culture industry. Still, their music was radical enough to demand a certain measure of self-organization to be able to grow and expand, a self-organization that connected them to an avantgarde tradition. The Grateful Dead were part of the famed Acid Tests, they co-owned the Carousel Ballroom together with other bands, and in 1973 the band formed its own short-lived record companies, Grateful Dead Records and Round Records, the latter dedicated to musical offshoots from the Grateful Dead. The band tried to be in control of its touring, organizing mail-order ticket sales; it also engaged in the development of audio technology. Every community needs a material basis for it to be something more than only imagined, and the Grateful Dead carefully built this foundation for themselves. Now, in the post-Dead era, both Phil Lesh and Bob Weir are taking on a mission as elderly statesmen, teaching younger musicians how to play Grateful Dead music, and to improvise collectively, at their respective sites, Weir’s TRI studios and Sweetwater Music Hall, and Lesh’s Terrapin Crossroads.

v Tradition is a problematic word. What does it mean to be in a tradition, to be traditional? Or to be outside of tradition? Traditions are basically ambiguous; they can imprison the musician but they also provide a well from which musicians can draw ideas. Tradition can be understood as a type of collective memory or archive that contains what can no longer be formulated in language. In music, Adorno writes, “survives what is otherwise forgotten and is no longer capable of speaking directly.”84 We find a similar point in Attali’s Noise; music “repeats the memory of another society . . . a society in which it had meaning.”85 Tradition, for the Grateful Dead, seems

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to have worked precisely as a well for the musicians to go to, find ways to play in. Through tradition the band could memorize, or imagine, a long-lost Western landscape, or perhaps Romantic English poetry, a ballad tradition, with memory then taking on both lyrical or literary form as well as musical, concretized in, for instance, Robert Hunter’s translations of Rainer Maria Rilke’s poetry.86 But the band also formed its own tradition: Those 613 performances of “Me and My Uncle”—is that not a type of imprisonment within, or at least a both remarkable and problematic fealty to a tradition that the band by and by made into its own? Tradition can be seen as an archive, containing repertoires of songs, techniques, and gestures; but more importantly it is an attitude, a relation between musician, music, and audience. Yet, tradition remains alive and meaningful only if generating new varieties of expression and updating old ones; and tradition becomes even more problematic and ambiguous under the commodification that late capitalism generates. In that system, tradition runs an acute risk of ossification, of becoming an object of mere academic interest, left behind by the culture industry and commodified into albums, CDs, and other formats. This risks killing tradition and in its place inserting a law: This is the authentic version, this is the canon that every musician must observe; all else can and should be ignored—the criticism directed against Bob Dylan for “going electric” comes to mind. Tradition, however, also can be commodified as material for new products, new hit songs, new styles in popular music. Tradition remains a source only if it remains part of a community, only if it is shared, and therefore part of transformative and dynamic practices. As Walter Benjamin emphatically stated, “Every age must strive anew to wrest tradition away from the conformism that is working to overpower it.”87 What Benjamin points to is the urge, generated by modernity, to rescue some form of tradition to which one could belong. John McCole points out that “tradition” for Benjamin was “less a particular canon of texts or values than the very coherence, communicability, and thus the transmissibility of experience.”88 The Grateful Dead phenomenon is one such example of a more or less coherent tradition: It is very much about sharing experience, about forming a collective body—but not by just reproducing traditional music. The question of tradition becomes of decisive importance because, as Paul Ricoeur emphasized, he “who is unable to reinterpret his past may also be incapable of projecting concretely his interest in emancipation.”89 Not the passive reproduction of tradition, then, but the active reinterpretation of it—if imprisoned within tradition, music risks being reduced to serving non-musical ends, and Adorno maintains that with the development of

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the culture industry, the “autonomy of music is replaced by a mere socio-psychological function. Music today is largely a social cement.” The culture industry destroys tradition, imprisoning music but in the commodity form; this gives it a superficial mobility and variety, which actually is its exchangeability. Adorno further sees two basic types of mass behavior in relation to music—“the ‘rhythmically obedient’ type and the ‘emotional’ type.”90 This of course is a very rough division, but it is still worth asking whether we—an entire arena moving to the Grateful Dead—are not “rhythmically obedient.” The kernel of musical tradition is its repeatability, but commodified it becomes nothing but repetition—such as 613 performances of “Me and My Uncle,” all sounding very much like each other, always already identified, despite superficial variations in tempo, coloration, or set-list placement. As Attali writes, contemporary music heralds “the establishment of a society of repetition in which nothing will happen anymore.” Music, Attali claims, was once an “instrument of differentiation” but has become a “locus of repetition.”91 Therefore, music tends to be “too often only a disguise for the monologue of power.”92 Attali might seem extreme in his verdict, but he does have a point—and he acknowledges that music not only performs power, but also heralds what he calls “the emergence of a formidable subversion.”93 The breakthroughs in audio technology during the twentieth century—including radio, gramophone, and tape recorder—pave the way for commodification and repetition. Therefore, as Attali points out, “performance becomes the showcase for the phonograph record, a support for the promotion of repetition.”94 But here the Grateful Dead differs: although there normally is an obvious relation between records and touring—an industry norm the band ignored—the band produced fewer records over time, privileging the live concert instead, which gained an independent value. Technological transformations change the conditions for tradition— often drastically. If we look at tradition as some kind of belonging, a sense of being part of something bigger than the individual, then technological development and commodification breaks tradition apart. Here, as Benjamin pointed out, it is “as if a capability . . . has been taken from us: the ability to share experiences.”95 Instead of the shared, collective experience, music turns into an individualistic enjoyment of a substitute product, illustrated by everyone listening with earphones—as if we are all connected to the same source, listening to the same monologue but individually, separated from each other. Attali points to how audio technology promotes repetition, which “requires the ongoing destruction of the use-value of earlier repeti-

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tions, in other words, the rapid devaluation of past labor and therefore accelerated growth.”96 This is the logic of capital and commodification, and no musician—or anyone else—escapes it. It is a dismal perspective that Attali offers us, yet he sees possibilities for challenging power through “the route of a breach in social repetition and the control of noisemaking.”97 In its own way, even a rock-and-roll band like the Grateful Dead tries to subvert power structures. Self-organization, the dialectic of tradition and avant-garde, the focus on live performances, the careful cultivation of craftsmanship, the forming of and reliance upon a community—these are factors that combine to generate what Attali (naturally without referring to the Dead) calls “a music produced elsewhere and otherwise.”98 Another word for that is, of course, marginalization—but it is in the margins that possibilities sometimes appear. Walter Benjamin points to the ambiguous character of modernity and what he calls “the age of technical reproducibility,” an era beginning in the nineteenth century, when “technological reproduction not only had reached a standard that permitted it to reproduce all known works of art, profoundly modifying their effect, but it also had captured a place of its own among the artistic processes.”99 Repetition, then, is what technology makes possible, but a repetition quite different from the repetition that is an integral part of ritual. Although repetition in ritual generates the wholeness of tradition, technological repeatability, on the contrary, is a form of fragmentation. As Jacques Attali writes, “repetition entails the development of service activities whose function is to produce the consumer. . . .”100 Yet this repeatability has another function as well, and Benjamin emphasizes how “technological reproducibility emancipates the work of art from its parasitic subservience to ritual.”101 According to Benjamin, this means that the original work of art can “meet the recipient halfway, whether in the form of a photograph or in that of a gramophone record.”102 The de-ritualized availability of the work of art in reproduced form means that its foundation can no longer remain the collective and ritual tradition, but instead becomes a “different practice: politics.”103 Repetition, then, might not only be the constant stating of the given, and instead perhaps is a powerful pointing to something else, something different. I come back to “politics” elsewhere in this text, but Benjamin’s analysis offers important leads to the ambiguous character of the Grateful Dead phenomenon. On the one hand, the Grateful Dead are, from their earliest days, deeply invested in mastering audio technology, experimenting with ways to optimize sound for both musicians and audience, as well as for different settings. The most famous example is the “Wall of Sound,” the

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enormous sound system used by the band for live performances during the mid-70s, though ultimately too complicated and expensive to sustain.104 On the other hand, the concerts took on a life of their own, generating the Grateful Dead phenomenon, attracting a steadily growing audience—and an audience that was not an ordinary rock audience. Even when addressing the problems posed by the band’s growing popularity, band members were careful to refer to their fans as “the best audience around; supportive, civil, and hip to the realities of America in the late 20th century.”105 This was an audience that did not expect the Dead to sound like their records, but on the contrary wanted, encouraged, and expected them to reinterpret and renew their music. A Grateful Dead show could then take on the form of a carnivalesque festival, including masks and costumes, jugglers and dancers, food and drugs—a celebration of life and of communal bonds.106 The ever-critical Nadya Zimmerman states, “The Dead’s concerts might very well have been communal folk festivals, but they were experienced within the cocoon of technology and consumerism.”107 But how could it be otherwise? And does such a close-fisted remark really do justice to the cultural phenomenon of a Dead show? The key word, though, is “experience.” Grateful Dead concerts became an arena for reinstating what was lacking in any reproduction, what Benjamin calls “the here and now of the work of art—its unique existence in a particular place.”108 The experience of this uniqueness was, of course, collective, and took on a Dionysian, carnivalesque or circus-like form of ritual; the Grateful Dead show became a space radically different from the surrounding society. The ritualization of the show as event even generated cultic elements, and Garcia in particular suffered from fans looking at him as some kind of demi-god—with a wry sense of humor, Garcia distanced himself from this devotion, stating that he would “put up with it until they came to me with the cross and nails,” another acknowledgment of what Garcia called the “fascist” element of rock music’s power over the audience.109 The uniqueness of every show made Deadheads travel with the band, catching not only one or two shows but several, to be part of this event in which the work of art happened when the band was “on.” Sometimes it didn’t happen—but if it didn’t, there were always recordings of shows where it did happen circulating among the fans. The show took on a ritualistic dimension in its Dionysian excess, and, as I discuss below (see Chapter 2: vi), its heterotopic character emerged—even as the music changed with every show, and improvisation of different kinds kept the music not only alive but also constantly shifting. The Grateful Dead phenomenon is then marked by a tension between technological reproducibil-

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ity and ritualistic uniqueness—which is another form for the basic tension between avant-garde and tradition in the band’s music. “Tradition” for the Grateful Dead was not only playing in a bluegrass band such as Old and In the Way, which Garcia did, nor was it in only performing all-percussion music, which Mickey Hart did, sometimes with Bill Kreutzmann. Both of those examples suggest that tradition for the band did not mean reproduction of something lost, but rather an appropriation and remodeling of heritage, an endeavor to adjust it to new conditions of possibility. For the band as a unit, tradition was not only a matter of including traditional material in shows and on albums—foremost covers of blues or country and western tunes—tradition also was reformulated and articulated anew in the band’s own music. The most obvious examples are the albums Workingman’s Dead and American Beauty, but many of the new songs first released on the live album Europe ’72 also explore tradition to ferret out what is most usable. This remodeling of tradition also marked Robert Hunter’s lyrics for the band; in “Uncle John’s Band,” for example, the lines “When life looks like Easy Street, there is danger at the door,” and “Think this through with me, let me know your mind,” hint at the traditional role of the storyteller, in Walter Benjamin’s understanding of him, as a “man who has counsel for his readers.”110 Hunter has also characterized some of his lyrics as “proverb songs,” including “Deal,” “Ripple,” “The Wheel,” and “Loser.”111 At the same time, Hunter acknowledged that the conditions actually had changed, that tradition had been destroyed, and his counsel—a term he might resist—took on an ironical or paradoxical form: “Comes a time/ when the blind man/ takes your hand/ says: Don’t you see?” (“Comes a Time”).112 The Grateful Dead became the storytellers of their community (a function actually thematized in Hunter’s lyrics to “Lady With A Fan,” on Terrapin Station (1977), but the image of the world that the music, together with the lyrics, distributed was that of a world turned upside down. In this reversal—really a turning upside down—of hegemonic culture and established forms of conduct, types of resistance were being formed. But resistance against what? And what was and is the political significance of the culture germinating around a constantly touring rock band?

vi The resistance that the Grateful Dead offered was not a resistance to capitalism as such, but rather one directed against a society in which commodification, conformism, and hypocrisy ruled, where power was rendered

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anonymous. Theirs was a protest against a society that constantly is at war—both abroad and at home—against its own population. The band could be quite clear-eyed about what was going on in the world, as when Garcia talked about the war in Vietnam as “an effort on the part of the establishment to keep the economic situation in the United States comparatively stable”113 or, in another early interview, when he stated that the band was “interested in lending our support” to what he calls a “subeconomy in the United States,” one that “doesn’t depend on the rest of the straight, American capitalist system.”114 The type of resistance to the “American capitalist system” that the band was part of, however, then must be understood not as a direct negation of power, but rather as a turning away from hegemonic ideologies and an affluent society emptied of life and vitality. In other words, the Dead engaged in forms of resistance which were informed both by avant-gardism and tradition. Nadya Zimmerman sees the band sharing this stance with the “counterculture” in general and the contemporary San Francisco bands specifically. In her view, their music “reveals that the countercultural sensibility was pluralistic, not oppositional; it embodied an anything-goes mindset, not an antiestablishment stance; it attracted people who sought on the whole, to disengage from mainstream society, not to transform it.”115 Other scholars see the counterculture in a more positive light. To Terry H. Anderson, “[t]he counterculture must be defined broadly. The movement developed as a counter to the political establishment: the counterculture was a counter to the dominant cold war culture.”116 Anderson’s analysis, however, might be too narrow: The counterculture cannot be reduced to a reaction against the “political establishment,” rather, it was a rebellion against the dual commodification and technologizing of everyday life. Zimmerman’s analysis, conversely, is very general, and in the case of the Grateful Dead is not wholly accurate. She securely fastens the band, even early on, to a simple production of nostalgia “for a populist aura of a time and space long ago.”117 Zimmerman simply reproduces a critique of the band, recurrent in reviews and articles in the music press at least since the onslaught of punk, and even if the band cannot be totally acquitted of this accusation—younger fans clearly did find the band to be a powerful conduit for a view of the sixties absent from the mainstream—it is not very accurate. Listening to, for instance, the two boxes of live recordings of concerts comprising almost the entire spring tour of 1990—Spring 1990 and Spring 1990 The Other One—one hears a band adding a sharp edge to the music, a band actually and actively resisting nostalgia. What a Grateful Dead show offered was a relief, however temporary, from normative hegemony,

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from “Reaganomics” and authoritarian society, but the band never really engaged in any revival of the sixties, nor did it invest or traffic in that kind of nostalgia. A critique of this type does raise the question of what sort of demands we can place upon—and what expectations we can reasonably make of—a rock-and-roll band. Early on, the band was hounded by demands that they should play for free—and the Grateful Dead did play for free quite often in those early years (and later played innumerable benefits), but even musicians need an income, and the band had to defend itself against accusations of being just another greedy moneymaking machine, even though their ticket prices remained far below those of comparable acts. Also, is it reasonable to demand of a group of musicians that they take some sort of anticapitalist stand? Jerry Garcia made a relevant comment on that kind of moralism, saying, “Well I think the musician’s first responsibility is to play music as well as he can, and that’s the most important thing. And any responsibility to anyone else is just journalistic fiction . . . or political fiction.”118 As Phil Lesh pointed out, the Grateful Dead and the culture surrounding the band seemed to survive the sixties in much better condition than most of the more directly political movements—or overtly political bands—of the time, and there is probably a lesson to be learned there.119 The culture surrounding the Grateful Dead—of which the band is only one of many parts and not the sole instigator—can be seen as a public sphere: a quite momentary, provisionary, and mobile public sphere, that perhaps also (to a great degree) is imaginary. Michael Warner sees the public as the effect of a symbolic address or interpellation: “To address a public or to think of oneself as belonging to a public is to be a certain kind of person, to inhabit a certain kind of social world, to have at one’s disposal certain media and genres, to be motivated by a certain normative horizon, and to speak within a certain language ideology.”120 The band and its music addressed an audience (“Dead Freaks Unite!”) that formed into a public, but at the same time the band also was a channel through which an address was distributed. The imaginary character of this public is easy to see: Simply imagine dancing hippies. This “imagined community,” however, a community based on volunteers imagining something that bound members to one another (I come back to this concept below), also was supported by material institutions, and then not only by the band’s concerts, but also records, tie-dyes, drugs, head shops, magazines, and the Internet. One must look at this public, in all its complexity, as exemplifying the kind of interaction which, as Warner writes, though seemingly without political aspirations, “can be seen as attempting to create rival publics, even rival modes of

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publicness.”121 I do think that the Grateful Dead phenomenon qualifies as such a “counter-public”; and this alternative public is also called forth through an address to the strangers comprising the mass audience, but these strangers are, as Warner writes, “socially marked by their participation in this kind of discourse; ordinary people are presumed not to want to be mistaken for the kind of person who would participate in this kind of talk or be present in this kind of scene.”122 Warner’s description fits Deadheads nicely, as well as the presumed ordinary citizen’s reaction to the spectacle of Deadheads gathering for a show. There are quite a few testimonies about the Grateful Dead phenomenon, ranging from coffee-table books to autobiographical narratives such as Peter Conners’ Growing Up Dead, and scholarly discussions from sociological and ethnological analyses, to business analyses and dozens of journalistic accounts.123 A shortcut to the complexity of the Grateful Dead phenomenon as a counter-public is offered by browsing the fanzine The Golden Road (edited by Blair Jackson and Regan McMahon) from between 1984 and 1993. The Golden Road—one of several fanzines—was very well edited and written, and the early issues from 1984 and 1985 give a vivid image of the Deadhead community. The magazine included articles on taping and presenting new digital equipment, and had juridical articles informing readers about their rights when harassed by the police, for example. It featured interviews with band members and also with staffers such as Eileen Law, the undisputed heroine of the office, and Dan Healy, master of the soundboard. A multi-issue feature discussed the band’s cover songs, referring readers to the original sources and later recordings. The Golden Road also had classifieds: contact ads, tape trading, and ads offering services: “Get high on the Dead without drugs! Licensed psychotherapist; six years substance-abuse counseling experience.” The Golden Road formed an important part of a sort of pedagogical discourse that informed the Deadhead community: older Heads taught younger Heads how to behave, and the magazine was part of this educational process, helping to transform a growing mass audience into some sort of community. At the center of this counter-public is a rock-and-roll band, a simple but at the same time highly complicated machinery for distributing an address, a call to strangers to join the world that the music establishes—in that sense, the Grateful Dead phenomenon also is what Warner states characterizes every public: it is a “poetic world making.”124 This suggests that it is worthwhile to look into, and even sharpen, the question of what kind of world this music generated: a real world, not the imaginary world of the song lyrics.

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vii What was it that was changed during those years when the music played the band and the audience? What world did the music generate or produce? Obviously, the music did not change the politics of this nation, nor bourgeois society—if the United States can be called that—or the workings of late capitalism; nor did it affect the political arena, even though members of the band did show up in a few political situations, and even though you could find Deadheads in prominent political positions—and not only in the United States, but abroad as well.125 What Bürger alludes to with his concept of “life praxis” (see section ii, above) is his fellow German theoretician, philosopher, and sociologist Jürgen Habermas’ theory of the public sphere. That sphere, which presupposes a private sphere, always has a material foundation, but is itself not reducible to material institutions. Rather, it is a symbolic space where citizens come together to discuss common matters and decide on the future of society. Habermas would later also distinguish the two “systems” of state and market from the “lifeworld.” These two levels of society can be imagined separately, but in reality are interrelated.126 In the lifeworlds, people lead their daily lives, look at themselves, perform themselves, and decide who they are and how they are it. This, of course, is influenced by what’s happening in the systems, which through politics and economics, laws and values, bureaucracies and markets, condition and regulate—and in late modernity tend to colonize—the lifeworld. Now, if art has lost its representative functions within the systems, and its dominant social function instead has become that of upholding art as an institution as Bürger claims, then it must find ways to be meaningful in the lifeworld. Art, Habermas suggests, “is a sanctuary for the satisfaction of those needs which become quasi illegal in the material life process of bourgeois society.”127 This is a role that the Grateful Dead show, and to some degree the band’s recorded output, has fulfilled: it awakens needs that social rationality denies, and any Deadhead recognizes those needs and their illegality. The point here is that not any artwork can fulfill this function, but rather art as event, in forms related to the avant-gardist manifestation: Jerry Garcia repeatedly points to this in interviews, as when he speaks of the original Acid Tests as a whole, and not a performance by the band: “It was the whole event that counted,” he emphasized in 1972. He looked at the later Grateful Dead shows in much the same way, talking about the shows in Egypt 1978: “If you were to think of this whole thing as a piece of

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concept art, rather than as a performance, they [the spectators] are full participants.”128 It is precisely this inclusion of what for (almost) any other band would have been an audience of consumers, and not of participants, that generated the effect on the life praxis of Deadheads. If not, the audience would have been merely consuming their records for a few years, and then could move on to something else. The band’s insistence that the audience was, or must be, part of the event—that only band and audience together could form the Grateful Dead experience, a claim that is not original but which has more relevance for the Dead than for most rock groups—is gestured at through practices such as having the lights directed on the audience, or leaving it to the audience to sing the lyrics of a song (“Not Fade Away”), or including a “sound sculpture” from the parking lot scene outside the concert arena on the album Infrared Roses (1991). Although such practices might be considered “democratic,” as a way of sharing the performance through gestures of inclusion, they don’t necessarily have that much to do with art as such, but instead they gesture towards the community-building aspect of the Grateful Dead phenomenon, delimiting the Deadhead audience from the mainstream outside. Another aspect of this sharing is that it allows the musicians to get out of a certain position: lyricist Robert Hunter once memorably wrote that “when the Dead are at their best, . . . we perform a kind of suicide in music,”129 a poetic description of the very real way that the different musicians become engulfed by the music, abdicating control, and surrendering to the music. This leads up to a somewhat paradoxical situation: at these peak moments, the audience is participating in a collective work from which the artists have disappeared. . . . This is not at all a private or subjective testimony, but rather what with José Ortega y Gasset must be recognized as “dehumanized art.”130 This should not be understood as some sort of mechanical or automatic form of art, but rather as art happening but not performed. There is no subject deciding what will happen, and how it will happen, yet the work itself is happening, and producing the artists, those on the stage as well as those in the arena: “one isn’t creating, but being created—in fact, one no longer exists,” as Phil Lesh put it.131 This is not at all a religious experience, but a classical aesthetic experience. As Michel Foucault states about literature in his “What is an Author?” the thing is to create an “opening where the writing subject endlessly disappears.”132 Prime examples in the Dead’s oeuvre that illustrate this disappearance of the artist are improvisations such as “Feedback” on Live/Dead, many versions of “Playing in the Band” and “Dark Star,” as well as the whole of Oswald’s manipulations of “Dark Star”

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on Grayfolded. One also can sense this dehumanization on cover songs, however, such as “Death Don’t Have No Mercy” and “Morning Dew,” when the band seems to shift into overdrive, producing formidable crescendos of noise. There are several other examples, although it doesn’t happen in all shows nor in all performances of a song, and these examples do not include Infrared Roses. That album instead tends to fetishize this “dehumanized” aspect of the music, isolate it in pieces without the surrounding show, give these pieces separate titles, and present the music by combining these fragments into a false whole. Dehumanization, however, probably does not unfold in any of the 613 performed versions of “Me and My Uncle.” When it does happen, it is the effect of improvisation. Improvisation here must be understood both as an aesthetic practice and as a sort of cultural tradition. Improvisation is the key both to this loss of the superego, or even the subject, that musicians and audience experience, and to the Grateful Dead phenomenon as at least an attempted collective transcendence of established forms of “life praxis.” Improvisation (I revisit “improv” in Chapter 3) can provisionally be understood as “composing in the moment.” The improvising musician has very few rules as guidance, and to be part of the music instead must listen intently to what is going on around him or her. Improvising means composing, creating form through responding to what others are playing, to what you yourself just played, and to the space in which the music is happening, a space that also is defined by the reactions of an audience. This is, of course, a compositional tradition quite different from the traditional Western canon, in which one scores a piece of music and then hands it over to someone else to perform as faithfully as possible, although we should acknowledge that improvisation is an important part of much notated music today. The improvising musician is not naked, though. There is a tradition or, rather, several traditions, for the musician to relate to and find support in, and improvisation always happens in relation to what has been played before. For the Grateful Dead, one can single out jazz, blues, bluegrass, and folk music as being important sources of improvisational traditions, both aesthetically, for the band, and culturally, for the Grateful Dead phenomenon. Within these traditions, the relationship between performers and audience differs from that of Western classical music, as well as from that of most products of the culture industry. Improvisation is not the same in these different forms of music. In bluegrass, improvisation, with a slight generalization, is a “gestural improvisation”

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based on the advance knowledge of the forms of this music, its conventions, its language, and restricted to variations on the given. Bluegrass, then, is a music that respects what has been handed down; it respects order so that it can add something to that order. Bluegrass also is a virtuosic refinement of a tradition that it confesses to honor, but also actually transgresses: as Neil Rosenberg states, instrumental bluegrass compositions “feature alternating solos, as in jazz—a clear stylistic departure from the old-time southeastern string band music from which bluegrass developed.”133 Jazz improvisation started out as a “gestural improvisation,” but has become much more differentiated to include very different forms of improvisation, spanning from melodic variation to free form. This tension between different improvisational practices is found within the music of the Grateful Dead, too. What some critics call “aimless noodling” is basically this gestural form of improvisation. The typical example is the many different versions of “Eyes of the World” in which Garcia could endlessly vary the harmonic and melodic constituents of the song, while the band more or less faithfully accompanied him, keeping up the pulse and rhythm of the tune. Improvisation here gestures, so to speak, towards what it treats as given. At the other end of the spectrum are those parts that Lesh described as “free improvisation,” first called “Feedback” and later “Space,” as well as “Drums.” In those parts of a performance, nothing is presumed. The form is open, initiatives are welcome, and often the instruments sound deformed. Distortion and digital technologies were used to transform the expected, regular sound into something strange and unfamiliar, even uncanny. One can say that this is music that explores what is possible, instead of relying on what is already there. In between these poles, we find something that Lesh in my interview called “deconstruction.” He described how the band played “Bird Song,” and when discussing the version found on Without a Net—and later included on Spring 1990, featuring Branford Marsalis on soprano saxophone—he called it a “deconstruction” of the song’s melodic, harmonic, and rhythmic parts, to make obvious and investigate the material that comprises the song.134

viii The sort of work which the Dead performed was made possible not only by the musicians themselves—their skills, and diverse knowledge of different musical traditions—but also by the audience. Garcia should be taken seriously when he emphasizes the audience as a participant. The audience formed a space with roots that harkened back to jazz and bluegrass audi-

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ences and their ways of forming communities around the music; but the Dead did it on a much larger scale, and for a much longer time. I think we can talk of the band as being the center of a “counter-public sphere.” It is in this sphere that the Grateful Dead phenomenon—which is nothing but the (loose) organization of a collective experience—shows similarities with other forms of resistance towards a central authority or an economic system, as for example the growth of the European workers’ movements of the late-nineteenth century. Not included within the public sphere of bourgeois society, the workers formed their own organization, their own “counter-public”—and self-organization is, of course, what the Dead phenomenon was and is all about.135 If they were a product of their time, then they certainly were not alone in the effort to rule themselves. As Oskar Negt and Alexander Kluge wrote in the seventies, when counter-movements of different kinds were quite visible, “there are emerging impulses toward a public sphere that attempts to break through the context of exploitation. This is not a question of abstract alternatives: the capitalist process of production itself produces this countermovement.”136 We find this figure of thought in Foucault as well, but there in a seemingly even more general form: “Where there is power, there is resistance,” Foucault notes, but he does not stop there: “and yet, rather consequently, this resistance is never in a position of exteriority in relation to power.”137 Foucault’s reminder is important for any discussion of the Grateful Dead, and it warns us to be careful in our consideration of the band’s trajectory: the alternative or counter-sphere is always interior to existing power relations. As Foucault also emphasizes, however, “points of resistance are present everywhere in the power network . . . a plurality of resistances, each of them a special case: resistances that are possible, necessary, improbable; others that are spontaneous, savage, solitary, concerted, rampant, or violent; still others that are quick to compromise, interested, or sacrificial; by definition, they can only exist in the strategic field of power relations.”138 Power relations form a constantly shifting, mobile condition of possibility and, as Miriam Hansen states in her introduction to Negt and Kluge’s work, “we have to confront the fact that not all counter-publics are equal or proceed from the same conditions of subalternity.”139 Resistance, then, is also multiple; it takes on many different forms, and disguises itself in everyday practices—such as dropping out of school for a few months to follow a rock band on tour, or to develop and elaborate a dervish-like dancing technique practiced at Grateful Dead shows. The role of tradition within this counter-sphere is then not only that of a warm-up for the band, nor is it the effect of nostalgia on the part of Garcia

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or Weir: the hundreds of performances of “Me and My Uncle” serve as a glue for the counter-sphere, with tradition as the point that the participating audience can refer to. And although the avant-garde forms of the music transform and even dehumanize us, tradition reminds us that we are all humans, all social beings, all doing this together: tradition ties the net, so that it is strong enough to hold even “Feedback.” “Feedback” is a beast. So was “Seastones,” the electronic work composed by Ned Lagin and performed and partly improvised by him and Phil Lesh. So, too, was the institutionalization of free improvisation known as “Space” in the choreography of later Dead shows, along with “Drums”—which was partly performed on “the Beast,” as Hart’s drum and percussion installation was called. The improvisations that inhabited songs such as “Dark Star,” “Playing in the Band,” and “The Other One” are musical beasts, or monsters—“monstrous” in the early sense of the word, meaning something that has not yet been given form. The free, improvised music is in the process of attaining form, but what form that will be is always open for negotiation. This work of giving form includes a moment of stylization, which has a double significance: stylization can give tonal material a “Deadish” identity but, conversely, stylization also, as Ortega y Gasset emphasizes, might “deform reality” and lead to “dehumanization.”140 To have a working rock band like the Grateful Dead rely on this form of musical practice is to install a beast right in the heart of the culture industry. Some of the most majestic versions of “Dark Star” and “Playing in the Band” from the early- to mid-seventies have an undeniable quality of the monstrous—which in aesthetic theory also is known as the sublime. At their best, the Grateful Dead played a music that was truly sublime, that overwhelmed the listener with sensations of might and fear, of danger and threat, of life at risk. Moving into atonal regions; leaving meter and beat behind, as well as vocals and song formats; producing a quite contradictory music, also was a way of lending legitimacy to the band’s work. As Theodor W. Adorno writes in his Aesthetic Theory, “Scars of damage and disruption are the modern’s seal of authenticity; by their means, art desperately negates the closed confines of the ever-same; explosion is one of its invariants.”141 Tradition, whether made up of cowboy tunes or ballads, Chuck Berry or Garcia-Hunter compositions, was not there only, if at all, to serve as a unifying glue for the community. Tradition served to keep the explosive monster at bay, it kept dislocation and displacement framed within a recognizable world. It must also be asked whether tradition won out in the long run. The Grateful Dead of 1995 is not the same as the band of, say, 1972 or 1969. Of

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course, it could not be—but for varying reasons. Given that the avant-garde is always a historical moment, always situated, one can look at the Grateful Dead as the result of a crack opening in hegemonic culture, of new conditions of possibility being generated. There also and always—if we are to believe Roland Barthes—comes “a moment when Order recalls its vanguard . . . the avant-garde rarely pursues its career as a prodigal son all the way; sooner or later it returns to the bosom which had given it, with life, a freedom of pure postponement.”142 The Grateful Dead did resist and postpone their inclusion in mainstream American culture for a remarkably long time, and considering rock music’s role within the culture industry, the band’s trajectory is truly impressive. Surely, however, the fact that the band, its music, and the surrounding culture are the objects of academic research and a growing scholarly discussion, testifies to the Grateful Dead’s status as part of established culture. No longer something left behind, shunted to the side of the mainstream, existing at the margins of normativity, the Grateful Dead have now been integrated. Integration within mainstream culture, or within hegemonic normativity, also has shades and nuances, however, varying with time and situation. The Grateful Dead, even today, carries an oppositional edge that makes integration uncomfortable.

2. Wave That Flag: An Apolitical Band

On January 20, 1994, Vuong Thinh, director of International Relations for the Ministry of Culture and Information, sent the Grateful Dead an “Official invitation to perform in Vietnam” at what was called “The U.S.A./ Vietnam Peace, Healing and Friendship Festival.”1 The band never did perform in Vietnam, but why would a self-declared “apolitical” band be invited to the Socialist Republic of Vietnam? Whatever the Vietnamese authorities might have thought, the Grateful Dead never really actively protested the war. The band stubbornly called itself “apolitical,” defending itself against appropriation from conventional “establishment” politics, as well as from antiestablishment, left-wing politics. This probably was a decisive aspect of the band’s efforts at forming and controlling its own working conditions. Regardless, the band repeatedly found itself involved in politics—perhaps because it was political in its anarchic refusal to follow the mainstream, its avowed anti-authoritarianism, and its refusal to let itself be operated and used by someone else. In 1967, San Francisco police raided 710 Ashbury, arresting several band members and friends and hangers-on, documented by front-page pictures of Bob Weir in handcuffs, walking down the front steps. There are wellknown pictures of the band and some family members posing on the stairs to their house, waving guns. The band also played a benefit for the Black Panther Party in 1971; as the poster for the event announced, it was a “Revolutionary Intercommunal Day of Solidarity”—together with a picture of a machine gun.2 The Grateful Dead also performed at benefits for the People’s Park in Berkeley in 1969, and for something called the “Spring Mobilization to End the War” in 1967, among many other causes. The band played at Columbia University in New York in support of the student strike in 1968.3 There are pictures of Mickey Hart behind a drum kit—the bass 52

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drum decorated with a revolutionary fist—playing at MIT in response to the killing of four students at Kent State in 1970, although the revolutionary fist was attached to the drum because of the American bombing of Cambodia, Hart stated in an interview.4 At a show at Nassau Veterans Memorial Coliseum in Uniondale, New York, in May 1981, the band dedicated “He’s Gone” to Bobby Sands, an imprisoned member of the Provisional IRA (Irish Republican Army), who had died on hunger strike the day before.5 But there are also other images of the band. On January, 16, 1969, a short piece in the San Francisco Chronicle reported that the Grateful Dead, “one of the world’s top rock groups” would play at the high society event called the “Black and White Symphony Ball,” a benefit for the San Francisco Symphony Orchestra. There are photos of the band posing with Al and Tipper Gore— and was it not Tipper Gore, a self-declared Deadhead, who was responsible for the labels on records warning listeners about explicit language—the “Parental Advisory” stickers? Mickey Hart talked on music and aging before the U.S. Senate 1991; Bob Weir wrote in the New York Times in defense of a forest in Montana, threatened by exploitation; Hart drummed at a welcoming ceremony for Nelson Mandela, and lyricist John Barlow has been a key activist in the struggle for a free Internet, as well as engaged in local Republican politics. Two members of the band are reportedly members of the Bohemian Club in San Francisco, a society where men of power—ex-presidents, business executives, bankers, and the like—form a very exclusive social club, with no “bohemian” credibility at all. There is, then, no lack of (more or less) respectable, conventional politics surrounding this band—although in these last examples, we are hard-pressed to find any whiff of the “counterculture.” Even the most anti-establishment rock group did have to negotiate and cooperate with that same establishment—Robert Hunter commented that they risked being “forced to become our opposites.”6 As always with this band, the resulting image is complicated and contradictory. After the so-called riots at the Deer Creek show—when thousands of ticketless spectators jumped the fences surrounding the arena, fighting security and police—the band on July 5, 1995, issued a rare statement to Deadheads, almost a decree, “The old slogan is true: if you’re not part of the solution, you’re part of the problem. The security and police whom those people endangered represent us, work for us—think of them as us.”7 Using a slogan favored by the revolutionaries of the sixties, but using it to secure the system rather than subverting it, the Grateful Dead had come all the way round: they did not simply ask their fans to respect or obey security and police, but asked them to identify the band with the law

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enforcement. In a press release regarding the cancellation of the July 3d show after the riots, tour manager Cameron Sears also said “[W]e particularly want to commend and show our support for the performance of the area law enforcement personnel last night.” The background to these statements was the safety of the audience, which had become of paramount importance for the band when moving into larger and larger arenas to play.8 Band members and representatives might have been “[d]esperate to avoid being ‘cops’,” as Dennis McNally says, but apparently the band was keenly aware of its responsibility to provide a safe environment, or “found itself dragged into exercising authority anyway.”9 The politics—not just the economics—of public assembly forced it into taking such a position. One of the ironies of the situation was also that, the day before the Deer Creek show, local media reported on the nice and peaceful gathering of Deadheads for the show: “the shows have a real family value kind of feel to them these days,” one spectator was quoted as saying, and the headline to the article announced: “All’s right with America as long as the Dead are still alive.”10 This also was how it looked to band members. Phil Lesh said, “People came to our shows as if they were a family reunion. Their commitment was as much to each other as it was to the music.”11 That commitment was reciprocal. The band always was clear about the fact that the band did not create Deadheads, Deadheads created themselves. That meant that not only was the band more or less trying to police the audience, but the audience itself also took measures that could be called a form of policing. Going to shows, becoming a Deadhead, had aspects reminiscent of initiation rites—young newcomers always could learn from seasoned veterans about how to behave, from parking lot manners to navigating psychedelic drug use. With the band’s growing popularity, however, these mechanisms and the Deadhead traditions were strained. Groups of fans documented the scene, reported the problems that the fans faced to the band’s organization, and sometimes also suggested solutions—a practice of responsibility that had started in the seventies. As Peter Conners notes, however, by “the early 90s, even the best efforts of Heads to police each other were coming up short.”12 The Deer Creek riot, however, was not exclusively an effect of the band’s enormous growth in popularity from the late eighties onward. In 1971, a newspaper article reported that at least “14 persons were arrested by the police, mostly upon loitering charges, as those denied entrance to the concert milled about outside the building and made sporadic attempts to break in.”13 A band like the Grateful Dead—at the time still closely connected with the counterculture—was of course often targeted with demands for

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free concerts, as can also be observed in the documentary movie Festival Express (2003), a movie on the 1970 tour that was made by train through a few Canadian cities by, among others, the Grateful Dead. Still, these recurrent demands on the band to play for free were not popular with band members, as angry statements in interviews testify: Free for the audience was never free for the artists. Twenty years later, the situation was different. Rioting at shows was not in the least any type of political gesture related to countercultural ideals, but rather perhaps only and simply was a way to not have to pay for a ticket—it also was a frustrated claim of the right to be part of something. For the band, this was a growing concern, because it risked running out of performance venues if audience behavior became out of control. But identifying with the police? How are we to understand this change or, perhaps better, this process? We of course can think of it as a process of “normalization,” a nearing to mainstream culture that also was acknowledged by that culture: Senators, businessmen, and celebrities of different types confessing that they were Deadheads. This sort of acknowledgement, however, perhaps is most of all a recognition of the band’s financial and political muscle when its audience became one of the biggest in America.14 The opening of this chapter employed a rhetoric of contrasts that oversimplifies matters. Still, we begin with a discussion of the band as a political phenomenon, which is what these examples indicate. As hinted above, Phil Lesh in 1994 said that the Grateful Dead could be seen as “the last holdout—the last piece of that culture that really exists in this era. . . . If it is the only remnant of the ’60s, thank goodness there’s something left. Because there really isn’t much else that survived the ’60s intact.”15 Lesh’s view is shared by Horace Fairlamb, who said, “[T]he musical phenomenon known as the Grateful Dead proved a more successful experiment in utopian possibilities than the New Left, not by imposing their agenda onto society at large, but by creating their own alternative culture out of which a remarkably successful mini-society grew of its own accord. Theirs is the success story of the revolutionary Sixties.”16 Even though this view—as expressed by Lesh and Fairlamb—is reasonable, I think it still is necessary to ask, by paraphrasing the band itself in one of its songs, “Saint Stephen”: Did the Grateful Dead matter politically? Do they now?

i There is an obvious first step to begin this discussion: The band repeatedly referred to itself as being an apolitical band. Garcia especially maintained

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that in many, many interviews, but it must have been either against his better knowledge—Garcia was sometimes pretty good at denying the obvious—or a strategic choice to refuse to shackle their art to any political agenda or ideology. Given the band’s appeal to even some conservative Republicans, Garcia’s avowed apolitical stance indeed was strategic, aiming at not estranging any potential audience for the band. Still, Garcia never missed a chance to attack the Reagan administration. Also, how could an apolitical band do a benefit for the Black Panther Party, which at the time was America’s number-one enemy (at least according to the FBI)? We have some loose semi-association with the Black Panthers because we met Huey [P. Newton] and got along well with him,” Jerry Garcia explained after the performance. “We don’t deal with things on the basis of content, the idea of a philosophy or any of that shit—mostly it’s personalities. [The show] did what it was supposed to do—it made them some bread.” He added that the Dead admired some of the Panthers’ social policies, notably their free breakfast program for neighborhood kids. “But it’s not our concern what they’re doing or why they’re doing it,” he said. Then his real feelings came through in a torrent: “I’m convinced, more than ever, that politics is bullshit, always was bullshit and will be bullshit. It’ll continue to be an empty, futile bullshit trip as long as people are willing to go for it. It doesn’t get things done. It has no real relationship to the world in which we exist.17

No matter what Garcia, or anyone else, thought about it, it is what you do—your practice—that counts. Under the claim of being apolitical, the Grateful Dead practiced a surprising amount of politics. The political significance of the Grateful Dead will stand out even more if the terms “politics” and “political” are given a significance that stands apart from mere “ideology.” Another step will make the band’s political significance—and stance— more obvious: All the benefits at which the band performed (and they were numerous) attest to this. In addition to the benefit for the Black Panther Party, a couple of weeks later they played another benefit, this time for a totally different cause: the Sufi Choir of San Francisco.18 The band stuck to its tradition of playing benefits, but eventually used the Rex Foundation, created and financed by the band, as an intermediary. This meant that every benefit would involve great diversity. A typical example is a 1988 Grateful Dead show at the Greek Theatre in Berkeley, California. This was a benefit for the Rex Foundation that raised money for the following causes: Heart of America and Bone Marrow Registry, Human Concern Center of Marin, Davis Science Center, Nest Foundation, Happy Camp High School, Fairfax-

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San Anselmo Children’s Center, Certified California Organic Farmers, Peace Center of Marin, Creating Our Future, Camp Winnarainbow, Children of the Night, Berkeley Society for the Preservation of Traditional Music, Friends of the River, Cascade Canyon School, Marin Community Food Bank, Wyoming Outdoor Council, and IN SPIRIT.19 It is important here to emphasize that, as Dennis McNally pointed out, the Grateful Dead “probably did more benefits than any band ever, and frequently for explicitly political groups, but they’d sign nothing. They put their time where their beliefs were, but not their mouths.”20 We could add that, in the nineties, the band demanded that the promoter provide space for nonprofit organizations to solicit and distribute information. These organizations, the band stated, were “non-profit, non-political,” but did include groups that engaged in conventional political work, including the Rainforest Action Network and Greenpeace, as well as Wharf Rats (a rehab group for Deadheads trying to stay sober), and the National Student Campaign for Voter Registration. It’s important to put some emphasis on the local character of those organizations frequently receiving funding. Even though the band sometimes also did things on a much grander scale—for example the Rainforest campaign of 1988—and it donated money to national and international causes, most of the band’s benefits privileged local charities, and local political and cultural causes. Those weren’t always San Franciscan or even Californian, but rather causes along the route of a tour. One out of many examples is a donation to the Broadway United Methodist Church in Indianapolis, when the band played in that city on July 1, 1995; another example is a $10,000 donation to the Sexual Assault Center in Seattle, after a show there in May 1995. Sometimes the donations would be to causes that the band wanted to support for musical reasons. In 1970, the Grateful Dead played a benefit for—and with!—the Buffalo Philharmonic and its conductor Lukas Foss. The Rex Foundation has supported “classical” composers also outside of the United States, as well as bluegrass musicians, music schools for children and youth, and avant-garde jazz musicians (such as Ornette Coleman, Sun Ra, and David Murray). Another step moves into an even more conventional conception of politics—and successful as it was, the band had to participate in a political discourse that it was at the same time quite estranged from. One example is the shows performed in Egypt in 1978, for which the press release issued by the band included phrases pointing to the performances as an “expression of the universality of culture.” After the tour, on October 10, 1978, the Egyptian ambassador to the United States, Ashraf A. Ghorbal, sent a letter

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to Jerry Garcia stating, “These concerts have become a unique chapter in the story of Egyptian-American friendship and we are pleased and gratified that the proceeds of the ticket sales went to the Faith and Hope Society and the Department of Antiquities. They will be put to good use.”21 In the negotiations preceding the shows, the Middle East Research Associates engaged by the Dead to clear the way for the band had written to that same ambassador about “President Sadat’s unrelenting and courageous quest for peace” (March 4, 1978). Robert Hunter also seemed to think of his lyrics for “Blues for Allah” as political—but, once again, these politics seem rather vague in their hinting at the Israel-Palestinian conflict: “What good is spilling blood? It will not grow a thing. . . . The desert stars are bright tonight, let’s meet as friends.”22 The performances in Egypt seem to have passed without being publicly exploited by political forces. The band and the event probably were a little too far from the mainstream to be suitable for political purposes, and the discourse that the band and its representatives had to engage in seems to have been the only price the band had to pay. Examples like these invite some questions. What could “politics” mean in relation to a travelling rock-and-roll band, and in relation to any “phenomenon” that the band generates? There are predecessors to this discussion, thinkers who use a political concept to understand rock music. One is the “invisible republic,” addressed by Greil Marcus in his book on Bob Dylan’s and the Band’s so called “basement tapes.”23 Another is Michael Kramer, who in his The Republic of Rock, wants to see the rock republic as part of what he calls a “transnational counterculture during the 1960’s and ’70s.” To the notion of rock as a “republic,” Kramer adds the notion of citizenship.24 Bill Kreutzmann talks about a “nation of Deadheads.”25 I think that they all suggest a way to understand the Dead as a political phenomenon. What did “politics” mean in that republic? How was that republic governed? And what did citizenship in the Dead nation entail?

ii When Charles Reich suggested that Garcia and the Dead could be looked upon as a “signpost to a new space,” Garcia agreed, saying, “Yes. That’s the place where we should be—that’s the function we should be filling in society. And in our own little society, that’s the function we do fill.”26 This was in 1972 when Garcia’s “little society” was rapidly growing albeit still possible to relate to. Garcia’s optimism was to some degree shared by Herbert Marcuse. Marcuse, as discussed above, supported the “rebels” and their will to create an altered consciousness but, for Marcuse, art—and not drugs—

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was the essential element. As he stated, art “alters experience,” and it does that by articulating what is “not accessible to ordinary language and ordinary experience.”27 Marcuse then denied that he had seen hippies as some kind of “revolutionary class” in late capitalism. Instead, he pointed to the new rebels as part of a disintegration within the system, “anarchically unorganized, spontaneous tendencies—that herald a total break with the dominant needs of repressive society.”28 This emancipatory tendency lacks subversive power, however; it lacks the material force to overthrow the system—the original German (and quite ambiguous) title of Marcuse’s book was also Das Ende der Utopie: The End of Utopia. Today, Marcuse’s analysis might seem too rough, too “square” in its longing for and formulation of a proper revolutionary project. Marcuse seems to engage in a rather conventional political discourse. He did, however, acknowledge something of a political significance of “the dissolution of ordinary and orderly perception.” Anyone the least knowledgeable about the Grateful Dead knows that the band’s culture has long been identified with drugs—especially psychedelics—and that the same goes for its audience culture. Therefore, a discussion of citizenship in the Grateful Dead republic must confront the issue of inebriation—even though that is a fraught topic, characterized by decades of propaganda and steeped in entrenched opinions. Also remember that, as Stephen Paul Miller suggests, “[h]istorical periods modify the ‘reality’ of drugs.”29 He makes a minor though useful reminder—even if I disagree with Miller that drugs are “a certain kind of escape from reality.” Critical theory conversely tends to look at drugs as an intensification of reality. Drugs perhaps never have been that central an issue within critical theory but, as Walter Benjamin writes in a letter; “Critical theory cannot fail to recognize how deeply certain powers of intoxication [Rausch] are bound to reason and to its struggle for liberation.”30 It took time for critical theory to realize this (if indeed it has done so), and even Gilles Deleuze could start his discussion of drugs thus: “Clearly no one knows what do to with drugs, not even the users. But no one knows how to talk about them either.”31 Normally, when drug use has been touched upon and talked about, it often is related to some sort of break; not so much with reality as with normality, with social order, with law. Walter Benjamin partook in some experiments with hashish, opium, and mescaline, writing “protocols” of what he experienced. He notes for example how the “enormous sensitivity” induced by eating hashish threatens language, “every moment of not being understood threatens to turn into acute unhappiness.”32 Benjamin then goes on to tell how a coffee cup is turned into a scepter, and in “a hashish

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trance, you can certainly talk about the hand’s need for a scepter.”33 The scepter has a traditional role as a sign of authority—which one loses under the influence of the drug. Further, in classical Greece the scepter gave the one holding it the right to speak—authority was then related to speech and language. It is precisely this language-based authority that drugs often do away with. A couple of years later, Benjamin wrote an essay, “Hashish in Marseilles,” in which he seems to leave speech and conversation behind; at least, he does not report any dialogues. Instead, the drug transports him into a physical state. “The music, which meanwhile kept rising and falling, I called the ‘rush switches of jazz.’ I have forgotten on what grounds I permitted myself to mark the beat with my foot. This is against my education, and it did not happen without inner disputation. There were times when the intensity of acoustic impressions blotted out all others.”34 In its triviality, Benjamin’s observation of his stomping foot is important: Drugs transport people out of their training, and allows them to do things they normally do not do. Peter Conners reports from a Dead show, under the influence: “I didn’t know how to dance—hell, I’d never even tried before—but my body didn’t care about that. It was going on without me.”35 Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari talk about drugs as a “deterritorialization,” “ ‘I was disoriented . . .’ (a perception of things, thoughts, desires in which desire, thought, and the thing have invaded all of perception: the imperceptible finally perceived).”36 But doesn’t this happen only momentarily, while listening to music under the influence of the drug? As a vehicle of transportation, drugs are a quite unreliable machine, not only because of their consequences for health and, for some of them, their capacity to be addictive. Michel Foucault, no stranger to drugs, contrasted a more ritual use of drugs, in which they ideally resulted in the “annihilation of the individual,” with contemporary Western drug culture, which he calls “individualistic if there ever was one.” In his view “it is all about refinding in oneself the internal possibilities of madness.”37 Deleuze seems to think along the same lines. Dividing the experience of drugs into vital and deadly experimentation, Deleuze emphasizes how the vital experimentation generates a “kind of self-destruction” because the self is open to “more and more connections.” But, like Foucault, Deleuze sees the “deadly experimentation” of drug use as a form of individualism. “The suicidal enterprise occurs when everything is reduced to this flow alone: ‘my’ hit, ‘my’ trip, ‘my’ glass. It is the contrary of connection: it is organized disconnection.”38 The drug history of the Grateful Dead can be interpreted along these lines: band members have often emphasized the importance of LSD in the development of their approach to music. Phil Lesh especially refers to the “group

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mind” as at least partly an effect of hallucinogenic drugs; the “group mind” meaning the band members ability to communicate musically in free improvisation.39 Garcia, for his part, stated in an early interview that his “little attempt at having a straight life and doing that was really a fiction” that LSD made it impossible to hold on to.40 Habits changed, however, and instead drugs such as cocaine and heroin entered the scene—and they do not produce any group minds, and instead tend to isolate every user within himself or herself. These drugs produce a systematic disconnection. Adorno and Horkheimer, in their classic Dialectic of Enlightenment, argue that drugs might generate a form of societal regression to a historical stage older “than any production.”41 Drugs, then, on a symbolic level might be interpreted as a withdrawal from work, from capitalist production and the work-ethic, from “a society based on work and on the subject answerable as subject,” as Jacques Derrida writes.42 The trajectory of the Grateful Dead, however, seems to indicate the opposite: certain drugs seem to reduce artistic creativity to industrial labor; and certain drugs actually support the work ethic, because they can be used to numb the body, and ignore basic physical needs, making it possible to stay awake longer, work harder, and be more focused.43 Derrida makes an important point in stating that as “soon as one utters the word ‘drugs,’ even before any ‘addiction,’ a prescriptive or normative ‘diction’ is already at work, performatively, whether one likes it or not.”44 Avital Ronell also sees this discursive logic, “Clearly, it is as preposterous to be ‘for’ drugs as it is to take up a position ‘against’ drugs.”45 This discursive ordering then already is at work in this text, and of course even more so in the culture surrounding the Grateful Dead, where hallucinogenic drugs still are being mythologized today, and sometimes even nostalgically commemorated—the CD box celebrating thirty years of music is entitled 30 Trips Around the Sun, and the simple ambiguity of “trips” is obvious. Not least the band members themselves have pointed to the importance of marijuana and LSD in learning to “stretch out” the music—what Bob Weir calls taking the songs “for a walk in the woods”46—incorporating different elements and improvising. That the use of other drugs is threatening to the music they frankly acknowledge, but less often. From the FBI files on the band, we can learn—albeit falsely—that “LSD originates from San Francisco, California[,] through a renowned rock group known as the Grateful Dead. The Grateful Dead is well known to DEA [Drug Enforcement Administration], San Francisco.”47 The emphasis on hallucinogenic drugs as the key to an understanding of why the Grateful Dead started “stretching” its music might be true, and

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there are, of course, traditional bonds between drugs and creative work. The point I wish to make here, however, is that drugs—as an important and integral part of the band’s as well as the culture’s understanding of itself— legitimize an existence on the outskirts of society, outside the law. This necessitated the forming of a community if the band was to persevere in this alternative existence. Todd Gitlin in his analysis of the sixties hints at a similar point when he suggests that drugs are “perhaps the most potent form of mass communication,” and in combination with other mass media, “notions which had been the currency of tiny groups were percolating through the vast demographics of the baby boom. . . . As with the beats, the cultural panic spread the news, the image of hippiehood.”48 Thus, drugs— those used by band members and by the audience—do point to a political problematic, noticeable for instance when Garcia talks about the Grateful Dead’s function, “Music goes back way before language does. And music is like the key to a whole spiritual experience, which this society doesn’t even talk about. We know it’s there. The Grateful Dead plays at religious services essentially. We play at the religious services of the new age. Everybody gets high and that’s what’s it all about, really.”49 One also could—as David Shumway does—see the band as embodying the counterculture, “the Dead consciously sought to embody the idea of counterculture, meaning an alternative to the dominant social order founded on different rules and values.”50 Not surprisingly, a Grateful Dead show has been likened to a Dionysian party, but as Stan Spector emphasizes, the Dionysian cannot be understood without the Apollonian.51 In the music of the Grateful Dead, the tension between these two forms is quite tangible, as on one hand a striving for ecstasy, and on the other the striving for the definitive version, or a kind of dream-like clarity, of a song. Spector wants to follow a sort of Nietzschean thread through the lyrics of the band. Be that as it may, the discussion of the Dionysian and the cultic can, I think, be taken a step further. The Dionysian Festival then serves as the model for characterizations of a Dead show as an excessive feast. What these comments tend to overlook, however, is that the Dionysian festival in classical Athens was a very political event: it served, Paul Cartledge writes, “as a device for defining Athenian civic identity, which meant exploring and confirming but also questioning what it was to be a citizen of a democracy, this brand-new form of popular self-government.”52 This gives us a perspective on the Dionysian character of the Grateful Dead show: It was not only a matter of “getting high” but also—and more importantly—was a statement, issued to both the exterior world as well as to the interior, of the necessity of a radical self-forming, and of forming a lasting counterculture.

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iii The sixties’ “counterculture”—already touched upon several times above— seems to have about as many definitions as it has commentators. Perhaps this actually accurately mirrors the counterculture as an eclectic, flexible, and changing assemblage of people and projects. Theodore Roszak—who came up with the concept of “counterculture”—put more effort into giving a definition of what this culture countered, namely technocratic society, than of the culture itself. Roszak defines “technocracy” as the “social form in which an industrial society reaches the peak of its organizational integration.”53 As Roszak points out, technocracy tends to make itself “ideologically invisible”54; put differently, technology turns into second nature, becomes a given rather than a historical product. Against this technocracy, Roszak frames his “youthful opposition” or “styles of dissent”—his idea being that the resistance against technocracy is fueled by an “extraordinary personalism.”55 This means that truth and authenticity for the resistance must have more than merely ideological foundations. Namely, an orientation to the individual, “grounded in an intensive examination of the self, of the buried wealth of personal consciousness.”56 But there is every reason to question this emphasis on the individual, and instead underline the composite character of the counterculture. The term “counterculture” falsely reifies what should never properly be construed as a social movement. It was an inherently unstable collective of attitudes, tendencies, postures, gestures, “lifestyles,” ideals, visions, hedonistic pleasures, moralisms, negations, and affirmations. These roles were played by people who defined themselves first by what they were not, and then, only after having cleared that essential ground of identity, began to conceive anew what they were. What they were was what they might become—more a process than a product, and thus more a direction or a motion than a movement.57

It is easy to observe this composite character in the tension between the New Left and hippies—even though that polarization is a simplification. The Grateful Dead performed at what was meant as a unifying event for both leftists and hippies, the Human Be-In in San Francisco (1967). Not as much political unity came out of the event as its organizers wished, although one could see connections between the more established Beat poets and their younger admirers among the rock musicians being formed. But Jerry Garcia even called one of the main speakers at the event, Yippie politician Jerry Rubin, “at worst fascistic.”58 and Lesh writes about “some leftist politicos from Berkeley” as the “only bring-down of the day.”59

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Hunter S. Thompson reported in the New York Times that the initiative was moving from Berkeley to the Haight-Ashbury, or what he called the “Hashbury,” apparently because acid was more powerful than left-wing politics: “A cap of good acid costs $5, and for that you can hear the Universal Symphony with God singing solo and the Holy Ghost on drums.”60 Still, the counterculture must include both leftists of different shadings as well as so called hippies—and others. Joanna Freer uses “counterculture” as what she calls a “general term” which covers “the New Left, the psychedelic movement, the Black Panther Party, the Yippies, and even the women’s movement.” Freer bases this wide inclusive definition on what she sees as “core values,” shared to varying degrees by the different parts of the aggregate. Those core values, “collectively” endorsed, include “personalism, egalitarianism, communitarianism, participation, and flexibility of structure. In the individual: openness, continuous attention to learning, creativity, wholeness, responsibility, the privileging of the moment over end goals, and a focus on the subjectivity of consciousness.”61 With Freer we have come quite far from the psychological emphasis of Roszak, and it is obvious that the Grateful Dead spent their early years right in the middle of the tensions generated by this often-contradictory contemporary motion: performing at benefits for the Black Panthers as well as for the Sufi Choir within just a few weeks’ time. Before that, the band had been part of the Acid Tests, parties that rapidly grew to include a few thousand people testing then-legal LSD. In his discussion of the Acid Tests, Michael J. Kramer emphasizes that the tests “became collective attempts to reshape the meaning and boundaries of collectivity itself.”62 This composite character of the band’s primary context is reproduced in the band’s audience. This republic was, and still is, inhabited by people with very differing motives for being there, forming a very diverse culture— though admittedly predominantly male and white. Saxophonist/composer Branford Marsalis reminisced about playing with the Dead in 1990, and although he raved about the band’s musicianship, he especially singled out the audience: “The crowd was there to listen. When most people go to concerts, they say, ‘I’m going to see such-and-such.’ Dead fans—they went to hear the band.” He also talked about closer encounters with that audience: “I got people calling my house: ‘That was a fantastic show. ‘Hey, how did you get this number?’ ‘We’re everywhere, man. But don’t worry about it. We’re harmless.’ ”63 Deadheads were tapers, who with advanced audio technology were recording shows and then circulating tapes. They were Deafheads, who could experience the music through the vibrations and follow, in the Nineties, the lyrics through sign interpretation. They were

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Wharf Rats, fans who wanted or needed to stay sober during the shows as well as in their everyday lives. Some were imprisoned, often for unreasonably long periods of time, for drugs used and sold. Some were leftists (like this writer), some were university professors (like this writer), some were right-wing politicos (Ann Coulter, for one),64 some were “Spinners” (members of the Church of Unlimited Devotion, a small Deadhead congregation based in Mendocino, California65), others were college students,66 others were members of what today often is called the “precariat”—people without reasonable work conditions or secure positions, people that late capitalism locks into a state of social insecurity. There is no typical “Deadhead,” just an assortment of different heads—although the most common Deadhead probably is male, white, and college educated.67 What should be an authoritative source here, David Shenk and Steve Silberman’s Skeleton Key: A Dictionary for Deadheads, defines “Deadhead” as someone “who loves—and draws meaning from—the music of the Grateful Dead and the experience of Dead shows, and builds community with others who feel the same way.” That definition is of course rather open, and the authors also warn us that Deadheads have differing opinions about what it means to be a Deadhead: “a lifestyle, a set of progressive social values, a religion, or strictly a musical preference.”68 Already this basic account of the “styles of dissent” hints at different, more or less organized forms of being a citizen of the Grateful Dead republic. Mikal Gilmore gives a general characteristic of Deadheads—that “sprawling coalition of fans,” as he calls them—that emphasizes the political dimension. In his view, to identify as a Deadhead in 1995, was an act of conscious dissent: a protest against the anger and malice that seems to characterize so much of our social and artistic temper these days. The Deadheads may sometimes seem like naïfs, but I’m not convinced their vision of community is such an undesirable thing. After all, there are worse sustained visions around—for example, the conservative and neoconservative ideologies that have engendered disaster in the nation since the 1980s and that still scourge any community of the misfit or helpless.69

In what way could a constantly moving, constantly changing mass of people be called a “community”? Deadheads tend to look at themselves as part of a community, even though, as one sociologist has noted, not “all Deadheads would describe their community in similar terms.”70 So what is it that turns a mass of people of different backgrounds, class, education, ethnicity, religion, and age into a community of some kind? Jay Williams engages Benedict Anderson’s well-known idea that communities, nations

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above all, are always “imagined,” and it is a productive perspective on the Grateful Dead phenomenon.71 Benedict Anderson, in his original discussion, singles out four criteria characterizing the imagined community as “both inherently limited and sovereign.” The first criteria is that the “members of even the smallest nation will never know most of their fellow-members,” but they still think of each other as belonging to the same community. This rings true for the nation of Deadheads as well—although friendships were made at shows and people shared the music, they would never know everyone in the audience. Secondly, Anderson points to the limits of the community as “finite, if elastic, boundaries, beyond which lie other nations.” In the case of the Deadhead nation the boundaries were very flexible, and were increasingly so with the band’s growing popularity—but there was always another nation surrounding the community, that of mainstream America. Here it is important to understand that the Grateful Dead phenomenon cannot be equated with a youth movement: it is not about young people being surrounded by the parental generation, it is rather a political difference that is crucial, what we could call the “politics of ecstasy” against the “politics of normativity.” Third, Anderson sees the imagined community of the nation as sovereign, because “the concept was born in an age in which Enlightenment and Revolution were destroying the legitimacy of the divinely-ordained, hierarchical dynastic realm.” Of course, the nation of Deadheads cannot be given the same historical significance, but it can be looked upon as one consequence—out of many—of this newfound sovereignty, in that the center of the community was self-definition and self-organization. Anderson’s fourth and final criterion speaks to the nature of the community: “regardless of the actual inequality and exploitation that may prevail in each, the nation is always conceived as a deep, horizontal comradeship.”72 That “comradeship,” if anything, characterizes the Deadhead community. Benedict Anderson’s theory goes a long way in answering Gary Burnett’s question of what a “community might be in the absence of physical proximity.”73 Burnett tries to answer that question through looking at Deadhead virtual communities, Internet-based forums of different kinds, and he therewith points to the importance of media. Also Jay Williams, who looks at the Deadhead community from a more historical perspective, emphasizes different media: “the newspaper, the broadsheet, the music concert, the rock poster, and the album.”74 Already in Anderson’s discussion of the origins of nationalism, modern print culture, or what he calls “print-capitalism,” plays a crucial role in producing one general community out of a diverse set of communities.75 Even though the community as such is imagined, also in

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the case of Deadheads, this imaginary nation has powerful support in these “material events,” as Williams calls them,76 producing identities within the community. Jacob Cohen suggests that the entourage of Deadheads might be seen as a “nomadic musical audience,” with deep roots in American history: rather than being inventors, the Grateful Dead phenomenon is “the inheritor of a rich strain in American culture that goes back almost two hundred years. In the camp-meeting religious cultures of nineteenthcentury America one finds the same type of nomadic musical audience.”77 It is worth pausing here to add to the comments above about drugs and Deadheads, as drugs are one apparent medium through which both band and fans generated a certain comradeship, as well as defined themselves in relation to the surrounding society. The Grateful Dead were, as the FBI files noted, well-known to the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), which increasingly targeted the band and its audience over the years. Band members of course had their share of “drug busts,” most famously the one in 1970 in New Orleans, alluded to in the song “Truckin’,” but there were several others. It was the audience, however, that bore the brunt of lawenforcement efforts, and local police often were as great offenders as the DEA. Band meetings discussed the activities of the DEA, both in 1985, when the band discussed a “DEA investigation of certain phone records,”78 and again in 1992, when the DEA filed a subpoena to make Pacific-Bell release information about the “Grateful Dead hotline,” a telephone service informing fans about shows and tickets, a demand the band chose to resist.79 Deadheads proved to be easier targets. In December 1992, the journal USA Today featured an article about imprisoned Deadheads, many of whom faced unreasonably long sentences for possession of LSD, due to a dubious statute that included the weight of the carrier with the drug—thus a sugar cube laded with LSD could be construed as a presumed “intent to sell,” making sentences for first-time offenders who were only casual users much longer than sentences for convicted murderers and rapists.80 Carol Brightman estimates the number of imprisoned Deadheads to “fewer than a hundred in 1988 to over two thousand two years later,” a number that could be as high as ten thousand a few years later, according to Relix editor Toni Brown.81 Once asked about how he looked upon repression, Jerry Garcia responded that he was “concerned with repression only when it comes to my door and represses me.”82 Repression, in the Grateful Dead world, could be spelled, “p-o-l-i-c-e” but also, and perhaps foremost, “DEA”: “ ‘We have opened a vein here,’ exulted Gene Haislip, head of LSD enforcement at the Drug Enforcement Administration. ‘We’re going to mine it until this whole thing turns around.’ ”83 These attacks continued also after

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Garcia’s passing in 1995, as when DEA chief Tom Constantine declared: “And you can’t have Jerry Garcia, reportedly a heroin addict, now being extolled as one of the great parts of the American system, and what a wonderful person he was, and things like that.”84 Aside from the clear statement that Deadheads were easy targets, the linguistic violence and contempt employed by Haislip and Constantine was a declaration of war, and the band’s (only) answer to this repression was to try and protect the scene by gaining permission from USA Today to distribute the article at shows as a warning to those in the audience interested in hallucinogens.85 One might easily conclude that everyone in the audience at a Grateful Dead show was selling drugs—probably to each other. But this is a clearly wrong-headed, malicious view of the scene. Many fans—albeit to varying degrees—tried to make a living out of their interest in the band in less dangerous ways, selling tie-dyed t-shirts, artworks, or food such as grilledcheese sandwiches and homemade burritos at shows. The number of cover bands performing Grateful Dead music still today (2016) seems endless, and over the years several have achieved significant commercial success, most notably Dark Star Orchestra. Others wrote about the band, even starting fanzines that grew into full-fledged magazines: Dead Relix, The Golden Road (as discussed in Chapter 1), and Dupree’s Diamond News. The Grateful Dead is today probably the most well-documented rock band of all time, with an enormous amount of live shows available on the Internet, in the Archive, as well as on YouTube, and elsewhere. Life in the Grateful Dead republic, however, was not always idyllic. Even in the Acid Tests there was a strong ambiguity at work. The Acid Tests have been nostalgically recalled by band members and Pranksters, most of whom characterize the Acid Test as a free space in which there was no division between performers and audience: every participant was performing, making the event more important than any performance. But the Tests were also manipulated—the event was observed from the inside; there was a control center, manned by Kesey and others, connected to speakers, cameras, and lights, all feeding the sensorium, even if largely unplanned. If it was a free space, then in a sense it was under surveillance by the Pranksters in a way that mimics today’s surveillance society, in that anonymous surveillance can now be found everywhere. This surveillance took on a more direct, exterior form, when LSD became illegal: Now the police also watched the scene. Grateful Dead shows became easy targets for drug squads; plainclothes cops mingled with the audience, and the next day newspapers often reported how many drug arrests the police had made the night before. According to a report in the Oakland Tribune, 75 arrests were made during

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a three-day stint in 1989 at the Greek Theatre in Berkeley: “The Dead concerts are an annual event for which the police gear up, but arrests this year set a record, said UC police Lt. Pat Carroll.”86 The police knew that Deadheads were easy targets: as one police detective said, “they’re the nicest people in the world to arrest.”87 As the audience grew, so did the size of the venues, and the attendant security apparatus. In a 3,000-seat theatre, security can be low key; in a 60,000-person stadium, there are fences, gates, guards, police, and surveillance cameras: the ecstatic practices of the audience were allowed—but constantly monitored—and in 1990, when the Grateful Dead played Foxboro, Massachusetts, local police even requested the support of the National Guard. Forty Guard officers, using night-vision goggles and a helicopter, assisted a large local police force in targeting drug use and dealing, despite the troubling—and serious—violations of concertgoers’ civil rights.88 The outcome, looked upon as a huge success by the authorities, was a mere thirty arrests, a number comparable to other rock acts and sports events at the venue and, in relation to the mass of people gathered, in fact a very low number. At some shows, as at the Charlotte Coliseum in June 1991, a temporary jail was set up at the arena.89 Grateful Dead shows were not only an easy way to justify police budgets, but also apparently used by the authorities as training camps on how to control the country’s own population. Police surveillance of the Grateful Dead scene to a large degree was part of the “War on Drugs.” Originally launched by the Nixon regime towards the end of the sixties, the War on Drugs, Dan Baum comments, “is about a lot of things, but only rarely is it really about drugs.”90 Instead, it can be seen as a dress rehearsal in the development of modern forms of control over a population, and with racism built in from the start. John Ehrlichman, aide to President Nixon, was quite clear on this in a 1992 interview, conducted by Dan Baum. The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar Left, and black people. You understand what I’m saying? We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black. But by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.91

As Baum shows, the War on Drugs meant, during the Reagan regime, that armed federal forces such as the military, police, customs, and the DEA,

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grew, and the civil sectors of society, such as schools, shrank. The War on Drugs could mean heavily armed raids against drug cartels in Mexico, but also small everyday practices aiming at the disciplining of individuals. Baum tells of a typical scene, featuring a representative of PRIDE [“Parent Resources and Information on Drug Education”], one of the organizations that formed around the War on Drugs, pretending to represent mainstream America, and working to prevent American kids from finding out about drugs in their own way. When she visited classrooms she’d pick out the scrawniest boy in the class, the one with the long hair and the sallow complexion and the Grateful Dead stickers on his notebook. She’d make him stand and take his shirt off in front of the others. See what pot smoking can do to you? She’d say. The kids would get very quiet.92

This might be a trivial scene from the larger perspective, yet undeniably was a traumatic experience for the boy who was pilloried. The point is that this scene was part of a larger endeavor by the authorities to discover and develop ways through which the population would control itself. The War on Drugs combined repressive violence with this type of psychological warfare, and Deadheads were easy targets for both strategies. “The DEA continued shadowing Grateful Dead concerts,” Baum writes about the nineties, “determined to bust deadheads for LSD until, in the words of the agent in charge, ‘the whole thing turns around.’ ”93 The War on Drugs then hit the Grateful Dead scene, but the scene was being watched over from the inside as well: tapers were documenting the music, others were filming the show. This documentation often has been used to assess discrepancies, such as how Garcia varied the lyrics, or Weir changed the order of the verses. Variations were observed, pinned down, checked. The band itself used both audio and visual technology to document its work, and the recordings were used as material for the band’s discussions and analyses of the music. In later years, the band members also used technology that allowed them to communicate with each other on stage, without the audience hearing them. Ambiguity is deeply embedded in the Deadhead community: Deadheads are identified through social practices of “othering,” but Deadheads also affirmed othering and practiced “self-othering.”94 The band’s call to its listeners to unite as freaks—“Dead Freaks Unite”—was a gesture that exploited this ambiguity, continuing the hippie appropriation of “freak” as a positive word. The band had a long history of systematically playing with this ambiguity, embodied in Ron McKernan’s appearance—he looked like a

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dangerous biker even if his nickname was “Pigpen,” after the cartoon character in Charles M. Schulz’ Peanuts. Othering must be seen as a dialectic process, the surrounding society and media trying to fence off the phenomenon from of the public sphere, and the phenomenon to the contrary affirming othering to strengthen its identity, appropriating this othering for its own use and identity practices. Rebecca G. Adams has observed how the “cultural mainstream applies a tribal stigma to Deadheads because they do not appear to be what they should be.”95 The formulation is, once again, suggestive in that it hints at an essential Deadheadness that each Deadhead should personify—but there isn’t. The linguistic logic is of the kind that Marcuse pointed to when discussing the language of “prevailing Law and Order”: “This language not only defines and condemns the Enemy, it also creates him; and this creation is not the Enemy as he really is but rather as he must be in order to perform his function for the Establishment.”96 The Deadhead identity is the effect of othering, which must be seen as a double movement, a combination of the language of power (police, media, local authorities) and a subversive appropriation of the same language. In 1989, with the growing audience and attendant problems, security chief Ken Viola wrote in a letter addressed to the promoter John Scher of Monarch Entertainment that forms of bad behavior were considered “normal” for a Bruce Springsteen or Billy Joel concert by the surrounding society, but “Grateful Dead concerts, however, scare them. . . . They are confused over anything out of the norm, or more succinctly, what they PERCEIVE as being different. . . . Let’s face it. The fact that the Grateful Dead audience[s] look different from the average 1980’s concertgoer marks them.” Promoter Scher wrote in a letter to the band’s manager Jon McIntire, “Politics in the United States being what they are, the Grateful Dead have become an easy target for the conservatives.”97 This othering, though, was not a recent phenomenon, occurring with the band’s rise to a position as a top-grossing act on the American touring circuit. Rather, it accompanied the band from the start: it was used and exploited by the band as an important aspect of its community-building. Drugs were a symbolic center of this othering, and we can therefore situate the band within a certain historical trajectory. When the San Francisco Board of Supervisors in 1875 legislated against drugs and drug use, the legislation was directed against Chinese immigrants who upheld the tradition of opium smoking. Shane Blackman sees this legislation precisely as a form of othering: “This early anti-drug legislation was ethnocentric and centered on the fears of sexual corruption of young women and men by ‘foreigners’ who were seen by politicians and media as polluting the purity of the race.”98

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According to Avital Ronell, this othering is still ongoing, “Under the impacted signifier of drugs, America is fighting a war against a number of felt intrusions. They have to do mostly with the drift and contagion of a foreign substance, or of what is revealed as foreign (even if it should be homegrown).”99 But late capitalism has a logic of its own: The othering of the drug user is transformed into an apotheosis of the “cultural outlaw,” as Shane Blackman writes, “and this in turn becomes a means for commercial ends for promotion by the record company.”100 The Grateful Dead were precisely and perfectly suited for—and caught within—this paradox. Life within in the republic of the Grateful Dead was the effect of a kind of subject formation, generated by or through the band—and as the band wrote in a letter to its audience in June 1988, “We didn’t invent Deadheads: you created yourself.”101 What is at stake in this subject formation generated around the music of the Grateful Dead is the forming of a collective body, what Jacques Rancière calls a “community of sense,” which means that “the kind of equality and freedom that is experienced in aesthetic experience has to be turned into the community’s very form of existence: a form of collective existence that will no longer be a matter of form and appearance but will rather be embodied in living attitudes, in the materiality of everyday sensory experience.”102 Herein lies the political significance of the Grateful Dead and the phenomenon surrounding the band—in the organizing of sensory experience, in the “distribution of the sensible,” and making it a constitutive part of social life.

iv The perhaps most obviously political aspect of the Grateful Dead is the band’s elaborate and somewhat subversive use of American iconography in its imagery and lyrics. On the cover of the band’s debut album Grateful Dead, Garcia is wearing a hat with red and white stripes, and on Live/Dead, the “Dead” part of the album title is inscribed in the American flag, with black skulls added to the imagery. On the cover of “Skull and Roses” (1970), the Grateful Dead’s eponymous live album, photos include Pigpen with the American flag wrapped as a bandana around his head, and there are pictures of the band, from roughly the same time, with the American flag in the background—sometimes turned upside down. This is not the military gesture, signifying dire distress, but rather a statement about turning American myth upside down—and it meant that the band’s vision of its native country was quite different from the hegemonic image, which Timothy E. Scheurer summarizes.

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[T]he myth of America as presented in popular song: America is a vast, rugged, and plentiful land, whose destiny is providentially guided by the hand of God, and where, because of the noble sacrifices of pilgrims and patriots in the cause of liberty and freedom, we enjoy unlimited opportunity, equality and freedom.103

The band seems to have intentionally engaged in a type of displacement or disorientation of several traditions and symbols central to America. The most obvious example is perhaps the “Stealie” (or “steal your face”), the iconic image of a stylized skull with a lightning bolt on its frontal bone. This image has been circulated in countless variations, but the basic image is in blue, red, and white, and the bolt has thirteen points, the same colors and the same number of lines as found on the American flag, representing the thirteen original colonies (which became the first thirteen states).104 It wasn’t necessarily antagonistic; the band does not deny its American affiliation, on the contrary, it emphasizes it: it is an identity that the band would keep stretching, testing its significance, trying out different forms of being “American.” America is still that experiment about how much can we get away with? The whole notion of whatever freedom is—we’re still part of that. If the Grateful Dead get to define this next level of success, if we actually come up with some notion of how to deal with it, it will be a real boon for what America’s really about in a sort of spiritual sense.105

But in doing that, they evoked another America—not corporate America, not imperialist America, not suburban middle-class America. Or as Garcia put it, when asked whether one could like both the Republican Party and the Grateful Dead, “Yeah, we’re American too. What we do is as American as lynch mobs. America has always been a complex place.”106 The familiar Dead skeleton rendered as a Minuteman served as a stage backdrop for the band’s twentieth anniversary performance at the Greek Theater in Berkeley, and it was certainly no random choice. Here was a signal that the band was prepared to perform its vision of a different America: their Minuteman did not hold a gun, but a guitar.107 How alternative their America really was can be disputed. In 1993, three members of the band sang the national anthem before a San Francisco Giants baseball game, surrounded by a soldout Candlestick Park and by all the traditional insignia of such an event: flags, soldiers “honoring America,” and cannon fire. As one commentator writes on YouTube, “Most American thing I have ever seen.”108 This ambiguity, so productive musically for the band, is perhaps best articulated by Bob Weir, when in an interview he says that the band members “espouse the American musical tradition” but also that they “make music that was

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in some way expressive of a fairly critical view of the social structure that spawned them.”109 Robert Hunter’s lyrics for the band formed into an imaginary American universe. Starting in earnest with the album Workingman’s Dead (though some hints of it exist on previous albums), the band would call forth an America populated by gamblers, hustlers, losers, and cowboys, but also by coal miners, railway workers, and vagabonds. Here, the Dead could draw on alternative traditions in their depiction of America. For instance the folkprotest movement of the early sixties whose myth of America, Scheurer maintains, “was that the individual, especially the worker, was the central component of America’s mission to the world.”110 Thus, the band took its leave from Jack and Jill, the all-American couple, in “Ramble On Rose”: “Good-bye, Mama and Papa / Good-bye, Jack and Jill / the grass ain’t greener, the wine ain’t sweeter / either side of the hill.”111 But if life is the same on both sides of the hill, where could one go? The song seemingly celebrates the breaking of chains, but it doesn’t promise any rewards: There is no utopia. The same could be said of “U.S. Blues,” in which Hunter again plays with an eclectic assortment of American icons and sayings. But who or what “Uncle Sam” is might be a question without any given answer, “I’m Uncle Sam, that’s who I am / Been hidin’ out, in a rock-and-roll band.”112 Nor is he coming forward trustworthy, this Uncle Sam promises to “run your life, steal your wife”—which is impossible not to read as an allegorical image of American (foreign) policy. But this song, too, marked by Hunter’s recurrent irony, offers no utopia, but only a gesture: “Son of a gun / better change your act / We’re all confused, what’s to lose?” These lyrics might not seem that political, at least not overtly. They must be interpreted to gain political significance, and discussing precisely the lyrics of “U.S. Blues,” David Shumway concludes that they point to “a band more aware of social and political life than they are usually reputed to have been.”113 Lyricist Robert Hunter also explained that, “when I’m writing for me, I am speaking for me, and when I write for the Dead I must take a more universal stance. It must (within limits of course) speak for all of us, the community and the equipment guys too.”114 What might seem as a quite defensive attitude—keeping politics out of the songs—can be interpreted as something totally different: in trying to speak for the “community,” song lyrics take on a political function, which can be something other than an intentional direct political or ideological statement. Even “My Brother Esau,” with lyrics by John Barlow and which Bob Weir calls “our most political song,” is political only as allegory.115 But even more overtly political is “Throwing Stones,” once again with lyrics by Barlow, and which

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Weir called an “anarchistic diatribe,” and which Dennis McNally called “by far the most overtly political song in the Dead catalog.”116 In its directness, it is also an exception in the Dead’s songbook. Both “Ramble on Rose” and “U.S. Blues,” along with “Ship of Fools,” were originally written and performed during the Nixon era, with the war on Vietnam raging.117 The Grateful Dead were never known for political activism, they did not celebrate confrontation with the police and power the way for example that Jefferson Airplane did (“Up against the wall, Motherfucker”). Garcia commented upon the band’s position vis-á-vis Nixon: “. . . I mean the way I see it, we can’t get high unless they continue on that miserable bummer. We’re a reaction to it. Our highness is the polarity.”118 Othering, in other words: the band needed hegemonic American politics and culture to form itself into something else, thereby also confirming Foucault’s thought of what he calls an “immediate and founding correlation between conduct and counter-conduct.”119 This “counter-conduct” Foucault tentatively defines as conduct practiced by a “movement whose objective is a different form of conduct, that is to say: wanting to be conducted differently, by other leaders (conducteurs) and other shepherds, towards other objectives and forms of salvation, and through other procedures and methods.”120 Here, Foucault is discussing early modern Christianity, but his thought might be transferred to the Grateful Dead: other (non)leaders, other procedures and methods in order to gain new forms of salvation. Instead of Holy Communion, celebrants must take the Acid Test. As Foucault adds, these movements seek to “define the way for each to conduct himself”—which is a key to the extreme individualism that band members often expressed. The Grateful Dead were part of, and practiced, rapidly expanding forms of counter-conduct, based not on programmatic or dogmatic principles but rather on intuitive forms of opposition combined with a genuine hunger for difference. The band never did come out as anti-war activists, although it did perform in such contexts. As Bob Weir said, “We weren’t into protesting it. . . . In our hearts, we were against it [the war in Vietnam]”.121 His bandmates agreed. Bill Kreutzmann felt that, “We weren’t political hippies. We were the much more dangerous kind—fun-loving, peace-seeking, do-as-youwish hippies that just wanted everybody to get on with their getting on, whatever that may be.”122 Having fun when the war on Vietnam was still raging? Seeking peace when the National Guard killed students in their own country? Why hide their politics inside their “hearts”? Yet, the Dead were not as politically naïve as these examples might suggest. Conversely, they were reasonably conscious of what was going on in America, and

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about the mechanisms defining society and social relations. Instead of political declarations, resisting appropriation by external political interests, the band invested in a more or less carnivalesque use of American tradition and myth, a more or less systematic displacement that interacted with the band’s use of a wide array of American musical forms: blues, country and western, jazz, bluegrass, rockabilly, folk songs—forms the band often would use as a launching ramp for its improvisations, or for more delimited modernizations of traditional forms, as exemplified by “Cumberland Blues” (on Workingman’s Dead), which hints at what could have been a traditional workingman’s song about taking shifts in the mine. In an interview, Garcia explained, Our trip has never been to go out and change the world. I mean, what would we change it to? Whatever we did would probably be worse than the way it is now. . . . ’Cos here we are, still surviving, still following this intuitive path which makes itself up as it goes along in an almost magical way and yet it’s no mystery. I just believe that if you get caught up in reality or society or any of the rest of those illusions, you’re definitely gonna get nowhere.123

The declared politics of the Grateful Dead might then seem mild, not very radical, often as contradictory in its celebration of a myth of America as not. Still, I would maintain that the political significance of the Dead is a much more important and complex aspect of their project than that of almost any other band. But it is a political significance that originates from the band’s resolute turning away from conventional forms of American politics (yes, the Dead did say no to playing a benefit for the democratic presidential candidate George McGovern’s election campaign in 1972),124 as well as their refusal to invest in traditional forms of rock rebellion. Those early pictures of the band waving guns did not continue, nor did they find public expression again, except for an amusing episode, told by David Browne: band members took a television set, on which the then governor of California, Ronald Reagan, was appearing, and used it as target for their gunfire.125 For the band, turning away from mainstream America— especially its politics—was never more resolute than during the presidency of Ronald Reagan. The band had firsthand experience of Reagan as governor of California from 1967 to 1975, an important period for the Dead, and they would never give in on their disdain for Reagan. As Garcia said at the time, “The Grateful Dead do not interact at all with Reagan’s America—it does not intrude into our reality. It strikes me that Reagan’s America is like a rabid dog which is randomly biting itself in the leg but it’s not going to get its teeth into the Dead. If there’s anything the Dead share, it’s a

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pathological mistrust of authority. We don’t accept leading from each other, much less the world at large.”126 Turning their backs on politics, including the left-wing politics they met as part of the early San Francisco scene, the band still had an interesting political function and dimension. If the lyrics to the band’s songs were rarely overtly political, however, then the music carries much more political significance. To John Street, rock music’s politics generally “lie in the sounds and their structures, in the way they refuse or embrace musical orthodoxies, in the way they follow and disturb expectations.”127 This sharply rigorous view puts heavy demands on musical language, a stance that Garcia seems to reject: “Music isn’t propagandist. It isn’t political. It’s free of the confusion of language, for example—it just cuts through all of that.”128 Garcia is both right and wrong: No musical tone is political in and of itself, but in a given situation, any tone could potentially gain political significance. Or as Theodore Gracyk puts it, “as a specifically musical gesture, a guitar riff or a melody or a dissonant voice is strangely mute. It represents nothing at all. Its capacity to mean anything, to convey one meaning rather than another or to support one ideology rather than another, rests on its relation to previous music.”129 Bill Kreutzmann seems to suggest this when he praises “the promise that music without politics could just be the most effective politics of all.”130 And of course, Street’s dichotomies are not unproblematic when it comes to a band such as the Grateful Dead—which saw itself as part of a community, providing the sounds for its celebrations (or its religious ceremonies). Could the Dead then “refuse musical orthodoxies,” could they “disturb expectations”? How would that community answer to refusal and disturbance? The “social significance” of the Dead’s music depends, as it does for music in general, on “how it articulates and consolidates structurally necessary practices of listening,” as John Mowitt writes.131 The Grateful Dead practiced a constant negotiation between refusal and embracing, following or disturbing—as discussed in Chapter 1—and then generating “practices of listening,” including dancing, meditative, intellectual, sober, intoxicated. As Mikal Gilmore put it, “At their best, they were a band capable of surprising both themselves and their audience, while at the same time playing as if they had spent their whole lives learning to make music as a way of talking to one another, and as if music were the language of their sodality, and therefore their history. No doubt it was.”132 But here I would like to emphasize the political dimension of this constant negotiation. The political significance of the Grateful Dead lies in what Street calls rock music’s “role in shaping and focusing experience.”133 Although rock music, and popular

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music in general, however, have an obvious role in the listener’s identity formation, specifically regarding sexuality, the Grateful Dead were not very prominent in performing sexual politics. And yet there is a sort of prolific gender activity immersed in the Grateful Dead phenomenon. . . .

v One of the most-loved Grateful Dead songs is “Scarlet Begonias,” with music by Garcia and lyrics by Robert Hunter. The studio version can be found on the album From the Mars Hotel (1974). It is a happy song, optimistic, with an infectious rhythm and it often opened up to improvisation. The lyrics tell of an encounter with a woman, rock music’s basic formula for lyrics. The singer meets a young woman on the street, realizes that “she was not like other girls,” and immediately falls in love with her—but, alas, he “had to learn the hard way to let her pass by.”134 These lyrics are one of rock music’s variations on Baudelaire’s poem “À une passante,” which tells of an encounter in the street, a glimpse of someone walking by, someone who disappears in the crowd. The Doors used that same poem as inspiration for their hit song “Hello, I Love You,” and it might be interesting to note the differences produced in the respective versions.135 The Doors’ song is basically a showcase for male bravado, even though the singer/narrator does not get the woman, and the Dead’s version of the same sort of encounter is much more nuanced, weaker, and suggestive of respect for the integrity of the woman. Although the counterculture, at least to some degree, tried to elaborate new gender identities and relations, a rock band of this kind remained a machine for masculinity. On one of the early Grateful Dead albums, Aoxomoxoa (1969), the back cover artwork featured an image not only of the band, but of the extended Grateful Dead family, including men, women, and children. This and other images represented a fantasy that would not survive the everyday life of rock music, or of a constantly touring working band. A rock band is traditionally a ritualized form of male bonding, and even the Grateful Dead exemplifies this elementary fact; band members often have testified to the strong bonds between the players, bonds that also included the shared experience of psychedelic drugs. Band members also have testified about the band as a vehicle for sexual conquests, at least according to some embarrassing stories in Bill Kreutzmann’s memoir Deal—Donna Jean Godchaux’s perspective on this has not been published. The greater point is that the band did not exploit sexuality as part of its stage shows, nor did the Dead project sexual personae the way rock music

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often does. The deliberate lack of stage theatrics produced a simplicity or straightforwardness severely lacking in most rock acts. Still, that authenticity was an effect rather than a true essence: The lack of theatrics decreased the distance between band and audience, made it easier for the beholder to sympathize or even identify with the band. The band did include different forms of masculinity—a continuum defined by Bob Weir’s early androgyny and Pigpen’s biker persona. In between there was Garcia, who slowly assumed an outwardly patriarchal position, which placed enormous pressure on a fundamentally private man, a burden impossible to live up to. Garcia’s relationship with Carolyn “Mountain Girl” Adams seemed to embody an ideal model for a generation of hippies, in a way that the relation between Kim Gordon and Thurston Moore of Sonic Youth would for a later generation. But both relations ended in divorce, the fantasies fell apart and, instead, a traditional gender structure prevailed. The reproduction of gendered power relations tells of a severe limitation of the political significance of the Grateful Dead phenomenon: Even the “freedom” generated around the band and its music carried with it the world outside of itself, reproducing its power structures, the alternative politics generated by and through the band were never strong enough to obstruct the influence of normativity.136 This is not a question of ideology, nor of morals, but rather of the structural difficulties of forming an alternative world within the old world. This limitation is, I think, important to keep in mind when discussing the politics of a fundamentally apolitical band. It is equally important, however, to keep in mind how the Grateful Dead show offered a temporary freedom—expressed in Deadheads’ dancing beyond gender rules and identities. This aspect of the phenomenon is important: No matter what band members or crew were doing, members of the audience were trying out their own identities, and the Dead offered an arena where identities could be transgressed and transformed, here exemplified by four testimonies. Dancing at Dead shows taught me to feel the music and dance like no one is watching. In 1984, I was a sophomore at William & Mary, gay and internalizing all the anti-gay hatred and HIV hysteria fomented by Ronald [Reagan]. The first Dead show, at Norfolk Scope, was a release. It freed me, allowed me to find a loving community, and guaranteed my survival through a tumultuous and self-destructive time. It was the first time I knew I could just ‘follow the love’ and I’d be fine, and I was. When I made it to my first GD show, I felt free to be MYSELF—and accepted—for the first time in my life.

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Then I felt the peace and the weight of the world disappear, and we danced, every single one of us. Without a care. Without strings.137

The type of experience that these fans describe is not unique as such; they are the same sort of testimonies as those made by, say, Madonna fans. Testimonies like these tell us something about popular culture, and its power to influence us. But there is an interesting difference here: Most acts that grow very big offer a role model, but the Dead did not. Instead, the band’s message was, “It is up to you, you decide”—which was part of their anti-authoritarian stance.138 The show was an open space, and each and any person in the audience was encouraged to step into it. To many fans, dancing was a form of self-construction or self-forming, and not a representation of something already formed and performed before others—it was a bodily exploration of what the self could be.

vi To come to grips with the political Grateful Dead, there is a need to define, or redefine, more exactly what we mean by “political.” Jacques Rancière offers a different set of answers or quite preliminary guidelines to our questions. According to Rancière, politics is “generally seen as the set of procedures whereby the aggregation and consent of collectivities is achieved, the organization of powers, the distribution of places and roles, and the systems for legitimizing this distribution.”139 But Rancière renames this type of politics “the police.” “Policing is not so much the ‘disciplining’ of bodies as a rule governing their appearing, a configuration of occupations and the properties of the spaces where these occupations are distributed.”140 Politics, according to Rancière, is “not the exercise of power,”141 but a meeting between two heterogenic processes, of which one is governing, the other equality. Ranciére’s terms roughly equal those of the republic—How is it governed?—and of citizenship—which in itself is a wide-ranging form of equality, and which according to Rancière also is liberation. Neither governing nor liberation are fixed structures, but rather are evolving, constantly changing processes, because politics is the object and context of constant battles. Politics, then, is not a question of parties or even ideologies, it is not the exercise of power, nor is it the taking of a stand, as such. In an article, Rancière emphasizes politics as being about democracy, “The opposition of socialism and capitalism has obscured the more fundamental struggle defining the political, or its absence: the struggle between democracy and capitalism.”142 Politics is an activity that consists in “making what was unseen visible; in making what was audible as noise heard as speech

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and in demonstrating that what appeared as a mere expression of pleasure and pain is a shared feeling of good or an evil.”143 This happens, says Rancière, because politics is “dissensus” which is “not a confrontation between interests or opinions. It is the demonstration of a gap in the sensible itself.”144 This gap then can be approached in different ways. Rancière exemplifies his ideas with different forms of labor struggle, but also other social and cultural phenomena can be understood as political because they are forms of dislocation. They can be radical refusals to accept normativity, with its delimiting of the sensible. The Grateful Dead in this perspective can be seen as an endeavor to distribute the sensible in other ways; they set out to explore, albeit in their own way, and under the obviously limited conditions that a rock band (of some sorts) works under. Thus, the noise and sounds that the band produced or generated also took on the democratic function of becoming a voice, tentatively formulating an opposition to hegemonic American or Western society. The Grateful Dead avoided aligning themselves to conventional political movements and ideologies, but they persisted in an activity that was fundamentally political. What does this political activity relate to? Kostas Vlassopoulos sees politics as “the affairs relating to a political community,”145 and while that community could be the national state or a city, I would like to suggest that it also could be the travelling circus surrounding a rock band. This is because—as Rancière points out—a “political subject is not a group of interests or of ideas, but the operator of a particular dispositif of subjectivation and litigation through which politics come into existence.”146 This means that the waving of the freak flag of the Grateful Dead phenomenon was an insistence on the forming of a subject, and assigning a voice to this subject. This subjectivation could take on different forms also within the Grateful Dead phenomenon. As Vlassopoulos says, one aspect of this political coming into existence is “service to the community by one’s means and abilities.”147 If we look at the Dead and the phenomenon as citizens of the same republic, it is easy to see that the Dead did indeed provide service to their community: Garcia once called the band a “utility service,”148 and the band provided the music for the celebrations of the community, and through music, possible identities as well. But the band also performed service to the community in another respect, as mentioned earlier—as a sponsor of different local causes. Performing service to the community is a very old and very traditional form of the political. In classical Rome, it was institutionalized as a combination of virtue and glory. As Vlassopoulos explains, “For the Romans, the establishment of one’s virtus and the pursuit of gloria were the supreme

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aims for every man; but these aims could only be achieved by serving the community, holding office and performing great deeds in counsel and war.”149 Politics was then supposed to “provide individuals with the opportunity to achieve these,”150 that is, the achievement of glory through virtue. And I do think that the glory of the members of the Grateful Dead—part of the band’s enduring appeal—is based on the way they performed their services to the community, both musically and financially. But if the band is then thought of as not delivering a political message but rather performing a political activity, it still needs to be understood how this “anarchist pirate ship,” as journalist Joel Selvin referred to the band in 1995,151 could navigate through America. How did “the holy ship of the Grateful Dead,” as drummer Bill Kreutzmann calls it, “a ship of fools,”152 relate to society at large? Many comments have been made about the utopian character of the band as well as the phenomenon, but I don’t think this utopian character has that strong a locus outside of the music itself. The Grateful Dead was a quite practical (if strongly democratic) project, a machine that had to function all year in all its different parts. Precisely a concept of the machine, or the dispositive, would be one way to understand the social function of the band: a machine, an apparatus, a dispositive—defined by what it produces and generates, what it makes possible. We could call the Grateful Dead a “war machine,” even though the term, created by Gilles Deleuze, might seem uncomfortable.153 In Gerald Raunig’s view of the concept, however, the “martial dimension of the war machine consists in the power of invention, in the capacity for changes, in the creation of other worlds.”154 The war machine, Deleuze writes, creates a space and aims at “the movement of people in that space.”155 It is, of course, quite tempting to read the Grateful Dead into this perspective: people moved along with the band’s tours, peopled moved in dancing to the music. But the band is a war machine even more so in its capacity to open up a space: Raunig describes how “the inventiveness of the war machine evolves new forms of sociality, instituent practices and constituent power, the creation and actualization of other, different possible worlds.”156 This production is a deterritorialization, what Claire Colebrook calls a “becoming other than itself.”157 This form of othering—different from the social repellence that forces otherness upon the body—this becoming other is grounded in the Grateful Dead’s music, in the improvisations that takes familiar songs into unknown territories. A different way to understand the band and its audience is as a heterotopia. Michel Foucault, who invented the concept, singled out “the ship” as “the heterotopia par excellence. In civilizations without ships the dreams

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dry up, espionage takes the place of adventure, and the police take that of the corsairs.”158 And was not the Grateful Dead supposed to be a pirate ship exploring a sea of adventure and dreams? Heterotopias, according to Foucault, are very real, existing places, “actually realized utopias in which the real emplacements, all the other real emplacements that can be found within the culture are, at the same time, represented, contested and reversed, sorts of places that are outside all places, although they are actually localizable.”159 Foucault mentions a line of historical examples of heterotopia that he calls “crises heterotopias,” from places used in passage rites in traditional societies, to modernity’s boarding schools, military service, and “honeymoon trips” during the nineteenth century. These temporary places, Foucault suggests, are now giving space to a “heterotopia of deviation”— and this is where the Grateful Dead phenomenon can be found. In his discussion of heterotopia, Foucault writes about the techniques that are available to delineate or formalize different spaces. Spaces are often structured in pairs of opposition, such as private and public spaces, spaces reserved for work and for leisure, and traditionally sacred places and secular places. But to these places, which can be understood in relation to each other, Foucault adds other places—places that “suspend, neutralize, or reverse the set of relations that are designated, reflected, or represented [réflechis] by them.” These places “contradict all the other sites.”160 This goes to the heart of what a Grateful Dead concert created: “It’s a different world out there”; “it’s like another culture”—as a couple of police officers commented on the scene before a Grateful Dead show.161 Jacques Rancière hesitates before defining any utopia, and at the same time he makes clear what it is that might be political, “[T]he concept of utopia has never seemed appropriate to apply to any event whatsoever . . . [and] ’68 showed that what matters is not the fixed goals of a movement, but rather the creation of a subjective dynamic that opens a space and time in which the configuration of the possible is transformed. Actions create dreams, not the other way around.”162 Rancière here is discussing the turbulence and upheavals of May 1968 in France, but his argument is easily transferable to the Grateful Dead. The observation of “the creation of a subjective dynamic that opens a space and time” as the essence of politics is totally relevant here. Politics is then the process through which possibilities open up, new relations between body and space, between body and body, become possible. Many heterotopias are bound in time and space, as for instance museums and libraries. The Grateful Dead phenomenon is another type of heterotopia, moving around the country, forming momentary and provisional

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spaces around a concert arena and with a very different temporal character. As the band stated in its letter to the Deadheads in the summer of 1989, “It’s a game to travel through America, and we don’t make the rules—after all, we’re just passing through.” This kind of heterotopia is, according to Foucault, “absolutely temporal”—it is a party, a celebration, a ritual, and it happens now, in the present, not tomorrow, not in eternity. The absoluteness of time, of course, also was emphasized in the Grateful Dead phenomenon, often with the help of different substances. To be part of the climax of this temporal absoluteness, you had to pay for a ticket, but the delineation of the heterotopia was loose enough so that you could also be part of the parking lot scene surrounding the event.163 The music then generated a space, or it materialized as many spaces: the stage is one, often decorated, as for example by tie-dye artist Courtenay Pollock for the shows at the Greek Theatre in Berkeley 1981, or by Polish artist Jan Sawka for the 1989 anniversary tour.164 Both of these iconic sets emphasize how the central space of the heterotopia is different from the outside world. But the music generated a space much larger than the actual theater or arena, such as the parking lot or campgrounds: the heterotopia included several different spaces, from the stage to the floor, aisles, hallways, and the tapers’ section—all real places, but temporary ones. Was a Grateful Dead show then a free space? Not at all—but its rules were different from those outside the heterotopia. Or were they? Even a heterotopia has rules: a grammar for the language used, a set of approved gestures, a dress code—though in this case those rules were not very strict. But the point is that they were watched over by the citizens themselves— those who were members of the scene—for years, or for a tour, or for a single show; there was no external force ensuring that the rules of the heterotopia were followed. Andrew Thacker emphasizes that a heterotopia involves “a sense of movement between the real and the unreal; it is thus a site defined by a process, the stress being upon the fact that it contests another site.”165 That could serve as a definition of the Grateful Dead phenomenon: moving around the country, moving between reality and the imaginary, and—especially during the Nixon and Reagan eras—contesting or challenging hegemonic forms of subject formation and power. But external forces did watch the scene, and surveillance grew more and more important as the scene grew larger and larger. Fans had to be careful: the guy sitting next to you could be a plainclothes police officer, your ticket could be counterfeit, arena security might want to beat you up; the heterotopia was constantly pressured from without, criticized, attacked, and sometimes banned. As the 1989 letter to Deadheads warned, fearful locales

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were banning the Dead; as a result, they were “running out of places to play.”166 The concept of heterotopia enables us to see the traveling circus of the Grateful Dead as a real—albeit temporary—space. Citizenship, I would suggest, was based on a deviation from the surrounding world: Inside the heterotopia you could be a taper, a spinner, a deaf head, a gay head, a wharf rat—all forms of citizenship within the Dead republic that had no real significance outside the heterotopia. Inside its confines, however, they were quite real and significant. I also think that these and other identities should be seen as being produced by the heterotopia; that is, inside it a process of self-forming took shape. People were employing different types of technologies of the self, to borrow Foucault’s term. They manipulated their own bodies and souls through drugs, and also through diet, meditation, yoga, dancing, and other forms. The band, of course, was part of this, and band members often commented upon what could be called, after Nietzsche, a “complete self-forgetting” of subjectivity,167 and after him, with Foucault, the “annihilation of the individual.”168 This process of self-formation should not be idealized, and because it grew in such an individualistic way and not in a truly collective or social fashion, it had to give in to external conditions more and more, which forced a more fixed identity upon the scene. In short, Deadheads became social fantasies—or nightmares. But a heterotopia has its history like any other space; its forms change and evolve, and it also can pass away, disappear. I think the band actually understood the dialectics involved here, and they stated in a letter to Deadheads in June 1988: “We didn’t invent Deadheads: you created yourself. . . . More security or more rules aren’t the answer—you guys know what righteous behavior is about. Because you created your scene, it is up to you to preserve it.”169 In the band’s eyes, the process of self-forming could not come to a halt, but must be kept up, and perhaps especially so with new audiences coming to shows. Ned Lagin, who performed with the band in the mid-seventies and was the composer of Seastones, discusses this self-invention in an interview: “Americans invent themselves. For a good while, the Grateful Dead were a very powerful American embodiment of that alchemy. That alchemy created time and space for a different kind of community—a least theoretically—and a different kind of loyalty. A different kind of commitment. A different sense of place and meaning and purpose in the universe for each and every person.”170 Lagin might be idealizing how “Americans” create themselves, but he saw clearly that it was not only the audience that changed, but the band, too, was engaged in a transformation. As he put it: “Although the Grateful Dead came from the counterculture they wound up behaving just like the

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dominant culture . . . fundamentally, they were locked into the same American Dream growth paradigm.”171 What Lagin is pointing to is a structural problem more than a moral problem, and it is observable in many phenomena of an “alternative” character: Those also require a constant accumulation of capital, both financial and symbolic, if they are not to wither away. Yet that growth also means that the alternative loses its oppositional potential. Built into a heterotopia of this type is that it cannot and should not last: its life is always temporary and diffused. Indeed, any heterotopia of some significance will also become an arena for social struggles, as Henri Lefebvre has emphasized: “Anomic groups construct heterotopic spaces, which are eventually reclaimed by the dominant praxis.”172 The Grateful Dead phenomenon could seem like such an “anomic” group, its Dionysian desire for ecstasy being only the outward sign of a hedonistic culture. Deadheads, however, hardly qualify for “anomie.” Instead, ethical values such as mutual aid, solidarity, and empathy were, and continue to be, held in high esteem. The emphasis should not be on the amoral character of heterotopia, but rather on heterotopia as being in a relation of opposition and tension to a dominant or hegemonic power, and therefore destined for only a temporary existence. There was, however, what might seem like a strong utopian aspect to the band’s project in its relationship with its audience—specifically the effacement of the division of labor. Band and audience were one—the band members often alluded to this merger or collective identity, as Bill Kreutzmann averred, “When it’s really happening, the audience is as much the band as the band is the audience. There is no difference.”173 Even so, this does not obscure the very real division that still existed, even in those peak moments: musicians played, the rest danced. Not even the Grateful Dead could escape the divide that Jacques Attali calls “one of the very first divisions of labor,” that between musician and non-musician.174 Looking at the division of labor from another angle, however, it is apparent that the band actively tried to overcome aspects of it, and that in a quite non-utopian way. Within the extended Grateful Dead “family,” members other than the musicians had a say, including roadies and office workers. The Grateful Dead did become an industry of its own, but the band was an unusually good employer, with employee pension funds, health insurance plans, even profit sharing: band meetings deliberated about retirement plans, Blue Cross coverage, and compensation packages for employees leaving the organization.175 These meetings included musicians, equipment crew, staff, management, and legal counsel, and all voices were heard, even if the band’s wishes remained paramount.

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There are legendary stories about the early meetings between the band and Warner Bros., the band’s first label. At one encounter, the band brought the extended family of forty people, making regular corporate protocols somewhat more difficult to follow. Even the behavior of individual band members could challenge corporate norms. After a 1967 meeting, Warner Bros. CEO Joseph B. Smith wrote band manager Danny Rifkin that, “It’s apparent that nobody in your organization has enough influence over Phil Lesh to evoke anything resembling normal behavior.”176 This, in response to Lesh’s goading of a company engineer during recording sessions. A band that seeks to interact with the surrounding world as little as possible is forced to try and organize its own world. The Grateful Dead did that, in many different ways. The band always had an ambivalent relationship with record companies, so the formation of the band’s own companies— Grateful Dead Records and Round Records—in 1973 was a logical step. Their first release was the album Wake of the Flood (1973), which garnered some critical acclaim. Its success was badly damaged, however, by widespread counterfeiting, which put the company into financial straits from the start. This also meant that the band, somewhat ironically, had to cooperate with none other than the FBI to combat the piracy. The band also sought support from Deadheads, who went to stores, looked for counterfeit records, and reported back to the band, which then took action. These short-lived record companies were far from the only examples of self-organization within the Grateful Dead world, however. For a few months in 1968, the band owned and ran the Carousel Ballroom in San Francisco, together with other bands—Jefferson Airplane, Big Brother and the Holding Company, and Quicksilver Messenger Service. The Carousel Ballroom was not only a concert venue, it also became something of a community center. Both the Black Panthers and the Chicano movement had offices in it.177 This, too, was a short-lived experiment, however. For financial reasons the Carousel closed and was taken over by Bill Graham, who renamed it the Fillmore West. The band also had its own travel agency, Out of Town Tours in the 1970s, and later developed a ticket agency that would become a legendary part of its business empire—and a crucial source of income and for maintaining control of its own work. In 1981, longtime staffer Alan Trist wrote a report for the band organization, “A Balanced Objective: Overview of Job Definitions,” providing a detailed analysis and discussion of the organizational structure. The report featured a foreword by Jerry Garcia, which not surprisingly gave a sort of ideological statement. This report shows how we really work. We do business the way artists do business. The reason there is a Grateful Dead Productions is because

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the State of California requires that we identify ourselves as a business. We have to fulfill the standard formalities of operating as a business. Grateful Dead Productions Inc. is a legal fiction, not a working reality. It doesn’t represent our real work. Just because we have an office doesn’t mean we have to feel we have to be office workers, not identify ourselves as a Corporation because we have a corporation.178

This would not hold—at least, not entirely. The growing popularity of the band in the late eighties meant that the band became a target for professional bootleggers, forcing the band into more and more conventional corporate thinking, as exemplified in a 1987 lawsuit, with Grateful Dead Productions and Ice Nine, the band’s publishing company, as plaintiffs. Several firms were prosecuted for bootlegging, and in a letter from the defendants demanding a “temporary restraining order,” one can sense the logic of capitalism at work: the defendants deny having produced, distributed or sold “any ‘bootleg’ cassettes, albums or tapes,” and they instead explain a circuitous—and dubious—chain of custody that allegedly justified how the product came about.179 Commercial success—which Garcia stated that he was “appalled” by—put a heavy pressure on the band and its organization, and with the death of Garcia in 1995, they also lost an important moral voice. Later band meetings took on a different character: The March 11, 1998, meeting was exclusively about merchandise, products, marketing, and related issues—with no band members in attendance.180 While Garcia was alive, however, the band to a remarkable degree did manage to keep up its tradition of self-organization. For example, the band started the Rex Foundation in 1982 to handle all the demands for donations that the band—well-known for its generous attitude—confronted. As Rock Scully, nominally the publicist of the band said, “We no longer want to do benefits that support bureaucracies. We want a direct hands-on use of money that directly affects people.”181 As of 2016, the Rex Foundation is still very active and continues to support grass-roots philanthropy. Spin-off enterprises also were generated by the band, including the Alembic company (founded in 1969), builders of guitars and amplifiers, and which would continue to work closely with the band. These examples of self-organization—and they are only a few of many—can be seen as the core of an alternative society as well as aspects of a larger movement formed by turning its back on established forms of both political, social, and corporate practices. Even if—in the long run—the basic division between musicians and audience could only be reproduced and reinstated, this tendency or imperative to abolish the division of labor points to a problem: What happens to

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music in a heterotopia of this kind? What function does it fulfill, and how do the music’s transformations relate to the broader Grateful Dead phenomenon? As Jerry Garcia observed (quoted above), music “cuts through” different aspects of modern life. I would say that what it cuts through is everyday experience: It cuts through going to work, going home from work—all the mechanics and rituals that define mundane existence. Art offers a vision that life could be totally different—and that is precisely its political function. This is, of course, only saying that art—including music—always has a political function precisely when it does not form part of politics as performed under late capitalism. How could one say anything else when the music of the Grateful Dead was the call for heterotopia to form? Art, then, has a critical capacity: It cuts through, it separates. Art is one form of what we with Rancière could call “dissensus”; works of art don’t teach us anything, and they have no aims—their existence is not instrumental or goal oriented. Within a heterotopia like the Grateful Dead phenomenon, however, music tends to lose its critical capacity and instead becomes the accompaniment to the absolute time of the festivity. On a macro level, this is what happened to the Grateful Dead: The band’s music slowly changed function, moving away from a critical exploration of what could be said within the confines of a rock band to a backdrop against which the audience had a party. “No one’s noticed but the band’s all packed and gone,” as John Barlow’s lyrics for “The Music Never Stopped” suggests.182 Band members also expressed a certain surprise and even dismay when the audience cheered even the sloppiest performances. Less and less, the band’s music was that of a “singular power of presence” that Rancière speaks of,183 and instead the band substituted presence with repetition. Here, the utopian vision of abolishing the division of labor is negated, and the gulf between band and audience widens. The critical role of art is to redistribute the relation between space and body, to paraphrase Rancière. In the long run, however, the Grateful Dead could not do that. In the early days, Phil Lesh reminisced, there “was no rock-and-roll bubble that would isolate us from the world as we went through it,”184 but in the face of a spiraling popularity, the fragile experiment could not be maintained, and in the vast concrete confines of sports arenas and stadiums, the band withdrew to a conventional division between artist and audience.185 Still, also during this long process of growing popularity and decreasing creativity, the band could produce both great music as well as the kind of personal experiences of transformation that fans have testified about since the late sixties.

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One might say that it could not be any other way; momentum was lost, and the band had to adjust to changing times. Had the utopian promise of the abolition of the division of labor been fulfilled, there would not have been any more music. As long as the band explored musical avenues, the utopian fulfillment was kept alive as a possibility that gave the band’s music such a spirit of hope. The formation of the heterotopia and its use of the music as an identity marker, however, was also the start of the process that would lead to the formulaic shows of the last years. The work of art, then, has an ambiguous status within a heterotopian setting: On one hand, it serves as a critical activity separating the heterotopia from the surrounding world; on the other hand, it tends to become a tool for identity production, giving it an ornamental function which is quite contrary to the critical function. If Rancière is right in suggesting that what art produces is a redistribution of the relations between bodies and space (a thought not that new or radical), then one must say that the Grateful Dead performed a great experiment in doing precisely that—but that, in the long run, they lost some of their capacity to open up this space in which other bodies could be formed. Or perhaps one could rather say that the band and its audience drifted apart; at some level, for some fans, that was overtly true. The widening gulf also meant that the music itself was threatened, and this threat to a great extent came from inside the heterotopia. The band understood this, and even had to start defending its right to perform, as the 1989 letter to Deadheads made clear, “This is a music scene first, and camping and vending have turned it into a largely social scene that is potentially a real and ominous threat to the future live performance of the music itself.”186 This prophecy was correct—at least if read as a flashback rather than as a look ahead: The growth of the audience, of the phenomenon, also marked the slow downfall of the music. The Grateful Dead had come a long way. In 1990—looked upon by most Deadheads as the last consistently good year—the band “Greatful Death” received a letter from Lech Walesa—who at the time was the leader of the oppositional Polish trade union movement Solidarnosc (Solidarity), and soon to be the president of Poland (elected after the downfall of the Communist regime). Walesa invited the band to perform at the ten-year celebration of Solidarnosc, and the band promptly answered, perhaps tongue in cheek: The Grateful Dead would be very honored to appear at the Anniversary Celebration of Solidarnosc if the proper arrangements could be made. It is our understanding . . . that transportation would be provided by the

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U.S. Air Force direct from San Francisco-Gdansk-San Francisco through arrangements to be made by the U.S. Ambassador and the USIA.187

The project was never realized; however, the image of the Grateful Dead flying into Poland on a B-52 Bomber supported by the U.S. Ambassador and the United States Information Agency (USIA), speaks volumes about the complexity that even a simple rock band can generate. Performing at a rally for Solidarnosc would have been appropriate. The Grateful Dead was about the freedom from authority, the freedom to be your self—and the antiauthoritarian politics was rooted in an ongoing quest for musical freedom.

3. Crashes in Space: Aspects of Improvisation Sometimes I think that the Dead are the only really happy people left. ellen willis1

The Grateful Dead improvised—this is a given. Improvisation was a decisive aspect of what made the band special and set it apart from other bands. The band, of course, acknowledged the fundamental role of improvisation in its music—one could say it was part of the band’s DNA. Jerry Garcia said, “We don’t improvise out of choice! We improvise because we don’t have any choice! It’s not as though we could play anything exactly the same as we played it last night because we’re incapable. So, improvisation, for us, is not an option, it’s our coloration, it’s our personality.”2 Thus, when attending a show or listening to a live album, one could foresee that the band at some point would start to improvise. Garcia’s use of the musical term “coloration,” or “coloratura,” underscores this point— coloration is a form of improvisation used by a singer of classical vocal music to put his or her mark on the song and call the music to life.3 With the Grateful Dead, the audience often could predict the tunes during which improvisation would happen, for instance “(Turn On Your) Love Light,” “Bird Song,” “The Other One,” “Playing in the Band,” “Cassidy,” “Eyes of the World,” and “Dark Star” among many. And, yes, the band’s way of playing songs without strong improvisatory character has a dimension of “coloration.” Eventually, the band even institutionalized free improvisation and gave it a privileged slot during the show, such as “Drums” and “Space.” Here we already can see the contradictory character or complexity of improvisation as practiced by the Grateful Dead. Derived from the Latin word “inprovisus,” meaning something that is “unforeseen” or “unexpected,” improvisation ultimately—and ironically—became something quite expected and entirely foreseen with the Grateful Dead. To this linguistic contradiction, we also should add the ideological overtones, signaling that improvisation—at least to its adherents—means freedom, liberation, openness, dialogue, as the 92

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phrase “free improvisation” evokes. The band, however, also can be seen as trying to capture and control improvisation, keeping it safely locked up within a rather traditional framework of songs. The Dead were searching, Garcia explained, for something open but with enough form for the band to “lock into.”4 Since Garcia’s death in 1995, the improvisations of the Grateful Dead come to us only as given, as recorded and distributed in different technical forms that also make possible their repetition, enabling us to listen to them again and again. Today, those improvisations truly have become locked in place—whereas the unforeseen can be unexpected only once. This might sound like a rather negative take on of the band’s signature improvisational skills, but here we are contending with the idea of improvisation which must be understood within a certain polarity and as a type of struggle or even a battle: improvisation is not freedom; rather, it is forced. At least the band thought about it not only as a choice but as a compulsion, something they could not help but do. Musical improvisation is, of course, not one single practice. It is multi-layered, rooted in and dependent on the situation in which it is practiced; with the Grateful Dead, it can be a triumphant elevation of the music to ecstatic heights, as well as a critical platform for an investigation into the conditions and rules of that situation and of the given song or musical setting. Starting quite early in the band’s history, the live concert was made up of a mix of renditions of original material as well as covers, and improvisations, both within and outside the song format. The players did not have fixed roles, and instead who did what with a song shifted. One could see the show as a balancing act in which the different interests and desires of the band members were negotiated, along with the relations with the space and the audience; this balancing act, of course, changed radically over time, even as the band remained identifiable. The Grateful Dead more or less consciously, I would suggest, worked within the general polarity of music that Theodor W. Adorno describes as the simultaneous representation of both “the immediate manifestation of impulse and the locus of its taming.”5 Isn’t that impulse the ecstasy and Dionysian transcendence that the Grateful Dead shows were striving for? And the taming: Wasn’t that also part of the shows, with the band’s efforts to perform the ultimately perfect Apollonian version of any given song? The wave-pattern that the show often had—a wavering between ecstasy and control, between limitless freedom and strict limitation—was typical: Adorno’s polarity was inscribed at the heart of every Dead show. Thus, what is it that makes improvisation possible, and specifically, what made improvisation both possible and necessary to exercise for this band?

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Improvisation was the Grateful Dead’s special way of practicing dislocation. Through improvisation the band managed to move the music out of itself—out of the given, regulated form of the song and into a strange and sometimes even uncanny territory. As every Deadhead knows, however, this did not happen every time the band performed; moreover, improvisation must be practiced again and again, even at the risk of becoming fixed, stale, and predictable. Seasoned Deadheads also know that this is what happened to the band over the years—less and less often, improvisation transported the music to those strange, defamiliarized territories it once explored. Yet, there are enough recordings of the band at its improvisational best to merit discussion here, because improvisation also was the central aspect of the Grateful Dead as a political phenomenon. After all, there is a strong connection between self-organization and improvisation acted out within the tension of tradition and the avant-garde. At the same time, this space between tradition and avant-garde that the band explored also was defined by technological limitations and possibilities, as we shall see.

i The early history of the Grateful Dead is often written against the backdrop of the radio and record industry of the times, which favored the threeminute, AM-friendly hit song, although the Dead perversely and heroically learned how to stretch out and improvise during the Acid Tests. There is some truth to this picture, but it is not the whole truth. Improvisation in rock music—which basically is such a formalized genre—was made possible by inventions in the technological media that rock music employed, and foremost among them the long-playing vinyl album, the LP. In contrast to older technologies, the LP format could accommodate twenty-three minutes of “Dark Star” on one side—it not only supported but also seemed to welcome musicians in “stretching out.” The record industry was certainly interested in music that could make the LP more sellable, more profitable. Originally looked upon as a medium best suited for classical music, the LP emerged during the early sixties as a medium that enabled jazz musicians to expand their repertoires. John Coltrane is the most obvious example, appropriating “My Favorite Things” from the Rodgers and Hammerstein musical The Sound of Music and recording it in versions of ten or twenty minutes in length. The John Coltrane Quartet, featuring an interplay between players that Garcia called Coltrane’s “syntax,”6 was one of the most formative influences on what would become the Grateful Dead.7 Although rock music from the start could include instrumental solos, more

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or less improvised, it really was with the wave of British blues-rock that players started stretching out—although one can wonder to what degree bands really were improvising and not just playing mere variations. Later, with the wave of so-called “psychedelia,” more collective forms of improvisation enter rock music. As Steve Howe, guitarist in the English rock group Yes, points out, however, it was the LP-album that made it commercially viable: “[I]mprovisation was really to expand the whole idea of what a song had been up to then in a single way. It all ties up with the expansion of the selling commodity—the change from the single to the album.”8 Other technological innovations also made improvisation possible within rock music, such as those that supported the live performances of rock bands. As Theodore Gracyk points out, the “elaborate improvisations of Cream, the Grateful Dead and the rest of the San Francisco scene, Led Zeppelin, and Jimi Hendrix . . . depended on superior sound systems: improvisational rock was hardly possible when the musicians had no stage monitors and the cheap amplification system distorted the music into a dull roar, with a sound mix that put the tinny vocals out in front.”9 The Grateful Dead would become leaders in the technological development of instruments and sound systems, most famously with the mammoth “Wall of Sound” (mentioned above) and through their close collaboration with companies investing in new technology, such as Ultra Sound, Meyer Sound, and Alembic; as Nicholas Meriwether says, the band’s “attitude toward technology was innovative, exceptional and noteworthy.”10 To Gracyk’s list of bands, we should add a jazz group or a few such groups, foremost Miles Davis’ electric groups from the late sixties and onwards. These were bands that could improvise while playing very loudly and, with Davis’ guidance, they demonstrated how improvisation could be based on a groove around which the musicians formulated their respective voices. Davis’ band awed the Grateful Dead when it opened for them in April 1970, having just released the soon-to-be legendary album Bitches Brew. Suitably humble, the Dead opined in interviews that it should have been the other way around.11 The LP, then, meant that a music of the moment, a collective improvisation, could be recorded and stored for later retrieval; it made possible an ambiguous process of simultaneous experimentation and domestication both generated and permitted by the medium. That process can be followed in the first few albums by the Grateful Dead, with the debut album recorded according to convention, the second album—Anthem of the Sun—marked by a cut-and-paste mix of studio and live performances, and the third album—Aoxomoxoa—dependent on the then-new sixteen-track recording

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technology. It was domestication, because the music was to be listened to at home. Thus, with the growing music industry, Jacques Attali writes, “consumption ceased to be collective.”12 Even more, Attali claims, the recording of music itself became “a support for the promotion of repetition.”13 It is the fixation that is repeatable, whether it is notation on a paper or inscriptions on a plastic surface—but even performances are repeatable, and recordings conditioned audiences to expect to hear those recordings repeated in concert; the performance, Adorno suggested, “sounds like its own phonograph record.”14 “Repetition” is the key term; with the gramophone record, a performance could be played again and again. Repetition here also carries the sense that Adorno gives it: the technological conditions of its creation also work inside the music, and come out as the insistent repetition of the chorus or refrain. This form of repetition differs radically from repetition—or repetitive structures—exploited as formal aspects of most music, and instead of generating form, it functions as the slogan for the commodity form: “Music, with all the attributes of the ethereal and sublime which are generously accorded it, serves in America today as an advertisement for commodities which one must acquire in order to be able to hear music.”15 Adorno observed this as early as in the 1930s, but his observation is even more astute today—one only has to browse the online store at www.dead.net to understand the concomitant need to buy t-shirts and tea mugs to be able to enjoy the music comfortably. As Adorno emphasized, however, the commodity form is not an exterior power, forcing itself upon the work of art, but rather works from the inside: “Countless hit song texts praise the hit songs themselves, repeating their titles in capital letters.”16 Yet, for Attali, this means that music has ceased to be “an instrument of differentiation, it has become a locus of repetition.”17 Repetition is used not as a formal principle of composition, but rather unconsciously, automatically music repeats itself as commodity. And in repetition, in the constant and monotonous distribution of hit songs, power speaks: “What is called music today is all too often only a disguise for the monologue of power.”18 We actually do find a similar critique of how the culture industry functions inside the Grateful Dead, as Phil Lesh’s denunciation of it makes clear: “Music industry. The image that comes to mind is an assembly line, which wouldn’t be so serious if it affected only the mechanical process of distribution. The problem is that the content (’songs’) is assembled in the same way as the medium of distribution: market-driven, prepackaged, modular, subliminally dumbed-down units of commerce.”19

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ii In general, modernity can be seen, as Marcuse writes, as a “totalitarian universe of technological rationality” which is “the latest transmutation of the idea of Reason.”20 Modernity has turned into a constantly expanding rationality that subjugates every aspect of human life; this also means that “domination perpetuates and extends itself not only through technology but as technology, and the latter provides the great legitimation of the expanding political power, which absorbs all spheres of culture.”21 The Grateful Dead did resist this logic of repetition, but of course the band could not escape it. Instead, the Dead placed themselves at the technological frontier of rock music—of live music, really—trying to assert control over the conditions that governed their playing. But their music was, to an increasing degree, conditioned by the technological conditions of possibility. As John Mowitt states, “recording has profoundly altered the improvisational idioms in music essentially by providing them with a norm of notation. Besides making it possible to study the ‘scores’ of jam sessions, reproduction . . . restricts interpretation to the recorded notation of specific performances of the piece.”22 When improvised music in this way is fixed, it not only becomes readable, in Mowitt’s sense, but when the event becomes permanent, Gary Peters writes, and no longer is a singular event, then the music “through repeated listening, is quickly drained of the contingency that accompanied the original working of the work.”23 Musicians are not stupid, however; they might have let themselves be victimized but—following Coltrane’s lead—they also have appropriated the medium, exploring and exploiting it for their own needs, even if that risked absolute marginalization. The best example here is perhaps John Oswald’s plunderphonic version of “Dark Star,” Grayfolded, which is rooted in, depends upon, and exploits the technology of recording. The media of recording—whether LPs, CDs, DVDs, video, streaming, or another medium— is a part of the environment and the situations in which improvisation takes place. Technology shapes and controls live performances, as well. The Grateful Dead, for instance, used digital technology, in the form of synthesizers and MIDI (Musical Instrument Digital Interface) technology to give the band a richer sound palette, as well as more complex and exclusive forms of production; media and audio technology form then what we might call a condition of possibility also for improvisers.24 Kim Gordon, of Sonic Youth, maintains that the electric guitar has become a “technologically primitive social tool,”25 something that the guitarists of the Grateful Dead might have intuited when they adopted MIDI In the hands of the Dead,

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MIDI became a tool to modernize the string band, with Garcia especially using it to disguise his guitar as other instruments, producing other sounds. With this fundamental repeatability, a kind of paradox reveals itself. David Grubbs points to a practice that with the growing abundance of “free” music on the Internet might become more widespread: the practice of listening to records just once, “and once only before moving on to others, and your practice as a listener would more closely approximate an improviser’s musical practice.”26 This is a practice that contradicts English improvising guitarist Derek Bailey’s view of records: “The point of a record is that you can play it again. . . . It’ll all eventually become mood music, right?”27 Still, Grubbs uses the singular—“a listener”—and the single listener remains bereft of the collective experience of listening in the form of an audience. A strange dialectic is at work here, which Grubbs pinpoints; he begins by observing that “[r]epetition has always been experimental musicians’ most fundamental objection to recordings,” but he also notes that “nearly every free improviser has set up his or her own record label or been member of a collective that releases its own recordings.”28 The Grateful Dead, too, invested in this sort of contradiction: band members often complained about tedious studio work, and they became notorious for the delays in finishing their albums—but band and band members did build their own recording studios and start their own record companies, and they were not averse to adding overdub on a couple of their early “live” albums, “Skull and Roses” and Europe ’72. As if trying to escape imprisonment within the culture industry, the Grateful Dead has released more live albums than any other band. Paul Hegarty sees the ambiguity in this, and his reasoning is applicable to any archival releases. Since Garcia’s death, recordings of Grateful Dead concerts have proliferated. As with many dead rock stars, this is excused as being the only way people can hear their idols, but it also questions, as literally as possible, the supposed value of a live event further. The recordings circulate not only in your and the band’s absence from the actual concert . . ., but in the permanent absence of the key player. Death does not only add commercial value, but also a relation to the music unbundled from the spurious belief in the proximity that might be possible with the source of music (as opposed to the person outside of their music). The existence of the recordings undermines the “purity” of the live event, but also the volume of releases threatens the individual importance of a specific gig, even as they are all taken seriously as individual moments.29

And to further the complications a bit more, one must realize that improvisation is not antagonistic to repetition as such, as a form-generating, aes-

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thetic dimension of music; repetition is rather “already in improvisation,” as Jacques Derrida says, when interviewing Ornette Coleman. [T]he very concept of improvisation verges upon reading, since what we often understand by improvisation is the creation of something new, yet something which doesn’t exclude the pre-written framework that makes it possible. . . . I am not an “Ornette Coleman expert,” but if I translate what you are doing into a domain that I know better, that of written language, the unique event that is produced only one time is nevertheless repeated in its very structure. Thus, there is a repetition in the work that is intrinsic to the initial creation—that which compromises or complicates the concept of improvisation. Repetition is already in improvisation; thus, when people want to trap you between improvisation and the pre-written, they are wrong.30

Repetition, then, is not only an effect of commodification, but a basic part of improvisation, and therefore is possible to transform into an artistic resource—as music has demonstrated, repeatedly. Edgar Landgraf criticizes Adorno’s “rigid separation between invention and repetition” and emphasizes the inventiveness of repetition itself.31 In the Grateful Dead’s music, repetition naturally appears in different forms—even if 613 performances of “Me and My Uncle” might give us pause. Yet, other examples show how repetition in the Dead’s music could indeed be creative. A song such as “Shakedown Street” is based on the repetition of a riff, even when the band stretches it beyond the recorded form, as on the album by the same title. Improvising on one or two chords is another form of repetition that the band picked up from jazz. The band made it a practice to record their concerts so that they could identify promising jams to mine for new material to work into songs. The band also actively tried to avoid repeating itself— meaning that no two concerts included the same songs in the same order at least after the 1960s, or that the band even tried to put some variations into chestnuts like “Me and My Uncle.” At the same time, this basic repetition that happens in all music is also what generates identity and makes the music recognizable.

iii The technological conditions of possibility defining what a rock band could be and do, can be seen in the history of the Grateful Dead’s work in the recording studio, and in the struggle between the Grateful Dead and Warner Bros. over the recording of the albums Anthem of the Sun and Aoxomoxoa. Both releases depended upon the technology of the LP and the recording

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studio, and left the band heavily indebted to the label: A first step out of that debt was the much-cheaper recording of Live/Dead.32 This album really showcased the band as an improvisational ensemble, and it also included the canonical version of “Dark Star,” supplanting to the rather flaccid single released in 1968, which clocks in at less than three minutes. The amount of Grateful Dead live albums being released is staggering, and the availability of the band’s music on the Internet is overwhelming; this contrasts starkly with Derek Bailey’s emphasis on the singularity of the event that constitutes improvisation, and his claim that an improvisation should be “played and then forgotten.”33 But it is the other way around, it seems, with the Grateful Dead, “too much of everything is really barely enough. . . .” In reading the comments about concerts available on the Internet Archive, or to new releases on www.dead.net, it is striking to see how often commentators claim to have been at the show, leading one to wonder, with the always cynically critical Adorno, if the listener enjoying these recordings “actually wants to hear . . . himself” and not the music,34 remembering how he or she first heard and interacted with the music, and one can also wonder if the valued possessions that recordings have always been for Deadheads are not what Adorno calls “virtual photographs of their owners, flattering photographs—ideologies.” This reified listening was generated by the technological medium of the gramophone, emphasized today by the “repeat” function on CD players and iPods, and with streamed music constantly available on the Internet. As Theodore Roszak pointed out, however, the concept of the counterculture is that of a culture opposing technocracy, but that opponent is difficult to identify: “[I]t is characteristic of technocracy to render itself ideologically invisible.”35 The microphone, the amplifier, the pedal box— electronic tools such as these do not produce ideology as such, but they become ideology generators in certain situations. As Derek Bailey points out, “more important than the limitations of the technology is the loss during the recording process of the atmosphere of musical activity—the musical environment created by the performance . . . which is one of the main strengths of improvisation.”36 No album by the Grateful Dead illustrates this better than the last studio album, Built to Last (1989). Drugs of different kinds used in different ways might have accompanied this era, but they were not the singular or even the main cause of the Grateful Dead slowly transforming into an almost mainstream act—one finally embraced by the recording industry. The recording of Built to Last was a sort of artistic and musical analogue to the ultimate triumph of the pro-

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duction forms of the culture industry in finally conquering this band as well. Built to Last tells us something about the price of success. The recording of the album was done individually: tracks were recorded separately by each musician, and largely in isolation—including overdubs. As the album grew, the musicians really did not see each other or play together: it was an industrialized form of production, which built the music out of small fragments, and the musician, like an industrial worker, did not have to—nor was allowed to—relate to the aesthetic whole, only to a commodified totality, an addition of disparate parts. This was a form of music making that contradicted everything the Grateful Dead represented. Lesh clearly saw this logic at work, writing that for Built to Last, “the pieces were slapped on an assembly line and the song was manufactured. . . .”37 The resulting album is polished, precise—but somehow lackluster, although a couple of the songs do belong to the band’s most interesting material from the later years: Hunter’s and Garcia’s “Foolish Heart” and Garrett Graham’s and Weir’s “Victim or the Crime.” The memory of this process could have contributed to their failure to complete their last studio sessions for what would have been their final album. The idea of “the atmosphere of musical activity,” as Bailey formulated it, is important here. Improvisation is always situated, and modern technology tends to isolate and “un-situate”; the ultimate example today probably is the streaming of music. “Streaming” means the endless repetition of music removed from its source or origin. Bailey’s conclusion is that a recording produces “certain identifiable features. Features which, although completely unique and personal to that group or individual, are useful only for purposes of identification.”38 In this taxonomy of the function of recordings, ideology materializes as fixed, stable identities. Not even improvised music could escape this function. Identification offers an entrance to the music: identifying a piece of music as a work by the Grateful Dead, whether heard at home or in the car, generates a set of expectations that also serve an ideological function, and failure to identify and classify that music might confuse the listener. Improvised music also most often is based on certain harmonic or rhythmic figures that the players repeatedly return or allude to. One typical aspect of the Grateful Dead’s improvisation in the first half of the seventies is the wave pattern—a musical movement between silence and noise, both poles representing extreme moments of intensity. But improvised music might also hamper and resist this type of taxonomical or classificatory listening. The early Grateful Dead albums, as a kind of archival material, do present a rough outline of how improvisation took place within the music,

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what musical function it had, and the conditions under which it was worked out and distributed. Here, again, a paradox emerges, in that the longplaying album actually provided room for experimental music, and it also provided a space for what Ajay Heble calls dissonance: “sounds (and, more generally, cultural practices) that are ‘out of tune’ with orthodox habits of coherence and judgment [and that] occasions a disturbance to naturalized orders of knowledge production.”39 To understand more in detail the role of improvisation and dissonance in the Grateful Dead, however, one must distinguish between different forms of improvisational practice. The first form is simply “jamming,” meaning that one or more players improvise but always remain in touch with the song, and the rest of the band mostly sticks to the harmonic and rhythmic structure of a given song. This form of improvisation is also called “idiomatic improvisation” or “gestural improvisation.” Derek Bailey defines idiomatic improvisation as “mainly concerned with the expression of an idiom—such as jazz, flamenco or baroque—and takes its identity and motivation from that idiom.”40 The second form can be called “deconstruction”—which is the term that was used by Phil Lesh when discussing the performance of “Bird Song,”41 featuring Branford Marsalis, from the Spring 1990 tour and originally released on Without a Net. The band works the song, takes it apart, reduces it to its constituent elements, displaying the rhetorical conditions under which it is formed—only to return to the melody as if by command. An even more radical deconstruction of the same song was performed by the band together with saxophonist David Murray at Madison Square Garden, September 22, 1992. Murray, a player with free jazz roots, pushed the song and the band even further out. The third form of improvisation is what is normally called “free” improvisation; it is an improvisation that does not as such refer to any pregiven musical structure. Bailey defines this as “non-idiomatic” improvisation: “while it can be highly stylized,” he explains, it “is not usually tied to representing an idiomatic identity.”42 Bailey’s formulation is important— as long as improvisation is tied to representation, it can take on ideological functions; but when liberated from this referential or gestural relation to a pre-given script (a song, a composition) it can take on a critical function. The Dead could combine these three forms of improvisation into different configurations, into what can be called a “montage.” The typical example is “Dark Star”: many performances of the song feature quite recognizable statements of, or melodic variations on, melody and riff—what John Oswald calls “the moments which were expected in order to define this music as ‘Dark Star’ and not as something else.”43 Graeme Boone, in a detailed analy-

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sis of “Dark Star” as performed on Live/Dead, discusses “basic events” that together become the “formula” of the song.44 Boone also emphasizes that what he calls the “Dark Star progression” is a “crucial element of the song’s identity and a crucial point of reference for other musical ideas in the song.”45 These moments or events, and the progression, were combined with tearing the song apart—and, in many performances, with a decentered improvisation that made no stable reference to the song, either harmonically or rhythmically. At the same time, as the Dead move through their material as if unfettered by any rules, improvisation is always framed: it has a surrounding protective structure that supports and makes improvisation possible, and perhaps also necessary. David Malvinni, in his seminal Grateful Dead and the Art of Rock Improvisation, maintains that improvisation in the Grateful Dead “occurs within a traditional, conventional framework” and the parameters of this framework were, as Malvinni writes, “quite predictable.”46 This framework, then, is primarily that of the song. Malvinni uses the example of “Sugaree,” a song that was used for what he calls “episodic jamming” on two chords with “carefully constructed solos,” which Malvinni calls “a conservative approach to improvisation.”47 “Sugaree” often was featured in the first set and seems to have served as a sort of warm-up for the soloists, often providing the first real place for the band to start to stretch out. Regardless of whether a political term such as “conservative” is the best choice here, Malvinni still has a point: Improvisation is a sort of monster, a being that has not yet been given its form. It therefore must be kept under careful control so that it does not swallow the players—meaning that songs serve as frameworks with a double function. Songs serve for generating as well as controlling improvisation; letting loose of one’s impulses—and taming them. Another more general aspect of the framework is, of course, that of the rock concert as well as the culture industry—for no matter how countercultural we might think the band was, the Grateful Dead was very much part of this industry. They could not avoid it.48 As its popularity grew, the band adjusted to the demands of the rock concert, slowly rationalizing its shows and investing more and more conventional rock-and-roll dynamics into the performances. An obvious example is the introduction in the late eighties of MIDI, a technology that enabled the band to manipulate its sound in new ways, but which also transformed the show from a form of collectively working out of the music into more of a spectacle that could entrance and hold an audience of twenty to fifty thousand (and more) people. Mass audiences and enormous arenas made it so much more difficult to improvise,

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creating in an acoustic setting that challenged the finer nuances of listening and dynamic interplay that the Dead sought, and instead demanded that the band deliver. At that scale, performance and attitude become more important than the sounds generated.49 As Adorno wrote in the early thirties, “the transition from artisanal to industrial production transforms not only the technology of distribution but also that which is distributed.”50 And this was the logic that the Grateful Dead had to observe and follow as well. As Nadya Zimmerman points out, the band was always a “high-tech” unit,51 and technology is never innocent—although it might pretend otherwise. Perhaps Adorno’s thesis can be illustrated with the shifting role of keyboards in the Dead’s music. The first player to handle the keyboards was Pigpen, playing organ, but his role in the music rather quickly made him into an accompanist, adding color in the background, and his role as singer and harmonica player was foremost. Pigpen was for a short time augmented by Tom “TC” Constanten, whose background in notated avant-garde music let him add something very different to the music— experimenting with sounds, but without really adjusting to the demands of a rock group. Shortly before the European tour of 1972, the band recruited Keith Godchaux, who preferred the grand (acoustic) piano. Godchaux was a born improviser, weaving through the band’s musical texture with ease. Over time, however, Godchaux retreated to an almost introverted style of playing—and losing the dialogic, almost ebullient and conversational qualities heard in his first years with the band. After Godchaux, Brent Mydland became a key player in the Dead’s slow process of normalization, as they adjusted to more of rock’s conventions. Although Mydland added muscular energy and attack to the music, he was not as gifted an improviser. He preferred organ or synthesizer to the grand piano, which added texture but also a certain heaviness to the band’s sound. Godchaux and Mydland are the two keyboardists who really put their mark on the band, and it is interesting how very different those marks are. On the Europe ’72 recordings, and especially on the improvisational pieces, Godchaux is an active voice in the formulation of the music, on an equal footing with Garcia and Lesh, often challenging them, driving them further. Compare this to Mydland’s playing on the Spring 1990 albums, which also are of a generally high standard; yet his electric piano often seems almost mechanical, or like a sewing machine running at a constant, automatic, and high speed. It is a playing that does not generate form, but rather passes the generative or creative impulse to the rest of the band.

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Here, one can also ask whether the Grateful Dead—or any band—uses its equipment, or if the better question instead is whether their equipment uses them. It is a matter of control: Is the musician in control of his instrument, or is his playing conditioned by equipment (and other factors) to such a degree that the musician is really commanded by technology? Mickey Hart and Bill Kreutzmann developed “Drums” as part of the most improvisational section of the band’s shows, using an enormous array of percussion instruments, acoustic and electronic, traditional as well as some invented by the drummers themselves.52 Yet sometimes listening to—and especially watching—a performance of “Drums” can leave one with the impression of seeing two industrial laborers, working in the production line, just as the noise produced could suggest a steel mill. “Drums” was often ambiguous; at once suggestive, overwhelming, and frightening. Over their careers, the members of the Dead invested heavily in increasingly advanced technology, and MIDI synthesizers became an important part of the band’s sound palette. But, again, one can raise the question of whether Garcia was truly in command of his playing when sounding like a flute or a bassoon, a French horn or an oboe. Was his playing forced or produced, expanded or limited, by the possibilities that technology offered? Saxophone player Branford Marsalis, who performed with the Grateful Dead on several occasions, suggests in an interview that Garcia’s playing lost something when becoming increasingly dominated by technological gadgets—in his view, and I tend to agree with him, technology “obstructed his sound.”53 Another factor that contributed to the band’s music slowly growing less flexible, losing its light swing, and instead depending much more on attack and heaviness, was the addition of a second drummer, Mickey Hart. With Hart, the band gained a percussive richness and an experimental attitude— brilliantly exemplified by the studio album Blues for Allah (1975), and by the live 1975 performance of that material, issued as One from the Vault (1991). With two drummers, however, the band would eventually lose a great deal of its flexibility, its capacity to turn around in the moment. The power of two drummers added weight to the music and the band seemed to be striving for a more conventional rock sound. On records, however, the duo could sound dull—playing in a unison that seemed more mechanical than spirited. Hart’s considerable contributions changed the music, but what was lost with that addition, as well as with improvisation decreasing in importance, again raises the question of whether the players really are in command of

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the music. Do aesthetic judgments govern the elaboration of the music? Or does technology—by putting more and more distance between the player’s body and the actual forming of the sounds—take control? Acoustic guitars and harmonicas also are technological objects, of course, and their limits can also imprison musicians. But the issue becomes more acute when the music is performed in sports arenas, with the acoustic demands that an enormous space generates, and the abyss arenas open between musicians and audience. Inside an arena, the majority of the audience watches the performers on large screens, reducing the experience of “live” shows even more. Here, not even the Grateful Dead could remain uninfluenced by the culture industry: technology is also one of the ways through which power is implemented. It also must be remembered that the market as such changed during the seventies. Promoters gained more control over it, and unions in their resistance to exploitation and bad working conditions also influenced the conditions under which bands performed. One effect of this constellation of powers was, for the Grateful Dead, that the band’s shows became shorter, more focused.54 The band did try to negotiate these conditions all the way until the end—but the pressure of popularity meant that the music became marked by social forces not generated within the music, but rather forced upon it. Even so, the Dead kept on trying to defend the integrity of their music.

iv Yes, miracles can happen, and the band did improvise under acoustically difficult conditions. Indeed, improvisation remained, I would suggest, a form of resistance employed by the Grateful Dead throughout its history. It was not only a resistance to the record industry, to the culture industry, but perhaps also to its audience—when it transformed into a mass audience, and grew away from the sort of mobile or flexible community that the band initially fostered and was part of. Even earlier, however, improvisation was a way of challenging a too easily declared identity politics. As Gary Peters states, improvisation is not a “love-in,” it is rather “much more combative and competitive than the majority of discourses on improvisation are willing to admit.” He concludes that free improvisation is thus “more about power than it is about freedom.”55 Improvisation can be seen as a way of relating the body to the surrounding space, as well as to the instrument, both the materiality of it as well as the conventional techniques used to play it. This results in the temporary creation of a shared space, of what Bailey calls the “atmosphere of musical

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activity.”56 It is a relationship between bodies that is created through work. Improvisation is a form of work in which precisely its character of being worked out is never hidden but rather the raison d’être of improvisation. Improvisation allows the listener to follow and take part in the articulation of the music, a practice that is absolutely different from that of catching an artist delivering the song and reproducing the recorded version of it—that is the industrial practice that hides its own character of, precisely, work: industrial work. Improvisation is a form of work that negates the work form—it does not want to be fixated as a Work. A crucial aspect of the improvisational process is the temporal: improvisation takes time, but it also construes time—a time that is quite different from that of the three-minute hit song. This time of improvisation is a form of delay. Improvisation really does not have any aim, it is not based on any form of instrumental or rational logic or reason; it does not seek closure in the form of a coda, nor does it necessarily need to come to a crescendo. As Gary Peters writes, “To be successful improvisation must be a form of delay, an incessant interruption of the work’s desire to be a work and to speak.”57 Improvisation is a form of work, a practice that negates the work form as its aim: It is the process—not the end product—that is the happening of improvisation. The Grateful Dead were known for their very long concerts, meaning that the music could build on this kind of delay— the band took the time not to jump immediately into the given song. This durability of the show had also to do with their artisanal way of production, which included the tuning of guitars; the process of rationalization would— almost—put an end to this chronotype of delay and work. Gradually, the scale and logistics of shows mandated stricter schedules, and later Grateful Dead performances settled into a two- or two-and-a-half-hour format, divided into a first and a second set, separated by an intermission. This also meant that musical delay became harder to practice: forty-minute excursions into “Dark Star” were not possible when the band could play for only two hours. The prominently placed clock on stage—a reminder of local sound ordinances, venue rules, and union overtime clauses—meant that the band could dip into “Dark Star” for seven minutes before having to move on.

v Improvisation is a form of what Ingrid Monson calls “embodied practice,”58 and I take this to mean what Jerry Garcia was getting at in an interview discussing his music:

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I experience it as a kind of transparency and it’s very, very easy when you get to that place. It’s impossible to make a wrong decision. In fact, the music’s kind of playing itself in a way because I’m not making decisions about where I’m gonna be anymore or where I’m gonna end up or how long a phrase is gonna last or any kind of that. I’m just goin’ with it and everybody else is too.59

What Garcia describes is precisely how the body seems to make any decision on its own; conscious intellectual control becomes superfluous, and the practice of playing music becomes, precisely, embodied. There are, of course, many ways that this experience of the body being played by the music can be expressed—Kim Gordon describes it as becoming “unconscious of your body, in some ways losing your mind.”60 The improvising musician is thinking, but doing so with minimal, if any, mediation between thought and action. The practice is embodied, a “thinking on your feet,” as Garcia said.61 This is true for musicians in other genres, from symphonic musicians to fiddlers in Swedish traditional music, both of whom can attest to the loss of ego when playing. Indeed, it is a general aesthetic experience, that the work takes command over the worker. For the improvising musician, however, this experience is both cultivated and obligatory. In other words, it is a practice, and not just physiological reactions, because intentional, culturally and socially coded, and shared: the body is collective. This practice takes place within a polarity that philosopher Gary Peters, in his The Philosophy of Improvisation, describes as that of preservation, on the one hand, and on the other, destruction, “regarding the past understood as tradition.”62 This, Peters states, must be seen as a “predicament” within which the improviser is working: “free-improvisation is no longer presented as a radically autonomous art, outstripping the past and the present in transcendent acts of innovation pure and immaculate, but as a predicament within which the artist performer is saddled with the ‘tragic’ task of preserving the beginning of art without destroying the freedom of this origin through the creation of an artwork conceived as an end.”63 To succeed with this, the improvising musician engages in what Peters calls “active forgetfulness,”64 which time and again will explore “the infinite opening of the artwork.”65 What could an “active forgetfulness” mean? What is at stake here is the dialectic of musical improvisation, and the role of tradition within it: It is through remembering that the improviser forgets. Improvising musician and composer Frederic Rzewski talks about improvisation as “shortcircuiting” musical conservation: a way of “forgetting—momentarily, at least—everything that is not relevant to the objective of expressing an idea

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immediately in sound. This process has more to do with spontaneous reflexes than with language.”66 Rzewski’s line of argument is not without problems: it seems to erase history and memory from the music, and transforms it into an almost physiological process. His reduction of improvisation to bodily functions—different from embodied practices—might be relevant for the actual performance, for the improvising musician who cannot or must not think instrumentally while playing, but who rather thinks through playing. In thinking through playing, however, the improviser remembers his or her tradition. Composer/musician/scholar George E. Lewis criticizes the common view of improvisation as spontaneous and superficial, and instead emphasizes history and memory as essential aspects of musical improvisation. Here, we find diverse relations between improviser and improvisation: Rzewski works within a European avant-garde tradition, which demands the erasure of conservative limitations, and Lewis works within what he calls an “Afrological” tradition. In contrast to the “Eurological,” the “Afrological must remember and reconstruct its history, a function of its historical oppression.”67 What is it, then, that the improviser remembers in playing? Edgar Landgraf gives a basic definition of musical improvisation as the “simultaneous conception and presentation of art.”68 A double time, generated by two trajectories: Composition on the one hand, performance on the other. What the improviser remembers through playing is thus the practice of art. As Landgraf writes, instead of being heralded as absolute freedom, improvisation “must be seen as a mode of engaging existing structures and constraints.”69 In this simultaneity of composing and performing, the improviser forms a “self-organizing process that relies on and stages the particular constraints that encourage the emergence of something new and inventive.”70 In both “Eurological” and “Afrological” improvisation, tradition has an important part to play. Tradition within the avant-garde is there only to be transgressed, however, and never an archive of representative examples to be reproduced—and if tradition is reproduced, then it is not an avant-garde work of art happening. The emphasis on process is fundamental. Improvisation is not a way of producing a work, even though archival technologies such as recordings tend to reify the improvisational process into a work. It is the event, and not the result, that is improvisation. As Gary Peters writes, improvisation is “the art of making something happen,” and the continuous unfolding of improvisation refuses the work, the finished and objectified work.71 In the case of the Grateful Dead improvising, what happens might be an intensification of the music until it reaches a screaming crescendo, leaving

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players and audience exhausted and devastated—or it might be more of a mumble, bass and drums grudgingly making conversation without really going anywhere, as the “Dark Star” played at the Lyceum Theatre, London May 23, 1972, suggests. This mumbling marks this performance also when the rest of the band joins in, and “Dark Star” then turns into an aggressively introvert piece of music. With the Dead, improvisation is also a process that opposes being fixed into a final form, and as Peters states, this is not an absolute freedom, but rather “a search for it in the here and now of the work’s becoming.”72 The here-and-now are given, as a material space and time, but it must also be understood as a form or effect of the “production of presence.” If improvisation does not happen, then the audience will not sense this presence of art. Hans-Ulrich Gumbrecht, in initiating the concept of “production of presence,” emphasizes its materiality: “presence” is a spatial relationship, which appeals “exclusively” to the senses, “in reach of and tangible for our bodies,”73 but also that it is always momentary, concentrated to what he calls “moments of intensity.”74 One could ask if not this intensity of presence implies a radical forgetting. The Grateful Dead excelled—as did and do many rock acts—at producing moments of intensity, but those were not a matter of reciting well-known songs to sate the audience, and instead improvisation would transport the music to intense moments—moments of presence, perhaps supported by hallucinogenic drugs but which nonetheless were still musical or aesthetic in their essence. Some rock bands produce a Schein of presence, by using sound level and theatrical gestures, at the risk of producing ideology and (potentially Fascist) crowd control, and some bands—most of all the Dead—put something at stake, creating the music in front of and together with the audience. Walking out in front of fifty thousand people without a set list might perhaps not be that scary. But improvising with no harmonic or rhythmic structure to hold on to? Of course, a rock band such as the Grateful Dead, composed of white, Californian, middle-class kids, faces a situation very different from the “Afrological” or “Eurological” perspectives suggested by Lewis, but rock music—albeit far from being suppressed—was considered to be of no aesthetic value up until the mid-sixties. Marginalized, at least in that sense, rock music did not seem to be an arena for musical exploration, but rather for the rudimentary reproduction of the recorded works. If—as Edgar Landgraf writes—improvisation is a “victim of the distinction between ‘high’ and ‘low’ art,”75 and therefore suppressed from aesthetic theory, then improvisation in rock music could be seen as doubly impossible. But the Grateful Dead emerged at a time when rock music generated a dynamic

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that would give it more of artistic legitimacy, and I think that the categories of preservation and destruction, of memory and forgetting, are useful for a discussion of the Grateful Dead. David Malvinni touches on these when he writes, “In what is a movement of deconstruction—as preserving while canceling—the jam can subvert or erase the binary oppositions inherent in a song—beginning/end, verse/chorus, melody/accompaniment, and so on.”76 Preservation is important here. If improvisation is a way of actualizing a song, a way to update it and make it contemporary, then in that way it also preserves it for the future. This happens in “Sugaree” or in “Scarlet Begonias” and in countless other tunes, be they originals or cover songs: The soloists play variations of the melody; they relate to it, preserve it. This is a function of idiomatic improvisation. More importantly, however, improvisation is a way of destroying a given musical framework, of exceeding given harmonic and rhythmic conditions—that is, destruction recognizes the framework only to criticize it. And improvisation does that by openly engaging the framework, relating to it—and not hiding it. Additionally, the form that this takes in the music of the Grateful Dead is that of montage. “Dark Star,” as is shown herein, is a constructed composition made of different parts forced together.

vi “Dark Star” has come to be looked upon as the embodiment of improvisation in the music of the Grateful Dead. This is not wrong, but it is also not the whole truth. Phil Lesh characterizes the song as a “tone poem,”77 adopting a term from classical music for music that wordlessly articulates a poetical text, a mode of music used by Richard Strauss, among others. Lesh thus hints at the composite character of “Dark Star,” how the instrumental interpretations of its different parts and possibilities refer to Hunter’s lyrics, which allude to T. S. Eliot’s “The Love Song of Alfred J. Prufrock”: “Shall we go, / you and I / while we can? / Through / the transitive nightfall / of diamonds.”78 The music here paints an image of a passage through an enchanted “nightworld.” Lesh’s conceptualization of “Dark Star” seems to capture the band’s interpretation of the song around 1970, but fails perhaps to account for the more radical performances of the song between 1972 and 1974. Interestingly, his view also describes the latter-era “Dark Star,” when it is revived in the band’s final years. As Malvinni points out, “the inclusion of outside jam segments and entire other songs is what led the concept of ‘Dark Star’ to grow in time

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span to versions spanning thirty to forty minutes.”79 What Malvinni touches on but doesn’t fully recognize is that “Dark Star” is precisely a montage—made up of different, more or less heterogeneous, forms that the band would juxtapose and relate to each other through improvisation. Some of these parts of the montage were given, although open to variation. The lyrics were given, of course, and with them the verse—Garcia even might omit some of the lyrics. There also were performances of the song with no vocals (often called “Dark Star Jam”), presenting the riff that really identified the song. Certain forms of flow, the “Dark Star progression,” and instances of atonality also were recurrent features of the performances. The band had introduced this practice of musically juxtaposing different elements on Anthem of the Sun, an album that does not include “Dark Star” but which still serves as the key to the song. Lesh even talks about the album in terms of a “temporal collage.”80 Montage as an artistic principle is not bound to only music, and is an important concept in literature, visual art, dance, film, theater, and all other art forms. It has a history: I think Malvinni is somewhat mistaken in speaking of the montage as a “postmodernist fascination.”81 The montage is rather intimately connected to high modernism and to the avant-garde. In music, it reaches back at least to Charles Ives, and highlights of its general history include, for instance, John Heartfield’s photographic montages, cubist painting, Sergei Eisenstein’s films, Walter Benjamin’s critical constellations, and Brecht’s theater—all examples that naturally suggest how this practice of juxtaposition can generate very different results. Jacques Rancière suggests that the history of montage goes back to the early nineteenth century, in a “continuous process of border crossings between high and low art, art and non-art, art and the commodity.”82 That process also generated what Rancière calls “political” art, a concept that on the surface might sound uncomfortable in relation to the Grateful Dead, but at heart illuminates a vital aspect of their music. Rancière distinguishes between symbolic and dialectical montage. The first form, the symbolic, produces “a familiarity, an occasional analogy, attesting to a more fundamental relationship of co-belonging. . . .”83 This form of montage is quite common with the Grateful Dead in how the band connects songs to each other: “Scarlet Begonias” segues into “Fire on the Mountain,” or “Help on the Way” into “Slipknot” into “Franklin’s Tower,” for example, but there are many such transitions—some well-established, others serendipitous, all characterized by how songs seemed to grow out of or into each other. These transitions often gained an aesthetic value in their own right, as the listener could follow how one song is abandoned to make

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room for another one in a fascinating balancing act that sometimes could sound like magic: How did it happen? The band’s music, however, could also take the form of dialectical montage, the form that, according to Toni Ross discussing Ranciére’s concepts, “choreograph clashes between incompatible elements in order to set forth conflicting visions of reality—in particular, to present alternative realities to those purveyed by hegemonic constructions of communal life.”84 Rancière himself looks at the dialectical montage as seeking to “provoke a break in perception, to disclose some secret connection of things hidden behind everyday reality.”85 His description makes it obvious that the montage in his sense is a central Modernist strategy, a part of Modernism’s tradition of the new: to break with the automation and reification of perception in everyday life, and make the world possible to perceive again, as theorized early in the twentieth century by Viktor Shklovsky and Russian formalism.86 Importantly, the Grateful Dead were precisely about such a transcendence of the merely mundane. The Grateful Dead worked, I would suggest, within the tension or dialectic between symbolic and dialectical montage. Montage is a central strategy in the band’s music: the eclecticism of the band members is made into a whole not by melting the ingredients together, but by juxtaposing them. Garcia alluded to this when he talked about the band’s relation to tradition: “It’s the thing of taking a well-founded tradition, and putting in something that’s totally looped.”87 Different versions of “Dark Star” help us see this. The one found on Live/Dead exemplifies primarily a symbolic form: the band weaves the music into an organic web and the wave pattern dominates, the music forming into a world or a universe in its own right. Lenny Kaye (later guitarist for Patti Smith) in his review of the album for Rolling Stone magazine, emphasized the radicality of the music, stating that “if you’d like to visit a place where rock is likely to be in five years, you might think of giving Live/Dead a listen or two.”88 The wave pattern between increase and decrease has an obvious sensuous or even erotic quality which serves to produce a presence, as if the music is materialized in space. This version is also what one could call a “mystical” interpretation, however; as if the band is illustrating the cosmic forces that the lyrics denote—here, it is obviously a tone poem, as Lesh said. The montage character consists in the interplay between more or less improvised parts, on the one hand, and written or composed parts on the other. As Garcia put it, “There are certain structural poles which we have kind of set up in it, and those periodically we do away with.”89 The version on Live/Dead seems to come forward out of an interlude of almost atonal exploration—what detractors called

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“aimless noodling”—and after only one and a half minutes the basic riff is introduced and the music gains its direction. Then the band leaves that motif, with Garcia hammering on the riff as if bent on destroying it, when the second riff appears to provide some order, and they return to the verse, which Garcia sings, and then the chorus. And so it unfolds—the riffs, verses, and chorus are given parts that the band aims to reach at different points, and they go to these acoustic spaces through improvisation: Garcia playing variations on the riffs, the band working around a small, repetitive figure with distorted sounds, and percussive ensemble play. The secret, of course, is how these different parts are juxtaposed and made to interact and produce an effect of synergy. This version then tends to the organic: it transforms music into a type of “second nature,” naturalizing what is a social practice—meaning that this “Dark Star,” in all its beauty, tends to ideology. Itself a montage, “Dark Star” also is installed within a framework that is a montage: Live/Dead juxtaposes psychedelia, blues, improvisation, soul, atonality, and a traditional funeral song. Nadya Zimmerman discusses this as being a problem for the album when she hears the improvisation on “The Eleven” as leading up to “a safe haven of origin”:90 well-known parts, like a verse and a chorus, serve as such havens, idyllic pastures where the audience can relax, take a deep breath, and find more rhythmic stability for dancing. This figure, a sort of homecoming, is a recurring feature but with different—and not only conservative ideological—functions, in the music of the Grateful Dead. Zimmerman’s critique seems exaggerated and monocular. but David Shumway offers a more nuanced view of this figure, comparing it to the idea of transformation in alchemy, meaning that transition from one song to another produces an effect: “What is surprising and pleasing in the return of the original is that, having been led away, we hear the original anew, but we also experience a powerful sense of closure. We have come home.”91 Shumway makes an important point here, finding in this renewal the original that the band brings home, forcing the listener to hear new aspects of a given song. Still, it is far from given that the players return to the song from which they started. David Malvinni touches upon the homecoming aspect of the band’s music, and gives this figure a basic historical foundation, seeing the band as “consciously composing tight sequences that would bind and tie their improvisatory episodes together. . . . Looked at this way, this principle of return to a familiar and stable place as a unifying device is actually quite traditional and conservative, and by no means experimental; yet, in a rock context that was dominated by short little

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snatches of songs, it could often be a mind-expanding experience to early audiences.”92 As accurate as this observation of the band bringing the music “home” might be, one also must remember that this homecoming could take on different functions: Returning to the chorus of “Bird Song” after having deconstructed the song does not have the same ideological implications as having, say, “Dark Star” move into a rock song such as “One More Saturday Night.” The homecoming did not always take place, and one also can observe that quite a few of the band’s improvisations start in silence and end in silence, a silence that is no “safe haven” but rather a space of openness, of potentiality, that sometimes even is threatening—a negation of closure. The framework of songs surrounding improvisation is more of an engagement with “existing structures and constraints,” as Edgar Landgraf put it: We don’t relax when the absolute noise of a thunderous close to “Dark Star” transforms into “Morning Dew.” Instead, we might even start thinking. Zimmerman’s discussion tends to be merely ideological. Graeme Boone offers a subtle musical analysis of “Dark Star,” emphasizing the “ambiguity” of the song in its dialectic of nonidentity and identity. In his view, the music here does not fulfill expectations about a “comfortable resolution”; instead, Boone suggests, there is no “definitive orientation.”93 He sees the song as defined by a “musical searching,” an “open-ended jamming” in which the “tonal enigma of the song is resolved, by force; the progression triumphs over its nemesis of tonal insecurity.”94 Boone’s analysis focuses on one song, and on one recording of a performance of that song, and in his discussion he does not include the framing of the song on the album. Still, his emphasis on the ambiguity of the song—which he sees both in its improvisational nonidentity and in Robert Hunter’s “both powerful and dangerously paradoxical” lyrics—should make any listener hesitate before making definite ideological judgments. “Dark Star” was performed several times during the 1972 European tour, including a fabulous almost forty-minute-long version at the Olympia in Paris on May 4. It starts out as a figure of delay which lasts for almost twelve minutes: it is as if the band refuses to acknowledge the tune as such, avoids introducing it, and avoids entering the given form: a progression with no progress. The wave pattern is there, but now more radical in that the music is repeatedly drawn towards silence, as if threatening to end at any given moment. The riff is introduced at 11:45, followed by verse and chorus, but the band immediately leaves these well-known grounds, and it takes more than twenty minutes before they return there. Instead,

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distorted sounds and a recurrent approach to silence characterize this version. The band is remarkably careful and discreet: improvisation-asdestruction not only can take on the form of absolute noise, it can destroy through silence and non-playing as well. This dynamic is part of the possibilities that the montage form offers the band, as is the dialectic between tonality and atonality. What the band is doing here is a destruction of “Dark Star” in the sense that it refuses to fulfill the listener’s expectations: delay is the basic strategy. The release of the tension that is constantly built up comes instead through Weir’s introduction of the well-known beat of “Sugar Magnolia”—and the rock machine now goes to work again. This provides a sort of homecoming. Landing on familiar ground, but with no return of the original, this is something else: an obvious clash between different worlds. But the musical as well as emotional flexibility of “Dark Star” is remarkable: three weeks after the Paris show, the band performed “Dark Star” in London on May 25, 1972, and an obvious jazz feel dominates large parts of the thirty-five minutes devoted to the song here. The band had already been to London on the same tour, performing “Dark Star” there on April 8, and in that performance they reach towards silence at least five times during its thirty minutes, while also violently forcing the music into moments of intensity. Yet, on the version performed at Alexandra Palace in London in 1974, included on Dick’s Picks 7, delay rules—as if the band really doesn’t want to reach any kind of closure. This version is totally propelled by Kreutzmann and Lesh, and not at all by Garcia and Weir. Another beautiful example of “Dark Star” was performed in Veneta, Oregon, in August 1972, and there the song led into a cover of Marty Robbins’ cowboy tune “El Paso”: an almost shocking change of pace that is an excellent example of how the band could exploit the dialectical montage form. Out of “Dark Star”—which had the band travel through atonal depths, through dissonance—would come not a home, but what Blair Jackson calls “form and consonance”—consonance being conditioned by dissonance. During the first half of the 1970s, “Dark Star” quite often transitioned into “Morning Dew,” sometimes with an improvisatory segment or jam that on records were given names of their own, such as “Mind Left Body Jam” or “Spam Jam.” These combinations have a special significance. The lyrics of “Morning Dew” speak of the world after a nuclear bomb has exploded, meaning that it is impossible to walk out into the morning dew anymore. The Dead took what is basically a folk song, a melancholy protest written and originally performed by Bonnie Dobson, and turned it into an anguished scream. On October 19, 1973, in Oklahoma City, released on Dick’s Picks 19,

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the band performed “Dark Star,” moving into the free improvisation called “Mind Left Body Jam,” and ending with “Morning Dew.” “Dark Star” often is called “psychedelic,” a perfect companion to an LSD trip. The resolution into “Morning Dew,” however, opens the sequence up to a very different interpretation. The year is 1973, the American war on Vietnam is still raging, and Nixon is in office with the Watergate scandal growing. When the Grateful Dead move into atonal noise during “Dark Star,” increasingly so in “Mind Left Body Jam,” the shift turns the song into a wholly negative, painful, and torturous experience of mind and body, of reason and senses being torn apart, pushing “Morning Dew” into a desperate scream into the uncanny darkness. The result is a political vision of the world as it is: as Marcuse stated, “the world really is as it appears in the work of art.” The dark star here is America: imperialist, capitalist, violent, corrupt.

vii The music performed by the Grateful Dead on the European tour of 1972, selections of which were originally released on the three-LP set Europe ’72, and released in its entirety on CD in 2011 as Europe ’72 The Complete Recordings, can be considered the band’s finest work as well as a high-water mark in the history of rock music. The band was extremely well rehearsed, had lots of new material, had new voices in keyboardist Keith Godchaux and singer Donna Godchaux, and they met audiences that were not as familiar with—or enamored of—the band as were the American audiences. Europe challenged the Dead, but it also gave them a freedom to explore and exploit their music. Listening to the long improvisations that were part of every show, one is struck by certain aspects of the band’s playing: intensity, silence, repetition. Years later, when Branford Marsalis played with the band in 1990, he immediately felt comfortable with the music, and odd time signatures were nothing exceptional to a jazz musician. But what Marsalis emphasized was the intensity: “The one thing about the Dead was the level of intensity. Harmonically, most of the music was simple—one, two chords. But the intensity was off the chain.”95 Intensity is, of course, related to volume— but the remarkable thing about the 1972 European shows is that intensity also was generated by the band playing softer, even almost silencing the music at times. “Dark Star” was played several times during the tour, and every time produced new layers of emotional depth. The song—if that is what it should be called in this context—remained inscribed in a wave pattern, a tension between loud atonality and sensual carefulness. The

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intensity often is enormous, principally produced by Garcia repeating a tone on his guitar, Lesh moving around it, Godchaux’s piano and Weir’s guitar joining the repetition, and Kreutzmann giving a pulse, or more often circling the repetitive pattern with Lesh. Then suddenly the music is cut off, reduced to silent steps in the grass. It is as if the music is holding its breath and one can hear it listening; the music itself seems to be listening. Then the montage structure allows the whole band to turn into a percussion ensemble, everyone playing short notes, bouncing and jumping—until Garcia and Lesh move into atonal territory. . . . “Dark Star” was one of the improvisational vehicles employed by the band, but Weir’s “(That’s It For) The Other One” and his and Hart’s “Playing in the Band” also served that function. “The Other One” performed in London on May 24, 1972 is a brilliant example. The tune basically is a rock song celebrating the ecstatic life “on the bus” with the Merry Pranksters, but in this performance—as in many others—the triumphant riff is turned into a menacing threat. In performance, the Dead would turn their songs into something else: They wrestled with them, as they do here with “The Other One,” and out of the narrative of the lyrics they push the song into a totally different and uncharted territory. At its best, that is how presence is materialized in the band’s music—and it also describes how the band stretched out time. Songs that once were recorded in the studio as four-minute tunes could transform into thirty-five minute forays, twenty of those spent searching for a road to take the band through the song, or for the band to actively delay the decision, tonally and lyrically, of what song they were headed for. John Coltrane and Miles Davis taught the Dead how to improvise on one chord, and they had already learned how to explore the dynamics of sound and volume. Even more important, they had learned how to let music be present, forcing each other to go further—and let the music live its own life. Other bands also learned how to improvise, how to work on one or two chords, how to use and explore repetition as an aesthetic asset—but only the Grateful Dead dared play so close to silence, making silence an active element of musical form, although by the late seventies silence did tend to become more of an effect than an element of form. In those moments, frequently produced on the European tour, however, the band transgressed rock music, and the players seemed to leave themselves behind, dissolved: It was an aesthetic triumph. One way to define improvisation is that it is the art of failure: “Plug in, freak out, fall apart” as manager Rock Scully described the Dead at work.96 Jerry Garcia agreed, talking about improvisation as “problem-solving,”97

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seeing failure as a price that improvisation must generate: “The second half [of a show] for us is the thing of taking chances and going all to pieces and then coming back and reassembling. You might lose a few pieces, but you don’t despair about seeing yourself go completely to pieces; you let it go.”98 Also in one of the last interviews, Garcia emphasized the importance of failure: “The tension between trying to create something and creating something, between succeeding and failing. Tension is a part of what makes music work. . . . ”99 As, for instance, Kim Gordon says: “there’s beauty in things falling apart.”100 Improvisation will never get there; it is always too late or too early. It will not take you home. Improvisation emits a promise of happiness, as does art in general, but that promise is always betrayed. Improvisation denies closure, and instead destroys. But this destruction is not only musical in the sense of a transgression of the given parameters of a given song, it is destructive also in that it refuses to acknowledge such a basic assumption of Western music as even the song format: improvisation as a critique of reification. This is once again exemplified by “Dark Star.” In the Europe ’72 version discussed above, one can at any moment follow the musical process: you are there while the band works, when the band forms sounds. In the Live/Dead version that aspect is not as obvious, as it tends to this mystical Schein, to ideology. The 1972 Olympia version instead resists ideology in its refusal to become “cosmic”—failure is then precisely a critique of music as reproduction of the given. Thus, improvisation is an act of forming what has no form. This can happen only through an act of destruction that aims not only at the musical given, but which also takes on the form of a destruction of the subject. Phil Lesh, for instance, liked to talk about the “group mind,” meaning something bigger than the sum of its parts—a form of almost mystical cooperation. Of course, the band tended to give this “group mind” an ideological fixture by attributing it to insights fueled by LSD, and drugs certainly appear to have been a decisive psychological factor for the musicians in their struggle to break away from mainstream culture. This experience, however, is well known within the history of art, and it basically is an aesthetic experience: by subjecting himself or herself to the music, the subject is momentarily dissolved or destroyed and it is the music, and not individual intention, that is in command. “Whatever that guitar says to me, I play,” as Jerry Garcia said.101 Or as Jacques Derrida described the practice of improvisation, “But there, where there is improvisation, I am not able to see myself, I am blind to myself. And it is what I will see, no, I won’t see it, it is for others to see, The one who has improvised here, no I

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won’t ever see him.”102 Or as Jerry Garcia put it, “It’s nice when the music has the ability to really lose you . . . eventually you learn how to get around any musical catastrophe gracefully. That’s the art of the Grateful Dead.”103

viii What is it that is so special about the Grateful Dead? This is a question commonly asked by people who haven’t got it—at least not yet. And maybe there are many and shifting answers—even negative ones: No, there wasn’t anything special or unique about the Grateful Dead. Or maybe they were easy to love, and open to criticism—few bands have been so criticized by fans that really loved the band, “They could be sloppy, unrehearsed. They forgot lyrics, sang out of key, delivered rank harmonies, missed notes, blew takeoffs and landings, and laid down clams by the dozen. Their lyrics were often fruity—hippie poetry about roses and bells and dew. They resisted irony. They were apolitical. They bombed at the big gigs. They unleashed those multicolored dancing bears.” This is a rather typical view on the band, as delivered by a declared Deadhead.104 But looking at—or rather listening to—the band’s music through the mediation of critical theory, one way of answering the question of the Dead’s originality in the affirmative is to emphasize how the band’s music actually generates an ethic. First, the band did observe a work ethic not normally associated with hippies on acid—or even most professional musicians, especially successful ones. The Dead, however, worked hard. They systematically built their community, systematically formed their own working conditions. They toured constantly, and they rehearsed constantly—at least in the beginning. Part of this work ethic was its democratic basis that gave not only band members but also other members of the organization (such as crew and staff) a say and a vote, and it also meant that the organization took good care of its own (as referred to above, see Chapter 2: vi). Secondly, the “democratic” aspect of this ethic included the audience. Asked by Derek Bailey about the habit of many Heads to catch several shows in a row, Garcia simply stated that “you have to train the audience.” But he didn’t stop at having trained an audience; this pedagogical aspect seems to include, precisely, an ethical consequence, Garcia explained: “They’re [the audience] very involved and they feel in fact as responsible in some ways as we do. They share the responsibility for the music, which I think is appropriate. I mean they’re there and they’re culpable you know.

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If not guilty then certainly culpable.”105 Or as Garcia and Weir jokingly described the relation between band and audience (date unknown), garcia: Coming to see the Grateful Dead is like getting a kit from Radio Shack. weir: Yeah. The audience gets to help put it together. garcia: And it might not work.106 Thirdly, but here more important, the band played music that was unfinished in the sense that it was never fixed or complete—it was always being worked out in front of an audience. The music, at least up to the middle of the seventies, has a transparency, which enables the listener to follow the different instruments, listen to the way they interact and counteract each other. This is music at work, music as a process—music that opposes commodification and closure. It is the embodiment of what we mean by improvised music. But reading Bailey’s interview with Garcia, Paul Hegarty makes an important observation of a type of dialectic in the “unalienated production” of the Grateful Dead, which at the same time ignores the “power relations” that are always present in a concert setting: “Not everyone is equal in the setting of a concert by a band, and the community constructed in relatively improvised rock music needs or even is that playing out of power differentials. Like monarchs, the band might be ‘ours’, but the conditions on which that is based is that they are sovereign. The best, noisiest and truly experimental music tries to turn that power into failing, always potentially weak sovereignty.”107 Hegarty has a point: the antiauthoritarian ideology of the band hides precisely the power relations that are produced in concert settings. But what Hegarty does not reflect upon is that the Grateful Dead actually were open to failure. The examples of that openness could reach from releasing albums on which the band stumbles, as when they have to restart “Joey” on Dylan & the Dead, to the many examples of the band improvising next to silence, and finally Garcia saying to an eager fan: “No, no, man, you don’t understand, this is the part where we play soft, and you listen loud.”108 Does improvisation have or produce an ethic? Power relations always generate ethical problems, and improvisation is one way of confronting these problems. Three scholars working together—Daniel Fischlin, Ajay Heble, and George Lipsitz—emphasize the ethical aspect of improvisation: it is a “cocreation.” They see an “important social, musical, and ethical practice” which is “at its heart a democratic, humane, and emancipatory

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practice.”109 They do of course invest improvisation with a great deal of power, perhaps freighting it with too heavy an idealistic burden, but they can also point to a strong correlation between improvisation, free jazz, and the Civil Rights movement, giving their salute to improvisation a material foundation. Yet, even with no concrete anchor in realpolitik, improvised music ultimately might have this ethical dimension because it unsettles “orthodox habits of response and judgment.”110 It can do that because it is in the now: Improvisation—when it is in some sense successful—produces these moments of intensity for the attentive listener, and allows the listener to respond to and judge what he or she is hearing, inviting a dialogue that is the opposite of consumption, as musician and listener both must take responsibility for what they are hearing to make it meaningful. That is the ethical consequence of a music working while simultaneously refusing the work character. According to Fischlin, Heble, and Lipsitz, “Responsibility, one’s capacity to answer to others for what they have to say and how you have heard it, is implicit in all improvisatory encounters.”111 This is what characterizes what the three scholars call the “jazz citizenry,” adopting a political term of citizenship that we have met before (see Chapter 2), and this standing of citizenship, they fill with “responsibility, interdependence, trust, and social obligation.”112 If this seems like a risky idealization of improvisation, we should remember that this ethic is formed in conflict and struggle: As an ongoing critique of oppressive structures, improvisation is conditioned by power relations. It can be qualified with the help of Judith Revel’s characterization of “ethics” in Michel Foucault’s works: “Ethics in Foucault is neither a ‘moral’ nor an ‘individualist’ or ‘egoist’ retreat. Ethics means the problematization of the common which is constructed on the basis of differences and puts these differences to work in a new way of leading one’s life.”113 The point here is that, ultimately, ethics puts the individual before the question of how to lead one’s life, but that question never can be answered in the singular, and rather only in relation to others in a critique of normativity. But is this perhaps a critique of one’s own community as well? Improvisation has something to teach here. Fischlin, Heble, and Lipsitz emphasize a dialogics of listening responsibly, but we have already used Gary Peter’s polarities of preservation and destruction as essential to understanding improvisation: improvisation can preserve tradition—or destroy it. Its destructive side includes itself as a target: with Poggioli and Oswald, it can be seen how improvisation might destroy itself in an act of terminal perdition. It is the critique of the self that improvisation gives the

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form of its own perdition; it scrutinizes and condemns the basis of its own existence. Listening responsibly must include a critique of the self, and of the conditions for listening, to be able to escape the regression of listening that already Adorno saw the new technological media generating. The ethics generated by the Grateful Dead’s music was made possible by the relations between the instruments. When we describe hearing a certain lightness and transparency in the band’s music, we mean that there is a sort of distance discernible between the different instruments that makes them audible as individual voices within a collective whole, deviating from the common rock aesthetic that emphasizes heaviness and attack. This relationship between instruments is often likened to that of jazz (although jazz features many different forms of this), and to a form of dialogue going on in a given performance. Mickey Hart, for example, calls it “conversation,”114 and Blair Jackson agrees, talking about the “conversational relationship between the instruments.”115 A good example of this conversation between instruments (and players) is the studio album, Wake of the Flood (1973). It is an album that tends to the idyllic—a happy album, one might say, with the instruments sounding as if they are actually smiling at each other. Yet, other qualities also are audible in the relationship between instruments. Improvisation is no “love-in,” and listening to the improvisations of the Grateful Dead reveals a dialogue that also includes a violent struggle, tangible for instance in the interplay between Lesh’s bass and Garcia’s guitar: There is a powerful tension there, based in their mutual understanding, that allows them to draw the music in opposite directions, using the other’s playing to jump off into something else. Keith Godchaux, with his piano and keyboards, and Kreutzmann’s drums, could violently force the band to investigate a harmonic and rhythmical figure. The ethics of improvisation must allow for this type of conflict in its interplay, permitting and acknowledging creative tensions, and not idealizing the dialogic moment. Everyday linguistic dialogue, that is, “conversation,” also is full of unspoken rules, fights for power, even verbal abuse—conversation can be filled with spoken violence as well as mutual understanding. Acknowledging the tension-filled reality of improvisation does not mean that the responsibility of listening is eliminated. On the contrary, if the listening to the other is lost, then the resulting music will be more of an ensemble of effects than a meaningful whole; it might be a building, but it will be a shell with no inhabitants. The Grateful Dead did face this problem, and perhaps at times even gave in to it, on off-nights when the players did not really listen to each other. Momentarily, the band did click, with the players relating and feeding off each other, but even their better moments of

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the last years tended to be marked by this lack of interaction. One example is “Dark Star,” performed—to the obvious delight of the audience—in Madison Square Garden in New York (1990). This performance, apparently deemed by the band as worthy of release—on Road Trips Volume 2, No. 1— is, compared with the versions of the same song from the seventies, rough, clumsy, and not very satisfying. By then, the band had adapted to arenas and union schedules, inevitably becoming like the typical rock band, using volume, sound effects, and observing the song format, so even a performance of “Dark Star” was less of a break with that logic. Here, the song was more or less adapted to this more conventional presentation of rock music. When Ornette Coleman was about to jam with the Grateful Dead in 1993, he first listened to the band performing. His reaction was quite negative: “Man, these guys don’t listen to each other when they play.”116 At least momentarily, Coleman could make, or force, the band members to listen to each other, and his playing made the music come alive, as in an interesting rendition of “The Other One.” What Coleman observed, however, was a recurrent problem for the band. Dennis McNally’s history of the band slowly becomes a story about disintegration, of a band falling apart despite those moments of beauty. Due to the musicians increasingly losing hearing after playing loud music for many years, ear monitors were introduced in 1992, making it possible for the individual player to listen to the music being played. According to McNally, however, they preferred to listen only to themselves, with one exception, “But the real reason for the ear monitors was that the members of the Dead didn’t really want to listen to each other anymore. After three decades of trying to mix so that everyone could hear everything, the technicians found out that most of the band members mostly wanted to hear themselves; only Mickey [Hart] actually listened to the entire band.”117 One wonders whether that statement is fair or even accurate. Branford Marsalis marveled precisely at how the players were listening to each other and to the music, “There is a point where musicians who establish themselves stop listening to music and start listening to their own rhetoric. The Dead didn’t do that. It was obvious in the way they approached a song.”118 And it is apparent when listening to Marsalis play with the band at Nassau Coliseum, March 29, 1990, on Spring 1990 The Other One, that he actually made everyone listen to each other. Responsible listening could have been a casualty of the band’s last years, but even then, on occasion, the Dead could still produce great music. This decrease in improvisation in the band’s music can be understood in different ways, but as Derek Bailey points out, it was also a general trend within

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rock music. “Nothing reflects change more speedily than popular music, and the cultural climate in which the improvising rock instrumentalist flourished in the 1960s and ’70s is pretty much extinct. By the 1990s, his skills are likely to have been superseded by the latest piece of technology. The fact that improvisation, irrepressible as ever, has seeped into many of the uses of that technology is probably not much compensation to the redundant instrumentalist.”119 Even though Bailey sees the Grateful Dead as “seemingly untouched” by this process, his assessment of the situation is a valid description of the Dead and improvisation as well. Instrumental skills remained high, of course, but mediated through MIDI and synthesizers, sound effects were produced and distributed from the sound board. That remove was both reality and metaphor, as if technology was now a mediating agent for the music industry, for capital and power, introducing new forms of control over the music that were exterior to the actual playing. During their last years, the Grateful Dead often performed “I Fought the Law” as an encore. It served a vital purpose: a brief, four-minute song that did not lead into improvisation, it made a perfect, predictable show closer, a song that ended an evening on a bright, positive note—ended a show on time. Yet it could be read differently. Written by Sonny Curtis, a hit in 1966 for the Bobby Fuller Four, and also covered by The Clash, the chorus summarized the trajectory of the Grateful Dead: “I fought the law, and the law won.”

ix There might be few phenomena more conservative than white, middleaged men holding electric guitars. Perhaps the Grateful Dead also became victims of this conservatism. But the band did combine avant-garde and roots music, achieving a level of commercial success unequalled in popular music. The Dead could do that because they were supported by a community, in the forms of both an inner circle, “the Grateful Dead family,” and a wider, looser community of fans, the Grateful Dead phenomenon: Band and community were made possible through the interaction between them. What, then, was it that the Grateful Dead had to offer their followers? What was the band’s function within a larger, social perspective? In the new climate of the seventies, Carol Brightman saw the band as offering a safe haven, “With the Grateful Dead’s sense of otherness, along with their aura of communal ecstasy, they were poised to offer their audiences a refuge from a world that seemed harder to understand, much less to influence, than it had been only a few years before.”120

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Brightman emphasizes her view of this “refuge,” calling the band a “sanctuary from the upheavals of an often-scary time of change.”121 To some degree Brightman is right; art invites us into another world, and that other world can serve as a refuge away from the oppression and exploitation of everyday life. So, we could dance down the street to “Scarlet Begonias,” smiling at everyone we meet; we could get closer to each other and to the campfire, singing along to “Uncle John’s Band.” But art also can sensitize its readers, listeners, and beholders, to the world as it is—and it is my conviction that the darkness described by, and inherent in, the Grateful Dead’s music is a musical comment on the world. The world, paraphrasing Marcuse once again, is as it appears in the atonal sections of “Dark Star”: it is the distortion and sound effects of “Feedback” and “Space,” it is the aggression of “Drums,” the desperation of the screams of “Playing in the Band.” The dark star is planet Earth, screaming through space. It is late capitalism destroying everything in its way. And people—musicians—can be among the casualties. Somewhere along the track, this “train of music, drugs, and dance” lost its momentum. Times changed, musicians grew tired, fingers and minds stiffened; the Grateful Dead lost it, one can say. David Shafter, for example, writes about how he cannot think back on his Deadhead years “without a pang of embarrassment,” and he now believes that the “scene surrounding the band had anti-establishment trappings but was actually mainstream, bourgeois and ultimately quite safe.”122 Perhaps—although the scuffles with security and the thousands of arrests tend to undercut his halcyon retrospective. Yet, even if we grant him his view, what about the music: Did it also turn safe and mainstream? Yes, to a large degree it did. The band stopped exploring somewhere along the line, and instead became a machine for producing ballads: many of the late shows have their value in Garcia’s vocals on covers of Bob Dylan songs or originals such as “So Many Roads,” “Days Between,” or “Black Muddy River,” or in his guitar playing on Dylan’s “Visions of Johanna.” Maybe Garcia’s guitar playing was only momentarily like “the sun bursting through the clouds,” to borrow Steve Sutherland’s characterization of Garcia’s style,123 but his singing added another value to the songs, of loss and melancholy. Then I listened to a show, a late show, from September 22, 1993 (it has not been released by the band, but can be found on www .archive.org): the band was welcoming reedman David Murray and harmonica player James Cotton to play with them. If Branford Marsalis brought a fabulous melodic imagination to the band, Murray contributes something else. He provokes the band, wakes it up, electrifies it—through

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an avant-garde attitude of pushing the music further, also when it seems impossible. Suddenly, band members start listening to each other again, old staples come to life, Garcia and Lesh catch fire, as does the whole band, and Murray turns this show’s “Space” into one of the best performances ever. Which means that this music could still be relevant, still be made meaningful—as a stumbling towards freedom.

Coda: Listening for the Secret Listening for the Secret, Searching for the Sound. . .

Was it all just a “sunshine daydream”? The world at large kept on with its usual business of “war, kidnappings, crimes,” as Bill Graham had said when introducing the band (above, Introduction), while the Grateful Dead played on, listening for secrets and searching for sounds as Robert M. Petersen’s lyrics for “Unbroken Chain” describe, or Bob Weir proclaiming the “sunshine daydream” of “Sugar Magnolia.” Maybe it was just a daydream—but if so, then it was one that lasted for an unusually long stretch of time. And apparently that daydream was real enough to create believers in that promise of happiness that art is supposed to generate—a promise that still attracts a large audience today. In his crime novel, Children of the Revolution, Peter Robinson has the Yorkshire police investigate the suspicious death of an “emaciated old man.” The man looks much older than his age, his clothes are somewhat ragged, but he has £5,000 in his pockets. Searching for clues in the dead man’s home, Detective Chief Inspector Alan Banks finds Grateful Dead paraphernalia: a poster, records, and some psychedelics. The dead man, when living, was a Deadhead. So far, all the clichés are there—and this could be just another routine farewell to an outdated rock band, a symbolic death scene of something that has outlived itself. Back at his house, however, DCI Banks searches his own CD collection and finds American Beauty. Listening to it again, he hears something beyond the clichés. The music touches him; it makes itself felt, resonating with this aging English police inspector. He remembers having been to the Grateful Dead show at Empire Pool, Wembley, in 1972 (included in Europe ’72 The Complete Recordings), and turning to Live/ Dead, Banks loses himself in existential reveries while “Dark Star” plays. Even an English police officer, it seems, could be a Deadhead—at least in a novel: “Great band,” DCI Banks tells one of his colleagues.1 128

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Listening to the thirty shows that make up the fiftieth anniversary box set, 30 Trips Around the Sun (2015), one must endure the occasional lackluster performance and a fair number of repetitions of songs. Throughout, however, one can find those sparkling moments that define the Dead at their improvisatory best. The featured show of 1974 was recorded in the Parc des Expositions in Dijon, France, on September 18 of that year. Dennis McNally describes the short European tour as more about (hard) drugs than music, with crooked promoters and bad karma in general.2 The Dijon concert also had its problems, such as the vocal mics dropping out during a few songs. Still it turns into a fantastic show: Ned Lagin and Phil Lesh provide a fifteen-minute version of Seastones, the whole band plays “He’s Gone/Truckin’/Drums/Caution Jam” with an unequalled intensity, and “Drums” actually features the whole band in free improvisation. In this sequence of songs, the Grateful Dead are really the “jazz band” that Bob Weir talked about (see Chapter 1): loose enough to let every player move in and out through the music, yet tight enough to form a meaningful whole. Here, the sunshine daydream materializes as a sonic nightmare of aggressive, improvised music; the intensity is momentarily unbearable. That intensity, however, is also what makes it into rock music—in a way, rock music’s most important contribution to music might be precisely its ways of intensifying the moment. That evening in Dijon, in the face of equipment breakdowns and backstage politics, the band persevered. Starting from a mix of country and folk material, slowly moving into improvisational launching platforms such as “Playing in the Band,” this show unfolds with each listening, transforming as it progresses into one of those performances that really meant that the Dead were happening, not just reproducing themselves. Here, the music gained a form of political possibility— because it speaks a different language, or many different languages. It is this potentiality of something else—something different, a wordless pointing to another world, another life—that also constitutes the political dimension of rock music. Dijon 1974 is one of those shows—one of many, I should emphasize— that makes it all worth it. What the existence of such shows also means is that there must be something beyond simply shouldering on that explains the Dead’s endurance. Thirty years is quite a life span for a rock-and-roll band. Detractors might say it was too long, that perhaps the Dead should have called it quits long before 1995. Perhaps they did get caught in their own routines; maybe the wheels of fortune started spinning too fast, making it impossible to shut down the circus. The real question, however, is not why the shows of the

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last years often were quite disappointing; nor is the real issue how the Dead continued to sell out arenas and attract new fans, even in those twilight tours. Yet, those questions do get at the heart of what is really at stake in these last difficult years. The real questions are: “How could the Dead form and inhabit this alternative universe for such a long time?” and “Was there any secret behind the band’s trajectory—or was it just all about hard work?” One could see the Grateful Dead phenomenon as a form of community based on “charismatic authority,” to borrow a concept from Max Weber’s classic sociology of organization. Charismatic authority, according to Weber, is formed on “a certain quality of an individual personality by virtue of which he is set apart from ordinary men and treated as endowed with supernatural, superhuman, or at least specifically exceptional powers or qualities.”3 It differs from other forms such as legal and traditional authority, which depend on factors such as formal rules, bureaucracies, or inherited patrilineal power. Societies or organizations formed around charismatic authority do not crystallize into “any system of formal rules, of abstract legal principles, and hence no process of judicial decision oriented to them.”4 Instead, charismatic authority sends out a “call” that gathers its subjects (“Can You Pass the Acid Test?”), distributing an authority then upheld not through “everyday routine control of action”—the basis for traditional and rational authority—but one that generates “an emotional form of communal relationship.”5 Weber maintains that charisma is not only irrational in its denial of any formal rules, but is instead even a “revolutionary force,” because it does away with traditional forms of authority.6 Weber points to two recurrent forms of charismatic organizations, “prophetic religious movements” and “expansive political movements in their early days.”7 These might seem like forms of organization far removed from the Grateful Dead and its surrounding culture, but Weber’s formulation suggests that charisma might be only a passing phase; and, obviously, organizations of this type must be quite vulnerable. Weber is careful to explicate the “routinization of charisma.” It can happen in different ways and for different reasons, for example when the charismatic leader must be substituted (as with Jerry Garcia passing away), and the way that succession is managed is one such danger to charisma, because succession might form into tradition. Another threat to charisma occurs at the moment when charismatic authority is firmly established, for “as soon as control over large masses of people exists, it gives way to the forces of everyday routine.”8 The Grateful Dead—almost from the band’s inception—already were part of a charismatic organization as performers at the Acid Tests in the

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mid-sixties. Those events are striking examples of charismatic authority as personified by Ken Kesey. The Tests had a parodic dimension—participants were expected to confront their foibles, and part of that was learning to accept indignity—and, by the end, the Acid Test Graduation even imitated a high school or college graduation ceremony, with the Pranksters handing out diplomas to those who “passed” the Test. Basically, the Acid Tests were initiation rites, separating those who took the Test from the rest of the world. Those inside would form part of the charismatic group, and outsiders were excluded. When the Acid Tests became impossible to uphold, the Grateful Dead took up the mantle of charismatic authority through their performances—although playing down the “authority” aspect as much as they could. Interestingly, from early on the band also was keenly aware of the vulnerability of a charismatic organization; it tried to address this by developing what Weber calls an “anti-authoritarian direction.” As charismatic leaders for a growing audience, the Dead constantly tried to free themselves from performing as an authority or from a position of power. The emphasis on the audience as part of the band, the insistence that the band was apolitical, the absence of conventional stage theatrics, and Garcia’s sensitivity to what he called the “Fascist” aspects of the culture industry, the rock-androll machine, and even music itself—these are all signs of this awareness. Even the famed “hiatus”—when the Grateful Dead, with a few exceptions, stopped performing for nineteen months between 1974 to 1976—can be understood as a way of resisting charismatic authority. Deadheads also understood that they were taking part in a charismatic organization—albeit one that avoided the standard forms of idolization that the culture industry generated. This is the reason for their playful, tonguein-cheek claims made to credulous reporters that the Grateful Dead actually did control the weather, just as charismatic leaders are supposed to do.9 This dialogic exchange—with the band refusing to accept the mantle of charismatic authority, allowing their audience to play with it—is one decisive reason why the band as well as the phenomenon could thrive for so long. Large-scale commercial success ultimately made the Dead’s loose, charismatic form of community impossible. Weber’s theory points in that direction, and it is obvious that the commercial success of the late eighties and the growth of mass audiences meant precisely that charismatic authority had to be routinized. Mass popularity puts art and artist before a totally different set of demands than does a smaller, initiated, and trained audience. For the Grateful Dead, it meant that rational forms of authority were

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introduced and grew more and more important in their organization, and personal contact and long-term knowledge diminished in importance— making the gulf separating musician and audience increasingly difficult to surmount. This hardening of structures from the inside combined with the pressure from the outside—from DEA harassment to television show punch lines— put an end to the Grateful Dead, as effectively as the death of Garcia and the decision by the remaining band members to dissolve the band and retire the name. Although a rock band is always composed of individuals, it also is a machine that does not conform to individual wishes and desires. We can look at the Grateful Dead as a form of charismatic organization, but I believe that we also must remember that the band was a machine that produced certain effects—such as charismatic authority. The band was not made up of charismatic individuals, but the band-as-machine produced exactly that type of authority—and therefore there was no way for band members to escape the machine. Garcia, foremost among band members, was forced into the position of charismatic authority even though he worked hard at fending it off, often talking about how he just wanted to play music. It seems clear, however, that the band sensed the problematic aspects of charismatic authority, and this insight naturally took on a musical form. One of the songs on Live/Dead is called “Feedback.” This title, of course, is neither innocent nor accidental: the players are feeding back the signal produced by their instruments into the electrical circuit formed by amplifiers and PA system. This act of feeding back is further emphasized by the band turning its back on the audience and instead facing their amplifiers and loudspeakers. The resulting music is a form of short-cutting of rock music, which in a way is the system that the band is feeding back into: there is no pulse, no melody, no chorus—none of the conventions we expect of rock music. In 1969, this was still pretty radical; today, nearly fifty years later, “noise” is a musical genre in its own right, and even is found within mass culture. Feedback is an effect within some kind of electrical system: a signal that goes counter to the system. With the Grateful Dead system, however, we already have invested it with a symbolical force: feedback is a countersignal within a system of power relations. I believe that we can enlarge this symbolical function, seeing that feedback at a social or political or cultural level consists of many different practices. Thus, feedback also can be understood as a feeding of the system, bringing new life into it. This was precisely the ambiguous edge on which the Grateful Dead performed their balancing act.

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Even during the band’s existence, a tradition was forming to counter the tendency of routinization and normalization. Deadheads—inspired by the band’s example of charismatic (non)authority—took what they learned and applied it in different contexts. Numerous cover bands still perform the band’s music; some even transpose the Dead’s signature small-group improvisatory style to other genres, from reggae to bluegrass to traditional Irish music. Jazz players have interpreted the Dead’s songbook, and some of the band’s songs seem to be entering the “Great American Songbook.” The Grateful Dead often are called the progenitors or grandfathers of the jam-band scene, with bands stretching out in instrumental jams inspired by the Dead, and frequently emulating the Dead’s business model, with its emphasis on direct contact with fans. The Dead, then, continued in the vein of traditions they relied upon, and at the same time renewed them, reformulating them for a new time and a new situation. As intriguing as the jam-band scene is for considering the legacy of the Grateful Dead, I think a more interesting phenomenon appeared in a surprisingly different milieu, one far away from the Dead’s aesthetic and geographical home: the New York “punk” scene. The New York band Sonic Youth played a music wholly different from the Grateful Dead’s—yet, one of its members, guitarist Lee Ranaldo, is a declared Deadhead. There are musical affinities between the two bands despite their very different sounds; an improvisational attitude as a basic element of the music, a space and a permission for players to move in and out of the song, even a shared interest in noise. But more interesting than any points of musical similarity is the creativity that Sonic Youth generated. Like the Dead, Sonic Youth performed for its tribe, but it also resisted and even transgressed identification as a punk outfit. The group also started its own record company, releasing records where Sonic Youth performed avant-garde music by composers such as John Cage, Yoko Ono, and Christian Wolff. Members have engaged in different solo projects, producing both rock music and experimental electronica, and bassist/guitarist Kim Gordon is not only a thoughtful writer (as suggested earlier) but is a clothes designer as well. Sonic Youth suggests how a rock band, working—because there are no other options—within the confines of the culture industry, nonetheless can form a center of creative energy, generating different kinds of activities and refusing to remain only a rock-and-roll machine. Sonic Youth, like the Grateful Dead, is a pocket of resistance in the larger mainstream culture. In neither case is it a resistance that can be transcribed into conventional politics. Instead, it is a turning away from the mainstream, a refusal to do what power expects and demands. The challenge—some

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might say the impossibility—of folding phenomena like these into conventional politics is precisely what makes them so important. There is what can be called a “contact zone” between different artistic practices, and in this zone, practices as well as technologies and aesthetics are traded, questioned, and mixed together. The concept of “contact zone” might in itself be an example of this: it originates from post-colonial discourse, and Mary Louise Pratt defines contact zones as “social spaces where disparate cultures meet, clash and grapple with each other, often in contexts of highly asymmetrical relations of domination and subordination—like colonialism, slavery, or their aftermaths as they are lived out across the globe today.”10 In the context of the Grateful Dead, the most important contact zones are those between mainstream America and the counterculture, between normative conduct and counter-conduct, and between the culture industry and the avant-garde. In these contact zones, different practices, ideologies, and morals clash—conditioned by and conditioning asymmetrical power relations. The contact zone also might be looked upon as an enclosure—and then we start realizing the problems involved. As Gilles Deleuze says in discussing society as now being a control society, in contrast to a former disciplinary society, “Confinements are molds, different moldings, while controls are a modulation, like a self-transmuting molding continually changing from one moment to the next. . . .”11 The Grateful Dead, both the band and the wider phenomenon, was made into an enclosure from the exterior, from where it was being watched, but on the inside it was at the same time a modulating machine. As Deleuze also claims, “In a control-based system nothing’s left alone for long.”12 Meaning that the pressure was on, from the start and onwards—the pressure to normalize, become like other bands, become a machine oriented towards commercial success and profit, and nothing more. The loose or open forms of the Grateful Dead phenomenon—its different ways of performing counter-conduct—is what kept it going while at the same time making it into a quite vulnerable micro-climate. One conclusion to draw from the trajectory of the Grateful Dead is that there is no outside. Whatever you do, you will always be part of a machine producing effects both intended and unintended, that are effects of the machine as such, and not the people who think they are in command of the machine. The machine combines mold and modulation: it molds its different parts but the total effects of the machine’s workings are a constant modulation, forming a Group Mind that might also be called a discursive order. The machine takes on a life of its own, appropriating even revolutionary slogans for its purposes, making outlaws into in-laws.

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If we look to these phenomena as examples of alterity or even resistance, obviously this otherness has its momentum—there is a moment when alternative practice is possible, but this moment always becomes a past moment and a missed chance, meaning that resistance must be flexible, constantly moving. It cannot have the form of a mold, producing identity. It must take on the form of a constant modulation—even if it then risks being reduced to merely feedback. “If you believe in the world,” Gilles Deleuze says, “you precipitate events, however inconspicuous, that elude control, you engender new space-times, however small their surface or volume.”13 That was what the Grateful Dead meant: new space-times, loopholes where control could be eluded. Because the counterculture will form into a machine, however, it also will reproduce the conditions under which machines are being produced. What looks like a parody of mainstream America also shares properties with hegemonic culture—for machines produce power relations. The history of the Grateful Dead is indeed a rare and different tune, and it is not over even though the group has formally disbanded. That history is part of a stubborn legacy that haunts the present—a present difficult to decipher and impossible to accept, a darkening world of war and exploitation. But there is a lesson in that history, one that reveals how even a rock band could, if only for a moment, overcome and transgress the limitations forced upon living, dancing bodies. One of the Dead’s last songs, “Liberty,” with lyrics by Robert Hunter, allegorically confronts the problem of freedom. The Grateful Dead’s stubborn independence made them resist being pinned down, and Hunter’s lyrics ironically play with different disguises applicable to the band. Behind the playful lyrics is a much deeper point about the meaning of freedom and the nature of liberty. As the song indicates, the band did indeed learn something about the fragility of the conditions we call “freedom” or “liberty.” Maybe the Grateful Dead were not the best at what they did—but they were, in fact, the only ones doing it, which is why they could sing Hunter’s words with such authority. Ooo, freedom Ooo, liberty Ooo, leave me alone To find my own way home.14 Freedom: so hard to reach, so distant—and at the same time so threatening and alluring. Perhaps the band’s quest for freedom, and the acknowledgment of its impossibility, is the secret of the music of the Grateful Dead.

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Notes

introduction 1. For a short but basic discussion of the concept of self-organization, see Jonathan Sheehan and Dror Wahrman, Invisible Hands: Self-Organization and the Eighteenth Century (Chicago & London: The University of Chicago Press, 2015), x ff. Sheehan and Wahrman, although writing on a very different topic, also favor a “more flexible and capacious” (xi) understanding of self-organization. 2. Tom Wolfe, The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1968), 243f. 3. Peter Conners, Growing Up Dead: The Hallucinated Confessions of a Teenage Deadhead (Philadelphia: Da Capo Press, 2009). 4. Joan Didion, “Slouching Towards Bethlehem” [1968], in Slouching Towards Bethlehem (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2008), 85. 5. Douglas Coupland, Polaroids from the Dead (New York: Regan Books, 1996). 6. Robert Hunter, “Touch of Grey,” in A Box of Rain (New York: Penguin, 1990), 228. 7. Adorno, Minima Moralia: Reflections On a Damaged Life, tr. E. F. N. Jephcott (London & New York: Verso, 2006), 151. 8. See, e.g., Nicholas G. Meriwether, “‘A Thousand Stories Have Come ‘Round to One’: Studying the Grateful Dead Phenomenon,” Reading the Grateful Dead: A Critical Survey, ed. Nicholas G. Meriwether (Lanham: Scarecrow Press, 2012), 24–48. 9. Jerry Garcia, quoted in Blair Jackson, Garcia: An American Life (New York: Viking, 1999), 368. 10. Theodor W. Adorno, “On the Fetish-Character in Music and the Regression of Listening,” trans. Susan H. Gillespie, in Essays on Music, ed. Richard Leppert (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), 299. 11. Adorno, “On the Fetish-Character in Music and the Regression of Listening,” 299.

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12. Michael Jarrett, interview with Ornette Coleman. Originally conducted in 1987. http://www2.yk.psu.edu/~jmj3 /p_ornett.htm (accessed June 24, 2015). 13. Adorno, “On the Fetish-Character in Music and the Regression of Listening,” 313. 14. James W. Cook, “The Return of the Culture Industry,” in The Cultural Turn of U.S. History: Past, Present, and Future, ed. James W. Cook, Lawrence B. Glickman, and Michael O’Malley (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 2008), 300. Cook also sees how Adorno himself nuanced his view of the culture industry, as when writing about the long-playing album and new German films, respectively (292). 15. Karl Marx, “Letter to Arnold Ruge, September 1843.” https://www .marxists.org/archive/ marx/works/1843/letters/43_09-alt.htm (accessed April 14, 2016). 16. Roland Barthes, “Works of Mass Culture and Explication du Texte,” in ‘A Very Fine Gift’ and Other Writings on Theory, trans. Chris Turner (New York: Seagull Books, 2015), 39. 17. Herbert Marcuse, The Aesthetic Dimension: Towards a Critique of Marxist Aesthetics (Boston: Beacon Press, 1978), xii. 18. Marcuse, The Aesthetic Dimension, xii. 19. Lars Norén, Fragment (Stockholm: Albert Bonniers Förlag, 2015) [n.p.], the present author’s translation.

chapter 1 1. Charles Reich and Jann Wenner. Garcia: A Signpost to a New Space. The Rolling Stone Interview by Charles Reich and Jann Wenner, Plus a Stoned Sunday Rap with Jerry, Charles and Mountain Girl (San Francisco: Straight Arrow Books, 1972), 127. Garcia never was afraid of talking against himself, “[T]he Grateful Dead never thought of itself as being a psychedelic band. We’ve always thought of ourselves as a rock ’n’ roll band.” Blair Jackson, Garcia: An American Life (New York: Penguin Books, 1999), 106. 2. Bob Weir in David Gans, Conversations with the Dead: The Grateful Dead Interview Book, 2nd ed. (Cambridge, MA: Da Capo Press, 2002), 182. 3. Phil Lesh, quoted in Dennis McNally, A Long Strange Trip: The Inside History of the Grateful Dead (New York: Broadway Books, 2002), 578. 4. Phil Lesh, in David Gans and Peter Simon, Playing in the Band: An Oral and Visual Portrait of the Grateful Dead (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1985), 7. 5. Mickey Hart, quoted in Dennis McNally, A Long Strange Trip, 538. 6. Dennis McNally, quoted in Jim DeRogatis, Turn on Your Mind: Four Decades of Great Psychedelic Rock (Milwaukee: Hal Leonard, 2003), 11. 7. See http://webharvest.gov/peth04/20041019034351/foia.fbi.gov/grateful _dead_the/ grateful_dead_the_part01.pdf (accessed April 17, 2015). 8. The first slogan was a popular bumper sticker, the second slogan was posted by concert promoter Bill Graham outside the Winterland Arena in San Francisco 1978, when Winterland was closing.

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9. Ellen Willis, Out of the Vinyl Deeps: Ellen Willis on Rock Music, ed. Nona Willis Abramowitz (Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press, 2011), 112. Her comment originally was made in 1972. On the Grateful Dead and Californian bohemia, see Peter Richardson, No Simple Highway: A Cultural History of the Grateful Dead (New York: Saint Martin’s Press, 2015), and Jay Williams, “Bears and Flags: The Grateful Dead’s America and Bohemian Nationalism,” in The Grateful Dead In Concert: Essays On Live Improvisation, ed. Jim Tuedio and Stan Spector (Jefferson: McFarland & Co., 2010), 232–50. 10. Mary Harron, “McRock: Pop as Commodity,” in Facing the Music, ed. Simon Frith (New York: Pantheon, 1988), 181. 11. Harron, “McRock: Pop as Commodity,” 180. 12. Willis, Out of the Vinyl Deeps, 83. 13. Jerry Garcia, quoted in Joe Coscarelli, “As Grateful Dead Exit, a Debate Will Not Fade Away,” New York Times, July 2, 2015. 14. Jerry Garcia in Gans, Conversations with the Dead, 51. 15. Phil Lesh, Searching for the Sound: My Life with the Grateful Dead (New York: Little, Brown, 2005) 211. 16. Grateful Dead Archive, Ser. 2, Box 1001A. 17. See contracts in Grateful Dead Archive, Business Records, ms. 332, Ser. 2. The material in the Grateful Dead Archive is still being processed, thus complete references are not always possible. 18. Ralph J. Gleason, “Jerry Garcia, the Guru,” in The Jefferson Airplane and the San Francisco Sound (New York: Ballantine Books, 1969), 315. 19. Theodor Gracyk, Rhythm and Noise: An Aesthetics of Rock (Durham: Duke University Press, 1996), 82. 20. Dennis McNally, “The Grateful Dead in the Academy,” in Reading the Dead: A Critical Survey, ed. Nicholas Meriwether (Lanham: Scarecrow Press, 2012), 17. 21. Fredric Jameson, “Periodizing the 60s” [1984], in The Ideologies of Theory (London & New York: Verso, 2008), 491. 22. Jameson, “Periodizing the 60s,” 514. 23. Stephen Paul Miller, The Seventies Now: Culture as Surveillance (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1999), 33. 24. Michael Hardt, Antonio Negri, Empire (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000), 274f. Hardt and Negri’s evaluation is shared by Jonathan Crary in 24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep (London & New York: Verso, 2013), 112f. “Foremost, perhaps, was the collective and individual understanding, arrived at in the 1960s through direct experiences, that happiness could be unrelated to ownership, to acquiring products, or to individual status, and could instead emerge directly out of the shared life and actions of groups. . . . ‘Dropping out’ was more fundamentally disturbing on a systemic level than many are prepared to admit.” 25. Herbert Marcuse, An Essay on Liberation (Boston: Beacon Press, 2000 [1967]), 7.

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26. Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1958), 40. 27. Hardt and Negri, Empire, 275. 28. Stefan Muller Doohm, Adorno: A Biography, trans. Rodney Livingstone (Cambridge, MA: Polity Press, 2005), 285. 29. “Enlightenment as Mass Deception” is the subtitle to the chapter on culture industry in Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments, trans. Edmund Jephcott (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002). 30. Herbert Marcuse, “Liberation from Affluent Society,” in Critical Theory and Society: A Reader, ed. Stephen Eric Bronner and Douglas MacKay Kellner (New York & London: Routledge, 1989), 277. 31. Marcuse, “Liberation from Affluent Society,” 281. 32. Hardt and Negri, Empire, 286. 33. On Marcuse’s critique of rock music, see Javier Sethness Castro, Eros and Revolution: The Critical Philosophy of Herbert Marcuse (Leiden & Boston: Brill 2016), 244. 34. Marcuse, An Essay on Liberation, 25. 35. Marcuse, An Essay on Liberation, 37. 36. Herbert Marcuse, The End of Utopia (1967), trans. Jeremy Shapiro and Shierry M. Weber, https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/marcuse /works/1967/end-utopia.htm (accessed November 5, 2015). 37. Todd Gitlin, The Sixties: Years of Hope, Days of Rage (New York: Bantam Books, 1987), 215. David Farber in his The Age of Great Dreams: America in the 1960s (New York: Hill and Wang, 1994), 168, goes further and talks about a “culture war,” based on the fact that “far more young people would experiment with illegal drugs and countercultural lifestyles than would ever participate in civil rights, antiwar, or student movements.” 38. Gitlin, The Sixties, 206. 39. Ryan Moore, “Break on Through: The Counterculture and the Climax of American Modernism,” in Countercultures and Popular Music, ed. Sheila Whiteley and Jedediah Sklower (Farnham: Ashgate, 2014), 37. 40. Several critics have noted the montage form of the album. See, e.g., Blair Jackson, Garcia, 146. 41. Lesh, Searching for the Sound, 130, 128. 42. Dennis McNally, Jerry on Jerry: The Unpublished Jerry Garcia Interviews (New York: Black Dog & Leventhal, 2015), 60. 43. Charles Baudelaire, Paris Spleen, trans. Keith Waldrop (Middleton: Wesleyan University Press, 2009), 3. 44. David Grisman’s part in this renewal of bluegrass, turning it into what Grisman calls “dawg music,” must be emphasized. 45. Tom Constanten, quoted in Nicholas G. Meriwether, “Shadow Boxing the Apocalypse: An Alternate History of the Grateful Dead,” liner notes to Grateful Dead, 30 Trips Around the Sun (CD-box 2015) [p. 38]. 46. Blair Jackson, Garcia, 230.

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47. Michael Kaler, “How the Grateful Dead Learned to Jam,” Reading the Dead: A Critical Survey, ed. Nicholas Meriwether (Lanham: Scarecrow Press, 2012), 79. 48. Hunter, A Box of Rain, 80. 49. On this event, see Rickey Vincent, Party Music: The Inside Story of The Black Panther’s Band and How Black Power Transformed Soul Music (Brooklyn: Lawrence Hill, 2013), 295f. See also the discussion of this performance in Corry Arnold, “March 5, 1971 Oakland Auditorium, Oakland, CA Huey Newton Birthday Celebration with The Grateful Dead.” http://lostlive dead.blogspot.com/2010/02/march-5-1971-oakland-auditorium-oakland.html (accessed December 29, 2016). 50. Renato Poggioli, The Theory of the Avant-Garde, trans. Gerald Fitzgerald (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1981), 25–27. 51. The story of the tape sent to Cage is taken from Matthew Christen Tift, “Grateful Dead Musicking,” All Graceful Instruments: The Contexts of the Grateful Dead Phenomenon, ed. Nicholas G Meriwether (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Press, 2007), 83. Phil Lesh, Mickey Hart, and Bob Weir also participated in a June 1996 performance of Cage’s Renga with the San Francisco Symphony Orchestra under Michael Tilson Thomas. 52. See John Oswald, Letter to the Grateful Dead, February 18, 1992, Grateful Dead Archive, ms. 332, Ser. 2, Box C7. 53. Chris Cutler, “Plunderphonia,” in Audio Culture: Readings in Modern Music, ed. Christoph Cox and Daniel Warner (New York: Bloomsbury, 2004), 143. On Oswald’s work, see also Simon Reynold’s interview, “Rites of the Living Dead,” in The Wire, no. 142, December 1995, 30–32, and John Oswald, “Plunderstanding Ecophonomics: Strategies for the Transformation of Existing Music. An Interview by Norm Igma with John Oswald,” in Arcana: Musicians on Music, ed. John Zorn (New York: Granary Books/Hips Road, 2000), 9–17. 54. See, e.g., David Jay Brown and Rebecca McClen Novick, “Tales of the Living Dead with Jerry Garcia,” Voices from the Edge (Freedom: Crossing Press, 1995), 59. 55. Cutler, “Plunderphonia,” 152. 56. Poggioli, The Theory of the Avant-Garde, 39. 57. http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/deadhead (accessed December 29, 2016). 58. See Greil Marcus, Lipstick Traces: A Secret History of the Twentieth Century (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989). 59. See David Gans, Conversations with the Dead, 53f. Garcia could be seen as echoing Theodor Adorno’s statement that the “star principle has become totalitarian,” see “On the Fetish-Character in Music and the Regression of Listening,” 293. 60. Ellen Willis, in her portrait of Creedence Clearwater Revival, writes of a similar experience, growing tired with the theatrics of the Rolling Stones and instead searching for a “more direct, more human connection to rock and roll,”

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which she for some time found with CCR; see her “Creedence Clearwater Revival,” in The Rolling Stone Illustrated History of Rock & Roll, ed. Jim Miller (New York: Rolling Stone Press & Random House, 1976), 299. 61. Peter Bürger, Theory of the Avant-Garde, trans. Michael Shaw (Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press, 1984), lii. 62. Anthony DeCurtis, “The Music Never Stops: The Rolling Stone Interview with Jerry Garcia,” Rolling Stone 664 (Sept. 2, 1993), 44. 63. Bürger, Theory of the Avant-Garde, 49. 64. Bob Weir, in Ulf Olsson, “Förankrad i musiktraditionen,” in Dagens Nyheter, May 6, 1983. 65. Ben Lerner, The Hatred of Poetry (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2016), 41. 66. Bürger, Theory of the Avant-Garde, 50. 67. Mickey Hart, in Gans, Conversations with the Dead, 251. 68. Peter Conners, Growing Up Dead, 21. The CD box set 30 Trips Around the Sun (2015), contains a booklet that includes a large section of fans’ stories about their lives with the band, and many of them speak of shows as life-changing experiences (for examples, see Chapter 2: v, herein). 69. Andreas Huyssen, After the Great Divide: Modernism, Mass Culture, Postmodernism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986), 15. 70. Lesh, Searching for the Sound, 23. 71. Garcia interviewed by Tom Hibbert, Q, February 1988. 72. Garcia quoted in McNally, A Long Strange Trip, 55. 73. Stewart Brand, interviewed by David W. Bernstein, in The San Francisco Tape Music Center: 1960’s Counterculture and the Avant-Garde, ed. David W. Bernstein (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008), 244. Musicologist Jane Alden discussed the Dead in relation to contemporary electronic music in her paper, “Dante, Berio, and the Bay Area Labyrinth, 1965,” at the Eighteenth Annual Meeting of the Grateful Dead Scholars Caucus, Southwest Popular/ American Culture Association, Albuquerque, New Mexico, February 13, 2015. 74. The most detailed account of this pilgrimage is Blair Jackson, Garcia, 62ff. See also Thomas A. Adler, Bean Blossom: The Brown County Jamboree and Bill Monroe’s Bluegrass Festivals (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2011), 81f; and Peter Richardson, No Simple Highway, 45–46. Sandy Rothman provides a snapshot from their trip, http://woodstockrecords.com/woodstock113 .shtml (accessed December 29, 2016). 75. Neil V. Rosenberg, Bluegrass: A History, rev. ed. (Urbana & Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2005 [1985]), 6. 76. See Peter Richardson, No Simple Highway, 32–34. 77. Rosenberg, Bluegrass, xi. 78. Rosenberg, Bluegrass, 171. 79. Ralph J. Gleason, Jefferson Airplane and the San Francisco Sound, 312. For examples regarding taping practices among Deadheads, see Ben Ratliff, Every Song Ever: Twenty Ways to Listen in an Age of Plenty (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2016), 115ff.

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80. Ajay Heble, Landing on the Wrong Note: Jazz, Dissidence, and Critical Practice (New York: Routledge, 2000), xi. 81. Steven L. Isoardi, “Horace Tapscott” in The Grove Dictionary of American Music, 2nd edition. http://www.oxfordmusiconline.com/subscriber /article/grove/music/ A2242595?q=horace+tapscott&search=quick&pos=1& _start=1-firsthit (accessed April 16, 2015). 82. For a detailed history of the AACM, see George E. Lewis, A Power Stronger than Itself: The Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008). 83. Jacques Attali, Noise: The Political Economy of Music, trans. Brian Mussomi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985), 138. 84. Adorno, Philosophy of Modern Music, trans. Anne G. Mitchell and Wesley V. Blomster (London: Sheed & Ward, 1973), 42. 85. Attali, Noise, 120. 86. See Rainer Maria Rilke, The Duino Elegies, The Sonnets to Orpheus, trans. Robert Hunter (Eugene: Hulogosi Press, 1989). 87. Walter Benjamin, “On the Concept of History,” trans. Harry Zohn, Selected Writings, Volume 4, 1938–1940, ed. Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2003), 391. 88. John McCole, Walter Benjamin and the Antinomies of Tradition (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993), 2. 89. Paul Ricoeur, “Hermeneutics and the Critique of Ideology,” in From Text to Action: Essays in Hermeneutics II, trans. Kathleen Blamey and John B. Thompson (London: Continuum 2008), 296. 90. Theodor W. Adorno with George Simpson, “On Popular Music” [1941], trans. Susan H. Gillespie, in Essays on Music, ed. Richard Leppert (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), 460. 91. Attali, Noise, 5. 92. Attali, Noise, 8f. 93. Attali, Noise, 5. 94. Attali, Noise, 84. 95. Walter Benjamin, “The Storyteller: Observations on the Works of Nikolai Leskov,” trans. Harry Zohn, in Selected Writings Volume 3, 1935–1938, ed. Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2002), 143. 96. Attali, Noise, 130. 97. Attali, Noise, 132. 98. Attali, Noise, 133. 99. “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility,” trans. Harry Zohn and Edmund Jephcott, in Selected Writings Volume 4, 1938–1940, ed. Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2003), 253. 100. Attali, Noise, 103. 101. Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility,” 256.

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102. Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility,” 254. 103. Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility,” 257. 104. It is no surprise that there is a book on the band’s use of technology. See Blair Jackson, Grateful Dead Gear: The Band’s Instruments, Sound Systems, and Recording Sessions from 1965 to 1995 (San Francisco: Backbeat Books, 2006). Jackson devotes a chapter to the “Wall of Sound,” at 131–50. The “Wall of Sound” should not be confused with producer Phil Spector’s famous recording aesthetic of the same name. 105. A message to Deadheads, June 1988. Grateful Dead Archive, ms. 332, Ser. 2. 106. This community forming around the shows is captured in Paul Grushkin, Cynthia Bassett, and Jonas Grushkin, Grateful Dead: The Official Book of the Deadheads (New York: William Morrow & Co., 1983). 107. Nadya Zimmerman, Counterculture Kaleidoscope: Musical and Cultural Perspectives on Late Sixties San Francisco (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 2008), 121. 108. Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility,” 253. 109. See Brown and Novick, “Tales of the Living Dead with Jerry Garcia,” 74. 110. Benjamin, “The Storyteller,” 145. 111. Hunter, quoted in Brent Wood, “Robert Hunter’s Oral Poetry: Mind, Metaphor, and Community,” Poetics Today 24, no. 1 (Spring 2003): 53. 112. Hunter, A Box of Rain, 42. 113. Randy Groenke and Mike Cramer [interview with Jerry Garcia, 1967, published as] “One Afternoon Long Ago . . .”, The Golden Road 7 (Summer 1985): 27. 114. Steve Peacock, “Jerry Garcia,” ROCK December 1972. 115. Zimmerman, Counterculture Kaleidoscope, 5. 116. Terry H. Anderson, The Movement and the Sixties (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), 241. 117. Zimmerman, Counterculture Kaleidoscope, 105. 118. Garcia, in Lisa Robinson, “CREEM Interview w/ GRATEFUL DEAD,” Creem (December 1970): 19. 119. See Blair Jackson, Garcia: An American Life, 437. 120. Michael Warner, Publics and Counterpublics (New York: Zone Books, 2005), 10. 121. Michael Warner, Publics and Counterpublics, 14. 122. Michael Warner, Publics and Counterpublics, 120. 123. See the bibliography for works by, for instance, Rebecca G. Adams; Barry Barnes; and the trio of Paul Grushkin, Cynthia Bassett, and Jonas Grushkin. 124. Michael Warner, Publics and Counterpublics, 114.

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125. I am thinking of, for example, Vermont Senator Patrick Leahy and Britain’s Alex Allan, who held several important positions within the British government. See The Guardian, Nov. 15, 2007. http://www.theguardian.com /politics/2007/nov/15/whitehall.immigrationpolicy (accessed December 29, 2016). 126. For a discussion of Habermas’ concepts, see Johan Fornäs, Cultural Theory and Late Modernity (London: Sage, 1995), 66–77. On the interrelatedness of systems and lifeworlds, see Nancy Fraser’s critique of Habermas: “What’s Critical About Critical Theory? The Case of Habermas and Gender,” in New German Critique, no. 35 (Spring-Summer 1985): 97–131. 127. Quoted in Bürger, Theory of the Avant-Garde, 25. 128. Jerry Garcia, in Michael Watts, “Dead on the Nile,” Melody Maker (September 23, 1978). 129. Hunter, quoted in Meriwether, “Introduction,” in All Graceful Instruments, xxviii, xxx. 130. See José Ortega y Gasset, “The Dehumanization of Art,” trans. Helene Weyl, The Dehumanization of Art and Other Essays on Art, Culture, and Literature (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1972). 131. Lesh, Searching for the Sound, 261. 132. Michel Foucault, “What Is an Author?” trans. Donald F. Bouchard and Sherry Simon, in Language, Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews, ed. Donald F. Bouchard (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1980), 116. 133. Neil V. Rosenberg, Bluegrass, 7. 134. I elaborate on the different forms of improvisation in Chapter 3. For my interview with Lesh, see “Alla behagfulla instrument: The Grateful Dead,” in Konstruktion av en kropp. Musikessäer (Stockholm: Norstedts, 1992), 110ff. 135. It might seem far-fetched to compare the Dead phenomenon with the workers’ movement, but Jerry Garcia had strong roots in union culture (“I was a union person”) going back to his grandmother working for the Laundry Workers union. See McNally, Jerry on Jerry, 208, 69. 136. Oskar Negt and Alexander Kluge, Public Sphere and Experience: Toward an Analysis of the Bourgeois and Proletarian Public Sphere, trans. P. Labanyi, J. O. Daniel, A. Oksiloff (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), 84. 137. Michel Foucault, History of Sexuality Volume 1 An Introduction, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Pantheon, 1978), 95. 138. Foucault, History of Sexuality, 95f. 139. Miriam Hansen, “Foreword,” in Negt and Kluge, Public Sphere and Experience, xxxviii. 140. Ortega y Gasset, “The Dehumanization of Art,” 25. 141. Theodor W. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, trans. Robert Hullot-Kentor (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 23. 142. Roland Barthes, “Whose Theatre? Whose Avant-Garde?” in Critical Essays, trans. Richard Howard (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1972), 68.

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chapter 2 1. Grateful Dead Archive, Business Records, ms. 332, Ser. 2. 2. On this event, see Chapter 1, note 49. 3. See Blair Jackson and David Gans, This Is All a Dream We Dreamed: An Oral History of the Grateful Dead (New York: Flatiron Books, 2015), 108f, for several eyewitness comments about the Columbia event. 4. Mickey Hart in Harry Jackson, “On Tour with The Dead,” Zygote, July 22, 1970, 42f. 5. Several of these examples, as well as the following, are drawn from Dennis McNally, A Long Strange Trip: The Inside History of the Grateful Dead (New York: Broadway Books, 2002). Carol Brightman gives an interesting exposé of the relation between the political atmosphere in the early 1970s, and the Grateful Dead’s position within that field (or outside of it); see her Sweet Chaos: The Grateful Dead’s American Adventure (New York: Clarkson Potter, 1998), especially 201–06. 6. Robert Hunter in Jackson and Gans, This Is All a Dream We Dreamed, 349. 7. Grateful Dead Archive, Ser. 2, Box 56. 8. Cameron Sears discusses these issues in Jackson and Gans, This Is All a Dream We Dreamed, 347ff. 9. McNally, A Long Strange Trip, 574. 10. Mike Leonard, “All’s Right with America As Long As the Dead Are Still Alive,” in Sunday Herald Times, Bloomington, IN, July 2, 1995. For a description of how it could be when Deadheads invaded a town in the mid-1980s, see Tony Sclafani, The Grateful Dead FAQ: All That’s Left to Know About the Greatest Jam Band in History (Milwaukee: Backbeat Books, 2013), 286–94. Sclafani’s example is Columbia, Maryland. 11. Phil Lesh, Searching for the Sound: My Life with the Grateful Dead (New York: Little, Brown, 2005) 265. 12. Peter Conners, Growing Up Dead: The Hallucinated Confessions of a Teenage Deadhead (Philadelphia: Da Capo Press, 2009), 241. 13. “Unruly Rock Fans Are Arrested,” Intelligencer Journal, April 11, 1971. 14. Cf. Shane Blackman, Chilling Out: The Cultural Politics of Substance Consumption, Youth and Drug Policy (Maidenhead: Open University Press, 2004), 91. Blackman argues that the “dominant class” took interest in the Rolling Stones because of their “future financial muscle.” 15. Phil Lesh, quoted in Jackson, Garcia at 437. 16. Horace Fairlamb, “Community at the Edge of Chaos: The Dead’s Cultural Revolution,” in The Grateful Dead and Philosophy: Getting High Minded About Love and Haight, ed. Steven Gimbel (Chicago and La Salle: Open Court, 2007), 16. 17. Jerry Garcia in Creem 1971, quoted in Peter Doggett, There’s a Riot Going On: Revolutionaries, Rock Stars and the Rise and Fall of ‘60s CounterCulture (Edinburgh: Canongate, 2007), 411. See also Corry Arnold, “March 5,

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1971 Oakland Auditorium, Oakland, CA, Huey Newton Birthday Celebration with The Grateful Dead.” 18. The Sufi benefit took place on March 24, 1971. A report in the San Francisco Examiner from the following day is available at http://deadsources .blogspot.com/2012/07/march-24-1971-winterland.html (accessed December 23, 2016). 19. Complete lists of the Rex Foundations grantees can be found on http:// www.rexfoundation.org/grantees/ (accessed December 23, 2016). 20. McNally, A Long Strange Trip, 174. 21. Grateful Dead Archive, Ser. 2, Box 1021. 22. Robert Hunter, “Blues for Allah,” A Box of Rain, 20. 23. Greil Marcus, The Old Weird America: The World of Bob Dylan’s Basement Tapes (New York: Picador 2011). The original edition of Marcus’ book was entitled Invisible Republic (1997). 24. Michael Kramer, The Republic of Rock: Music and Citizenship in the Sixties Counterculture (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013). 25. Bill Kreutzmann, with Benjy Eisen, Deal: My Three Decades of Drumming, Dreams, and Drugs with the Grateful Dead (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2015), 325. 26. Charles Reich and Jann Wenner, Garcia: A Signpost to a New Space, The Rolling Stone Interview by Charles Reich and Jann Wenner, plus a Stoned Sunday Rap with Jerry, Charles and Mountain Girl (San Francisco: Straight Arrow Books, 1972), 127. 27. Herbert Marcuse, An Essay on Liberation (Boston: Beacon Press, 2000 [1967]), 40. For a short but poignant discussion of Marcuse, see also Tyrus Miller, “All Along the Watchtower: Aesthetic Revolution in the United States in the 1960s,” in Aesthetic Revolutions and Twentieth-Century Avant-Garde Movements, ed. Ales Erjavec (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2015), 162–68. 28. Herbert Marcuse, The End of Utopia [1967]. 29. Stephen Paul Miller, The Seventies Now: Culture As Surveillance (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1999), 15. 30. Walter Benjamin, letter to Max Horkheimer, February 7, 1938, in On Hashish, trans. Howard Eiland et al. (Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2006), 145. 31. Gilles Deleuze, “Two Questions on Drugs,” in Two Regimes of Madness: Texts and Interviews 1975–1995, trans. Ames Hodges and Mike Taormina (Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2006), 151. 32. Walter Benjamin, “Hashish, Beginning of March 1930,” in Selected Writings Volume 2, 1927–1934, ed. Michael W. Jennings, Howard Eiland, and Gary Smith (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1999), 328. 33. Benjamin, “Hashish,” 329. 34. Benjamin, “Hashish in Marseilles,” in Selected Writings Volume 2, 1927–1934, 678.

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35. Conners, Growing Up Dead, 47. 36. Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 283. The concept of “deterritorialization” has been applied to the Grateful Dead by Mark Tursi, “Deconstructing Deadheads,” ed. Nicholas G. Meriwether, Reading the Grateful Dead: A Critical Survey (Lanham: The Scarecrow Press, 2012), 247–56; David Malvinni, Grateful Dead and the Art of Rock Improvisation (Lanham: Scarecrow Press, 2013); and Jim Tuedio, “‘Pouring Its Light into Ashes’: Exploring the Multiplicity of Becoming in Grateful Dead Improvisation,” The Grateful Dead in Concert, ed. Jim Tuedio and Stan Spector (Jefferson: McFarland, 2010), 133–51. 37. Michel Foucault, interviewed by P. Caruso, “Who Are You, Professor Foucault?” in Foucault, Religion and Culture, ed. Jeremy R. Carrette (New York: Routledge, 1999), 90. 38. Deleuze, “Two Questions on Drugs,” 154. 39. Lesh, Searching for the Sound [passim]. 40. Reich and Wenner, Garcia: A Signpost to a New Space, 42. 41. Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments, trans. Edmund Jephcott (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002 [1947]), 50. 42. Jacques Derrida, “The Rhetoric of Drugs,” trans. Michael Israel, Points . . . Interviews, 1974–1994 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995 [1989]), 241. 43. Nicholas Meriwether has in conversation suggested to me that this is the reason heavy drugs entered the Grateful Dead organization in the seventies. 44. Derrida, “The Rhetoric of Drugs,” 229. 45. Avital Ronell, Crack Wars: Literature Addiction Mania (Lincoln & London: University of Nebraska Press, 1992), 50. See also Elizabeth Carroll, “Plato’s Pharmakon: Grateful Dead Concerts and the Politics of Getting High,” in The Grateful Dead in Concert, ed. Jim Tuedio and Stan Spector (Jefferson: McFarland, 2010), 165–79. 46. Bob Weir in Jackson and Gans, This Is All a Dream We Dreamed, 188. 47. http://webharvest.gov/peth04/20041019034351/foia.fbi.gov/grateful _dead_the/ grateful_dead_the_part01.pdf (accessed January 20, 2017). 48. Todd Gitlin, The Sixties: Years of Hope, Days of Rage (New York: Bantam Books, 1987), 205. See also David Farber, The Age of Great Dreams: America in the 1960s (New York: Hill and Wang, 1994), 173. 49. Jerry Garcia, interviewed by Tom Hibbert, “The Last Great American Adventurer: Jerome John Garcia 1942–1995,” Q (February 1988), http://www .rocksbackpages.com/Library/Article/the-last-great-american-adventurer -jerome-john-garcia-1942-1995 (accessed June 1, 2016). 50. David Shumway, Rock Star: The Making of Musical Icons from Elvis to Springsteen (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014), 123.

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51. Stan Spector, “When ‘Reason Tatters’: Nietzsche and the Grateful Dead on Living a Healthy Life,” in The Grateful Dead in Concert, 180–90; see also Stan Spector, “Who Is Dionysus and Why Does He keep Following Me Everywhere?” in Studying the Dead: The Grateful Dead Scholars Caucus; an Informal Story, ed. Nicholas G. Meriwether (Lanham: The Scarecrow Press, 2013), 63–72. 52. Paul Cartledge “‘Deep Plays’: Theatre As Process in Greek Civic Life,” in The Cambridge Companion to Greek Tragedy, ed. P. E. Easterling (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 6. 53. Theodore Roszak, The Making of a Counter Culture: Reflections on the Technocratic Society and Its Youthful Opposition (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1969), 5. 54. Roszak, The Making of a Counter Culture, 8. 55. Roszak, The Making of a Counter Culture, 56. 56. Roszak, The Making of a Counter Culture, 62. 57. Peter Braunstein and Michael William Doyle, “Introduction: Historicizing the American Counterculture of the 1960s and ’70s,” in Imagine Nation: The American Counterculture of the 1960s and ’70s, ed. Peter Braunstein and Michael William Doyle (New York: Routledge, 2002), 10. 58. McNally, A Long, Strange Trip, 179. 59. Lesh, Searching for the Sound, 97. 60. Hunter S. Thompson, “The Hashbury,” New York Times Magazine, May 14, 1967. 61. Joanna Freer, Thomas Pynchon and American Counterculture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 13. 62. Kramer, The Republic of Rock, 35. 63. David Fricke, “Branford Marsalis on His Unlikely Collaboration with the Grateful Dead,” Rolling Stone (July 10, 2014). http://www.rollingstone .com/music/news/branford-marsalis-on-his-unlikely-collaboration-with-the -grateful-dead-20140710 (accessed September 27, 2015). 64. See Taylor Hill, “‘Deadheads Are What Liberals Claim to Be but Aren’t’: An Interview with Ann Coulter,” http://www.jambands.com/features /2006/06/23/deadheads-are-what-liberals-claim-to-be-but-aren-t-an-inter view-with-ann-coulter (accessed August 12, 2015). 65. The “Spinners” are described in Jennifer A. Hartley, “‘We Were Given This Dance’: Music and Meaning in the Early Unlimited Devotion Family,” in Deadhead Social Science: You Ain’t Gonna Learn What You Don’t Want To Know, ed. Rebecca G. Adams and Robert Sardiello (Walnut Creek: Altamira Press, 2000), 129–54. 66. Nicholas Meriwether writes in “Higher Ed with the Dead,” liner notes to Dave’s Picks Volume 4, CD, Rhino Records (2012), that the way “the band took root in America’s institutions of higher learning is a critical part of the story of the Dead” that still remains to be explored. 67. Carol Brightman lists Deadheads stretching from “a Stealth bomber pilot with Dead stickers on his wing” via “a string of carpenters and fishermen

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along the Maine coast” to “the coach of the Chicago Bulls,” see Sweet Chaos, 6f. Sociologist Rebecca G. Adams, “‘What Goes Around, Comes Around’: Collaborative Research and Learning,” in Deadhead Social Science: You Ain’t Gonna Learn What You Don’t Want To Know, ed. Rebecca G. Adams and Robert Sardiello (Walnut Creek: Altamira Press, 2000), 34, “Most Deadheads come from middle[-] and upper-middle[-]class families, have completed or will eventually finish college, and have or eventually will have a white[-]collar or professional job.” See also Stephanie Jennings, “Becoming a Deadhead,” in Deadhead Social Science, at 203–13. 68. David Shenk and Steve Silberman, Skeleton Key: A Dictionary for Deadheads (New York: Doubleday, 1994), 60. 69. Mikal Gilmore, “The End of Jerry Garcia and the Grateful Dead” [1995], in Stories Done: Writings on the 1960s and Its Discontents (New York: Free Press, 2008), 69f. 70. Rebecca G. Adams, “‘I Can’t Do Anything But Lie’: Studying Deadheads While Wearing Simmelian Lenses,” in The Grateful Dead in Concert, 314. 71. Jay Williams, “Bears and Flags: The Grateful Dead’s America and Bohemian Nationalism,” in The Grateful Dead in Concert: Essays on Live Improvisation, ed. Jim Tuedio and Stan Spector (Jefferson: McFarland, 2010), 238f. 72. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, rev. ed. (London & New York: Verso, 1991), 6f. 73. Gary Burnett, “Improvising Community: A Hermeneutical Analysis of Deadheads and Virtual Communities,” in The Grateful Dead in Concert: Essays on Live Improvisation, ed. Jim Tuedio and Stan Spector (Jefferson: McFarland, 2010), 251. 74. Jay Williams, “Bears and Flags: The Grateful Dead’s America and Bohemian Nationalism,” 239. 75. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities, 43–46. 76. Jay Williams, “Bears and Flags: The Grateful Dead’s America and Bohemian Nationalism,” 239. 77. Jacob A. Cohen, “Nomadic Musical Audiences: A Historical Precedent for the Grateful Dead,” in Reading the Dead: A Critical Survey, ed. Nicholas G. Meriwether (Lanham: Scarecrow Press, 2012), 238. 78. Band meeting minutes, May 2, 1985, Grateful Dead Archive, Business Records, ms. 332, Ser. 2. 79. Grateful Dead Archive, Business Records, ms. 332, Ser. 2. 80. For an example of an imprisoned “Deadhead,” see the case of Timothy Tyler. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timothy_L._Tyler (accessed December 23, 2016). 81. Carol Brightman, Sweet Chaos, 295. 82. Jerry Garcia, interviewed by Marlese Ann James, “Jerry Garcia, Guitar,” Circus 5, no. 4, March 1971. 83. Dennis Cauchon, “Attacks on Deadheads Is No Hallucination,” USA Today, December 17, 1992.

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84. Constantine, quoted in Peter Richardson, No Simple Highway: A Cultural History of the Grateful Dead (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2015), 298. 85. On the DEA and the Grateful Dead’s (lack of) reaction to the Agency arresting Deadheads, see also Carol Brightman, Sweet Chaos, 294ff. 86. Terry Link, “Doctor at Dead Concert Arrested on Drug Charges,” Oakland Tribune, August 22, 1989. 87. Detective Lyman, interviewed by Donna Liquori, “Deadhead Detectives Have Lots of Tickets,” Albany Times Union, March 28, 1993, quoted in Peter Conners, Growing Up Dead, 137. 88. See, e.g., Michael Isikoff, “Interest in Grateful Dead Was Not Musical,” Washington Post, August 14, 1990. http://www.washingtonpost.com/archive /politics/1990/08/14/interest-in-grateful-dead-was-not-musical/259ae94c -aab9-4f34-bac4-4329af8192ab/ (accessed April 4, 2015). 89. See Jeremy Ritzer, “Deadheads and Dichotomies: Mediated and Negotiated Readings,” in Deadhead Social Science, 260. 90. Dan Baum, Smoke and Mirrors: The War on Drugs and the Politics of Failure (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1996), xi. 91. John Ehrlichman, quoted in Peter Moskos, “Cop in the Hood.” http:// www.copinthehood.com/2015/11/what-war-on-drugs-was-really-about-we .html (accessed February 5, 2016). 92. Baum, Smoke and Mirrors, 195. 93. Baum, Smoke and Mirrors, 333f. On the “War on Drugs” and the Grateful Dead scene, see Jesse Jarnow, Heads: A Biography of Psychedelic America (Philadelphia: Da Capo, 2016) 299ff. 94. I pick up the concept of “self-othering” from Simon During, “Rousseau’s Patrimony: Primitivism, Romance, and Becoming Other,” in Colonial Discourse/Postcolonial Theory, ed. Francis Barker, Peter Hulme, and Margaret Iversen (Manchester & New York: Manchester University Press, 1994), 47–71. During uses the concept in a discussion of Enlightenment writers such as Diderot and Rousseau. 95. Rebecca G. Adams, “Stigma and the Inappropriately Stereotyped: The Deadhead Professional,” Sociation Today 1, no. 1 (Spring 2003). http:// www.ncsociology.org/sociationtoday/deadhead.htm (accessed December 23, 2016). 96. Herbert Marcuse, An Essay on Liberation, 74. 97. Viola, May 30, 1989; Scher, June 6, 1989, Grateful Dead Archive, Ser. 2, Box 1091B. 98. Blackman, Chilling Out, 11. 99. Ronell, Crack Wars, 50f. 100. Blackman, Chilling Out, 81. 101. Grateful Dead Archive, Ser. 2, Box 1090. 102. Jacques Rancière, “Contemporary Art and the Politics of Aesthetics,” in Communities of Sense: Rethinking Aesthetics and Politics, ed. Beth Hinderliter et al. (Durham: Duke University Press, 2009), 38.

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103. Timothy E. Scheurer, Born in the USA: The Myth of America in Popular Music from Colonial Times to the Present (Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 1991), 5. 104. The comparison of points and lines is Dennis McNally’s in A Long Strange Trip, 337. 105. Jerry Garcia, in Steve Sutherland, “Grateful Dead: Acid Daze,” Melody Maker, May 6, 1989. 106. Fred Goodman, “Jerry Garcia: The Rolling Stone Interview,” Rolling Stone 566, November 30, 1989. http://www.rollingstone.com/music/features /the-rolling-stone-interview-jerry-garcia-19891130 (accessed November 9, 2015). 107. The image, designed by Rick Griffin, can be viewed at http://www .dead.net/features/twenty-years-so-far-flyers-front (accessed December 23, 2016). 108. The event can be found on YouTube, at https://www.youtube.com /watch?v=MH8ObibNCoo (accessed December 23, 2016). 109. Weir in Gans, Conversations with the Dead, 185, 189. 110. Scheurer, Born in the USA, 150. 111. Hunter, A Box of Rain, 174. 112. Robert Hunter, “U.S. Blues,” A Box of Rain, 234. 113. David Shumway, Rock Star, 137. 114. Robert Hunter, letter to Art George, Grateful Dead Archive, ms. 332, Ser. 2. George published an article incorporating these lines in “Rap-Up,” Oakland Tribune, June 23, 1974. 115. Weir, quoted in David Browne, So Many Roads: The Life and Times of the Grateful Dead (Boston: Da Capo Press, 2015), 290. 116. McNally, A Long Strange Trip, 545. 117. Dennis McNally, A Long Strange Trip, 470, comments on “U.S. Blues” and “Ship of Fools”: “Both reflected the political atmosphere of 1974. . . .” Horace Fairlamb, “Deadly Beauty: The Aesthetics of the Grateful Dead,” in All Graceful Instruments: The Contexts of the Grateful Dead Phenomenon, ed. Nicholas G. Meriwether (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2007), 28, also emphasizes the political situation, “the paranoia of the Nixon administration’s acceleration into a police state, an America dedicated to eliminating political dissent and countercultural lifestyles” and he calls “U.S. Blues” a “protest song.” 118. Reich and Wenner, Garcia: A Signpost to a New Space, 212. 119. See Michel Foucault, Security, Territory, Population: Lectures at the Collège de France 1977–1978, trans. Graham Burchell (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 196. 120. Michel Foucault, Security, Territory, Population, 194f. 121. Quoted in McNally, A Long Strange Trip, 174. 122. Kreutzmann and Eisen, Deal, 97. 123. Steve Sutherland, Jerry Garcia Interview, Melody Maker, March 1981. 124. McNally, A Long, Strange Trip, 442.

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125. Browne, So Many Roads, 7. 126. Garcia, in Tom Hibbert, “Deadheads!” Q 2, no. 5 (February 1988): 59. On the Grateful Dead’s view on Reagan, see Peter Richardson, No Simple Highway, 269–81. 127. John Street, “Rock, Pop and Politics,” in The Cambridge Companion to Pop and Rock, ed. Simon Frith, Will Straw, and John Street (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 248. 128. Steve Lake, Jerry Garcia interview, “Rock ‘n’ Roll Misfit,” Melody Maker, September 14, 1974. 129. Theodore Gracyk, I Wanna Be Me: Rock Music and the Politics of Identity (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2001), 9. 130. Kreutzmann and Eisen, Deal, 275. 131. John Mowitt, “The Sound of Music in the Era of Its Electronic Reproducibility,” in Music and Society: The Politics of Composition, Performance and Reception, ed. Richard Leppert and Susan McClary (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 178. 132. Gilmore, “The End of Jerry Garcia and the Grateful Dead,” 69. 133. Street, “Rock, Pop and Politics,” 249. 134. Hunter, A Box of Rain, 197. 135. For a detailed analysis of The Doors’ “Hello, I Love You,” see Ulf Lindberg, Rockens text: Ord, musik och mening (Stockholm/Stehag: Symposion, 1995), 38–45. 136. The Grateful Dead scene might be described as fundamentally heterosexual; for a discussion of how it is to be a gay Deadhead, see Edward Guthmann, “A Tale of Two Tribes: A Gay Man’s Adventure in the World of Deadheads,” in The Grateful Dead Reader, ed. David G. Dodd and Diana Spaulding (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), 220–24. 137. All four examples, picked among an infinite number of possible ones, are anonymous and from the booklet accompanying the CD box set 30 Trips Around the Sun, Rhino Records (2015), R2-547369, pp. 35, 66, 119, and 12, respectively. 138. Interestingly, the CD box set Day of the Dead (2016), celebrating the music of the Grateful Dead through interpretations of their songs, includes several artists closely connected to questions of gender politics: notably Anohni (formerly Anthony of Anthony and the Johnsons) and Lucius. 139. Jacques Rancière, Disagreement: Politics and Philosophy, trans. Julie Rose (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998), 28. 140. Rancière, Disagreement, 29. 141. Rancière, “Ten Theses on Politics,” Dissensus: On Politics and Aesthetics, trans. Steven Corcoran (New York: Continuum, 2010), 27. 142. Rancière, “Division of the Arche,” Moments Politiques: Interventions 1977–2009, trans. Mary Foster (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2014), 47. 143. Rancière, “Ten Theses on Politics,” 37. 144. Rancière, “Ten Theses on Politics,” 38. 145. Kostas Vlassopoulos, Politics: Antiquity and Its Legacy (London and New York: I. B. Tauris, 2010), xx.

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146. Rancière, “Ten Theses on Politics,” 39. 147. Vlassopoulos, Politics, xx. 148. Garcia, in Steve Sutherland, “Grateful Dead: Acid Daze.” 149. Vlassopoulos, Politics, 89. 150. Vlassopoulos, Politics, 117. 151. Joel Selvin, “Jerry Garcia: The Last Post,” Mojo, October 1995. 152. Kreutzmann and Eisen, Deal, 349. 153. Mark Tursi applies Deleuze’s concept of “war machine” to the Grateful Dead in “Deconstructing Deadheads,” 248f. 154. Gerald Raunig, A Thousand Machines: A Concise Philosophy of the Machine as Social Movement, trans. Aileen Derieg (Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2010), 57f. 155. Quoted in Raunig, A Thousand Machines, 57. 156. Raunig, A Thousand Machines, 70f. 157. Claire Colebrook, Gilles Deleuze (London and New York: Routledge, 2002), 56. 158. Michel Foucault, “Different Spaces” [1967], in Aesthetics, Method, and Epistemology: Essential Works of Foucault 1954–1984, trans. Robert Hurley, Volume Two (New York: The New Press, 1998), 185. This essay is better known as “Of Other Places,” original title “Des Espaces Autres.” For a Marxist critique of Foucault’s text, see David Harvey, Cosmopolitanism and the Geographies of Freedom (New York: Columbia University Press, 2009), 159ff. For example, when Foucault uses the image of the ship, Harvey states that “the banality of Foucault’s concept of heterotopia becomes all too plain” (160). 159. Foucault, “Different Spaces,” 178. 160. Foucault, “Different Spaces,” 178. 161. Diana Nelson Jones, “‘It’s a Different World out There,’” Pittsburgh Post Gazette, July 1, 1995. 162. Rancière, “The Pleasure of Political Metamorphosis” [interview], in Moments Politiques, 172. 163. On the “Parking Lot scene”—also called “Shakedown Street”—see for example Matthew Sheptoski, “Vending at Dead Shows: The Bizarre Bazaar,” in Deadhead Social Science, 157–81. 164. For Sawka’s work, see Hanna M. Sawka, “Deconstructing Totalitarian Images: Jan Sawka’s Grateful Dead Set as an Expression of Liberation.” http:// jansawka.com/blog/?cat=10 (accessed April 14, 2016). 165. Andrew Thacker, Moving Through Modernity: Space and Geography in Modernism (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003), 25. 166. Grateful Dead Archive, Summer Tour 1989, Ser. 2, Box 1091B. 167. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy and Other Writings, trans. Ronald Speirs (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 17. 168. Foucault, Religion and Culture, 90. 169. Grateful Dead, “Letter to Dead Heads,” Summer Tour 1989, MailOrder Enclosure, Grateful Dead Archive, Ser. 2, Box 1091B. 170. Ned Lagin in Gans, Conversations with the Dead, 388.

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171. Ned Lagin in Gans, Conversations with the Dead, 363. 172. Henri Lefebvre, The Urban Revolution, trans. Robert Bononno (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003 [1970]), 129. 173. Kreutzmann quoted after McNally, A Long Strange Trip, 389. 174. Jacques Attali, Noise: The Political Economy of Music, trans. Brian Mussomi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985 [1977]), 12. 175. See, for example, Meeting Minutes, November 8, 1984; December 13, 1984; February 1, 1985, Grateful Dead Archive, Ser. 2, various. 176. Joseph B. Smith, Letter to Danny Rifkin, December 27, 1967, Grateful Dead Archive, Ser. 2, Box 52. 177. McNally, A Long Strange Trip, 265. 178. Grateful Dead Archive, Business Records, ms. 332, Ser. 2. 179. Grateful Dead Archive, Business Records, ms. 332, Ser. 2. 180. Grateful Dead Archive, Business Records, ms. 332, Ser. 2. 181. Rock Scully, in Cynthia Robins, “The Benefits of Rock,” San Francisco Sunday Examiner & Chronicle, February 7, 1982. 182. Barlow, ”The Music Never Stopped,” in David Dodd, The Annotated Grateful Dead Lyrics. http://artsites.ucsc.edu/GDead/agdl/mns.html (accessed December 23, 2016). 183. Jacques Rancière, Aesthetics and Its Discontents (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2009), 19. 184. Lesh, quoted in David Dodd, The Complete Annotated Grateful Dead Lyrics (New York: Free Press, 2007), 134. 185. This “normalization” of the band and its relation to its audience can be understood in different ways. One is suggested by David Browne: That the band adjusts, slowly but irrepressibly, to the “industry” and business side of music, itself eventually becoming an industry. See Browne, So Many Roads, 197, 245, and passim. 186. Grateful Dead Archive, Summer Tour 1989, Ser. 2, Box 1091B. 187. Grateful Dead Archive, Misc. Europe, Ser. 2, Box 1051.

chapter 3 1. Ellen Willis, Out of the Vinyl Deeps: Ellen Willis on Rock Music, edited by Nona Willis Abramowitz (Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press, 2011): 175. 2. Jerry Garcia, interviewed by Steve Sutherland, “Grateful Dead: Bone Idols,” in Melody Maker, October 27, 1990. 3. Thanks to Anna Bohlin for pointing this out to me. 4. David Gans and Peter Simon, Playing in the Band: An Oral and Visual Portrait of the Grateful Dead (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1985), 69. 5. Theodor W. Adorno, “On the Fetish-Character in Music and the Regression of Listening,” [1938] Susan H. Gillespie (trans.), in Essays on Music, ed. Richard Leppert (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), 288.

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6. Jerry Garcia, in David Gans, Conversations with the Dead: The Grateful Dead Interview Book (New York: Citadel, 1991), 66. 7. On the importance of Coltrane, see Phil Lesh, Searching for the Sound: My Life with the Grateful Dead (New York: Little, Brown, 2005), 27, 59; and Bill Kreutzmann with Benjy Eisen, Deal: My Three Decades of Drumming, Dreams, and Drugs with the Grateful Dead (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2015), 36, 83. 8. Steve Howe, quoted in Derek Bailey, Improvisation: Its Nature and Practice in Music (New York: Da Capo Press, 1993), 39. 9. Theodore Gracyk, Rhythm and Noise: An Aesthetics of Rock (Durham: Duke University Press, 1996), 193. 10. Nicholas Meriwether, “Introduction,” to All Graceful Instruments: The Contexts of the Grateful Dead Phenomenon, ed. Nicholas Meriwether (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Press, 2007), xix. 11. For the Dead’s reactions to Davis’ music, see Lesh, Searching for the Sound at 177f. For Davis impressions of those nights, see Miles Davis with Quincy Troupe, Miles: The Autobiography (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1990), 300ff. 12. Jacques Attali, Noise: The Political Economy of Music, trans. Brian Mussomi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985 [1977]), 88. 13. Attali, Noise, 84. 14. Adorno, “On the Fetish-Character in Music and the Regression of Listening,” trans. Susan H. Gillespie, in Essays on Music, ed. Richard Leppert (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), 301. 15. Adorno, “On the Fetish-Character in Music and the Regression of Listening,” 295. 16. Adorno, “On the Fetish-Character in Music and the Regression of Listening,” 295. 17. Attali, Noise, 5. 18. Attali, Noise, 8f. 19. Lesh, Searching for the Sound, 257. 20. Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society (Boston: Beacon Press 1964), 93. 21. Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man, 116. 22. John Mowitt, “The Sound of Music in the Era of Its Electronic Reproducibility,” in Music and Society: The Politics of Composition, Performance and Reception, ed. Richard Leppert and Susan McClary (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 175. 23. Gary Peters, The Philosophy of Improvisation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), 152. 24. “Condition of possibility” is a Foucauldian concept that originated in Kant. In this example, it means that the conditions did not cause improvisation, and instead opened up possibilities for it. 25. Kim Gordon, Is It My Body? Selected Texts (Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2014), 50.

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26. David Grubbs, Records Ruin the Landscape: John Cage, the Sixties, and Sound Recording (Durham: Duke University Press, 2014), 140. 27. Derek Bailey, quoted in Grubbs, Records Ruin the Landscape, 107. 28. Grubbs, Records Ruin the Landscape, xviii, 108. 29. Paul Hegarty, Noise/Music: A History (New York & London: Continuum, 2010), 65. 30. “The Other’s Language: Jacques Derrida Interviews Ornette Coleman, 23 June 1997,” trans. Timothy S. Murphy, Genre 37, no. 2 (2004): 319–29. 31. Landgraf, Improvisation as Art: Conceptual Challenges, Historical Perspectives (New York: Bloomsbury, 2014), 6. 32. The Dead would remain indebted to Warner Bros., making it necessary for the band to learn how to make also studio albums financially feasible; Workingman’s Dead and American Beauty, their two most rewarding studio albums, was one outcome of this process. 33. Bailey, Improvisation, 35. 34. Adorno, “The Curve of the Needle,” trans. Thomas Y. Levin, Essays on Music, ed. Richard Leppert (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), 274. 35. Roszak, The Making of a Counter Culture, 8. 36. Derek Bailey, Improvisation: Its Nature and Practice in Music (New York: Da Capo Press, 1993), 103. 37. Lesh, Searching for the Sound, 285. 38. Bailey, Improvisation, 104. 39. Ajay Heble, Landing on the Wrong Note, 9. 40. Bailey, Improvisation, xi. 41. See this author’s interview, Ulf Olsson, Konstruktion av en kropp, 111. 42. Bailey, Improvisation, xii. 43. John Oswald, “Plunderstanding Ecophonomics: Strategies for the Transformation of Existing Music. An Interview by Norm Igma with John Oswald,” in Arcana: Musicians on Music, ed. John Zorn (New York: Granary Books/Hips Road, 2000), 16. 44. Graeme M. Boone, “Tonal and Expressive Ambiguity in ‘Dark Star’,” in Understanding Rock: Essays in Musical Analysis, ed. John Covach and Graeme M. Boone (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 173. 45. Boone, “Tonal and Expressive Ambiguity in ‘Dark Star’,” 176. For a discussion of “Dark Star,” see also Ben Ratliff, Every Song Ever: Twenty Way to Listen in an Age of Plenty (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2016), 116ff. 46. David Malvinni, Grateful Dead and the Art of Rock Improvisation, Lanham: Scarecrow Press, 2013, 204. 47. Malvinni, Grateful Dead and the Art of Rock Improvisation, 211. 48. The question to what degree the Grateful Dead was part of the music industry is not uncontroversial. Dennis McNally, for one, in his A Long Strange Trip, maintains as one of his basic ideas about the band that it was “only tangentially part of the American music industry” (3). That they were not centrally positioned within it is perhaps true. They did not score hit single after hit

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single, but in other ways, the band was central: they did land record contracts with Warner Bros., United Artists, and Arista; as a touring act, they worked with the biggest promoters, playing the biggest arenas; and their innovations on the technological front were universally admired and often emulated. As the Dead endured, it became difficult to characterize them as apart from the industry, despite their uniqueness. 49. Carol Brightman, in Sweet Chaos, also makes the point that with “a mass audience, it was important to provide entertainment with some degree of consistency” (141). 50. Adorno, “The Curve of the Needle,” 271. 51. Zimmerman, Counterculture Kaleidoscope, 98. 52. For a detailed discussion of the band’s gear, see Blair Jackson, Grateful Dead Gear. 53. David Fricke, “Branford Marsalis on His Unlikely Collaboration with the Grateful Dead.” 54. The importance of promoters and unions was emphasized by Nicholas Meriwether in conversation, August 11, 2016. 55. Peters, The Philosophy of Improvisation, 51f. 56. Bailey, Improvisation, 103. 57. Peters, The Philosophy of Improvisation, 58. 58. Ingrid Monson, “Jazz as Political and Musical Practice,” in Musical Improvisation: Art, Education, and Society, ed. Gabriel Solis and Bruno Nettl (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2009), 23. 59. Garcia, in Steve Sutherland, “Grateful Dead: Bone Idols.” 60. Kim Gordon, Girl in a Band: A Memoir (London: Faber & Faber, 2015), 267. 61. Garcia, quoted in Meriwether, “Shadow Boxing the Apocalypse” [140]. 62. Peters, The Philosophy of Improvisation, 2. 63. Peters, The Philosophy of Improvisation, 2f. 64. Peters, The Philosophy of Improvisation, 48. 65. Peters, The Philosophy of Improvisation, 2. 66. Frederic Rzewski, “Little Bangs: A Nihilist Theory on Improvisation,” in Audio Culture: Readings in Modern Music, ed. Christoph Cox and Daniel Warner (New York: Bloomsbury, 2004), 267. 67. George E. Lewis, “Improvised Music After 1950: Afrological and Eurological Perspectives,” in Audio Culture: Readings in Modern Music, ed. Christoph Cox and Daniel Warner (New York: Bloomsbury, 2004), 279. 68. Landgraf, Improvisation as Art, 16. 69. Landgraf, Improvisation as Art, 11. 70. Landgraf, Improvisation as Art, 6. 71. Peters, The Philosophy of Improvisation, 26. 72. Peters, The Philosophy of Improvisation, 72. 73. Hans-Ulrich Gumbrecht, Production of Presence: What Meaning Cannot Convey (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004), 17. Edgar Landgraf refers to the “production of presence,” Improvisation as Art, 143. 74. Gumbrecht, Production of Presence, 97.

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75. Landgraf, Improvisation as Art, 7. 76. Malvinni, Grateful Dead and the Art of Rock Improvisation, 139. 77. Lesh, Searching for the Sound, 102. 78. Robert Hunter, A Box of Rain, 54. 79. Malvinni, Grateful Dead and the Art of Rock Improvisation, 77. 80. Lesh, Searching for the Sound, 130. 81. Lesh, Searching for the Sound, 110. 82. Rancière, “Contemporary Art and the Politics of Aesthetics,” 43. 83. Jacques Rancière, The Future of the Image, 57. 84. Ross, “Image, Montage,” in Jacques Rancière: Key Concepts, ed. JeanPhilippe Deranty (Durham: Acumen, 2010), 165. 85. Rancière, “Contemporary Art and the Politics of Aesthetics,” 41; cf. Ross, “Image, Montage,” 165. 86. See Viktor Shklovsky, ‘Art as Device,’ Theory of Prose, trans. Benjamin Sher (Elmwood Park, IL: Dalkey Archive Press, 1990), 1–14. 87. Garcia, quoted in Jackson, Garcia, 158. 88. Lenny Kaye, in Rolling Stone, February 7, 1970, quoted in The Rolling Stone Record Review (New York: Pocket Books, 1971), 268. 89. Reich and Wenner, Garcia: A Signpost to a New Space, 58. 90. Zimmerman, Counterculture Kaleidoscope, 120. 91. David R. Shumway, Rock Star, 143. 92. Malvinni, Grateful Dead and the Art of Rock Improvisation, 93. 93. Boone, “Tonal and Expressive Ambiguity in ‘Dark Star’,” 178. 94. Boone, “Tonal and Expressive Ambiguity in ‘Dark Star’,” 195. 95. David Fricke, “Branford Marsalis on His Unlikely Collaboration with the Grateful Dead.” 96. Rock Scully, quoted in Jackson, Garcia, 120. 97. Garcia, quoted in Meriwether, “Shadow Boxing the Apocalypse,” at 140. 98. Garcia, quoted in Jackson, Garcia, 318. 99. Garcia, in Brown and Novick, “Tales of the Living Dead with Jerry Garcia,” 61. 100. Kim Gordon, Is It My Body? 125. 101. Blair Jackson, “American Beauty,” in The Grateful Dead Reader, 297. 102. Derrida, quoted in Peters, The Philosophy of Improvisation, 37. 103. Jerry Garcia, interviewed by Tom Hibbert, “Deadheads!” Q, February 1988. 104. Nick Paumgarten, “Deadhead: The Afterlife,” The New Yorker, November 26, 2012. http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2012/11/26/deadhead (accessed November 3, 2015). 105. Garcia, quoted in Bailey, Improvisation, 46. 106. Garcia and Weir, quoted in McNally, A Long Strange Trip, 578. 107. Paul Hegarty, Noise/Music, 65. 108. Garcia quoted in Ed McClanahan, “Grateful Dead I Have Known,” in The Grateful Dead Reader, ed. David Dodd and Diana Spaulding (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), 69.

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109. Daniel Fischlin, Ajay Heble, and George Lipsitz, The Fierce Urgency of Now: Improvisation, Rights, and the Ethics of Cocreation (Durham: Duke University Press, 2013), xi. 110. Fischlin, Heble, and Lipsitz, The Fierce Urgency of Now, 232. 111. Fischlin, Heble, and Lipsitz, The Fierce Urgency of Now, 239. 112. Fischlin, Heble, and Lipsitz, The Fierce Urgency of Now, 198. 113. Judith Revel, “Identity, Nature, Life: Three Biopolitical Deconstructions,” in The Government of Life: Foucault, Biopolitics, and Neoliberalism, ed. Vanessa Lemm and Miguel Vatter (New York: Fordham University Press, 2014), 117. 114. Hart, quoted in Jackson, Garcia, 466. 115. Jackson, Garcia, 108. 116. Coleman, quoted in Jordy Cummings, “This Is Not an Obituary: Listening to Ornette Coleman,” Red Wedge, July 1, 2015. www.redwedgemagazine (accessed January 5, 2016). 117. McNally, A Long Strange Trip, 592. 118. David Fricke, “Branford Marsalis on His Unlikely Collaboration with the Grateful Dead.” 119. Bailey, Improvisation, 41f. 120. Carol Brightman, Sweet Chaos: The Grateful Dead’s American Adventure (New York: Clarkson Potter, 1998), 2. 121. Brightman, Sweet Chaos, 151. 122. David Shafter, “The Grateful Dead Gave Suburban Kids a Safe, Accessible Counterculture Outlet,” The Guardian, June 26, 2015. http://www .theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/jun/26/the-grateful-dead-suburban -kids-safe-accessible-counterculture-outlet (accessed August 12, 2015). 123. Steve Sutherland [review of Built to Last], Melody Maker 65(41), October 1989.

coda 1. Peter Robinson, Children of the Revolution (London: Hodder, 2013), 52. 2. Dennis McNally, A Long, Strange Trip: The Inside History of the Grateful Dead (New York: Broadway Books, 2002), 475ff. 3. Max Weber, The Theory of Social and Economic Organization, trans. A. M. Henderson and Talcott Parsons (Mansfield Centre: Martino Publishing, 2012), 358. 4. Weber, The Theory of Social and Economic Organization, 361. 5. Weber, The Theory of Social and Economic Organization, 360. 6. Weber, The Theory of Social and Economic Organization, 362. 7. Weber, The Theory of Social and Economic Organization, 370. 8. Weber, The Theory of Social and Economic Organization, 370. 9. On the Dead controlling the weather, see for instance Revell Carr, “‘Where All the Pages Are My Days’: Metacantric Moments in Deadhead Lyrical Experience,” in The Grateful Dead in Concert: Essays on Live

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Improvisation, ed. Jim Tuedio and Stan Spector (Jefferson: McFarland, 2010), 110. Garcia finally addressed the question explicitly in an interview, stating emphatically that they did not, in fact, control the weather. See David Jay Brown and Rebecca McClen Novick, “Tales of the Living Dead with Jerry Garcia,” in Voices from the Edge (Freedom: The Crossing Press, 1995), 60. 10. Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (London and New York: Routledge, 1992), 4. 11. Gilles Deleuze, “Postscript on the Societies of Control,” in Negotiations: 1972–1990, trans. Martin Joughin (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995), 178f. 12. Gilles Deleuze, “Control and Becoming,” in Negotiations: 1972–1990, trans. Martin Joughin (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995), 175. 13. Deleuze, “Control and Becoming,” 176. 14. Robert Hunter, “Liberty,” in David Dodd, The Annotated Grateful Dead Lyrics, http://artsites.ucsc.edu/GDead/agdl/libe.html. Cf. A Box of Rain, 135, for a slightly different version.

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Discography

This discography includes only recordings by the Grateful Dead that are directly referred to in the text. A more complete discography is available at http://www.deaddisc.com/GDFD_Grateful_Dead.htm (accessed December 28, 2016).

30 Trips Around the Sun, CD box set, Rhino Records 2015, R2-547369; Parc des Expositions, Dijon, France (September 18, 1974). Beyond Description (1974–1989)—CD boxed set, Rhino Records (2004): •

Wake of the Flood (1973)—Rhino 8122-76491-2-A

•

From the Mars Hotel (1974)—Rhino 8122-76491-2-B

•

Blues for Allah (1975)—Rhino 8122-76491-2-C

•

Terrapin Station (1977)—Rhino 8122-76491-2-D

•

In the Dark (1987)—Rhino 8122-76491-2-I

•

Built to Last (1989)—Rhino 8122-76491-2-H

Dave’s Picks 13: Winterland, San Francisco February 24, 1974 (2015)— Rhino R2-547316. Dave’s Picks 4: College of William & Mary, Williamsburg, VA 9/24/76. CD Rhino Records (2012)—Rhino R2 529205. Dick’s Picks 19: Fairgrounds Arena, Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, October 29, 1973 (2000)—Rhino R2 76472. Dick’s Picks 7: Alexandra Palace, London, England, September 9–11, 1974 (1997)—Grateful Dead GDCD3 4027. 163

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Dylan, Bob, and The Grateful Dead, Dylan & the Dead (1989)—Columbia COL 463381 2. Europe ’72 The Complete Recordings (2011)—CD boxed set Rhino Records, Rhino GRA2-6023: •

Wembley Empire Pool, London, England (April 8, 1972)

•

Olympia, Paris, France (May 4, 1972)

•

Lyceum Theatre, London, England (May 25, 1972)

The Golden Road (1965–1973)—CD boxed set, Rhino Records (2001): •

The Grateful Dead (1967)—Rhino R2 74401-B

•

Anthem of the Sun (1968)—Rhino R2 74401-C

•

Aoxomoxoa (1969)—Rhino R2 74401-D

•

Live/Dead (1969)—Rhino R2 74401-E

•

Workingman’s Dead (1970)—Rhino R2 74401-F

•

American Beauty (1970)—Rhino R2 74401-G

•

Grateful Dead [“Skull & Roses”] (1971)—Rhino 74401-H

Infrared Roses (1991)—Grateful Dead GDCD 40142. Lagin, Ned, Seastones (1975)—Ryko 1990: RCD 40193. One from the Vault: Great American Music Hall, San Francisco, August 13, 1975 (1991)—Grateful Dead GDCD-4013-2. Oswald, John, Grayfolded (1994–1996)—Swell/Artifact S/A 1969–1996. Road Trips Volume 2, No. 1: Madison Square Garden, New York, September 1990 (2008)—Grateful Dead GRA2-6005. Spring 1990 (2012)—CD box set, Rhino Records. Spring 1990 The Other One (2014)—CD box set, Rhino Records. Sunshine Daydream: Old Renaissance Faire Grounds, Veneta, Oregon, August 27, 1972 (2013)—Rhino R2-536030. Without a Net (1990)—Arista ACD2–8634.

Bibliography

manuscript collections The Grateful Dead Archive, McHenry Library, University of California, Santa Cruz.

books and articles Adams, Rebecca G. “ ‘I Can’t Do Anything But Lie’: Studying Deadheads While Wearing Simmelian Lenses.” In The Grateful Dead In Concert: Essays on Live Improvisation, edited by Jim Tuedio and Stan Spector, 310–22. Jefferson: McFarland, 2010. Adams, Rebecca G. “Stigma and the Inappropriately Stereotyped: The Deadhead Professional.” Sociation Today 1, no. 1 (Spring 2003). http://www.ncsociology .org/sociationtoday/deadhead.htm. Accessed March 15, 2015. Adams, Rebecca G. “ ‘What Goes Around, Comes Around’: Collaborative Research and Learning.” In Deadhead Social Science: You Ain’t Gonna Learn What You Don’t Want To Know, edited by Rebecca G. Adams and Robert Sardiello, 15–47. Walnut Creek: Altamira Press, 2000. Adler, Thomas A. Bean Blossom: The Brown County Jamboree and Bill Monroe’s Bluegrass Festivals, Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2011. Adorno, Theodor W. Aesthetic Theory. Translated by Robert Hullot-Kentor. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997 [1970]. Adorno, Theodor W. “The Curve of the Needle” [1928]. Translated by Thomas Y. Levin. In Essays on Music, edited by Richard Leppert, 271–76. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002. Adorno, Theodor W. Minima Moralia: Reflections on a Damaged Life. Translated by E. F. N. Jephcott. London & New York: Verso, 2006 [1951]. Adorno, Theodor W. “On the Fetish-Character in Music and the Regression of Listening” [1938]. Translated by Susan H. Gillespie. In Essays on Music, edited by Richard Leppert, 288–317. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002.

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Index

AACM (Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians), 35 Abrams, Muhal Richard, 35 Acid Tests, 36, 45, 64, 68, 75, 94, 130–31 Adams, Carolyn “Mountain Girl,” 79 Adams, Rebecca G., 71 address, 43–41 Adorno, Theodor W., 5, 7–8, 19, 36–38, 50, 61, 93, 96, 99–100, 104, 123 aesthetics, 1, 4–5, 8–10, 20, 22, 30, 32, 46, 47, 50, 72, 101, 106, 108, 110, 118, 119, 123, 133, 134 Alembic, 88, 95 Alexandra Palace, London, 116 Anderson, Benedict, 65–66 Anderson, Terry H., 42 Arendt, Hannah, 18 Art Ensemble of Chicago, 35 Attali, Jacques, 35, 36, 38–39, 86, 96 avant-garde, 21–22, 24–25, 26–31, 32–33, 36, 45, 50, 51, 94, 109, 112, 134 Bailey, Derek, 98, 100, 101, 102, 106, 120, 124–25 Band, The, 58 Barlow, John Perry, 9, 53, 74, 89 Barthes, Roland, 8, 51 Baudelaire, Charles, 24, 78 Baum, Dan, 69–70

Beach Boys, The, 22 Beast, The, 50 Beatles, The, 22 benefits, 43, 52, 56–57, 64, 88 Benjamin, Walter, 37, 38, 39–40, 41, 59–60, 112 Berio, Luciano, 25 Berry, Chuck, 50 Big Brother and the Holding Company, 9, 87 Black Panther Party, 26, 52, 56, 64, 87 Blackman, Shane, 71–72 bluegrass, 23, 24, 33–35, 41, 47–48, 57, 76, 133 blues, 2, 21–22, 23, 32, 41, 47, 76, 114 Bobby Fuller Four, 125 Bohemian Club, San Francisco 53 Boone, Graeme, 102–103, 115 Brand, Stewart, 33 Brecht, Berthold, 112 Brightman, Carol, 10, 67, 125–26 Brown, Toni, 67 Browne, David, 76 Buffalo Philharmonic, 57 Bürger, Peter, 29–31, 45 Burnett, Gary, 66 Cage, John, 27, 29, 133 Captain Beefheart, 22 Carousel Ballroom, San Francisco 36, 87 Cartledge, Paul, 62

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Cash, Johnny, 24 Charlotte Coliseum, Charlotte 69 Cherry, Don, 22 Church of Unlimited Devotion, 65 citizenship, 58–59, 80, 85, 122 Clash, The, 125 Cohen, Jacob, 67 Colebrook, Claire, 82 Coleman, Ornette, 7, 57, 99, 124 Coltrane, John, 22, 25, 94, 97, 118 Columbia University, New York 52 commodity, 4, 7, 8, 30, 38, 95, 96, 112 community, 15, 16, 18, 21, 33, 34, 35–36, 37, 39, 41, 43–44, 46, 50, 62, 65, 66–67, 70, 71, 72, 74, 77, 81–82, 85, 106, 120, 121–122, 125, 130–31 Conners, Peter, 3, 31, 44, 54, 60 Constanten, Tom, 9, 25, 33, 104 Constantine, Tom, 68 contact zone, 134 Cotton, Elizabeth, 24 Cotton, James, 126 Coulter, Ann, 65 counterculture, 16, 17, 18, 20, 42, 53, 54, 58, 62, 63–64, 78, 85, 100, 134–35 counter-conduct, 10, 75, 134 counter-public, 44, 49 Coupland, Douglas, 3 Cream, 95 culture industry, 5, 6–8, 14, 16–17, 19, 21, 23, 24, 25, 29, 31, 35, 36, 38, 47, 50, 51, 96, 98, 101, 103, 106, 131, 133, 134 Curtis, Sonny, 125 Cutler, Chris, 28 da Vinci, Leonardo, 26, 29 Dada, 26, 27, 28, 31 dance, 15–16, 60, 79–80 Davis, Reverend Gary, 24 Davis, Miles, 24, 95, 118 DEA (U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration), 61, 67–70, 132 Deadheads, 3, 6, 9, 15–16, 18, 28, 31, 40, 44, 45–46, 53–55, 58, 64–65,

66–72, 79, 84–85, 86, 87, 90, 94, 100, 120, 126, 128, 131, 133 Deafheads, 64 Deer Creek, Noblesville, 53–54 Deleuze, Gilles, 59, 60, 82, 134–35 Derrida, Jacques, 61, 99, 119 deterritorialization, 60, 82 Didion, Joan, 3–4 Dijon, France, 129 Dionysus Festival, 62 dislocations, 17, 21, 23, 32 dispositive, 82 Dixon, Bill, 35 Dobson, Bonnie, 116 Doors, The, 78 Duchamp, Marcel, 26, 29 Dylan, Bob, 34, 37, 58, 121, 126 Egypt, 45, 57–58 Ehrlichman, John, 69 Eisenstein, Sergei, 112 El-Din, Hamza, 34 Eliot, T. S., 111 Fairlamb, Horace, 55 FBI (Federal Bureau of Investigation), 14, 56, 61, 67, 87 Festival Express (movie), 55 Fillmore West, San Francisco, 87 Fischlin, Daniel, 121–22 Foss, Lukas, 57 Foucault, Michel, 46, 49, 60, 75, 82–84, 85, 122 Foxboro Stadium, Foxborough, 69 Frankfurt School, 4, 18 Freer, Joanna, 64 Gans, David, 10 Garcia, Jerry, 1, 6, 7, 9, 13, 14, 16, 23, 24, 27, 28, 29–30, 32, 33–34, 40, 41, 42, 43, 45, 48, 49, 50, 55–56, 58, 61, 62, 63, 67, 68, 70, 72, 73, 75, 76, 77, 78, 79, 81, 87, 88, 89, 92, 93, 94, 98, 101, 104, 105, 107–108, 112, 113, 114, 116, 118, 119, 120, 121, 123, 126, 127, 130, 131, 132 Garrett, Graham, 101

Index gender, 17, 78–79 Ghorbal, Ashraf A., 57 Gilmore, Mikal, 65, 77 Gitlin, Todd, 20, 62 Godchaux, Donna (Jean), 9, 78, 117 Godchaux, Keith, 9, 104, 117, 118, 123 Golden Road, The, 44, 68 Gordon, Kim, 79, 97, 108, 119, 133 Gore, Al, 53 Gore, Tipper, 53 Gracyk, Theodore, 16, 77, 95 Graham, Bill, 1, 15, 87, 128 Grateful Dead: Albums, 30 Trips Around the Sun, 61, 129, American Beauty, 41, 128, Anthem of the Sun, 21, 22, 23, 24, 95, 99, 112, Aoxomoxoa, 78, 95, 99, Blues for Allah, 58, 105, Built To Last, 100–101, Dave’s Picks 13, 1, Dick’s Picks 7, 116, Dick’s Picks 19, 116, Dylan & the Dead, 121, Europe ’72, 41, 98, 104, 117, 119, Europe ’72 The Complete Recordings, 117, 128, From the Mars Hotel, 78, Grateful Dead, 21, 72, 95, Infrared Roses, 46, 47, Live/Dead, 46, 72, 100, 103, 113, 114, 119, 128, 132, One from the Vault, 105, Road Trips Volume 2, No. 1, 124, “Skull and Roses” [Grateful Dead], 28, 72, 98, Spring 1990, 42, 104, Spring 1990 The Other One, 42, 48, 124, Terrapin Station, 41, Wake of the Flood, 87, 123, Without a Net, 48, 102, Workingman’s Dead, 41, 74, 76; Songs, “Big River,” 24, “Bird Song,” 48, 92, 102, 115, “Black Muddy River,” 126, “Blues for Allah,” 58, “Cassidy,” 92, “Caution (Do Not Stop On Tracks),” 21–22, “Caution Jam,” 129, “China Cat Sunflower,” 28, “Comes a Time,” 41, “Cumberland Blues,” 76, “Dark Star,” 1, 22, 25, 27–28, 46, 50, 92, 94, 97, 100, 102–103, 107, 110–17, 118, 119, 124, 126, 128, “Days Between,”

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126, “Death Don’t Have No Mercy,” 24, 47, “Drums,” 50, 92, 105, 129, “El Paso,” 24, 116, “Eyes of the World,” 48, 92, “Feedback,” 46, 48, 50, 126, 132, “Fire on the Mountain,” 112, “Foolish Heart,” 26, 101, “Franklin’s Tower,” 112, “Help on the Way,” 112, “He’s Gone,” 53, 129, “I Fought the Law,”125, “Joey,” 121, “Lady With a Fan,” 41, “Liberty,” 135, “Me and My Uncle,” 24, 37, 38, 47, 50, 99, “Mind Left Body Jam,” 116, 117, “Morning Dew,” 47, 115, 116, 117, “My Brother Esau,” 74, “Not Fade Away,” 46, “Oh, Babe, It Ain’t No Lie,” 24, “One More Saturday Night,” 115, “Playing in the Band,” 46, 50, 92, 118, 126, 129, “Ramble On Rose,” 74, 75, “Saint Stephen,” 55, “Scarlet Begonias,” 78, 111, 112, 126, “Ship of Fools,” 75, 82, “Sing Me Back Home,” 24,“Slipknot,” 112,“So Many Roads,” 126, “Space,” 25, 50, 127, “Spam Jam,” 116, “Sugar Magnolia,” 116, 128, “Sugaree,” 103, 111, “(That’s It For) The Other One,” 118, “The Music Never Stopped,” 89, “The Other One,” 28, 50, 92, 118, 124, “Throwing Stones,” 74, “Touch of Grey,” 5, 6, 9, “Truckin’,” 67, 129, “(Turn on Your) Love Light,” 92, “Uncle John’s Band,” 41, 126, “U.S. Blues,” 74, 75,“Victim or the Crime,” 101 Grateful Dead Archive, 10, 15 Grateful Dead Records, 36, 87 Grayfolded, 27–28, 47, 97 Greek Theatre, Berkeley, 15, 56, 69, 73, 84 Greenpeace, 57 Grisman, David, 24 Grubbs, David, 98 Guattari, Félix, 60 Gumbrecht, Hans-Ulrich, 110

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Index

Habermas, Jürgen, 45 Haggard, Merle, 24 Haislip, Gene, 67–68 Hansen, Miriam, 49 Hardt, Michael, 18–19 Harron, Mary, 14 Hart, Mickey, 9, 13, 27, 31, 34, 41, 50, 52–53, 105, 118, 123, 124 Healy, Dan, 44 Heartfield, John, 112 Heble, Ajay, 35, 102, 121–122 Hegarty, Paul, 98, 121 Hendrix, Jimi, 95 heterotopia, 82–86, 89–90 hippies, 3, 17, 19–20, 43, 59, 62, 63–64, 69, 70, 75, 79, 120 Horkheimer, Max, 19, 61 Hornsby, Bruce, 9 Howe, Steve, 95 Human Be-In, The, 63 Hunter, Robert, 5, 9, 26, 37, 41, 46, 50, 53, 58, 74, 78, 101, 111, 115, 135 Huyssen, Andreas, 31 I.R.A. (Irish Republican Army), 53 improvisation, 1, 2, 17, 21, 22, 23, 25, 26, 40, 46, 47–48, 50, 61, 76, 82, 92–127, 129, 133 Ives, Charles, 11, 112 Jackson, Blair, 10, 25, 44, 116, 123 Jackson, Michael, 27 Jackson, Milt, 24 Jameson, Fredric, 17–18, 19 jazz, 1, 4, 13, 22, 32, 34–36, 47, 48, 57, 60, 76, 94, 95, 99, 102, 116, 117, 122, 123, 129 Jazz Composer’s Guild, 35 Jefferson Airplane, 9, 75, 87 Joel, Billy,71 Kaler, Michael, 25 Kaukonen, Jorma, 34 Kaye, Lenny, 113 Kesey, Ken, 3, 68, 131 Kluge, Alexander, 49 Kramer, Michael J., 58, 64

Kreutzmann, Bill, 9, 41, 58, 75, 77, 78, 82, 86, 105, 116, 118, 123 Lagin, Ned, 9, 28, 50, 85–86, 129 Landgraf, Edgar, 99, 109, 110, 115 Law, Eileen, 44 Led Zeppelin, 95 Lesh, Phil, 9, 13, 15, 20, 22, 24, 28, 31, 32, 33, 36, 43, 46, 48, 50, 54, 55, 60, 63, 87, 89, 96, 101, 102, 104, 111, 112, 113, 116, 118, 119, 123, 127, 129 Levi’s Stadium, Santa Clara, 6 Lewis, George E., 109–110 Lieberman, Fredric, 34 Lipsitz, George, 121–122 Lomax, Alan, 34 LP (long-playing album), 94–95, 96, 99 LSD (lysergic acid diethylamide), 4, 18, 60–61, 64, 67, 68, 70, 117, 119 Lydon, John, 29 Madison Square Garden, New York, 102, 124 Madonna, 80 Malvinni, David, 103, 111–112, 114 Mandela, Nelson, 53 Marcus, Greil, 28, 58 Marcuse, Herbert, 9, 18, 19–20, 58–59, 71, 97, 117, 126 Marsalis, Branford, 48, 64, 102, 105, 117, 124, 126 Marshall, Jim, 26 Marx, Karl, 8, 18 McCole, John, 37 McGovern, George, 76 McKernan, Ron “Pigpen,” 9, 21, 71, 72, 79, 104 McMahon, Regan, 44 McNally, Dennis, 10, 13, 17, 54, 57, 75, 124, 129 Meriwether, Nicholas G., 6, 10, 95 Merry Pranksters, The, 3, 68, 118, 131 Meyer Sound, 95 MIDI (Musical Instrument Digital Interface), 97–98, 103, 105 Miller, Stephen Paul, 18, 59 Mills College, Oakland, 36

Index Mingus, Charles, 35 MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology), 53 Modernism, 5, 23, 24, 36, 112, 113 modernity, 5, 8, 18, 20, 37, 39, 45, 83, 97 Monroe, Bill, 33 Monson, Ingrid, 107 montage, 22–23, 32, 102, 111, 112–114, 116, 118 Moore, Ryan, 20 Moore, Thurston, 79 Mothers of Invention, The, 22 Mowitt, John, 77, 97 Murray, David, 57, 102, 126–27 Mydland, Brent, 9, 104 Nassau Veterans Memorial Coliseum, Uniondale, 53 National Guard, 69, 75 National Student Campaign for Voter Registration, 57 Negri, Antonio, 18–19 Negt, Oskar, 49 New Left, The, 55, 63, 64 Newton, Huey P., 56 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 62, 85 Nixon, Richard, 69, 75, 84, 117 Norén, Lars, 9 Obama, Barack, 16 Oklahoma State Fair Arena, Oklahoma City, 116 Olatunji, Babatunde, 34 Old and in the Way, 41 Olympia, Paris, 115, 119 Ono, Yoko, 133 Orff, Carl, 23 Ortega y Gasset, José, 46, 50 Oswald, John, 27–28, 46, 97, 102, 122 othering, 6, 70–72, 75, 82 Pan-Afrikan Peoples Arkestra, 35 parking lot scene, 9, 46, 54, 84 Peters, Gary, 97, 106, 107, 108, 109 Petersen, Robert M., 9, 128 Phillips, John, 24

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Pink Floyd, 22–23 Poggioli, Renato, 26–27, 28, 29, 122 politics, 2, 8–9, 10–11,17–21, 29, 39, 42–43, 45, 52–91, 94, 106, 112, 117, 122, 129, 131, 133–4 Pollock, Courtenay, 84 Pratt, Mary Louise, 134 PRIDE (Parent Resources and Information on Drug Education), 70 Quicksilver Messenger Service, 87 Rainforest Action Network, 57 Ranaldo, Lee, 133 Rancière, Jacques, 72, 80–81, 83, 89, 90, 112–113 Raunig, Gerald, 82 Reagan, Ronald, 43, 56, 69, 76, 79, 84 Reed, Lou, 29 Reich, Charles, 58 reification, 7, 8, 113, 119 Relix, 67, 68 repetition, 36, 38–39, 93, 96, 97, 98–99, 101, 117, 118 resistance, 2, 10, 11, 14, 16–17, 18, 19–20, 41–42, 49, 63, 106, 133, 135 Revel, Judith, 122 Rex Foundation, 56–57, 88 Richardson, Peter, 10 Ricœur, Paul, 37 Rifkin, Danny, 87 Rilke, Rainer Maria, 37 Roach, Max, 35 Robbins, Marty, 24, 116 Robinson, Peter, 128 Rodgers and Hammerstein, 94 Ronell, Avital, 61, 72 Rosenberg, Neil 33, 34, 48 Ross, Toni, 113 Roszak, Theodore, 63, 100 Rothman, Sandy, 33–34 Round Records, 36, 87 Rubin, Jerry, 63 Rzewski, Frederic, 108–109 Sadat, Anwar, 58 San Francisco Mime Troupe, 33

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Index

San Francisco Symphony Orchestra, 53 San Francisco Tape Music Center, 33, 36 Sands, Bobby, 53 Sawka, Jan, 84 Scher, John, 71 Scheurer, Timothy E., 72, 74 Schulz, Charles M., 71 Scully, Rock, 88, 118 Sears, Cameron, 54 Seastones, 28, 50, 85, 129 self-organization, 2, 35–36, 39, 49, 66, 87, 88, 94 self-othering, 70 Selvin, Joel, 82 Sex Pistols, The, 27, 28–29, 30 Shafter, David, 126 Shenk, David, 65 Shklovsky, Viktor, 113 Shumway, David, 62, 74, 114 Silberman, Steve, 65 Smith, Harry, 34 Smith, Joseph B., 87 Soldier Field, Chicago, 6 Solidarnosc (Solidarity), 90–91 Sonic Youth, 79, 97, 133 Sound of Music, The, 94 Spector, Stan, 62 spinners, 65 Springsteen, Bruce, 71 Stevens, Jay, 34 Stockhausen, Karl-Heinz, 25 Strauss, Richard, 111 Street, John, 77 Sufi Choir of San Francisco, 56, 64 Sun Ra, 57 Sutherland, Steve, 126 Sweetwater Music Hall, Mill Valley, 36 Tapscott, Horace, 35 technology, 34, 36, 38–40, 63, 64, 70, 95–96, 97, 99, 100 101, 103–106, 125 Terrapin Crossroads, San Rafael, 36 Thacker, Andrew, 84 Thinh, Vuong, 52 Thompson, Hunter S., 64

tradition, 2, 16, 21–25, 29, 31, 32–35, 36–39, 41, 42, 47–48, 49–50, 54, 73, 74, 76, 81, 83, 94, 103, 108–109, 113, 114, 122, 130, 133 TRI Studios, 36 Trist, Alan, 87 Tzara, Tristan, 27 Ultra Sound, 95 USIA (United States Information Agency), 91 utopia, 20, 55, 74, 82–83, 86, 89–90 Velvet Underground, The, 22, 25, 27, 29 Veneta, Oregon, 116 Vicious, Sid, 29 Vietnam, 17, 42, 52, 75, 117 Viola, Ken, 71 Vlassopoulos, Kostas, 81 Walesa, Lech, 90 Wall of Sound, The, 39, 95 war machine, 82 War on Drugs, The, 69–70 Warlocks, The, 9, 21 Warner Bros., 14, 87, 99 Warner, Michael, 43–44 Weber, Max, 130–131 Weir, Bob, 9, 13, 24, 30, 34, 36, 50, 52, 53, 61, 70, 73, 74, 75, 79, 101, 116, 118, 121, 128, 129 Welnick, Vince, 9 Wharf Rats, 57, 65 Williams, Jay, 65, 66 Willis, Ellen, 14, 92 Winterland, San Francisco, 1 Wolfe, Tom, 2 Wolff, Christian, 133 Yippies, 63, 64 Young, Lamonte, 25 Zappa, Frank, 22 Zimmerman, Nadya, 40, 42, 104, 114–15