Why the Grateful Dead Matter

Illustrations

Introduction

LIGHT THE SONG

Light the song with sense and color, hold away despair.

Robert Hunter, Terrapin Station

Light the song, and pass it around. Don’t bogart. Let it shine, let it shine, stoke it on a Palo Alto stage, until that fire reaches the mountain in Concord, the magnolia fields down by the river, becomes a conflagration of the heart stretched from south Colorado to the west Texas town of El Paso, the twilit purple plain of Wichita, all the way to Europe and the Pyramids of Egypt under a lunar eclipse. Stoke it until it envelops the earth with an accelerando of peace.

And that’s the Grateful Dead, not just a band that played songs, sold records, and gave concerts, but a band of sorcerers, conjurers of a rare and different tune, music with a heartbeat and breath, with the perfect tension between dissonance and resonance, suspension and completion, a cynosure for the huddled masses, tie-dyed angel music for spinning the sacred dance of life as a falling leaf at the jubilee, a rolling away of the dew, a movement and groove that gets into the fiber of your skull, spreads like ripples on still water, grows roses along a trellis of bones, messes with the gears of your body clock until you’re on a long, strange pilgrimage jonesing to find the forty-five-minute Sugaree, waving that flag, driving that train, holding away the despair with a cloak of space and drums, lightening the load until you get up and fly away.

You don’t have to take my word for it. The famous mythologist Joseph Campbell (his book The Power of Myth is required reading in many college courses) went to a Dead show and said the music was the antidote to the Damoclean sword of nuclear war.

Why do the Dead still matter? Why will they always matter? Sure, because of the genius music, years of trippy listening pleasure—Jerry Garcia’s beam-me-up-Scotty leads and achingly sad vocals, Phil Lesh’s intricate bass lines weaving in and out of everything including the sound system, Bobby Weir’s strong masculine vocals and truly weird and wonderful second-chair guitar, the growling blues of Pigpen, the musicality and lightness of Keith and Donna Godchaux, and the Apocalypse Now rhythm section, the devils, Bill Kreutzmann and Mickey Hart, all of whom we’ll be on a first-name basis with from now on—but there’s a rebel bad-boy social component as well. Their first fans thought they were bikers. The band matters because through it the counterculture lived on—ironic because the musicians were more piratical than political. They never turned a show into an antiwar demonstration. Although they were against all violence, their vision of show biz didn’t involve causes. They just didn’t like to follow rules and were constantly trying to get away with shit. But it didn’t matter. The counterculture burbled urgently from deep fissures in the earth beneath the San Andreas Fault, and the Dead were swept away in the movement despite their apathy. They were too close to the crevasse to avoid the deep rift in society.

America came out of World War II a militaristic animal, intoxicated by its own might, its ability to push enemies around, to purge the world of evil. But the following generation, the kids coming of age in the 1960s, saw military solutions in a different light. The war in Vietnam had no real purpose; it had sprung up like a malignant weed through the cracks in Elm Street—Dealey Plaza, Dallas—where a crossfire disguised as a magic bullet burned Camelot to the ground. While America was spoon-fed Oswald pabulum, an undigested buzz of coup cabal grew into an electronic feedback wail—Dylan at Newport—and radicalized the American folkie-bohemian. Anti-Nam protests evolved smoothly from the preexisting Cold War academic beatnik movement to ban the bomb. Like the war before it in Korea, Vietnam was a civil war, a north fighting a south, and there seemed no cause for the United States to intervene. What was it all about, anyway? Profit? They said it was about the domino theory: if North Vietnam—and it’s Red Chinese backers—were allowed to conquer South Vietnam, the other small countries of Southeast Asia would fall as well. To many, the theory seemed weak—who cared who owned the jungle? Eisenhower had warned of the military-industrial complex, which would one day come slouching toward Bethlehem. War without reason was a symptom of the behemoth. The younger generation believed that war existed only to make a few men rich, while sacrificing the lives of American boys who didn’t have the connections to avoid the draft. American involvement in Vietnam was light until the so-called Gulf of Tonkin incident, in which it was reported that a North Vietnamese ship fired across the bow of an American ship, an act of aggression used by LBJ, sworn in on Air Force One on a terrible day in Dallas, as an excuse to escalate hostilities to the jangly tune of billions of dollars and more than 50,000 American lives. Finally, CBS newsman Walter Cronkite, the most trusted man in America, said on the six o’clock news that the war was unwinnable. In order to show their dissatisfaction with the world the adults were creating, the youth of America grew their hair long, a fashion that began as Beatlesque but eventually became antimilitary. Youths began to take mind-altering drugs, which they were told by Timothy Leary, Aldous Huxley, Ken Kesey, and so many others, would expand their consciousness. Like Jack Kerouac and the beatniks before them, they worshipped the road, all the roads that led to the next Dead show, psychic roads that led to enlightenment.

It was the birth of a movement, initially a fad of psychedelia,* from which the Dead were the last survivors.

*The Dead’s contribution to hippie fashion is immeasurable. One quick example: Without the Grateful Dead there would be no tie-dye. It was about 1969 and Bobby was driving to his ranch when he picked up a hitchhiker looking for a place to crash. Weir said he could stay at the ranch if he stacked firewood. The guy turned out to be a good worker and bunked there for a while. He was also an artist who invented the tie-dying technique in which dye and cloth simulated the psychedelic patterns of colored-water-on-a-vibrating-membrane light shows. The Dead dug his stuff and began draping tie-dyed sheets over their amps and speakers during shows. And that was how it began. Millions of T-shirts and summer-camp experiments later, tie-dying is here to stay.

THEY’RE AN AMERICAN BAND

The Grateful Dead were made up of misfits, many of whom hung out in the same Northern California music store. They formed a band for the usual reasons, to attract women, for something to do, but unlike most garage bands—satisfied with three chords and high-school dances—they developed a seriousness of purpose that combined drug intake, a nerdy interest in sound technology, eclectic musical influences, a willingness to improvise, and talent, and turned it all into something resembling real ambition. Thus, they became charter members of the counterculture movement’s noisiest wing—acid rock. They were joined by bands that, like the Dead, were weirdly named to convey their disregard for straight convention: Jefferson Airplane, Moby Grape, Quicksilver Messenger Service.

A lot of acid rock was electric folk, like the Byrds, but at a whole new freak-out level. The Dead heaped blues atop the mix, and later country, bluegrass, Americana. It was a time of strobe lights and many guitar solos. As the sixties progressed tumultuously, the movement became rich with all kinds of bands, many of whom played Monterey and Woodstock, then one by one dropped by the wayside while the Dead forged on, so many roads, pied with tie-dye and humming with love vibes.

They were American gypsies, and yet somehow the act didn’t cross borders well. Perhaps customs was an issue. The Grateful Dead never built a solid fan base outside of the United States. Even in Canada, there was a disconnect.

As Bobby Weir told Benjy Eisen of Rolling Stone in 2014, We played in Mexico, but there weren’t any Mexicans there.

The Dead played some of their best music in Europe in 1972, but the audiences sat there and stared, not totally comprehending, their hands folded in their laps even when Bobby begged them to get up and dance. How odd it was to hear the silence when Jerry dropped the F-bomb in Wharf Rat.

No, the Dead are an American band, for American audiences the F-bomb kills every single time. They are just one of many advantages we Americans have over the rest of the world, and being a Deadhead is an act of patriotism. To find the reasons why, let’s take a look at the symbols used in the band’s most red, white, and blue song: U.S. Blues.*

Words by longtime lyricist Robert Hunter, sung by Jerry, U.S. Blues is a rocker party song consisting largely of a list of people, places, symbols, objects, and situations to which the Dead are wedded in myth and legend. These things are, first, red, white, and blue—Old Glory herself. During a time when it was fashionable to burn the flag in protest of U.S. foreign policy, the Dead preferred to cling to the traditional symbol, but with the caveat that to recognize national flaws and to seek to fix them (or just get off the ride and do your own thing) is, in itself, a new and enlightened form of patriotism. Second, Blue Suede Shoes, the rockabilly of Carl Perkins, and a song made famous by Elvis Presley. The song can be seen as a musical bridge linking Big Joe Turner’s shouted Kansas City blues, with the birth of rock ’n’ roll, and it’s assimilation into white culture. Third, Uncle Sam, a recruiting symbol for the military, now appropriated by a rock ’n’ roll band to build a new army of shaggy revelers. (As we learn during the animated portion of The Grateful Dead Movie, the new Sam is a skeleton, but he still wears the same ol’ hat.) Fourth, P. T. Barnum, a symbol of American show business, partly vulgar, partly a con job, always on the road, moving to a new city with the self-proclaimed Greatest Show on Earth. Fifth, Charlie Chan, a symbol of immigration, a wise old Chinese detective of the movies (although always played by a white man in heavy, racially offensive makeup), who traveled with his son, always played by an actual Asian, who spoke English with an American accent and called his father Pop. The notion that immigrants are being celebrated here is supported by the line Shake the hand that shook the hand, originally an Irish-American lyric in which the singer is bragging about the degrees of separation between himself and the first heavyweight boxing champion, the great John L. Sullivan. The chorus urges us to wave our flag wide and high, as patriotic as anything ever written by Irving Berlin or George M. Cohan. The song is happy, even joyous, which makes its title the sole touch of irony. What are the U.S. blues? Is there an undercurrent of sadness in the song? No, the closest it comes is poignant with a profound nod to the power hunger and immorality that really successful Americans (including even themselves perhaps) exhibit (Run your life / steal your wife). Maybe there’s a touch of melancholy in the notion that summer is almost over, and the kids have to get back to school. But there would be other summers, and sometimes great things happened in the fall, so what the heck. According to Dennis McNally, the title is rather none of the above, but an inside joke, a jab by Hunter at Bobby. Weir and Hunter fought over the song One More Saturday Night, McNally says, because Bobby rewrote Hunter’s lyrics and wanted to change the title of the song to U.S. Blues. Hunter forbade it, removed his name from the songwriting credit, and wrote a new song for Jerry to sing. As it says in the song, "You can call this song the United States