Listening for the Secret
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Listening for the Secret is a critical assessment of the Grateful Dead and the distinct culture that grew out of the group’s music, politics, and performance. With roots in popular music traditions, improvisation, and the avant-garde, the Grateful Dead provides a unique lens through which we can better understand the meaning and creation of the counterculture community. Marshaling the critical and aesthetic theories of Adorno, Benjamin, Foucault and others, Ulf Olsson places the music group within discourses of the political, specifically the band’s capacity to create a unique social environment. Analyzing the Grateful Dead’s music as well as the forms of subjectivity and practices that the band generated, Olsson examines the wider significance and impact of its politics of improvisation. Ultimately, Listening for the Secret is about how the Grateful Dead Phenomenon was possible in the first place, what its social and aesthetic conditions of possibility were, and its results. This is the first book in a new series, Studies in the Grateful Dead.
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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.
Edited by Nicholas G. Meriwether, Center for Counterculture Studies
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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 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.
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