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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, 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 self-organization 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 self-supporting 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 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 Auto-Grind 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 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 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 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 (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 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 double-sidedness 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 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 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 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 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