The Grateful Dead: Playing in the Band
In rock & roll, there is Grateful Dead music and then there is everything else. No other band has been so pure in its outlaw idealism, so resolute in its pursuit of transcendence onstage and on record, and so astonishingly casual about both the hazards and rewards of its chosen, and at times truly lunatic, course. “Well, I just see us as a lot of good-time pirates,” Jerry Garcia told a reporter just as the New Euphoria hit its high-noon peak in San Francisco in the mid-1960s. “I’d like to apologize in advance to anybody who believes we’re something really serious. The seriousness comes up as lightness, and I think that’s the way it should be.”
Garcia wasn’t actually talking about his band but about the local bliss missionaries in general. But that benevolent-brigand spirit, the rare gift of turning subversion into sunlight — that was the essence of the music and the mission of the Dead. “The important thing is that everybody be comfortable,” Garcia added. “Live what you have to live and be comfortable.”
As a guitarist, songwriter and — given his pillar-of-salt stage presence and rather grandfatherly countenance in recent years — deceptively commanding figure in a band ostensibly made up of equals, Jerry Garcia tried to live that axiom to the fullest. “I don’t think of my work as being full-time work,” he declared in his epic 1972 Rolling Stone interview. “What I’m doing is my work, but I’m playing! When I left the straight world at 15, when I got my first guitar and left everything I was doing, I was taking a vacation — I was going out to play, and I’m still playing.”
Yet for Garcia and the other core members of the Dead — bassist Phil Lesh, singer and guitarist Bob Weir, drummers Bill Kreutzmann and Mickey Hart, and the original much-loved singer, organist, lusty harp blower and 100-proof bluesman Ron “Pigpen” McKernan, who died in 1973 of liver disease — there was no life, and no comfort, without risk. No task was accomplished successfully without some attendant mess and an edifying side trip to the margins. In a music business that prefers expedience to expedition and treats even its most celebrated renegades like errant children, the Dead routinely took the longer, harder route to revelation. Some of the most enduring songs in their repertoire — “Truckin’,” “Uncle John’s Band,” “Casey Jones,” “Dark Star,” John Phillips’ outlaw fable “Me and My Uncle,” the traditional “I Know You Rider” — are about motion, in real time and otherwise, and about the world of diversion and possibility on the road to enlightenment.
The Dead spent three decades on that road. They were in no hurry to become celebrities. And when they did become stars, the Dead were more interested in the Utopian investments that wealth and the luxury of time could buy: their first misfire at starting an independent label, Round Records, in 1973; the huge, hideously expensive wall-of-speakers PA that the band dragged around on tour in ’73 and ’74; the heavy logistics of their historic shows under the stars at the Great Pyramid, in Egypt, in September 1978.
“But our scene is always healthiest when it’s really struggling,” Garcia told Rolling Stone in 1973. “Basically our situation is on the borderline of collapse all the time, anyway.”
Musically the Grateful Dead were a product of square-root influences. The songs, the jamming — even those long twilight stretches in concert when the band would dissolve into look-Ma-no-maps quadrants of free improvisation — were born of elemental Americana: hard-bitten Mississippi blues, galloping Chicago R&B, the back-porch and campfire strains of classic country music, old-timey Appalachian bluegrass. One side of the Dead’s humble indie-45 debut, issued in 1966 on the Scorpio label, was a reading of the traditional country-blues chestnut “Stealin’.” Over the past decade, as they labored at leisure over original material for their infrequent studio releases, the Dead increasingly returned to the Motown, Willie Dixon, Jimmy Reed and Bob Dylan songbooks that had been part of their source material going back to their dance-band days as the Warlocks. (Dylan’s “It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue” and “She Belongs to Me” were both features of the Dead’s early shows.)
Yet the Dead, who were charged with a mutinous optimism and an irrepressible restlessness too often mistaken for unprofessionalism, were rarely content to leave well enough alone. Sometimes it was something as simple as adding an asymmetrical kick to “Viola Lee Blues” — a 12-bar, 78-RPM-vintage stomper covered on the group’s 1967 debut album — by cutting a half-bar out of it. Or it could be as willfully trippy as 1969’s Aoxomoxoa, an attempt to make a disciplined song-based record that instead mutated into an unforgettable marvel of rococo psychedelia, as elegant and cryptic as Rick Griffin’s mesmerizing cover art.
Even between the extremes — 1970’s pair of jewels Workingman’s Dead and American Beauty; the graceful, spacey Blues for Allah in 1975; the unlikely 1987 chart monster In the Dark — the Dead never lapsed into formula. They spent their entire career struggling to bottle on LP the living color of their stage performances. But the Dead refused to betray the substance of their music and the improbable mix of talents and personalities that fueled it.
Back in December 1967, Joe Smith — the executive at Warner Bros. Records who signed the Dead to the label — wrote a letter to the band’s then manager, Danny Rifkin, complaining about, in Smith’s words, the “lack of professionalism” that was hampering completion of the band’s second album, Anthem of the Sun. “The Grateful Dead are not one of the top acts in the business yet,” Smith wrote (to his subsequent chagrin). “Their attitudes and their inability to take care of business when it’s time to do so would lead us to believe that they never will be truly important. No matter how talented your group is, it’s going to have to put something of itself into the business before it goes anywhere.”
Later, someone scrawled across the letter in big capital letters the words fuck you.
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