In the inaugural edition of “Crate Digging,” we unpack the negative baggage associated with the Grateful Dead and propose revisiting their discography.
Last week, Nikki Finke’s “Deadline Hollywood” announced that documentary filmmaker Malcolm Leo had secured a deal to produce and direct a biographical documentary on the life of Jerry Garcia. Garcia, the shaman-esque center of the Grateful Dead, died in 1995 and in the years following his death, numerous films about the icon have emerged only to stall out before reaching production. The challenge, it seemed, had been securing the rights to the Dead’s catalog. Now ICM has been granted permission to use the band’s music and this development – along with the apparent green-lighting of the documentary – provides the music world with the perfect opportunity to revisit the legacy of the Grateful Dead.
The Grateful Dead’s catalog is nothing if not staggering in its volume; in addition to thirteen studio albums, the band officially released nine live albums, five compilations, four box sets, thirty-eight retrospective live albums, thirty-six Dick’s Picks1, seventeen Road Trips2, and fifteen digital downloads series.
Further, the band toured relentlessly from 1965-19953 and the majority of those shows have been recorded and are readily available as bootlegs. Taking all of this into consideration, one might wonder if having unlimited access to the Dead’s endless back catalog is not as stifling as being unable to use any of it. Moreover, when such prolificacy is as integral to an artist’s identity as it is with Jerry Garcia and the Dead, how do you begin to assess their value? Moreover, given how polarizing and daunting the Dead are, is there merit in even considering this question?
My answer to these questions is yes and hopefully, this piece will make an argument for why you ought to reconsider your stance on the Grateful Dead. It goes without saying that trying to convert listeners into Grateful Dead fans is an impossible feat. As Mark Richardson noted in his 2008 article for Pitchfork entitled “Broken Thoughts and Hand-Me-Downs: Ladies and Gentlemen, the Grateful Dead,” Dead fans are not actively created so much as listeners slip into fandom by virtue of “a combination of time, place and people around every person who gets into [the] band.” This article’s objective is not to sway a non-believer into loving the dead but rather, to encourage naysayers to appreciate the subtleties of the band’s musical impact.
The Grateful Dead may be the most divisive band in the history of rock and roll. Obsessively adored by their fans and reviled by, well, almost everyone else, they exist in a category all their own. The group began in 1965 as The Warlocks4, a band created from the ashes of a Palo Alto jug band that included future Grateful Dead members Bob Weir and Ron ‘Pigpen’ McKernan.
In the early 1960s, the country was experiencing an American folk music revival. The genre was immensely popular among young intellectuals and the coffeehouse culture of Stanford University’s environs proved fertile ground for those looking to partake in the movement.
But as any rock historian will tell you, 1965 was also the year that Bob Dylan went electric at the Newport Folk Festival and changed everything. The band, which now included Phil Lesh on bass and Bill Kreutzmann on drums, renamed themselves the Grateful Dead and set their acoustic instruments aside. Shortly thereafter, the group played their first gig under their new name at one of Ken Kesey’s acid tests and subsequently cemented their association with the halcyon days of the love generation.
With today’s overabundance of Dead-inspired jam bands, it can be difficult to recall how unique they were in the context of the mid-1960s. Collectively, they sounded completely unlike their peers because each member of the band brought with them a unique perspective on popular music.
Bassist Phil Lesh began as a classically-trained violinist and later explored electronic music as a teenager. Bill Kreutzmann’s pre-Dead drumming experience focused primarily on jazz and R&B. Pigpen was a blues traditionalist and Bob Weir’s rhythm guitar was heavily influenced by his immersion in the early ‘60s folk movement. Jerry Garcia was a remarkably versatile guitar player who could seamlessly shift between playing slide (as exemplified by “Cosmic Charlie”) and pedal steal guitar (he contributes this element to Crosby Stills Nash & Young’s “Teach Your Children”), but he is arguably most famous for his lead guitar work. Despite this stylistic pliancy, Garcia’s guitar playing retained a distinct tone which was due in part to the lasting effect of a childhood accident that necessitated the amputation of 2/3 of his right middle finger.5
In a 1970 review of Live/Dead for Rolling Stone, Patti Smith guitarist and rock critic Lenny Kaye wrote, “the Dead are one of the best performing bands in America…their music touches on ground that most other groups don’t even know exists.” And it’s true; with so many diverse elements culminating in one musical group, it was inevitable that the band would explore a number of different sounds throughout their career and push the boundaries of genre. Regardless of whether one’s taste skews toward the psychedelic (Aoxomoxoa and Anthem of the Sun, the latter of which features some John Cage-influenced prepared piano), the country folk sound of the Band (American Beauty) or soaring vocal melodies (Workingman’s Dead6), there is a something for everyone in the Dead’s catalog.
The most common criticism of the Grateful Dead centers around their reputation as a vehicle for ramshackle, interminable jams. This reputation is simultaneously well-deserved and deficient. In the mid-‘70s, Dead shows frequently featured one or two songs that stretched well-past the twenty minute mark.7
Some of these jams displayed a great deal of spontaneous virtuosity and some of them were in fact hallucinogenic noodling. The 1969 Fillmore West performance of “The Eleven” (a song performed almost entirely in an 11/8 time signature) is fantastic, frantic and cohesively groovy.
From a performance aspect, the spontaneous jams served a greater purpose, which was to create segues between songs and a continuous flow of the setlist, rather than the stop/start of performing singles as they appear on the studio albums. In the following decades, artists such as Animal Collective would acknowledge borrowing this technique from the Dead. Further, while most shows did feature one protracted sound experiment, they also showcased the band’s other influences with covers of artists such as Leadbelly, Bob Dylan and Chuck Berry. Despite a reputation to the contrary, most studio takes of original Grateful Dead songs clock in around four and a half minutes.
The Grateful Dead was always a jumble of contradictions. They toured with the most sophisticated sound system of their time—a veritable wall of speakers—and used it to bleat out campfire sing-a-longs. The traveling circus-like atmosphere that followed them on their tours birthed an entirely new creature: the Deadhead8—those grilled cheese-shilling, patchouli-scented, acidhead burnouts—and yet, the band was remarkably blue collar and unfussy in appearance and manner. Sure, they had a surprise MTV hit in 1987 with “Touch of Grey” but it was a song about aging and mortality (not exactly typical of MTV’s content).
And no one in the band exemplified these contradictions better than their front man, Jerry. He was hailed as the king of the flower children but underneath his relaxed exterior lay a dark, deeply troubled human being. It’s all there in the music: the vulnerability, the legal troubles, the womanizing, the losing struggle against his personal demons, the existential loneliness and the joy of playing music. Fundamentally, Jerry Garcia was a storyteller and a sentimentalist who unflinchingly revealed his scars and desires to his fans.
To the Dead, there was no separation between the band and the fan. The audience was encouraged to build a community by recording shows and sharing experiences. The fan was not there for the band, they were there with them. (This ideology should feel familiar to fans of the Clash and Fugazi.) Perhaps that’s why I’ve grown to love the Garcia and the Dead as much as I have, despite my own predisposition toward the arty aggression of punk. Loving Garcia and the Dead is, to me, about dispensing of the mythological rock star without substituting a sneer in its place.
- A series of live recordings culled by Grateful Dead audio archivist Dick Latvala with the band’s approval. The first “Dick’s Picks” was released in 1993 and the last was released in 2005.
- The successor to “Dick’s Picks.” The series began after the band signed a deal with Rhino Records to release their archived material and unlike its predecessor, “Road Trips” includes multiple performances from the same tour.
- For those of you keeping score, that amounts to 2,318 shows, according to Dead Base.
- On the East Coast, seminal art rockers the Velvet Underground were also using that name in 1964.
- His older brother accidentally cut his finger off with an axe.
- CSNY gave the Dead vocal lessons in exchange for Jerry’s work on “Teach Your Children.” The CSNY harmonies are especially apparent on “Uncle John’s Band.”
- “IT” is code for the Dead song “Dark Star,” which was the gold standard for enormously-long jams. The longest version on record is over 63 minutes long and for a while, one could not be considered a true Deadhead unless they had attended a show that featured the song.
- Famous Deadheads include: Steve Jobs, Bill Walton, Nancy Pelosi, Ann Coulter, Bob Dylan , Perry Ferrell, Keith Haring, Bill Clinton, Tony Blair, Henry Rollins, Gregg Ginn (who proclaimed them his favorite band of all time), Hunter S. Thompson, Joe Strummer and Lee Renaldo.
