Sitting by the Pool with Zebra 3
presents a Joe Anybody special report:
1983 Letter from David Gans
Dawn of the Deadheads
by David Gans
The psychedelic era is ancient history, and LSD is so far out of
fashion that it probably doesn't even need to be illegal any more.
But still you see them: people with shamelessly dated tastes in
footwear who shop in the wrong places and dress themselves in
impolitely colorful tie-dyed t- shirts printed with images of
grinning skeletons sporting garlands of roses or the bearded and
bespectacled visage of Jerry Garcia. If these stringy- haired
anachronisms were a little more populous, or maybe just better
distributed, they might be as good a movie sight gag as the Hare
Krishnas and flower-foisting Moonies who molest us in the airports of
our choice.
A large subclass of the Last of the Hippies are Deadheads - people
who make the Grateful Dead their household religion and more or less
organize their lives around their devotions. Grace Slick was right
when she said, ""You want to know where all the hippies went? Go to a
Grateful Dead concert. That's where they are" - but it's also true
that that's where the hippies come from these days. You might think
Love Children are as rare as clean air and condors in the hostile,
Hell-in-a-bucket environs of post-Me Generation America, but there
are lots of people who have continued to live That Way and dress Like
That since the days when saving the world with love seemed a viable
aim in life to many. And furthermore, thousands who were unborn or
still in diapers when the members of the Grateful Dead first started
playing together nearly two decades ago are learning tribal arts and
laws of diet and hygiene that have been lovingly preserved and handed
down since the Summer of Love.
Seen through Eighties eyes, the hippies are an odd and anachronistic -
but not entirely unenviable - lot. Sure, they sport unfashionably
optimistic and/or fatalistic world-views, disdain anything remotely
redolent of pop or mainstream culture, cuisine or currency, furnish
their lives in Low-Rent rather than High-Tech (except, of course, for
their stereos), and work at jobs rather than professions or careers
so they can unplug from employment and/or residence any time they
want to hit the road with the Grateful Dead. But while mainstream
America has lowered its expectations and tightened its belt, a lot of
hippies aren't sweating it: Their material expectations are already
pretty close to the ground - and many of them don't wear belts. More
importantly, the Deadheads have a community - a real and widespread
network of people who take care of each other - and that's something
precious few modern Americans can say.That community is documented -
celebrated - in The Official Book of the Dead Heads, by Paul
Grushkin, Cynthisa Bassett and Jonas Grushkin and published in 1983.
It's a collection of prose, poetry, posters, letters, license plates,
drawings, quotes from band members and critics and fans, photos of
them and photos of us.
But the book only shows the most visible Deadheads, the ones who fly
their freak flags proudly. There are plenty of us who fly it on the
inside while participating more fully in mainstream society and
economy. We do work at careers and professions, and we do participate
in and contribute to conventional society - and reap the myriad
benefits of cavorting in the higher playground of the Grateful Dead.
Although the most visible of the Dead's audience may appear at first
glance to be little more than a blissed-out throng of hippies, there
are plenty of Deadheads you wouldn't mind being seen riding in a car
with and with whom you can have meaningful conversations on subjects
ranging well beyond their plans for the New Year's shows or the
quality of the pot they just got. Believe it or not, there are
Deadheads who go in for grand opera; Hell, there's even a member of
the Dead who's into opera! I know Deadheads who hold responsible
positions in the legal, medical, electronics, education and other
fields. I even know one or two who work for major record companies,
but those are pretty rare - there were a couple of years back in
the '60s when the Dead were promoted in the same breath with other
rock acts, but for the last ten years or so it's been separate tables
for the Dead and the Music Industry ("How I hate that phrase," fumes
bassist Phil Lesh). Most people who work in the Music industry don't
understand - and therefore don't like - the Dead.
There are Deadheads who play tennis, live in fine homes, don't smoke
pot, and know what things like T-Bills and Capital Gains are all
about. There are Deadheads who drive BMWs, eat sushi and wear
alligator shirts; hell, there's even a member of the Dead who wears
alligator shirts!
There are Deadheads who make their livings from creative pursuits
more closely linked to the Index of Leading Economic Indicators than
to the Deadheads' own counter-economy of herbs, clothing, jewelry and
religious supplies; these people see the Dead as an inspiration for
their own work. There are some rock writers - myself included - who
have Grateful Dead t-shirts in our closets between the obligatory
tweed jackets and manage to deal with other musics objectively. There
are actors, scientists, software designers, artists, dentists and
veterinarians who function more or less normally most of the time.
Hell, there's even a member of the Dead who functions more or less
normally most of the time!
The Grateful Dead is everything to some people, and that's probably
as unfortunate as any other kind of obsession. But for most
Deadheads, a concert is something to help keep life from getting too
dull or too serious - an escape valve and a bright spot on the
calendar. There's more to it than just music, obviously, but
everything about the Deadhead phenomenon stems from the music, and it
eventually comes back to that: never mind the hit singles, the giant
videos and smoke bombs, man - just play the music.
I think it was rock critic Greil Marcus who likened Grateful Dead
concerts to the pace of life itself: brief periods of excitement
separated by long stretches of boredom. That's fine with the band and
fine with the fans, because aside from surface similarities a
Grateful Dead gig has very little in common with a typical rock
concert. There are guitars, keyboards, drums, amplifiers and
speakers, of course, but this.is definitely a case of looks; like a
duck, walks like a duck, barks like a dog: no tortured castrati front
man in a leather union suit shrieking breathlessly about how "It sure
is good to be back in [local reference] again! You guys are the best
audience on the tour!"
What the Grateful Dead do is play music. They perform different songs
from show to show (their active repertoire is more than a hundred
songs strong) and they play each song differently from show to show.
The stately pace of a Dead concert is more like baseball than the
hyperactive, aggressive tempo of football or heavy metal. It's music
that suggests rather than insists, leaves plenty to the beholder's
imagination - asks rather than declares. "If there's any message in
our songs;," says lyricist Robert Hunter, "it's 'Think for
yourself.'"
This isn't the kind of band that'd be satisfied putting on a pat,
prepared show with all its peaks and lulls in place; this isn't the
kind of audience that would appreciate such an attitude. As San
Francisco Chronicle writer Joel Selvin put it in a recent
review, "This is one band that talks down to nobody."
The key element, the thing that sets the Dead apart from any other
rock band, is improvisation. It's an all-American musical melting
pot, drawing from an astonishing variety of sources and undertaking
musical conversations in many voices at once. What each player says
with his instrument is heard differently by each of the other band
members, and the tone and content and dynamic contour are different
every time they play. It's psychic white noise in which each of us -
band and audience alike - discerns a pattern and visualizes vivid
mental pictures of indescribable things and ideas and emotions.
"We do it because it's our basic drive, an inescapable part of what
we do musically," said guitarist and guru-by-default Jerry Garcia in
a 1981 interview.
"The whole thing with the Grateful Dead is a challenge to get
something new happening, even when you don't feel like doing anything
new or don't feel anything new lurking around the corner," says
guitarist Bob Weir. "It's like pushing a boulder uphill all the time,
until it gets rolling. It's a real-time experience; every time we do
a song it's different, because the mood of the evening is different,
the crowd is different, the way everybody in the band feels is
different, and the sound in the hall is different. Those are the
major ingredients in the moment."
The major ingredients of the Dead's musical jambalaya are almost too
numerous to mention. The backgrounds, tastes, styles, skills,
directions, personalities - just about every critical element you
could imagine - of these players are as different from each other as
Salvador Dali, Deion Sanders and Newt Gingrich. There are folk, rock,
jazz, bluegrass, classical, Brazilian, blues, Indian, hillbilly,
Middle Eastern - even marching-band - influences among the band
members, making the Dead's improvisations a truly interdisciplinary
musical experiment, or perhaps America's longest- running musical
argument.
Their albums show the Dead in a relatively static, distorted and
ultimately unsatisfying way because recording isn't what this band
does best. The band often doesn't really know the songs "until years
after they're recorded," says Weir. "We should make a blanket policy
of not recording anything we haven't played on stage."
Maybe this has something do to with it: "I'm a shitty studio
musician," Phil Lesh confesses. "If I never had to play in a
recording studio again, I'd be a happy man. That is the truth."
Keyboardist Brent Mydland, who joined the Dead in 1979 after having
played in "normal" situations for several years, says, "I don't think
we've ever run through a tune more then four or five times before we
played it. Any other band I've been in, we've rehearsed over and
over, grinding it into the ground." But the audience embraces that,
too. A new song is joyously received, no matter how shakily it.'s
presented at first; part of the fun of following the Dead over the
course of a tour or a season or a year.is hearing the songs grow and
sharing the players' delight when some nuance emerges in a part or
arrangement, or when two guys lock into a new idea and play together
for a while.
"Musically, you couldn't ask for a better gang of people to play
with, in terms of the variety of influences, " Mydland adds. "The
whole spectrum's there. "It's nice knowing that whatever you do,
somebody can relate to it! Nobody tells him what to play in the
Grateful Dead - "and I'm starting to get used to it," he laughs.
The best Grateful Dead music several years ago was a spiraling
confluence of positive and adventurous musical intellects; these days
it's often a case of each.member doing what he can or what he feels
like within the agreed-upon framework of a song or jam."Music happens
best for us when we rely on our intuitions more and our egos less,"
Weir explains. "It's sort of a tightrope: you're trying to forget
yourself, and at the same time you're trying to maintain control."
"It's slow, it's anarchic, and sometimes it sputters and won't
start," says Lesh. "But when everybody in the band is happening, I
don't have to think about what I'm playing - there's no time to think
about what I'm playing - and I can't put a finger in a wrong place."
"Yeah, it comes up triple bars, man," Garcia grins. "All the golden
yummies."
"For a short time," Lesh teases.
"For seconds on end!"
In those moments, Lesh says, "you're not a musician any more, you're
not even a person - you're just there." But he.admits they don't come
as often as they have in the past. "But you have to keep believing
that there's a payoff somewhere. If it's not happening right now,
there's always the future. It's been 18 years now, and it's still
challenging enough. Sometimes it's challenging in a negative way -
'Okay, I'll show those bastards' - and sometimes it's, 'Wow, did we
really play that?! Let's try and get there again!"'
"People say, 'Aren't you surprised you've been together so long?' And
I keep saying it's like we're just getting started," says
Garcia. "There's so much we haven't done.
"One of the things that's amazing about it is that everybody
experiences it on their own terms," Garcia continues. "From the point
of view of being a player, it's this thing that you can't make
happen - but when it's happening, you can't stop it from happening.
I've tried to analyze it on every level that I can gather together,
and all the intellectual exercise in the world doesn't do a thing to
explain it to any degree of satisfaction.
"The Grateful Dead has some kind of intuitive thing - I don't know
what it is or how it works, but I recognize it phenomenologically.
It's been reported to me hugely from.the audience, and we've compared
notes about it among ourselves in the band. We've agreed that we'll
continue to keep trying to do this thing - whatever it is - and that
one best attitude toward it is a sort of stewardship."
"Only the concert itself has a beginning and an end," notes Official
Deadhead Paul Grushkin. "The rest is a continuum. There's a special
relationship between the Dead and their audience that his to do with
participation and shared identity. And the fruits of the interaction
are shared equally. When that undefinable magic makes its visitation,
everyone knows and everyone shares. It's special because it's
elusive; it's there when it is and it's gone when it's not."
"With the Grateful Dead," says Lesh of the eclectic, adventurous,
maddeningly uneven and unfathomably rewarding thing that the name
represents, "there's more possible than you could ever dream of." And
across the country thousands of tie-dyed, saucer-eyed Deadheads - and
their brethren in straight disguises - nod in telepathic agreement.
August 1983
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