Why I like the Grateful Dead

"Writing about music is like dancing about architecture"

I'm not sure who coined that, but they may have had a point. Still, I'm going to have a go. (Lots of people have!) I just read something I wrote in 2015 which promised more about the Grateful Dead. Better late than never.

It started in 1970 with my friend Mike Smith introducing me to West Coast rock (the Dead, Jefferson Airplane, Quicksilver Messenger Service etc - I'd already discovered The Doors) during our first year at uni. Among the many outstanding albums he introduced me to was one called 'Anthem of the Sun'.

Side 1 of 'Anthem' was not like any music I'd ever heard. The sleeve notes showed a regular (admittedly weird) song list ...but when you played it you find it's one continuous track where songs morph into each other or into studio-created soundscapes which then resolve into new tunes or extracts from live jams to create a single experience you have to hear from beginning to end in one go just like this never-ending sentence.

And what an experience! To my ears it is still the only studio-created album that remotely evokes the excitement of the Grateful Dead live. At the time I embraced it as music for the mind - you put on your headphones or stuck your head between the speakers and just immersed yourself in it. It was cerebral.

The Dead, St Petersberg Times Forum, 
30/7/03

It wasn't until much later, hearing the music live and played by both the Grateful Dead and other bands (Cosmic Charlies, Shotgun Ragtime Band, Grateful Dudes, The Other Ones, Ratdog, The Dead, Dark Star Orchestra) that I realised that the Dead were basically a dance band. That's how they came into being at the early 1960s events and that's how many fans still enjoy the music. There's just something so alive, so exuberant, so joyful about certain songs that, even now, I find it hard not to get up and move when I hear them. Scarlet Begonias! China Cat Sunflower! The Eleven! 

I first experienced the music live from the front row in Newcastle City Hall in 1972. At the time I didn't really want to hear the songs, just the jams: that was what was different and exciting about this band. It wasn't a case of the lead guitarist doing a solo in the middle of a song, rather that the whole band were able to take the rhythm and melody of a song and go with it to another level, even breaking through the glass ceiling of the song itself into new places altogether. They didn't seem to work from a set list; every gig was different. They virtually invented a new genre of rock music.

Of course (peerless) guitarist Jerry Garcia was central to the music, but even with him in full flow there was always lots of other stuff going on: little runs from the keyboard player, stabbing chords or riffs from Weir, and bass like you never heard before. (And Phil Lesh, incidentally, is as far removed from a conventional 'rhythm section' bass player as you could imagine. Not much happening in a jam? Just listen to Phil!)

I heard Lesh sum it up once, to the effect that, when everything was working, there seemed to be a gestalt thing going on: that in those moments band was more than the sum of its parts. ("Like in Theodore Sturgeon's book "More Than Human".) 

The band always recorded their live gigs and never discouraged audience tapers. From 1984 there was an allocated tapers section in each venue The upshot is a vast archive of soundboard and audience recordings as well as an impressively large catalog of official releases (much of which I can still look forward to hearing for the first time).

And personally at the heart of the GD experience I find a compulsion to join in! There's something about the music, and Garcia's guitar playing in particular, that can trigger an involuntary stream of psychogenic notes in my head. I guess it's what I'd be playing physically if (a) I could play guitar that well and (b) was there on stage alongside Garcia. (Not that I'd want anybody else to hear it!!!) I've never heard of anyone else describe this experience, but it can't just be me, can it?

And then there's what I missed as a young man. The songs themselves, with a few exceptions, are masterful. Throughout their career the band continued to play covers of classic numbers which they made their own, but their original songs, many by the writing combinations of Hunter/Garcia and Barlow/Weir, are sublime. Robert Hunter, in particular, was a consummate wordsmith, able to express in a few words a lifetime, a situation, or a story. If Dylan hadn't happened then perhaps Hunter would have got the Nobel Prize! I can't think of another band whose song lyrics are the subject of a 500-page annotated *compendium.

Finally the fans - the Deadheads - the people who get it. You instantly have something in common. At the Dark Star Orchestra gig in London in 2012 I was dancing next to people from Germany, the Netherlands, the States... The Grateful Dead used to acknowledge the contribution of the audience to the live music and this continues wherever the music is played. (Not that I'm saying you can't be a Deadhead and also a twat.)

It's 25 years since the original Grateful Dead ended. Yet there is still a lot of interest. This year the Guardian and others (also here) have published articles and commented on the ongoing popularity of the band. And the music lives on - in the bands still playing it, and in the worldwide community of Deadheads who love it.

Long may it last.

*The Complete Annotated Grateful Dead Lyrics" David Dodd, Free Press, New York, 2005

Postscript

When it comes to Jerry's musicianship I can't really add to what fellow musician John Mayer wrote already:

"I’m a good enough guitar player to know a great guitarist when I hear one, but I had to become an even better one to begin to understand the depth and complexity of Jerry Garcia’s playing.I’ve always said that musicians play like they are, and in the case of Garcia, his performances serve as a detailed map of a man, his intentions, his desires, and his impressions of the world around him. And going by that map, Garcia was a lovely, mighty soul. I never met him, and will never understand the loss of those who did, but the vast archive of his music amounts to the makings of a starry night sky that turns listeners into explorers.

Several years ago I set out not just to learn Garcia’s approach to the guitar and the songs he played, but to learn what about it has allowed millions of people who don’t play the guitar to key into it for hours on end. Soloing has been known since its inception as a kind of self-indulgent expression. Why, then, could so many listeners, myself included, listen to him do it endlessly without fatigue?

To best understand what makes Garcia’s guitar playing so unique, it helps to start with what it sidesteps: though it drew from blues and RandB, his guitar approach left a few traditional elements out of the equation, he didn’t play from that well-worn feral, sexual place that traditional blues music traded in, nor did he really touch the sinister aspects that were born into the idiom. Garcia didn’t sing about wanting to rock a young woman all night long, and any of his deals with the devil existed metaphorically as mere setbacks. (What’s 20 bucks, anyway?) These changes affect the fundamental color palette of the storytelling. I’m not sure the sun ever rises in Chicago blues music, but in the musical storytelling of Garcia and the Grateful Dead, it shines so bright it hurts.

On a more technical note, he played most often in a major blues scale, which added to this mix of innocence, and even joy. Minor blues notes lend themselves to the exquisiteness of pain, while major blues scales kind of explore the relief from it. Garcia played to relieve people of pain. That melodic innocence must have something to do with bringing so many people to their “happy place.” He wasn’t pulling notes from an anguished place within, he was catching them with a butterfly net as they went flitting by overhead. On a tactile level, he held the guitar with grace. It wasn’t a weapon, it was a vehicle. He took it easy. He may have played fast, but he was thinking slow. And that makes us listen with a smile.

I put Jerry Garcia on the same level as Miles Davis and Bill Evans because of the intention in his performing; once you’ve learned all the notes, and the chords, and the bends and the runs, you come to the final frontier of playing which is the why of it all, and that’s where the power was and still is in his playing. He played from a real place, a place that faced out to the world, not for his own reception or gratification. He played for the joy of interacting with the band and with the music he loved. If you listen close enough to a musician, you can tell what they’re looking to get out of each and every note they make. Garcia, to me, was looking to bring music to life out of the tacit, sacred duty to use his gift.

Even after learning these things, they offer very little help in sounding anything like the man. That’s because he didn’t play anything stock or repetitive. There are no “signature Jerry Garcia solo riffs” as exist with so many revered guitarists. To “sound like Jerry,” you have to make people feel like he did, and well—good luck with that.
The real magic—the kind that will make the Grateful Dead music live forever—that’s in the way we carry it on in our hearts and minds. 

I don’t listen to Garcia and the band play—I watch it. I believe we all do, and that what we see is a blend of the music, the year in which it was played, the season and location of the show so as to understand the state of mind the band was in that night, that week, that presidency. We see it differently from one another the way we do our own dreams, but we all agree that our dreams contain these songs, and this band, those places and names. 

And that’s how the Grateful Dead managed to freeze time. We discuss our favorite years in present tense; we say we just heard the best version of something last night as if that was the moment it first took place. Your favorite year of their music "wasn’t", it "is." And in that way, inside that beautiful dreamscape the band created, the Grateful Dead is still up there, still playing. And Jerry is right there in front of them, and time is held in place by those who refuse to let it fade, and even as we sleep, as long as one of us is listening, the band is still playing.

We lose the ones we love, we pine for those who have left, and we lament the changes of modern times. But the makers of this music dug a tunnel, and it runs beneath time and space, and we, the ones who love it like family, crawl through to visit 1974, and 1969, and 1987 and 1990. If we were alive at the time the show took place, we see ourselves as the people we were in the lives we had, and if we weren’t born yet, we get to wistfully dream what it must have been like.

We only get a few minutes on earth, and Jerry Garcia gave all his minutes so that we could forever visit his life and times through his playing, and let it unravel into a new kind of now."