This kind of book is right up my alley. Uniquely among Grateful Dead books I’ve encountered, its main focus is to situate the phenomenon of the Grateful Dead within the various cultural strains in which it belongs.
Words like ‘important’ or ‘significant’ or ‘influential’ can seem like mere cheerleading, especially when talking about bands. “I think this music is good, has value, is so valuable that I tend to want to assign it a significance over and above what its actual historic significance may have been.’
I can think of some other bands for which there has been a rhetorical effort to assert and assign an influence over and above what seems intuitive or logical based on their exposure to the public, so I want to be careful in performing this same kind of rhetorical move regarding the Grateful Dead. But the fact is I believe their cultural significance is larger than supposed by most, and there’s also a level of musical sophistication that’s often dismissed by detractors.
A simpler and more direct way of saying that is that people who ‘don’t get it’ really don’t realize how much there is to get, and tend to therefore think there’s nothing to it.
Richardson asserts in his preface:
For all of its strengths, this work hasn’t convinced broader audiences that the Grateful Dead deserve their attention. There is more to this failure than Garcia’s famous observation that the Dead resembled licorice…Much of the indifference to, and sometimes disdain for, the Dead and their project can be traced to simple intellectual inertia. For decades now, a large fraction of the mainstream media has depicted the Grateful Dead as grizzled hippie throwbacks with a cult following of burned-out stoners. Never especially accurate, this stereotype has become a handy synecdoche for the 1960s…Whatever purposes this cartoon version of the Dead has served over the years, it has also discouraged any serious reconsideration of their legacy and obscured the combination of talent, range, intelligence and authenticity that made them so appealing in the first place. (p.6)
So Richardson’s is an effort along those lines, and for the most part a successful one that adds a lot to the discussion.
The book is split into three sections “Ecstasy” “Mobility” and “Community” and each tackles a cultural aspect of the band, where they were influential or part of a larger strain of American culture. Ecstasy is about the origins of the band in the Beat scene in San Francisco and the Acid Tests. Mobility talks about the touring scene, how being on tour built the fanbase, and Community talks about the fanbase that rose up around the band, and the business end of the band relating with the Deadheads and the general public.
Overall its very well done, easy to follow along, and mostly manages to avoid the usual Dead book plot of ‘ linear historical narrative featuring 40% 1960s, 30% 1970-75, 20% 1975-95 and Deadheads, and 10% Drugs and Garcia’s death.’ If anything it’s a bit light on the drug aspect, though I’d rather hear about how the pro-drug (and generally pro-freedom) attitude of the band points up the hypocrisy and futility of the ‘war on drugs’ than a lot of moralistic clucking about Garcia’s drug problem. (Though of course it is a major element of the band’s history and culture.
Also of interest (to me, at least,) was his discussion of the Grateful Dead as a political entity, in spite of their vocal disavowals of politics (especially Garcia’s) the band and its individual members did have a political viewpoint and did function as a focus of politics, especially during the Dark Age of the 1980s. The phenomenon of conservative Deadheads has given rise to the myth that the band themselves were anything but radical (though they were frequently outside the left/right axis,) and Richardson offers evidence to thoroughly debunk any notion that they were friendly to political conservatism. (My own take is that they exhibited an ‘all are welcome medicinal anarchism,’ but that’s a topic for another post.)
Anyhow, here are a few choice quotes I typed up, I may have had some angle in mind when I did this, this is one of the books I finished reading a while ago but never finished writing up. So, since I bothered to transcribe them, I offer them here without commentary:
Garcia liked songs that “hint at either a larger story or something behind the scene…Maybe something not quite nameable…It was the power of the almost expressed, the resonant. It seemed to speak at some level other than the obvious one, and it was more moving for that reason.” [they have] the scary power that the Mass used to have in Latin.” (p.105)
“No rock band in this world flies so high and so brilliantly as the Grateful Dead, San Francisco’s gift to intelligent, mind-blowing music.” (p.187) Philadelphia Daily News 1972
“Aside from the individual virtues of the group, they have mastered the ability to control dynamics to a more consistent degree than any group I know of except the James Brown band. “(p.187) Ralph J. Gleason
ianuaditis 