GOOD OL' GRATEFUL DEADCAST
Season 4, Episode 7
JESSE: We’ll start with a thought that sociologist Dr. Rebecca Adams offered during our “Dead Freaks Unite” episode, about what happened to the Grateful Dead community in the years after the Grateful Dead officially dissolved in 1995.
REBECCA ADAMS: We no longer have a community where we all know what the party was that night. We all knew what the big party was back when the Dead were on tour — we knew which show we were supposed to be at. Now, you've got to choose where you are, and which part of the Dead Head community you're going to encounter.
JESSE: Some Dead Heads see each other at Dead and Company shows, or Phil Lesh and Friends, or the Wolf Bros., or gather at Dead night at their local bar, or maybe even all of the above. Some rendezvous every year at the Oregon Country Fair, or convene for backyard grill outs, basement listening parties on boss sound systems, private acid quizzes, shows by other non-jam bands, Wharf Rat meetings, on social media, and for many other reasons, both intentional and accidental. Surely there are Dead Heads for nearly all occasions. And while it’s not exactly a party, if you go to Albuquerque most Februarys, you’ll encounter the temporary autonomous zone known as the Grateful Dead Scholars Caucus, meeting as part of the Southwest Popular American Culture Association conference.
AUDIO: “Promised Land” [Listen To The River, 10/17/72] (1:58-2:08) - [dead.net]
JESSE: There’s long been scholarship about the Grateful Dead. Considered as primo specimens of the psychedelic counterculture, they were the subject of studies starting in the early 1970s. And of course in the ‘80s, DeadBase created a model for fan scholarship; we interviewed co-creator Mike Dolgushkin about that last episode. But it was in the late ‘90s that the academic scholars began to gather, mostly in Albuquerque, but also in the pages of scholarly journals and collections, at a few Dead specific symposiums, and more recently, at the national Popular Culture Association conference. Behind much of this activity is historian Nicholas Meriwether, a name you might also know from Grateful Dead liner notes, and the first keeper of the official Dead Archive at UC Santa Cruz. Lately, Nicholas has founded the Grateful Dead Studies Association, getting ready for its 2nd annual meeting in April at the annual national Popular Culture Association conference, virtual this year. And in February, Nicholas will once again serve as area chair for the Dead Caucus, back in-person in Albuquerque. Please welcome back to the Grateful Deadcast, Nicholas Meriwether.
NICHOLAS MERIWETHER: I've been thinking and studying the Dead more or less since my very first show, which was November 10th, 1985. I was a college sophomore at the time, and a bunch of my friends took me to a show at the Meadowlands. I was absolutely smitten the second I walked into the parking lot. It was just wonderful, and the show was amazing. When we walked out of the show, one of my friends asked me, “Yeah, so, what do you think?” I said, “I will spend the rest of my life thinking about this.” And really, I have.
One of the things that really struck me that night is when you listened to a Grateful Dead show, you were really listening to history. There was so much there: so much depth, so much resonance, and you had a sense that you were listening to not only a band that had a lot of history, and was still exploring it, but you were listening to a band that was in dialogue with its own history. I was studying history at the time, and became a historian, so I had my antenna up. I didn’t have the term then, but this is a kind of public history. I thought that was fascinating. Since it's 1985, it’s the height of the Reagan 80s — much of what was happening in mainstream, cultural and certainly political discourse, was kind of an interrogation and dismissal and argument over the meaning of the counterculture in the 1960s. When you walked into a Dead show, here was the absolute artistic, musical repudiation of almost everything that passes for what the mainstream was saying about the 1960s.
I started reading immediately, and I also kind of shifted. I was studying 19th century American literature and culture and history. I immediately signed up for a senior seminar on the Vietnam War. I remember coming back to college that night and a friend of mine gave me his battered copy of The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test and said, “You need to read this.” And I sort of looked at him and I said: “Yes, I do.”
JESSE: “Find the others,” Timothy Leary once said, and by the mid-’90s, Nicholas Meriwether did that, connecting to a national group of Dead scholars.
NICHOLAS MERIWETHER: Rob Weiner, who's a librarian at Texas Tech University, was involved in the Southwest Texas American Popular Culture Association. He had the idea after 1995, he thought, a way of keeping alive our spirit and interest in the Grateful Dead would be to have some academic conference papers. A couple of years later, there were enough papers to actually make it a formal area, which means multiple sessions spanning a couple of days. And since 1998, it's met every year. There have been two great big conferences devoted to it: 2007 at UMass Amherst, Michael Grabscheid convened an amazing three-day conference that had dozens of papers, had Bill Walton there, had Carolyn “MG” Garcia [Mountain Girl], Dan Healy. Seven years after that, Michael Parrish, who was at that time Dean of College of Sciences at San Jose State University, he and I co-chaired a big conference called So Many Roads — that brought together more than 100 papers and that was another three-day conference as well. Lots and lots of stuff. Bill Kreutzmann gave the keynote speech, which was amazing. And since then, I think there have been more and more papers actually given at other conferences as well. But still, the locus and the incubator of most of the scholarship is the group that continues to meet in Albuquerque every year at the SWPCA.
JESSE: For the past few years, the Caucus has been given a place of honor in a conference room on the upper floors, high over Albuquerque, with a view of the Civic Center where the Dead played on November 17th, 1971, now Dave’s Picks 26.
AUDIO: “Playing in the Band” [Dave’s Picks 26, 11/17/71] (3:18-3:40)
JESSE: If you’ve visited the Deadcast before, as you may have surmised, these are my people, and it’s one of my happy places. To paraphrase Willy Legate, there is nothing like a Grateful Dead conference. I wrote about the conferences a bunch in a story called “The Deadologists.” The 2021 edition, of course, was remote, and we’re going to listen to excerpts from a number of presentations. Thanks to all the participants for their permission to feature these. Rebecca Adams appeared on a few panels outside the Dead track, acting as ambassador from the Dead world to the outside scholarly community. One presentation was titled “Collaborative Pedagogy: Teaching (with) the Grateful Dead on Tour, on Campus, and Online.”
REBECCA ADAMS: To many of us here at this conference, popular culture is now an accepted focus for research and teaching. It was really stigmatized back then in the beginning of time, and the Grateful Dead and Dead Heads are a lot less stigmatized now. They're much more widely accepted as musicians and bands.
JESSE: In the summer of 1989, she took a group of students on the Dead’s summer tour.
REBECCA ADAMS: I took a class on tour, actually two classes — SOC 501-502, Qualitative Research Methods and Applied Social Theory. The students were required to take both of the classes simultaneously. 21 students, two graduate assistants, five members of the video crew, a photographer, a bus driver and, for the second leg of summer tour, my husband and daughter, comprised the class. They explored the social world of Dead Heads. We were supposed to do a lot of meetings on the bus, but we actually ended up doing most of our meetings in the hotel room. We separated at concerts. They had their own experience, and then we came back together and discussed it.
JESSE: Rebecca co-edited a book of papers that grew from the class titled Deadhead Social Science: You Ain’t Gonna Learn What You Don’t Wanna Know.
REBECCA ADAMS: Grateful Dead shows were improvisations within a structure. The structure of the show was comforting to Dead Heads; it allowed them to be adventurous. This improvisational ethos filters down into the everyday practice of Dead Heads, as many of my colleagues in the Grateful Dead Caucus have written. Concerts were also examples of secular rituals. Here I cite Victor Turner's book in 1969 — many other Dead Heads have cited his book. But basically, the argument is that during a show external statuses became irrelevant, and liminality between what was before the show and what was after the show allows magic to happen. And both personal and cultural transformations can occur during the shows. So Dead Heads very self-consciously applied this ethos to their everyday lives and professional lives. Applied for teaching, this allows for risk-taking and collaboration across status differences.
JESSE: The Dead Head scholarly community evolved over 20 years with many sub-branches and conversations.
NICHOLAS MERIWETHER: At one point, I counted 27 different disciplines and fields. It gets a little bit murky, because what's the borderline between a discipline and a field? It's everything from anthropology to history to literature to musicology, a couple of different kinds of musicology, lots of different kinds of sociology. It's not just that Grateful Dead studies is interdisciplinary; it's unique in that it requires all scholars who are working in it to read way outside of their disciplines, which is taking us out of our comfort zones. I thought that was just the most marvelous metaphor for what the Grateful Dead exemplified on stage. It's sort of like there's this absolute continuum of how the band approached their own work and their own music and their own art, every aspect of it, and how that actually models the kind of behavior that scholars at their best, at our best, should also follow.
JESSE: Brent Wood lectures in the Department of English and Drama at the University of Toronto at Mississauga. This December, Routledge will publish his book, The Tragic Odes of Jerry Garcia and The Grateful Dead, Mystery Dances in the Magic Theater.
BRENT WOOD: The history and composition of “Scarlet Begonias,” in tandem with its medley-mate, “Fire On the Mountain,” can be heard as a microcosm of the Grateful Dead's unusual career. The parallels and contrasts they embody, the messages in their lyrics, the musical intricacies and evolution, can together be read as emblematic of the group's challenges, contradictions, changes and achievements — a microcosm or a touchstone, resonating with tragic overtones, adding a meta critical layer to the phrase “dead to the core,” from “Fire On the Mountain.”
AUDIO: “Fire On the Mountain” [Get Shown the Light, 5/8/77] (4:42-4:50) - [dead.net] [Spotify]
JESSE: May 8th, 1977, naturally, from Get Shown the Light. Brent touched on that classic version in his paper.
BRENT WOOD: The performance has something for every taste: clear, in-tune harmony vocals, timbral and textural contrasts, morphing rhythms, and attractive melodic contours from Garcia's guitar, in addition to the bass and bells. The drummers maintain the 16th beat framework throughout “Scarlet Begonias,” maximizing syncopation possibilities. 25 minutes long in this performance, the medley became the longest sustained dance vehicle in the group's repertoire and, in some later concerts, stretched out beyond 30 minutes.
AUDIO: “Scarlet Begonias” [Get Shown the Light, 5/8/77] (8:26-8:57) - [dead.net] [Spotify]
JESSE: When Brent talks about microcosms, he really means it.
BRENT WOOD: The sing-along chorus absent from “Scarlet [Begonias]” rings loudly and simply in “Fire On the Mountain,” poignantly prefaced by a passing minor chord, a sonority absent from its partner. The addition of a C# minor chord at the turnaround of each chorus line illustrates Garcia's interest in tinkering with the arrangements of the songs he sang with Grateful Dead for expressive purposes. That insertion of that kind of minor chord, just a passing chord into an all major progression, to evoke a fleeting moment of pathos, that's one of Garcia's signature gestures, which originated with his arrangements of “[I] Know You Rider” and “Morning Dew.” Still toying with the C# minor edition, Garcia used it only on the last repeating chorus during spring ‘77.
JESSE: It’s pretty subtle in those early versions, right after Garcia and Donna finish each line in the final chorus, like this one from May 25th, 1977 in Richmond, Virginia, from Dave’s Picks 1, coming out on vinyl in early 2022.
AUDIO: “Fire On the Mountain” [Dave’s Picks 1, 5/25/77] (6:56-7:11)
JESSE: Though the May 8th, 1977 performance became the definitive take to many, Brent rightly points out that “Fire On the Mountain” wasn’t yet finished.
BRENT WOOD: The group continued to pump out popular versions of the medley throughout spring ‘77, with the drummers maintaining the 16th beat feeling for “Scarlet [Begonias].” But their summer tour was derailed by an injury to [Mickey] Hart. When they returned to the stage in the fall, the drummers resumed their playing with the shift into 4/4 time, but returned to 16s for the New Year's Eve concert at Winterland. Not until recording sessions for Shakedown Street in the summer of ‘78 did Garcia add the middle verse and settle the lyrics. The group continued to employ the 4/4 beat often throughout 1978 and early ‘79, until the Godchauxs were replaced by Brent Mydland in the spring. Meanwhile, Garcia kept experimenting with the point at which he wanted to introduce that C# minor chord, [until] finally he made it standard after each chorus line in 1979.
AUDIO: “Fire On the Mountain” [Dead Set, 10/31/80] (1:54-2:18) - [Spotify] [YouTube]
JESSE: That version was recorded at Radio City Music Hall in 1980, released on Dead Set. Brent’s whole paper was fantastic and even heavy.
BRENT WOOD: [Robert] Hunter noted in A Box of Rain that he had written the lyric at Hart’s ranch while a blaze raged on the surrounding hills. As the catastrophic California wildfires in the past few years demonstrate, the song's warning about the psychology of competition, overwork, overconsumption and addiction was not only for Garcia, or even for drug addicts, but for all of North American society. If “Fire On the Mountain” became a soundtrack for Garcia's tragic decline in the late 20th century, it now plays the same role for us all as we plunge headlong into climate crisis — triggered by the same problems that plagued Garcia, but on a global scale.
AUDIO: “Fire On the Mountain” [Dead Set, 10/31/80] (6:03-6:27) - [Spotify] [YouTube]
JESSE: One feature of the conference is a question and discussion section that often gets even deeper into the details. While we can’t reproduce one in its entirety, my co-host Rich does have a comment for Brent.
RICH: Thanks, Jesse. Hi Brent — loved that you brought this up for discussion. “Fire On the Mountain” and this addition of the chord after the A major chord is a great example of Jerry changing a riff as a song progressed. I’m wondering if this is actually an A major 7th, vs. a C# minor? Both chords are very close to each other in structure, but it seems to me an A major 7th serves the song better, retaining the A as the root note, vs. that C#.
JESSE: If you’ve got other thoughts on that “Fire On the Mountain” chord or anything else that comes up, drop us a line. Another musicology presentation I found fascinating was by Melvin Backstrom, “Compositional Change in the Music of the Dead.” Like Brent, Mel focused on how the Dead’s music gradually changed shape, sometimes even after decades. Did you know that they slightly rewrote the chord changes to “Dark Star” in 1990?
MELVIN BACKSTROM: From its first release as a single in 1968 until it's March 29th, 1990 version, which famously featured Branford Marsalis, the harmonic form of the verses of “Dark Star” remained the same. The first line, A major, then it shifted to E minor, then the third line E minor, then a shift back to A major for “Shall we go.”
AUDIO: “Dark Star” [Wake Up To Find Out, 3/29/90] (5:56-6:24) - [Spotify] [YouTube]
MELVIN BACKSTROM: Beginning with its subsequent live version, however—so the next one, and this is the last one to feature Brent Mydland on July 12th, 1990—they didn't play it, between the 29th of March and July 12th. There's a difference, and this carries through to every single one that I've been able to find, from this point all the way up until the final “Dark Star.” Its harmonic form is instead A, A, B, A, B, A, B — so with the second line set to A major, followed by a shift to E minor for the third. So when it gets to “reason tatters,” listen: it doesn't go to E minor. It stays on the same pattern as the first line.
AUDIO: “Dark Star” [View From The Vault II, 7/12/90] (2:30-2:56)
JESSE: When they get to “searchlight casting,” the E minor finally arrives.
AUDIO: “Dark Star” [View From The Vault II, 7/12/90] (2:57-3:10)
MELVIN BACKSTROM: The reasons for this change are perhaps known only to Phil Lesh. Although given its significance and change it would have demanded of Bob Weir, perhaps he would know something about it as well. As the composer of “Dark Star”—that is, the song, rather than the accreted collective improvisation—perhaps it originated with Garcia, thinking it made for a better harmonic setting of that second line. As one who played “Dark Star,” both before and after the change, perhaps Marsalis might know something about it too. Regardless of the reason for the change, however, that it happened so late in “Dark Star”’s performing history is curious to say the least. And the timing is interesting: could Marsalis’s involvement have somehow been the impetus for the change?
JESSE: Sometimes questions like that just don’t have answers. But every single Dead conference I’ve attended, I’ve walked away with a richer understanding of the band and their music, from the subtleties of the arrangements to non-musical ways the band functioned. We’ve posted a link to Mel’s thesis, “The Grateful Dead and their world: popular music and the avant-garde in the San Francisco Bay Area, 1965-1975.” Presentations ranged far past musicology, though, sometimes shifting the frame of the band’s history. Beth Carroll, professor of rhetoric and composition at Appalachian State University, is a conference regular, presenting pieces of a large ongoing research project.
BETH CARROLL: My general framework for the project is that women's contributions really shaped the direction and the impact and the legacy of the Grateful Dead.
JESSE: Informing the project is a deeper theoretical argument: social reproduction theory.
BETH CARROLL: Investigating women's work, and really looking at women's work in a more in a more holistic way, as the paid and unpaid labor as well as the domestic and more public work, sort of seeing women's value in a different light by considering the economy to include all of those different features.
JESSE: The title of Beth’s paper was “The Spiritual Mother To All Deadheads,” and its subject was Eileen Law.
BETH CARROLL: She was literally the voice of the organization for Dead Heads for years through the hotline number.
EILEEN LAW, DEAD HOTLINE [11/24/86]: Thank you for calling the Grateful Dead hotline number. This is a new message as of 24th. The Grateful Dead will be playing at the Oakland Coliseum Arena in Oakland, California on December 15th, 16th, and 17th. There are still plenty of tickets available through all BASS Ticket Centers.
BETH CARROLL: She was in charge of the Dead Heads mailing list from 1972 to ‘93; the voice of the Grateful Dead hotline from ‘76 to ‘95; in charge of the guest list, which got to be really enormous, especially for home shows from 1980 to ‘95; and probably her most significant contribution, over the entirety, has been to collect materials that have become part of the Grateful Dead Archive. She did that in an unofficial as well as an official capacity. She was office manager, at least at one point, maybe various points in the 1980s. And she's worked with Ice Nine Publishing— with the newsletter, with their copyright, with research, with requests from publishers.
JESSE: Eileen Law’s work doesn’t fall into the unpaid labor aspect, but as the connection point between Dead Heads and the Dead themselves, her influence can still be felt.
BETH CARROLL: In her interview about the list with communication with the band, she says, “People would write: ‘Do you know the band members? Have you met them?’ I'm sure many bands don't know what's going on at their shows unless something terrible happens. But just like the day-to-day business, our fans had a place to write in and tell us. We tried to deal with every kind of complaint, and we had a bulletin board in the kitchen at Lincoln where everything was pinned, the good and the bad. Real change happened through these letters.”
JESSE: A series of letters about tapers setting up taping gear in people’s reserved seats, pinned to the bulletin board at the band’s office, was one of the influencing factors when the band instituted their official taper section in 1984. Another feature of Dead conferences are papers and presentations by Dead family members. Rhoney Stanley, uniquely positioned to comment on life inside the Dead’s office, has been a frequent presenter in Albuquerque. Rhoney wrote a cool book called Owsley and Me: My LSD Family.
RHONEY STANLEY: I had been their first secretary hired because nobody else wanted the job, which I gave up when I got pregnant with Starfinder. Owsley had arranged for [other partner] Melissa and me to split his salary while he was in prison and, of course, the band agreed. Monday was the best day in a Grateful Dead week. Unlike the rest of the working world, Monday was payday. The office on Lincoln and Fifth in San Rafael was full of secretaries, roadies, old ladies, and band members, everyone too exhausted from the weekend frivolities to take anything anyone said seriously. And like ducks, we let the water run off our backs. Nobody would be critical, nobody would cause too many headaches — this was our day for lounging.
By 1972, we had moved out of the city to Marin. We had an office separate from the rehearsal studio, a staff, and a payroll. Our accountants, Dave and Bonnie Parker, guardians of our wealth, sat at a table shuffling papers, ready to hand out the payroll. The office was like a home without nannies or babysitters. We brought the children with us.
In the corner next to the kitchen, Eileen worked on consolidating the mailing list of Grateful Dead fans and communicating with them. She could have passed for a Quaker, as she rarely wore dazzling colors, but preferred muted blues and grays. Her manner, too, was serene and reassuring. Eileen got the job in 1972 when she was already Grateful Dead family.
JESSE: The Dead scene was hardly a bastion of feminism, but it was progressive in its own ways.
RHONEY STANLEY: 1972 in the business history of the Grateful Dead was very egalitarian. Men, women, stars and staff all got the same salary, no matter their role. Each person contributed a share that made the whole work better. We never thought of it as a political statement, but perhaps it was.
JESSE: Though the Grateful Dead were known for being apolitical, Rhoney came up with a way to work with that.
RHONEY STANLEY: Jerry would listen to Mountain Girl. The women of the Grateful Dead actually had an influence on the men. I went into the kitchen and grabbed some cheese without bread. MG knew I followed Owsley’s diet of no carbs and she didn't bust my chops. I crumbled up a piece of cheese and put it into my baby's mouth. He gurgled and looked happy, his big blue eyes smiling. Now his hair was turning blonde and wavy. When he was born, it was dark and straight. “MG, I want to set up a political table in the office,” I declared. She laughed loudly: “Jerry will never allow it.” I told her my idea. November 7th, 1972, was the election and one of the propositions on the ballot, Proposition 19, was for decriminalization of marijuana: “No person aged 18 years of age or older shall be punished in any way for personal use, or growth, of marijuana.” What if we had a table in the office and we registered everyone to vote? It wasn't exactly political, because we weren't saying vote “yes” for Prop 19. We were simply giving everybody the opportunity to exercise their right as citizens of the United States to vote. “Brilliant,” she replied, “let's take it up the fire pole. Let's bring it to Jerry.” Of course, Jerry agreed.
JESSE: Though Proposition 19 failed, decades before Rock the Vote and HeadCount, Rhoney was on it. I often come away from Dead conferences thinking about the Dead from a number of new perspectives, and through a number of new stories. Rhoney’s voter registration tale was one. Our poobah Nicholas Meriwether made this observation in his presentation.
NICHOLAS MERIWETHER: Even well-publicized parts of the Dead's history can still offer new insights. Not only for those interested in the band, but especially for those interested in the ways that the Dead connect to and illuminate the larger defining issues in the counterculture and the 1960s.
JESSE: Nicholas’s paper was titled “LSD and the Dead’s First Appearance on an Album.”
NICHOLAS MERIWETHER: In summer 1966, Capitol Records released an unusual LP entitled simply LSD. Recorded just after California had passed legislation outlawing the drug, the album was the first documentary on the label. Though really more journalistic expository than documentary, the LP claimed to present a balanced overview of the LSD issue, with interviews from medical experts in law enforcement, along with stories from users and opinions from national luminaries, such as Allen Ginsberg and Timothy Leary. The album was largely the work of photographer Lawrence Schiller, who spent several weeks immersed in the Los Angeles underground interviewing several Merry Pranksters, but mostly locals, a few of whom and a few of whom intersected with the outskirts of the Dead’s circle during the band’s sojourn there in the spring of 1966. Although a flop commercially, the LP has long been a collector's curio — mostly for the subject matter, but also for its approach, usually characterized as Reefer Madness-style scaremongering, though perhaps not quite as exaggerated.
“INTERVIEW WITH CRACKPOTS” [LSD: A Documentary Report, 1966]: This young man never had a bummer in some 33 LSD trips. Every one of them was a delight: everything under control. He needed only to snap his fingers, and down he came, anytime. But on Voyage 34, he finally met himself, coming down an up staircase — and the encounter was crushing.
NICHOLAS MERIWETHER: For scholars of the Grateful Dead, the album is more significant than it’s history suggests. Not only does it include both written and audio references to Owsley Stanley's chemical acumen and his role as the band's patron, it also represents the first appearance of the Grateful Dead on an LP. That bit of trivia is misleading — had the band's name not been included as part of a glossary of terms, and misspelled at that, any real connection could be dismissed. There is no substantive music by the band, just a minute of sonic weirdness from an Acid Test, that listeners would be hard-pressed to definitively attribute to the Dead.
NARRATOR [LSD: A Documentary Report, 1966]: Ken Kesey is another prime mover in the LSD order. He organized and incorporated a peripatetic repertory troupe called the Acid Test, a group formed to simulate and stimulate the LSD experiences for paying audiences. Projectors flash signs, messages, kaleidoscopic patterns on the walls. Blinking strobe lights silhouette the dancing throngs, making them resemble fragmented memories of an LSD high.
JESSE: And though the Dead only appear on the album in the most literal and non-musical way, they are very much adjacent to its contents, and a look into its history reveals the contours of the Dead’s world in 1966, and where their countercultural existence and professional ambitions may not have overlapped. We talked extensively about the tiny window the Dead and Owsley Stanley spent in southern California during our bonus episode, “Bear Drops: LA ‘66.”
NICHOLAS MERIWETHER: By the time the Summer of Love catapulted the Haight Ashbury into international prominence a year later, Capitol’s confused foray into the thick of the counterculture was quickly forgotten. The label jumped on the San Francisco bandwagon and began to build their own roster of psychedelic bands, signing the Dead’s friends Quicksilver Messenger Service, among others. The LP may have been dead, but it wasn't finished with the Dead. 14 months after the album was released, the Grateful Dead’s house in the Haight was raided, with several bands, members, associates, and friends arrested. The day after the bust, the front page story in the San Francisco Chronicle reported that the Dead “came on the scene last year as the group playing for a Capitol Records documentary called LSD. The record was produced by Owsley Stanley, a 31-year old who reportedly retired a millionaire by selling acid before it became illegal.” That was nonsense, but the fact that the police cited the LP as central to the band's reputation must have made the Dead groan.
The bust happened a year after California's law prohibiting possession of LSD took effect, effectively exiling even the experience of taking the drug to the criminal margins in society. Outlying the knowledge and transformation that ingestion brought became one of the central and most powerful currents in the counterculture, and became a defining part of the Dead's early identity. That makes the LP an agent of exile on several levels, ones that dramatically affected the Dead. That's a lot to hang on an obscure album, and ultimately, the LP is far more interesting for its implications than it is significant on its face. But those implications are important. For the Dead, the LP was their first encounter with the corporate music industry, and that experience taught them that a major label could be cynical, exploitative, and cruel. It's hard not to wonder if those impressions contributed to the band’s deep ambivalence about the record industry. The LP also demonstrated the power of bad publicity, a lesson made frighteningly real by their arrest. In time they learned to harness the machinery of PR, but media bashing remained a constant in their career, as Garcia observed in a 1991 interview. Lost in the mythic blow that Tom Wolfe's The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test would cast over this year is the darkest story of the threat and anti-LSD hysteria posed before the band really became established, and the complex role it played in their reception. The LP is a stark reminder of the origins of that stigma.
JESSE: There are two elements of the conference that don’t quite translate to the podcast format. The first are the question, answer, comment, conversation segments that follow the presentations. With singular mixes of personalities and scholarly knowledge in the room, as well as the privilege of working out ideas among colleagues, it can often turn into a free-flowing but not-quite-freewheeling discussion that calls back to previous presentations and previous comment sessions. You kinda have to be there. The conversation hardly ends there though, spilling into the proverbial set breaks and beyond. Naturally, with a bunch of Dead Heads hanging out in a faraway town, everything spills over into group dinners, hootenannies, house parties, hotel listening sessions, museum visits, anthropological field trips to see local cover bands, and more. As my friend Christian Crumlish put it, referencing “Tennessee Jed”: “Think all day, talk all night.” The company is delightful and interdisciplinary. Just make sure you’re there in time for the morning session.
While plenty of the presentations at the scholarly conferences focus on history and musicology, there are numerous frames for the Dead’s music and we’re going to let one especially rich paper stand in for numerous personal but scholarly approaches. Isaac Slone’s paper, “The Transmission of Jewish Identity on the Jam Band Dance Floor,” calls on spirituality, movement studies, queer theory, memoir, and more.
ISAAC SLONE: The jam band genre developed its integrity, its mode of music production and its following in celebration of ephemeral spaces. Grateful Dead guitarist and singer Jerry Garcia muses on this foundational aspect of the band's philosophy. Garcia remembers seeing the Los Angeles Watts Towers in their permanence and reflecting on his art and offering to the world. Quote:
JERRY GARCIA [1973]: I thought, wow, that's not it for me. Instead of making something last forever, I thought, I think I'd rather have fun. For me, it was more important to be involved in something that was flowing and dynamic and not so solid that you couldn't tear it down.
ISAAC SLONE: End quote. This philosophy came to inform the jam band genre.
JESSE: That story can of course be found in Amir Bar-Lev’s great Long Strange Trip documentary, and we went into its context in our “Bear Drops: LA ‘66” episode. Isaac opens up the concept of the ephemeral.
ISAAC SLONE: Ephemeral moments occur in innumerable ways at these shows. These moments may take the form of an encounter with a smiling stranger, a memory caused by a particular riff of music, or an embodied experience provoked through dance. The acknowledgement, study, and memorialization of ephemeral moments as a means of relating to history is an aspect of Dead Head culture that compels me. The concert space created can mean being out of step with normative concert practices in ways that can feel liberating: dancing in ways that would look odd when set to other kinds of music, dancing through the aisles and giving full attention to music and environment. To me, the jam band audience always looks as if they're engaged in prayer as they sway and bow. I, too, dance to music in ways that mimics the act of shuckling, a Yiddish word meaning “to shake” that refers to the ways Jews deep in prayer sway back and forth. It refers to the bodily method meant to foster total physical, mental and spiritual immersion. The soul is like a flame, moving and flickering in prayer, as one's body moves back and forth. Both in synagogue and at shows, this kind of movement enables participants to achieve total spiritual immersion. As an observant Jew who shuckles at synagogue as well as at jam band shows, I find in both settings a familiar and welcoming feeling of giving my full body over to the experience. While dancing or shuckling at synagogue, my physical stature is not under observation or at threat of being judged. The jam band concert space is more public than a synagogue, but still allows me to engage in the sacred and powerful movement that's divinely sanctioned by fellow heads.
Though this type of movement is liberating for me, it is steeped in a complex history. In 19th century Europe, the Jew was closely bound to the idea of the diseased hysteric. At the time, hysteria was seen as a diagnosable and treatable illness most commonly seen in females. Feminized males, such as Jews, were also diagnosed as hysterics. In fact, much of popular and scientific literature of the 19th and early 20th century argues that hysteria sets Jewish men apart from other men. These ideas highlight the antisemitism and implicit misogyny that underwrote representations of Jewishness at the time.
Though I do not believe that jam band concert spaces are essentially Jewish, jam band music has a particular influence on some of its Jewish fans, in part because of the style of dance the music evokes and invites. The unscripted and expressive qualities of this dancing helped me freely explore the queerness of my Jewish body, moving without care for how I look and in whatever way I desire.
JESSE: The Grateful Dead experience can be understood in as many different ways as there are Dead listeners. And those listeners are very much still coming. Though she didn’t get to present it at the conference proper, Julie DeLong wrote a paper titled “Strangers Stopping Strangers: Subcultural Recruitment of Deadheads in the Digital Age.” She posed a series of fascinating questions about 21st century Grateful Dead culture.
JULIE DeLONG: While the initial stage of my subcultural recruitment was through physical points of contact, or people I knew in real life, most of the deeper learning and familiarization with the Dead and their music was facilitated through the Internet. Does that make me less of a Dead Head? And similarly, are such virtual communities any different from those arising from embodied face-to-face encounters?
Today, the point of contact one might have with the Dead Head community could be a complete stranger on a social media platform, message board or other online community. If the point of contact and means of subcultural recruitment have changed, as the Dead Head subculture itself changed, how have the values of the subculture changed since the Internet became a primary means of recruiting new members?
Since the Dead's inception, fans have been separated by physical distance and other barriers and have used various forms of technology, including radio, newsletters, podcasts and more, to connect with other Dead Heads and intentionally build community. Message boards and social media platforms create a permanent place of gathering for Dead Heads and other fan groups, as opposed to the ephemerality of Shakedown Streets and tours. [Howard] Rheingold argues Dead Heads didn't have a place, demonstrating the need for the establishment of a virtual one.
The virtual community of Dead Heads provided more than just a place in which Jerry Garcia can be mourned. Instead, this virtual community not only sustained Dead Heads already on the bus, so to speak, in 1995, but has continued to recruit others in the days since. While technology is often demonized as having negative, irreparable effects on interpersonal relationships and intellectual thought, technology is not simply the intrusion of scientific hardware on authentic human experience, but as a cultural phenomenon that permeates and informs almost every aspect of human existence, including forms of musical knowledge and practice.
The recruitment of new members continues, thanks to a vibrant online community that makes possible communities and new social practices that may have been unimaginable before. Physical barriers dissolve and tour never stopped [on] the Internet, which provides a new materiality through which social interaction and group formation can take place, and from which new possibilities for subjectivity and group identity can emerge. The move from the Dead to physical to digital subculture allows not only more people to get on the bus, but also allows older folks who comprise most of the Dead Head community to participate — barring any technological resistance of course.
JESSE: Julie also moderates So Many Reads, an online Grateful Dead book club. Clinical psychologist Adam Brown visited us during our last episode, “Dead Freaks Unite,” and was a first-time presenter at the Dead Caucus in 2021 with his moving paper, “We Will Get By, We Will Survive: Situating Intergenerational Grateful Dead Memories, Lyrics, and Cultures Into Frameworks for Emotional Coping and Resilience During the COVID-19 Pandemic.”
ADAM BROWN: I am a clinical psychologist, so a lot of my time is spent thinking about how traumatic events and different stressors and upheaval impact individuals and communities on large scales. We all know personally how hard these months have been — I can't believe it's almost a year since we really sort of went into lockdown and remote mode, and I just want to share a little bit of that data and how Grateful Dead music, in some way, has personally helped me to name a lot of the emotional experiences that I've been going through, and probably a lot of other folks as well. But then I want to pivot into talking about emotional resilience, which, in my field, is something a lot of us think about — not only the factors that make it hard to bounce back from difficult events, but what are the ingredients? What are the different processes that allow us to weather the storms of life? Can we begin to really understand those, so we can integrate them into our lives, into our therapies, as a way to support people and heal and overcome challenges?
I want to focus on one process that we're increasingly recognizing as important in that, which is the power of family stories. There's something incredibly important about the stories that we share across generations that seem to help people overcome even the darkest of times. And what I'd like to argue, and building on other people's work to who really thought about the Grateful Dead as a certain type of community, a certain type of family, that even though this might not be made up of a biological family, there's enough of a family structure that allows for the transmission of various levels of stories that, during COVID-19, is helping us to stay, to some degree, emotionally resilient. That's not to say that Dead Heads aren't experiencing a lot of the mental health challenges that come with COVID-19. But there is some evidence of people feeling generative, people feeling proactive, coming together, showing up digitally online that reflects a certain amount of ongoing engagement, and focus towards the future. I've been thinking a lot about why — why is that? And I wonder how much of these stories might be contributing to this overall sense of being able to carry on.
You can think about a family, of course, in biological and genetic terms. But we also can think a lot about family in terms of other forms of family. If you especially look towards research coming from the LGBT/queer community, there's a lot of research and scholarship around this idea of chosen families — that when people feel like they are marginalized, and when they are not accepted into a biological family, well, people are adaptive, they are resilient, they find other families to create. One of the wonderful things about the Grateful Dead family is that it is so diverse in terms of the kinds of people, whether it's in shows or online spaces, who come to connect with one another. Not that it necessarily replaces their biological families, but it's an additional form of family that often gets added to their social supports, and ways in which they engage socially in their lives. When I think about the Grateful Dead, I think about memory and the questions. As soon as you enter into the Grateful Dead world, memory is sort of front and center: “What was your first show?” The last Dead and Company show I saw, I got on line waiting to get in, met someone I had never met before. First question he asked me was, “What was your first show?” Memory is automatically a part of experience — “I was there when they first played” something, the sort of flashbulb memory of “where were you when Jerry died?” But memory seems to be such a part of this community that it’s been making me think more about how does this form of chosen family, and its relationship to memory, possibly serve as a conduit for some of these ingredients that I mentioned before, around human resilience?
JESSE: In our last episode, “Dead Freaks Unite,” Steve Silberman talked about how the second of Dead performances were the musical embodiment of a psychedelic journey, and Rebecca Adams shared data about how this structure leant itself to deep personal realization.
ADAM BROWN: That structure provides for something like a meditation, where you kind of accept whatever happens within those two sets, and the different points of that journey without really trying to change anything; this is the framework for which we are okay with whatever directions it takes. Certainly with impermanence, I think we see this again and again, both in Barlow and Hunter’s writing — we know that if there's one thing we can count on, it is change. In a lot of the audio programs, on the radio, on the Internet, there's often this sort of coming back to just how much things, even though they are continuing, they do continue to change and move in different directions. That's not only something we're okay with, but actually we support and we encourage and we nurture within the Grateful Dead community. I've wondered if taping in some way is a response to that impermanence — we accept the fact that this is one time only, we are bearing witness. But at the same time, we want to find a way to document that impermanence.
JESSE: The Grateful Dead continue to be an incredibly rich lens for a vast array of scholarly disciplines, each with different concerns and interests. Historians are after facts. Musicologists want notes. Sociologists need data. Psychologists want something else.
ADAM BROWN: Thankfully, I'm a psychologist and not a lawyer, because to some degree, I don't care if it's accurate. What I'm interested in is the function and the meaning of these stories. So I think I'm a little bit closer to a literature person, where I want to understand why a person is sharing something — knowing, from all of my memory research and so many others’ that, to some degree, our memories suck. We were not designed as a species to have really good memories. We do remember the gist of things, but everything cognitive psychologists and neuroscientists say is that we remember from the present: where we are now, it's the lens at which we recall back. We do all kinds of manipulative things to our memory to help serve our current goals and our future ones.
JESSE: Thanks, Adam. Next up we have Corry Arnold, who studies memory and the Dead in a different way. Corry has never joined a Dead Caucus, but is one of the Dead scene’s eminent independent scholars. You may know him from his work on the historical Grateful Dead blogs called Lost Live Dead, Hooterollin, and one named after his very own speciality — Rock Prosopography 101. Please welcome to the Grateful Deadcast, Corry Arnold.
CORRY ARNOLD: My first Dead show was 1972. I was in high school, December 12th, 1972. Basically, I've been taking notes ever since. I made the decision decades ago — I wasn't going to be a journalist, I wasn't going to write books. So most of this stuff was for myself. And then the Internet came along, and basically it was a form of public notetaking, so I could point people to them, I didn't realize that people would actually read them and engage. So initially, it was like record keeping, and it evolved. My first site with a partner was Chicken On A Unicycle, which is still active.
JESSE: Chicken On A Unicycle provides an incredible array of venue histories, performance chronologies, and musician family trees for the Bay Area music scene of the ‘60s and ‘70s.
CORRY ARNOLD: But honestly, that was for Ross and me. We didn't realize other people would read it. So the blog just got added and people started to engage, and I realized I had something else on my hands. From the point of view of the Grateful Dead, it's based on a book by a medieval French historian named Fernand Braudel — not a name you hear often in rock ‘n’ roll circles. [It’s] a book called Wheels of Commerce. In Wheels of Commerce, he looks through the account books of Genoese merchants in the 13th and 14th centuries and sees where they're doing business. Even though he doesn't know who's doing that business — they're just the account books. So in the history of where a band played, you can build a narrative and see the story, even if you don't necessarily know which individuals were activating a story, because our information is sketchy, or everyone was stoned and forgot, or whatever. But you see where a band [was], what a band was doing, where bands were playing — you can tell where there's a scene because bands play there. Even if you don't know who was running the scene or what was going on, but the bands show up.
We're still learning new things. This is the other thing which is remarkable about the persistence of blogs, which is very different than Twitter: these things just sit there. Each year, people get old and they're relaxing, going, “Oh, yeah, I saw the data.” They start Googling, and they come across it and they put in a comment. It might be two years after the previous comment.
JESSE: One example of Corry’s blogs in action was his post about a stray date the Grateful Dead played in Cincinnati in 1968. There was almost nothing known about it, but Corry went to work.
CORRY ARNOLD: The Soto list, which is the urtext of Janet Soto, it’s the urtext of Grateful Dead lists. Even the errors are the urtext. I’m pretty sure it was on that list, but it didn’t make sense because it was Thanksgiving. So I started to look into it, and then it turned out there was a teen center and bands that played there. But you put out what's out there, and then people start writing in. It turned out there were two nights, and they showed up late the first night but everybody was there, so they just played a set. Then, the next night, they just played two sets, but these were people who said, “Oh yeah, I was there. That’s the show I went to.”
When you try and ask, I don't know, Bob Weir or something, they were at a million shows. But if you only went to one show, man, you know it. The other golden source is opening acts, because a band who was a local band who maybe just played around a little bit, the one time they opened for the Dead, it was the greatest time in their life. It's absolutely legendary, and they're still dining out on it. So they remember everything.
JESSE: Comment sections have earned a pretty bad rap around the internet, and for good reason. But not only are the comment sections on Grateful Dead historical blogs benevolent, they’re mandatory. That’s where the good shit happens. One massive comment thread is attached to a potential lost live Dead performance that was advertised at Ungano’s in New York on February 12th, 1970. Reading through the comment thread, it’s like the Schrödinger’s cat of Dead shows — it both did and didn’t happen.
CORRY ARNOLD: My new theory and the way that I explain it is the Dead did play Ungano’s, but not on February 12th. They played September 25th, ‘69. So all the memories are from September 25th, ‘69. The people who say they saw it, like Marty Weinberg, it’s September 25th ‘69. All the pieces fit: the Dead were in town, I figured all that out. But that Creedmore State guy who says “No, they didn't show up” — that's true too. They didn't show up on February 12th, 1970, probably because Bill Graham was angry there was an ad. The comment thread reads like a movie.
Dave Davis has some information about how many people attended Dead shows. He calculated it through Pollstar or something. If you think about early Dead shows, before everybody says shows over and over, we've got 1.5—I figured it out once—1.5 million memories. We've got to get them all. Even the ones that are kind of boring: people who go, “Yeah, show started, they played for a couple hours.” Okay, the show happened — that's actual information. There's plenty of shows. That's all I want to know, is that they occurred.
JESSE: Did you see the Dead once? Did you roadie for them? Play in an opening band? Check out Corry’s sites and add your comments. While you’re at it, point your World Wide Web browser to dead.net/deadcast and record your story for us — it could end up in a future episode. The world of Grateful Dead scholarship is vast and growing. But it’s a big bus, and there’s always room for more. See you next time.