Before we begin…If you’re interested in reading my essay on Dark Star and the rest of my new book, Pity the Genius, check Amazon in a few days…it’s about to become a pre-order for release in Sept.
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Last night I watched friends of mine play a set of Grateful Dead music in a nightclub (really well). This morning I woke up to see an article in the New York Times about the band's residency at The Sphere in Las Vegas. My upcoming book, Pity the Genius, contains an essay about their signature jam “Dark Star.” They’re everywhere! Still…
Who woulda thunk? Since my first GD concert in 1973 I have watched, wide-eyed, at this trajectory. Their lasting power can be a bit bewildering. As I'm fond of saying they did everything wrong, and it all turned out right. No band was more expert at self- sabotage. And yet here they are, decades and decades later, a multibillion dollar franchise.
Some, but not all, of this can be explained. They were one of the only rock bands to create a songbook in which improvisation plays a major role. The Dead’s songs can be reinvented every time they’re played. That’s powerful. Sure Jimi Hendrix did too, but he was so incredible at playing his own music that covering Hendrix for any guitar player is a questionable endeavor. The Allman Brothers and their jams live on…sort of. But The Dead’s songs contain a DNA that is unique, resilient, and maybe even timeless. The songs are fun to play, they have interesting twists and turns, they have a good beat. The lyrics are amongst the most profound you will find anywhere.
But there’s more…and this is where words get fuzzy. The DNA of the Dead songbook contains a point of view, an attitude, a set of characters, ideas, and dimensionality that directs the listener on a journey pointing towards unity, high times, cosmic knowledge, empathy and collective ecstasy. What other band does that?
God Bless the 60s.
I know there are plenty who disagree, especially in the jazz community. I get it. In some ways they were the worst exponents of their own music. To put it more bluntly—they could really suck. I quote from my essay:
“Their audience was willing to allow failure in pursuit of the sublime. Sometimes I would listen to the Grateful Dead live and it would feel like a party with the guy who won’t stop
talking. A guy with sour breath who would get up close to me and blab in my face for 20 minutes about himself, exhausting my patience and goodwill. But to the Deadhead, mediocrity, if it eventually led to magic, was acceptable.
This puzzlement, that you could play poorly in pursuit of transcendence, and still have hundreds of thousands of devotees, was something new in American music-making.
I asked Oteil Burbridge, bassist for Dead and Company, about all this. Oteil is a player of uncommon ability—in the parlance he has “chops.” What was his perspective on this legacy of uneven performances? He told me that the band was all too aware of its limitations. They knew what great musicianship was, after all Bob Weir’s first side project included Billy Cobham and Alphonse Mouzon in the rhythm section. But what they were after was something that had to withstand failure. It was bigger than any single member, bigger than any bad night. It was a democratic ideal whose success required the best and worst in each of them. When it worked, all the perdition was worth the wait.”
Once again…God bless the 60s!
We know that they spawned legions of so-called jam bands. Some of these bands played their instruments quite well. But none of them have come close to creating a great songbook. It's something for any musician to remember. You can play your butt off, but in the end that's not enough. The bands that last are the ones who know how to compose. The Beatles, Stones, Dylan, The Who. Those other bands from that era? Mountain, Canned Heat, Moby Grape, Electric Flag, Quicksilver Messenger Service? Nobody plays that music. It's just not good enough. Absent of being in the Woodstock movie they’re headed to the great dustbin of history.
The Dead? They’ve engendered a kind of devotion and love in their audience that is downright touching. They’ve offered meaning to a lot of lost souls. I expect their music will be played for hundreds of years in some form, and those of us who were there (old as we may be getting) will be looked at with a touch of awe. I mean…the good nights when the whole band was alive and cranking were amongst the most positive, impactful experiences of my life. It may be that the current edition (as tangential as it is to the original) could be called the best Grateful Dead cover band on the planet. Only one surviving member is remotely functional. One almost wishes they would JUST STOP. But the world apparently still needs and loves them. And when it all does come to an end, meaning when Bob Weir can no longer play and/or sing, it will be a momentous day. Dylan, McCartney, Weir. Man…when they go? The angels will sigh (and maybe crack a cold beer). A painful, reverential silence will descend…
In a previous post I talked about composing a song for my brother David’s memorial service. But my performance consisted of two pieces. I also played the Grateful Dead’s song “Ripple.” This lovely, poetic, country- infused song has become a favorite at memorial services for decades. It’s a little unclear why. What's interesting is that the words are quite ambiguous. The lovely images could mean many things to many people. This, it turns out, is part of its lasting power. Think of the Psalms: they are textbook cases of ambiguous imagery that inspires the reader to create his or her own interpretation. Like the music itself, the words find new meaning with each iteration. And this song, like a Psalm, speaks to, and of, the soul.
Playing “Ripple” at that service was one of the heaviest musical experiences of my life. My journey with the piece goes back to the first time I heard the record American Beauty, I suppose I was 14. I watched the band perform the song a couple of times in the late 70s. Something about it sums up the ethos of the band. Take these lines:
There is a road, no simple highway
Between the dawn and the dark of night
And if you go, no one may follow
That path is for your steps alone
Ripple in still water
When there is no pebble tossed
Nor wind to blow
You who choose to lead must follow
But if you fall you fall alone
If you should stand then who's to guide you?
If I knew the way I would take you home
The service was in San Francisco. Almost everyone was a baby boomer. Their emotions heightened, a number of people started singing along with me. I could feel a powerful energy circuiting through the room. The energy came from the song, filtered as it was through grief and love of my brother. You could feel the associations everyone had with it. The fact that my brother loved this song, that in its own quiet, strange way it spoke to peoples’ insides. As I sang I felt the 50 year trajectory of the band in my life, overwhelming, beautiful, galvanizing wounded hearts into one. It was all I could do not to burst into tears as I sang the last lines. And in fact I did so, after I had laid the guitar down and found my seat again. What a journey— footprints of the song, from a seeking/ searching teenager in 1972, to a seeking/searching guitarist/ composer in 1979, to a cynical, gimlet-eyed grey beard in a Dead cover band in 2015, to now…
The mystery of music. Its singular place in our lives. It's importance in our lives, foundational, intimate, part of our bones. Its invisible magic, sustaining us, illuminating hidden zones, basements, attics, back gardens, deep forests—a container for our emotions, a vehicle to express those emotions. How music can say more than words. The way a bunch of stoned, zonked out, utterly dysfunctional hippies can bring happiness out of thin air to millions of people decades after the leader of the tribe died. Who can understand the intricacies of this saga? Or maybe it's simpler than we think. This ragtag band of brilliant clowns followed their hearts. Followed the vision of the times. Never played it safe. Always played by their own rules. Anchored in the deep, rich soil of the American music tradition they also moved forward into a visionary future.
It's really quite amazing.