What If The Grateful Dead Weren’t
Featured Album
The Grateful Dead are a peculiar entity, and tough to think about critically because they exist almost entirely as their own subculture. The Beatles and The Rolling Stones are similarly successful, massive revenue-generating groups, but they defined culture at large. Everyone can find ways to wrap themselves in the subtext of those bands or, in the least, find songs that they admire. The Dead are a different thing; with fans of the group comes a persona, often self-identified, of inclusion. It’s a pack mentality. Following the band on tour. Purchasing tie-dye merchandise. Draping yourself in skulls and roses. Toting day-glo teddy bears. Rocking hemp necklaces. Rubbing patchouli on your person. These signifiers represent a subcategory of person that, to non-fans, often seems indulgent and weird and maybe a little smelly. But what has gotten lost in the sauce of subculture is the thing upon which the band was born: music.
I was never a Deadhead. Not close, really. My engagement was passing, then a little intense for 5 months as a teenager, and then gone. Hearing these albums again, after having not heard them for many years, I can’t help but feel warmth, some latent affection, and curiosity. Makes you wonder What if? What if the frustrating and off-putting elements of this band–more often the fans and the attendant drug gags–didn’t exist. What if The Grateful Dead didn’t become icons? How would we understand their catalog? For the sake of this query, I ask you to disregard the songs you probably know, the hits. There is no coke-sniff “Casey Jones” here. No lollygaggers ‘laments like “Truckin’.” And certainly no long-in-the-tooth cash-out like “Touch of Grey.” These are misrepresentative for our (and really, all) purposes. Without all this baggage, would the prejudices fall away? It’s impossible to know, but worth a shot.
Initially, when I began thinking about the Dead as obscurity, I was hearing a West Coast The Band. Country-rock and folk and Americana, full of uncomplicated story songs, yearning vocals, and experimental tinges all performed by a gifted and multi-tasking slate. Just spend a few minutes with Aoxomoxoa‘s “Dupree’s Diamond Blues.” It’s a lock-stock roots song, recorded at the same time that bands like Creedence Clearwater Revival and The Allman Brothers Band were building a career. I also hear shades of The Flaming Lips, not just for the obvious psychedelic connection (probably understated for the Dead and overstated for the Lips), but for the journeys into the unconventional. Again from Aoxomoxoa listen to “Rosemary” and “What’s Become of the Baby,” two deeply transgressive songs co-written by Robert Hunter that feature Jerry Garcia’s howlish vocals stripped and recorded through filters made to sound alien and distant. “Baby” especially is an 8-minute mindbender, with references to Alice in Wonderland, the films of Jean Cocteau, and Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s “Kubla Khan; or, A Vision in a Dream: A Fragment.” Garcia once said the song was unlistenable without the aid of nitrous oxide. Fun! But not true. Despite the mythology, there are early remnants of these sound experiments in celebrated purveyors of the curious, like Frank Zappa and Captain Beefheart. All of this was massively, shockingly influential.
That the band could shift fairly seamlessly to Aoxomoxoa closer “Cosmic Charlie,” a standard 12-bar blues, or a plucky Hunter tune like “Easy Wind,” from Workingman’s Dead (released less than a year after Aoxomoxoa), grittily sung by erstwhile keyboardist Ron “Pigpen” McKernan, is a testament to a searching but humble band who were willing to stretch, but not at the expense of songwriting. No one ever thinks of The Grateful Dead as a hardworking band, in the visceral sense, but there’s a lot going on here, an orchestration of slop in some regard. That 1969-1972 era, from Aoxomoxoa to the celebrated American Beauty through the terrifically curated Europe ’72 (the only truly essential live document for my cash) represents a varied and thoughtful band. Maybe they weren’t yet spoiled by drugs and women and brown liquor. Or the maybe the merch hadn’t begun to pay the bills the way it soon would. Ego wasn’t the impediment it would soon be. Instead, we get a picture of band reaching for a little more, with a little less to lose. If they’d stopped in ’72, we might think of them differently.
