A couple of weekends ago, I had fun playing with the Elliot Mouser Floating Blues Band at an outdoor party in Sheffield, Mass. It was a big spread, lots of land, the Berkshire Mountains in the background. We played a long daytime set of mostly Grateful Dead repertoire, because that's what the people wanted, and it's what the Mousers tend to do.
The Grateful Dead must be the most polarizing band in the history of rock and roll. On the one hand, you have the millions of people for whom music equals the Grateful Dead, and the Grateful Dead equals music, and if it isn't Dead-related they aren't interested. On the other hand, you have the people who, upon the very mention of that band's name, spit in the dirt. When the punk-rock revolution came through in 1977, the Grateful Dead were the first to be lined up against the wall.
Is it possible to like some Grateful Dead stuff without regarding them as a lifelong spiritual quest? Is it possible to criticize them without passionately hating them?
The Grateful Dead will never be completely all right in my book. For a band that has two drummers, they don't swing very hard. Worst of all, they have no sense of proportion. Jerry Garcia solos longer than Sonny Rollins between verses, noodling endlessly in a shapeless mass. When they stretch a four-minute song into 16 minutes, sometimes it's good, and sometimes it's most definitely not good. Their vocal harmonies are sloppy and lazy. And Bob Weir's onstage personality is that of a total douchebag.
As for the endless jams and the "drums in space" and the freeform improvisation, you either get it or you don't, and most of the time I don't. I've never been able to sit still and let the surface charms of that music wash over me. Then again, full disclosure, I never saw the Grateful Dead while tripping on acid, so maybe I just missed it.
And that's not even talking about their audience, but let's leave the audience out of it, because you can't blame a band for its audience. Nor can you blame the Grateful Dead for the prevalence of tie-dye.
From the late '70s to the mid-'80s, I saw the Grateful Dead about six times, and maybe one of those shows, -- in Lewiston, Maine -- was actually good. I used to be amazed at how little effort Jerry Garcia exerted on stage. Sometimes it seemed as though they had put a stuffed Jerry Garcia onstage, and the real one was out back somewhere...
And yet, and yet, you can put all of that on one side of the scale, and on the other side, Jerry Garcia wrote a handful of songs that are not just good but beautiful. That's not just the Grateful Dead's redeeming quality, it's the most important thing any band can do. "China Cat Sunflower," "Eyes of the World," "Scarlet Begonias," "Jack Straw," "Loser," "Bird Song" -- each of those songs is a piece of unfolding wonder. And there are others. Garcia's best tunes have a purity about them, and they make sense, lyrically and melodically.
Sure, you could pick out some silly lyrics to Grateful Dead songs -- you could do that with anybody. If you're going to judge somebody, it's only fair to judge them on their best stuff, not their worst, and the Grateful Dead's lyrics are good more often than not. And there's nothing at all wrong with the words to "Bird Song."
You can make fun of the Grateful Dead all you want, and heck, I'll join you, but the main question is, do they have any tunes? Like them or not, the Dead had the tunes.
At that party in Sheffield, I ran into an old housemate from college whom I had not seen in about 20 years. This guy was a true Deadhead who had seen the Grateful Dead about 80 or 100 times, following them from city to city. When I lived in the house with him and a few other Deadheads, back in 1981, cassette tapes of the Dead in concert were playing in that house day and night. So I have heard hundreds of hours of the Grateful Dead in concert, and I still can't accept them or reject them completely.
(One of my other housemates at the time had a tape of the Grateful Dead playing in Egypt, at the pyramids, during a total lunar eclipse. I said, "Oh, so that's why they were playing at the pyramids." He said, "No, that's why there was an eclipse.")
Even when the Dead get on my nerves, they're just musically astute enough that I can't dismiss them out of hand. Maybe I'm in the minority, but after years of intense immersion in the Grateful Dead, I'm neither a true believer nor a hater.
At the party, I was talking with the wife of my old housemate, and she feels the same way that he does about the Grateful Dead. Since the Mouser Band had just played all those songs, she and I got to talking about the Dead, pro and con, and about how unusual it is to have an opinion about them that isn't one-sided.
She said, "What do you mean you don't love them?"
So you see, it goes both ways.
(To read Part 2 of this blog post, please click here.)