Listening for the Secret: The Grateful Dead and the Politics of Improvisation

By Ulf Olsson

Listening for the Secret is a critical assessment of the Grateful Dead and the distinct culture that grew out of the group’s music, politics, and performance. With roots in popular music traditions, improvisation, and the avant-garde, the Grateful Dead provides a unique lens through which we can better understand the meaning and creation of the counterculture community. Marshaling the critical and aesthetic theories of Adorno, Benjamin, Foucault and others, Ulf Olsson places the music group within discourses of the political, specifically the band’s capacity to create a unique social environment. Analyzing the Grateful Dead’s music as well as the forms of subjectivity and practices that the band generated, Olsson examines the wider significance and impact of its politics of improvisation. Ultimately, Listening for the Secret is about how the Grateful Dead Phenomenon was possible in the first place, what its social and aesthetic conditions of possibility were, and its results.

This is the first book in a new series, Studies in the Grateful Dead.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of California Press
• Release date: May 9, 2017
• ISBN: 9780520961760

Ulf Olsson

Ulf Olsson is Senior Expert at Ericsson’s Business Unit Multimedia, with a main interest in application architecture. He entered the world of programming forty years ago, working with large scale software system architectures for the past thirty. Initially, these efforts were in the field of distributed high performance systems for shipborne command and control, but as it turned out the principles and experiences from that field were surprisingly applicable also to the design of mobile packet data systems. He has been with Ericsson since 1996, being involved with systems like GPRS, PDC, UMTS, cdma2000 and - of course - IMS. His professional focus has recently shifted to the next level of abstraction: how to support and automate the business processes of a communications service provider. He holds a M.Sc. in engineering physics from Stockholm’s Royal Institute of Technology, having also spent a scholarship year at Dartmouth College, New Hampshire. He is the co-holder of a number of patents in the mobile communications area, and is a frequent contributor to Ericsson Review.

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Olsson

The publisher gratefully acknowledges the generous support of the Music in America Endowment Fund of the University of California Press Foundation, which was established by a major gift from Sukey and Gil Garcetti, Michael P. Roth, and the Roth Family Foundation.

Listening for the Secret

STUDIES IN THE GRATEFUL DEAD

Edited by Nicholas G. Meriwether, Center for Counterculture Studies

Editorial Board

Graeme M. Boone, Ohio State University • Wai Chee Dimock, Yale University David Farber, University of Kansas • Michael J. Kramer, Northwestern University • James M. Williams, University of Chicago

Advisory Board

Mickey Hart • Bill Kreutzmann • Phil Lesh Bob Weir • David Lemieux • Alan Trist

1.Listening for the Secret: The Grateful Dead and the Politics of Improvisation, by Ulf Olsson

Listening for the Secret

The Grateful Dead and the Politics

of Improvisation

ULF OLSSON

University of California Press

University of California Press, one of the most distinguished university presses in the United States, enriches lives around the world by advancing scholarship in the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences. Its activities are supported by the UC Press Foundation and by philanthropic contributions from individuals and institutions. For more information, visit www.ucpress.edu.

University of California Press

Oakland, California

© 2017 by The Regents of the University of California

Blues for Allah by Robert Hunter and Jerome Garcia, Ice Nine Publishing Co., Inc. adm. by Universal Music Corp. Comes a Time by Robert Hunter and Jerome Garcia, Ice Nine Publishing Co., Inc. adm. by Universal Music Corp. Dark Star by Robert Hunter and Jerome Garcia, Michael Hart, William Kreutzmann, Philip Lesh, Ronald McKernan, Robert Weir, Ice Nine Publishing Co., Inc. adm. by Universal Music Corp. Foolish Heart by Robert Hunter and Jerome Garcia, Ice Nine Publishing Co., Inc. adm. by Universal Music Corp. Liberty by Robert Hunter, Ice Nine Publishing Co., Inc. adm. by Universal Music Corp. Ramble on Rose by Robert Hunter and Jerome Garcia, Ice Nine Publishing Co., Inc. adm. by Universal Music Corp. Scarlet Begonias by Robert Hunter and Jerome Garcia, Ice Nine Publishing Co., Inc. adm. by Universal Music Corp. The Music Never Stopped by John Barlow and Robert Weir, Ice Nine Publishing Co., Inc. adm. by Universal Music Corp. Touch of Grey by Robert Hunter and Jerome Garcia, Ice Nine Publishing Co., Inc. adm. by Universal Music Corp. U.S. Blues by Robert Hunter and Jerome Garcia, Ice Nine Publishing Co., Inc. adm. by Universal Music Corp. Unbroken Chain by Philip Lesh and Robert Petersen, Ice Nine Publishing Co., Inc. adm. by Universal Music Corp. Uncle John’s Band by Robert Hunter and Jerome Garcia, Ice Nine Publishing Co., Inc. adm. by Universal Music Corp.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Olsson, Ulf, author.

Title: Listening for the secret : the Grateful Dead and the politics of improvisation / Ulf Olsson.

Description: Oakland, California : University of California Press, [2017] | Series: Studies in the Grateful Dead ; 1 | Includes bibliographical references, discography, and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2016050507 (print) | LCCN 2016052201 (ebook) | ISBN 9780520286641 (cloth : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780520286658 (pbk. : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780520961760 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Grateful Dead (Musical group) | Improvisation(Music)—Social aspects. | Rock music—Social aspects—History—20th century.

Classification: LCC ML421.G72 O47 2017 (print) | LCC ML421.G72 (ebook) | DDC 782.42166092/2—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016050507

Manufactured in the United States of America

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We make the noises we can, and that’s all.

SAMUEL BECKETT

Contents

Series Foreword

Acknowledgments

INTRODUCTION

1.POPULAR AVANT-GARDE? RENEGOTIATING TRADITION

2.WAVE THAT FLAG: AN APOLITICAL BAND

3.CRASHES IN SPACE: ASPECTS OF IMPROVISATION

CODA: LISTENING FOR THE SECRET

Notes

Discography

Bibliography

Index

Series Foreword

From the band’s inception, the Grateful Dead attracted critical attention ranging from insightful to sensationalistic. Often obscured by the media fanfare was the seriousness of the group’s project, although some of that early attention was thoughtful, appreciative, and even scholarly. As early as 1966, academics gravitated toward the band, attracted by the intelligence and accomplishment they heard. What was also clear was the depth of the band’s commitment, which became one of the hallmarks of the Dead, especially noteworthy in an industry substantially defined by brevity, novelty, and shallowness. Over the course of their thirty-year career, the Dead managed to build a remarkably devoted audience and earn an enviable critical reputation, in part by defying industry norms and expectations; they were often cited as an exception to almost every rule that defined popular music as a commercial enterprise. Yet the band’s artistic and musical ambitions made a deeper kind of sense, creating a perennial appeal that made the Dead one of the most durable concert draws and consistently one of the top touring acts in the country in their final years. Their caliber as songwriters, their commitment to improvisation, the breadth of their repertoire, and their enduring success made them exemplars, and helped to establish the band as a unique voice in American popular music and culture.

These attributes also have made the Grateful Dead one of the most studied bands in the academy. In addition to its depth and extent, the interdisciplinary discourse on the band is distinguished by the range of perspectives it encompasses, principally in the humanities and social sciences but extending into engineering and the sciences. The Dead were known for their live performances, thus it is fitting that much of the scholarly discussion about the band began with conference presentations, though many of the hundreds of those have been developed into articles, chapters, and books.

That work has achieved a level that now merits and can sustain more detailed and focused exegeses, which this series provides. The increasing sophistication of the scholarship on many of the contexts that the Dead’s achievement informs and entails—from the 1960s and the counterculture to many of the genres of music that the Dead’s work incorporates— highlights the band’s significance and makes plain the utility, and even centrality, of its example.

Academic work on rock music traditionally has challenged scholars on a number of levels, from basic issues of definition and demarcation to fundamental critical issues. Scholars continue to investigate a range of questions—from tradition and artistic intent to production and audience reception to cultural and historical dissemination—all framing an art form and informing a literature that show no signs of diminishing, even as they both continue to undergo drastic changes. The volumes in Studies in the Grateful Dead participate in and often directly address these contexts, offering readers a unique lens for illuminating and exploring the wealth of issues raised by one of the most enduring and significant phenomena in popular culture.

Nicholas G. Meriwether

Acknowledgments

This book has been prepared, researched, and written in both close vicinity to and at a certain distance from its object. Closeness was granted me by the University of California, Berkeley, and the Grateful Dead Archive at the University Library of the University of California, Santa Cruz: Closeness both to the sources and to the air that the Grateful Dead breathed. But critical writing seems to also depend on a dialectic of closeness and distance: My employer, the Department of Culture and Aesthetics, Stockholm University, as well as the National Library of Sweden, Stockholm, have made my reading and writing from a distance possible.

The life and times of a rock band can be documented in different ways, and the Grateful Dead must be one of the most (if not the most) documented bands ever. Still, there is much detailed knowledge and atmosphere that can only be relayed orally. I am honored by the hard work as well as the friendship of Nicholas G. Meriwether, Grateful Dead Archivist at UC Santa Cruz, and a living source on the history of the band, written and oral. Nicholas is a historian, an utterly careful writer in his own right, as well as the most generous scholar. The work he has done for the Archive is what makes this and future studies on the band possible.

Other scholars, fans and skeptics alike, also have contributed—probably more than they realize. Peter Richardson (lecturer at San Francisco State University), who himself has written a splendid book on the band, generously read and commented on my manuscript. So did a few Swedish friends: Johan Fornäs (professor of Media Studies, Södertörn University College) offered a meticulous reading of my manuscript, as did my colleague at Stockholm University, Bosse Holmqvist (professor of the History of Ideas), and Erling Bjurström (professor emeritus, Linköping University). Johan Petri (Gothenburg University) shared his knowledge of the literature on improvisation. Stefan Helgesson and Frida Beckman, both of the English Department at Stockholm University, invited me to try out a few ideas in the form of lectures.

Two readers of the manuscript, unknown to me, generously shared their obvious insights and knowledge about the band in their respective peer reviews.

My San Francisco friend, music industry veteran, entrepreneur, free spirit, Jewish activist, and editor, David Katznelson, took me to different shows in San Francisco so that I could hear something other than just Dead music—and to have some gris-gris along the road.

While on the left coast, I have enjoyed the discussions and the erudition of the Frankfurt School Working Group, University of California, Berkeley, with Erin Greer and Megan O’Connor as its unifying center.

My editors at the University of California Press, first Mary Francis and after her Eric Schmidt, have believed in and supported the writing of this book.

Early ideas for this book have been discussed at different conferences. The open-minded and generous intellectual climate of the Grateful Dead Scholars Caucus and its annual congregations at the Southwest American/Popular Culture Association meetings in Albuquerque, New Mexico, have been of a fundamental importance: those gatherings showed to me that perhaps I could have something to say about a band, whose music I listen to and always will listen to. I hope this book fulfills that promise and indeed says something about the Grateful Dead that has not been said before.

My wife, Linda Haverty Rugg (professor of Scandinavian Studies, UC Berkeley), patiently corrected my English and drove me to Santa Cruz and San Rafael, Mountain View and Santa Clara, for archival or field studies. But Linda not only took the wheel when I was seeing double, her critical mind was always open to discussions on how to do things with words, and how to find out ways to make writing generate a shared understanding. Her probing questions, her deep understanding of language—written and spoken—and her demands for clarity drove me on, even when I found myself lost in writing.

Sometimes one loses oneself in writing—as well as in music. The Grateful Dead’s music has been and remains a deep well, one in which I find myself transformed, lost, renewed—or just happily smiling. The art, example, and work that define and inform the Grateful Dead phenomenon are the wellspring that nourished this volume and will continue to do so, for many others, for many years.

Introduction

On February 24, 1974, the Grateful Dead played at Winterland in San Francisco, California. The show, presented by Bill Graham, also was introduced by the promoter, who said Whatever is going on in the rest of the world, if it’s war or kidnappings or crimes, this is a peaceful Sunday night with the Grateful Dead. Indeed; this was just one of the fifty-nine shows that the Grateful Dead played at Winterland; one more night, then, in the life of a hardworking rock and roll band.

And, could we add, perhaps one more night protected from the evils of society? Maybe. The band played what could be called its standard repertoire, including Dark Star, probably their most requested song and their most frequently used vehicle for improvisation; and still, at that time, often performed live. This night, they feel their way into Dark Star, trying different sound figures, until they find a groove sixteen minutes in. When the music gels, the playing takes on an obvious jazz feel—and this Sunday evening is transformed into something special, turning (I imagine) an audience of a few thousand people into one dancing body. The Grateful Dead created that magic innumerable times during the band’s thirty-year career. Moreover, this transcending of the merely mundane was an aesthetic feat, and was not the effect of drugs. I did not attend that show. I listened to it on a CD (Dave’s Picks 13), and I am absolutely sober. This twenty-nine-minute interpretation might not be the most spectacular or aesthetically radical Dark Star the band ever played—they do not take it out to absolute atonality and distortion—not until twenty-four minutes have passed, when Jerry Garcia suddenly, and for just a short time, generates a formidable noise out of his guitar, while the rest of the band suggests something of a Spanish or Latin groove. But still, the music played this evening touches me, hits me with its power: the music cuts through the body, torments it, reminds it of another life that is at hand—in the music itself. Perhaps this music wasn’t so much about withdrawing from society; on the contrary, even now it seems intended to intensify the experience of contemporary life.

It is in improvisation that the Grateful Dead found and formed itself, even though the song, and the song format, grew more and more important with time. Improvisation meant that the band had to invent its music while performing it, but improvisation here also had a wider significance: it was the center of a continuous struggle for self-organization. In that sense, we can talk of a politics of improvisation. Self-organization is a key concept here, although I would hesitate to give it too fixed a definition, as self-organization spans so much of my argument here.¹ In the background to my use of the concept is both the workers’ movement from the late 19th century and onwards, as well as looser forms of trying to gain control over one’s own life and working conditions in the 1960s. In both these traditions, self-organization meant both a care of the self and the material conditions under which different aspects of everyday life were formed. My hesitancy to give self-organization a firmly fixed definition arises from the fact that self-organization here encompasses both the individual and the collective. The care of the self—the forming of the self—in a refusal to adjust to handed-down, normative patterns of individuality and instead, through improvisational acts, trying out new forms of subjectivity, is one aspect of self-organization. Improvisation is the fundamental musical form of self-organization, with the musician inventing the music while it is happening. And the Grateful Dead were forming themselves as a kind of self-supporting machinery, and were generating a culture of self-organizational practices surrounding the band. Self-organization here, then, covers very different forms of resistance to hegemonic power relations and subject formation.

That is one way of describing the Grateful Dead. There are others, partly made possible by the music’s many different roots, dimensions, and faces, and already early in the band’s history, public writing about the Dead and their environment tended to become polarized: either celebratory or dismissive. Interestingly, the band attracted and even generated forms of writing that negotiated the borders between fiction and nonfiction, between reality and the representation of reality—perhaps because the band’s music encompassed the nitty-gritty of traditional blues and Bakersfield country as well as the strange, surreal world of free improvisation. Two texts in particular—both originally published already in 1968—exemplify this polarization as well as the hybrid form of writing: Tom Wolfe’s The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Trip, and Joan Didion’s Slouching Towards Bethlehem, in her collection of essays of the same title. Both texts seem to have generated if not a tradition, then at least plenty of followers.

Wolfe, writing in a style that became known as New Journalism, lets what he learns, sees, and observes infect his language, turning his novel/report into a hip, almost turned-on account of the Acid Tests, public parties organized by The Merry Pranksters and the writer Ken Kesey, in which the Grateful Dead played an important part. Here, the hippie culture is depicted as Dionysian, ecstatic:

… then the Dead coming in with their immense submarine vibrato vibrating, garanging, from the Aleutian rocks to the baja griffin cliffs of the Gulf of California. The Dead’s weird sound! agony-in-ecstasis! submarine somehow, turbid half the time, tremendously loud but like sitting under a waterfall, at the same time full of sort of ghoul-show vibrato sounds as if each string on their electric guitars is half a block long and twanging in a room full of natural gas, not to mention their great Hammond electric organ, which sounds like a moviehouse Wurlitzer, a diathermy machine, a Citizen’s Band radio and an Auto-Grind garbage truck at 4 a.m., all coming over the same frequency….²

Peter Conners’ Growing Up Dead joins the celebration, and the ecstasy, twenty years later, in a narrative both novelistic and autobiographical—but now, forty years after Wolfe, there is a touch of melancholy and loss in the story. Interestingly, Conners uses confession in his subtitle, The Hallucinated Confessions of a Teenage Deadhead—as if this identity of being a Deadhead, with its connotations of drugs and excess, must be confessed before his readers, and before power.³ Didion delivers the opposite. Her writing is more of an accusation than a confession: a view of the Dionysian as misery, combined with a dystopian vision of America that the writer uses as starting point for her reportage: All that seemed clear was that at some point we had aborted ourselves and butchered the job, and because nothing else seemed so relevant I decided to go to San Francisco.⁴ Didion’s imagery is telling: we read about people that seem to have aborted their reason, kids that have butchered what life they had—as if they are performing acts of violence, of abortion and butchering, on what is, or should be, only normal and natural. And throughout Didion’s walk through the hippie ghetto of Haight-Ashbury, the Grateful Dead is playing—and American society seems to be facing an early death. Almost three decades later, Douglas Coupland published his Polaroids from the Dead in 1996, a collection of texts that once again balances between fiction and report, and has striking affinities to Didion’s work. Here, some of the lost and deserted kids, as if picked out from Didion’s San Francisco, show up at a Grateful Dead concert across the San Francisco Bay, in Oakland. Almost thirty years have passed, but the same band is playing, and we once again meet teenagers without a language of their own, dosing on LSD instead of formulating intelligible lines. But we also meet survivors, who now have respectable professions, families, and social standing.⁵ The polaroid snapshots of the Grateful Dead show are not celebratory, the band’s Dionysian aspects seem futile, but neither are they totally dystopian or dark. Something has happened—and now, writing more than twenty years after the dissolution of the Grateful Dead, what was really the meaning of this music, what was at stake in this culture?

This is a book about a rock band, its music, and its audience, listened to and viewed through the lens of critical and aesthetic theory: not so much another narrative of the band, because there already are so many good stories on the band circulating, but more of a discussion and a critical assessment. Its basic presupposition is that even rock music can generate not only sensual pleasure but also aesthetic fulfillment. Yes, this is a lover’s discourse—but love is not always blind, nor deaf. If critique is to be meaningful, however, then the Grateful Dead, the rock band in question, must be granted agency: that is, I will try and look at the band not as merely reflecting or articulating the conditions it existed under, but as actually negotiating and even actively resisting those conditions. It also means that I claim (and I am of course far from the first to make this claim) that rock music can be viewed through the lens of a perspective, informed by a tradition of critical theory, which in its original versions resolutely opposed any thought of granting popular music, whether jazz or dance music, any aesthetic relevance—which might seem a far too heavy a burden to place on a simple rock and roll band.

Although rock music in general often has been granted an oppositional function as a socio-psychological vehicle, a repertoire of attitudes and gestures for youth’s search for identity and acknowledgment, my ambition is to go a little further. I believe that the Grateful Dead is a band worthy of a discussion that is both aesthetic and political. The roots of this theoretical perspective go back to the 1920s and to Critical Theory as produced by the Frankfurt School. If desired, this tradition could be traced back even further and it might seem outdated, at least in its condemnation of mass culture. And aspects of this critique might be ready for retirement—a certain moralism, for instance—but we do live under basically the same conditions as when these left-wing critics formulated their ideas: capitalism is even more dominant and hegemonic, the commodity form covers everything with its appeal to consumption, the Western world remains a class society—and the extreme right and Fascism once again are growing stronger in several European countries, as well as in America.

In combining mass culture and aesthetic theory, there are several risks: idealization of the band, pretentiousness, or a mismatch in the form of too grand a theoretical discourse applied to a simple rock band. A line from the Grateful Dead’s only hit single, Touch of Grey (lyrics by Robert Hunter) seems to capture perfectly the spirit of mismatching: the shoe is on the hand it fits.⁶ Yet mass culture is today triumphant, reaching into every part of the world, and every part of our lives. It is a form of culture that continually rids itself of any burden of the past to intensify the now of the moment—its dominant practice is that of consumption. As a social practice, consumption transforms its objects to waste products, to leftovers, ruins of what they once were, for the consumer’s desire to be directed toward a new object. Modernity transforms, in a grotesque way, the slogan of Modernism—Make it new!—into a constant consumption of new objects.

Putting the Grateful Dead before the test that critical theory offers also has its gains. One is that the listener and interpreter is allowed to demand something from the band in question, as for instance that the music puts something at stake, that the musicians risk something when walking out on that stage—and I would think that walking out in front of fifty thousand people and trying to improvise is a way of really putting something, both music and musician, at stake, at least when you work with a certain musical looseness and openness. The Grateful Dead has something to say not only as a phenomenon within the history of popular culture in America, but also musically—and if the band didn’t have that musical edge to it, then they would not be a very compelling object for the type of discussion that I propose.

In one of his aphorisms in Minima Moralia, Theodor W. Adorno writes that "knowledge