Listening for the Secret: The Grateful Dead and the Politics of Improvisation
200
Listening for the Secret: The Grateful Dead and the Politics of Improvisation
200Paperback(First Edition)
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Overview
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780520286658 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of California Press |
| Publication date: | 05/09/2017 |
| Series: | Studies in the Grateful Dead , #1 |
| Edition description: | First Edition |
| Pages: | 200 |
| Sales rank: | 1,064,373 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.90(w) x 8.90(h) x 0.60(d) |
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Listening for the Secret
The Grateful Dead and the Politics of Improvisation
By Ulf Olsson
UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS
Copyright © 2017 The Regents of the University of CaliforniaAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-520-28664-1
CHAPTER 1
Popular Avant-Garde? Renegotiating Tradition
When studying the Grateful Dead — both the band and the wider cultural phenomenon — one should not be surprised if the image discovered is mixed or even contradictory: Was the Grateful Dead a rock band at all? If not, what was it? Jerry Garcia early on could claim that the band was not for "cranking out rock and roll" but "to get high." Bob Weir stated that "we're a jazz band. I won't say we're nothing but a jazz band, because our basic premise is rock 'n' roll. We just approach it from a jazz point of view." Phil Lesh talked about the music that the band played as "electric chamber music," emphasizing that the "Grateful Dead is more than music, but it has always been fundamentally music ... this ongoing experiment in collective creativity." The three band members apparently agree that they did not form your average rock band, but at the same time they formulate rather different visions of what the band is about. Even within the band, opinions differ on what must have been a central issue — but that issue could not be settled outside of the music, it could only be worked out, resolved in music. In that practice, positions could shift, often in just a few bars — Garcia searching for an Apollonian exactness and clarity, the definitive CD version or interpretation of a song, and Lesh pushing the music into the ecstatic unknown, promoting improvisation and madness, the Dionysian version of the Dead. Or, as Mickey Hart put it, the band "is in the transportation business. We move minds." Dennis McNally, band publicist and historian, claims that "the point is the Grateful Dead is not a rock 'n' roll band. They use rock modalities, but to evaluate them purely as a rock 'n' roll band, they're not. They are a twenty-first century American electronic string band." McNally might risk making the band too traditional, but he is right in suggesting that the Dead cannot be looked upon squarely as a rock band, although the "rock modalities" must form part of the horizon that frames the band's work.
This hesitancy about the identity of the band (even the FBI files on the Grateful Dead are uncertain: "It would appear that this is a rock group of some sort") also could be turned into insider references or, later, commercially quite viable slogans, for instance: "There is nothing like a Grateful Dead concert," or "They're not the best at what they do; they're the only ones that do what they do." These catchphrases, as well as others, point to the Grateful Dead as an alternative type of act, as something else — something different, something perhaps even unique. The band "grew up" as part of a San Franciscan, bohemian culture, for which commercial success was not crucial, or at least was not openly sought, and it became part of what Ellen Willis called the "San Francisco countercultural 'rock-as-art' orthodoxy." But, as Mary Harron comments on this era of rock music, the "paradox (and the profits) lay in the fact that rock's anticommercialism became the basis of its commercial appeal." Harron emphasizes how "quickly and easily the new hippy culture fitted into the existing commercial structure" and states that "the new counter-culture simply found different strategies for selling sincerity." We must, then, remember a simple fact, bluntly put forward by Ellen Willis: "basically rock is a capitalist art" — meaning also that moralisms about "selling out" should be avoided. Or as Jerry Garcia chuckled: "We've been trying to sell out for years — nobody's buying." If we would do what Harron did, browse the lists of gold records, singles, and albums in Billboard magazine, then the Grateful Dead would long be absent. There was no commercial success from the start, even though the band did land a recording contract with Warner Bros. early on. With time, their albums would sell enough to go "gold." During its existence, the band also changed and adapted to different conditions, most of all to a growing popularity. That and other factors — both within and outside of the band — naturally influenced how band members looked at themselves and at the band, and pushed them to define themselves in an era of political, social, and cultural upheavals. The Grateful Dead of 1995 was not the same group that it was in 1965, but I claim that the band worked on keeping its roots, and an original creative impulse, alive throughout the groups' career.
Harron's argument is much too general, but she does have a point in this paradoxical success of the anti-commercial: The Grateful Dead did become a mega-phenomenon, partly because they seemed to ignore the conventions of the music industry. Still, this resistance against the culture industry was to some degree a myth cultivated by band members, as when Garcia maintained that the band worked outside the music industry: "we're really not quite in that whole world as it's presently constructed. We're like the exception to every rule." A perhaps more nuanced standpoint is articulated by Phil Lesh: "Although we had to be a 'business' in order to survive and continue to make music together, we were not buying into the traditional pop music culture of fame and fortune, hit tunes, touring behind albums, etc." Reading the many different touring contracts that the band signed with different promoters, and that now are collected in the Grateful Dead Archive at the University of California, Santa Cruz, there are some recurrent paragraphs, which inform us of a band working within the heart of capitalism but still trying to do things its own way, trying to formulate and control its own working conditions — even though contracts are a formalized genre, its standards dictated by the Union and promoters. For instance, contracts state that the band "shall have the unqualified right to perform at least four (4) hours. Employer understands and agrees that Artist's reputation will be substantially and materially damaged if Artist is prevented from performing for said full four hours." Other and older contracts, such as one contract from 1976, stated the band's performing time was up to five hours, and these formulations had to do with the fact that the band was fined for playing too long — which of course sometimes happened. The contract with Bill Graham Presents, for a concert at the Greek Theatre in Berkeley in 1987, also states that the band must not "be sponsored or in any manner tied with any commercial product or company" and the band "shall not be required to appear and perform before any audience which is segregated on the basis of race, color, creed or sex." This latter paragraph might seem surprising, because audiences were not segregated in the United States in the 1980s, but one can perhaps assume that this formulation was inserted into contracts after the so called "Sun City boycott" — Sun City being a South African "Bantustan" to which artists were lured to come and perform during the apartheid regime.
The contracts in general are very careful to define the security measures that the employer must observe on behalf of the band and the crew, as well as the audience and anyone working at the arena. Most contracts also state that vending of alcohol at the arena is not permitted, and in later years, they also stipulate that ticket buyers be provided with information about "campsites, inexpensive restaurants and hotels, hospitals and medical facilities, and other social services in the area" — this, of course, to try and ease any tensions caused in a local community from the invasion of "Deadheads" (defined as Grateful Dead devotees and fans). The last contract rider, from 1993, includes a paragraph about the band wanting to "provide speakers in the lobby area to give the fans a place to dance without blocking the aisles." What the band here also does is an act of remembering: they began as a band to dance to. As Garcia once emphasized, "We feel that our greatest value is as a dance band and that's what we like to do." The Grateful Dead remained a dance band for the whole of their career — and the surviving members even played, as The Dead, at one of President Obama's inauguration dances in 2009. Dance was one of the more or less ritualized practices that held the community together; therefore, even though Theodore Gracyk claims that the band's emphasis on dance "did not last," I think he is wrong. The point is that even when the music was not really what some people would expect dance music to be, Deadheads still managed to dance, albeit in their own, inimitable free-form style.
This resistance towards "selling out" — which is how I interpret aspects of these contracts — did help to guarantee the band a special position during an era when the music industry became more and more industrial, even if it at the same time produced margins for both experimental and political music. We may call the Grateful Dead "unique" if we compare their survival to the early deaths of most other San Francisco bands from the same time. Although the machinery of the music industry at large kept grinding on, the Grateful Dead became this touring unit on the outskirts of the soundscape of the culture industry. Their uniqueness can be disputed; they did after all work with the major record companies and the most successful promoters, and a rock band cannot really be run at this level of commercial success without being part of the industry. The crucial problem is the effects that integration within the culture industry has on the music. And, not least, can one ask whether music as eclectic as that performed by the Grateful Dead should be discussed in terms of uniqueness? Often coupled with the emphasis on uniqueness is the notion of authenticity — as if the singularity of the unique guaranteed the authenticity of this singular end product. I do think that the band was unique, or rather became or grew to be unique, and not because this idea legitimizes this book. Rather, the Dead's uniqueness must be scrutinized carefully to avoid a solely and overtly ideological celebration of the band. Any evaluation of what the band was about and what its significance is must be based on a dialectical analysis that moves between the actual music and the social conditions under which it was performed.
Therefore, this first chapter suggests different ways of understanding the Grateful Dead as a kind of hybrid aggregate, assembled from different and sometimes even conflicting parts. Taking as a starting point the Western political and cultural dislocations of the sixties and the counterculture they generated, the discussion focuses on the role of tradition and avant-garde respectively. Framing this discussion is the problem of the public sphere in which a rock band also must work: What happens to the public sphere under the conditions defined by the culture industry? Was it even possible for a countersphere to exist? This discussion, which the Grateful Dead substantially contributes to in different ways, provides a foundation for the rest of the book, and for a discussion of the Grateful Dead as the nucleus in a form of resistance.
I
Dennis McNally suggests that the "dislocations of race, class, gender, and culture that defined the 1960s and generated the Dead can ... be best understood by looking at them through the lens of improvisation — through the Dead itself" I take his lead, both in using improvisation as my guide, and in hinting at the band's dependence on and contributions to those "dislocations" McNally that points to: improvisation is a relation or attitude to the world, and therefore it can at times, and under special conditions, function as precisely a type of dislocation, and then not only of a musical composition.
These dislocations were far from isolated to popular music, and it is impossible to understand even the Grateful Dead without taking the larger, social dislocations of the 1960s into consideration. Those dislocations can be seen on a global scale, but their immediate effects also could be felt by every individual — the American war on Vietnam was broadcast to every home around the world that could afford a television set. Other dislocations settled in the individual body but were effects of collective movements in the society of late capitalism, such as black liberation, women's liberation, and the beginning of gay liberation. Here, "hippies" must be included as well, along with student protests around the globe. Fredric Jameson gives us an important reminder, however, by noting that "the 60s, often imagined as a period when capital and First World power are in a retreat all over the globe, can just as easily be conceptualized as a period when capital is in full dynamic and innovative expansion, equipped with a whole armature of fresh production techniques and new 'means of production.'" This expansion of capital — which the music industry exemplifies — momentarily generated what Jameson calls "an immense freeing or unbinding of social energies, a prodigious release of untheorized new forces," forces that Jameson exemplifies rather conventionally as different political movements — the counterculture is not included, unless it is covered by the suggestive formulation, "movements everywhere." But Jameson also warns that this "sense of freedom and possibility" of the sixties is a "historical illusion": while this freedom was enacted and enjoyed, society transitioned "from one infrastructural or systemic stage of capitalism to another." One consequence for the analysis of a historical era is that it must dialectically include both power and resistance, both capital and labor. Stephen Paul Miller offers — using Foucauldian terms — a view of the "episteme" or "epistemological horizons" of the sixties as "derived from consumer culture and was in fact immediately merchandised. But in itself it was something else. The forces of the marketplace helped bring sixties culture together and then sold that culture, but the phenomenon of the sixties was a kind of Frankenstein monster that defied the commercial codifications that helped constitute it."
Jameson's rather negative view, perhaps limited by his academic orthodoxy, cannot perceive the kind of community that the counterculture generated and that was forming around the Grateful Dead. Yet a dialectical analysis must be more flexible, and there are other theoreticians who are more open to the potential political significance of countercultural phenomena like the Grateful Dead. In Empire, Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri seem to imagine a potential Deadhead in what they call a "massive transvaluation of values."
"Dropping out" was really a poor conception of what was going on in Haight-Ashbury and across the United States in the 1960s. The two essential operations were the refusal of the disciplinary regime and the experimentation with new forms of productivity. The refusal appeared in a wide variety of guises and proliferated in thousands of daily practices. It was the college student who experimented with LSD instead of looking for a job. ... The entire panoply of movements and the entire emerging counterculture highlighted the social value of cooperation and communication.
Hardt and Negri, being much more open to the diversity of the resistance to disciplinary regimes, agree with Jameson about the expansion of capital, which they see as subsuming "all aspects of social production and reproduction, the entire realm of life," an absolute and totalizing tendency in capitalism observed already by Marx and emphasized by the Frankfurt School, as when Herbert Marcuse talks about how the dynamic character of capitalism means that it can "join and permeate all dimensions of private and public existence." This dynamic, and its resulting penetration of every aspect of everyday life, is observed also by non-Marxist thinkers, as for instance Hannah Arendt in her description of Modernity as "the rule by nobody" — that is, a bureaucratic rule that could become tyrannical. Arendt also sees how society, in its varying historical forms, imposes "innumerable and various rules, all of which tends to 'normalize' its members, to make them behave, to exclude spontaneous action or outstanding achievement." Hardt and Negri observe how "production processes and economic structures" were being redefined by "cultural relations": a "regime of production, and above all a regime for the production of subjectivity, was being destroyed and another invented by the enormous accumulations of struggles." I think the key issue is the "production of subjectivity": the culture industry of Adorno and Horkheimer is still shaping consciousness, subjectivities are still being produced and stylized by impersonal apparatuses, by power relations. The concept of "culture industry" refers to "the entire network by means of which culture is socially transmitted, in other words, it refers to the cultural goods created by the producers, and distributed by agents, the cultural market and the consumption of culture." What this industry produces is ultimately "conformism through stereotypes, obedience through identification, intolerance through normalization"; it is, Adorno and Horkheimer writes, "enlightenment as mass deception." Although this analysis basically rings true, it leaves out the simple fact of resistance: every power relation also generates resistance within these relations. Many small, independent record companies issue albums with music of every noncommercial type; rock bands producing noise music are being formed every day; and rappers appropriate a language that has been distorted by power. Even under an all-encompassing capitalism there always is a margin where other divergent voices are being formulated. This resistance, in its many diverse forms, must not be idealized — but neither should it be neglected. It might not be anti-capitalist but rather anti-commercial, anti-bureaucratic, anti-authoritarian: an opposition against power, consumer society, or simply the boredom of modern life — even if it might be "untheorized," as Jameson complained.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Listening for the Secret by Ulf Olsson. Copyright © 2017 The Regents of the University of California. Excerpted by permission of UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS.
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Table of Contents
Series Foreword ix
Acknowledgments xi
Introduction 1
1 Popular Avant-Garde? Renegotiating Tradition 13
2 Wave That Flag: An Apolitical Band 52
3 Crashes in Space: Aspects of Improvisation 92
Coda: Listening for the Secret 128
Notes 137
Discography 163
Bibliography 165
Index 179