essays on the grateful dead

Photo by Jay BakesbergHere is Bill Walton's essay from the Saturday Fare Thee Well program created by Relix and Jambands.com.Welcome to Chicago, and thank you for coming to this intergalactic celebration of peace, freedom, love, independence and the first 50 years of the Grateful Dead.It is most appropriate that we are here in Chicago now, a city and community that epitomizes everything that the Grateful Dead has come to be over this half-century. Chicago is our history, our evolution, our core. So much has transpired—right here, within sight and reach. And now it serves as our launching pad to what is next. It is with incredible anticipation and hope that I land gently on this burning shore at Grant Park, on the edge of The Lake, fully aware to what this sacred ground has meant to all who have been in this game for so long.I am coming to gather strength and to be healed. You will have your own reasons.I have been coming for 48 of these 50 years, and while I’m always excited to come on tour and to the show, I can’t remember ever being this ready, or more in need. From the very beginning, the Grateful Dead have always made me proud, confident and bold. They give purpose and meaning to my life. And they give me a reason to believe in the essential beauty, humanity, courtesy and goodness in and of this world.The Grateful Dead have provided me with a living, thriving, breathing, surging culture of curiosity, exploration and experimentation that has led to the spirit of generosity that I know will engulf all of us while we’re here, and beyond. I am privileged, honored and humbled to have gone to the shows last weekend at Levi’s in the Bay Area—no tuxedos there. It was all better than perfect. From the jammed airports and planes—nobody was willing to give up their seat in the oversold situation—to the hotels, restaurants and clubs swarming with Deadheads. From the standing.
Granville Ganter English Department St. John’s University Homepage ganterg@stjohns.edu An early version of this essay was first published in Dead Reckoning: The Life and Times of the Grateful Dead. Edited by John Rocco. New York: Schirmer Books, 1999. pp. 172-181. Tuning In Together: Daniel Webster, Alfred Schutz, and the Grateful Dead Like accounts of the Grateful Dead, the stories people told about Daniel Webster are hard to believe. During the nineteenth century Webster was hailed as one of the primary voices of American civic culture, defining the terms of national union in the turbulent decades prior to the Civil War. From his renowned legal defense of Dartmouth College’s independence in 1818, to his ceremonial and Congressional oratory in the 1820s and 1830s, people spoke of Daniel Webster’s eloquence with religious awe. During Webster’s memorial speech at Plymouth plantation in 1820, George Ticknor was so overwhelmed by Webster’s oratory that he wrote, “I thought my temples would burst with the gush of blood” (Life 330). Coming from a conservative Boston Brahmin like Ticknor, this is unusual praise, but only one story among many. Full grown Congressmen allegedly cried “like girls” during Webster’s “2nd Reply to Hayne,” where he championed the sovereignty of national union over states’ rights(March 142). Today, however, most people read Webster’s speeches with a grimace rather than with pleasure. It seems that Webster’s audiences must have been under a spell of patriotic hysteria. Similarly, accounts of people’s experience at Grateful Dead concerts tend to have the same problem. They often fall prey to the anticlimactic claims of “you had to be there” or invocations of a mystical ritual that exceeds description in words (neither of which have I found very helpful or enlightening). To most non-fans of Grateful Dead, recordings from even their most inspired.
THE GRATEFUL DEAD READER Edited by David Dodd and Diana Spaulding Oxford University; ; 352 pages The Grateful Dead Reader, an anthology of writing about the band, is like a Dead show -- one of those many nights that was neither wonderful nor terrible, a night by no means devoid of high points but paid for by a fair amount of repetition, noodling, false starts, low energy and distractions. As at a Dead show, all eras of the band's history are represented. The fans are an obsessive, devotional in- group, much of the scene is dripping with drugs, and because of or despite that, some people just aren't making a whole hell of a lot of sense. And then there are those transcendent moments of pleasure and holy joy, those intimations of immortality and mortality -- the good stuff -- that make it all worthwhile, not to mention really, really fun. Many of the writers represented here are primarily trying to explain what the whole thing was about. They want to make a case for the Dead's grand cosmic significance, and a few, both Deadhead and outside observer, do a pretty good job of it. The best pieces manage to re-create the unique, heart-opening experience of a Dead show. They show how and why those shows were qualitatively utterly different from any other live music, even that of much better musicians. Whether you were actually in the Haight, or even La Honda, when it was all starting, or were just reading about it then or later, yearning in some suburb, this book can make you just want to weep with nostalgia. On the other hand, great swaths of it are so inside-baseball that they will be of little interest to anyone but hard-core Deadheads. How could all those Brent (Mydland)- haters, complains one Deadhead, miss the constant loving looks (he and Jerry Garcia) gave each other (or their choice of the lines they sang whilst looking at each other, which deserve a whole.
Edited by Jim Tuedio and Stan Spector Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2010 ISBN 978-0-7864-4357-4 365 pages Reviewed by Melvin Backstrom It is not at all surprising that the field of improvisational studies has, for the most part, concentrated its attention on manifestations of improvisation in avant-garde contexts, given the still pervasive suspicion of the value of popular culture within the scholarly community. Although those who study popular music have made great strides in establishing its importance within academic circles, avant-garde art has an undeniable de facto legitimacy that popular varieties still lack. It is therefore a welcome opportunity for me to review this recently published collection of essays concerning a musical group that over 30 years and some 2300 performances likely performed for more people than any other in history. This is not the first edited volume to focus on the Grateful Dead (see also Weiner, Dodd and Spaulding, Gimbel, Meriwether), but it is the first to specifically focus on the improvisational character of their music and the broader “deadhead” culture that came to so thoroughly define them. For despite the critiques of the value of improvisation to, and indeed its actuality in, popular music (Frith, Adorno), its importance to the Grateful Dead (hereafter simply the Dead) would be difficult to overstate. Although its ideals were not always lived up to in their practice, improvisation did define them in a myriad number of ways that the essays in this volume explore. Passion and care for the music of the Dead and its attendant “deadhead” culture are clearly evident throughout The Grateful Dead in Concert; producing this volume was obviously a labor of love for those involved. Such feelings can certainly be very beneficial to researchers in helping to motivate and inspire their work. However, one of the perennial problems faced by.