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| They were the longest-running continuous circus on Earth, and in the end, not even the main attraction at the show. They were a touchstone of controversy; an industry of merchandise and a free exchange; a hippie (then neo-hippie) theme park and gypsy caravan all rolled into one. They inspired a new catch-all suffix for obsession. Such is the English language, and such were the Dead. The party is long over now. I went to my first and only Dead show in 1991 during a break in my freshman year of college. I was never a huge fan, but with the advent of my short-lived pot-smoking days, I had become interested in the scene and decided to check out a show before Jerry checked out permanently. Before I came home from Buffalo for the vacation, I drove out to the Indian reservation and bought a couple cartons of cigarettes. A week later I was hanging out in the parking lot of Giants (as Deadheads called Giants Stadium in New Jersey), trading packs of smokes for beers and joints. It was a good deal, a fine experiment in the Deadhead tradition, and an experience just as I’d hoped for. I got a glimpse into that world and understood the allure. The show sucked, however. I couldn’t hear any of the lyrics, just the reverb of Jerry’s guitar and Phil Lesh’s off-key voice. But I was seriously stoned, and the girl in front of me kept flirting. The Dead had done their job yet again simply by holding a party. I must admit: when Jerry Garcia did die, I felt a certain frisson of pleasure. It’s not that I was celebrating his death in any way. I was just happy that those nomadic Deadheads I had seen that day at Giants were homeless for the first time in almost forty years. They could follow Phish, yes, but that wasn’t quite the same, and of course Phish broke up anyway. Yes, my pleasure came from thinking of the insane masses who gave up their lives to travel with the ultimate traveling band that later in its existence was more of a traveling corporation. I disliked Deadheads because I distrust any large group of people with such a narrow focus, like Moonies or PETA activists. It wasn’t about the music anymore. Which is exactly what senior Deadheads must have said from the very beginning. Still, my irritation was as much of a pose as that of the Dead hangers-on. The scene was always about the scene. The Dead started as a party band. They played any gig they could get until they became famous as the house band for Ken Kesey’s famous Acid Tests in the late Sixties. Jerry Garcia actually called himself Captain Trips. They all lived together in a big house in the Haight. In the beginning, the Dead were a live band. They got a chance to cut a studio album, so they did. It was simply called Grateful Dead, and it’s sufficiently trippy and San Francisco sounding, but they didn’t think it captured them. Next was Anthem of the Sun, and next Aoxomoxoa, and both of those albums strove for a way to put down the Dead’s live feel on wax. They didn’t do it until their next album. Live/Dead has it all: the overwrought psychedelic lyrics and feedback solos, the chimes and the mood music, but it also has the driving blues and the backbeat. And, of course, it’s live. If you want to give people a sense of what you’re like live, put out a live album, and if it's good, maybe they'll come out and see you the next time you pull into town. On that score, it succeeded wildly, pulling parts of shows from February and March of 1969 at the Fillmore West and the Avalon Ballroom, and it came out in the fall just after the Summer of Woodstock (where the Dead played, getting electrocuted whenever they touched their instruments). The total time of the album is just over 73 minutes, an abbreviated representation of their marathon concerts, but it is the show all Dead fans wish they had been to, and which some think they were at. What’s I’m about to write sounds goofy and too conceptual, but I only write it because it’s not inconceivable—that this is how Jerry and Bob and Phil, under the influence of the old lysergic, put it together. We start off the show in the primordial soup, the swirling of matter and antimatter, pops of the bass, chips of the drums, taps of the cymbals, plunks of the guitar all subatomic particles in chaos. Then, slowly, a rhythm emerges, the celestial bodies start coming together, arpeggios are sprung, and we’re moving. Then real form develops, and we have a guitar line, a bass line, a beat. It gets stronger, and then Jerry’s guitar, the voice of God (again, this is goofy, but goofy isn’t off the wall here) rises above the rest, and we’re off into a 23-minute version of the ultimate trip song, “Dark Star,” the meaning of which escapes me (although in those druggie days I think I came close to cracking it). Six minutes later, Jerry starts singing. Never an exceptionally strong singer, he is at the heights of his power here, and the wispy, whiny quality of his vocal stylings match perfectly with the floppy rhythms of the band. Placing this song on the first track was genius—it captures exactly what was great about the Dead. They were always playing what I think of as the “Magic Carpet Ride” game. That song, by TK, has a great rock hook that resolves so wonderfully that it’s like a caress or a drink of water when you’re thirsty. But the hook wouldn’t work unless they made you thirsty, so you get those bulky minutes of introspective jamming and free-jazz improv, and then bam!—they hit you with the hook again, and you’re friends for life. Of course, drugs only make the introspective moments seem more meaningful, but they also make you more grateful when they’re over. Grateful. That’s what the Dead have always made me feel when I indulged their artsy self-indulgence. They never failed to reward me with a great R&B song immediately afterward. After many minutes of lost time, the band brings it all back down to Earth, and leads back into major chords and then back into chaos and then back out again, to a beautiful rendition of “Saint Stephen,” on which they jam, showing their credentials as a rock band, though you must be ready to forgive them for the folksy interlude complete with a martial drum-roll beat—don’t worry, it devolves into jamming soon enough in “The Eleven,” a song with an industrial-strength bass line and silly and distracting lyrics by bassist / writer Phil Lesh. Then the Dead show that they are masters at the “Magic Carpet Ride” game. A strange man who happened to be the Dead’s keyboard player, a man named Pigpen, takes over the party and turns it into a feel-good roadhouse dance with a blues tune, “Turn on Your Lovelight.” There’s a reason this is the first place on the album the engineer laid down some cheering. This is the first place you feel like cheering. It’s the cool drink of water, complete with responsive singing, drum solos. Nothing floppy here. This is muscular blues, and it reminds you how great of a rock band the Dead were before Pigpen drank himeslelf to death in 1973. The end of the album, which includes a Rev. Gary Davis dirge, “Death Don’t Have No Mercy,” that the Dead turn into an excuse for partying even more (if death don’t have no mercy, then what the hell?) and “Feedback,” what would eventually become a Dead tradition called “Space,” a free-form use of everything on stage (in this case the speakers), is the inevitable but not unenjoyable hangover from all this tripping and partying. “Feedback” ventures out into serious goofiness, but by this time who cares? “Magic Carpet Ride” again: the Dead end their trip with a folk benediction, “And We Bid You Goodnight,” that is lovely and shows just how constructed this album is, how important an artifact it really is. --Scott Holden Smith (email) April 28, 2002
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