Sweet Chaos: The Grateful Dead's American Adventure - Rilegato

Carol Brightman is the author of Writing Dangerously: Mary McCarthy and Her World, which won a National Book Critics Circle Award for Biography, and the editor of Between Friends: The Correspondence of Hannah Arendt and Mary McCarthy. She is the recipient of an American Academy of Arts and Letters Award in Literature. She lives in Walpole, Maine.

Introduction

I first saw the Grateful Dead perform live in March 1972 at the Academy of Music (now the Palladium) in New York. They had been playing together for seven years, a long time in an era when rock 'n' roll bands came and went like dandelions after a spring rain. Already the band had been exiled from the pop commonwealth, which suspected, accurately enough, that the Dead's success might hinge on extramusical forces beyond the marketplace.

I had recently come back east after a year of communal living in Berkeley, California, and gone to see my sister, Candace, who had signed on as the Grateful Dead's lighting designer. It was an odd moment, such as happens once or twice in life, when the action in which you're deeply engaged suddenly reverses itself, and it's hard to grasp the meaning of the play. Berkeley's out-of-town radicals had packed up and moved on like Bedouins in the night. The larger antiwar movement in which I'd been active for six years had collapsed, while the war in Vietnam lurched on. Even President Nixon had begun to lose the starch that led him to hail his youthful critics as "bums, radicals, and other criminal elements," and to sink into bumdom himself.

Sitting in the darkness of the Academy, watching the fans who were dressed in the paisley-patched jeans, headbands, and beads we wore in Berkeley, I felt a little tired. The crowd was excited, as if someone had delivered a rousing political speech rather than "Mister Charlie," "China Cat," and "Casey Jones," songs that the Dead (I see now) played nearly every night of the week's run in New York. New York, by the way, would "make" the Grateful Dead, in the opinion of the band. In New York--New Jersey, too--the musicians were emissaries of a culture of enchantment indigenous to another country, conveniently located in the western reaches of the United States.

At the Academy, some of the formal elements were already in place that would lend a Grateful Dead concert the feel of a revival meeting in years to come. There was the gentle noodling of the musicians, warming things up, throwing out phrases; the happy response of the crowd when a favorite song emerged; the patterned gestures, arms swinging overhead, wrists cocked, though the dance audiences were more typical of California.

I didn't know it then, but I was witnessing the genesis of a movement whose takeoff was related to the breakdown of my own. If the climate of the '60s made you feel things could be changed and were worth changing, the climate of the '70s, more like today's, counseled retreat from storms over which you had no control. With the Grateful Dead's sense of otherness, along with their aura of communal ecstasy, they were poised to offer their audiences a refuge from a world that seemed harder to understand, much less to influence, than it had been only a few years before.

LSD, of course, was the genie behind the Dead's birth, though in 1972 I didn't grasp that, either. And who in the counterculture, whether hippies or politicos, could have guessed that when you entered the world of psychedelics, you would pass, unaware, through doors first opened by the Central Intelligence Agency? For it was during the CIA's search for "truth drugs" and behavior-altering substances among hallucinogens such as LSD, mescaline, and psilocybin, in the 1950s and early '60s, that the genie escaped from the bottle.

It surprises me to learn that the Grateful Dead used LSD every time they played until the 1970s. By the early '70s, the larger crowds demanded more control from the musicians than LSD permitted, also more predictability; and by then, for the band, the hard drugs had begun to roll in, cocaine and heroin. LSD, however, introduced the Dead to what percussionist Mickey Hart calls a "road map," to which they could return again and again to "bring back the sights and sounds and sensations" of the early trips. It wasn't the kind of map that told you what to do, "like if you go from here to there, you're going to find Eureka." It only showed you that "you're on the road"--that you've found "this rhythm and this zone," which is what made musical invention possible.

There was, for me, the sense of a closed shop about a Grateful Dead show in the beginning, partly because I lacked access to the road map, but also, to be honest, because I went, every other year or so, mainly to see what my sister was doing with the lights. My taste in popular music inclined more to the Doors and Janis Joplin, Dylan and the Band. My taste in crowds ran to parades and political demonstrations. The political was molting into the personal, but music was music, as far as I was concerned, and dance was play, not worship. With the Grateful Dead, it was as if the music had been spoken for by a secret society of lotus-eaters, and now the musicians, having slipped into the hair shirts of prophets and holy men, were no longer available to the casual listener.

At the same time, the Dead kept reaching out and making new conquests, especially on college campuses. The enormity of the following they amassed over the next twenty-odd years raises the question of agency. How much is the vaunted Grateful Dead phenomenon an expression of the yearnings of the vast audiences they tapped? To understand the Dead's place in American history, don't we need to take a closer look at how history shaped them? And what was the band's role in creating a subculture that, three years after Jerry Garcia's death, remains surprisingly intact?

"We don't have any real plans," Garcia told The Greening of America's author Charles Reich in 1972. "Everything's kinda hashed out. It stumbles, then it creeps, then it flies with one wing and bumps into trees, and shit, you know, we're committed to it by now . . ."--which was the nonleader leader speaking. For Mickey Hart, however, forging the new culture was a crusade. "We went on a head-hunting mission for twenty-five years," he exclaims. "We went out there and got this army in tow." It started around 1969, when the band dispatched its first power object, the image of a skeleton walking on stilts across The Tibetan Book of the Dead, dragging a ball and chain. The work of a forgotten artist, it was the original Mr. Bones, a Grateful Dead icon; and Hart remembers it as a code that "let you see in the windows of people in San Francisco who were Deadheads before there were Deadheads."