A San Francisco Music Chronicle
A San Francisco Music Chronicle
Excerpts:
The Dead and Their Critics
The Grateful Dead Ethos: An Inspection of
Lyrics and Philosophy
The Grateful Dead's Music
Record Reviews 1966-1990: Wake of the
Flood - 1973
To: Dick's Picks and Other Reviews
The
members of the Grateful Dead seem to like their jobs and it's
possible the band has refused to fade away simply because they
have recognized themselves as unique and artistically
irreplaceable. They've stayed the course as the idiot wind of pop
criticism has whipped around them. They've sailed onward through
a capitalistic sea which has sunk sturdier vessels than their
own. Through the good albums and the bad, the dull performances
and the brilliant, the Dead have never looked back; they seem so
resolute in their course it's become a voyage toward an
ENVISIONED DESTINY of mythic (they've passed legendary)
proportions.
The Grateful Dead's peculiar self-satisfaction is insurmountable
because their artistic and aesthetic credentials are in order.
Like the Stones and the Beatles before them (and unlike Elvis,
the Beach Boys and many other "folk' talents), they've
seized the moment and never let it loose. The Grateful Dead have
harnessed the energy of their art and channeled it, conserved it,
transformed it.
From the beginning, Garcia and his cohorts have consciously
related to art rather than to pop. Art has been on their mind.
Art has been a prerogative. The evolution of American songwriting
in the sixties, starting with the advent of Dylan, left behind on
a mass scale a more fertile hybrid of song styling than had
previously been known. Folk, blues, country, r&b and, to a
lesser extent, jazz coalesced into a strong new brew. A different
type of songwriter had arrived on the scene. The new writers were
no longer enslaved to "pop" visions or, more common,
the pop performer's lack of vision. Mick Jagger, John Lennon, Van
Morrison, Ray Davies, Grace Slick, David Bowie, Lou Reed, Gary
Brooker, Bob Dylan, Neil Young, Leonard Cohen, Randy Newman and
Joni Mitchell were consciously artistic; they drew inspiration
from sources other than pop music. These artists were facing a
new frontier and they were armed with more than raw talent,
street smarts, guitars, pianos and rock & roll hearts. Their
sophisticated style distinguished them from most of the artists
that came before them - Elvis, Little Richard, Fats Domino (but
not Chuck Berry, a progenitor of Dylan, before the Zeitgeist) -
and would distinguish them from many of their peers - John
Fogerty, Eric Clapton and Rod Stewart - artists who drew their
inspiration from the music they loved, and not much else.
John Lennon had a love of literature and all of the arts,
unequivocally; he was an artist and proud of it. Van Morrison has
always had his poetry and his solitude. Jagger has been a poseur
in a grand theatrical manner. The image of the Stones was
grounded in rock theater as an objective correlative; but some
people heard Jagger sing "I'm a monkey" or "My
name is Lucifer" and were actually foolish enough to think
he was serious: they didn't see the aesthetic conceit behind the
fakery. He didn't seem to be acting. The edge these learned
artists had over the others came in the form of self-confidence
and a long view of the process in which they were involved. They
drew on resources that would never occur to songwriters
struggling with the trends of the day or the strict limitations
of folk forms. It gave them depth, originality, and variety of
expression. Their overriding faith in the validity of aesthetic
achievement is a faith shared by members of the other artistic
professions. Critics of literature, art and film consider it a
part of their job to defend difficult, misunderstood or unpopular
works from the instability and inconstancy of public taste. Too
often the "pop" music critic defends the public's taste
at the expense of imaginative art. Subsequently, only a popular
American songwriter (Bruce Springsteen) would feel comfortable
saying The Godfather was the only book he'd ever read, as if
illiteracy has had a good effect on his songs.
The Robert Hunter/Jerry Garcia songwriting team has approached
the level of achievement of Lennon/McCartney, Jagger/Richards,
Van Morrison, Ray Davies and company. The work of these artists
is, by definition, neither inferior nor superior to the more
natural group of talents from Willie Dixon to Jerry Leiber and
Mike Stoller. Willie Dixon, Little Richard and Elvis Presley
transcended the formulations of their time and place. They are
more than just pioneers, they are artists, and they are rightly
praised for their contributions. But, for reasons I will soon
examine, the work of consciously artistic songwriters has been
undervalued by a very influential clique of critics which
includes Dave Marsh (Creem, Rolling Stone, Musician,
Rock and Roll Inconsequential), Robert Christgau (Village
Voice), Jann Wenner (by proxy in Rolling Stone) and
Robert Hilburn (L.A. Times). Their populist ideological
line, because of its simplicity, has been institutionalized by
critics in local newspapers and music magazines across the
nation, but it is an ideology which ignores aesthetic standards
and rigorous analysis at the same time it supplies an excuse for
superficial, off-the-cuff commentary that conforms to popular
critical dogma. Consequently, the art of songwriting, in many
respects, has been unapprehended by these writers.
Populist critics have always posed highbrow academicians as
dangerous to the popular arts. One imagines a group of professors
ensconced in the Hoover Institute conspiring to unleash a hoard
of big ideas into mainstream music in an effort to corrupt its
vitality and to sever the "pop" artist's connection to
the masses. Perhaps these professors are writing songs
themselves; soon the only way to understand the average song will
be by taking advanced college courses. Not only are the highbrow
crucified, but the middlebrow are attacked as conspirators. (For
instance, a recent statement by sometimes critic Ellen Willis:
she argues the original sixties conception of rock & roll was
of a "`serious' art in the most snobbish, middlebrow sense
of the term.") The lowbrow are the only "brows"
not picked on, and it would be easy to suggest this is where most
of these writer's intelligence derives, but this would serve to
perpetuate the name-calling peculiar to this type of critic
without diminishing their sense of superiority over brows high,
middle and low.
The populist writer has done more damage to the fine arts, jazz
and the visual arts, and, I would suggest, to the art of
post-fifties songwriting than the academy or the middle-class
could ever hope to do even if damage was intended.
Remember: Elvis failed to sustain his career because he had no
grand ideas, not because he had too many.
Back to Top
Altamont may have changed a lot of
people's hippie perceptions, but the Dead were well beyond a
flower-child mentality. "Spent a little time on the
mountain" is an acknowledgement of their own philosophical
attitudinizing: but they shove Altamont into its proper
perspective as one event among many in a nation in turmoil.
Altamont may have been a turning point for collective
consciousness, but the Dead, years before, had dropped out of
this particular collective.
Back to Top
....The
Dead started as a juggernaut, but finesse has been the end
result. The Dead impart their songs with a thorough sense of
musicality. "Candyman" has such a strong sense of
rhythm is seems cinematic in its depiction of a gambler riding
into town. The percussion invokes horse hooves clopping along;
it's a weary, ominous gait. Garcia's vocal and jagged guitar
fills have a historical authenticity and his guitar solo is so
gut-wrenchingly lyrical it sounds like it came out of a Sergio
Leone Western epic. On "Candyman," the Dead create an
atmosphere you can practically walk through.
What the dead achieve with "Candyman" is the same type
of descriptive genius they use on the better known "Casey
Jones". Other bands have written train songs utilizing a
locomotive rhythm section, but none of them have evoked a train
with the amount of hardware the Dead's train comes equipped with
on the classic live version on Steal Your Face. Brake
squeals, whistles, track rumbling and locomotive speed all figure
into the task of getting this train to the station. The
escalating tempo on the live version gives an added edge to the
warning, "Casey Jones, you better watch your speed."
The Dead are masters of motion. Themes that concern physical and
spiritual motion are a large part of the Dead's subject matter
and the Dead's rhythm section has studied fundamental physics,
working up patterns that propel their songs with sublime movement
- China Cat's popping in and out of focus, Cosmic Charlie's goofy
strut, the disenchanted searching of "Shakedown
Street," the water-pump on "Pump," the passing
landscape in "Playin' in the Band," the rowboat in
"Row, Jimmy," another train in "Big Railroad
Blues," the dance in "France," the panic of the
workingman late for his shift at the mine ("Cumberland
blues"), the car fading away (along with the girl) in
"Midnight Getaway."
When the Dead take off on a musical caravan ' as they do, for
instance, on "Blues for Allah" - their audience rides
along on the camels behind them....
Back to Top