Grateful Dead - Towards the Sun and Beyond

The gold medal in the history-of-rock category awarded to Grateful Dead bears, on its two faces, an unsettling hallucinogenic mushroom and a vivid red rose: dissonant symbols of the lysergic trips of the flower-power era and the country-folk fragrances of the early Seventies. The Dead managed to transcend the narrow mythology of the "Summer of Love" (which left behind numerous victims, real and metaphorical, of its own cultural and musical axioms) and build themselves a timeless pedestal in the "Hall of Fame" of the great American dream. Between the endless sonic trances immortalized in the inextinguishable storm of Live Dead and the acoustic sweetness of American Beauty lies an epoch-spanning gulf; an eternity bridged only thanks to the immense artistic talent of the great Haight Ashbury family.

From "blue grass"... to acid

It's here, in this San Francisco neighborhood now reduced to a haven for "hobos", that in the second half of the Sixties the historical nucleus of the Dead took shape. But the story had already begun a few years earlier, in 1963, under the fanciful name Mother McCree's Uptown Jug Champions, a thoroughly traditional bluegrass combo (a formative experience, as we'll see, for the second phase of our heroes' career) made up of Jerome John "Jerry" Garcia (1942, San Francisco – 1995, Forest Knolls; guitar, banjo and vocals), Ron "Pigpen" McKernan (1945, San Bruno – 1973, San Francisco; keyboards, harmonica and vocals) and Robert Hall "Bob" Weir (1947, San Francisco; guitar and vocals).

When drummer Bill Kreutzmann (1946, Palo Alto) and bassist Philip Chapman "Phil" Lesh (1940, Berkeley) joined in 1965, the name was cut short to simply Warlocks, and the rural sound was given a fresh coat of paint in favor of the more driving rhythms of the British Invasion and the electricity of the new blues.

They played around Palo Alto for a brief period, then were forced to change their name again because it had already been taken by another band — one that, shortly after, would itself drop the name to become... Velvet Underground.

Having moved their base to the heart of the hippie kingdom, at 710 Ashbury Street (which became a commune offering free meals, housing, music and medical care for all), the "Grateful Dead" (an esoteric reference to ancient Egypt stumbled upon by chance in a book) took on its original, multifaceted sound, with Garcia and Weir coming from the folk scene, Lesh bringing classical training and electronic know-how, McKernan his love of the blues, and Kreutzmann his jazz background. All of it left to steep in LSD, aided by the work of Ken Kesey (who had been experimenting with the effects of the new synthetic drugs since the Fifties), who became the promoter of the first psychedelic events, where the Dead were the sensation. In the live setting, their compositions branched out into endless improvisations modeled on jazz jams — flights of fancy on the damasked wings of flying unicorns, masterfully ridden by "Captain Trip" Garcia.

Another key influence of the period was poet and singer Robert Hunter, himself a pioneer of the acid tests, who became the band's lyricist. The great family's ranks also included graphic artist Rick Griffin and sound chemist-technician Owsley Stanley.

In 1967, alongside Jefferson Airplane (based on the other side of the Golden Gate city, at 2400 Fulton Street), Grateful Dead were the leading band of California's Summer of Love. Unlike Balin, Slick and Kaukonen's group, however, Garcia and co. had no political interest, and their musical approach was a distinctly intellectual one, manifested in the extreme refinement and complexity of their compositions. This, on one hand, would prove an obstacle to achieving success beyond the hardcore base of "Deadheads" (the die-hard fans of the early days, true sect-like followers with well-defined rules and codes of conduct); on the other, it would allow them to weather epoch-making changes across three decades, always managing to stay at the crest of the artistic wave, even with a few inevitable dips along the way.

Warner Bros. doesn't hesitate to capitalize on the magic moment, giving them the chance to make their recording debut. But the self-titled album Grateful Dead, made up almost entirely of covers and recorded in just three days, fails to capture even a fraction of the band's devastating live impact. A couple of pieces are still missing before things truly click. By the end of that same year, drummer and percussionist Mickey Hart (Michael Steven Hartman, b. 1943, Brooklyn) — already Kreutzmann's teacher — joins to complete the Dead's historic six-man lineup, revolutionizing the band's rhythms with his eccentricity; shortly after, pianist/keyboardist Tom Constanten (b. 1944, Long Branch), a student of Berio, Stockhausen and Boulez, also joins, bringing an experimental streak to the synthesizers.

Anthem Of The Sun

For Anthem Of The Sun, released in 1968, the Dead combine finely crafted studio compositions (the result of over six months of work) with live excerpts, creating a disorienting hybrid effect. The sound is full and dense, while the songs' structures draw on country and blues before dissolving into a psychic exploration of the deepest recesses of the human soul.

Constanten's contribution stands out, with prepared piano borrowed from John Cage, in the chilling noise-orgy finale (“We Leave The Castle”) of one of the two long suites, “That's For The Other One”, which opens with the delicate rural ballad “Cryptical Envelopment” before moving into the magmatic “Quadlibet For Tender Feet” and the devastating “The Faster We Go”.

Hart and Kreutzmann sit at stylistic opposite poles in the way they swirl around and pound on their drums, achieving that interlocking of percussive sounds that would come to be called “total annihilation”; but it's the entire instrumental arsenal — harpsichord, trumpet, timpani, gongs, bells, celeste and all — that gets used with an avant-garde vision hitherto unknown to rock music.

“New Potato Caboose” is perhaps the best track of the bunch, thanks to the closing guitar/organ duet that implodes the languid, apocalyptic mood teased by Pigpen's vibraphone. “Alligator” (the first lyric penned by Robert Hunter) has a chamber-music approach that spills over into a trance borrowed from the peoples of Central Africa. The sonic extremism of “Caution” piles up screams, animal cries, noise and dissonance over an organ line descending into the abyss of the unknown.

Aoxomoxoa (1969) finally manages to condense the band's energy, distilling its potential into a series of more structured songs that would go on to become classics of the repertoire. The bubbling sonic magma of improvisation solidifies, and the rhythms take on more orthodox lines. The personalities of the band members merge into a well-defined style, mirrored also in the cover art drawn by Griffin and in the palindrome chosen as the album's mysterious title. This, unquestionably, is acid rock. The album was originally meant to be called (less cryptically) “Earthquake Country”, and the record's allure would probably have lost a few points for it.

The musical oxymoron between traditional foundations and eccentric arrangements produces singular yet poetic ballads like “Mountains Of The Moon” (a sci-fi journey across our satellite's dusty dunes, catapulted by unexpected harpsichord touches into a mysterious, dark medieval setting) and psychedelic gems set within Hunter's poetic, visionary lyrics, such as “St. Stephen”, which blends soul with gritty blues-rock guitar work. “Dupree's Diamond Blues” is an ironic homage to early-century ragtime, while “Doin' That Rag” gives us a vocal performance as intense as something worthy of Robbie Robertson. The vocal distortions of the brief serenade “Rosemary”, accompanied by romantic acoustic guitar, instill a subtle unease. “Cosmic Charlie” lets itself be lulled by Garcia's insistent, tinkling guitar lines drawn from Hawaiian tradition.

The last remnant of the early Dead's original sonic bulimia is “What's Become Of The Baby”, a rosary of inner nightmares. No instrumentation, just distant noises and muffled breathing. Is this the sound of the void?

The Grateful Dead's natural habitat, however, remains the stage, from which they flood the audience with endless versions of their classics. Their true masterpiece (hailed as one of the greatest live albums of all time) could therefore only come from there.

At the end of 1969, as the Airplane released the equally epoch-making Volunteers, a double album titled Live Dead (which years later, with the advent of the CD, would become an unbroken, visionary ride) was released, collecting recordings from a handful of shows (at the Avalon Ballroom and the Fillmore West in San Francisco, on January 26 and February 27, 1969 respectively). The seven tracks are tentacular creatures that coil in on themselves before unspooling toward a dark infinity, wrapping the listener in their lethal grip.

“Saint Stephen” is transmuted into a fairy-tale orgy, while “The Eleven” is first played out amid Garcia's Latin-tinged flights of fancy and the percussive sparring of Hart and Kreutzmann, before melding into the lead guitar lines of Captain Trip, who fills the sails of an ecstatic, unbroken solo. Then come two standard blues numbers turned inside out: “Turn On Your Love Light”, a percussive maelstrom that again evokes African peoples, and the grim “Death Don't Have No Mercy” (written by Rev. Gary Davis), in which the slowness becomes almost solid, where every voice and every instrument are steps toward the fatal embrace of resignation.

“Feedback” is the peak of Garcia and Constanten's sonic research; a tribute to distortion, a nightmare of deranged minds journeying toward the edges of the universe. Finally, as would become customary at their concerts, the album closes with the brief traditional “And We Bid You Goodnight”, a sigh that restores lightness to minds and hearts, making up for the lack of oxygen suffered on the supreme peaks of the unknown.

Above everything else, though, looms the twenty-three-minute “Dark Star” (written in 1967 and released as a single in 1968), which takes up the entire first side. “Dark Star” is a biblical epiphany, an epoch-making apparition that mythically reconciles opposites. Yin and yang, hot and cold, matter and spirit, inner reflection and cosmic delirium. We stand at the edge of a black hole that contains everything and nothing, on the threshold of a chasm where the most blinding light becomes the darkness of non-existence. And finally… the apotheosis… the solitary flight of Jerry Garcia's liquid guitar, weaving sonic fractals as it crosses and diverts Weir's atonal phrasing and Lesh's murky basslines, pushing to places no one will ever again dare to go. A spaceship launched at the speed of light toward parallel universes. The quintessential live track, and the Dead's passport stamp for their final flight into legend.

The epic scale of their live dimension should have been cemented by appearances at the era's biggest festivals, but mischievous fate played more than one trick on the undisputed kings of the stage. At the Woodstock festival their set was ruined by a violent storm and turned out disappointing, so much so that the band chose not to appear on either the record or the film, while at Monterey they suffered a humiliating home-turf defeat, overshadowed by Jimi Hendrix's legendary, incendiary show. A small measure of revenge would only come in 1973, when they played alongside The Allman Brothers Band and The Band in front of a record crowd of roughly 600,000 people at the Summer Jam at Watkins Glen.

Back to the Roots

With the end of the Sixties comes the twilight of the era of great gatherings and lysergic journeys. Marty Balin leaves Jefferson Airplane, and the retreat-like mood gripping the Bay Area affects the Grateful Dead as well.

So the band turns the wheel 180 degrees. As Hart would explain: “We abandoned our lunar station to set foot on Earth.” This shift also coincides with a move of the band's base from Haight-Ashbury to Hart's own ranch out in the open countryside, which becomes a meeting point for many artists of the era, including Crosby, Stills & Nash and the New Riders of the Purple Sage. With the eccentric Constanten ousted, Garcia, temporarily free of excess, indulges in languid phrasing on his brand-new slide guitar.

In May 1970, Workingman’s Dead marks the decisive turn toward country-folk, though the signs had already appeared some time earlier, with the surprise live cover of Merle Haggard's “Workingman’s Blues.”

At the time, the old 19th-century America already had, in Robbie Robertson and his band, exceptional balladeers on the East Coast, and the Byrds had also surprised everyone with the country purity of “Sweetheart Of The Rodeo.”

The Dead, however, take things a step further in renewing the tradition, snapping a series of black-and-white photographs (the period cover art is telling) remarkably cohesive in faithfully reproducing lost atmospheres, and technically superb in their pursuit of enveloping sounds. The songs drift into a stillness after the sonic storm of the preceding years. But the calm is only apparent, because the Dead keep scratching away with their sharp-edged instruments.

Garcia and Hunter now astonish not with LSD-fuelled flying carpets, but with adventurous stagecoach journeys through the red dust of Monument Valley. The themes are the classic ones of the Old West: gunslingers and saloons, card sharps and brothels brushed by trains crossing the vast western deserts.

The angelic breath of “Uncle John’s Band,” which opens the record, is a triple somersault scored to perfection, representing the successful challenge of a band able to break out of Alcatraz—that is, to break the chains of a precise and limited historical-social context (the San Francisco of the flower children) to earn the reward of musical immortality beyond genre. Melody takes precedence over sonic experimentation, and old Buck Owens (whose guitarist, Don Rich, is recognized as one of the chief influences on Garcia) peeks through the whisky- and tobacco-soaked strings of Captain Trip. “Dire Wolf,” “Black Peter,” “Casey Jones” rise to the status of new band classics (the latter in particular, inspired by the story of a train driver who died in a successful attempt to save his passengers from colliding with another train, would be played live more than 300 times), while Pigpen is the chief architect of the rough edges of “New Speedway Boogie.”

That same year, in November, they produce American Beauty, whose title refers to a well-known variety of rose, depicted on the cover by Alton Kelley and Stanley Mouse. Here is the other side of the coin.

Although the underlying inspiration is similar to that of the previous record, the sound becomes more compact and radio-friendly (and indeed, for the first time, some tracks would travel successfully over the airwaves), benefiting from the compositional input of the other band members. Weir is behind the luminous “Sugar Magnolia,” with Garcia's constant support in the background, while Lesh is responsible for the West Coast echoes of “Box Of Rain.” Hunter, who wrote all the lyrics, blends beautifully with Garcia on the delicacy of “Friend Of The Devil” and the sonic enchantment of “Ripple” (on both, David Grisman plays mandolin). Also notable is “Candyman,” with its soft, wary gait, which even evokes the dreamy Fifties. “Operator” has a driving rhythm reminiscent of Creedence Clearwater Revival. That rhythm builds further in the closing “Truckin’,” a full-band boogie that demystifies the “on the road” epic. The full New Riders Of The Purple Sage lineup takes part in the studio sessions.

These are the two albums that, despite everything, achieve chart success, at the cost of disappointing a portion of the longtime fanbase. Despite the negative judgment of some critics regarding their artistic value, their fundamental importance is nonetheless undeniable (together with the work of the Flying Burrito Brothers, Gene Clark, and Gram Parsons) to the development, in the Nineties, of the movement known as “alternative country” or “Americana.”

Solo Ambitions, Stylistic Detours and Delusions of Grandeur

In the early Seventies, all the band's musicians turn toward solo work. Among the records released, Garcia (January 1972) contains the finest material, songs that also become part of the band's live repertoire (“Bird Song,” “Sugaree,” “Loser,” “To Lay Me Down”).

In February 1971, a key figure, Mickey Hart, leaves the band. Officially to pursue his own musical path, but in reality shaken by the reckless act of his father Lenny, the group's “treasurer,” who fled, making off with most of the funds he managed.

The band's live activity, nonetheless, effortlessly yields ten sides of exceptional quality.

The double LP Grateful Dead (October 1971, also known as "Skull And Roses" and originally titled "Skull Fuck" before being censored by the record label) pairs excellent originals — like the hypnotic "Wharf Rat" and "Bertha", one of Garcia's finest songs — with covers of Merle Haggard and Kris Kristofferson (the Joplinesque "Me & Bobby McGee").

Europe '72 (November 1972), a monumental triple album, documents the band's first European tour, which marks the arrival — replacing Ron "Pigpen" McKernan (a heavy drinker who would die of liver cirrhosis on March 8, 1973) — of keyboardist Keith Godchaux (b. 1948, San Francisco – d. 1980, Marin County) alongside his wife Donna (b. 1947, San Francisco). By now the Californian band had become a true living jukebox of the New World, able to unfurl at every show a veritable ethno-musical treatise on Anglo-Saxon folk tradition: from aching country-folk ballads to roaring blues-rock, from the pure, original rock'n'roll of Chuck Berry to the free-form improvisations inherited from the acid tests. All of it delivered with consummate mastery.

It is to Pigpen himself that History Of The Grateful Dead Vol. 1 (Bear's Choice) is dedicated, a live collection featuring material recorded in '70 at the Fillmore East in New York. The title is doubly misleading, since this is in no way an anthology, nor does it set up any sequel. The "Bear" referenced is Owsley Stanley, the Dead's sound engineer. The selection draws on lesser-known original material, while among the covers the standouts are the 18-minute "Smokestack Lightnin'" and the soulful "Hard To Handle".

On March 8, 1973, the Dead launched their own record label, Grateful Dead Records, inaugurated that October with the release of Wake Of The Flood.

The sound grows ever more elegant and sophisticated, but the quality suffers from increasingly frequent compositional lapses, overly elaborate arrangements, and a rather soft approach to jazz structures, even if the melody of "Eyes Of The World" manages to conjure up some of the old magic.

Worth noting is the band's obsessive attention to sound quality, which led the Grateful Dead to build an imposing amplification rig dubbed the "Wall of Sound" (nothing to do with Phil Spector's identically named wall).

The goal was to achieve the purest possible amplification through 11 independent amplification sub-systems, so that every instrument had its own channel and its own separate set of speaker cabinets (Lesh's bass even had a dedicated channel for each string). This avoided distortion caused by intermodulation between instruments, resulting in an extremely clean sound for each of them. The speaker system was placed behind the musicians, allowing them to hear exactly what the audience heard.

Between 1974 and 1976, after four farewell shows played on home turf at Bill Graham's Winterland (later immortalized in the 1977 video Dead Movie) with the returning Hart, the band temporarily stepped away from live performance. The absence from the stage took a toll on their artistic inspiration. Albums such as Grateful Dead From The Mars Hotel (June 1974) and Blues For Allah (September 1975) left even their most devoted followers puzzled.

1977 also saw the release of What A Long Strange Trip It's Been, a double anthology covering the Warner years (1967-1972).

The live album Steal Your Face is the last work produced by Grateful Dead Records.

In the course of 1977 the band moved to Arista Records under a deal granting them full creative freedom. Their first album was Terrapin Station, which winked at progressive rock. For the first time since Anthem Of The Sun, a genuine producer was in the studio, Keith Olsen (known for his work with Fleetwood Mac), but his touch weighed down the arrangements with choirs and orchestral interludes.

Yet another change of style (and yet another stylistic misstep) came the following year with Shakedown Street, which let itself be swayed by the disco-music craze without even managing to break through commercially. Garcia and co.'s delusions of grandeur reached their peak with the summer 1978 concert (only released on record 30 years later) on the Giza plateau, where the legendary grandeur of the Great Pyramid of Cheops, together with the concurrent magic of a lunar eclipse, helped — despite everything — etch the Grateful Dead's logo into the collective imagination of an era that, by then, no longer belonged to them. Telling, in this respect, was the New Year's Eve concert held at Winterland. Once more, but for the last time, at this historic venue, which met the same fate as the equally important Fillmore West, shutting its doors forever. It marked the definitive end of the West Coast psychedelic movement.

Deaths and the end of the Grateful Dead

But this was also the beginning of the end for the Grateful Dead. In 1979 the Godchaux couple departed (Keith would die on July 14, 1980 in a car accident), and the arrival of keyboardist Brent Mydland (b. 1953, Munich – d. 1990, Lafayette), already a friend of Bob Weir's, only temporarily revitalized the band's sound, which with Go To Heaven (April 1980) returned to producing a solid studio album.

Through the 1980s, the band devoted itself almost exclusively to live performance, limiting studio output to the individual members' solo projects. In 1981, a series of marathon concerts at Radio City Music Hall in New York and the Warfield Theatre in San Francisco yielded material for two excellent double live albums released the following year, just months apart: the acoustic Reckoning and the electric Dead Set (as well as a concert film released in 1982, also on videocassette, Dead Ahead Live).

The first is without doubt the band's finest album of the Eighties, with a setlist that doesn't just revisit the two 1970 masterpieces, but digs even further back into the pre-Dead bluegrass repertoire of the Mother McCree's Uptown Jug Champions, while also picking out the best of Weir's ("Cassidy") and Garcia's ("Bird Song", "To Lay Me Down") solo output. Its twin is slightly inferior, though it still boasts another splendid Garcia ballad ("Loser") and the alluring souplesse of "Friend Of The Devil".

In the mid-80s the band's charismatic frontman starts running into trouble. In January 1985 Garcia is arrested in San Francisco's Golden Gate Park for possession of heroin. Fifteen months of rehab at a treatment centre follow, but in July 1986 he slides back into drug addiction and collapses, narrowly surviving a diabetic coma.

Because of Garcia's unstable physical and mental state, the only two studio albums released in the second half of the 80s are In The Dark (1987) — which has the double distinction of being the band's only significant showing on the Billboard charts and of containing the hit single "Touch Of Grey" (whose animated video even reached MTV's young audience) — and Build To Last (October 1989), a disappointment that sinks into the murky waters of bland synth-rock.

Struggling himself, Garcia nonetheless comes to the aid of his friend Bob Dylan during a difficult period, offering the Dead as his backing band. These unusual live appearances yield, in 1989, Dylan & The Dead, which manages the feat of disappointing both the faithful deadheads and the critics who championed the bard of Duluth.

Fate continues to hound a band already in disarray, and on 26 July 1990 Brent Mydland dies of an overdose. He is honoured with the live album Without A Net (September 1990, which includes a compelling blues rendition sung by Mydland himself of "Mr.Fantasy" by Traffic), and is replaced by Vince Welnick, later joined on piano by Bruce Hornsby for the band's final concerts.

To fill the void, starting in the 90s, the band's own label unleashes an unrelenting stream of live releases. Worth noting are One & Two From The Vault (April 1991), the unusual Infrared Roses (a collage of experimental/spacey fragments drawn from the famous "drums" and "space" sections of their shows), Hundred Year Hall (September 1995) and Dozin' At The Knick (October 1996).

In 1994 Canadian composer John Oswald pays mad/brilliant tribute to the immortality of "Dark Star", reconstructing an ideal version of it drawn from over a hundred different live performances on a double CD titled "Grayfolded".

Towering over everything is the endless Dick's Picks series, "uncut" recordings of the band's best concerts with no editing or remixing, selected by Dick Lavala, the group's official archivist (and, after his death, by David Lemieux). From 1993 onward, 36 volumes have been released to date, each identified by the date and location of the corresponding show.

The end of a story that seems to defy eternity is written on 9 August 1995. Jerry Garcia suffers a fatal heart attack in his sleep at the Serenity Knoll Drug Center in Forest Knolls, California, a clinic where he is trying to put an end to his drug addiction. Stripped of their indispensable compositional and performing backbone, the band immediately announces its disbandment.

Since then the "grateful dead" have enjoyed their well-earned eternal rest, though some members would still perform together on occasion, alternately under the names The Other Ones or Crusader Rabbit Stealth Band, and even — brazenly but tellingly — on 14 February 2003, in one last flicker, as The Dead.

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