Grateful Dead

A country-rock-blues ensemble, this was what Jerry Garcia (guitar and vocals), Ron “Pigpen” McKernan (keyboards and vocals) and Robert “Bob” Weir (guitar and vocals) put together near San Francisco back in 1963. Could that be enough? Nope. The pull of the “fifth dimension” was too strong, and so — with Phil Lesh recruited on bass and Bill Kreutzmann on drums — began a journey to the outer limits (and often well beyond) of what we usually understand as vision. The time of Haight Ashbury arrived, of LSD-fuelled happenings, of a name that sounded ancient, distant, irreverent: it's 1965, and the Grateful Dead are born. More a commune than a band: within a couple of years they recruit a second drummer (Mickey Hart), an elusive lyricist (Robert Hunter) and a colourful keyboardist (Tom Constanten). Their first shot (“Grateful Dead”, 1967) is unresolved and out of focus, but the next two brushstrokes (“Anthem Of The Sun” in 1968 and “Aoxomoxoa” in 1969) shift the whole picture's coordinates, opening up goosebump-inducing perspectives along the lines of an untethered, incalculable psych attitude. But it's above all their live activity that underlines the Grateful Dead's presence within the “flower power” scene: legend has it of visionary concerts, dense as dreams and long as rivers. And it's “Live Dead”, from 1969, the record that tells us this side of the story. As well as it could possibly be told.

A delicate crossing of strings (the sordid, hushed tones of Lesh's bass and the thin, liquid, volatile lines of Garcia's guitar) sprouts from nowhere and winds itself around an ancient blues progression, the drums flutter fragile and airy, Constanten's organ stitches together a jagged, mysterious ridge, Weir's guitar scatters disorienting atonal phrases: almost without noticing, we're on our way to the heart of “Dark Star”. Then, suddenly, Jerry's sour voice scatters lost dice of meaning, like a silent collision, like a cut in the soul: the sound seems shaken, it collapses and recoils into a suspended undertow, it seems to retreat into a dimension that needs no words (indeed, fears them), the syncopated, tangled rhythm section brings us back onto the trail of the initial theme, where finally — after celebrating a genuine epiphany for organ and guitars — a hidden ritual is consumed, where everything stops, as if in contemplation, beneath a nocturnal rain of celestial diamonds.

Right on its heels comes a torrential medley (?!): it opens with the frozen country of “Saint Stephen”, which the grateful dead's visionary art turns into a feast of the senses and acid orgasm, with that miraculous interlude (a kind of suspended round dance) scattering further spores of myth and desecration. Then, here we are on the treadmill of “The Eleven”: Latin frenzies infect the masterful percussive interplay of Hart and Kreutzmann, Weir's guitar snarls viciously, Lesh holds his ground with his hulking, tireless four-string, the organ is a discreet drone while Garcia darts off on uncontainable tangents and fabulous polychromies, in a crescendo that leads to the brink of ecstasy and amnesia, uprooting the last remaining scaffolding that separated (once) body and soul. The sound bares its claws, its capricious profile, a diffuse and blinding splendour: and it's already time to return to earth with an overflowing “Turn On Your Love Light” (the R&B standard by J. Scott and D. Malone), where vocals and refrain once again take centre stage, though riddled with the wild bursts of the two reckless percussionists, with the guitars, backing vocals and keyboards' dilations and detours imposing traces of boogie, funky, garage and gospel onto the restless unfolding of the melody. It's a distilled scream, the kaleidoscope's explosion: fa-bu-lous!

Like a bleak awakening, as if the vision could not avoid the dark side of things, the intoxication of the senses gives way to the grim “Death Don't Have No Mercy” (the classic penned by rev. Gary Davis), a blues in which slowness reaches an almost solid state, where every voice and every instrument is a step toward the fatal embrace of resignation. Pigpen's organ rears up into the soul like a tear falling upwards, Lesh's bass is a relentless yet merciful executioner, the two drummers spread out bleak dirges, Weir as usual works in rough, oblique registers, Garcia is simply priceless both on vocals (a veil of anger, a wagon-load of sadness on a track of pain) and — naturally — in his searing, dripping plectrum work.

Next come the nearly eight minutes of “Feedback”: a listen as prickly as it is fascinating, the dreamlike layering of sharp distortions, of rustling drapery and icy globular shapes, the response of “germinal” rock sound to the interstellar journeys of Floydian memory. Then, just as happened at their concerts, the album closes with the very brief traditional “And We Bid You Goodnight”, a breath of lightness, voices and heart, the nakedness of a dream that, though American, feels it can soar to any height and — therefore — beyond any border.

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30/10/2006