Classic Rock: Grateful Dead, Forerunners of Digital Culture

From Haight-Ashbury, the alternative neighborhood of San Francisco’s Summer of Love, to the Sphere in Las Vegas, the most technological space for live music: “What a long strange trip it’s been”.
After U2, Phish arrived in the Nevada arena first, then Dead & Co: both bands are directly or indirectly descended from the Grateful Dead.

Phish are icons of the jam band world that has the Grateful Dead as its founding fathers; Dead & Co are the latest incarnation of some of the band’s surviving members.
The choice of this music, in this symbolic place, is a testimony, one of many possible, of how the Grateful Dead are an institution of rock and American culture.

“What a long strange trip it’s been”, precisely: the band sang in “Truckin'”, in one of their most famous songs, one of those that even non-followers of the cult of Jerry Garcia and co. know. And yet they still boast a huge fan base, almost 20 years after the death of their leader: Dead & Co have played in stadiums and the tradition of camping out in parking lots – the “parking lot scene” – was invented by Dead Head, not the Swifties. In 2015, all the surviving original members met up to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the group (and the 20th anniversary of Garcia’s death): 5 concerts with Trey Anastasio of Phish on vocals and guitar instead of the historic leader, over 300,000 people to see them live and 400,000 people in theaters or with a ticket for the live streaming viewing – before Taylor Swift, they were there.

Between studio and live

The story of the Grateful Dead is a slice of American culture, an adventure full of great music but also of great contradictions: starting with the leader Jerry Garcia, a musical genius but a self-destructive figure. A pacifist leader who did not want to lead, who commands a brigade of musicians who gather around the Bay Area in the midst of the psychedelic era of the 60s.
Active from ’65 to ’95, in the context in which the hippie counterculture was born, they released their first eponymous album in 1967.

The beginnings are acid and psychedelic in the 60s, and the great albums of the early 70s are more linked to folk rock, “Working man’s dead” and “American beauty” – true masterpieces. But already in the 60s the myth of the band is fueled by the legendary concerts in which the songs expand becoming very long jams, between psychedelia and jazz, and to certify this myth is “Live/Dead”, a live album from ’69. Musically, the history of the band thus travels on two tracks, the discographic one and the live one. The studio activity would continue even if in a much more discontinuous way: the Dead have always had a contrasting relationship with the discography and the recording studio, and the “vulgate” will remain that they have always given their best live.

Bootlegs and live records

In 30 years of career they have played more than 2350 concerts performing more than 500 different songs, never played twice in the same way. Of these shows, 2200 were recorded by the band and fans, encouraged by the group to exchange audio cassettes. A community that has been digitized since the dawn of the Internet: on the Internet Archive you can find over 15,000 recordings in streaming/download: of each date there are several versions, most directly from soundboards, with fans who have fun mixing them together to obtain a different sound.

Since 1991, the Dead have regularly and officially released recordings from their archive.

Over 200 live albums have been released, at a rate of 5-6 per year: most are sold directly and exclusively on Dead.net (tens of thousands of copies that usually sell out in a few days), the most important ones through Rhino, a Warner group label. In short, the Dead are a perfect example of how extreme creativity – never doing a concert the same as another, never playing the same song the same way – has created a huge fan base and has become a business model that many imitate. There are even those who have written books on marketing and business – not just music marketing, marketing tout-court – using the Grateful Dead as a model that anticipated digital culture by decades.

Dark Star

The perfect representation of the magic of the Grateful Dead is “Dark star”. Much more than a song, the symbol of a way of making and consuming music.
It was recorded in ’67 and released only as a single: a flop of a few thousand copies. It was the first collaboration with the lyricist Robert Hunter, who wrote a psychedelic and cosmic text: not even he knew what “Shall we go, you and I while we can/Through the transitive nightfall of diamonds?” meant. A song of less than 3 minutes: the Grateful Dead began to play it live, to expand it, to use it as a basis for improvisations and experimentations, with Garcia’s guitar weaving melodies, supported by Bob Weir’s rhythm and Phil Lesh’s bass. In 1969 it began to last up to 30 minutes, combining rock, psychedelia, folk, jazz.

It became a legend in ’69 when it was released on the first live album, the one that would consecrate the fame of the group: in “Live/Dead” it took up an entire side, 23 minutes.

During the band’s career it was included in the setlist over 200 times, never a version the same as another: it was always restructured and destructured. Until ’74 it was played regularly, lasting up to 40 minutes, then it disappeared from the setlists: Garcia said that he had said and played everything he could, in that song. But at that point it became even more legendary among the fans, the “holy grail” that was chased at concerts. Between ’75 and ’89 it was played only 5 times, then it returned to the setlist with regularity, although infrequently, in the last years of the band.

Curiously, the “Live/dead” version would remain the only official live version for over 20 years, until the early 90s, when the band began publishing the first concerts from the archives. Today there are dozens of officially published versions, in addition to the hundreds of unofficial ones. Extreme fanaticism, of course, like the endless discussion among Deadheads about which version is the best. Among these, certainly the one from August 1972 in Oregon, published a few years ago in “Sunshine daydream”.

Today in Dead & Co, instead of Garcia there is John Mayer who is a pop-rock singer with a solid guitar and psychedelic background. But “Dark star” is played often, even at the Sphere in Las Vegas…