Anarchy, State, and the Grateful Dead

As we recently observed the 12th anniversary of the passing of Jerry Garcia, I have been thinking a lot about the Dead and what they modeled for us on-stage.

It wasn't Utopia, exactly, but it was pretty damn close, it seems to me.

What the Dead accomplished musically was intimately related to the "polity" that they configured whenever they performed publicly: a loose confederation of individual talents, each intensely concerned with working through his (or her, let us not forget Donna Jean) particular musical vision.

What that meant for many of us was hours of time chewed up while the members of the "band" noodled around with their instruments, ostensibly searching for something--like a bunch of absent-minded professors groping first their suit-coats, then their valises, desperately trying to remember where they left their lecture notes.

Much of the time, the fact that the individual members of the Dead were located in reasonably close proximity to one another on stage was the only legitimate sense in which it could be said that they were playing "together" at all.

But, eventually, one musician would come up with something--a riff, a thin ribbon of melody--that would attract the attention of another musician and the two would begin to play off one another; others would pick up on what the pair was doing and a musical consensus would emerge. Before you knew it, Garcia was standing at the mike murmuring the words to Bonnie Dobson's apocalyptic folk standard "Morning Dew" and, as with all apocalypses, the shit was about to go down. And the Dead--all together now (as the Beatles would say)--were bringing the eschaton home.

It was just too much. A revelation almost every time.

I would contrast this musical methodology with that of another long-time favorite of mine, Bruce Springsteen and the E-Street Band. Bruce and the E-Streeters are nothing if not tight. They have a work ethic that produces music of amazing intensity and, live, even improvisation. But it is always at the direction of the band-leader, Mr. Springsteen (they don't call him the Boss for nothin'). Their magic (interestingly, the title of their forthcoming release) is a honed magic.

The Dead's magic was also honed by years of playing together, but it always had a surprisingness and spontaneity about it that I doubt Bruce and the E-Streeters would care to risk--in public at any rate. Rehearsal may be another matter. For the Dead, however, it was always rehearsal--a lifetime of it. And it had to be that way because the individual members of the group refused always to subordinate their individual visions to the collective--except when the moment seemed right.

In this way the Grateful Dead modeled for us all a vision of an egalitarian society: one that trades the efficiencies necessary to generate sustained intensity for the individual space necessary to allow idiosyncrasies to play themselves out. It could be aggravating, boring, narcissistic-seeming and, sometimes, even a little bit embarrassing: but these down-sides just may be the price one must pay to maximize individual artistic freedom.