Come Hear Uncle Sam's Band

The hippie capitalism of the Grateful Dead.

Brian Doherty from the March 2003 issue

A Long Strange Trip: The Inside History of the Grateful Dead, by Dennis McNally, New York: Broadway Books, 684 pages, $30

Robert Hunter, lyricist for the Grateful Dead, was interviewed in the 1990s by someone who wanted to know where that quintessential '60s countercultural band had stood on the key issue of those times-that-were-a-changin'. What was the Dead's relationship, the interviewer wondered, to the activist political movement that had been dedicated to bringing down a fascist warmongering Amerika?

Hunter replied that he found distasteful the fealty to Moscow and Peking (as it was called back then) widespread among prominent '60s revolutionaries. That fealty, he thought, was why that aspect of the '60s faded away while the Dead kept on truckin'. "We honor American culture, and what we find good in it," Hunter said of the Dead. And he knew American culture from many perspectives. As a member of the National Guard, Hunter had been called up to keep order during the 1965 Watts riots.

Never ones to sell a ton of records, the Grateful Dead were a phenomenally popular touring act in a career that started in 1965 and continued until the 1995 death of lead guitarist Jerry Garcia. Yet they were also subject to powerful enmity and mockery, often written off as standard bearers for an ignorant, torpid, left-wing hippie cult and an awful band of shapeless, self-indulgent musicians besides.

Yet as much as their detractors might prefer to keep them buried, the Dead again choogle among us. The remaining members of the band reunited last fall to tour as The Other Ones. And now here's A Long Strange Trip: The Inside History of the Grateful Dead, a huge, new, officially authorized history by Dennis McNally.

McNally is the author of 1979's well-regarded Desolate Angel: Jack Kerouac, the Beat Generation, and America. While researching that book, he decided that he "wanted to write a two-volume history of post-World War II American bohemia, volume one via the life of Kerouac and volume two through the lives of the Grateful Dead." In 1984, while researching this Dead bio, he was hired by the Dead to be their publicist. Garcia loved McNally's Kerouac bio and embraced him warmly.

This professional intimacy provides the book with insider insight and cooperation even as it stifles any brutal outsider objectivity. Still, McNally has written the most thorough, if not necessarily the most insightful, exploration of what he aptly calls "a spiritual experience, a musical phenomenon, and a business." The Grateful Dead's story is a vivid example of how and why the free pursuit of art and community can transform almost magically into a huge culture business. Neither the band's hacky-sacking devotees nor its conservative button-down critics may want to admit it, but the Dead is best understood as an amazing, traveling capitalist commune.

More than any other band, the Grateful Dead was always more than just a band. To tens of thousands of camp followers -- the notorious Deadheads -- they were a way of life, an ongoing odyssey, a modern American vision quest that stretched the length and breadth of the land. But when it came to leading the multitudes, Garcia was unambiguous:

"Our trip was never to go out and change the world. I mean, what would we change it to? Whatever we did would probably be worse than the way it is now." Although they used to do benefits for friends and even started their own charitable foundation, the Rex Foundation (which has given away over $6 million to a wide variety of social, artistic, and environmental causes that strike the fancies of Dead members and employees), they didn't take public stands on the hot issues of the '60s: Vietnam, civil rights, women's lib, socialist revolution.

Instead, the Dead just did their own thing -- pursuing their improvisational take on traditional American song forms in an innovative way. They were insular, largely segregated from the standard practices of the pop music industry. They practiced communal art and pleasure as a conduit to a different level of consciousness. In that, they are firmly embedded in a classic American grain dating back to Emerson -- modern transcendentalists, using the contemporary tools of electronically amplified music and, of course, huge amounts of psychedelic drugs.

The Dead were a throwback to the '50s Beat cool that reigned when Garcia and Hunter, born in 1942 and 1941 respectively, were kids. Its disengaged cynicism about the square masses and its pursuit of personal, experiential edges appealed to them in a way the radical '60s never did. "As far as we were concerned," said Dead guitarist Bob Weir, "the war was their business -- the people who were fighting it. We wanted nothing to do with it, and that was that. We weren't into protesting it." The Dead palled around with the Merry Pranksters and the Hell's Angels, not Students for a Democratic Society and the Weather Underground. "All that campus confusion seemed laughable," Garcia said. "Why enter this closed society and make an effort to liberalize it when that's never been its function? Why not leave and go somewhere else?"

That's what the Grateful Dead did. They started as a barroom rock and blues act in and around Palo Alto. As bohemians in that place and time tended to do, they gravitated toward the drug and experimental art scenes happening around the redoubt of renegade novelist Ken Kesey and his cronies, the Merry Pranksters. The Pranksters had settled in the nearby woods of La Honda and became famous for their "Acid Tests" -- wild, psychedelic-fueled art parties. The Dead became the house band for the tests, and it was in that atmosphere that the Dead became the Dead -- an LSD-fueled improvisational groove machine without peer or even comparison.

One of the ironies of that scene was the U.S. government's key role in creating it. Robert Hunter suggested that in a way the U.S. government "created me...and Kesey and the Acid Tests," and thus the Grateful Dead. Both Hunter and Kesey were first exposed to powerful psychedelics such as LSD, mescaline, and psilocybin as volunteers in government military research in the early '60s. (That research didn't just create hippies. Military strategist Herman Kahn of the RAND Corporation was also a heavy Army acidhead. He insisted that during one particularly heavy trip when he seemed to be just lolling about on the floor muttering "wow," he was really quietly reviewing potential bombing strategies against Red China.)

What eventually became a gigantic business -- by 1993 the Dead had become the most popular live act in American history, grossing $47 million a year and selling 1.8 million tickets -- first found its identity as an unpaid party band. The Dead further cemented their reputation in San Francisco's Haight-Ashbury neighborhood as frequent free entertainers in street and park concerts. The notion of free was the prime juju of the Haight-Ashbury scene circa 1965-'67, best exemplified by the secretive, legendary street gang the Diggers, who took their name from a band of 17th-century English proto-communists.

The Diggers were led by Emmett Grogan. A street thief since his early teens, Grogan gave away (mostly stolen) food and goods to the people of the Haight, a radical praxis to escape what he considered the constrictions of bourgeois capitalism. According to Grogan in his highly entertaining 1972 autohagiography, Ringolevio: A Life Played for Keeps, some East Coast hipsters were bummed out with the Dead when they first started playing there because they sold tickets. The Dead had to explain that while they reserved the right to play for fun and for free in their community and among their friends, they were in fact trying to earn a living through music.

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