Come Hear Uncle Sam's Band

The hippie capitalism of the Grateful Dead.

Brian Doherty from the March 2003 issue

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And so they did -- and a rich living it was. Over the years, the Deadhead scene grew slowly and steadily, with the band moving from clubs and theaters to arenas, never losing momentum even as they were written off by the press as irrelevant relics. The crowds kept getting bigger and more dedicated through the Reagan '80s, when the legendary parking lot and camping scenes that characterized their fanatical devotion really came into their own.

Of course, as the scene got bigger, the sellout talk got louder, especially when, in 1987, the Dead scored their first and only Top 10 hit, "A Touch of Grey." Cognoscenti particularly blamed MTV for exposing the bored kids of the late Reagan years to the groovy party scene of a Dead show. Still, no one could accuse the Dead of crassly chasing a mass audience. Even for the most commerce-hating critic, it would be hard to make the case that the Dead's riches came from anything other than wanting to play music in front of an appreciative audience and trying to accommodate the growing numbers who wanted in on the fun. They even let their fans tape their shows openly, while encouraging them to merely trade, not sell, the bootlegged results.

Of course, over the years things changed (change being something all psychedelic veterans can readily understand). In the old days, the Dead insisted that the audience was as important a part of the experience as the band itself in creating a group-consciousness "bleshing" (the gestalt concept derived from Theodore Sturgeon's 1953 beloved-by-hippies novel More Than Human). Later, one Dead critic charged, the band members found themselves viewing enormous audiences of strangers all over the world with "abstract feelings of affection, pity, or contempt" rather than the intensely personal connection they once felt for Haight-Ashbury crowds. But ultimately the Dead's only sin lay in being loved too well by too many people.

Even in the '90s, when Jerry Garcia's health and musical abilities were clearly on the wane and a long vacation might have been called for, the music never stopped. To be sure, that was partly because the band felt they couldn't afford to stop -- they now had a huge business machine relying on the income touring provided. The Dead never sold that many records for a band of their prominence, and the road and support crews didn't make money from them anyway.

From the beginning, the Dead was less like a corporation and more like a communal family that kept growing. They tended to have great loyalty to old friends, no matter how difficult they became, and were more terrorized by their rough-and-tumble crew than bosses to them. Indeed, the band once allowed the janitor at their office to shoot down a suggestion from rock superpromoter Bill Graham as "too commercial." The Dead took a yearlong hiatus in 1975 to quietly encourage some of their road crew to find other work -- they had neither the heart nor the will to outright fire them.

They tried an early, brief experiment running their own record label in 1973, the first major rock band to make a full end run around the big labels. The scoundrel who ran their label ripped them off for over $100,000. But before he took the money and ran, he dreamed of circumventing normal distribution channels by selling Dead albums from ice cream trucks. He contemplated getting a minority business loan from the government on the grounds that freaks like the Dead were certainly a minority.

For all their open-hearted and loving celebration of America, the Dead and their old pal Kesey were still, as their San Francisco compadres the Jefferson Airplane musically put it, "outlaws in the eyes of America." Although their acid sacrament was perfectly legal during the actual Acid Tests (which ran from 1964 until LSD was outlawed in 1966), milder marijuana was not. The original Prankster scene withered when Kesey fled to Mexico, running from a pot rap. The Dead's first communal home on Ashbury Street suffered a pot raid and arrest. Later, as they famously chronicled in song, they were "busted down on Bourbon Street/set up like a bowling pin."

In later years, federal and local drug cops were among the band's most loyal ticket buyers, treating Dead audiences as a rich source of drug arrests. The famously apolitical Dead were getting flack to weigh in as a business and cultural influence against mandatory minimum sentences and the injustice of drug law enforcement. Yet they never did. As Garcia once said, "We don't have anything to tell anybody. We don't want to change anybody."

The Dead occupy a unique niche in American musical history. A rock 'n' roll band playing folky songs with a jazzman's dedication to improvisation, they perplexed both themselves and critics by being the only group of any prominence to occupy the space they claimed through all the '60s, '70s, and '80s. But as they drew sustenance from the mighty river of American folk styles, so they became a source for American music further downstream. In the '90s, the Dead's spirit gave birth to a new wave of "jam bands" -- whose fans emulate the Deadheads in their obsessive dedication and camp following -- best exemplified by Phish.

The Dead left behind a legacy of extraordinary songs and performances -- a legacy best explored through hundreds of hours of recordings of live shows rather than through the band's usually failed studio efforts. As A Long Strange Trip shows, the Dead also left behind a legacy that challenges the idea, often voiced by the left and the right, that markets demean and disable culture. The Dead were a living example of how a communal enterprise can pursue a largely self-created way of art and life and bring real joy to millions.

Yet at the same time and with the purest motives, the band could also be a gigantic moneymaking machine that supported people, art, and a lifestyle. Art and commerce become the same thing when people are willing -- or insanely eager -- to pay for the privilege of being exposed to the art.

In achieving this, the Dead were true American capitalist visionaries, rich in dollars but also striving to remain rich in spirit. Doing their own thing, they became multimillionaires by accident, damn the complainers and damn the torpedoes. Like the character in one of their finest songs, "Uncle John's Band," they lived in a silver mine but called it Beggar's Tomb.

Former Dead manager Richard Loren told Carol Brightman, author of the 1998 book Sweet Chaos: The Grateful Dead's American Adventure, that the Dead were "anarchists" but also that "they were Americans. When I think of the Grateful Dead, I think of a flag and I think of a rose and I think of a steak and I think of a gun. And I think of the West, and I think of consciousness expansion. I think of irreverence and anarchy and I think of something pure."

The Dead insisted they had no message. But Garcia once summed up a most admirable anti-message about what the Dead experience meant: "A combination of music and the psychedelic experience taught me to fear power. I mean fear it and hate it." As the Dead once sang, perhaps Uncle Sam really was hiding out in a rock 'n' roll band.