The Music Of The Grateful Dead example essay topic

Sex, drugs, and revolutionary politics are commonplace in North America, but rock and roll all melted it together, especially in San Francisco in the sixties. One notable band to come out of this era was the Grateful Dead. The Grateful Dead started out as a small rock and blues band, then would go on to stimulate an entire generation to prolong, and finally a whole population of people to follow them from concert to concert and enjoy their music through their whole lives. In just thirty years the Grateful Dead became one of the single most popular rock groups in the world, with their touring rates breaking records, without becoming a focus of the media. They hardly got radio play, top forty hits, or even best selling records. But their fans continued to grow in numbers in appreciation for the Dead.

Even after the band's dismembering in 1995 due to the death of guitarists / lead vocalist Jerry Garcia, people still focus their lives around the standard of living the Grateful Dead has proposed for many. Their fans, who started as "flower children" and are more recently known as just "deadheads", will never let the music die away. As years went by, these flower children of the sixties grew up and continued on with their lives and the members of the Grateful Dead grew as well. Many changes took place over the course of their thirty-year run. The times in America were changing and each year brought about new adventures and especially new drugs. Due to changing drug experiences their lyrics were changing as well.

References of America growing older and new drugs are represented in the lyrics of their songs. As the drugs started to take their toll, their music and image would change as well. The Grateful Dead, although rooting from the sixties era of peace, love, and happiness, they would not stay with the same type of music forever. The band itself grew older and changed as a band with each new decade. They have been a huge part of American culture whether people choose to accept it or not. Over the ages of American rock civilization, the Grateful Dead's music has also changed millions of people.

The way an entire population would change their lifestyles to the ways of the Grateful Dead. No other band has taken an era and made it last over thirty years later. Despite all these changes, the Grateful Dead showed some sort of power, above all others and demonstrated this power from the stage through their music. Their power would enable them to always keep at least sixty thousand people dancing at the concerts, show after show, year after year, decade after decade. In the middle of the sixties, San Francisco, California was a town full of many new and upcoming bands. The theme of the time was peace and love and a whole new wave of music was about to explode out of the San Francisco Bay Area.

During this time as well, new drugs like acid, LSD were introduced to the whole world legally. By late 1964, LSD was thriving in the Haight-Ashbury district of San Francisco and the whole community was getting into this new scene. LSD was described as psychedelic, meaning mind manifesting. A new shape of music came out on a result of this drug, where the musicians would play blasted out of their mind on acid. LSD fashioned many new bands.

Five young guys who shared their love of music as their greatest common interest got together a band and called themselves The Warlocks. The members of the band included Jerry Garcia, Ron "Pigpen" Mc Kernan, Phil Lesh, Bob Weir, and Bill Kreutzmann. In December of 1965, while looking through a dictionary the Warlocks decided to change their name to The Grateful Dead, meaning the burial of Egyptian Pharoah's. This term was also the basis of many folk stories in which the hero of the story gave his last penny to aid a community in proper burial for a person. The hero then meets a companion that aids him in an impossible test; the story ends with the companion disclosing himself as the man who was originally the corpse that the hero helped. This name that they chose had shock value and show-business flair, but no one had any imagination that this band would start a revolution that would last a lifetime.

The newly named Grateful Dead started playing in local bars and clubs until asked to be the house band for the Acid Tests by author Ken Kesey. Kesey, the leader of the LSD-using group of outlaws the Merry Pranksters, threw a series of parties called the Acid Tests. The acid tests were basically all night Saturday night parties featuring LSD by millionaire drug manufacturer Owsley Stanley, multi-media light shows, and the music of the Grateful Dead. Owsley would play a huge part in the Grateful Dead's career providing the LSD for the acid tests then later on, the funds for the Grateful Dead to continue their music career when times were getting rough. The Grateful Dead were the perfect house acid test band because they would be strung out of their mind on acid, and each song would take about two to three hours a piece with long noodle-like rhythms, getting each listener lost in the music. The Grateful Dead, quoted in an interview with bassist Phil Lesh in the 1980's, claim they think that if it weren't for the acid tests, they would have been just another band.

The acid tests had been finally put to a stop because the police could not control what was going on. To keep the music alive, producers such as Bill Graham and Chet Helms hosted the Grateful Dead in their ballrooms. They had visions that the type of music that the Grateful Dead played was the formation of the direction that music was going in. Because of the concert success in these ballrooms, they became the most well-known acid rock band in the San Francisco area, playing only when the spirit moved them. In doing this, the Grateful Dead became trademarked as a band that no sets of music were ever planned, and they really had no desires to make it big in the media. Their goal was to provide music for dancing and partying, no matter what drugs you were on.

Instead of trying to promote their albums and then going along with the false image that the advertising agency would make up for them, they did what they felt like doing and did not put much emphasis on being famous. The way to enjoy the real essence of the Grateful Dead was through experience. You had to experience live the Dead show to understand why they made it so big. According to music critic and author of the book Summer of Love, Joel Selv in, the fans of The Grateful Dead, deadheads, were much different then fans of other bands. They were described as "hard-core hippies who came out of the woodwork, people who macram'e their own clothes, who had to hustle to scrape up the three bucks for a show, who didn't have much of a job". These followers of the Dead lived for the show, and the Dead continued to collect followers in numbers throughout the 60's, 70's, 80's, 90's, and today.

Many fans of the Grateful Dead use drugs while attending their concerts. One hippie explained it was easier to listen to all the melodies that the six members of the Grateful Dead were playing at once. Acid helped people do this, acid also helped people dance, moving to the music as if they were apart of it. Some would dance on other drugs like ecstasy and would say that your body could feel every beat of the music. The Grateful Dead became a worldwide-known band when first playing at the Trips Festival in January of 1966. The festival, run by Ken Kesey and Bill Graham, was a chance for the rest of the world to see what the San Francisco Bay area had been experiencing for the last year.

The event was basically a three-day circus, with music, light shows, silent movies and pictures flashed up on big screens, and all the LSD that was brought by the concertgoers to keep all the attendees happy. Because of the nationwide attention of this festival, thousands of youth flocked to the Bay area. After the success of the Trips Festival, different festivals began popping up everywhere, and hippie culture became a way of living for these youths. LSD shaped much of the Grateful Dead's music. By this time all of the band except for Pigpen were getting blasted off LSD all of the time. Acid introduced the band to the power of a thought, their lyrics became soulful and music became far out.

Described by Candace Brightman, the Grateful Dead's full time lighting designer "LSD puts you in tune with nature, you feel as though you are apart of it". But the Grateful Dead members did not start taking LSD until the end of 1964, up until that time, they were smoking marijuana, taking speed, and drinking alcohol. Most of the bands members were shooting up methedrine nearly every day. But by the end of 1964, they started used mind-altering drugs that transformed their music and the expectations of their fans and audiences forever. Playing high on LSD, the band would go off in their own tangents, and either the whole band would follow, or everyone would be going off on their own. The Grateful Dead's music kept changing on account of their different drug uses.

While most of the members of the Grateful Dead were using heavy drugs and getting high, Pigpen's drug of choice was always alcohol. He hardly ever did drugs except for when he would get "p ranked" which was getting slipped acid without knowing it. Once someone slipped him 2,000 or more micrograms of LSD before a show. He couldn't even play the second set, he sat upstairs just repeating over and over again, "I'm transparent.

I see it all now. And I don't like what I see". From then on he knew from his soul that he didn't need LSD. He begged people not to dose him ever again.

The Grateful Dead moved all in together in September of 1966. They occupied house at 710 Ashbury street in the Haight-Ashbury district of San Francisco. Friends, girlfriends and kids also lived with the band. During the day time, the band would sit around on the giant stoop outside, smoking grass and giving free concerts to the street. These days of free drugs would not last forever. On October 6, 1966, the day that LSD was claimed illegal; the Grateful Dead joined other bands in a Love Pageant Rally.

This marked the debut of the song, "Alice D. Millionaire" written about LSD, titled after a San Francisco Chronicle article about the arrest of Owsley, the predominant LSD manufacturer, titled "LSD Millionaire Arrested". Lyricist and good friend of the band Robert Hunter wrote most of the lyrics to the songs by the Grateful Dead. Most of the lyrics were based on the experiences of the band. During the sixties, other lyrics containing references of LSD started showing up in the bands melodies. Everything was about going out, throwing parties, and having fun. One of the most popular lyrics of the sixties promoted their fans to take LSD and party with the band, "So take off your shoes child, and take off your hat.

Try on your wings, and find out where it's at. Hey hey, come right away, join the party, party everyday" (The Golden Road (To Unlimited Devotion) 1967). The songs of the 1960's were all about tripping because of the frequent drug use, "What a Long Strange Trip Its Been", was a metaphor for the Dead and a popular lyric to come out of the sixties. The band at this time were expanding on what they could produce as musicians.

They were becoming a stable band and exploring new ideas to take the band further. Since the Grateful Dead had always tried to achieve the biggest, loudest sound ever, they got the idea to add another drummer with a second set of drums. Talented Mickey Hart joined the Grateful Dead on drums in September of 1967. Now that the band had two sets of drummers, during every show a whole section of time is devoted to drum solos. By 1967, the San Francisco Bay area was the subject of the hippie movement and many thought this would turn this city into a major music center. Instead, major political problems came into play.

War came about and the vision of peace, love, and happiness was left behind. In San Francisco, a "Death of Hippie" parade went through the streets, ending in the burial of the Psychedelic Shop's sign, a well-known hippie store, and a coffin full of paraphernalia was set to fire. The members of the Grateful Dead got busted with marijuana charges in a raid in their house at 710 Ashbury Street. The members of the Grateful Dead decided to leave town, describing the town as if it was invaded by the body snatchers. Members of the Dead moved to Marin County, north of San Francisco, in different ranches where they would live with family members, girlfriends, and roadies.

This accumulated to many people living at these different ranches, because for two years straight, the Dead was on the road, taking acid and having numerous children. Mountain Girl, otherwise known as Carolyn Adams, Garcia's second wife described the times at one of the ranches, Ranch Olompali as, The ranch was bobbing in a sea of hallucinogens, we would take all our clothes off and paint lines on ourselves and dance around in the sunlight, which was what the Pranksters did in La Honda, their headquarters. It was very infectious, so infectious that she is certain it will happen again, even in a culture convinced, as ours is, that it will never happen again (Brightman 177). Problems did start to revolve around heavy drug use within the band in 1968.

Preparing for their third album, "Aoxomoxoa", Garcia noticed that Bob Weir's tuning and timing were off, as a result of doing too much acid. Pigpen was also struggling and falling behind, due to his heavy drinking problem. Pigpen was rehearsing less and spending less time with the band. The Grateful Dead tried to help each other out and get through their problems together because they knew that they had started this whole thing as partners in the Grateful Dead, and the band would not be the same without every member. They also added Tom Constanten to the band on piano to help keep up the momentum of the Grateful Dead. The Grateful Dead started to move away from the blues element in their music.

This was largely due to the bands heavy drug problems. Pigpen, the biggest supporter of the blues music, wasn't into psychedelics like the rest of the band. The other members started playing long drawn out jams in their music, moving away from Pigpen's choice. Producer Rock Scully described this time as", (Pigpen) He isn't into drugs, period.

And here's Garcia and Weir stretched out to the max, and Phil taking acid through his eyes with eyedroppers", (Scully 154). Tom Constanten decided to quit the band in January of 1970 after less than two years with the band. As a talented classical pianist, he's had enough with the band and nobody tried to stop him from leaving. Despite all these problems that were going on inside the Grateful Dead, an introduction of a new drug in America, cocaine, would once again change the whole course and direction of the Grateful Dead's image and music. By the end of 1970 something happened to the drug supply for the Grateful Dead, the acid was beginning to get harder to find, and new drugs were popping up in America everywhere.

The band started using cocaine and opiates during the 1970's, probably due to the appeal of the lack of needles. Cocaine brought about a whole new world of problems for the band. The band due to touring all the time and expenses of moving equipment and taking care of the extended family began to realize all of the expenses that came with the job. They didn't make much money for themselves and cocaine would eat up the rest of the money.

Carolyn Adams, Jerry's second wife described the time as, "Cocaine is God's way of telling you that you have too much money, so the money began to vanish, to leak away" (Brightman 182). The Grateful Dead used cocaine as a work drug, using it to produce more music and write more songs. LSD was used much less frequently, but still used as an elixir, a break from work, or a prank, used when an unsuspecting friend or foe was dosed. The introduction of cocaine changed the whole path that the Grateful Dead's music was going in when they were high of LSD. During the end of 1970, the Grateful Dead brought out two new albums that have been described by producer Rock Scully as, "folk music that has taken LSD and come out the other side". (Brightman 178) These albums "Workingman's Dead" and "American Beauty", represented a return to the form of traditional American music that the Grateful Dead started out with, but in a more personal sense, the albums reflected a shifting consciousness within the band.

"Workingman's Dead", according to lyricist Robert Hunter, was a conscious reaction against LSD. "Like, hold it, we said. Just a minute now, we " re getting off the track here. Let's get back to our roots. Push this acid stuff aside!" (Brightman 179).

Due to the new cocaine use in the seventies, lyrics containing references to cocaine started showing up in their songs. The song "Casey Jones" written in 1969 sports the lyrics "Driving that train, high on cocaine", this describes the bus Further and the Merry Pranksters who went cross country in the bus. Casey Jones is prankster Neal Cassidy the driver of the bus and he was always blasted on speed and other drugs. A lot of the lyrics were metaphors from the early partying drug induced lifestyle they had performed. For example the song, Dire Wolf, written in 1973 had lyrics describing an out of luck gambler staggering about in a haze of red whiskey. This is an extended metaphor for the chemical excesses and romantic losses Hunter and the rest of the band suffered throughout the 1960's.

Pigpen died in 1973, due to cirrhosis of the liver and the music of the Grateful Dead changed dramatically. They lost something after Pigpen died; it was something they would not, and could not, ever regain. They never did try to replace him as a musician; Pigpen was the real thing, a true blues singer brought up strictly by the blues. He was undoubtedly one of the greatest male rock-and-roll and rhythm and blues singers in America. Some say that for his age and for his race, he was the best. By the middle of the seventies, there is a sense of "slowing down" in the Grateful Dead's music.

This came with the shift in all the band members, but especially Jerry Garcia's drug use. Cocaine was giving way to a more serious addiction to heroin. Cocaine use would speed up the band's music and heroin would slow it down. The different members of the band were into different drugs at this time. Garcia described this time as, During the seventies, we were experimenting on ourselves, we weren't experimenting with the music. Everybody was off taking their various drugs, off on self-destructive paths.

Trying stuff out. So for a long time we held together by sheer inertia. Heroin quickly became a part of the Dead's daily lives, easily and readily available for the Grateful Dead to find and smoke, at cheap prices. Heroin, especially for Garcia, became an escape drug from the Grateful Dead.

It protected him from his public scene. Many fans rarely saw this side of Garcia where he would be despising the predictability of playing in the same places every night. For Garcia, heroin gave him a private life of his own. Heroin, which became a huge problem for Garcia, with eventually resulting with his death, also started huge problems for the band. During this time Garcia was described as being unhappy a lot of the time.

He started using more and shutting himself off from the rest of the band. Even though he was unhappy with the band and wanted to take his music ability to the next level, he could never say no to the Grateful Dead. They were his original family. Also Garcia knew he could not disappoint his fans, which he described as", those people who gave him the opportunity to improve his guitar" (Brightman 305).

Also during the seventies, the Grateful Dead realized they weren't playing for their peers anymore, they noticed that their audiences were a bit younger. Bill Graham, a former producer, described the Dead at this time as, "the oldest juveniles in the state of California", The followers of the Grateful Dead, were once described as "the missionaries of bliss", searching to escape into happiness throughout the music and scene of the Grateful Dead. They were one big happy family, the fans and the band. The band protected their fans, allowing them to tape the shows rather then buying their tapes, they also demanded that fans would be allowed in the concert area even if they did not have tickets. When security would yell at the crowd to behave and respect the musicians on stage, the members of the Grateful Dead, tuning up for their next song, would play louder to drown the authority out.

They gave off the image of free music, charging hardly any money and providing lots of music. During concerts, they used their own sound system called the wall-of-sound that has never been surpassed, so that each seat in any hall or any outside arena anywhere could be tuned for optimum acoustic accuracy. Many Deadheads would think of the Grateful Dead as outlaws with their refusals to ever go commercial and become a money making band. When Carol Brightman, author of Sweet Chaos, and younger sister of Candace Brightman, the Dead's set lighting designer asked Deadheads what appeals to them most about the Grateful Dead their response was, "There was room for everybody, The Dead seem to encourage tolerance and caring for one another no matter what kind of person you were, they had an outlaw persona".

The Dead's record label, Warner Brothers never even spent much money on any of their albums. Warner Executive Joe Smith states, "with the drugs, and with their running around, three would be straight and two would be stoned, and two would be straight and three would be stoned... and then they'd all be stoned". (Brightman 250). The Grateful Dead always considered their fans as part of their family. In the 1971 album Garcia slipped in a note on the back of the cover that said, "DEAD FREAKS UNITE: Who are you? Where are you?

How are you? Send us your name and address and we " ll keep you informed". This was very uncommon in the music industry at this time, reaching out to the fans directly, as was the relationship the Grateful Dead had already established with its audience. By 1972, 25,000 letters had rolled in, creating a direct mailing list from the band telling their fans when they were playing and when the next album would be released.

The Dead realized their original audience was getting older and had jobs and obligations to fulfill and go home to. They realized their children of the sixties had lost their shoes and turned in their wings. Lyrics came in the seventies like "If I knew the way I would take you home" (Ripple 1970) and "Daddy's here and he never will forget you / I will take you home" (I will take you home 1970). Outside of Dead concerts, the attendees would give a one-fingered up salute, not only was this to look for that free miracle ticket into the show, but in also in tribute to find the lost spirit of the sixties. "I need a miracle, everyday", (I need a miracle) was what people were saying as honor as their elders were throwing in their towels (Brightman 226).

During this time, Berkley, California was holding many antiwar politics meetings and rallies during the time of the Vietnam. While the whole world was in storms swirling around the, the members of The Grateful Dead stayed aloof. The songs of the Grateful Dead always held some political meaning. Though they were not the originators of the political reform, like Bob Dylan and The Beatles, they were unquestionably part of the artillery. They could be bigger and louder and heavier then anyone, because they earned the respect. The best words that described how they felt about the war was best described in the song "Cream Puff War" written by Jerry Garcia, "Your constant battle are getting to be a bore / Go somewhere else and continue your cream puff war...

". The members of The Grateful Dead would stay in Berkley because at this time it reminded them of the beginning in Haight-Ashbury, with activists from the sixties, where graying baby boomers refreshed their sagging spirits. It was a town that gave the Grateful Dead new hope, and changed the pace of their music. After the whole world was shocked hearing about the Kent State shootings, the Grateful Dead did everything in their power to lift up their fan's spirits. Music was beginning not to be the main focal point as it had been in the sixties and only the San Francisco Bay Area bands held on to the music industry.

As a Rolling Stone writer expressed his feelings about the music at this time, "The Bay area band are the first deities, the sources of new myths, metaphors, and anecdotes". The Grateful Dead, stood apart from the rest, "they still fit the old Saturday-night dropping rituals, which included buying and selling dope, getting super-stoned and blasted and listening to music", continued the Rolling Stone writer (Brightman 205). Time went on and the Grateful Dead continued to tour and play sold out venues. The fans of the Grateful Dead stayed loyal throughout the years, even though by the nineties they had become a highly targeted audience. The DEA's LSD squad have rose upon the challenged of pinpointing deadheads at concerts, blasted on mind altering drugs.

Since 1990, the DEA's LSD squad had tripled spending and personnel, and as a result the number of deadheads incarcerated for acid gained such numbers as fewer than one hundred in 1988 to over two thousand in 1990. In March of 1990 Operation Deadhead took place in Maryland with the arrest of eighty young fans at a Grateful Dead concert by the DEA. The first public attention of the attack on deadheads was published in 1993 by Toni Brown, who is the publisher of the fan magazine Relax. This was also the same year that the Grateful Dead was noted the most popular live musical act in American history, selling 1.8 million concert tickets and grossing $47 million dollars. The Grateful Dead definitely started a phenomenon. "Where are these people who keep coming to our showing coming from?" Garcia quotes in a 1991 interview with Rolling Stone.

He "can't believe it's because they want to pick up on the sixties, which they missed. So what is it about the nineties in America? There must be a death of fun out there in America. Or adventure. Maybe that's it, maybe we are just one of the last adventures in America". The fans of the Grateful Dead today, though born over twenty years later still have the same ideals and lifestyles as the original sixties hippies.

These are the new age bohemians; they still take the same drugs, enjoy the same life, and listen to the same music as the original trendsetters. Even though in the nineties the drug scene had changed dramatically from the sixties. While America started new laws and harmful punishments for drugs, The Grateful Dead seemed to keep the drug scene alive, never letting the sixties die out. An original fan of the Dead from the sixties quoted saying, We " re survivors for some reason.

The whole culture of the '60's seemed to survive, except for the people that didn't survive. Mental institutions are still crowded with people who never came down from the sixties (Brightman 289). The Grateful Dead never cut out drugs from their music career entirely, even in their old age. Asked in 1991 to whether the Grateful Dead continued to use psychedelics, Garcia answered, Yeah. We touch on mushrooms, things like that here and there; for me, I just like to know they " re available, just because I don't think there's anything else in life apart from a near death experience that shows you how extensive the mind is (Brightman 285). The drugs that the Grateful Dead would take would always go hand in hand with the music, more for Jerry Garcia than for others.

Towards the end Garcia was up to a point where he would do over a gram a day of Persian, he opiate of choice, which was more like morphine than heroin, with a gram costing seven hundred dollars. The rest of the members of the band were not as serious on drugs. Bassist Phil Lesh ended his cocaine habit in the middle of the eighties and became a fan of fine wines. Bob Weir leveled out his LSD problem in the seventies and never got into any of the hard stuff.

At the time in the early nineties, Garcia's heroin addiction had gotten really bad. He was clearly a junkie, as heroin addicts are described, and his problem had started to affect the band. The other members of the band were not into this drug, but still dabbled in other drugs such as pot and even some acid, on occasion. Garcia had become exhausted in life, sparked by problems with the band, his personal life, and problems with drugs. The other members of the band confronted Garcia several times about his addiction and treated to pull out, especially after he collapsed in September of 1992. In Phil Lesh's opinion, the momentum of the Grateful Dead faded in the 1990's.

He said the band became more predictable, that most of the songs performed were sing a long ballads, and the music never really took off again. But Garcia always knew he had the power. He told them that he didn't care that he would just play with his own band, also he threatened them because he knew that they couldn't drop out, that they needed the money. One of the reasons that made Garcia so unique was his desires to play much differently than other musicians. "The fact is that most of my life has to do with seeking the high-energy experience of playing music for large audiences for the purpose of reaching some degree of communication and rapport with that audience", (Harrison 76) In a way, Garcia would get off from the excitement from the crowd.

Garcia has been described as having a "bottomless pit" of energy. When asked where this source of energy came from Garcia replied, "Enthusiasm, motivation-that's it. I get off on it. It feels good; let's do it, let's be committed, and that creates the energy, that's the big payoff, not riches, fame, power, but the sheer get-off, art for art's sake". (Harrison 78) The party came to an end for the Grateful Dead on August, 1995, due to the death of Jerry Garcia.

That day, deadheads danced in Haight-Ashbury, people wept openly in the streets everywhere, and even Wall Street closed early. Newscasters compared his death to the deaths of greats such as Elvis and John Lennon. They said his passing marked the end of an era for which he had become the last great symbol (Scully 367). Despite all the changes throughout the course of their career, the Grateful Dead have proved themselves a huge part of American folklore music. They continued an entire generation of American life over thirty years later. Producer Rock Scully describes the phenomenon of The Grateful Dead the best when he says that, "they put out the vibe, that quivering, numinous essence of the Haight geist, which the Dead had single-handedly brought with them, like the Ark of the Covenant, out of the sixties" (Brightman 232).

They are old-style now, and bands have become influenced by them including groups like Phish, the Allman Brothers, and Frank Zappa, amongst many other "jam bands". A jam band would be a band that takes one of their songs and then can change that song into a motif or theme on stage. Throughout their whole career, the Grateful Dead has changed. They changed their entire image many times, changed as people themselves, drugs changed the course of their music, and by performing, they have changed and touched many people's lives..