Nicholas Meriwether's anthology, Reading the Grateful Dead, gathering recently published work from multi-disciplinary scholars, breaks ground in this fertile and important yet often-overlooked academic field. The collected entries are arranged into five sections: About Dead Studies, Music and Lyrics (Medium and Message), the Deadhead Experience, Society and History (Context and Currents) and Encore. Most articles are engaging and substantive; a considerable number, many of which are highlighted in the following review, are valuable contributions to popular music studies.
Meriwether's introductory piece in About Dead Studies adroitly explores the challenges facing scholars studying the band, referencing important work by musicologist Graeme Boone and ethnomusicologist James Revell Carr, among others. His ‘Notes’ and ‘Works cited’ sections are valuable references to a wide range of Dead scholarship. Dennis McNally, illuminating the connection between the Beats and 1960s counterculture, argues that individuals like Beat painter Wally Hedrick helped to set Garcia on the path of artistic self-expression, anti-materialism, spiritual search and a scepticism about conventional rules of appearance, sexual activity and the consumption of mind-altering substances (p. 11). Natalie Dollar sketches a preliminary review of the (scholars') social science journey studying the Grateful Dead (p. 49). Much of this research has been focused on the Deadheads (the band's most avid fans) as constituting, but not limited to, a subculture, a religious community and a speech community (p. 50). She quotes Carr who argues that the Dead show is a highly ritualised event during which truly devout fans enter a liminal state, are exposed to a profound communitas, and at the end emerge with a renewed sense of self and a refreshed outlook towards the world (pp. 53–4).
In Music and Lyrics, Michael Kaler's article creates a ‘paradigm’ to examine and discuss the Dead's evolution of improvisation in their first two years. The Grateful Dead's real innovation, their distinctive approach, lies in their determination to show the potentialities that lie hidden within the structures and codes that make up normal lived experience … not so much to change these codes and structures – the song remains a song, the band remains a band – but rather to crack them open and show the freedom at their heart (p. 71). Drawing heavily on both Matthew and Victor Turner's work, Robert H. Trudeau's A Super-MetaCantric Analysis of ‘Playing in the Band’ suggests the song provides the listener with an understanding of how we embark on ‘episodic adventures’ (p. 93). We leave our normal lives for a while, joining thousands of similarly inclined pilgrims; we enter a different realm that is difficult to describe to non-participants; and then we eventually come back from the adventure, altered – presumably for the better (p. 96). To Victor Turner, this would be described as a process of ‘separation, liminality (living on the margins), and reincorporation’ (p. 97). Meriwether's The Dead Play Egypt, Thirty Years Later comments on the 1978 journey and presents readers with a number of essential band elements including: at the centre of the Dead experience is transformation; and improvisation, a guiding spirit, requires the venue and the audience to become active participants in its creation. Thus, ‘in their pilgrimage to the Great Pyramids of the Nile, the cradle of revealed culture’ the Dead sought a place and audience of immense power, historical and spiritual significance for three nights of spectacular transformation – even attempting to wire the King's chamber for special effects (pp. 124–5).
The Deadhead Experience examines the audience and its own processes of transformation. David Bryan reflects on William James's work to explore the Deadhead audience experience as ‘divine’ or religious, addressing sacraments (marijuana), congregations, and faith that the show would reach that place of ‘magic’ or transcendence. Carr's notable A Benjaminian Approach to the Grateful Dead hypothesises that the Dead's appropriation of technology as a catalyst to create communitas reflects Walter Benjamin's hope that products of modernity could be turned into instruments for the liberation of the soul – ‘reclaiming the ecstatic trance through highly technologized music’ (p. 178).
In Society and History, Jacob A. Cohen references 19th-century camp meetings in his astute Nomadic Musical Audiences. He suggests that ‘rather than being shunted aside as drugged-out hedonists or pushed to the periphery as a cultish underground, Deadheads are simply reenvisioning and reconstructing’ a (spiritual and musical) experience of place that has existed for centuries. The parking lot is ‘home’ and ‘place’, a nomadic settlement. Stanley Spector uses Heidegger's address ‘The Origin of the Work of Art’ to frame his examination of the Dead's intensely devoted fan base. He argues that (i) each show was an improvised singular performance where no set of songs was ever duplicated and ‘where there was always the possibility of also hearing something transcendent’ (p. 269) and (ii) the audience is a vital participant in the process of creation. Barry Barnes's entry, drawing from a wide range of theoretical models, focuses on the nature of Jerry Garcia's leadership role in the band community and his lack of comfort with that position.
Reading the Grateful Dead is a welcome entry into the field of popular music scholarship. Many articles, particularly those mentioned above, provide well-grounded and interesting perspectives on topics of broad concern to popular music scholars. Perhaps the next edition will incorporate essays about the Dead's intersection with technology, as they were pioneers in that field, as well as further exploration of their political and personal relationship with late 1960s Counterculture. Dead Studies, if the recent (and largest) 16th Annual Grateful Dead Scholars Caucus Conference gives any indication, is poised to generate further thought-provoking and important work.
