Deadhead Social Science: You Ain't Gonna Learn What You Don't Want to Know (review)

Imagine a community where, seventy times a year, tens of thousands of people wear colorful clothing, ingest hallucinogenic drugs, and dance wildly to rhythmic, improvised music. That community would be swarming with anthropologists, folklorists, and ethnomusicologists. At a recent Popular Culture Association conference, writer Steve Silberman used this idea to highlight the fact that, for thirty years, the rock band the Grateful Dead and its legions of devoted fans known as Deadheads have been engaged in these very rituals. Only since the death of lead guitarist Jerry Garcia, and the subsequent dissolution of the band in the summer of 1995, have scholars begun looking more seriously at the Dead and Deadheads. Unfortunately, the opportunity for social scientists to study the Grateful Dead and Deadheads in the field has passed. Those of us who want to make sense of this phenomenon now are forced to rely on the memories of those who were there.

During the summer of 1989, Rebecca Adams, a sociology professor at the University of North Carolina-Greensboro, rented a bus and took a class of 21 students "on tour" with the Grateful Dead. Adams had been working on a study of friendships among academics at conferences when one of her students suggested that the same sort of long-distance friendships are created among Deadheads at Grateful Dead concerts. This idea was attractive to Adams because she wanted a project that would both inspire her students and allow them to take an active role as partners with her in field research, while also fulfilling her own academic goals (p. 18).

Deadhead Social Science, edited by Adams and Robert Sardiello, is extremely valuable as a document of Deadhead culture, but it is Adams's commitment to partnership with her students that makes this an indispensable book for social scientists of all interests and fields. Now a tenured professor, Adams has been a mentor to over two hundred students writing term papers, master's theses, and doctoral dissertations on the Grateful Dead. A few of those works are featured in this new book, as are a few of the papers that came out of her 1989 class. While there is some unevenness to the essays, attributable to the authors' varying levels of scholarship, overall the book works well as a primer on the culture of the Deadheads, but more importantly as a pedagogical model for fieldwork studies.

The book is divided into six thematic sections, the first of which is Adams's introduction where she explains her theoretical orientations and reflects on the dilemmas she faced as a collaborator with her students. She outlines some of the "negative sanctioning" (p. 40) that she has encountered in the academy, but also discusses the rapid growth of interest in the Dead among scholars, especially since 1995. While Adams has fascinating insights into friendship and community building among Deadheads, her real message is that "faculty should encourage students to engage in research related to their personal passions and should support them while they are doing so" (p. 37). Finding the balance between passion and scholarship can be problematic, as a number of the book's essays illustrate, but it can also be extremely rewarding.

In the book's second part, "Music," Gary Shank and Eric Simon use semiotics and statistical analysis to develop a "grammar" that illustrates how the Dead structured their concerts, and how Deadheads perceived and interpreted that structure. The second essay, by folklorist Robert Freeman, looks at improvisation as practiced by a Grateful Dead cover band called "The Other People," analyzing their approach to the Dead's music. One gets the impression from these two essays that the music of the Dead itself is not as important as how that music is understood by Deadheads.

The next set of essays explores Deadhead spirituality. Shan Sutton shows that Dead concerts function...