Taking It to the Bridge: Music as Performance

Performing Collective Improvisation: The Grateful Dead’s “Dark Star”

37 Richard Pettengill Performing Collective Improvisation The Grateful Dead’s “Dark Star” Journalistic writing on the Grateful Dead, the San Francisco– based band that was active from 1965 until the death of lead guitarist Jerry Garcia in 1995, tends to focus more on the band’s countercultural fan base—the hordes of devoted followers that followed the band from city to city—than the actual music they played. When the music is mentioned , the references are usually to the best-known songs on The Dead’s two iconic 1970 studio albums, Workingman’s Dead and American Beauty (“Uncle John’s Band,” “Casey Jones,” “Truckin’”), and their one Top 40 hit from 1987, “Touch of Grey.” Although journalists occasionally pay lip service to the band’s penchant for improvisation,1 such accounts, until recently , seldom have displayed understanding and appreciation for the most distinctive aspect of the band’s musical achievement, which I believe is the art of collective free-form improvisation: the ability to improvise in a collective mode in which all musicians contribute to various extents and in various ways to a performed group exploration. Much of the scholarly work to date has focused more on The Dead as a cultural phenomenon rather than as a group of skilled improvisational musicians or as performers.2 Nancy Reist, for example, has written about the legions of Deadheads who claimed that the concerts were “magical, transforming experiences” that helped them “make decisions, solve problems and cope with the stresses of life.”3 Reist argues that fans became Deadheads for the same reasons that humans throughout history have turned to myth: because their participation in that community helped them to “make sense of the world, particularly by acting as links between one’s direct material experience and one’s concept of the unseen forces that are believed to shape or at least influence that experience.”4 But Reist makes little sub- 38 • taking it to the bridge stantive reference to the band as a musical ensemble. Nadya Zimmerman takes a step in a more substantive direction by exploring the irony of the band’s non-commercial ideology (they allowed and even encouraged fans to record their concerts) alongside their Fortune 500 status, but also pays refreshing musicological attention to the structure of two of their more rhythmically adventurous songs, “The Eleven” and “Sugar Magnolia.”5 Zimmerman does not, however, touch upon the band’s improvisational ability, or on the individual band members as performers. Thankfully, this neglect has been rectified by a recent volume of essays entitled The Grateful Dead in Concert: Essays on Live Improvisation.6 This volume, containing such essays as “Pouring Its Light Into Ashes: Exploring the Multiplicity of Becoming in Grateful Dead Improvisation” by Jim Tuedio and “‘Searching for the Sound’: Grateful Dead Music and Interpretive Transformation” by Jason Kemp Winfree, complements without supplanting my work in this essay, which ultimately focuses on about fifteen seconds of improvised interaction between members of the band. I suggest that the mythology that has so dominated discourse on this band could not have emerged without the foundation of their musicianship along with the personae they projected in performance. The music they created onstage was facilitated, I believe, by the relationship between both of these elements: by performing “authentic” personae, part and parcel of which were the subtle gestures, movements, and facial expressions that facilitated their onstage musical communication, this group of musicians was able to excel as an organic, interdependent improvisational juggernaut. Accordingly, my focus in this essay will be on the Grateful Dead’s onstage performance behavior as a way to enhance our understanding of their distinctive approach to improvisation and, I hope, the field of improvisational performance studies as a whole. In order to articulate the nature of this approach, I want to pay attention to two videotaped performances of their improvisational magnum opus, “Dark Star.” One significant strain of the jazz/rock music of the late 1960s was what many scholars refer to as “psychedelic rock,” the suggestion being that the music was either fueled by or was both lyrically and musically reflective of the experience of hallucinogenic drugs. Within this genre lies a sub-genre of predominantly instrumental music that I call extended, collective improvisation , a form more commonly heard in jazz than in rock. Examples that in my view warrant close attention (and are available on video) are Cream’s live 1967–68 performances of “Spoonful” and “I’m So Glad,” and Miles Davis’s “Call...