Fare Thee Well, Grateful Dead }{ Part 1: There is No Band
What shall we say, shall we call it by a name?
The Grateful Dead? No. But then they never claimed to be, contrary to popular misconception surrounding the 50th anniversary “Fare Thee Well” shows going down this week. They’re everywhere, headlines like: “Grateful Dead’s Long, Strange Trip to End in Chicago”; or “Warren Haynes Talks About the End of the Grateful Dead”; or “Ten Writers on the End of an American Adventure“. A misconception intentionally generated by the promoters, certainly. Pretty effective too. “Fare Thee Well: Celebrating 50 Years of the Grateful Dead” is a long title for a show. To make people’s lives easier, Ticketmaster billed the event on their website as The Grateful Dead.
But that’s not what it says on the ticket.
The “Fare Thee Well” title is more like what you’d label a multi-band tribute festival. In a way, that’s what this is, except all the bands are playing at the same time: there are strains of The Grateful Dead proper, but also of the distinctive approaches taken by post-Jerry Dead projects like Bobby’s Ratdog, Phil and his many friends, Mickey’s solo outings, and Furthur. Let’s not forget, either, that this isn’t some long awaited reunion of the “core four” as though they haven’t played together since Jerry’s death in 1995; they’ve toured together on and off as well over the years, as recently as 2009. They don’t sound much like Jerry’s Grateful Dead either. Each of these configurations has explored new avenues for The Grateful Dead repertoire by members of the original band, continuing to push the sound in different directions, just as The Grateful Dead proper always did. So while there’s good reason to continually compare post-Jerry Dead projects to the real thing, doing so has meant that many have lost track of all the things these new projects have done differently. Meanwhile The Grateful Dead proper are essentialized into a single unassailable entity, forgetting their many distinctive eras with their tremendous variations in quality and style.
Re-creating the sound of The Grateful Dead has never been the goal of any Dead project, including The Grateful Dead proper. Leave that to Dark Star Orchestra, the cover band famous for performing specific shows from the band’s history with meticulous attention to the historical details of gear, instrumentation and performance style. The fact that they are so popular is evidence that there is a desire for the kind of nostalgic recreation of what once was, something NOT being fulfilled by the post-Jerry projects involving surviving members of the band who are traveling different roads. “Fare Thee Well” owes its sound as much to these different roads – now 20 years in the making – as to the previous 30 with Jerry at the helm. And yet, this event has people obsessed with the notion that it is somehow a triumphant return of The Grateful Dead, for one last time. To frame “Fare Thee Well” as some hallowed return to The Grateful Dead proper is to misunderstand what that band was, and what its music continues to be today. It sets up unreasonable expectations while deafening us to new possibilities. And it structures reception according to patterns of comparison/contrast rather than assessing the music on its own terms. It has also ensured an unprecedented demand for any Dead project, including those that involved Jerry Garcia, making it very difficult to get tickets.
He can modify the dosage of a certain drug, give some advices regarding the pros and cons of a testosterone booster: Pros: purchase cheap viagra http://amerikabulteni.com/2011/09/11/video-yuruyen-merdivende-yuruyen-kus-nereye-varir-2/ It’s Natural: Most people consider that a testosterone booster is a natural supplement. Solution: There might be all sorts of products in the usa generic viagra market which is used as treatment in such cases. Plant domestic demand flare up, you should first flare location and environment to thoroughly clean equipment flare, the first device blowing clean, local removable parts should be detached and sent to a laboratory for generic viagra in usa evaluation. Most people struggle with order cheap levitra their writing.
The weight of the number 50 is heavy on this event, the popularity of staged anniversaries being the catalyst for regrouping at this particular time. To aid the celebration, and profit-taking, for the first time in any post-Jerry Dead project the name Grateful Dead appears on all merchandise as part of the full title of the event. It’s a good trick, branding these shows with a heightened measure of authenticity while covering their asses against charges that they are disrespectfully resurrecting a name that was consciously retired upon Jerry’s death. Many are confused enough to cry blasphemy on this issue, often tied to some good old-fashioned Phish-bashing. How dare they let that obnoxious upstart Trey Anastasio stand in Jerry’s spot (even though he is the only – yes, ONLY – true successor to the scale of jam band success achieved by The Grateful Dead as Phish inherited much of the community upon Jerry’s death while legitimately forging one of their own). Every post-Jerry Dead outfit has had to suffer endless bitching about who plays lead guitar, but since none of these bands ever claimed to be The Grateful Dead the bitching was all pointless. This isn’t a post-Waters Pink Floyd sort of thing (a situation that could have been easily solved if the remaining three had simply called themselves “The Floyd” after the bassist’s departure; arrogance stood in the way for Pink Floyd, but was easily cast aside by Jerry’s bandmates upon his death). If there’s an analogy to be drawn between post-Jerry Dead projects and any other examples from the annals of rock, I would argue that the closest relative would be what King Crimson did with the ProjeKcts in the late 90s, breaking the larger band into smaller configurations to explore new ways of pushing the music forward. But in another way, King Crimson provides an opposing example: there is no King Crimson without Robert Fripp, the only member to play in every line-up since their beginning not too long after The Grateful Dead. One could scarcely imagine Jerry Garcia having labeled a succession of new line-ups over a 40 year period – some entirely new – as “The Grateful Dead”. In this way, the core four seem to provide some semblance of stability to the idea of The Grateful Dead.
Even here, though, the boundary line around the core line-up has been a bit fuzzy. History showed us that keyboardists could be swapped while keeping The Grateful Dead intact, though Jerry did briefly consider retiring the name after Pigpen’s death. We’ll never know how important Bobby or Phil would have been to the operation had they died before Jerry, though there was a time when Phil and Jerry wanted Bob out of the band. Notably, however, the few gigs they played without Bob in that period came under the name “Mickey and the Heartbeats.” Lest we forget, also, that there were Grateful Deads both with and without Mickey Hart. In fact, some hold that the band’s best period was while Mickey was on hiatus in the early 70s. So maybe we should be talking about a “core three” then? At this point it’s water under the bridge. For now, it’s enough that for the last 20 years Bob, Phil, Billy and Mickey have at least agreed on one thing (and perhaps only one thing): there is no Grateful Dead without Jerry. So what, then, are these 50 years of The Grateful Dead that we’re celebrating?
Outside of line-up considerations, The Grateful Dead produced music under that name for 30 years, with new compositions joining established repertoire at every stage of their career right up until the end. This period set the canon, and the music lives on through their recordings, now the bread and butter for the surviving members as the vaults are mined for official releases in what is, for all intents and purposes, an endless supply. If they ever do manage to release everything the vault has to offer, new formats would ensure re-issues ad nauseam. And you know what? I think that’s just fine. 30 years of incredible music should be celebrated, circulated, and offered in the best possible way that the technology of the moment has to offer. The band deserves to get paid for that work, and the fans deserve the opportunity to continually reassess what the band laid down while contemplating its continuing relevance today. All of us, in turn, deserve the opportunity to discover where the music can go. That’s what the last 20 years of Dead projects have been about, and to my way of thinking, that’s what we’re celebrating here.
It’s fitting, then, that the band taking the stage in Santa Clara and Chicago remains unnamed, for they are but the latest incarnation of a group of people who have performed Grateful Dead material under a half dozen monikers over the years. What we’re celebrating is the music as interpreted by those who created it and are still alive to explore its potential. Sure, the core four have stated for the record that they will not play together again. But how important is that, really? Phil and Friends are booked into his venues for the rest of the year and rumors are nearly confirmed that the remaining three will tour with John Mayer this fall. If “Fare Thee Well” is about celebrating the dynamic between the four of them, we’re bound to be disappointed if for no other reason than they simply have not practiced together enough to achieve the heights that Furthur managed as a full-fledged touring operation from 2009-2014. And then there’s Trey, certainly capable but not immune to the need for practice as a vehicle to progress. In some ways it’s Trey that I’m most excited about here, a new element with the potential to bring this music into uncharted realms. The most disappointing aspect of this band, in advance of their performance, is that they are not committed to pushing themselves as a band. They’re here for a brief time and will then fly on. Whatever they make of it, it’ll be but a taste of what they could do if they toured over a longer period. To me, this is the opposite of closure, for they’ll be opening a new and tantalizing door only to leave it permanently ajar while we wonder what might have been as each of the members continues to play Grateful Dead music in various other ways until they meet their own graves.
People are expecting some kind of catharsis out of “Fare Thee Well,” expecting Jerry to appear in the clouds like the second coming to bestow his blessing upon the affair (as some thought he did with that rainbow in Santa Clara, and which the Garcia family wisely chose not to emulate with a holographic projection of our dearly departed). As I heard one aging fan put it on our way into the Levi’s Stadium for the first show: “Finally we can get some closure on this thing!” But really, where is the closure? If we’re saying goodbye to The Grateful Dead it is, as Rolling Stone put it, a long goodbye – one that will continue for me long after “Fare Thee Well” has come and gone. Making this about Jerry diverts attention away from what his co-conspirators on this adventure have done with their legacy since. We all said goodbye to Jerry 20 years ago. The music he made with Billy, Bob, Phil and (mostly) Mickey lives on, and this is just another iteration to enjoy, in the moment if you’re lucky enough to be in one of the buildings, and forever more once acquired on the format of your choice. After that, I’m hoping Bill Frisell might find his way back to Terrapin Crossroads, ’cause that was some of the best Dead material I’ve ever heard.
Let it grow.
In: Concerts, Grateful Dead, Music · Tagged with: Grateful Dead