The Night of the Living Deadheads
http://www.counterpunch.org/yearsley02192010.html
By DAVID YEARSLEY
February 19 - 21, 2010
One of my college friends was a Deadhead. He had crates of cassette
tapes with labels like "Bucknell, 1971", Stanford 1973"; "Fillmore
East 1970." Of an evening he would navigate through these hundreds
of cassettes and pull out "the greatest version" of a given Dead
song, "Truckin'", "Crazy Fingers", whatever. He'd put the tape in the
player and work the fast-forward or rewind button with the virtuosity
of a concert pianist and get right to the start of the number and
then let it pour out of the tinny little crate as if it were
ambrosia. Everything sounded good under those listening conditions,
largely molded by cannabis and cheap beer. The band famously did not
forbid bootlegging but encouraged it: piracy was thereby converted
into democratic dissemination; what was viewed as thievery by most
"recording artists" fueled the unique brand of Deadheadish
connoisseurship He became devotee and pedagogue, pointing out the
tastiest licks from Jerry Garcia's guitar, reveling in the ecstasy of
solo voice and the rapture of harmony.
One of those college weekends I played the harpsichord with the Bach
Society Orchestra for Bach's Brandenburg Concerto no. 5 and my
Deadhead friend came along. He like the performance but remarked that
during the famous cadenza, in which the harpsichord goes berserk in a
frenzy of whirling notes and careening chromatic chords, I took too
many rhetorical pauses. Music, he believed, should keep truckin'
along, those two drummers with the Dead making sure that the rhythmic
lifeblood kept pumping without a stutter.
Those college evenings listening the Dead were fun though at the
remove of a couple of decades things begin to blur, albeit with a
different kind of fuzziness than that which attended the evenings
themselves. The year after I graduated from college my friend
organized a road trip up the coast to hear the Dead in Oxford, Maine
over the Fourth of July weekend of 1988, and I joined in. We stayed
in a cheap motel, made a long, long walk to the Oxford Plains
Speedway past the vibrant Deadhead scene of VW buses, sprawling
encampments, barbecues and other kinds of smoke-outs and much Dead
mercantilism: everywhere handicrafts, food stuffs, and other
substances for sale or for barter or just to be had. The Maine Woods
was ablaze in tie-dye.
Little Feat opened the show and then the Dead came and did their two
sets. I remember thinking that a motor speedway wasn't the best
place to hear music of any sort and that it puzzled me why the band
felt it needed two drummers, whom together seemed to my ears to
obscure rather than enhance the rhythmic energy of the rock 'n roll
resounding across the oval.
The entire spectacle and the culture surrounding such a concert
certainly needed the sort of space a race track provided. There was
clearly more to it all than just the tunes; the conception of music
fostered by the Dead, or at least its adherents, was far bigger, more
encompassing simply a combination of melody, harmony, and rhythm. At
least for the weekend, music appeared to be life. Have now returned,
courtesy of the internet, to the Grateful Dead's past and my
ephemeral intersection with it. At www.dead.net I find the playlist
of the Oxford, Maine show, many comments exalting the event in its
entirety as the greatest ever: "This was an amazing scene. Totally
lawless yet peaceful." "Great weather, great, crowd, great scene,
great shows. Definitely one of my peak Head experiences."
One of the received truths of Grateful Dead criticism is that
sometimes the band was inspired and other times played poorly. My
college friends could draw cassettes from his massive collection to
make this point, and then further elucidate it with expert commentary.
At least around these parts of central New York, home to many a
counterculture escapee from the urban centers of the Northeast in the
1960s, the 1977 Grateful Dead concert in Cornell University's Barton
Hall is held as one of the group's ultimate concerts. The chair of
the physics department happens to be a neighbor and was playing a CD
(not a cassette) of that a couple months back when she gave me a lift
in her Prius. She'd been an undergraduate at Cornell and been to the concert.
Jerry Garcia's ashes have long ago been scattered over the Golden
Gate and the Ganges in like part, and death itself has visited the
group's keyboardists on several occasions. But two of the founding
members of the band, bassist Phil Lesh and guitarist Bob Weir brought
their own group Furthur, formed way back in 2009, to Barton Hall this
past Sunday, flushing Deadheads out of the wooded hills for leagues
around Ithaca, and indeed from across the Empire State and
countryall with much talk of the epochal 1977 show.Converted
schoolbuses with chimneys sticking out the side windows and vintage
VW campers appeared on Ithaca's streets. The Holiday Inn was filled
beyond capacity.
Barton Hall is an almost surreal building, and especially so for a
rock concert. It was built in 1915 in the run-up to America's entry
into World War I as a drill hall for the Department of Military
Science; it was an armory in World War II. Barton still serves as the
home of the Cornell ROTC and is also the field house. The structure
has a looming heft and indulges in much spurious crenellation. It's
like a Gothic fortress pumped up on steroids, a scary building that
was apparently designed with the idea of imbuing recruits with a bit
of the honor code of the medieval knight. The vast leaded-glass
windows and soaring trusses of the interior inspire doubts that these
architectural features can hold up the hulking stone of its walls: it
is a huge castle with one vast room. The Grateful Dead scene in full
force beneath all this war-like architecture must have been something
to behold in 1977 in the aftermath of Vietnam with the local
counter-culture still in the vigor of youth.
On the evening of what was hailed as the "return" show the aura of
the famous 1977 appearance fluttered down with the snow, a wintery
setting that stood in stark contrast to that hot summer of 1988 in
Maine. The loose-linen dresses, and bright colors, half-naked Dead
devotees were this time bundled up in parkas, the wild hair stuffed
under woolen hats, the flesh sealed from the elements.
As the long line filed into the castle keep dozens of people milled
about with their index fingers in the air, not gauging the icy wind,
but looking for a single ticket. The 5,000 tickets had sold-out
almost immediately when they went on sale back in December. The
police, a strong presence outside the venue, estimated that between
1,000 and 1,5000 fans waited outside Barton during the
show. Subsequent newspapers reports boasted of the "unusually large
number" of drug and alcohol related arrests and with some bigger drug
busts added to the nightly catch.
I did feel a bit guilty as I moved past these desperate Deadheads,
but took small, if opportunistic comfort in reasoning that such
exclusion is also part of the "scene"come rain or come shine there
will always be those left outside. Enough energy would certainly
extrude through the thick stone walls of Barton to warm them.
Lesh is seventy years old sprightly and seemingly full of optimism on
stage and in his music. Weir sports bushy mutton chops, looking like
a Civil War general in shin-length trousers and Birkenstocks. Both
can play and sing and seem to love it still. In the present
incarnation, Furthur, they've assembled a younger generation of
musicians for whom the Grateful Dead's music was mother's milk.
Guitarist John Kadlecik was born in 1969 and initially made his mark
in the Dar Star Orchestra, a Grateful Dead tribute band. My college
friend tells me his guitar playing sounds (almost) just like Jerry
Garcia, and he has fine, clear and penetrating voice. Jeff Chimenti
on keyboardsamong them a Steinway grand and a Hammond B-3is also in
his early forties, a downright baby by the present standard of
revival bands and Super Bowl half-time shows, and certainly seen as
youthful by the large body of the audience that have followed the
Dead from their inception. Chimenti is a virtuoso of the kind of
keyboarding gesturethunderous octaves and karte chordsthat can fill
up college field house not just aurally (for the massive speakers do
that), but visually. It's as much about sight as it is about sound.
Although the music is highly mediated by the electronics there is
nothing like being there. When the Jerry Garcia/Robert Hunter song
"Sugaree" filled Barton with its hypnotic grind, and the pscyhedlic
lights volleyed off ROTC banners through the wafting marijuana clouds
like battlefield smoke, one was glad to be inside and not out, in the
present and in the past.
High quality digital video of the show was up on YouTube the next
day: the economy of personal exchange that was such part of Dead
culture seems to have been supplanted by the unlimited access allowed
of the internet.
The age of the cassette is behind us, though doubtless many still use
the old-fashioned technology, just as my boyhood neighbor's
grandmother clung to her gramophone. The 1977 Cornell concert can be
downloaded for free from the internet. Youtube allows many a look at
the Dead and those concerts; even the parking lot of that Oxford show
can be scanned for those stuck in the past.
I remember now that my college friend also had the first personal
computer I think I'd ever seen, certainly the first Mac, the original
128K, which sold for upwards of $2,000 back in the mid 80s when it
came out. Now his own late-model Mac holds his voluminous Grateful
Dead catalog in digital form in the Connecticut suburbs. During the
week he's on Wall Street using computers to predict the ups-and-downs
of the stock market.
--
David Yearsley teaches at Cornell University. He is author of Bach
and the Meanings of Counterpoint His latest CD, "All Your Cares
Beguile: Songs and Sonatas from Baroque London", has just been
released by Musica Omnia. He can be reached at dgy2@cornell.edu
.
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