This is a philosophy shared by many successful jam bands, and groups like Phish from the 1990s or newcomers like Billy Strings and Goose have ridden this wave to great financial success ever since (even if you’ve never heard one of their songs on the radio.) While the Dead never officially encouraged tape-trading, they made little effort to curtail it. (The first kindlings of Burning Man is found here.) Continue Reading Below It’s also exactly the type of thing Elon Musk talks about when he says Twitter should be a haven for “free speech.” This is just one example of the counterculture-to-cyberculture pipeline, which does include a heavy techbro element. If you take it at face value, it is righteous. Bob Weir had his own songwriting partner, John Perry Barlow, who later became an Internet pioneer (anyone heard of “ The WELL ”?) and co-founder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a fund and lobbying group that works in good faith to defend digital civil rights. I’ve already mentioned Robert Hunter, Jerry Garcia’s lyricist. Gen Z types with a hammer-and-sickle in their Twitter avatars might consider this a disconnect, but the Dead’s brand of anti-authoritarianism has always leaned a bit Libertarian. While the Dead emerged from the San Fransisco of free love and pinko anti-war sentiment, it must be stated that the band itself never had a problem with making a buck. Psychonaught/Wikimedia Commons Pictured: capitalism. We weren't gods.How did they survive? Well, shows were cheaper in those days, but the parking lot scene (later renamed-and still named-Shakedown Street, after a later, funky Dead tune) became an unexpected haven of free market enterprise. At one point Kreutzmann spells it out: "I want to make it clear that we were not a cult. Sadly, you never knew what you were going to get. No one could project as much cosmic vulnerability and spiritual gravitas as Jerry Garcia - he was a vastly underrated singer who could inhabit a song with as much emotional grit and authenticity as Bob Dylan - and on a good night he set a pulse with his guitar that vibrated in perfect harmony with an audience calibrated with Owsley's finest. The Dead somehow found a sweet spot in the LSD experience - they never had the swagger or sweat or sex appeal of Jagger and Richards or Morrison or the cats in Led Zeppelin to ever become a convincing rock'n'roll band (it may not have helped that they were one of the few groups to ever dress worse than their fans) - but no group has ever been better at playing sloooow. But maybe 1977."), and then finally a heavy reliance on Xanax, which leads straight back to rehab, followed by some of the worst concerts of their dazzlingly inconsistent career, only to find him in the next chapter swilling more booze, smoking more dope, philandering without remorse, remarrying, band members dying, and all of this with almost zero trace elements of the self-awareness that one hopes to find in a rock'n'roll memoir.Ĭertainly as rock bands go, the Dead has a mystique about them that could rival the Stones or Zeppelin or the Doors. I'm thinking it was sometime before Egypt. But the real knock out, at least for the author, comes in the slightly more prosaic combination of coke and booze, which led him in and out of rehab more times than I could keep track of (ditto his marriages - which apparently he couldn't keep track of either, at one point basically giving up altogether: "I don't remember when Shelley and I got married, exactly. There is also far too much heroin, though it could be argued that any amount is too much, especially when your guitar player is nodding off in front of stadiums full of paying fans.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |