Messages 3, Back in the seventies, I would have described both as Country Rock, as the term Americana had not been coined yet. Country Rock possibly fits the Dead better The Band's music is unique, and doesn't fit that category as easily, but I would argue that the term Americana was coined to cover the melting pot that their music represents.
Their musicians may have been mostly Canadian, but most of their best songs are based on America's past. There have been many arguments about whether Robbie Robertson stole the writing credits from the other members. I think Levon Helm may have been a huge inspiration for his songs, and based on subsequent output, Levon was no songwriter Did he write songs at all?
Soft linking over to the YVM thread, they created an entire unique universe of sound and culture and should be credited for that. Cuthbert Member. I hate music categories. Messages 7, Rock and roll. Just plain old 70's rock music. Brian Zadow Member. Oh yeah, it's still Americana even if it is being played by a bunch of Canucks.
Messages 10, It's funny because a lot of what constitutes Americana has it's roots in Scotland, Ireland, and England. I loved when Garcia used to do those old scottish whaling ballads.
By the end of , the Grateful Dead were overwhelmed and exhausted, announcing their imminent retirement from the road. Working with Fleetwood Mac producer Keith Olsen, their first major outside collaborator since their debut 10 years earlier, the band created Terrapin Station A summer-ending show in Englishtown, New Jersey show before an estimated , minted a new generation of fans.
Though they would release Go To Heaven , the Dead now had most of their adventures on the road, where they existed off the radar of mainstream music.
With the country moving into a decade of increased conservatism, the parking lot scene surrounding Dead shows became an active meeting point for numerous countercultural networks.
While releasing the acoustic Reckoning and electric Dead Set , it was mostly up to the Dead Heads to keep up with their favorite band. Already playing large venues, the band catapulted into stadiums. After struggling with heroin addiction for nearly a decade, Jerry Garcia returned with a creative vigor after recovering from his coma, writing new songs with Robert Hunter, renewing old creative partnerships, diving into digital art not to mention actual SCUBA diving , and expanding his musical palette.
In and , the band began to outfit their instruments with MIDI, allowing them access to an infinite variety of tones and colors. Resulting in some of the most experimental music of their later years, documented on the live album Infrared Roses Yet there was a time when this marvelous blues singer, who also played harmonica and keyboards, was practically the face of the franchise.
They made albums? Record sales: The Dead was never a commercial juggernaut on the charts. In harmony: The Dead members were capable of doing some lovely harmony vocal work, especially on the two aforementioned classics from But it never made onto the actual album. More than Jerry? Most of these musicians, though, had already played together for almost three years; consequently, they already had an idea of what and how their bandmates would play, and they trusted their understanding.
As the music transformed from the conversation and exploration of the musical episode to the climax, the band members were no longer in conversation with each other; they were not listening the way they did while they were exploring.
Now each of them was independently exploring the space and the tension between the two traditional modes of improvisation. At this point in the song, no one was stepping forward to play an associatively improvised solo against the background groove established by the rest of the band, nor were they exploring together the possibilities of new forms and structures as if they were in an hierarchical mode. The possibility of transformative improvisation emerges where the space and tension between these other modes occurs, and it is precisely that moment when the band has found its new groove together, allowing each musician to play in the context of listening to the implied and understood groove rather than to what each player was playing at that moment.
To improvise in any mode at all presupposes a different kind of consciousness than one who does not improvise. That the Grateful Dead band members improvised in a new transformative mode indicates that they were already open to the possibilities of different kinds or states of consciousness than what is required for mainstream and traditional musical forms. Similarly, their fans, simply by participating with the music, likewise presupposed such open possibilities.
Too often, LSD and other psychoactive substances are given sole credit for this transformation in consciousness, and while it may be true in many cases these substances might be a sufficient cause for this shift in consciousness, they are not a necessary cause, for it is possible to experience the shift in consciousness without the drugs. Of course, even though we know that the Grateful Dead were immersed in the LSD culture, this particular problem of consciousness remains centred around the element of conversation in musical improvisation.
In traditional jazz improvisation, the spontaneous expression takes place within a structural tension at work in the ensemble, usually between the rhythm section and the soloist.
Ingrid Monson describes this structural tension in terms of the individual and the group:. In either case, it is essential that each of the players has something to say and that the music played and heard is in fact an extemporaneous conversation that they are having with each other. His primary emphasis was on classical music where the roles of composers, performers and listeners are clearly delineated.
He also applied his analysis to jazz music with just a brief comment about rock and roll. Nonetheless, his analysis is germane to our discussion of the Grateful Dead, who, while on stage, both composed and performed their music. For Benson, their dialogue is not so much between different sets of composers and performers as it is a conversation among themselves as they composed and performed. It was during rehearsals that each musician listened to what the other was playing and adjusted his playing to fit in the whole.
In that interview, Garcia emphasised the art of listening to the other players in order to have a meaningful conversation in a band. But when the Grateful Dead performed, there were times when they did not alternate solos, first hearing what the other players were playing and then responding.
The jazz model of improvisational conversation, both hierarchical and associative, does not explain how the Grateful Dead played collectively in a jam, if we maintain, as that model would suggest, that the members of the band were conversing with each other.
In performance, when exploring musical spaces between structured songs or when exploring musical possibilities within the song space itself, once all of them were committed to the same tune or fell into the same groove, they were no longer in a listen-respond mode of conversation anymore, even though, according to Monson and Benson, they were still in conversation and dialogue; now the dialogue was just not with each other.
I have argued elsewhere that they were in conversation with the un-played song itself Spector — Before looking at the details of that conversation though, it might be useful to consider a theoretical framework formulated by Friedrich Nietzsche where he suggested possible strategies for overcoming the cultural malaise of his contemporary culture.
Nietzsche argued that one of the primary problems with the Western intellectual tradition that has contributed to the cultural malaise has been its incredible emphasis on rational consciousness, even though, as Nietzsche observed, consciousness is not only our most recently developed organ but also our most fallible one as well.
Philosophically, consciousness is defined in terms of intentionality, which is to say that it always intends an object, that is, thoughts and beliefs are always about something. For example, if you pay attention to it, you can be conscious that you are reading the words on this page right now. This kind of awareness forms the baseline understanding of consciousness as we have ordinarily objectified the world.
The subject-object structure of consciousness is also an expression of a temporal horizon. To think of something is both to impose a temporal structure on the act and a gap between the thinker and the object thought about. When the members of the Grateful Dead jammed and played solos simultaneously, that temporal horizon had to disappear as they were all playing in the same present moment.
As the whole room is one being, there is no gap between subject and object, and you cannot look for those special moments, for if you try, you will firmly situate yourself in a subject-intended object structure of consciousness, and those special unified moments will elude you. To experience those moments, you have to be present for them; if you try to think them, you will not find them. If he is thinking about the notes that he or the others are playing, then he is not listening to the song as he plays but what the other players are playing.
In those thinking moments he is an active subject intending the objects of the notes and sounds. As such, the kind of listening that Lesh has described is an awareness of what the other musicians are playing in the context of his own playing and in the sense of allowing the sounds to be heard as a complete relational whole rather than actively trying to hear them particularly or individually.
He was the first in the Western philosophical tradition to recognise that the framework driving this tradition that has so valued reason to the exclusion of other human drives and passions is fraught with difficulty. In his delineation of some of the elements of what he called the Western cultural malaise, Nietzsche uncovered fundamental structures of mainstream culture that members of the s counterculture were trying to transform, and in his projection for the future of humanity, he indicated possible strategies for bringing about that transformation.
Beginning after the fall of Athens with the ascendancy of Socrates and Plato as cultural forefathers and continuing through the end of the nineteenth century with Nietzsche himself proclaiming the end of that tradition and the possible beginning of a new one, Nietzsche indicated that the legacy left by Socrates and Plato was the elevation of reason as a function of consciousness as the dominant drive in human experience to the exclusion of other more natural drives and instincts situated in our bodies.
What has held this tradition together through its various permutations of Rome, Christianity, the Scientific Revolution and the Enlightenment is precisely what is problematic for Nietzsche, namely, the tenacious grip that rationality as a function of consciousness, along with its presupposed metaphysical dualism, has had for two millennia.
In On the Genealogy of Morals , Nietzsche described the consequences of being overly rational. As human beings neglected or subordinated natural drives and impulses, Nietzsche observed:. They felt unable to cope with the simplest undertakings; in this new world they no longer possessed their former guides, their regulating, unconscious and infallible drives.
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