My two roaches worth:
Sticking to the music, my opinion is the Dead in concert followed a rule of three: a third of the show was OK, a equivalent of a decent bar band doing covers; a third of the show was tiresome pointless jamming; and third of the show was musically transcendent.
What made the good parts good was a remarkable confluence of the creativity of psychedelic music with the grounded emotional truths of bluegrass/country, and a willingness and ability to improvise. Again, sometimes that improvisation didn’t work, but when it did, there’s really nothing better than hearing music successfully created on the fly.
I think many people found the long rhythmic jams less boring than I did. Chemicals may play a part in that for some.
Of course, there is the attraction of the scene. They’re pretty mainstream now, but for a long while, they really stood for something outside (at one point, seeing ‘a deadhead sticker on a Cadillac’ was actually worth noting).
I think what happened in the 90s was that the jam band scene shifted from dirty, smelly hippie counterculture outsiders to the white baseball cap Abercrombie & Fitch upper middle class prep-school frat boy types. In fact, I tend to associate The Dead, Phish and DMB with my college fraternity days. Basically the type of music that the houses would play in the middle of the afternoon while barbequeing and drinking beer on a shitty old couch in the yard.
It’s only personal taste, but I’d disagree (although I do like those two albums too). Terrapin Station and Blues for Allah are sublime, in my ears.
Then again, I’m one of those musicians who focusses very much on the instrumentalists’ performances, to the extent of barely hearing the lyrics. Maybe that’s the difference.
I’ve never been a big fan of the Dead, but they engender a kind of respect. They famously allowed their audiences to record their concerts*, on state-of-the-art media yet. (Grateful Dead fans were a major component of the digital audio tape market in the late 1980s). In this era of the draconian measures of ASCAP and the RIAA, such enlightened self-interest seems downright quaint.
A guitarist I once played in a band with said one reason people would go see them over and over was that unlike most bands, they didn’t play the same songs every show. In fact, he claimed that in the three or four times he saw the Dead, they only repeated a handful of songs.
This might account for the disproportionate number of Dead concerts available on archive.org.
I think a lot of the appeal of the Dead was the same as the appeal of, say, KISS or The Aquabats: they gave their fans a sense of belonging to something. That kind of club/army/communal spirit goes a long way towards making lifelong fans.
My dad [allegedly] had an amusing encounter with one of the Grateful Dead, some time in the early '70s. Thing was, as a pure country music fan he had no idea who the Grateful Dead were at the time. He was working for the Washington State Patrol, at a weigh station on I-5 just north of Vancouver, WA, and the Dead’s truck(s) had to cross his scales on their way north (probably traveling from Portland, Oregon to Seattle). For whatever reason, they needed to stop and present their permits. This is what makes me take Dad’s story with a grain of salt, as his narrative implies that a member of the band was actually driving the truck (rather than a roadie/official driver). But his story of the encounter goes something like this:
Band member enters the weigh station and presents permits.
DAD: Grateful Dead, huh? What do you do, haul caskets?
GD MEMBER: Uh, no. We’re a rock band.
DAD: Huh. Are you any good?
GDM: … We’re the best band in the world!
DAD: All right, your permits are good. Good luck to you, and have a nice day!
Nah - if you are a long-time member of the band’s crew, the concept of We enlarges to include you. The Dead were particularly known for having a huge family of friends, crew, lyricists, archivists, etc. I doubt it was a band member, but instead someone who felt entitled to think they were part of the gang…
I’ll second both of those (though I do think there are a couple of dodgy tracks on Terrapin) and add a shout-out for my favorite Dead album of all, Aoxomoxoa.
The Dead were top-notch musicians and songwriters, which helped. If you download their music from archive.org, you can see they played a very wide repetoire of songs – probably more than any other band. They played not only their own music, but music from many other groups, and would switch effortlessly from one to the next. It never looked planned, either.
But the Deadheads were more a social phenomenon than a musical one: you went to the concerts to go to the concerts, meet other Deadheads, and have a good time.
I never went to a concert, but liked them for the music. I like other bands like Rush and Styx. I liked to sit in the dark with the album on and close my eyes, and relax. It was relaxing, and I wasn’t doped up. You can’t be taking cellphone calls and thinking of text messaging or other things like your email. Most people had some time where the pace was not hectic. You had no computers or consoles beyond Pong. There was a different mindset from now, because of the lesser demands on your time. Most music fits best at the time it is released, and that’s because it’s hard to get back into mind set of the times. Try laying in a dark quiet room and drift with the album.
Actually I think the fans can get in the way of the music. The Dead were a very talented and innovative band that drew on a lot of strains of American music: Blues, Jazz, Bluegrass, etc. They had a unique sound that’s never been duplicated. Unfortunately, when people think of the Dead they just think of swarms of annoying college students, not the music.
Obviously, you may not care for their music, and that’s fine. But their talent deserves respect. They weren’t just a bunch of spaced out hippies.
I thought they were boring until I developed a crush on a beautiful Deadhead-ette. Our first date was a show at The Greek in Berkeley. We got a spot up on the grass (so to speak), and set our blanket down. After a few songs, she said, “Let’s go down front and dance!”. We mingled our way through the crowd with no problem at all, people just let moved aside for us. It was there I got caught up in the vibe…totally different than any concert I had ever been to.
That vibe seemed to diminish as the demographic changed, most noticeably after “Touch of Grey” came out. That’s when the yuppies started showing up because it was “cool” to be a fan. For me, that’s when the vibe changed and it just wasn’t as much fun anymore.
Not a Deadhead. I didn’t hate them or anything, they just never made me care.
But back in the day my friend was and he convinced me that we needed to stand in line so we could get 10 tickets each. This was outdoors, in the Northeast, in February. We got our tickets and I didn’t feel a thing. The next day I went to his house to give him the tickets I got so he could resell them and some guys were there tie-dyeing shirts to sell. So I helped with that for a few hours.
He was blown away that I never had any intention of going to the concert or making money. I just had no interest. His crappy tapes were enough.
My interest in the Dead was that they could make music that sounded something like what you have heard before, but comes out like nothing you had ever heard. To put it another way, suppose Tom Clancy decided to retell Stephen King stories tongue in cheek. They could also go into these great jams, but the segues were even more impressive. I am a big fan of a successful segue. See “China Cat Sunflower” into “I Know you Rider.”
On a related note, what made the Dead successful was the genius of Jerry Garcia. He was not the hippie, peace, love and drugs guy that the fans would see. He sold what would appeal. Allowing bootleg tapes, selling tye-dies in the parking lot and constantly pushing the tour above all is what kept the Dead in the minds of the young people who would put money in the pockets of the band members. Anyone could duplicate the sound, but it is the marketing that made the Dead what they were.