The events at Altamont prompted a series of changes

The events at Altamont prompted a series of changes, which in the first place involved a redefinition of the Dead’s relation to the music business. The band wanted to be independent from the music industry, cut back the influence of outside managers, and took all organizational and promitional matters in their own hands. Ticket and souvenir sales were done exclusively on a mail-order basis—at a time when it was hardly foreseeable that this decision would turn Grateful Dead Enterprises into one of rock music’s largest businesses. (If my memory serves me right, the Dead are ranking as Nr. 4 in terms of all-time financial turn-overs.)

In 1971, the band suggested the formation of an informal association that came to be called Dead Heads. The organization, as its members were quick to point out, was not a "fan club," which in the music business usually means a convenient method for merchandising p.r. packages. Rather, "Dead Heads" was established as a method for channeling communication from audience to performer. For communications from performer to audience, the band proposed to set up a mailing list, inviting people interested in being informed regularly and directly about inside news, the doings and plans of the band. By 1995, the mailing list maintained by Grateful Dead Enterprises held 110,000 names. Their web site today is an extraordinary composite of an on-line shopping mall and an all-purpose archive for fans to roam.

The business and management side, however, is only one side of the changes caused by Altamont—which nominally at least was co-organized by the Grateful Dead. It may well be that, as some critics have claimed, the hiring of the Hell’s Angels was done following the advice of the Dead—though that allegation has never been confirmed. In the end, the Dead did not appear on stage at Altamont; their subsequent work shows that the shock went deep but led to a burst of creativity. A little over two weeks after the horrific events at Altamont, the Dead introduced a new song to their program. "New Speedway Boogie" was at once a confession expressing apprehensiveness and confusion, as well as an exhortation to a new order of wisdom, a desparate prayer and a hymn of hope: "One way or another / this darkness got to give."

Immediately noticeable was a new concern for the lyrics of the songs. Robert Hunter, a long-time friend of Jerry Garcia who had already collaborated on some earlier material, was invited to join the band as song writer. Hunter agreed and became a semi-official member of the band, though he never appeared on stage. Hunter, who like Ken Kesey had participated in the government-sponsored experiments at Menlo Park VA Hospital, was committed to poetry and literary craftsmanship; his contributions were largely responsible for the marked improvement in the lyrics of the band; indeed, some songs, like "Ripple," are verbal gems sparkling with allusions to the finest work in the history of poetry.

Hunter was responsible for the words of "New Speedway Boogie." Another song coming from his pen was an early highlight of the new collaboration—"Uncle John’s Band." Though written before Altamont, it seemed to make sense only afterward, and the band, Jerry Garcia claimed, "worked on it for really a long time, to get it working right." "Uncle John’s Band" is a call to the tribes, but note how careful the first stanza is in establishing a relation between speaker and audience. It may well be regarded as an attempt at re-establishing that relation, coming at a time when the sense of community in the hippie culture was disappearing, and it sounds a warning about those who seek to undermine the efforts. "Ain’t no time to hate, barely time to wait" sums up a world view that the Dead and Deadheads adopted to heart and practice.

The album from which this version of "Uncle John’s Band" is taken, Workingman’s Dead, came out in early summer 1970. The Grateful Dead’s fifth album and their first real studio production (they actually spent over a month recording), it was artistic evidence of the change the band underwent after Altamont. That change already indicated by the cover—no weird psychedelic stuff on this one, but a grim evocation of the hard times of the Great Depression—was continued in the turn to musical roots, traditional folk sounds that characterized the songs on the album. Clearly influenced by the work of Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young, Workingman’s Dead features concise tasteful, fequently "unplugged" instrumental arrangements and rough-hewn but always tuneful vocal harmonies. In the all too ornery diction of a music-magazine writer, the Dead went "from psychedelic assault unit to country-inflected bards of a world gone under." Another critic was no less flowery in his diction when calling the songs of Workingman’s Dead "Old West miniatures that will be the folk songs of the 21^st century."

While in early 1970—this was the time of the shooting of four students by the Ohio National Guard at Kent State—other bands like Jefferson Airplane were pairing political radicalism with a call to violent activism, the Dead abstained. Robert Hunter insists that it was a conscious choice, a response to the increased bloodshed on campuses and in the streets. The original back cover of American Beauty, the album which came out only a few months after Workingman’s Dead, was to depict the band wearing guns like cowboys in a Western. Hunter says it was his objection—that he would not want to have the band on public display in such a fashion in those turbulent times—that the picture was discarded. American Beauty continued to explore the musical terrain opened by Workingman’s Dead, clothing everyday topics in five-minute folk tunes that were rich in vocal harmonies and acoustic instrumentation. One difference between the two albums is that thematically the songs of Workingman’s Dead are more closely connected, while American Beauty is more diverse. The cover of the album renders the title to be read also as—"American Reality."

"Ripple" begins, like "Uncle John’s Band," by establishing a relation between the singer and the audience. With its biblical echoes, the diction of the first stanza seems in line with the traditional openings of folk ballads; but the rhetoric of negotiating between the speaker and the addressee is at once also a characteristic of postmodernist texts and their efforts at positioning themselves between author and reader. Arguably postmodernist is also the conscious employment of a wide range of intertextual references—from the Bible to Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s "Kubla Khan," William Butler Yeats’s "The Madness of King Goll" and "The Empty Cup," Walt Whitman’s "Song of Myself," Nietzsche’s "Vorrede," Kerouac’s On the Road, and the Japanese Haiku: the chorus of the song, "Ripple in still water / When there is no pebble tossed / Nor wind to blow" has 17 syllables. That stanza also invokes a favorite image of postmodernist theorizing, in which "ripple in still water" is likened to a key postmodernist concept of language—call it the arbitrary relation of signifier and signified or the sign’s unrelatedness to actuality. And "Ripple" closes by posing, quite self-consciously, as a hippie anthem—and to be sure, an anthem is always also a hymn celebrating the by-gone good old days.

After such awesome harmoniousness, it is difficult to strike up notes of discord. I admit to having been a Deadhead for over twenty years—in case you have not realized that by now—while I must say that I do not agree with them on two major issues. My first objection has to do with the drug problem related to and associated with the band. I am willing to accept that no one in the group has discouraged the use of pot and psychedelics, but I am deeply troubled by their unwillingness to draw a line somewhere. Some members of the band refused even to speak out against hard drugs—and that is hard to take. After all, Ron McKernan’s death of cirrhosis of the liver at age 28 was caused by overindulgence in alcohol and hard drugs. Brent Mydland, his substitute, died at age 37 of an overdose of of morphine and cocaine. Jerry Garcia’s death at age 53, in 1995, was caused by his addiction to heroin, and resulted in the formal dissolution of the band.

My second major objection is to the band’s concept of America, which in many an instance does not keep apart actuality and what Richard Brautigan has called "often only a place in the mind," the United States and the dream of America. The lampoonery of a simple-minded, red-white-and-blue flag-waving patriotism is itself finally no more than a gesture that refers back to itself—it is flag waving. "Truckin’," the hymn to and of the band’s life on the road, never crosses the confines of the United States. In all of the Grateful Dead, there isn’t really anything suggestive of a world beyond the borders of the U.S. The accident of the triple album Europe ’72 is revealing in the graphics of the inside cover—which suggests nothing so much as a step into another world.

Those setbacks—the drug cult and the national fixation—are issues that need to be reckoned with; the latter at least is a feature shared by almost all American rock musicians, and therefore it would be unfair to single out the Dead for blame. In general, the words and music of the Dead are far above rock mediocrity. Perhaps it would be too much to invoke categories of musical art or compare their lyrics to poetry; but what their words and music occasionally have to say is not to be dismissed too lightly. For me, the following lines come as close as anything to being a personal motto:

There is a road, no simple highway
Between the dawn and the dark of night
And if you go, no-one may follow
That path is for your steps alone

You who choose to lead must follow
But if you fall, you fall alone
If you should stand, then who’s to guide you?
If I knew the way, I would take you home.