The Tragic Odes of Jerry Garcia and The Grateful Dead

Mystery Dances in the Magic Theater

Brent Wood

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9780429582219
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Music

The Tragic Odes of Jerry Garcia and the Grateful Dead is a multifaceted study of tragedy in the group's live performances showing how Garcia brought about catharsis through dance by leading songs of grief, mortality, and ironic fate in a collective theatrical context.

This musical, literary, and historical analysis of thirty-five songs with tragic dimensions performed by Garcia in concert with the Grateful Dead illustrates the syncretic approach and acute editorial ear he applied in adapting songs of Robert Hunter, Bob Dylan, and folk tradition. Tragically ironic situations in which Garcia found himself when performing these songs are revealed, including those related to his opiate addiction and final decline. This book examines Garcia's musical craftsmanship and the Grateful Dead's collective art in terms of the mystery-rites of ancient Greece, Friedrich Nietzsche's Dionysus, 20th century American music rooted in New Orleans, Hermann Hesse's Magic Theater, and the Greek Theatre at Berkeley, offering a clear prospect on an often misunderstood phenomenon.

Featuring interdisciplinary analysis, close attention to musical and poetic strategies, and historical and critical contexts, this book will be of interest to scholars and researchers of Popular Music, Musicology, Cultural Studies, and American Studies, as well as to the Grateful Dead's avid listeners.

1 “Morning Dew” and the Greek Theatre

O new one, atomic war is a ripple on the broad face of the Amazon.

Theodore Sturgeon, More Than Human

A glimmering, foreboding guitar motif climbed, fell, and rose again, making the first steps of a musical journey through fear, hope, despair, love, and acceptance, sparked by Jerry Garcia’s fingers fretting steel strings along a minor-tinged scale as the Grateful Dead returned to the Greek Theatre stage. The motif grew into a passage as his bandmates joined in and Garcia’s guitar reached into the high register to evoke an air of tragedy. Eighty-five-hundred color-clad dancers in terraced semi-circles on the Berkeley hillside rose to their feet while the sun set over San Francisco Bay beyond the classical columns and proscenium stage as if in a summer solstice ceremony. They roared for the joy and suffering, beauty and sadness, communitas and isolation, optimism and pessimism they were about to explore together. As dark descended, Garcia sang the plaintive opening line, “Walk me out in the morning dew, my honey,” assuming the voice of a survivor of a nuclear holocaust in an imagined future poignantly cast in the style of a ballad from the past.

Most listeners who felt the power of “Morning Dew” on June 14, 1985 remained unaware of the historical nexus into which they had been drawn at that moment. Nevertheless, the impact of “Morning Dew” throughout the amphitheater was tremendous, as resonant in Ronald Reagan’s era of nuclear escalation as when Bonnie Dobson first composed the song in a Los Angeles apartment during the nuclear scare of John F. Kennedy’s term. Garcia, in the eye of the Grateful Dead’s musical storm, pushed the audience’s capacity for pathos to its limits, provoking sublime experiences especially in those whose doors of perception had been cleansed with psychedelics. Not all understood the post-apocalyptic scenario implied by the lyrics, or knew much about the song’s life outside the Grateful Dead. Of those who did, few likely recognized the extent to which their responses had been affected by Garcia’s editorial craftsmanship, or realized they were dancing above a laboratory in which preparations had been made for the development of the first atomic bombs. Fewer still considered the peculiar links between Richard Wagner’s prelude to Nazi fascism and the Grateful Dead’s tragic redemption of nuclear anxiety – two strikingly distinct yet curiously interrelated currents of musical tragedy that converged around the San Francisco Bay that week.

The Grateful Dead’s 20th-anniversary concerts at the University of California’s Berkeley campus followed close on the heels of a production of Wagner’s music-drama cycle The Ring by the San Francisco Opera. The Ring was first been performed in the city in the year 1900 by New York’s Metropolitan Opera company just as plans were hatching to build the Berkeley Greek Theatre.¹ By 1985 Wagner’s masterwork had become a museum piece, a relic of 19th-century Germany whose cultural import, artistic wealth, and epic scale had outlasted its connection with audiences at the Festspielhaus in Bayreuth. The Grateful Dead, though also sometimes viewed from a distance as remnants of a bygone era, were in fact at the height of their powers after twenty years of active performance inseparable from the unique artistic and political culture that evolved in the Bay Area over the course of the century. The group would go on to provide peak cathartic experiences to increasing numbers of followers for another decade, imbued with the spirit of Dionysian tragedy from archaic Greece that philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche thought he had perceived in Wagner’s work when he wrote his provocative first book The Birth of Tragedy out of the Spirit of Music.

Phil Lesh, a student of 19th-century European art music prior to taking up the electric bass with the Grateful Dead, reserved a box for the band at the downtown opera house a week before the group’s anniversary concerts, drawing notice of journalists covering the ambitious production. Though the San Francisco Opera spent lavishly on performers and stage design mixing German Romantic and ancient Greek motifs, its production of The Ring, according to one reviewer, “avoided the sense of emotional immediacy.”² Garcia attended Das Rheingold, Die Walküre, and Siegfried. On the third night he dozed off as the climactic ending of the second act was about to unfold around Siegfried, a hero who has lost his mother, sought the meaning of fear, and tasted “dragon’s blood” enabling him to understand the language of bird song. Lesh’s account casts his bandmate’s somnolence in a comedic light:

at the most tender part, as Siegfried is singing about his lost mother, from behind me there comes a sound – part chainsaw, part the rooting of a wild boar searching for truffles. Oops – Jerry has fallen asleep and begun to snore. Mickey leaps to the rescue, jabbing him repeatedly with a salad fork while shaking his shoulders and urging him, half-asleep, back to the foyer.³

Was Garcia instinctively retreating from a character whose situation too closely resembled his own? Or on the contrary, had the lavish production simply failed to engage him? Had he “nodded off” while his body chemistry worked its way out of an opiate habit? Whatever the case, Garcia did not return for the apocalyptic finale, Götterdämmerung or Twilight of the Gods, opting instead to attend a Phil Collins concert at the Oakland Coliseum with his daughter Annabelle – a significant gesture for a man whose personal problems had estranged him from his children over the preceding years.

Though he hadn’t heard the saga’s final chapter, Garcia couldn’t help but respond to the tale of a ring which would confer power to rule the world if its owner renounced love, and the tragic momentum of The Ring rippled through the Grateful Dead’s Greek Theatre concerts a few days later. Despite ragged vocals and a minimal stage show, the group had no trouble emotionally engaging its audience, from the chilling rendition of “Morning Dew” to the final encore and beyond. The super-charged air of festivity on the Friday night, with fanfare provided by the Beatles’ Sergeant Pepper (“it was twenty years ago today”), didn’t deter Garcia from following “Morning Dew” in the same set with two more slow-moving explorations of suffering and blindness delivered in the first-person, “China Doll” and “Comes at Time.” That day marked the re-introduction of “Comes a Time” to the group’s active repertoire along with “Stagger Lee,” yet another song concerned with irony and mortality. The tenderly sung “got an empty cup only love can fill” likely conjured for Garcia and Lesh the Rhinemaidens’ warning against the destructive power of the Rhinegold. As his biographer Blair Jackson observed, Garcia’s singing that night was “emotive and affecting, no doubt because the words mirrored his own experience of the previous few years so well.”⁴

This opening-night overload of pathos seemed to provide cathartic relief for Garcia himself as he closed the concert with the witty, lightweight “Keep Your Day Job,” and the next night bypassed the tragic ode he usually sang as the penultimate song in the second set. The third concert, too, remained uncharacteristically free of references to morality until Garcia echoed the Rhinemaidens’ foreknowledge of Siegfried’s fate in the fateful refrain “he had to die,” the central motif of “Cryptical Envelopment,” one of the only lyrics he ever devised for himself. Because Garcia had ceased performing “Cryptical Envelopment” many years before, its distinctive opening licks in the weekend’s final set provoked a groundswell of cheers overwhelming his creaking voice as he brought his parable to bear on the “The Other One,” the Bob Weir song for which it had originally provided a frame. In tragic mode again, Garcia played “Wharf Rat” in its familiar late second-set spot, then concluded the celebratory weekend with the sad, sweet farewell of “Brokedown Palace,” its river imagery recollecting the Rhine and its ring while Garcia shared a mutual declaration of love with those assembled.

Audience members left the concerts buoyant, the Grateful Dead having again succeeded in charging them with joy, in no small part thanks to Garcia’s fortitude in fathoming depths of pathos that few rock-n-roll musicians would attempt, and his complementary ability to propel listeners to ecstatic collective heights. Fans were justifiably enthusiastic about the band’s performance, and optimistic about the guitarist’s precarious health. Yet a prominent part in the experience had been played by the Greek Theatre itself, an auspicious site for marking two decades of revels with a sublime rendition of “Morning Dew.”

The Greek Theatre

The Berkeley Greek Theatre became a favorite of band and fans alike, until the overwhelming demand for tickets and chaotic scenes outside the concerts forced the group to larger outdoor Bay Area venues. Jackson described it as “wonderfully intimate … a mecca worth traveling to” for Deadhead pilgrimages.⁵ Its moderate size and semi-circular tiers ringed at the back by eucalyptus trees allowed audiences to behold one another dancing in a fragrant welter while band members stood framed by Greek columns on stage. A counterpoint to the collective intimacy was provided by visible connections with the broader world above the classical proscenium – the gorgeous backdrop of the campus and the San Francisco Bay Area, a reminder that Berkeley had once been known as “Athens of the West.” Countless concert-goers have tales to share about uncanny or fortuitous experiences at the Greek Theatre, evidence of the uniquely fertile ground it made for the synchronicities, epiphanies, and offbeat strokes of fortune that prevailed at Grateful Dead concerts.⁶ The absence of alcohol sales in the venue during this period helped facilitate the anarchic yet co-operative atmosphere. The band had performed at the outdoor amphitheater before, in the late 1960s when it began hosting folk and rock music after a half-century of classical tragedy, but didn’t return until the first of nine annual concert weekends in September of 1981. The venue’s aura was further enhanced under a full moon on Friday the 13th of July, 1984 when the band surprised the crowd with a rare trip through the primeval psychedelic “Dark Star.” In January of 1985, Garcia began the long, slow process of kicking his habits after being arrested for possession of cocaine, and by June his energy level was on the rise, along with anticipation of the anniversary concerts.

The Hearst Greek Theatre at Berkeley was modeled after the amphitheater at Epidaurus in Greece at the behest of new University of California president Benjamin Ide Wheeler, an enthusiastic Classics scholar who assumed his position at the turn of the 20th century after spending a year in Athens. The amphitheater set the tone for Wheeler’s expansion of the campus through an ambitious project of buildings in classical style designed by John Galen Howard. A sonnet praising Howard’s work in the University Chronicle included a quatrain emphasizing the cultural fusion of the Greek Theatre:

Present, past, future ages, Greek and ours,

Love and great law to timeless union brought,

The last and earliest things together wrought,

Truth and clear beauty one in all their powers.⁷

The original Epidaurus structure, built in the fourth century BCE, is among the best-preserved examples of classical architecture, having rested beneath mounds of earth until excavated in 1881. The Aesklepion, a sanctuary dedicated to Apollo’s son Aesclepius, god of healing, attracted the ailing from all over Greece, and the resulting prosperity enabled the building of the amphitheater, which opened psychic healing opportunities to thousands. A masterpiece renowned for its acoustics, the theater now hosts an annual festival of classical Greek drama and is a UNESCO World Heritage Site. The Berkeley copy is smaller than the original, but retains its elegant semi-circular form of tiered stone benches, facilitating dance throughout the steeply rising steps as well as on the floor in front of the stage.

A student production of scenes from the Aristophanes comedy The Birds in the original Greek language prophetically opened the theater in 1903. Originally performed in Athens around the time the amphitheater at Epidaurus was built, The Birds concerns the efforts of refugees from the city to establish a new society midway between gods and men, a tale presaging such efforts by the Grateful Dead and their peers. Funding for the amphitheater came from William Randolph Hearst, the San Francisco Examiner publisher whose chain of newspapers later played a prominent role in the criminalization of cannabis while popularizing the Mexican slang term “marijuana.”⁸ The site had been a natural bowl used for convocations and theatrical presentations known as “Ben Weed’s amphitheater,” a name now rich with irony. President Wheeler’s remarks to matriarch Phoebe Apperson Hearst on the performance of The Birds in Greek are readily applied to the Grateful Dead concerts decades later: “though the audience will be a little dazed as to what is going on, I think it will be interested in the oddity and weirdness of the situations and in the changes and movement which the play will develop.”⁹ The “wildly enthusiastic” response proved Wheeler’s expectations correct. The coach of the students playing The Birds predicted that the amphitheater would “wield a subtle influence in molding the culture of this Western coast,”...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Technical notes
• Introduction: Mystery dances in the Magic Theater
• 1. “Morning Dew” and the Greek Theatre
• 2. “Death Don’t Have No Mercy”: Catharsis and redemption
• 3. Befriending chaos: “Dark Star,” Dionysus and psychedelics
• 4. Dancing to fateful folk tales
• 5. Meditations on mortality, from Uncle John to Stella Blue
• 6. Chasing the dragon and escaping the netherworld
• 7. “Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door”: Dylan and Garcia
• 8. Is it the end or beginning?
• 9. The rebirth of tragedy
• Bibliography
• Index