Deadheads Term paper
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The Grateful Dead played together for over thirty years, quite a remarkable feat by any standards. Over the course of that thirty years they amassed a huge group of fans known as the Deadheads. These fans followed the Grateful Dead with unparalleled devotion. Deadheads are not like other rock & roll fans. They are the only fans that are as essential and charismatic as the band members are themselves. They transformed a subculture that is all their own. You cannot think of the Grateful Dead, without thinking Deadheads.
From the very beginning the group attracted a cult following that was much more than just a fan club. The two entities were brought together through a mixing of chemistry, karma, good vibes, and the aura of mid-Sixties San Francisco. The odyssey known as the Grateful Dead experience all began in the California town of Palo Alto, just south of San Francisco. This was the town where Jerry Garcia, the bands enigmatic leader, taught guitar by day and played the clubs at night (de Curtis and Henke 372). It was in these clubs that Garcia first began playing his brand of folk, blues, bluegrass, and jug-band music. These are also the clubs where Garcia first played with legendary band members Ron Pigpen McKernan, Bob Weir, and first collaborated with legendary Dead songwriter, Robert Hunter. Early in 1965 Garcia, Weir, and Pigpen, teamed up with drummer Bill Kreutzmann in a rock & roll band called the Warlocks. The group exchanged their jug band instruments for loud electric axes. But often times their music was too loud and formless. Bay Area club patrons often left a Warlocks performance feeling confused. Nonetheless, the Warlocks did establish a name for themselves with the local Bay Area gigs, and it was under this name that the band first took part in Ken Kesey s famed Acid Tests.
Later that same year, Garcia asked a friend named Phil Lesh to join the band as their bassist. Though he had never played the instrument before, Lesh s background in classical and electric music, allowed for his quick adaptation into the band. With Lesh on bass the Warlocks were able to refine their formless sound, and shape the brand of music that attracted so many fans over the years. Shortly after the arrival of Lesh, the band decided that a name change was in order, on a tip from Weir that another band was recording under the same name (Trager 394). In what could be described as a triumphant epiphany, Garcia opened a dictionary to a page where the words Grateful Dead jumped right off the page and into his head. Garcia later said of that event, We never decided to be the Grateful Dead. What happened was, the Grateful Dead came up as a suggestion because we were at Phil s house one day; he had a big Oxford dictionary. I opened it up, and the first thing I saw was grateful dead. It said that on the page and it was so astonishing (George-Warren and Dahl 10). The band went with that name, and while it cannot be exactly pinpointed, fans began to call themselves Deadheads, shortly after.
The Grateful Dead continued to play gigs in the Bay Area, attracting new fans with every performance. Perhaps most of their initial notoriety, as well as original Deadheads, came from the band s participation in The Acid Tests. In 1965 and 1966 LSD was legal and one the drugs most famed advocates, Ken Kesey, was taking full advantage. Kesey and the Merry Prankster, his acid-dropping entourage, hosted free form, audience participatory, multimedia West Coast events featuring films, projections, tape loops, ambient microphones, and Electric Kool-Aid (Trager 6). The Acid Tests allowed the Grateful Dead to play their music in a relaxed, no pressure to perform, type of way. The audience was there for more of the total experience, rather than the music itself. This same attitude has been characteristic of Deadheads throughout the years. The Acid Tests became the template for the three decades of Grateful Dead experience which followed (Trager 6).
However, it was not just the acid, and the psychedelic trip that attracted the band s initial fans. While it is probably true that Deadheads are more into acid than any other rock & roll bands fans are, there was much more to their appeal than the fact that it sounded good to someone stoned on acid. The attraction came from the Grateful Dead s ability to bring people together around those elements associated with psychedelics. They were a love of mystery and the unexpected, a search for community, quiet ideals, arts and crafts, and even a way of dancing (George-Warren, and Dahl). The first fans lived in a world of optimism and hope, the same way Deadheads today live. This was just the beginning of a family that would remain loyal to one another over the next thirty years.
The Grateful Dead continued to be a mainstay on the San Francisco scene. They performed for free at such venues as Golden Gate Park, made regular appearances at the Fillmore, the Carousel, and the Avalon Ballroom. The Dead would jam well into the early morning hours, pressed on by the spirit of the crowds and the energetic effects of the LSD. Their style of clothing and brand of art, which was displayed as the backdrop for all performances, began to pop up all over Haight-Ashbury, the legendary community that gave birth to the free-love counterculture of the 1960s. The Grateful Dead themselves took up a communal residence at 710 Ashbury Street (de Curtis and Henke 373). Major record labels descended on San Francisco in hopes of landing any number of the groups who had become so popular with the local counterculture, such as Jefferson Airplane, Ouicksilver Messenger Service, and the Grateful Dead. Warner Bros. managed to sign the Dead to a contract, commencing what we become one of the greatest recording careers of all time. The Dead s first album, The Grateful Dead, was released in March of 1967. Shortly after this release drummer, Mickey Hart, joined the band, and a second album, Anthem of the Sun, was released. Together these two albums quite simply remain as the apotheosis of psychedelic music, spacey, mind blowing, beyond definition (de Curtis and Henke 373). The next four years would undeniably be the Dead s most volatile.
The series of albums produced, covered a wide spectrum of musical influences, and gained the band a national following of curios fans. They were curios about the music, curious about the band, curios about the drugs, but most of all they were curios about the total experience and wanted to become a part if it. As amazing as the recordings were, the true essence of the Grateful Dead rested in their live performances. It is acknowledged by many Deadheads that their conversion to the lifestyle came from attending a live performance, rather than through listening to an album. The live concerts were surrounded by a mystic only capable of emerging through a magical mixture of band and audience. The Dead recognized this fact and, based on their philosophy that music is the timeless experience of constant change, began to release live recordings, because, they were the most honest record of that experience. The first of these live recordings was Live Dead, in 1970. Subsequent to 1970, all albums released that were of great significance, were...
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