The Great American Rock and Roll Band
In America we don’t really produce great rock and roll bands. Great rock bands are more of an English thing.
The Beatles, The Stones, The Who, The Kinks, Led Zeppelin, The Clash, the Sex Pistols, The Smiths, U2 (–ok, so U2 is Irish, Americans don’t know the difference anyway). In fact, next to men dressing in women’s clothes, creating (and anointing) great rock bands is Britain’s greatest national fetish. Oasis built its entire career on slavish devotion to the fetish. And the British rock press trawls the pubs like pedophiles trawl the Internet for fresh young meat, desperate for the next next big thing (The Libertines! The Fratellis!).
You have to get pretty far down the list before bumping in to the American contenders. The Allman Brothers, the Velvet Underground, the Ramones, the MC5, the Stooges, the Doors, Parliament-Funkadelic, the Monkees, Nirvana. At best, it’s a quirky list (with Buckingham-Nicks era Fleetwood Mac straddling both worlds).
The Brits produce twin engined bands powered by the tension between cooperating core figures–Lennon&McCartney, Jagger&Richards, Townshend&Daltry, Morrisey&Marr. We produce great solo artists with bespoke bands–Bruce Springsteen & the E Street Band, Tom Petty & the Heartbreakers, Bob Dylan & the Band (they really ARE a Canadian band you know!), CCR–or, because we’re driven by commerce, we produce great studio bands: The Funk Brothers at Motown, the Wrecking Crew at Gold Star in LA, the Sugar Hill records house band in New York.
It’s not surprising really. American music, like the rest of American culture, has been suspended from the start between the polar forces of rugged individualism and egalitarian populism. We revere the heroic loner who can’t follow the rules–Bruce Willis’ John Maclain is a classic American pop hero–AND the heroic teammate who sacrifices himself for the good of the whole. Our cultural constructions illuminate the dichotomy–our national sport is baseball, a team game built around the solo encounter of hitter with pitcher, for example.
I’ll never have anything bad to say about the Ramones–probably the most underrated band America has ever produced. For sheer, breakthrough genius the Velvet Underground will always be our most important rock band. And the MC5 will forever be my personal favorite. But the greatest, most American of American bands, the band I find myself listening to every summer, not coincidentally as the 4th rolls around, is the Grateful Dead.
Like the nation itself, the Dead is a grand, shambolic, ambitious, profligate, half-assed, entrepreneurial, naive, idealistic, hucksterish, deadly earnest enterprise. It was a band without a leader, the most democratic band America has ever produced with all the members writing material and voting on the group’s business decisions.
Sometimes, of course, this made the band seem rudderless. But most often the band seemed to me like the crew of the Pequod if lunatic Ahab, after nailing the doubloon to the mast, had jumped overboard–committed by blood oath to an uncertain quest each member defined differently: should we find the white whale, just fill the hold with oil, go hunting something all together different?
If ever there was a leader it was that Keseyan, acidhead chimera known as “group mind,” a unity of thought among the players achievable, so the idea went, through substantial quantities of acid. Dead bass player Phil Lesh describes it:
That eternal consciousness is the same in you as it is in me and the same in the guys in my band as it is in me. It’s a subliminal and subconscious process but when the nodes of that eternal consciousness link together and become one consciousness then that’s the group mind, the eternal universal archetypal consciousness.
The concept is pure Emerson (from The Over-Soul, 1841):
We live in succession, in division, in parts, in particles. Meantime within man is the soul of the whole; the wise silence; the universal beauty, to which every part and particle is equally related; the eternal ONE. And this deep power in which we exist, and whose beatitude is all accessible to us, is not only self-sufficing and perfect in every hour, but the act of seeing and the thing seen, the seer and the spectacle, the subject and the object, are one.
The idea of the Dead, like the idea of America itself, was a reality and a dream that diverged as often it converged, but which exploded transcendentally when it all came together.
Unfortunately that explosion never occurs on Three from the Vault, the Dead’s latest archival live performance release–a February 1971 gig from the Capitol Theater in Port Chester, NY. (The concert, like every other Dead show, has long circulated among fans.)
I’ve stopped hunting for the perfect Dead concert release, giving in to the hippie notion that the quest itself is the prize, the transcendental notion that the seer and the thing seen are one. But even so, among the Dead’s hundreds of commercially available concert recordings, Three from the Vault ranks near the bottom of the list. It’s not surprising to discover that it was mastered for release 15 years ago and shelved until now.
The horrible singing of which the band was capable is on full display. Rod “Pigpen” McKernan–keyboard player and spiritual center of the Dead’s East Bay biker band days–was in the final throes of drinking himself to death. Drummer Mickey Hart had quit the band the night before (after his father, the band’s then-manager, ran off with the group’s money); and, although the group was always better with one drummer–jazzier, more subtle, more agile–it sounds like it’s feeling its way through the gig. Normally guitarists Jerry Garcia and Bob Weir together with Lesh formed an interweaving front line–improvising narrowly on melodic themes in support of the vocals the way the front line of trumpet, clarinet and trombone did in old time New Orleans jazz. Here they just seem to be riding the tonic, hoping to hit the changes, unsure of how to fill all the newly cleared space.
Part of the reason may be all the new material. The Dead introduced some of its most famous material during the February 71 Port Chester shows– Playing in the Band, Bird Song, Bertha, The Greatest Story Ever Told, Loser, Deal, and the titanic down-and-outer’s monologue Wharf Rat. The repertoire is what has inspired continuing interest among collectors in these performances.
The songs the group wrote in 1971, particularly those composed by Garcia with his long time lyricist Robert Hunter, should have cemented the band’s reputation as one of the great pioneering bands of Americana rock, up there with Bob Dylan and the Band (alone, btw, on the list of great Canadian bands).
Garcia and Hunter came to their influences the same way Dylan did–absorbing 100 years of American music and churning it out nightly on an early 1960s collegiate folk scene (Dylan’s in Minneapolis, Garica’s & Hunter’s in Palo Alto), where the test of ones mettle was how many Child ballads you knew. In fact, before turning to electric blues and then psychedelic rock, the proto-Dead had been a jug band.
By 1970 the group had turned from the baroque psychedelia of its early records towards a country-tinged folk rock (Garcia switched from Gibson guitars with thick-sounding humbucker pickups to Fender Strats with their twangier single coils) recording two excellent studio albums Workingman’s Dead and American Beauty which clearly bore the influence of the Band’s first two albums (which had appeared in 1968 and 1969) and the basement tapes tracks that were circulating as songwriter’s demos among industry pros.
During the course of 1971, Hunter and Garcia wrote a string of songs that deliberately evoked the kind of timeless Americana that Dylan and the Band had summoned during the summer of 1967– a world populated by hobo murderers, confederate soldiers, singing brakemen, honky tonk pianists, patent medicine tent show con artists and the like, not just the titles mentioned, but over the succeeding months new songs too–Sugaree, Tennessee Jed, Ramble On Rose, Brown-Eyed Women, Comes a Time, and an arrangement of Big Railroad Blues a song which Garcia had learned from a 1920s jug band recording.
This was great stuff and Hunter expected the material to form the backbone of a studio follow-up to American Beauty. As band biographer Dennis McNally describes it, the lyricist was “bitterly disappointed” when no studio session materialized. Instead, in typical Grateful Dead fashion, the songs dribbled out piecemeal on a string of live albums (Grateful Dead, Europe 72) and side projects (Garcia).
There ARE great performances of these songs from live concerts later in the year. After Pigpen left the group in a failed attempt to recover his health, the band when into rehearsals (all too infrequent) to break in new pianist Keith Godchaux and came out burning on a fall college tour. I’m particularly fond of the shows from Texas Christian University in November 1971 thankfully available in streaming format on Archive.org (November 14 is my favorite, homecoming at TCU with the hippies playing for co-eds in gowns and blue tuxes!). But Hunter’s dream of a grand classic album built around his 1971 tunes with Garcia remains unrealized, and Three from the Vault doesn’t even get listeners into the ballpark.
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Look, I respect the hippie-stoner slow blues even if it bores the crap out of me, but these guys cut exactly no musical channels in American culture.
Hell, even in the genre (loosely defined) the Allmans ate their toast, or cooked their hash, or whatever. Far, far superior.
Sugaree is a nice tune - but Graham Parker covered it better than the lazy-ass, half-cocked Dead.
Garcia was, I'll admit, the greatest of the supreme, play-while-wasted, noodle-for-hours, blues scales, jazz chords slow-hand festival hounds. But that's a small sub-genre.
But the Dead over the Velvets, the Allmans, MC5, Ramones, Byrds, Creedence, Stooges, NY Dolls even....nah, don't see it.
The Dead are agreat moving festival and movable economy - but not a great band.
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GD are THE great American r'n'r band.
Musically and socially.
History will prove this as a fact.
They left everyone else in the dust.
Congrats for the insight.
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They were followers of Dylan in terms of the flight back to rural roots, or combining rural roots w/ rock and roll...but so was everyone. They were the #1 follower, and there's a reason Dylan asked to join the Dead in the mid 80s (he was turned down, btw, after a group vote in which reportedly one person voted no).
Garcia was a good player, a very good player, but not a great player. As he always said of himself he was an "idiomaitic" player. He had come up playing bluegrass banjo and had a finger roll style of playing. He was very comfortable and capable in his niche but even he knew he wasn't Django Reinhart or that kind of supreme player.
I never and still don't think of the Allmans as a great band. Love Eat a Peach, that's a masterpiece, but other than that I can take 'em or leave 'em. My problem w/ the Allmans is principally that they really only have one album's worth of really good original material in their entire oeurve. A dozen great originals is pretty thin for a band w/ that kind of longevity. I find I never listen to 'em. (BTW, the Allmans opened for the Dead at those gigs where they recorded Live at the Fillmore).
I also think you're way off base on the question of influence. The Dead is enormously influential. There's an entire school of jam bands that stand on the Dead's shoulders, obviously. And so much of the country rock that grew up in the wake of Dylan/theBand/The Dead bears the band's stamp. You might not like it or listen to it, but you can't deny it's existence. Take a quick glance at everyone who has covered Dead material--from the obvious to the less obvious (Elvis Costello, Sublime's skate punk ska version of "Scarlet Begonias"). The Dead haunt American music like few other acts.
I'll buy Van Halen as influential (but the influence is principally Eddie's, not the group's). But I'm sorry, I have to say it, Aerosmith blows. They were always a second rate band in my book and their born- again career as power balladeers has done nothing to raise them in my estimation. Clowns if you ask me. (Now I'm baiting Tony Alva).
The Band was a great band, maybe my all time fave. But 1) they're Canadian, so they don't make it past my limiter 2) to the extent that they were an Americana group they got it all from Dylan. You should grab the 5 CD boot of the complete basement tapes. It's Dylan giving the boys a master class.
CCR is great, really underrated I think, I just see that band as John Fogherty plus back up band not a real band. Like Sly and the Family Stone which was a little bit more of a group where all the players contributed but still a group dominated by a singular talent that wrote and arranged all the material. (If all these groups at the height of their powers playe in a battle of the bands my bet is that Sly and the 5 are the two left standing at the end. No one could out rock those two bands. That would be one hell of a steel cage death match, tho' my money's on Sly at his best over all comers).
But beyond the music, which is great, the Dead represent because of all the other stuff.
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Garcia and Hunter don't need us to defend 'em. I mean, just look at that list of songs:
Bertha, Bird Song, Brokedown Palace, Brown-Eyed Women, Casey Jones, China Cat Sunflower, China Doll, Comes a Time, Deal, Dire Wolf, Eyes of the World, Franklin's Tower (which Kruetzmann actually does have a credit on), He's Gone, High Time, Loser, Mississippi Half-Step Uptown Toodeloo, Ramble on Rose, Ripple, Row Jimmy, Ship of Fools, Stella Blue, Sugaree, Tennessee Jed, Touch of Grey, Uncle John's Band, Wharf Rat...just to cull some of my faves from the alphabetical list.
And some of the Weir songs are good too (especially the ones written w/ Hunter like Sugar Magnolia).
I'll still take the live recordings over the studio recordings, warts and all...like I said, the process of becoming is its own reward, I'm in touch w/ my inner hippie, I can accept and even ocassionally cherish the process.
Have you ever heard the recording floating around w/ Ryan Adams & the Cardinals plus Phil Lesh playing Wharf Rat? Great stuff.
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But orginals?
There's barely enough to string together a single side....compared to the Allmans' greatest? C'mon man!
Dreams
It's Not My Cross to Bear
Every Hungry Woman
Ramblin' Man
Whipping Post
Blue Sky
Revival
Midnight Rider
Elizabeth Reed
Jessica
Melissa
Hot 'Lanta
Ain't Wastin' Time No More
Stand Back
Wasted Words
Louisiana Lou
Just Ain't Easy
etc...vs. what...US Blues, Uncle John's Band, Sugar Magnolia, the insanely-overrated Casey Jones and some bits and pieces...
Further, the Allmans' collection of covers is also far superior.
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I'll give you Blue Skies, Whipping Post, Melissa, Jessica, Ain't Wasting No More Time, Revival, and, barely, Rambling Man and Elizabeth Reed...I'll even give you Les Brers in A Minor, which I think is over "You'd Be So Nice to Come Home To" changes....the rest of the stuff is forgettable to me...in one ear and out the other and the best of it doesn't come close to the best of Garcia-Hunter--Ship of Fools, Bird Song, Attics of My Life, Mississippi Half-Step..., Loser, Stella Blue, and my favorite, Wharf Rat.
One thing interesting about those Fillmore East shows...it was Love, the Allmans and the Dead on a triple bill, not sure what the door price was but probably 3-5 bucks, and the Dead and the Allmans each probably played 2.5 hour sets. That's bang for your buck!
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Jeez. I thought everyone knew that.
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Now Kit, easy there - steady now. Creedance had a wild roll of hits, though perhaps Chervokas is right that it was a Fogerty vehicle. Nonetheless.
The Dolls vs. the Dead - interesting case. One was too much, soon soon. The other was too little spread out over way too many years. You could easily make the case that the Dolls were more influential, I think. But I'm NY!
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My brother was one of those "Dead-heads," who until Jerry Garcia died, traveled around "taping the genius jams."
Once when I was in my early twenties, my younger brother was driving me somewhere in Chicago and indulging in his self-professed "religion." He had kindly turned it down when I requested. But to each his own, guys! I truly couldn't stand it. At the next red light, though it was late at night and I knew only that we were near Chicago somewhere, I jumped from the car. It was that or give up what tenuous hold I have ever had on sanity. One or two girlfriend years ago (claimed) to appreciate the Dead, but I highly doubt they still listen to them very often.
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As for my choices, I cannot attempt objectivity: Sonic Youth and Television for me. Lower in the pantheon, Velvet Underground, REM, Stooges, Buddy Holly and the Crickets (I say the Crickets count), Talking Heads (ok, this one may push the rock thing), and The Beach Boys.
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Try timeless.
The Grateful Dead span too many styles and so many years to be locked in a box.
There is much to discover within the Dead.
Many folks aren't willing to attempt such a grand leap. Too daunting. Zappa has a similar wide scope. Most music fans give up.
They need bands that make 25 hit singles. It's easier to inderstand.
Sans souci.
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I also forgot the Byrds, tho I'm not sure about greatness beyond their first two albums. Great singles band tho'.
Also, speaking of LA, I should have added Zappa and the Mothers as a prime example of genius w/ bespoke band. Also Captain Beefheart and the Trout Mask Replica/Lick My Decals era Magic Band.
Watson for some reason continues to tie the Dead to the Summer of Love, but that's all hype--like basing a critique of the Beatles on Love Me Do and Please Please Me, or saying the Stones were overrated because swinging London wasn't really all that. The Dead had a 35 year career and after Tom Constantin left in 1969 the group was not so much a psychedelic band at all (or a SF band, more a Marin County band) which is why I think they don't at all sound dated as someone observed, I think eroneously, at least the post 1970 stuff doesn't sound dated--furthermore I think Jerry Garcia remains the model for today's emo depressive singers--for worse, not better (btw, I love the early psychedlic Dead stuff too). You want dated, dig the Doors (whose first album I still adore, but jeez does that sound exclusively of its time and place).
US jazz musicians are the best because jazz is purely American...rock, like the American population, is a mongrel w/ plenty of Anglo influence present from the start. But there were, and are, a bunch of world class European jazz musicians. Django Reinhardt and Dave Holland spring immediately to mind and there are certainly others. Of course the Dead were also the jazziest of the great rock bands(tho' the Allmans could swing like hell, witness Les Brers in A Minor).
Manny, have you heard the David Murray Octet album of Dead songs? Incredible arrangement and performance of Dark Star...the rest of the album is blah...stiff, what too often happens when players who swing try to rock (like when opera singers try to do jazz)...but the Dark Star is out of this world. Also you should give a listen to Dick Picks Vol. 2, half a Dead show from Oct. 71 that's super jazzy, or any of the 1974 shows. This was a top flight improvising band with real skills and knowledge. Don't forget Garica was a Django acolyte, invited Ornette to play w/ the Dead and appeared on Ornette's Virgin Beauty album. And Lesh studied composition w/ Luciano Berio. This wasn't just a blown out garage band.
Kit, let's give CCR its due. Great oeurve. Honest to God greatness...Bayou Country, Cosmos Factory and Willie and the Poor Boys are all great albums and I listen to each of them fairly often, more often than I listen to any of the studio recordings of the Dead. And nothing in the Dead's oeuvre approaches "Fortunate Son."
OOC, although I can't get w/ Sonic Youth--never cared for them, always sounded like noise as an intellectual novelty, when I want noise I want Kick Out the Jams or Funhouse (gimme "I'm Loose" played w/o irony, or the 5, cocks out, playing "Come Together" over brainy noise any day)--Television is one of my all time favorite bands. But two albums, only one of which is great, does not a "greatest American band" make. Interestingly I think Television bears a real resemblance to the Dead--extended modal soloing, churning two guitar front, both great live improvising bands. The TV live recordings from the 1978 tour are stunners. Listening to one band often leads me into a jag of listening to the other.
The appeal of REM completely escapes me. Talking Heads were real competition for the Clash as the best band in the world circa 1979 or 1980...one of the Remain in Light shows w/ the enormous band w/ Adrian Belew and Bernie Worrell at Radio City remains one of the great rock shows I've ever seen (tho nowhere near as titanic as the three shows I saw of the Clash's legendary run at Bond's in NYC including a final weekend matinee at which I and about 30 others from the audience wound up on stage singing "London's Burning"). But Talking Heads burned out quickly...I found their last couple of albums essentially forgettable, or worse--annoyingly, willfully clever. Keep the baby up late and all that....blah blah blah...Amazing tho' how audible their influence is suddenly however w/ the likes of Modest Mouse.
Oh, and OOC, I'm not giving you the Crickets any more than I'd give you Elvis' TCB band. Elvis and the TCB band at the International in 1970 was as good as rock gets...better than the Stones of that year if you ask me, I'll take Live at the International over Get Yer Ya Ya's out 10 times out of 10...but that's a leader plus back up band and so is Buddy and the Crickets.
The Dolls, well, I know Watson adores the Dolls. And both of their albums are great (forget the latest incarnation), which puts them ahead of Television in terms of the audible artifacts. But again, the career is too short and slight to put 'em up there w/ the real contenders for the title.
Oh, and Kit, you bring up an interesting point about the Dead and its audience. Actually I think the sycophantic audience was the worst thing that ever happened to the Dead, never challenging or pushing the band. When audiences stop pushing performing artists, then the artists need tremendous internal will to continue to push themselves. The Dead never displayed that, which is why, after the mid 1970s, greatness was only occasional from the band.
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I just don't know what to make of the band in the context of the current discussion. There are so many different PFunk bands. If you want to tell me the original Funkadelics backing up the original Parliaments circa 1968-1972 was the greatest, I'm not gonna argue (if you haven't seen the TV performance of them from the Boston PBS show Say Brother recorded in 1969, you haven't lived). If you wanna make the case that the whole messy conglomerate on down to today's PFunk Allstars is one entity and not a band w/ GC at the helm, I think you could make that case. Certainly the Clinton-Collins-Worrell composition team, which was together more or less from 1973-1980, about as long as the Beatles were together as a recording band, stands as one of the greatest writing/performing units of the rock era. And PFunk is certaintly the kind of grand ungodly godlike group that makes the grade. On another day I might well have made that case instead of the case for the Dead, no doubt.