I am on that exhilarating part of the learning curve.

The part where any effort expended results in all kinds of new understandings and connections between things new, and old.  As a pretty involved music fan for about three and one-half decades thus far, I have read extensively and come, in passing, to understand generally speaking where the Grateful Dead fits into the rock universe.

Not listening to the music except through inadvertent contact, however, led me to file many details away as sheer data, untethered to context.  Now that I am hearing the songs and getting to a point of familiarity with them, I am remembering things I read long ago and it’s all making sense.  At least a lot of it.

My biggest a-ha moment is seeing the disconnect between the middlebrow cultural messages I absorbed largely approvingly, and the details I had accumulated but not processed coherently before.  Most glaring is the idea that the Dead were “acid rockers” who were the precursor to metal and other more assaulting forms of music.

If nothing else, the gentleness of the music, the direct connection to American roots music and the new writing by the band of songs in the old genres (examples I can cite today would be Friend of the Devil, U.S. Blues, etc.) is the exact opposite of the media hysteria created over the years about the Dead and the “threat” they posed to the social order.

And that leads me to one more final thought.  The music is much less political than I would have expected it to be.  With an additional thirty-plus years of musical experience after these performances occurred, a listener from another planet would be hard-pressed to hear any overt or even sly political ranting in these shows.  Given what we have recently experienced from the stage in concerts under W’s presidency, it is nothing short of stunning that many of the shows I am now listening to happened during Nixon’s presidency.  There is absolutely no sign of him whatsoever.

I’m not saying there was not a political understanding going on between performers and audience then, but simply noting the utter absence of overt comment either as banter to the audience or lyrically.

Maybe I haven’t hit the right shows yet.  If I do, I’ll be sure to correct the record here.