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Well, I was fooling around with YouTube after making the previous post and this little gem of a video tempted me to see Jerry before his beard.
I was too young to have seen this and understood it at the time — 1967 — but it certainly was the kind of media treatment I had in mind in my prior post.
It is apparently part of a TV special titled “Hippie Temptation” — presumably broadcast on CBS.
The benefit of time allows us to see how much stronger the voice of the media was back in the day of limited TV channels. Harry Reasoner carries an implied majoritarian authority that we simply do not confer on talking heads today. He would certainly be laughable to a younger person seeing it now. At the time, he was a standard “straight” media guy, and “straight” wasn’t referring to sexual orientation in those days.
The tone of the piece itself seems to justify the hippies becoming anything but what Harry Reasoner seems to be representing. Harry seems to be taking it personally, maybe he had a couple of teenagers at the time and was upset with the loud, strange music and partying . . . .
Yet, with the perspective of hindsight, we can also see that the hard questions about making a better world were too easily deferred and derailed by the blind faith put into drugs. No one seemed to have any idea whatsoever that there could be a downside.
If nothing else, watch the last minute for Harry’s most scathing commentary.
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.
I admit that I probably, unusually perhaps for a dedicated blues-rock fan, picked up a lot of the middle-brow vibes on the Dead over the years.
You know, the kind of jokes where Johnny Carson only had to say “The Grateful Dead” as a punchline and the crowd, and especially Ed McMahon, roared on cue.
California as the “land of fruits and nuts,” all that stuff. More often than not, the wariness and anxiety that the half of the country east of the Mississippi felt towards California — the harbinger of trends eventually heading to the Atlantic seaboard — could be channeled through a reference to Jerry Garcia and The Grateful Dead.
The name of the band alone struck fear in middle America. I wouldn’t be surprised if people mixed up the heavily bearded pictures and video of Jerry walking amongst the hippie fans with the terrifying news images of Charles Manson and his “family” from the late 60s.
I remember terms like “acid rock” and “psychedelia” being thrown around as examples of the extremes of youth culture. And the number one exemplar of those genres was said to be the Dead. Those guys who were Grateful about being Dead (how disrespectful!) As I thought about it more, the popular characterization didn’t jibe at all with the acoustic-sounding folky, country and jug band-sounding tunes like U.S. Blues I recalled from my high school days in D’s car.
In retrospect, from a musical standpoint, with my present limited but quickly expanding knowledge of the band’s catalog, it is clear to me that the Grateful Dead did more to revive understanding and awareness of “cosmic American music” (phraseology credit to Gram Parsons, no?) than anyone. Alt-Country as a modern genre would have been impossible without the Dead. And Alan Lomax (who chronicled the great bluesmen mid-century for the Smithsonian, I think) could not have done more to preserve these forms of American popular music than did the Dead.
What a disconnect with public understanding.
But I have to think the Grateful Dead wanted to be hip to their generation, and they were happy for their revival of the music of their fans’ grandparents to be seen as somehow radical and rebellious.
I guess in a few years my grandkids will be listening to Sinatra lookalikes and plotting revolution with cigarettes and martinis in hand.
But I digress again.
So it was then as a fully-formed adult with a couple of deacdes in the workforce under my belt that I finally began to answer the stirrings of my calling to learn more about the Grateful Dead.
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