When it came to encouraging the public to fork out for the products of
their labours in the recording studio, The Grateful Dead were never the
most marketing-savvy group of musicians. Peer an inch below the surface of
any interview with counter-culture cowboy Bob Weir, or hyper-intellectual
Phil Lesh, or any other of Jerry Garcia's grizzled and endearingly
shambolic troop of misfit minstrels, and you'll be confronted with an
unmistakable sub-text: "Our studio albums stink".
Perhaps because of its source being the members of the Dead themselves,
this view has taken on an air of orthodoxy. But like all orthodoxies, it
shouldn't be accepted unquestioningly, especially since it is in many
places directly challenged by the evidence. Listen, for instance, to the
sparse, poignant arrangements on 1973's Wake of the Flood, or the almost
medieval grandeur of the second half of '77's Terrapin Station. Listen too
to the unrivalled hippy outlaw music of '70's double-whammy of Workingman's
Dead and American Beauty. You'll soon be convinced that the accepted view
cries out for reappraisal.
Certainly, what the band brought to their live shows was different from
what appeared on vinyl. It couldn't fail to be: as the old saying goes
"There is nothing like a Grateful Dead concert". Dead shows were
unparalleled experiments in band/audience symbiosis, occasions for the
manifestation of a joyous Dionysian power that swept through, and united,
band members and crowd alike. Such talk may sound like so much stoned,
cosmic hyperbole, but the Dead in concert really had to be seen to be
believed. It is not for nothing that, having experienced a Grateful Dead
concert for himself, the veteran American mythologist Joseph Campbell
proclaimed the band "the inheritors of the Eleusinian mysteries".
It would be unreasonable to expect that sort of magic to take place in the
sterile, audience-free confines of the recording studio. But it is a
mistake to think that its absence from the band's studio corpus makes that
work bad. To be sure, some of it is bad - Shakedown Street (1978) and Go to
Heaven (1981), to name but two, have few redeeming moments, and even fewer
admirers. But then there were concerts that were bad too, shows in which
the musical kindling steadfastly refused to blaze, no matter how much heat
was applied by the audience. It could be argued that the Dead's
unpredictability - the tantalisingly real chance that this time they might
not succeed in pulling the rabbit out of the hat - was at least part of
what made them so exciting and mesmerising, both in concert and on record.