No other band has ever surpassed the enduring popularity of The Grateful Dead. No other group has regularly scheduled radio shows devoted solely to it, or such an extensive fan base stretching over several generations. And, with the surviving members still touring and the official website receiving more that 100,000 hits a week, no other fan base has proved itself more dedicated or more diverse, from professionals to vagabonds to politicians. From David Dodd, who has spent the last ten years building the Annotated Grateful Dead Lyrics website, comes this unique compilation that offers literary, historical and cultural references to all the band's lyrics. Building a better understanding of both the songs and the musical tradition they arose from, this essential guide includes the words to every original song from both recorded and live repertoire. Notes on performance statistics, a series of thematic essays, copious illustrations and a full-colour insert all contribute to an edition worthy of a special place in every Deadhead's collection.
The Complete Annotated Grateful Dead Lyrics Foreword
hat, after all, is the point of a compendium of scatology and ontology viz the lyrics of the Grateful Dead? When fans hear a song they like, they internalize it, dance to it, sing along. Tape it, collect it, trade it. When scholars hear a song they like, they annotate it. There is more than one way to love a song. There are as many ways as there are listeners.
The songlist of the Grateful Dead has achieved an anomalous status within the archives of current pop culture. It begins to appear that our output embodied the summation and close of a musical era, rather than heralding the bright new beginning devoutly wished for. But it bears mentioning that our work was a natural and inevitable blending of rock and roll, jazz, and traditional folk culture. It was, in its day, as shockingly innovative as the music of mounting urban psychosis that was to displace it. Its verbal and musical complexity offer little of overwhelming market value to a more intensely stratified current musical culture. I’m optimistically uncertain as to whether it is a dead issue or a ticking time bomb set to detonate long after its progenitors have quit this sphere of commercial sorrow. My own improbable dream was to aid and abet a unified indigenous American, or at least Western, music, drawing on all bona fide traditional currents including pop. Tall order for a bunch of white kids. Big dreams. But jazz wasn’t talking to pop, and bluegrass wasn’t talking to the blues—experimental postclassic soundscape wasn’t talking to anybody.
Most bands can be copied, but bands that have tried to mimic the Grateful Dead in a creative way, other than note-by-note reproduction, tend to fall short of the mark because there is no specific style to mimic, rather a range of styles that the band members have individually mastered and integrated into the music. Pigpen played blues and was accepted as a regular in the black nightclubs of East Palo Alto in his early teens. Phil studied composition with the great Italian avant-garde composer Luciano Berio to augment his classical training. Garcia’s knowledge and facility with American folk forms and instrumental styles was compendious. Mickey Hart was a titled world-champion rudimental drummer from a family of drummers and studied Indian rhythmic intricacies with Zakir Hussein and Ali Akbar Khan. Several of us were veterans of regular jazz sessions by sterling musicians such as Lester Hellum, Bob Pringle, Rudy Jackson, and Dan Barnett while living at the Chateau. My particular strength was a good memory. I knew the words to most of the popular songs of the forties and fifties and to most of the classics of the swing era, through my parents’ record collection (also strong in folk music) and through playing through “fake books” of the era on my trumpet. I also absorbed the lyrics to an untold number of folk songs during the folk revival of the sixties. Just a knack, but it’s small wonder that my songs are often fraught with allusions.
I believe that the lyrics themselves say all that wants saying but acknowledge that scholastic exegesis has a momentum of its own and it’s not my business to impede it, though I always believed we were “historicized” too early for comfort. I also believe, through experience, that beneath the window dressing of metaphor and rhyme, song is a naked, living, and amorphous creature. Where some assume that song is the transcription of self, my more intimate belief is that one goes out in the woods and ketches one, dresses it up, and trains it to talk. How the brute is trained is a matter of personal style, but beneath the window dressing, the song remains elusively itself, prevented from full expression by the limits of its intended use. The writer’s prejudices, blindsides, and occasional strengths are all utilized in the disguising of the primordial beast into form adequate to its specific purpose.
Scatology is the activity of tracking the spoor of the song, detecting borrowings, influences, and/or outright thefts; of uncovering, through internal evidence, the parentage of a particular song, or of repetitive tendencies throughout a body of work—of actual or imagined contingent sources. It is evidence for induction, building a hypothetical dinosaur from fossil traces. Looking for what species of fire causes such and such a spiral of smoke. Sometimes, there is indeed a flame; other times, the writer was just stretching for a rhyme, accepting something convenient with a deadline impending, no further significance intended. At other times, evidence is ironically removed from normal context and bespeaks influence less than sheer serendipitous proximity. All practice is acceptable practice! Who arbitrates this stuff anyway? It isn’t the artist’s sworn duty to be easily or accurately traceable. I grudgingly admit that prior knowledge of select sources can establish a context for a song that might positively increase the effectiveness of the allusions. One of my conscious goals as a songwriter is to provide a connective thread to the ongoing project of Western music, when and if it feels natural and right.
Ontology is an examination of causative factors, of intent. What was the impulse that seemed to require certain images to be duly expressed? Love, carnal or spiritual? Irony? Sentiment? Contempt? Patriotism? Existential devaluation? Self-advertisement? Revenge? Paranoia? Romance? Annoyance? Deconstruction? Revolution? Peer status? Exuberance? Broken-heartedness? Grief? Indomitability? Salvation? Sales? Sacrilege? Inanity? Responsibility or the lack of? Need of another song for the album? Discontent? Protest? Inspiration from another song? Disaster, personal or worldwide? There are prime models for each of these impulses in the literature of song, in the musical ocean in which we swim.
Who stands behind the mask of a song? Anyone willing and able to provide the voice can wear the mask and intone the metaphors. Song, a series of tones enhanced by metaphor, coalesces into a visage in the act of performance. Why just exactly metaphor? What is metaphor? Metaphor is that which stands for something that cannot stand for itself, since all else stands upon it. Philosophy is metaphor, war is metaphor, and, oh yes, dear sweet love itself. A broad term. What lies outside the capacity of imagining, by way of metaphor, is undefined because indefinable. The something I speak of is evocable, in a limited sense of emotional repercussion, by appropriate metaphor. It is surmisable though not contained by it. The juxtaposition of one metaphor to another yields relation; a juxtaposition of relations, a situation. A juxtaposition of situations provides narrative. Is music also metaphor? Yes, but you lose the value of both words by saying so. Invocation and evocation are classically terms of magic. You don’t evoke your dog, you call him. Spirit, however, you must invoke, coax with metaphor. A song, successfully invoked, evokes person, place, time, and condition.
Sometimes the singer becomes the song. This can be dangerous because the metaphoric mask, fitting too well, can be difficult to remove. Hans Christian Andersen’s tale of “The Red Shoes” is the scarifying metaphor of this situation. But when the metaphor supplants the mediator in less than tragic circumstances, mere make-believe becomes magic theater. We buy our tickets hoping this will happen and are disappointed when it doesn’t. But when it does—the audience, as well as the artist, assimilated by metaphor exalted by music—performance becomes ceremony. Words are no longer strictly necessary, they have done their duty toward the primary evocation; rhythm and tonality alone prolong the experience until it’s time to haul it back down to earth and bid you goodnight.
The Grateful Dead was, is, the master metaphor for our group situation. And yes, the shoes have run away with the feet at times. The evocative power of that strange, not at all comical name is considerable, for grace and ill. I know that my own input into the scene, my words, were heavily conditioned by that powerful name. It called sheaves of spirits down on us all. It expressed a deep and mystic hope about the nature of eternity. Our shows were ceremonies and our people, celebrants, in the most archaic sense of the term. There was no place else on God’s green earth that I, for one, fitted. Now that it is gone, there is no place else I fit so exactly as to shape and size. But that I fit once, and well, into something that fit me, that had a piece exactly my size missing, gives hope, in that such things may be at all, that thus it may be so again. Madly in love with metaphor, I took a lover’s liberties with it, crushing unlikely relations into strange situations, letting it summon a sense of its own, or none, or to be continued. . . . Crazy? By all means, whatever that peculiar metaphor of relative sanity portends. The attempt to speak on as many levels at once as is humanly possible, considering the limitations of language (which is also its condition of freedom), can invite the worried concern of more orderly minds.
The components of metaphor that can’t be so easily isolated or identified are those that have nothing to do with image per se, but rather the arrangement of the articles of the image. Say the image of the metaphor is, for example, a red silk banner in the rain. The same metaphor can be expressed as: in the rain, a silken banner of red. Or: silken, red, a banner in the rain. Same metaphor, different emphases and rhythmic pulses. In the context of rhyme, the same metaphor in different inversions could provoke many different shades of feeling.
Weeping tears of crimson pain
silken, red, a banner in the rain.
A certain elegance is provided by rhythmic contrast that would be lost in the doggerel rhythm of:
Weeping tears of crimson pain
a red silk banner in the rain.
All I mean to imply by examining this scrap of suspect metaphor is that there is a point where we leave scatology and ontology behind and enter the sphere of poetics, the land of measured feet, onomatopoeia, and rhythmic accent.
There are songs of such enduring stature that they have become part of the common mind, from “Row, Row, Row Your Boat” to “Happy Birthday to You,” from “Stardust” to “Auld Lang Syne,” from “Subterranean Homesick Blues” to “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction.” They seem like natural forces (as indeed they are)—unequivocal as the moon and perennial as grass—but in each case, oddly enough, somebody wrote the piece, wrote it or made it up, and passed it along, always around a fire—somebody whose name has come down through the ages along with his song, somebody like King David or Cab Calloway, or, more commonly, somebody forgotten. I like to acknowledge some of these works (it’s called allusion), borrowing a bit of their pizzazz or charm, certain of their authority if not my own. People ask me who my major influences are, and I have to smile, thinking, “You mean other than Walt Disney?” All qualitative assumptions aside, what music first moved us? Got down deep in there before we’d erected any barriers of taste and sophistication? An apt allusion can act like a magnet among the iron filings of a verse, making them all coalesce and decisively point north. One seeks the point in the soul that has already been touched in an undeniable way, only to proceed in directions of one’s own. A four-leaf clover on Mars is the desired item. A scrap of Stephen Foster or a bow to Mother Goose pleases the Muse who watches over such things. She likes us when we borrow, loves us when we steal. All of what song is ventures from and flies home to the same place: soul to soul. Copyright is an interesting and fairly new idea, but I don’t think it’ll ever rule the creative sphere where all things interpenetrate and cross-fertilize. A song is only ever fully realized when it belongs to everyone whose language it inhabits. Which is as much as to say: Few songs are ever fully realized. More than simple creative acts, they are acts of accretion, moss-covered and lichen-bearing bits of interstellar matter, living beings of word and harmony.
There is an approach that allows a song to achieve multiple personal evocations of déjà vu. Not amenable to recognizable formulation (like metric, rhyme, or allusion), it fits the facts of many lives, typifying a variety of situations, and seems to each of many listeners as though written for them alone. I mean specifically written for them, not just generically, but personally. I’ve run across too many testimonials to the phenomenon regarding my own work to doubt it—and have experienced it myself (who hasn’t?) in the lyric works of others that touch me most. A lyric that places its situation too restrictively in a particular time and place may fail in this regard but, on the other hand, might just redouble in such associative power to the ears of those from the same time and place. Usually New York City in the not-too-distant past. Mostly it’s the trusty love song, specifically new love and love disappointed, that takes you there. When the parallels get a little too exact, it’s just uncanny, and there’s not much more to say about that. It’s a bit more difficult to find subjects other than romantic love that partake of the particular and the universal at the same time, which is what a song must do to make any difference in the life of the listener. By report, I’ve done this with a few songs, such as “Ripple” and “Box of Rain” (neither love songs in the conventional sense), but I can’t tell how it’s done, only how it feels: like I’ve just spoken clearly to myself and survived the experience. Exalted. Satisfied. Though the facts of the writing of many lyrics are forgotten, I don’t forget the moments that define and validate my choice of professions.
The truths of song are not the truths of prose or those of nonlyric poetry. Poetry much finer than your garden-variety song lyric can fail entirely to accomplish what rhymed couplets of suspiciously nil content can pull off with mere emotional conviction. Denigrate the art of Hank Williams who dare! What speaks to the head most often misses the heart, since song is above all else and beyond all else, a language of direct emotion, which to be powerful must be simple. Elements of abstraction are added at peril, but in the instances where a mix of brain and heart doesn’t flat-out fail, it can work memorably well. Most studied attempts provide satisfactory fodder for neither mind nor heart; successful linkage is a gift of the moment’s Muse—it comes out of the blue or it doesn’t come.
The sheer dinkiness of rhyming (which the heart enjoys), besides providing an easy key to memorization for the performer, can be a distinct impediment to the free exercise of poetic flexibility. One of the great free-verse poets of our time, Allen Ginsberg (whose attempts at song lyric suffer from the constriction of a vast soul into iambic pentameter) asked me, “Does a song lyric have to rhyme?” I answered impulsively from the apparent truth of the matter that, yes, it must. He didn’t ask for elucidation but nodded gravely and simply accepted the pronouncement. I’ve made a kind of trademark of seeing how far I could push lyric into abstraction without losing touch with the heart. Just so far and no further. I’ve pushed it too far several times and lived to lick my critical bruises. To test the limit and miss, should the work suffer recording and release, is to be labeled pretentious and henceforth beneath notice. “Too bad,” they shake their heads, “he almost had us fooled.” The best way past that misfortune is to collaborate with ...
