RIP Phil Lesh, who passed on while I was writing this.
In the first part of this post, I analyzed the Live/Dead recording of “Dark Star” and compared it to several other versions. In this part, I survey the academic literature about the tune, of which there is a surprisingly large amount.
First, let’s consider the phrase “dark star” itself. It’s widely used in non-Grateful Dead contexts. It’s a theoretical predecessor to black holes, a so-so Crosby, Stills and Nash song, a science fiction movie by John Carpenter, a company that makes concealed carry holsters, a company that makes marble countertops, and many other random things. I guess the phrase is just very evocative.
Anyway, back to the Dead song. In his heroic review of the first one hundred performances, Jonathan Segal explains the conditions that made those performances possible in the first place.
[The Dead] had the time and space to do whatever they wanted on stage, and also: the audience came along. So imagine this scenario, you have a band that has learned to play their instruments pretty well, they have numerous stylistic areas they can draw from and they have been improvising together for about 8 years, and have no need to worry that they will offend any ticket-buyers if they just turn to themselves and try to make music for as long as they want to. The promoters don’t care, they’re not being rushed offstage. The audience is high as kites (we assume) and will go along with anything. Their audience is not only allowing the band to do whatever they want to, but in fact is happy that the band is going to take them on some weird-ass musical journey…and then possibly bring them back home to the song that encompassed it. Deadheads are/were a very forgiving and indulgent audience.
And what did the band do with all this freedom? David Browne, talking about the 11/2/69 “Dark Star”, discusses the band’s improvisational dynamics.
In the way Garcia would take command but then retreat back into the song’s haze, “Dark Star” spoke volumes of the band’s peculiar dynamic, the way Garcia didn’t always want to lead. But Lesh wouldn’t be steering “Dark Star” for long. In fact, no one would. Moments later the song essentially crumbled to nothing and the instruments largely dropped out, leaving little but an increasingly diminishing hum of feedback and then, finally, silence. At twelve minutes all that could be heard were dribs and drabs of organ and a dollop of bass. The music was no longer jazz or rock but a variation of new-music minimalism, to the point where, at twelve minutes and forty-five seconds, no one was playing at all (p. 146).
After I did my analysis of the Live/Dead “Dark Star”, I found when I went back to listen to the track that it no longer sounds aimless or drifting. I can hear the distinct sections and movements quite clearly. In his book Grateful Dead and the Art of Rock Improvisation, David Malvinni identifies four possible states for the “Dark Star” jam:
(1) starting a new section; (2) developing, building, moving within a section; (3) climaxing and reaching toward a new plateau; (4) and coming out of section, meandering, looking for someplace new to go… Often the music seems to come to a standstill and seemingly from the space of nowhere one player will offer a solution as to how to move forward (p. 117).
So that’s what the band is thinking. But what does all that jamming mean? Malvinni identifies three overlapping interpretations of “Dark Star”:
as a song, as a cosmic way of explorative improvisation that becomes a “tradition,” and as a vessel for quasi-religious experience (p. 79).
When Malvinni says “tradition”, he means that the musical signifiers of the jam transcend the song itself, so any open-ended Dead jam takes on an aspect of “Dark Star.” The cosmic and religious interpretations are the controversial ones for me; I hear it as more earthbound and secular. But it is true that the song admits an extremely wide range of moods and emotions:
[T]he prevailing mood of “Dark Star” becomes a dwelling that is at once melancholic, exuding mellow and reflective voices, while at the same time the actual destruction of the star might bear witness to an explosion of sound (p. 79).
I don’t know if this all rises to the level of a cosmic experience, but I haven’t experienced the song on acid. But maybe I’m not having cosmic experiences because I’m not expecting to have them. Beyond the qualities of any specific performance, Malvinni ascribes great significance to the idea of the song:
[I]n terms of Deadhead audience expectation, “Dark Star” names not only a piece and an improvisational practice but also an idealized, imaginary, magical space where any nuance of emotional is possible (p. 101).
What are the heads idealizing? Ulf Olsson, in Listening for the Secret: The Grateful Dead and the Politics of Improvisation, explains that improvisation as practiced by the Dead is about both freedom and constraint.
[I]mprovisation—at least to its adherents—means freedom, liberation, openness, dialogue, as the phrase “free improvisation” evokes. The band, however, also can be seen as trying to capture and control improvisation, keeping it safely locked up within a rather traditional framework of songs. The Dead were searching, Garcia explained, for something open but with enough form for the band to “lock into” (p. 93).
Olsson astutely points out that improvisation allows the audience to follow the entire musical process; nothing is concealed.
Improvisation is a form of work in which precisely its character of being worked out is never hidden but rather the raison d’être of improvisation. Improvisation allows the listener to follow and take part in the articulation of the music, a practice that is absolutely different from that of catching an artist delivering the song and reproducing the recorded version of it—that is the industrial practice that hides its own character of, precisely, work: industrial work (p. 107).
I would add to this that while free jazz and Grateful Dead jamming are in theory transparent to the listener, in practice the Dead’s jamming is more accessible. Free jazz is very difficult to follow because it’s so unpredictable. Dead jams are unpredictable at the macro level, but at the micro level they tend to be patterned and bound to familiar forms. Even the most chaotic Dead jams tend to follow a shape, and the really good jams are more like spontaneous songwriting than like free jazz.
But so, why do we care? What’s the big deal with getting to listen to a bunch of hippies improvising? In The Tragic Odes of Jerry Garcia and The Grateful Dead: Mystery Dances in the Magic Theater, Brent Wood argues that “Dark Star” is a Dionysian ritual that enables us to cope with the loneliness and alienation of modern American life. He begins by citing Nietzsche’s argument in The Birth of Tragedy that we bought our scientific advancements at the price of spiritual malaise, because rational empiricism requires “an acute separation between self and world.” Wood believes that Americans and other Westerners have carried this too far, becoming atomized individuals, no longer part of a community or collective.
Dionysian rituals evolved as a social coping mechanism during a shift toward individualism and away from collective psychology and behavior. Likewise, the synthetic effect of the loss and regaining of self in relation to both cosmos and the collective human organism at Grateful Dead concerts was uniquely revolutionary in the USA, a nation for which individual freedoms form an existential crux yet whose historical reality includes dangerous loss of community and increasing alienation from the natural world (p. 78).
What role does acid play in all this? Just because it hasn’t been a part of my experience of the Dead, it’s still important for many of their listeners, not to mention for the band itself. Wood attributes LSD’s ability to foster collective consciousness to the way that it removes the differentiation between different kinds of internal experience.
[I]t’s possible that what we call “synaesthetic” experience is better thought of as a return to a less-differentiated infant mind. In this sense, psychedelics allow us to revisit a mental condition not unlike the one we knew as infants. This model explains distortions of time-perception, rapidly alternating feelings of vulnerability and invulnerability, confidence and anxiety, exuberance and solipsism, and the aura of novelty taken on by everyday surroundings (p. 84).
Hippies, like babies, are wonderfully open to new experiences and thoughts. However, also like babies, they require endless caretaking by grownups. Is there a way to foster this kind of ego-dissolving community without the whole “huffing nitrous oxide out of Hefty bags in a football stadium parking lot” aspect? Is there a way for mature social beings to visit that infant space responsibly?
References
Boone, G. (1997). Tonal and expressive ambiguity in “Dark Star.” In J. Covach & G. Boone (Eds.), Understanding rock: Essays in musical analysis (pp. 171–210). Oxford University Press.
Malvinni, D. (2013). Grateful Dead and the art of rock improvisation. Scarecrow Press.
Olsson, U. (2017). Listening for the secret: The Grateful Dead and the politics of improvisation. University of California Press.
Segal, J. (2021). Listening to the first 100 Dark Stars. Retrieved from https://jsegel.wordpress.com/2021/11/30/listening-to-the-first-100-dark-stars/
Silberman, S. (2000). Primal Dead at the Fillmore East: February 1970. In D. Dodd & D. Spaulding (Eds.), The Grateful Dead reader (pp. 40–49). Oxford University Press.
Wenner, J., & Reich, C. (1972, January). Jerry Garcia: The Rolling Stone interview. Rolling Stone.
Wood, B. (2020). The tragic odes of Jerry Garcia and the Grateful Dead: Mystery dances in the magic theater. Routledge.