The Music Never Stopped

Better known for their live jams than their albums, very few bands are even close to the Grateful Dead when it comes to the concert experience. Nigel Williamson pays tribute to the ultimate live rock and roll act

- Nigel Williamson

The notion that the Grateful Dead were a stoned cosmic jam band whose music was best heard in an altered state gave birth to one of the better gags in the rock and roll joke book. It goes: “What did the Grateful Dead fan say when his drugs ran out? Man, this band really sucks.” Amusing as the joke may be, it is also a travesty for in many ways the Grateful Dead were the ultimate American band whose music covered every genre, facet and style.

They could play long, improvised alchemical wig-outs that took off for the furthest reaches of the cosmos. But they could also play tight, three-minute songs rooted in the vernacular traditions of folk and country music, like The Band. They could rock as hard as the Allman Brothers, but they could also roll with the loose-limbed groove of a band like Little Feat. And they could sing breath-taking harmonies like a rough-hewn version of the Eagles.

Espousing a freewheeling frontier philosophy based on communality, hippie hedonism, rebellion against bourgeois authority and mind-expanding psychedelic drugs, the Dead transcended rock stardom to become an institution, acquiring a vast following of like-minded fans known as ‘Deadheads’, who shared the band’s countercultural ideals as well as a love of their music. As Martin Scorsese put it, the Grateful Dead were not just a band. Rather they were “their own planet, populated by millions of devoted fans”.

Although they instinctively disliked like the discipline of the recording studio, they nevertheless produced a series of studio albums that were gem-like exercises in songcraft and virtuosic musicianship. But it was live on stage, following the music wherever it took them, that the Dead were in their true element.