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The Grateful Dead in Concert: Essays on Live Improvisation
This book offers a spirited analysis of the unique improvisational character of Grateful Dead music and its impact on appreciative fans. The 20 essays capture distinct facets of the Grateful Dead phenomenon from a broad range of scholarly angles. The band's trademark synergizing focus is discussed as a function of complex musical improvisation interlaced with the band members' collective assimilation of an impressive range of marginal musical forms and lyrical traditions. These facets are shown to produce a vibrant Deadhead experience, resulting in community influences still morphing in new directions 45 years after the band's initial impact.
- GenresMusic
365 pages, Paperback
First published February 1, 2010
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July 11, 2015
This, ultimately, is the sort of book you need to buy if your dad is a college professor and he has always wandered about the house, rubbing his belly while scratching his head quizzically as to how he just "doesn't get" the Dead. It's hard not to imagine Jerry Garcia off someplace in space, reading this book and cracking up, since it takes itself and its subject SOOOOO seriously!
Yes, he wanted rock and roll to one day become appreciated as "high art." What I am not sure he asked for was such a multi-syllabic verbal spew masquerading as cultural polemic, (all palaver of intellectual seriousness must be approached in such a fashion, lest it betray a 'low level of academic achievement' and intelligence!) or a compulsively anal analysis of every performance of Dark Star in its constituent melodic construction segments as it varied from show to show within an eighteen-month period! Nor would he have had much appreciation of a book which manages to find a means of linking the pet philosopher of the Nazi Party, Martin Heidegger, with the artistic impulse that drove the band, nor his erstwhile precursor Friedrich Nietzsche, without both of whom, the general German lemming-drive could not have been achieved in the mid-20th century.
I expected this book to be about improvisation in a musical context, and yet, so much of it is tangential to the musical charms of Grateful Dead music and more about the show, the cultural baggage, and the oh-so-serious attempt to breach academia, something "drop-out" Garcia would have wrinkled his nose at, but which drives this book (a collection of essays that take themselves o-so-seriously) over the top into what I feel is a ridiculous unnecessary manner of approach to an ability to appreciate, dig, and swim inside the world of the Grateful Dead's musical legacy. Dead Heads of the world, unite, you have nothing to lose but your chains!
Yes, he wanted rock and roll to one day become appreciated as "high art." What I am not sure he asked for was such a multi-syllabic verbal spew masquerading as cultural polemic, (all palaver of intellectual seriousness must be approached in such a fashion, lest it betray a 'low level of academic achievement' and intelligence!) or a compulsively anal analysis of every performance of Dark Star in its constituent melodic construction segments as it varied from show to show within an eighteen-month period! Nor would he have had much appreciation of a book which manages to find a means of linking the pet philosopher of the Nazi Party, Martin Heidegger, with the artistic impulse that drove the band, nor his erstwhile precursor Friedrich Nietzsche, without both of whom, the general German lemming-drive could not have been achieved in the mid-20th century.
I expected this book to be about improvisation in a musical context, and yet, so much of it is tangential to the musical charms of Grateful Dead music and more about the show, the cultural baggage, and the oh-so-serious attempt to breach academia, something "drop-out" Garcia would have wrinkled his nose at, but which drives this book (a collection of essays that take themselves o-so-seriously) over the top into what I feel is a ridiculous unnecessary manner of approach to an ability to appreciate, dig, and swim inside the world of the Grateful Dead's musical legacy. Dead Heads of the world, unite, you have nothing to lose but your chains!
Displaying 1 of 1 review