Anyway. This hardcover book, all 400-plus pages, is on sale for cash in the Roberts & Jones Gift Shop on Jackson Street. Run don't walk. If unable to get into Gate City for this Halloween special, try this link.
Now the spooky story...(insert ghastly groan here)...it's taken a while, but I've found something to post on a topic a certain sponsor may enjoy.
Once there was a pop group. At the time there were a lot of pop groups. A lot of young people were buying a lot of records, so a lot of other young people wanted to record their songs on them. In order to stand out in the crowd some of these groups adopted funny names. There were The Rolling Stones, named after a magazine, and The Who, who actually sang "Talkin' About My G-g-g-generation," and then there were these guys who'd been in groups with relatively normal names, like The New Lost City Ramblers, who got together and called themselves The Grateful Dead.
They sang a lot of old traditional blues, at first, with a rocking beat. When multiple voices sang with rhythm and bass, even on the expensive sound devices of the 1960s it was very hard to recognize words in the buzz of noise monaural sound equipment produced. On the cheap transistor radios kids carried around it was impossible. So the people who had been making fun of pop "crooners" like Frank Sinatra, Eddy Arnold, Pat Boone and my family's favorite Jim Reeves, who worked very hard to make it possible to hear the words of their songs, and of Elvis Presley, who distracted attention from any sound issues by tapping his feet so enthusiastically he moved his (shudder!) pelvis, naturally had a good time thinking of snarky ways to describe groups like the Grateful Dead in the mid-sixties.
Then in the late sixties people got interested in lysergic acid, or LSD, which some people claimed was a safe drug. It was not. (Echoes of morphine, heroin, thalidomide, DDT, paraquat, chlordane, cocaine, glyphosate...so many promises of "better living through chemistry" disappointed so many people so horribly.) A lot of cool, popular guys, like guys who were playing in pop bands in California, experimented with "acid." The result was known as "acid rock." At its best, when very talented musicians used just a little, it seemed to encourage them to compose fresher-sounding music, although most musicians were not that talented and merely thought they were composing...anything, actually.
(Pause to salute Dave Barry for getting our generation to agree: We are the generation that invented really bad rock music. Classics, yes, but also clinkers. Lots of clinkers.)
The Grateful Dead became one of the bands, like Ozzy Osbourne's Black Sabbath and Jim Morrison's Doors, that were generally classified as "acid rock." They notoriously hung out with some extremely hip and trendy older "hipsters" like Neal Cassady who took lots of drugs, and yes, one of them was with Cassady as he sped out of control and self-destructed that way. By 1970 they recall, somewhat sheepishly, being sort of exhausted, confused, and maybe even grateful to be alive, which several of their drug-experimenting friends from 1969 were not.
Not that all the private drug experiments, or the inadvertent suicides, were over in 1970. While the core of the Grateful Dead trouped on for a full thirty years, other band members dropped out, some due to illnesses whose progress was probably accelerated by drug use. "Pigpen" McKernan, who took a sick leave the year after his close friend Janis Joplin died, was thought to have died about a month before his body was found. Other stories of the survivors and non-survivors are collected and linked at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Grateful_Dead_members .
But the band had a solid core of four survivors, two of whom were still up for a "fifty-year anniversary" tour in 2015, and also they'd enlisted a real published poet, Robert Hunter, as their primary lyricist. Several other people, known and unknown, wrote songs the Grateful Dead performed. All of them agree that Hunter wrote the best lyrics.
What they agree got on their nerves, at times, was the way people who met them kept saying things like "I love your song--what are the words, and what do they mean?" Hunter's long foreword, and John Barlow's shorter afterword, and some quotes the others furnished to David Dodd, explain some of the reasons why this is generally a bad question. A song's "meaning" comes from its sound as well as its words; the phrases that make up a good song don't necessarily parse as coherent prose sentences, even if you allow for things like Hunter's partiality for leaving S's off words ("he say") to reduce the s-s-static tones of monaural sound equipment; there are times when songwriters who've struck gold with a lyric that just fits a tune and a genre realize, later, that they're living out an experience they could only imagine while they were writing about it. The Grateful Dead learned to deflect that question with "What does it mean to you?"
Sometimes there was a private meaning that could be elucidated in prose, as in the song "Cassidy," which was partly a memorial to the recently dead Neal Cassady and partly an expression of good wishes for a baby who'd been named Cassidy, and the instrumental "Sage and Spirit," also dedicated to children who'd been given those names. More often there wasn't.
Sometimes people who were able to read the official printed lyrics (which weren't always what the band members sang in live concerts, anyway) would ask whether they were meant to suggest some other song, or poem, or story with similar words. Hmph. Maybe they were, maybe they weren't. Hunter's lyrics as printed could only be the product of revision by a sober and well educated brain, but that does not necessarily mean they first occurred to a sober mind, nor does it mean that Hunter consciously remembered what might have suggested them to him even if he was sober at the time. Even poets who do all their writing while stone-cold sober don't necessarily remember everything that might have suggested a poem or a song. One major influence on songwriting, as Cecil Adams observed while tracing other popular songs, comes from thoughts like "Hmm, I don't think anybody's used 'Chevy' and 'levee' in a rhyming refrain before," and another comes from the fact that sometimes, if you have a contractual obligation to write a new song and you've not thought of a good one yet, and you sing "la la la" a few times, especially if you run the "la la la" version through monaural sound equipment, sometimes somebody will hear it as something bizarre enough to suggest a fresh-sounding verse.
Barlow tells a spooky story of having written a song just to fit into a genre people wanted, having it succeed enough that he went on singing it until it finally did have meaning for him. Many if not most "creative" people have the experience of...perhaps unconsciously seeking and finding real-life counterparts to things we had "created" from imagination? But you have to read Barlow's story as he tells it.
Anyway the Grateful Dead never were all that popular in any given year. Their image put so many people off that even radio stations that specialized in rock didn't want to play their songs. Their sound kept evolving, featuring different singers and guitarists, because they kept losing band members. Nevertheless they had a fanatical following, the Deadheads, who just would not allow the band to die. They still have. They still have an active web site: http://www.dead.net/ . They are still releasing new music--remixes of old tapes, and new performances by those members who are still alive.
It's downright creepy. The force that's kept an "acid rock" band going this long, after almost twenty-five years of declaring themselves dead and accepting huge fees for yet another "Final Reunion" performance, has to be sinister.
I found this big book of song lyrics on sale cheap in the Friday Market. People who take nice new-looking books into open-air markets are very highly motivated to sell them before the next shower of rain. I offered a dollar for it and a fellow vendor said "I'll take it." I did know better than to sell the book for a dollar, or take it back into an open-air market. I've given some people some fabulous bargains on books that have gained value since they were published. For this one...I gave the gift shop a bargain price, but not that fabulous.
I collect song lyrics, whether or not I know the tune or like the words. Some people like songs I don't. Some songs whose words don't appeal to me have delightful tunes. I didn't know, and still don't know, any of the tunes to a single one of the songs in this book. I do know where to find them online, but since I go online in public places I don't intend to restore the sound on the computer. (Of which more below.)
I didn't expect to like any of the songs the Grateful Dead would have sung. I was pleasantly surprised. Some of the other songwriters commented that Hunter's songs, without making much sense as prose sentences, manage to suggest complete novels. I'd agree.
The book, as a whole, tells a true story. Not that it's written as a history of the band; its annotations do not, for example, mention McKernan's full name, much less the story of his short life, nor do they ever explicitly mention Donna and Keith Godchaux being a married couple. But in an indirect, evocative, Hunter-like way it is the story of how four guys with creative synergy went from being just another garage band, with a silly name, playing old songs about other people's unhappy lives, to being one of the great legendary bands of American musical history, spanning generations, like The Weavers or the Carter Family.
Dodd's annotations are informative. A librarian by profession, and the curator of the Grateful Dead web site, he prints each song alongside references to the songs, books, and movies of which the lyrics remind people, with full-length lyrics for several vintage songs, so even if you've never heard a Grateful Dead song you can still sing your way through the book. (A Californian, he's familiar with variant versions of some classic songs that are sometimes even fresh, to those of us who learned the songs in the Eastern States.) He anticipates that every reader can think of a few references he missed, and writes cheerfully that the annotation of these songs will never be complete. After the literary references, or in lieu of them for some songs that aren't especially rich in reference points, come historical notes on when and where each song was first performed and first recorded and how often it was performed thereafter. For a few songs he's able to add reminiscences by band members.
In some ways the leader, the organizer, sometimes the lead singer and/or guitarist and the old friend who recruited Hunter, was Jerry Garcia. A rock star for exactly thirty years, Garcia died just after his fifty-third birthday in 1995, and the Grateful Dead declared itself--as a band--dead without him.
But the band was not quietly laid to rest, as Garcia was. Toward the end the songs and annotations become a testimony to the way life goes on, though good men die and you forget just why. There's a decline in the quality of the songs as lyrical poems; there's even one that reads like a typical rock song. Then there's a revision of "Joe Hill"...Joe Hill was an early labor union activist, best remembered for a song that affirms that Hill's spirit was still alive, ten years after his death, in activism for his cause. Hunter's version of this song initially envisioned President Kennedy, John Lennon, and Martin Luther King living on (or not) in the continuation of things they were did. Then, he claimed, another verse popped into his head: "I saw the sun explode...I heard a sweet guitar lick...It sounded like Garcia but I couldn't see the face."
Never having been a Deadhead, I opened this story-in-song-lyrics of friendship and bereavement, for the first time, about the time Robert Hunter died. He was seventy-eight.
Writers are, of course, always discovering books, and new favorite writers to add to their ever-growing lists, about the time older writers die. If there's a meaning to this phenomenon, it's that too many public libraries rush to discard older writers' books so they can use more of the taxpayers' money to buy new books by living writers who need the money from more sales to individual readers. Harrumph. Libraries should not be allowed to discard old, hard-to-find books patrons are still reading, nor should they have much freedom to compete with bookstores during the first two years after books are printed. But it's Halloween, so somebody out there may enjoy a good shiver, thinking of a reader discovering Robert Hunter as a poet just as his life ended.
(Status update on the computer:
It is officially a dying computer. I wondered what was going on when Google Chrome wouldn't open any more; poked around and found that the laptop's memory had shrunk down to something close to that of the older laptop I nicknamed The Sickly Snail, a few years ago. It'll still run Firefox, which is a little better than the Snail's Opera, and Microsoft Office, which is much better than the Snail's Open Office, but it won't run Chrome. I talked to the friendly local wizards about adding memory, then realized that one reason why this laptop was runnning low on memory was an increasing tendency to crash due to overheating because its fan's wearing out. Its keyboard is well beyond the stage a less professional typist would call usable. Its mouse pad is wearing out too.
I do actually like playing with new computers--if they're other people's original computers. It's the waste of electronics that bothers my conscience. What Americans call recycling computers (or cell phones) means shipping them to some desperately poor part of the world where the "recycling" process forms mounds of toxic waste, to be handled by people who don't fully understand the future implications for the health of children they allow to earn the local equivalent of pennies by "helping to recycle." That is not something I want to be a part of. I'd rather keep what I have, even if it becomes unusable, until the manufacturers take a hint and start "supporting" it again.
Nevertheless the time has come for this laptop to retire. And that means not even pushing the limits of what Firefox allows it to do. It means minimal use of computers and the Internet, preferably for paid work only, no surfing-for-fun, until I get another computer that can run Chrome.)
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