Dead reckoning

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 28/10/2023 (1006 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

The great thing about this book is that if you know the Grateful Dead’s music, it’s a hum-along, sing-along tome. As you read song titles or concert descriptions, lyrics and melodies float into your head.

Author Ray Robertson’s stated object is to track the Grateful Dead’s evolution via the historical record of their concert gigs — specifically “from the R & B-based garage band at the beginning to the jazz-rock conjurers at their creative peak to the lumbering MIDI-manacled monolith of their decline.”

He largely succeeds in that object, but his snapshots in time of the band at work are of wildly uneven quality.

Robertson is the Toronto-based author of nine novels, five works of non-fiction and a poetry collection. More apposite here, he contributed liner notes to two Grateful Dead archival releases: Dave’s Picks #45 and the Here Comes Sunshine box set.

The Grateful Dead performed more than 2,350 live concerts over four decades, according to Robertson. The band finally stopped touring in 1995 following the death of lead guitarist, singer and principal songwriter Jerry Garcia.

But while it flourished, its singularity was well documented: It’s the only rock band that spawned a mobile subculture of diehard fans — christened Dead Heads — who flocked to every possible concert.

Robertson’s other object is corrective — to change the focus of the Grateful Dead’s legacy in our culture. And in this, he succeeds admirably.

“Now that the Grateful Dead have become subsumed by mainstream culture (file under: Hippie Nostalgia),” he writes, “ there’s no lack of Grateful Dead-themed nights at hockey games or cute Jerry Garcia bobbleheads or commemorative drinking glasses and key chains, but at the expense of obscuring the main reason to still pay attention to them nearly thirty years after their final performance: the music. Sociology is okay; art is better.”

His summaries of Dead concerts often display elements of verve, invention and colour in the telling. But at the end of the day, they remain just that — summaries.

So while Robertson sometimes makes the writing spritely, he’s constrained by the fact that he’s, at base, cataloguing concert playlists.

There’s sometimes insightful takes on the genesis of songs, or how the guys in the band play off of, and inspire, each other in the Dead’s trademark transcendental jams. But the format pretty much limits the ambit of his writing.

Oddly, the two best pieces aren’t any of the 50 capsule concert summaries, but rather the essays that open and close the book.

And while his introduction sets up the collection nicely, it’s the closing essay-cum-memoir that’s top drawer.

Pick a Prize – How I Became a Dead Head is a niftily rendered portrait of how 13-year-old Ray Robertson from Chatham, Ont. was introduced to the band (or at least its name) by winning a carney barker prize — a mirror with the Dead’s skeletal-head logo — at a local Jaycee summer fair. It captures young Ray in a Canadiana place and time and then tracks his adolescence, as place and time evolve, and with them, young Ray.

No book about the music of the Grateful Dead can avoid touching on the band’s classic two albums of the early 1970s, Working Man’s Dead and American Beauty.

Prior to those two albums the Dead was America’s archetypal hippie-dippie-psychedelic-astral-travelling rock ‘n’ roll band. But the band suddenly pivoted and produced a pair of rootsy melodic recordings that tapped into every genre of Yankee music — folk, bluegrass, country, blues and gospel. Robertson duly chronicles this shift from transcendental to truckin’ in the Dead’s live concerts.

It’s hard to convey the magic of the Dead’s music in words. But Robertson, mostly, succeeds.

At its core this is one fan’s subjective and highly original, canvass of the rise, apogee and decline of a great rock ‘n’ roll band.

Douglas J. Johnston is a Winnipeg lawyer and writer.