The History-Politics Podcast: Putting the Past to Work
"The History-Politics Podcast: Putting the Past to Work" connects past to present, using historical analysis and context to help guide us through modern issues and policy decisions. Then & Now is brought to you by the UCLA Luskin Center for History and Policy. This podcast is produced by David Myers and Roselyn Campbell, and features original music by Daniel Raijman.
The History-Politics Podcast: Putting the Past to Work
The Living Legacy of the Grateful Dead
In this episode, host David Myers interviews Jim Newton, renowned political journalist and UCLA lecturer, on his recent book on musician Jerry Garcia and the Grateful Dead, the iconic American band. Newton reflects on his personal and professional pathway to writing about the Dead. He traces his first serious recognition of “Deadhead culture” to the 1982 US Festival, where the band’s community stood out sharply against the broader music landscape. The conversation emphasizes the Dead’s “unique alchemy”: a convergence of Bay Area time and place, the improvisational ethos, the band’s eclectic musical catalogue, and the formative social experimentation of the Acid Tests. Newton argues that the band’s unusually porous relationship with its audience, rooted in these early LSD gatherings where the Dead were not the central attraction, helped produce a distinctive form of loyalty and collective identity that endured long after the scene expanded beyond its intimate origins.
Newton frames the Dead as culturally radical but not conventionally political, aligning the band more with a bohemian ethic of lived values than an evangelical politics of persuasion. The Dead, Newton suggests, modeled community, freedom, and “collective bliss” as a refuge in both the late 1960s and the Reagan-era 1980s. Turning to Jerry Garcia, Newton offers a sober epitaph: an obsessive musical genius with vast curiosity and a deep resistance to responsibility, ultimately undone by addiction and isolation. Yet the episode closes on the enduring afterlife of the Dead through successor acts and cover bands, arguing that the phenomenon persists because it meets persistent social needs that are captured, for Newton, most powerfully in the song “Ripple.”
Jim Newton is a veteran journalist, author and teacher. In 25 years at the Los Angeles Times, Newton worked as a reporter, editor, bureau chief, columnist and, from 2007 through 2010, editor of the editorial pages. He is the recipient of numerous national and local awards in journalism and participated in two staff efforts, coverage of the 1992 riots and the 1994 Northridge Earthquake, that were awarded the Pulitzer Prize. Newton began working at UCLA full-time in early 2015, teaching in Communication Studies and Public Policy and founding Blueprint, a new UCLA magazine addressing the policy challenges facing California and Los Angeles in particular. He serves as the magazine’s editor-in-chief. Newton also is a respected author of important works of history including Justice for All: Earl Warren and the Nation He Made, Eisenhower: The White House Years, Worthy Fights: A Memoir of Leadership in War and Peace, and his 2020 release Man of Tomorrow: The Relentless Life of Jerry Brown, and most recently: Here Beside the Rising Tide: Jerry Garcia, the Grateful Dead, and an American Awakening.
Welcome to the History Politics Podcast, Putting the Past to Work from UCLA's Luskin Center for History and Policy. We study change in order to make change, linking knowledge of the past to the quest for a better future. Every other week we examine the most pressing issues of the day through a historical lens, helping us understand what happened then and what that means for us now.
SPEAKER_03:Hello, this is David Myers, Director of the UCLA Laskin Center for History and Policy, and host of today's podcast. On this episode, we're going to delve into the world of American cultural and countercultural history by exploring the life and legacy of one of the country's most iconic bands, The Grateful Dead. In its remarkable 60-year career, The Dead has been present at and contributed to key moments of change in the United States, beginning with its origins in beat era San Francisco. The band's lead guitarist, Jerry Garcia, was one of the most beloved, enigmatic, and confounding personalities of American popular culture. And the band's followers, known as Deadheads, have created their own distinctive style of dress, dance, and listening that has been transmitted from generation to generation. To help us understand where the dead came from, why it was so distinctive, and what its long and strange trip tells us about America, I'm pleased to welcome Jim Newton, who teaches at UCLA and edits the UCLA magazine Blueprint. Jim is a veteran journalist who worked at the LA Times for 25 years, including as columnist and bureau chief. He is also the acclaimed author of four works on California political history. But recently, Jim has shifted gears and produced an exceptional piece of American cultural history here beside the rising tide: Jerry Garcia, The Grateful Dead, and An American Awakening. So tell us what's your own origin story with The Grateful Dead?
SPEAKER_02:I guess there's probably two that are worth mentioning.
SPEAKER_01:Uh personally, um I started going to Dead Shows in the 70s. Uh I grew up in Palo Alto or I went to high school in Palo Alto where they had come from. So they were very much still in the air. Uh, but really the dead show that first impressed me as something worth writing about uh was the Us Festival in 1982. And there it was really that's the first time I really noticed and appreciated the culture around the dead, the crowd, the deadheads. Um, partly because it was in contrast, so so starkly in contrast to the rest of the US Festival that weekend.
SPEAKER_02:Um it was called Breakfast with the Dead, in fact. Um uh so that's one piece of it. That's my sort of entry into the band and its music. Uh professionally, though, uh, as you know, I write mostly about uh politics and politics and culture in California.
SPEAKER_01:And everything I had written, or pretty much everything I had written up to this point, had been politics and culture of California. This time I thought to do call culture and politics to sort of reverse that idea. Um that took me a while professionally kind of to get to, uh, having gone through or done some other books.
SPEAKER_02:So uh so I had to kind of work my way to this as a book project. But it's something that I've been thinking about in one way or another, really, since 1982.
SPEAKER_03:So it took me took me a while to do it. Well, I mean, in some sense, you're uh I mean, you're a scholar of many things, but if I think of the Warren and the Brown books, um and what lies in between them, you're um an expert on California in the 60s and 70s, um, this extraordinarily generative period. Um I'm just wondering what I mean, it seems almost too obvious to say as a child of almost a child of that period. Um what what draws you to that era of California history, life, and society?
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, I mean, some a little bit an accident to have come upon it. The Warren book took me to the edge of it. Uh, but Warren, of course, left California to become Chief Justice in the 50s. So he's really not there for that part of the story. Uh, so when I finished the Warren book, I felt this kind of just yearning to get back to that, to California, and to finish that story. The Jerry Brown book gave me the opportunity to cover some of that ground. But the Jerry Brown book left me feeling like there was so much culture happening in California that I was really only able to hint at in that book because I wanted to stay focused on him.
SPEAKER_01:And he's not properly thought of, I think, as a counterculture figure exactly. He's sort of on the periphery of it.
SPEAKER_02:Um, so I felt like it was a little between uh the material sort of fell between the cracks of a couple projects. Um, so there was that, but also, you know, as I as I mentioned, I I've spent my high school years in Palo Alto, Silicon Valley, uh, the aftermath, sort of the hate and and everything that had happened there. There was this feeling that something very big was happening. Um, and some of it was technology and some of it was culture and music, some of it was politics.
SPEAKER_01:And I guess what I would say is my previous work hadn't ever allowed me to dive right into that. I felt like I had nibbled the edges of it, but never quite gotten to the meat of it.
SPEAKER_03:And tell us what your sense is of the unique alchemy of The Grateful Dead, um, that has uh been such a unique experiment. The longevity is astonishing. But also, as we were talking about just before we started recording, uh the remarkable eclecticism. So, how do you understand that that alchemy, that combination of um incredible musicianship, um uh uh social norms and their uh recreation, um, and the incredible lyrics uh of so many songs.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, and all of that woven together in ways that are hard to disentangle, you know. Um I mean, start with sort of time and place, I guess. Grateful Dead comes into being in 1965, 1966 in California in the Bay Area. I don't think The Grateful Dead happens at a different time or a different place. I mean, I don't think there's The Grateful Dead can't come out of Oklahoma City, you know, or or Burlington, Vermont, um, or it can't come into existence in 1980 or 1950. So there is a kind of confluence of things that that allows the audience and the band to develop simultaneously and with each other. And in that vein, what I would say is that the acid tests, I think, are a very important part of understanding how the dead came to life, so to speak, uh, and also uh how they it affected their relationship with their audience. So the acid tests are these series of LSD experiments, experiments, rather, um, at a time I should note when LSD was still legal, um, where the dead performed at them, but they weren't dead shows. The band was still very young. It had just changed its name from the Warlocks to The Grateful Dead. Um, they came, they played, they put their music, their instruments down for a while, they participated. People didn't come to see the band, they came to and sort of enjoy each other, and members of the band were part of that. They paid admission just like everyone else did. Um, so they weren't really the center of attention. And I think that that idea, that sort of uh casualness in their relationship uh with their audience carried over even into the late days when there were 50,000 people there, clearly to see the Grateful Dead. But the idea that they were not separated entirely from the audience is important to understanding what they felt about the experience. Um and I think also goes some ways to explaining the loyalty that deadheads have that's unlike anything else to any other musical act that I'm aware of. Um, so I think you put um the different musical styles, the dead's uh experimental quality, the commitment to improvisation, drugs, the Bay Area, 1965, the politics of it, all of that somehow, you know, add a dash of cayenne and a little salt and pepper, and then you've got it, right? Um, it's hard. It is hard though to take out any one of those ingredients and know what it would have looked like. Mountain Girl, Jerry's longest, uh, the woman to whom he was married the longest or with the longest, uh, said to me in the as we were talking about this book that the dead were like the rennet, as she said, which is uh something I hadn't heard of until then, but that's the the coalescing agent in cheese, which who knew. But um her point was there's this giant culture, cheese around them, but they had something to do with sort of pulling it all together. And that's as close as as good and as close a description as I've come up with.
SPEAKER_03:So that's that's great. Um, yeah, I mean, I think it's just so important to emphasize that um going to a dead concert is not just about listening to the music, it is a social scene. And what you remind us is of is that it was a social scene from the very first moment, uh, from its inception.
SPEAKER_02:Um even arguably even a social moment before it was a concert. So they they sort of backed into being a performing act. They they really started as part of a social experiment.
SPEAKER_03:Yeah. I mean, and just to capture that moment and the social scene, and for that matter, the cultural scene, there's an incredible picture in the book that I'm looking at right now uh of a group of um uh people of the 60s, um, musicians gathered at 710 Ashbury, uh, the Dead's house, that includes members of the Grateful Dead, Quicksilver Messenger Service, Janice Joplin and Big Brother, Jefferson Airplane, and the Charlatans all gathered together on the steps. And you just have this sense that this was either the preface to the prelude or the aftermath of a long party that included extended jam sessions and probably ingestion of many different kinds of drugs, principally LSD. And it really captures that scene.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah. Yeah. Someone said to me along the course of this reporting that uh or wrote somewhere that I read that the there were sometimes it was described as the San Francisco music or the San Francisco sound more often. That's a little bit misleading because those bands all had very distinctive sounds, but the San Francisco scene was real. That they performed on each other's uh albums. Jerry himself produced uh albums for others. Uh, he famously played the steel guitar on Teach Your Children for Crosby Souls and Nashville. There's an enormous amount of interplay between those bands, uh, not so much in terms of musical style, but just in their social uh they they liked each other, they supported each other. That's a real scene, that scene in the hate. It got too big and it sort of outgrew itself and got very chaotic, but particularly in the early months of it, it was really, I think for Garcia, really a highlight moment of his life, frankly.
SPEAKER_03:So, one of the things that makes the dead the dead is not only this unique blend of music musical talent, uh Jerry Garcia on lead guitar, Bob Weir, rhythm guitar, vocals, um, the classically trained Phil Lesh and the two drummers, uh Mickey and Bill, uh, but the lyricists, um Robert Hunter and John Perry Barlow. I wonder if you could say a word about them and their import to Hunter is dead.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, I'm sure, yeah. Um, both very important, both highly gifted. Uh, it's easy, I think, to overlook Barlow, just because Hunter is such a dominant uh lyricist in the band. But uh, but that's only to say, I mean, to be the the the second best lyricist for The Grateful Dead is like being the second best player on the on the Yankees at their height in their heyday, right? I mean, he was a uh uh gifted uh lyricist and wrote mostly for Bob Weir. Um, you know, I think what they captured, Hunter in particular, um, was that very subtle place uh in which they write about the ineffable and the big and the cosmic while also giving you those intimate real life details. Um, very rarely um writing about current events, um, Garcia had a real aversion to being too on the nose. Um, and in fact, there's a few uh dead lyrics that he amended over time to make them a little more opaque. Um uh but the you know the essence of those lyrics is there is something uh elusive about uh them that uh allows different people to hear them differently. I've I've certainly had the experience of hearing them differently over time. Um they can seem to refer to something in the news, but then viewed from a different direction seem to be about something entirely different. Um, that's a real gift of a poet. Um and Hunter had was enormously gifted, and I think Barlow was quite gifted. And so both of them uh, you know, it's a it's actually, I should add, a little bit of a challenge to write about Garcia because you want to impute to him those lyrics when he didn't actually write them. Um and so the sentiments that are being expressed by them, certainly he's comfortable with, he's singing them, and sometimes he's editing them, but they didn't really come from his pen. So that that is a and these are both popular parts of it.
SPEAKER_03:These are both poets um possessed of a huge literary reservoir. I mean, capable of drawing on illusions from English literature for a thousand years, um, really astounding in the range. And that is integrated into the lyrics as well as the references to the train culture of the 19th century and and and and taking drugs in the in the 20th century. It's really that that amalgam that uh that makes for such a unique lyrical experience.
SPEAKER_02:And they feel timeless as a result, um, which may be part of why they do, in fact, wear so well with time, that they're not rooted in a particular event or moment, but they feel very large culture.
SPEAKER_03:The obverse of that is, as you note at length, they're not topical. They're not um on the nose, as you said, they're not an exceptionally or even significantly political band in a highly political time. And that's sort of the interesting juxtaposition. This is 1966, Ronald Reagan is elected governor of California. Um, uh counterculture um is turning political um uh uh with the war um becoming more and more ominous. Uh the free speech movement is taking rise uh in the very state. Ronald Reagan provides that counterweight, and the band resists that political pull.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah. Yeah, the band's relationship to politics is fascinating. It's uh the the jury did not consider himself a political person, as I'm sure you know. Um, the band did not consider itself political. Now, I think it's safe to say that most of those around the band, in the band, and certainly in the larger dead community, skew heavily to the left, not entirely, but heavily. Um, but the you don't you won't hear, you don't see the Grateful Dead doing fundraisers, endorsing candidates. They don't participate in politics in the way that Joan Baez say did and does, or that others in the 60s did or have since. Um uh and yet uh I would also make the argument that there is a an inherent politics in them. They are expressing values, they're living values. You know, one way I think to think of the many factions of the counterculture is to think about the difference between radicals and bohemians. Um and one way to think about that is a radical is someone who's very much trying to change your mind, right? Trying to change the world and the way you look at it, and is evangelical in that sense. Uh, a bohemian is someone who I think is living a set of values, but may not be preaching those values and really wants to be left alone to pursue those values. And to the extent that those values have any appeal beyond the immediate circle, any evangelical value, it is by their gift of attraction, right? They're just the model of them. That's where I would place the dead and Jerry in this, is that they've clearly had a sense of values.
SPEAKER_03:Yeah, I mean, the lineage, I mean, it draws upon the culture of hippies, the culture of the beats, um, which is very much a culture and it's about culture, it's about the reimagination of culture. Um, there seems to be a parallel uh political tradition, um, that is, as you describe it, a progressive slash radical tradition that often intersects uh those parallel lines meet over time. But one, as you actually successfully trace that cultural lineage of the dead uh back to the Casey's um uh and the beats of uh of an earlier time. Absolutely.
SPEAKER_02:I think that's exactly right. And I I remember as a kid someone saying to me that the only place you could go uh and expect to meet a Black Panther and a Hell's Angel would be a dead show. And so, you know, I mean, they were again at the center of that geographically and philosophically, but also position themselves as comfortable with all of that. Um, and so their their politics are hard to pigeonhole by kind of our modern definitions of them, but they were an expression of their creativity, their commitment to freedom, uh, that commitment to community. Those all have political valence, even if they are not electoral politics.
SPEAKER_03:Yeah, I mean, help us understand that that social scene, the dead show, where the Hells Angel, uh the flower girl, the spinner, and the Black Panther can somehow coexist.
SPEAKER_02:I think it is a space to be free. Um, but it is it is not freedom in the kind of Western individual tradition of freedom, right? It's a freedom, it's a community freedom. Um, it's a it's a refuge. Um and it's a place to to be with others and be free, to experience. Someone said to me, it's a place to experience bliss collectively rather than in a solitary uh way. And and that uh again, I think is a is a is a value that's easy to pigeonhole to the 60s, but in fact present in our lives today. I think a lot of people yearn for that. Um, and so yes, uh it is a a place to get away from uh certain, you know, uh aspects of culture that feel oppressive, um, a place to express them with others who want to feel that too. Um, and I think one of the reasons the Grateful Dead became so huge in the 1980s is it was one of the few places where people could go. In the 1960s, there were a lot of places you could go for that kind of outlet. Um, by the 80s, when Reagan is now president and Grateful Dead uh are no longer just a California band, the Grateful Dead and Dead Shows became a place to hide out uh from Reaganism and from what people felt was a an oppressive, insensitive culture.
SPEAKER_03:So at the center of that universe stands the cosmically significant personality of Jerry Garcia, whom you uh follow very carefully uh in the course of the book of the book, from his um humble origins uh to his um uh ignominious decline um uh owing to uh drug addiction. Um and yet, I must confess, throughout Caprity remains an enigma. Um you know, uh a countercultural figure of world historical significance and decidedly apolitical. Um uh a man of great musical expression and yet relatively few words, it would seem, um, in certainly in the public sense. Um uh a person who uh believed in sort of the democracy. Of performance and uh exposing the public to the music, um, and yet who was not um especially um uh enthralled with the stage and in fact suffered from stage fright um late in the day. What's your epitaph for Jerry Garcia?
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, well, first of all, I think you've summed him up uh quite well there, uh both enigmatic and contradictory uh in some ways, right? Those some of what you just described, there doesn't seem like it would fit together in the same uh body. Um I mean, I I I think the standout features of Garcia for me are a an obsessive commitment to his work and his craft, a genius for it, um a ravenously curious intellect, uh, musically and otherwise, just eager to absorb strains of culture. In fact, uh you can make the argument that there's no band that better coalesces American musical genres into one act than The Grateful Dead, um, and that's because of Garcia. Um, and also someone who was chronically afraid of responsibility, um, and really uh resisted any attempt to make him responsible for almost anything. Um his uh he was uh his marriages, uh he was not uh a good uh companion to his wives, he was an uh on-again, off again father to his daughters, um, which is not to say he didn't love them. He did, uh there's no doubt about it. Uh, but he was his commitment to music was close to absolute, um, and it came at the expense of personal relationships. And then finally, I think the thing I would add uh to his makeup is drugs. Um drugs which started as something that he saw as creatively helpful to him, uh LSD and marijuana, um, felt to the he and other members of the dead and many other people as a kind of gateway into understanding new um conscious levels of consciousness. Over time, that segued into uh heroin and cocaine, uh, which did not uh do that for any of them. Instead, heroin in particular grabbed him by the throat. It didn't take him over instantaneously, and there's a long period of him kind of bumping in and out of using using. Uh, but by the end, it robbed him of what might have been the thing that mattered most to him, which is being able to perform capably as a musician with other musicians and enjoy it and be part of a community. Instead, he became terribly isolated um and he died at age 53. Um, so uh it's a tragic story on top of uh everything else. I think also an enlightening and uplifting story. But uh, and you know, I don't know. I don't know what Jerry Garcia in his 70s or 80s would have been doing or whether we'd be enjoying it. Uh he put down a lot of work by the age 53. So maybe he had done all he needed to do. But um, but it is certainly true that drugs uh cut short his life and cut short the meaningfulness of his life even before they killed him.
SPEAKER_03:Who else interests you in the band? I mean, one could do a uh a discrete episode in every single person in the band. In fact, shows have been devoted to each of them. But I'm curious in your own rendering, who who else interests you? I mean, there's the obviously the Bobby Jerry dynamic, but I'm just wondering what what what stands out to you as particularly interesting musically or otherwise.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, well, I would say this is a slightly slightly dodge to your question, but um, I do think that they work because each of them brings a different kind of musical background to it. And so the it is the in the amalgamation that they are special. Um, and so it's a little hard to separate any of them out of that. Uh, I mean, I someone said to me early in this that the the three great geniuses of the Grateful Dead were Jerry Garcia, Robert Hunter, and Phil Lesh. Each of them, and Phil is this particularly unusual in that respect because Phil joined the dead as its bass player before he knew how to play the bass. Uh, he was really there just because of his interestingness to Jerry. He was a violin player. He was a piano player, he was a composer, really, a classical composer. And Jerry he agreed to join the dead if Jerry would teach him how to play the bass, which Jerry, I guess, did well. Uh, and as a result, though, he's a very unconventional bass player, was a very unconventional bass player. Uh, I I the one thing I would add to that, Bobby is a real is a real fun figure to me. I've never met him. Um uh I've seen him, of course, a million times. And now most recently with Dead and Company. I've I really enjoyed seeing Bob Weir with Dead and Company because I spent my whole growing up thinking of him as kind of Jerry's kind of kooky younger brother figure, right? He was the one kind of rock star figure in the band. His post-grateful dead life is now as long as his life was.
SPEAKER_03:So, Jim, how did you take the news of Bobby's passing on January 10th at age 78?
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, it's uh it was definitely sad and sobering. I got a I learned of it uh in a text actually from my editor uh on the book, uh Ben Greenberg at Random House. Um, and you know, just along with the the sadness of seeing someone you've known or been around, I never knew him personally, but uh go, there is that sense I feel, and I know you do too, of of something ending. Um, and now, of course, uh Bill Kroisman is still alive, Mickey Hart is still alive, it's not really the end of the living members of the Grateful Dead, but it does feel like the end of the musical enterprise uh of that phase of that musical enterprise anyway.
SPEAKER_03:It does seem that that marks the end of the extraordinary chapter known as the Grateful Dead. Um, and I wonder, you know, at that moment, at this moment, um, how do you assess his legacy in the history of the band?
SPEAKER_02:Um, as a member of The Grateful Dead, um I I thought of him as a little bit of a sidekick for most of the years that I was seeing the band. Um that began to change, though, I would say, in the later years of the band, especially as Jerry's health declined, uh, Bobby became a bigger and bigger stage presence. He's the only member of The Grateful Dead that had anything that one would associate with a stage personality, right? He did sometimes feel like a rock star trapped in a non-rock and roll band. Um, but he was fun. He was uh active and and jumping around and enjoying himself while the other members could be sort of out of it. Uh, so he was always uh an appealing member of The Grateful Dead. That in this second iteration, though, in the post-dead career, it really felt to me like he became the kind of keeper of the flame, right? He he kept it alive, kept something alive. He was the connection back to the original. Um, and I loved uh have loved Dead and Company, not as a continuation of the dead, but as a a kind of um attending of the fire of the dead. And and Bobby was the essential ingredient of that. He became the sole center of that band in a way that he was always a little bit off-center uh in The Grateful Dead itself, because Jerry was there. Uh so I really came to really like him and appreciate him even more, I think, in the post-dead years.
SPEAKER_03:Uh going back to phase one, maybe we'll push on to phase two at some point. How do you what'd you say about their sort of blending of the guitar styles of Jerry Unlead and Bobby as you know um one of the most accomplished and acclaimed rhythm guitarists? What did that do for you?
SPEAKER_02:You know, it's funny. There's a there's a moment in the fairly early in the life of the dead where Phil and Jerry moved to push Pig Pen and Bobby out of the band. Um and it would be discussed, wouldn't you discuss? It's in the book. Um oddly, it was tape recorded, so there's a tape of it. Um and it would have been a catastrophic mistake for the dead. Um uh and of course it didn't stick, so that was it's good news for everyone. Um, but I think it would have been a mistake, mainly because Bobby and then Pig Pen, who who died not long after, but um uh brought their musical sensibilities to the dead. And the thing that makes the dead special, in my view, is that it doesn't favor one musical genre over another, that it's really about the the sort of collecting of those musical influences. Um, and Bobby brought a a jug band, country music sensibility to the whole thing. That had that disappeared, I think it could have become too esoteric and weird, you know. Um, it was grounding. Um, he was a performer, he loved performing. I mean, and he can make a credible case for having performed before more people than any person ever, really. Um that the case was made for Jerry at the time of his death, and Bobby did 30 years more performances.
SPEAKER_03:So uh I, you know, there's not I mean he's he's such a curious cultural foil to Jerry as well. I mean, you mentioned that uh, you know, the country vibe as opposed to Jerry's classic hippie uh profile. Um Jerry was, as you chronicle, um kind of religiously anti-political. Bobby was more inclined to speak his mind, especially uh in later years. Uh there they they made for you know a really fascinating pair that was part of the unique dynamic that lent the Grateful Dead its incredible oomph, it's it's staying power.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, I I mean I don't think they're a great band if they're five identical musicians, really. What makes them interesting is that they are different from each other. Phil is a classically trained, Bobby is the country guy, you know, each of them brings this kind of uh idea, set of ideas with them. Um, and it wouldn't have the balance that it had uh without him, either in terms of the showmanship or in terms of the musical underpinnings of it. Um so he's an absolutely essential ingredient of the Grateful Dead from the first day.
SPEAKER_03:And the corpus of Bobby's songs is um is uh an impressive one. Um, you know, Jack Straw Cassidy, trucking playing the band, Terrapin Station. Um what do you say about that corpus and what's your favorite Bobby song?
SPEAKER_02:Well, I have a dog named Sugar after Sugar Magnolia, so I'm I'm I feel like I'm obliged to say that. I didn't even mention perhaps the most famous of them, Sugar Magnolia. Yeah. Yeah. Well, which is an interesting one too, because it's the only one he co-wrote with Hunter, and they actually had a little bit of a fallout over it. Um, yeah, I all of those songs that you mentioned, uh, those are those would be the standout piece of music of any other musical act, right? And they fit uh neatly into the the dead's larger work. I would say that the Bobby Barlow songs tend to be less elliptical, a little less uh uh uh uh broad and allegorical. They don't draw on the same kind of literary references that Robert Hunter did, but they're they're strong and rhythmic and and and Barlow, especially uh as the years went by, I think became a really, really a quality lyricist. So they're great pieces of music. Bobby loved performing them. Um and they just they created together. They a lot of them have a kind of western country tinge to them, Mexicali blues, uh uh Jack Straw, as you mentioned. Um, so they're they round out that piece of the dead's uh musical portfolio, I would say.
SPEAKER_03:And let's say the dead is the necessary condition for their success. Deadheads are the sufficient condition for their success. Um when do we first come into consciousness of the phenomenon known as deadheads? Yeah.
SPEAKER_02:Deadheads start very early. Um, and that's interesting too, right? I mean, it didn't take 20 years for there to be this loyal following around the dead. There were really deadheads almost from the get-go. Um, and and there still are. I I mean, I I I'm not uh exaggerating when I say I just this last week signed a book for the daughter of a friend of mine who's 22 years old and thinks of herself as a deadhead. And it's like, I just think it's magnificent. I've it's it's astonishing. Um, and I, you know, then the question is why, right? Like, why are I mean I went to these uh Dead and Company shows in San Francisco last summer, um, 60,000 people a night, polo field in San Francisco. Um, I would say at least half to two-thirds of the people there too young to have ever seen Jerry. Um, and yet right there, you know, paying whatever they're paying a night to see Dead and Company, uh, and loving every minute of it. Um, and I so I've I've sort of stumbled around a lot for explanations as to why that would be. I I would offer just a couple thoughts. None of them is a full explanation. Uh, one, I do think the eclectical musical style gives something for everyone. And there is something about the fact that every show is different, um, means you can come night after night and not be bored by the same set list. Um, uh, so that I think that's the essential ingredient. But beyond that, I do think there is a a yearning for to be happy with other people at a time when there are not all too few opportunities to do that. Uh to that has a kind of political feel to it, even though it's definitely not a political rally. But I think at a time when our politics deprives us of that, um, that's something that politics used to help fill in us, right? We go to a political rally, you go to a demonstration, you could feel like you were working with others and experiencing something joyfully with others. There's some of those opportunities now, but not in the same way. And so I think the music, the culture, and that very ancient desire to be joyful with others, um, I think that expresses itself now too. And deadheads have that. I mean, you don't have to be a deadhead to recognize that other people have that in that experience. And so that's real, you know.
SPEAKER_03:Yeah, I often wonder if, you know, in terms of a political identity to the extent that we could affix one to bury in the dead and maybe deadheads, it may be that a kind of American libertarianism, you know, live and let live, um, is the guiding ethos. Um, it's a kind of cultural sensibility, uh, maybe more than a political sensibility. Um, but it often seems like that that may be where Jerry was at.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, I mean, and and there are some conservatives or libertarians who find that sucker in the dead. Um, I mean, and Jerry himself owned handguns, right? I mean, there is a um there is a kind of Western libertarianism. If you look at the the album covered a working man's dead, it's a sort of western pastige. Um uh so yes, I do think that you can find that. And the lyrics, again, are elliptical enough to find that in there. I I would say a slight caution on that. You don't see the Grateful Dead show performing for the National Rifle Association, right? I mean, you know, it is, I do think that the dominant dead culture skews progressive. Um and with the deadheads who identify as conservatives are the exception, not the rule. And they have to I think you have to strain it a little bit to get there, but but there is that ethos that you're describing, that libertarian ethos.
SPEAKER_03:Yeah, that Western libertarian sensibility, perhaps not defined in cultural rather than political terms. But I I do often wonder what the composition, how how the the crowd at a Denko show would vote. And I'm kind of always landing at 70-30. Um not 90-10, which one might assume going in.
SPEAKER_02:Hunter Thompson once said that you could change this country if you could just get every deadhead to vote.
SPEAKER_03:So I wish they would. Um so I I just want to uh dwell for a minute on the the musical eclecticism. Uh, we were talking about this a little bit before we started. I mean, you could identify bluegrass, country, American folk, uh, rock and roll, rockabilly, and jazz. I mean, uh, you mentioned the fact that a number of jazz greats, Miles Davis or Nett Coleman, were all um enamored of the Grateful Dead.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah. I mean, I would say what the the jazz, the biggest part of the jazz influence on the dead is the way they play as opposed to what they play. Um, but uh, and and that is just that determination to make every night different, that willingness to follow the sound where it leads. Sometimes, and I will let me confess, sometimes into kind of dead ends, you know, there I've been to a couple of dead shows where there was some some sort of snafu moments. Um, but but and I'm sorry, this goes back to your earlier question about deadheads. One thing that deadheads really gave the dead is the ability to do that, right? I mean, I've never heard anyone leave a show saying, Oh, I want my money back, or that was terrible, right? It was it was a ride. Um, and and part of that was was the willingness to make mistakes and try things um and just sort of fall over on them. But that that is a bit of an extrapolation, I think, from the the jazz uh fondness. Jerry was very uh uh enamored of Ornak Holman, as you mentioned. Um they performed on the same bill as Miles Davis in San Francisco and very much uh admired uh each other. It was uh Phil was just uh astonished by being there with uh Miles Davis. So I think that that um uh that uh desire, willingness, eagerness to to play music that required them to listen to each other and play off each other, that's the biggest part of the jazz influence, I would say, on the day is the way that they saw each other as a unit. And it's one of the most exciting things about the music, is what makes it so fresh night after night.
SPEAKER_03:Um Yeah, that improvitor improvisatorial spirit that now John Mayer uh brings to uh to the corpus um as uh as the lead guitarist for Dead and Company, um, which is um one of the successor bands, the most successful successor band of The Grateful Dead, um, 30 years after The Dead's last show. So how can we understand this afterlife?
SPEAKER_02:Yeah. I uh someone asked me recently, does the does it ever end? Um and in one sense, I think there's probably a moment in the not too distant future where it changes, which is to say the living, surviving members of the Grateful Dead will someday have to stop performing. But does the music end? Does the culture end? I don't think so. Uh, I mean, thousands of bands, more than I can imagine or count, uh, perform the music of The Grateful Dead day after day, night after night. Um, it has a life um that is independent of any of its performers. Um, and the culture I think draws on some very ancient yearnings uh in humanity. So I don't think those go away either. I suspect it'll look different. Um, it already looks different than it did when Jerry was. And sounds and sounds and sounds different. John Mayer John Mayer, I think that the great genius thing that John Mayer has done is to not try to copy Garcia. Um, he is his own, he's a brilliant guitar player in some ways, maybe better technically than Jerry. Um, it's not, it doesn't to me have the same deep soulfulness that the Garcia work did, but it has something else, and that something else is I I I sort of I compare it to the imitation hamburger meat, right? Like if you if you taste it thinking you're wanting hamburger, then it tastes kind of weird. But if you just taste it on its own, it tastes great. Uh and I think John Mayer has done a really great job of of freshening and modernizing that and not trying to appropriate it.
SPEAKER_03:Yeah, and his his connection to the keyboardist Jeff is uh is a beautiful thing to see. Fun to watch, yeah. Um so you know, as you assess the import um and the longevity uh of this remarkable cultural phenomenon, what do you think it tells us about America, about American culture, uh American social norms? What what what can we learn from the Grateful Dead about the United States?
SPEAKER_02:Well, I think one thing we can learn about ourselves in the United States is that there is um it's good to be true to your values. Um and that doesn't mean that they can't change or Evolve over time, but a commitment to values will see you through some dark places. Um, and and I think that was true for the dead, more than any band that came out of that San Francisco scene or out of that era, stayed true to itself. Um, there's a funny press conference at one point where some reporter asks, have the Grateful Dead sold out? And Jerry just says, Yep. And uh, and later he said, Well, we've been trying to sell out all this time, but nobody will buy. Uh, you know, he was a very self-deprecating interview, which is part of what makes them fun. But but yeah, there was a they enjoyed who they were. They didn't change to meet the fashion, and I think there's real something to be learned from that. I think another thing that I would take away from the dead, and this goes back to our conversation about the politics of the dead, Jerry's life to me is a is an important, has within it important reminders that the government can control certain things about you. It can control your liberty, it control, and sadly your body on occasion, um, but it cannot control your heart or your feelings or your creative inner soul. And Garcia was to the Garcia took that so seriously that he didn't regard the government as meaningful in his life at all, which with the couple of times he got arrested may have reminded him that that's not true. But there is something to be learned from that, too, that there is a limit to the government's authority uh on any of us. Um, and that's true even in the face of the most repressive governments. Um, so I it's a difficult that's difficult to exercise at times, but I think it is worth remembering that we have with all of us within us a place that is immune to changes in administration or policy, uh, that we are, we are and can be and should be ourselves.
SPEAKER_03:Yeah, I mean, that's such a beautiful way to end, although I do have one more question. Um, because I'm just thinking of the role that jazz has played as a culture of resistance in Nazi Germany, uh in post-war communist uh Eastern Europe. Uh uh Milan Kundera, the great Czech writer, wrote at great length about uh jazz as a as a culture of resistance. And in some sense, the dead are a culture of resistance while at the same time being deeply woven into the American cultural mainstream at this point. Um my last question um is unfair. It's kind of asking you to name your favorite Beatle or this way, or in this sense, member of the Grateful Dead, but I'm not gonna do that. I'm gonna ask you to just um say a word about uh you your favorite dead song, or what comes to mind as uh a favorite.
SPEAKER_02:Choosing your favorite children, right? But um the uh well Uncle John's Band uh has real meaning. That's why it's in the title, the title borrows from Uncle John's Band. Um I think as an expression of American sort of cultural piece of a piece of Americana, it's my favorite. But the the song that I think speaks most to my heart is Ripple. Um I uh that line, uh If I knew the way, I would take you home, is something I have been thinking about uh since I was uh uh in my 20s. Um it's meant different things to me at different times in my life. Um, but it and it it plays a role in the ending of the book as I try to reflect on it there. Um uh I would say if if I had to choose one, and I do resist a little bit having to choose one, but it's probably the one that most has spoken to me the most deeply over the longest time.
SPEAKER_03:Wow, that's a great, great response, uh Jim. Um Jim Newton, author of Here Beside the Rising Tide, Jerry Garcia, The Grateful Dead, and an American Awakening, a wonderful, wonderful book. Thank you so much for making time to be with us.
SPEAKER_02:A real pleasure, David. Thank you very much for having me.
SPEAKER_00:Thank you for listening to the History Politics Podcast, Putting the Past to Work, from UCLA's Luskin Center for History and Policy. You can learn more about our work or share your thoughts with us at our website, LuskinCenter.history.ucla.edu. Our show is produced by David Myers and Rosalind Campbell with original music by Daniel Reichman. Special thanks to the UCLA History Department for its support, and thanks to you for listening.