had to fend for herself, because Garcia had gotten an impromptu out-of-town gig at the Ashgrove, Southern California’s premier folk club. Marshall Leicester, Ken Frankel, a returned Robert Hunter, and Garcia were the Badwater Valley Boys, and they were opening for the God and creator of bluegrass, Bill Monroe, as well as bluegrass’s finest younger band, the Kentucky Colonels. Nervous, Hunter began to spin a yarn as Badwater Bob, and someone yelled, “Shut up and play bluegrass.” So they did.
5
Interlude: A Meeting of Minds (COMPANY MEETINGS, 1984)
It is a California corporation that grosses over eight figures annually, carries an employee pension fund and a health insurance plan, and retains two attorneys. It owns office and sound equipment and a Mack truck, but no stocks, real estate, or diamond mines. It is run by monthly board (primarily band member) meetings, where the president of the corporation is a crew member with nineteen years’ seniority, and the putative manager has no vote. Roughly once a month, there is an all-employee “band meeting” at the rehearsal hall, where everyone gathers around a sixteen-foot-long Victorian Gothic Revival table found in Europe by Alan Trist during the 1972 tour. The opinions expressed there carry weight. The shape of the Grateful Dead, lyricist Robert Hunter once said, reflects the shape of Jerry Garcia’s mind. Hunter described the band as an “anarchic oligarchy.” Garcia once said, “I am not an artist in the independent sense, I’m part of dynamic situations, and that’s where I like it.” The band’s social organization flows from precisely the same principle.
Since he is philosophically antisystematic, his perspective, said one friend, is “a matter of sensibility rather than system,” and he leads only subtly and by example. The result is an intelligent and functioning anarchy, with responsibility so diffused that the essential is accomplished, but only that, and in which, as Lesh once said, “Avoidance of confrontation is almost a religious point with us.” Or, as manager Rock Scully put it, “Default and digression [are] the principal modus operandi of the band.” Although seniority often resolves conflicts, building a consensus is the usual deciding political factor. There is a hierarchy, but it changes constantly, and the considered optimum is for everyone to lead as they feel their moment. It is in fact a conservative democracy, often disorganized because it is quite genuine. The most negative vote carries. “The question is,” Garcia told one interviewer, “can we do it and stay high? Can we make it so our organization is composed of people who are like pretty high, who are not being controlled by their gig, but who are actively interested in what they’re doing? . . . Wisdom is where you find it, every point of view at its very worst will see something that you don’t see . . . It would be a terrible bummer not to be able to go through life with your friends anyway— that’s what the very start was about, you know . . . But as a life problem, the Grateful Dead is an anarchy. That’s what it is. It doesn’t have any . . . stuff. It doesn’t have any goals, plans, or leaders. Or real organization. And it works. It even works in the straight world. It doesn’t work like General Motors does, but it works okay. And it’s more fun.”
The subtext of anarchism is surrealism, and the Dead’s best political statement came in a 1974 letter from Ron Rakow, then president of the Grateful Dead Record Company, to President Richard Nixon. Rakow offered the threatened officeholder an idea on how to continue his administration. “We pass our solution along to you with only the remotest expectation that you will carry it out. Since, while it is brilliant, it is not extremely logical. We have concluded that the problems referred to above would disappear, as if by magic, were you to chrome the entire White House.”
In fact, the one dependable
5
Interlude: A Meeting of Minds (COMPANY MEETINGS, 1984)
It is a California corporation that grosses over eight figures annually, carries an employee pension fund and a health insurance plan, and retains two attorneys. It owns office and sound equipment and a Mack truck, but no stocks, real estate, or diamond mines. It is run by monthly board (primarily band member) meetings, where the president of the corporation is a crew member with nineteen years’ seniority, and the putative manager has no vote. Roughly once a month, there is an all-employee “band meeting” at the rehearsal hall, where everyone gathers around a sixteen-foot-long Victorian Gothic Revival table found in Europe by Alan Trist during the 1972 tour. The opinions expressed there carry weight. The shape of the Grateful Dead, lyricist Robert Hunter once said, reflects the shape of Jerry Garcia’s mind. Hunter described the band as an “anarchic oligarchy.” Garcia once said, “I am not an artist in the independent sense, I’m part of dynamic situations, and that’s where I like it.” The band’s social organization flows from precisely the same principle.
Since he is philosophically antisystematic, his perspective, said one friend, is “a matter of sensibility rather than system,” and he leads only subtly and by example. The result is an intelligent and functioning anarchy, with responsibility so diffused that the essential is accomplished, but only that, and in which, as Lesh once said, “Avoidance of confrontation is almost a religious point with us.” Or, as manager Rock Scully put it, “Default and digression [are] the principal modus operandi of the band.” Although seniority often resolves conflicts, building a consensus is the usual deciding political factor. There is a hierarchy, but it changes constantly, and the considered optimum is for everyone to lead as they feel their moment. It is in fact a conservative democracy, often disorganized because it is quite genuine. The most negative vote carries. “The question is,” Garcia told one interviewer, “can we do it and stay high? Can we make it so our organization is composed of people who are like pretty high, who are not being controlled by their gig, but who are actively interested in what they’re doing? . . . Wisdom is where you find it, every point of view at its very worst will see something that you don’t see . . . It would be a terrible bummer not to be able to go through life with your friends anyway— that’s what the very start was about, you know . . . But as a life problem, the Grateful Dead is an anarchy. That’s what it is. It doesn’t have any . . . stuff. It doesn’t have any goals, plans, or leaders. Or real organization. And it works. It even works in the straight world. It doesn’t work like General Motors does, but it works okay. And it’s more fun.”
The subtext of anarchism is surrealism, and the Dead’s best political statement came in a 1974 letter from Ron Rakow, then president of the Grateful Dead Record Company, to President Richard Nixon. Rakow offered the threatened officeholder an idea on how to continue his administration. “We pass our solution along to you with only the remotest expectation that you will carry it out. Since, while it is brilliant, it is not extremely logical. We have concluded that the problems referred to above would disappear, as if by magic, were you to chrome the entire White House.”
In fact, the one dependable
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