Eyes to the World: The Ending of the Sixties and the Evolution of the Grateful Dead
-
Upload
incornsyucopia5127 -
Category
Documents
-
view
222 -
download
0
Transcript of Eyes to the World: The Ending of the Sixties and the Evolution of the Grateful Dead
8/3/2019 Eyes to the World: The Ending of the Sixties and the Evolution of the Grateful Dead
http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/eyes-to-the-world-the-ending-of-the-sixties-and-the-evolution-of-the-grateful 1/14
1
Eyes to the World: The Ending of the Sixties and the Evolution of
the Grateful Dead
In his book Decade of Nightmares: The End of the Sixties and the Making of
Eighties America, historian Philip Jenkins argues that rather than its nominal ending in
1970, “the sixties,” as a name for a constellation of tumultuous social, cultural and
political events, are best understood as having begun in late 1963 with the assassination
of John F. Kennedy and ending in 1974 with the resignation of Richard Nixon from the
presidency of the United States. For if one understands “the Sixties” as standing for the
culminating events of post-war liberalism, “the year 1970 is an especially implausible
candidate for marking the end of an era, because so much of the unrest of the 1960s was
peaking in that year, while critical events we think of as characterizing sixties liberalism
actually occurred afterward.”1 And though the Watergate crisis that eventually forced
Nixon from the presidency “was a strictly political affair,” it coincided with the definitive
end of the post-War economic boom as the results of Nixon’s unilateral abnegation of the
Bretton-Woods accords in 1971 (the so-called “Nixon Shock”), itself the consequence of
the deterioration of the United-States’ post-war global economic dominance, and the
1973 OPEC oil embargo ushered in a very different, and much less optimistic, world
economic situation than that which had fueled the optimism and liberal reforms of the
1960s, such as President Johnson’s Great Society initiative.
That 1974 was also the year that the Grateful Dead, one of the musical groups
most strongly associated with the counterculture of the sixties, chose to “retire” is an
intriguing historical parallel especially since when they resumed touring in 1976 their
1PhilipJenkins, Decade of Nightmares: The End of the Sixties and the Making of
Eighties America(NewYork:OxfordUniversityPress),4.
8/3/2019 Eyes to the World: The Ending of the Sixties and the Evolution of the Grateful Dead
http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/eyes-to-the-world-the-ending-of-the-sixties-and-the-evolution-of-the-grateful 2/14
2
musical practice had changed in significant ways: with the return of 2nd drummer Mickey
Hart they had two drummers for the first time since early 1971, quite a few new songs (or
old ones with new arrangements) were introduced and a number of songs and
instrumental segments that had been staples of their live repertoire disappeared from their
performances. And as John Dwork and Michael Getz point out in their editorial
comments on the Dead’s 1976 performances in the second volume of The Deadheads
Taping Compendium, “the band’s ability to access the same sort of deep psychedelic
realms previously reached through improvisation seemed to have been lost…it was a
band that had left behind its far-left-field esoteric/mystical character. While this was
disappointing for many Deadheads, the resulting sound was a more down-to-earth,
structured style, which made the Dead’s live music much more accessible for a larger
audience.”2
In this paper I’d like to interpret this turn towards a more grounded, less overtly
psychedelic performance style through the lens of Jenkins’ thesis in order to argue for a
connection between them: that the Dead’s post-retirement performance practice reflects
the broader social-cultural shift in the mid-1970s (what Jenkins argues marks the real
“end of the sixties”) through an eschewal of the extremities of improvisational flexibility
and musical esotericism that had previously been foregrounded in their live
performances. Although elements of both would survive in their repertoire until the
group’s end in 1995, after coming out of retirement in 1976 their manifestations were
increasingly incorporated into designated structures within the two-set form that would
2JohnDworkandMichaelGetz,TheDeadhead’sTapingCompedium:AnIn-depth
GuidetotheMusicoftheGratefulDeadonTape,Vol.II (NewYork:HenryHoltand
Co.),97.
8/3/2019 Eyes to the World: The Ending of the Sixties and the Evolution of the Grateful Dead
http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/eyes-to-the-world-the-ending-of-the-sixties-and-the-evolution-of-the-grateful 3/14
3
become standard for the Dead by the late 70s. On one hand, this would seem to represent
a troubling loss of freedom or lack of willingness to venture into the more adventurous
musical forms that they had before. On the other, as Jenkins’ thesis as to the proper
chronology of the sixties points out, the world of 1976 was very different than that of
1973-74, let alone that of 1969, and it would have been foolish and artistically
reactionary for the Dead to pretend otherwise by not changing with the times. Although
they were, and are, often characterized as forever-caught-in-the-past perpetuators of
sixties nostalgia, that they managed to survive for three decades, becoming even more
popular as the years passed, reveals the opposite: while continuing what they began
during the Acid Tests in the mid-1960s—bringing popular music and the avant-garde
together in a highly improvised, dance-band context—the Dead remained highly aware of
the broader cultural context and consistently reflected its changes in their musical
practice.
Among those who study the music of the Grateful Dead, the years 1973-74 are
commonly recognized as the period in which jazz exerted its strongest influence over
their musical practice. Clearly aware of the contemporaneous developments in jazz
fusion—Miles Davis and his then electric quintet had in fact opened for the Dead over
four nights in April of 1970, an experience that bassist Phil Lesh has stated was
incredibly influential on the group—the Dead had, by 1973, realized a jazz-rock fusion of
their own, but one that moved from rock towards jazz rather than the other way around.
They were, of course, hardly unique in this as many other pop-rock musicians in the late
60s and early 70s also found inspiration in jazz and incorporated elements of it into their
music (e.g. Blood, Sweat & Tears; Santana; Frank Zappa), but the Dead undoubtedly
8/3/2019 Eyes to the World: The Ending of the Sixties and the Evolution of the Grateful Dead
http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/eyes-to-the-world-the-ending-of-the-sixties-and-the-evolution-of-the-grateful 4/14
4
foregrounded the improvisational character of jazz more than any other rock group at the
time, along with a significant amount of its harmonic complexity, and at no time more so
than in their live performances in 1973 and ‘74.
Such influences are particularly evident in “Eyes of the World,” a song the Dead
introduced in concert in early 1973 and that appeared regularly in their set-lists until the
group disbanded in 1995 after the death of lead guitarist Jerry Garcia. As with much of
their repertoire, “Eyes” changed over the years reflecting the Dead’s improvisational
aesthetic and goal to never play a song exactly the same way twice, but the basic slightly
modified verse-chorus form remained the same. Its versions from 1973-74 differ
significantly from later ones, however, because of an instrumental “outro” section that
always followed the final chorus. Featuring numerous shifts in modality and metrical
modulation in a highly flexible form, this outro is an ideal example of the jazz-like
character of the Dead’s music at this time. An analysis of this musical material thus offers
important insights into the Dead’s pre-retirement practices and thus into the evolution of
their musical style.
Before discussing the outro, however, a few remarks on the song structure of
“Eyes of the World” are necessary. That it immediately acquired a long, extensively
improvised outro is not surprising given its strongly jazz-influenced character. First,
rather than the triads or dominant 7th chords that serve as the basic harmonic structure for
most rock songs, “Eyes” begins on, and continually returns to, an E major seventh chord.
Although this sonority was not unheard of in the pop-rock music of the time
(interestingly, Marvin Gaye’s 1971 hit “What’s Going On” also tonicizes an E major
seventh chord—a source of inspiration perhaps?), its use as the primary harmonic color in
8/3/2019 Eyes to the World: The Ending of the Sixties and the Evolution of the Grateful Dead
http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/eyes-to-the-world-the-ending-of-the-sixties-and-the-evolution-of-the-grateful 5/14
5
up-tempo rock songs was then, and remains today, unusual; whereas in jazz major
sevenths, along with added sixths, are the usual extensions to non-dominant functioning
major triads.3
The other jazz-connoted aspect of the song is its relative harmonic
sophistication. As you can see here (Example 1), the clearly expressed E major tonality at
the song’s beginning is continually undermined by one-measure interjections of A major
(two beats of a Bm7 chord, two beats of an A major chord) after the first two lines of
each verse, as well as by a hint of through-composition in the first verse, where the line
“Wings a mile long just carried the bird away” is set to a D major triad (some subtle text-
painting perhaps), foreshadowing the even more surprising shift to G major for the chorus
(Example 2). And although harmonic third-relations, usually based on the minor
pentatonic scale, are quite common in rock music (what Alf Björnberg has referred to as
“Aeolian” harmony4), such third-related key changes (E major to G major) are
considerably less so and, in the case of “Eyes,” serve to dramatically emphasize the
chorus. At its end, the return to E major is brought about, somewhat paradoxically,
through another instance of the one-measure interjection of A major: again, two beats of
Bm7, two beats of A major. And though this brings the song back to its E major seventh
“home” chord, this modulation is not confirmed by a move to its sub-dominant or
dominant as a proper tonal modulation should; instead, it is reinterpreted modally as E
3“ Now, what makes the major-seventh sonority so distinctive and sonically attractive is
its perfect fifths and major thirds. Of all the tetrachords it is the only one with exactly twomajor thirds and two perfect fifths.” Allan Forte, “Harmonic Relations: American
Popular Harmonies (1925-1950) and Their European Kin,” Contemporary Music Review 19m no. 1 (2000), 5-36.4AlfBjörnberg, “On Aeolian Harmony in Contemporary Popular Music,” paper
presented to the Third International Conference of IASPM, Montreal (1985). Available:http://www.andrelambert.org/uqam/analyse/aeolianharmony.pdf (accessed Nov. 15,
2011).
8/3/2019 Eyes to the World: The Ending of the Sixties and the Evolution of the Grateful Dead
http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/eyes-to-the-world-the-ending-of-the-sixties-and-the-evolution-of-the-grateful 6/14
day, June 30, 2011
8/3/2019 Eyes to the World: The Ending of the Sixties and the Evolution of the Grateful Dead
http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/eyes-to-the-world-the-ending-of-the-sixties-and-the-evolution-of-the-grateful 7/14
day, June 30, 2011
8/3/2019 Eyes to the World: The Ending of the Sixties and the Evolution of the Grateful Dead
http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/eyes-to-the-world-the-ending-of-the-sixties-and-the-evolution-of-the-grateful 8/14
6
Ionian as the band begins to collectively improvise, shifting to B minor seventh, modally
B Dorian, two bars later. This four bar section is then repeated ad lib until they decide to
begin the next verse. With the exception of the aforementioned appearance of the D
major chord in the first verse, this form is repeated twice to constitute the song’s basic
form. As complex for rock music as the song’s basic form and harmonic syntax is,
however, the outro from 1973-74 pushes the degree of complexity even further.
Integral to the outro’s proper understanding, however, is that it seems to have
developed fairly organically over the course of the first half of 1973, at which point it
attained a relatively consistent overall form, while remaining relatively flexible in terms
of the length of each formal area. Because the vast majority of the approximately 2,300
performances by the Dead were recorded by the band and/or audience members, and are
now available online, scholars of the Dead’s music are able to document to an
unprecedented degree how their music changed over their 30 year performing career. I
have thus been able to trace the development of the outro from its nebulous beginnings in
a jam at the end of the song’s first performance on February 9, 1973 to its last
performance on October 20, 1974, during the group’s final concert before their
retirement. Given my limited time I cannot hope to go into the details of its evolution or
dozens of different examples; instead, the following analysis is of a synthesis of a number
of key examples from this period.
As you can see here (Example 3), after the final chorus, the outro begins with the
group collectively improvising in E Ionian rather than shifting to the B minor seventh
every two bars as in the earlier improvised sections between the first two choruses and
2nd
and 3rd
verses. From there the group works their way through the various modes that
8/3/2019 Eyes to the World: The Ending of the Sixties and the Evolution of the Grateful Dead
http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/eyes-to-the-world-the-ending-of-the-sixties-and-the-evolution-of-the-grateful 9/14
day, June 30, 2011
8/3/2019 Eyes to the World: The Ending of the Sixties and the Evolution of the Grateful Dead
http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/eyes-to-the-world-the-ending-of-the-sixties-and-the-evolution-of-the-grateful 10/14
7
I’ve diagrammed: the lengths of each are highly variable but generally occur in some
multiple of four bars. (I’ve condensed them here for the most part to two bars in order to
fit legibly on one page.) Although at first the modal shifts are relatively close—E Ionian
shares all but a single note with G# Aeolian, and with G# Dorian all but two—when
moving from the E Ionian to Eb Dorian four notes must change. The harmonic drama
then further builds as the group moves outside the diatonic pitch collections to improvise
on the whole-half octatonic scale starting on D#, F#, A or C. Although none of these are
more clearly emphasized in the bass, and thus a clear root note, I refer to it here as D#
diminished because although the band is using it modally—that is, as an independent
harmony rather than as part of a functional chord progression—it simultaneously
suggests a functional progression as a diminished chord built on the leading tone, D#, of
the following E Ionian modality. The band then moves back to Eb Dorian before
launching once again into the unexpected: rather than the root movement that has
accompanied every other modal change thus far, the band moves to the parallel Eb
Mixolydian mode (although with a bluesy Gb as well), but metrically modulated to 7/8,
to play the riff you see here. Repeated seven times, and shortened to 6/8 the last, they
then move to D Dorian thereby suggesting that the previous Eb Mixolydian be
reinterpreted harmonically as Eb7, that is, as the tri-tone substitution of A7, the dominant
of D minor. They then match the number of repetitions of the 7/8 riff on a higher formal
level with 7 repetitions of the 16 bar form beginning with the movement to Eb
Mixolydian before finally ending the outro in D Dorian, gradually seguing into another
song.
8/3/2019 Eyes to the World: The Ending of the Sixties and the Evolution of the Grateful Dead
http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/eyes-to-the-world-the-ending-of-the-sixties-and-the-evolution-of-the-grateful 11/14
8
I have gone into this degree of theoretical detail because I think this outro is a
remarkable musical construction; I am unaware of anything quite like it in the history of
popular music. Although clearly influenced by the modal improvisation pioneered by
Miles Davis on Kind of Blue, the Dead here manage to integrate its allowance for endless
melodic inventiveness with significant harmonic and rhythmic complexity in a
collectively improvised yet compositionally sophisticated form. Given that they would
never again perform this outro, or indeed anything closely similar to it, upon their return
to touring in 1976, however, one must wonder why.
The usual explanation for the Dead’s decision to retire from touring in late 1974 is
that the band was exhausted from nine years of nearly constant touring, made worse by
the work and expense needed to set up, take down and move their monumental “Wall of
Sound” PA system introduced in March of 1974. (It was, in fact, so complex that two
were required so that while one was being used, the other could be set up at the next
venue). In addition, the sharp increase in fuel prices on account of the 1973-74 OPEC oil
embargo made touring with such a massive sound system economically prohibitive. But,
returning to my initial thesis as to their music reflecting broader cultural currents, I would
suggest that there was another reason as well: aware on some level of the passing of the
decade that had so defined their identity and their music, they needed time away from
who they were, a constantly touring band, to figure out who and what they were going to
be in the very different world that was dawning in the mid-1970s.
It is therefore of some interest that the 1973-74 outro of “Eyes of the World”
seems to have provided the group with some important starting points to later musical
developments. In early 1974 lead guitarist Jerry Garcia began to play with a riff based on
8/3/2019 Eyes to the World: The Ending of the Sixties and the Evolution of the Grateful Dead
http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/eyes-to-the-world-the-ending-of-the-sixties-and-the-evolution-of-the-grateful 12/14
9
a diminished, octatonic scale in some of the group’s improvisations that is closely related
to the diminished mode jam in the outro of “Eyes”; in fact, at least twice (one of which
was during its very last performance on October 20, 1974) it appeared as an addendum to
the outro. In 1975 this riff would become the nucleus of a composition entitled
“Slipknot” that would serve as an instrumental bridge between their songs “Help on the
Way” and “Franklin’s Tower.” And on account of their shared time signature and similar
rhythmic pattern, it seems likely that the outro’s repeated 7/8 riff was the origin of the
instrumental “King Solomon’s Marbles>Stronger Than Dirt” that bassist Phil Lesh
composed in 1975 (from their album of that year Blues for Allah). These genealogies
would also seemingly explain why the Dead never played the “Eyes” outro after their
retirement: if they understood these later compositions as resulting from what they had
been previously experimenting with in the outro, the outro itself would have served its
purpose and represented a less sophisticated musical realization than what they had by
1976 accomplished. But this still does not answer the question why worked out
compositions, rather than loosely organized improvisations, would have seemed more
appropriate to the band in the mid-70s.
In his seminal essay “Two Concepts of Liberty,” Isaiah Berlin defines two
different and, in many ways, contradictory, understandings of liberty or freedom: positive
and negative. In simplest terms, by negative liberty Berlin means the freedom to make
choices unhindered by external restraint; by positive liberty, he means the freedom to
fully realize one’s individual capacities. These contradict because while the negative
form of liberty is highly individualistic, the positive form is highly dependent on others
since one’s capacity to fully realize oneself, to achieve self-mastery, is very often
8/3/2019 Eyes to the World: The Ending of the Sixties and the Evolution of the Grateful Dead
http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/eyes-to-the-world-the-ending-of-the-sixties-and-the-evolution-of-the-grateful 13/14
10
inseparable from the social conditions that make it possible. I would like to suggest a
possible connection between these two forms of liberty and the movement by the Dead
away from their earlier more freewheeling improvisational practices in the mid-1970s.
For it was precisely the attempt to have the fullest extant of both negative and positive
liberty, ignoring their tensions, upon which foundered the beliefs of so many in the
Sixties that the world could be radically changed for the better. One cannot build a better
society with greater equality if no limitations on the satisfaction of each individual’s
private desires are to be accepted. But neither can individuals accept their wholesale
subsumption into a collectivity that presumes to know what is best for each. Both forms
of liberty must be respected, while recognizing, as Berlin so forcefully argues, that they
can never be wholly reconciled; they are incommensurable because the complete
realization of positive liberty would require complete social equality, but this would
require the almost total abrogation of negative liberty since individuals’ freedom to make
choices is precisely what leads to inequality.
In closing I would suggest that awareness of the tension between these two forms
of freedom, and an attempt to achieve a balance between them, is what the Grateful Dead
were trying to achieve with their music upon resuming touring in 1976. Although they
created some incredible music in years before, it sometimes reflected too much their own
negative freedom to play what they wanted without due consideration to the broader
social context. In contrast, after they resumed touring their more down-to-earth
performance style, improvising both with and within established songs, but rarely making
use of structures like the outro I’ve discussed today, suggests a greater consideration of
their audiences ability to realize themselves within the music. Instead of the more utopian
8/3/2019 Eyes to the World: The Ending of the Sixties and the Evolution of the Grateful Dead
http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/eyes-to-the-world-the-ending-of-the-sixties-and-the-evolution-of-the-grateful 14/14
11
dreams of the sixties, in which everyone could have what they want while at the same
time believing it possible to realize a radical transformation of society, the Dead’s post-
retirement music seems to suggest an awareness of the limitations that such dreams must
face: a greater emphasis on bringing the musically familiar into unfamiliar relations
rather than a constant search for the wholly unfamiliar. It is, then, the group’s eyes to the
world, rather than any claim to know what the eyes of the world might see, that perhaps
best defines the Grateful Dead’s post-retirement musical direction.
Bibliography
Berlin,Isaiah.“TwoConceptsofLiberty.”InTheProperStudyofMankind:An
AnthologyofEssays,191-242.EditedbyHenryHardyandRogerHausheer.
NewYork:Farrar,StrausandGiroux,1997.
Dwork,JohnandMichaelGetz.TheDeadhead’sTapingCompendium:AnIn-depth
GuidetotheMusicoftheGratefulDeadonTape,Vol.II .NewYork:HenryHolt
andCo.,1999.
Jenkins,Philip. Decade of Nightmares: The End of the Sixties and the Making of Eighties America.NewYork:OxfordUniversityPress,2006.