How Grateful Dead’s 2015 Farewell Became a New Beginning
Amazingly enough, the band’s story remains compelling, and writers continue to parse what it all means. In addition to Jackson and Gans’ oral history, this year saw the band bio So Many Roads: The Life and Times of the Grateful Dead by Rolling Stone‘s David Browne; Bill Kreutzmann’s memoir, Deal; Peter Richardson’s “cultural history” of the band, No Simple Highway; and The Complete Annotated Grateful Dead Lyrics, a lavishly illustrated volume that might serve as a bedside King James Version for a certain breed of music fan. And due next year, among other titles, is Jesse Jarnow’s Heads: A Biography of Psychedelic America, which traces a nation’s neurochemical enlightenment in large part through the Dead’s community and affiliates. It’s always been about more than just the music.
What might be most remarkable about this revival, however, is the critical revisionism around the band’s legacy, with knee-jerk punk-generation Dead-bashing — born in the Dead’s fallow final years — being replaced by a consensus cross-generational respect, even reverence. After the July 4th Fare Thee Well concert ended, an all-star crew was making their own Dead tribute down the road, organized by Alex Bleeker of the blissy New Jersey indie-rockers Real Estate. Jenny Lewis sang “Sugaree;” Sonic Youth’s Lee Ranaldo and Yo La Tengo‘s Ira Kaplan soared through “Dark Star.” In a similar spirit, 2016 should finally see the release of a Dead-based benefit compilation organized by the National, and featuring Ranaldo, Kaplan, Stephen Malkmus, Kurt Vile, the War on Drugs, Fucked Up, Perfume Genius, Justin Vernon and Sharon Van Etten, among others. The National’s Aaron Dessner recently told an interviewer that lead singer Matt Berninger’s take on the Dead staple “Peggy O” is “my favorite vocal performance [he’s] ever done,” and expressed how satisfying the project has been. “To actually shine a light on these [songs],” he said, “and to do it with a lot of care and to see how excited all these musicians are … I mean, you’d be shocked at all the people.”
Given all the Dead accomplished as musicians, and all they clearly still represent, it’s actually not shocking at all.