The Grateful Dead is known for its devout troupe of followers, the Deadheads. But many people over the decades have hated the Grateful Dead. Nick Paumgarten writes in The New Yorker, "The Dead, more than any band of their stature, have legions of haters – real hostility."  The first part of this article analyzes such expressions of Grateful Dead hate to reveal this criticism's key terms. The transition to Part II turns on this word "criticism" by responding to the question posed by Nicholas G. Meriwether at the first annual Grateful Dead Studies Association meeting in 2021: "How do we read the Grateful Dead?" Many Grateful Dead scholars respond to this question by trying to express why the Grateful Dead experience is so magical. But if the emerging field of Grateful Dead Studies is to gain legitimacy, it must distinguish itself from Grateful Dead fandom by showing less love, and by critiquing the Romantic theories that currently dominate the field. To consider seriously the animosity toward the Dead, then, is an opportunity for those who love the band – and especially those who write about the band – to reconsider the claims we make about this beloved music as a legitimate field of academic criticism. Acknowledging the "outspoken partisanship" of Grateful Dead Studies, Meriwether asserted that the authors' "personal connection" to the band is "part of the scholarship, and it enriches the work." Part II of this paper argues that, in some cases, the personal connection of love actually weakens the work. Part III asks, "What's Next for Grateful Dead Studies?"

PART I 

VOICING THE HATE 

Why do people hate the Dead, and what kind of language do they use to express their hatred? Music critic Dave Marsh calls the Grateful Dead the "worst band in creation." The indie band The Violets had a minor hit called "I Hate the Grateful Dead" in 1991, the same year that brought us "Bring Me the Head of Jerry Garcia" by Iron Prostate. "I couldn't stand that band," said fellow 1960s musician Steve Miller. Writing for Huffington Post, Mike Edison contended, "The Sex Pistols notwithstanding, never has a band had such contempt for their fans. What other band could get by putting on so many admittedly bad shows?" (I will return to the Sex Pistols shortly.) Like Edison, many critics say they hate the Dead because the band members were bad musicians. Paumgarten, a Dead fan who collects audience recordings of their concerts, wrote, "Pop-craft buffs, punkers, and anyone steeped in the orthodoxy of concision tend to plug their ears to the noodling, while jazz buffs often find it unsophisticated and aimless." Ethan Hein, adjunct professor of music at NYU and avowed Deadhead, agreed: "They could never be bothered to sing in key. They wrote convoluted arrangements and didn't rehearse them, so they routinely trainwrecked. The music was ad-hoc and messily indifferent a lot of the time. Some of the lyrics are pretty, but a lot of them are empty stoner poetry." While Deadheads love to praise the band's stylistic eclecticism, critics argue that while the Dead borrowed from numerous styles, they didn't perform any of them particularly well.

Other reasons exists for people who hate the Dead. One Deadhead in a 2017 Reddit discussion admits, "It's not so much the music or the band. One of the main reasons people hate the Dead is us…It's our fault, really.' As Paumgarten put it, "Most objectionable, perhaps, were the Deadheads, that traveling gang of phony vagabonds…They dispensed bromides about peace and fellowship as they laid waste to parking lots and town squares." Robert Cristgau, famed rock music critic and "admitted fanatic" of the Dead, called Deadheads "a huge, insular cult accustomed to rendering its very real aesthetic discriminations within a context so uncritical no outsider need pay them the slightest mind." Similarly did Mark Mosley and Tyler Coe call Deadheads "the least critical, most accepting mass audience in the history of entertainment. If unconditional love is a virtue, then surely they are all going to heaven." But Cristgau was correct that uncritical does not mean unopinionated. In fact, the hyperbolic opinions of Dead lovers inspire the backlash from Dead haters – even from those who tolerate the Dead in moderation. In his Los Angeles Times obituary for Garcia, Rip Rense wrote, "In a media world of stunt-guitarists shrieking banal nothings in our ears, Jerry Garcia was practically Shakespeare. He'd laugh at that kind of hyperbole, and shy away from it with a touch of revulsion, but it's a fair statement."

THE DEAD/PUNK DIALECTIC

Disagreement exists as to whether the Grateful Dead even compare favorably to other rock bands, never mind to Shakespeare. And while Rense's comparison will galvanize the like-minded, it's precisely these annointings of the Grateful Dead to the pantheon of elite culture that incite the Dead's haters, especially those who align themselves with the anti-establishment music scene that existed alongside the Dead but seemingly on another planet: punk rock. Paul Budra, a Shakespeare scholar who hates the Grateful Dead, argued that popular music "should reinvent itself and alienate those who came before. It should create a new affective agenda." In the late 1960s, the Grateful Dead satisfied these criteria: they were LSD-fueled rebels who helped to reinvent rock music, disgust parents, and provide the soundtrack for whatever drugs and activities their fans wanted to indulge in; "a new affective agenda" is a good description of the Acid Tests and the psychedelic era as a whole. But by the mid-1970s, Budra argued, the Dead represented "a dying cultural movement that we wanted to get past." Those with a sense of "inchoate anger at the hedonism of the '70s" wanted to "shout at it, be aggressive, not just dance in a field."

The music that performed this aggressive shouting back was punk rock. In his review of the Sex Pistol's 1977 debut album, Never Mind the Bollocks, Here's the Sex Pistols, Cristgau wrote, "Get this straight: no matter what the chicmongers want to believe, to call this band dangerous is more than a suave existentialist compliment. They mean no good...The forbidden ideas from which Rotten makes songs take on undeniable truth value, whether one is sympathetic…or filled with loathing…These ideas must be dealt with, and can be expected to affect the way fans think and behave…the only real question is how many American kids might feel the way Rotten does, and where he and they will go next. I wonder – but I also worry." The same year, the Dead released Terrapin Station. The title track, Cristgau lamented, was "so polite it sent me hustling back to the verbal, vocal, and musical crudities of [the Dead's previous album] Anthem of the Sun…Amazing how all the hard-won professionalism of a decade disintegrates in the face of the sporadic, irresistible inspiration of their lysergic youth."  

So what can be learned from Dead hate, particularly from the comparison to punk? It's important to note that the comparison is not strictly oppositional. First, not all Deadheads are uncritical votaries who listen to nothing else, and not all lovers of punk rock hate the Dead. Second, the Dead represented (though to a lesser degree than 1970s British bands like Yes and Pink Floyd) not simply punk rock's opposite, but its antagonist. As an act of rage and defiance, punk rock is to a great degree motivated by, and defined in terms of, what it is not: long-winded songs about love and nature. Given this dialectical relationship between punk and the Dead, it follows that the reasons people give for hating the Dead contain implicit arguments about what popular music should be.

From the various quotations above, the following negative critical terms cluster around the Grateful Dead and their fans: untrained, unsophisticated, ragged, inconsistent, aimless, conservative, uncritical, nostalgic, and phony. The opposing cluster is the terminology that orbits around punk, including new, angry, jagged, and aggressive. Certainly, nostalgia and phoniness were enemies of punk rock, and its music was neither aimless nor uncritical: punk rock was aimed pointedly at mainstream society (and its music), of which it was ferociously critical. "The secret to the Grateful Dead's success in songwriting," writes Jason Palm, "was its willingness to ignore the present." Punk rock, on the other hand, is entirely about the present – the past is dead (or Dead) and the future is an empty promise. 

But closer inspection reveals the commonalities beneath the surface oppositions. For in the case of punk, untrained, ragged, inconsistent, and unsophisticated are not flaws, but features; they are central to the punk ethos and aesthetic. Given these commonalities, is punk really the counterstatement to the Grateful Dead? John Lydon, known in the Sex Pistols as Johnny Rotten, stated that he does not "view the Grateful Dead as competent in any shape or form." Yet competence was not exactly a hallmark of punk rock: attitude was far more important than aptitude. Should we conclude, then, that the Grateful Dead were punk, or even anticipated punk a decade before its arrival? Jason Diamond claimed, "All GD is punk. They did EVERYTHING themselves and just used major labels for distribution, much like punk bands did." Here is the claim again, in a thread on Reddit: "the punk philosophy is DIY, operate outside the mainstream, non-conformity, anti-authority, etc, right? Who embodies that more than '65 through mid-'80s Dead?"

This comparison doesn't hold. Just because two musical scenes have some commonalities does not make them the same, and there really were fundamental differences between the sound and the culture of the Grateful Dead and punk rock. In fact, though punk rock may, in a dialogic and antagonistic sense, depend upon the Grateful Dead and other big 1970s rock acts – punk could not be rebellious without something to rebel against – the differences are precisely what matter: love, jams, the past vs. rage, concision, and the present. The relationship between the two styles is one of tension and contrast, so neither can be collapsed into the other. 

On the Steve Hoffman Music Forum, there are 476 responses to the question, "Why do punk rockers tend to hate the Grateful Dead?" Most responses fall into one of five categories. Two of the five confirmed the premise of the question, that punks do indeed hate the Dead. Responses in the first of these two categories claim defensively that punks hated the Dead because the Dead, unlike punk rockers, were actually talented. Responses in the second category say that punks hated everything established and establishment, and by the late 1970s that included the Grateful Dead; such is Budra's position. The other three categories of response challenge the premise. One category consists of personal statements such as "I like both kinds of music." Another points out that some famous person associated with the punk scene – often Patti Smith or Henry Rollins – likes the Grateful Dead. The final type of response states that the Dead were punk, as above. These last two reveal most strongly the dialectical relationship underlying the Dead/punk opposition because we have Deadheads implicitly acknowledging that punk rock is some sort of standard; these Deadheads look up to punk admiringly, even desperately, for validation, while punk looks down upon the Grateful Dead scornfully, for agitation and motivation. Note that we don't find people comparing punk to the Grateful Dead; rather, they compare the Dead to punk – holding punk as the touchstone and trying to identify the Dead with it. At that point, those who hate the Dead and those who love the Dead appear to agree on something: punk rock really is the music that matters most, and even Deadheads seem to realize it. To argue that the Dead were punk is an attempt to refute the charge of nostalgia by saying the Dead were new before the new new even came into existence. To point out that Patti Smith likes the Dead is to say, "See? Even the cool people like us!"

Meanwhile, other Deadheads seek to align the Dead not with punk but with jazz, classical music, and – again – Shakespeare. Stories about Dead bassist Phil Lesh were eager to point out his fondness for Charles Ives and Hector Berlioz. Dead scholar Robert Weiner observed that in the years 1972 through 1974, "The Grateful Dead spread its experimental wings and had more in common with the likes of John Coltrane, Thelonious Monk, and Charlie Parker than the Rolling Stones or Led Zeppelin." On stage, Weiner continued, "guitarists Jerry Garcia, Bob Weir, and Phil Lesh would come out and explore musique concrete that would make John Cage proud." Perhaps anxious that academics might scoff at his edited collection of essays on the Dead, Weiner argued, "[T]he response to such critics is that Shakespeare was only a playwright…[He] would never have believed that centuries after his lifetime, his plays would continue to be studied and analyzed…The Grateful Dead, in this respect, may prove to be no different from Shakespeare, Chaucer, Dante, Beethoven, Van Gogh, or any other master of the visual, literary, or performing arts." Here Weiner demonstrated why, as the anonymous Reddit commenter said, "It's our fault" that people hate the Dead: the hyperbole borders on absurdity. And note that punks don't defend the Sex Pistols by comparing Sid Vicious to Beethoven. 

As mentioned, not all Deadheads and Dead scholars dispute the criticisms of the Dead haters. Weiner, in fact, began the introduction to his essay collection with some examples of Dead hate – if only to get them out of the way and move on to the love. Cristgau enthused that side two of 1969's Live/Dead is "the finest rock improvisation ever recorded." But on 1987's In the Dark, Cristgau found only one song – "When Push Comes to Shove" – that would refute the people "who've lambasted [the Dead] as symbols of hippie complacency since the '60s were over." Hein acknowledged that "there are many good reasons to hate the Grateful Dead. The biggest one is their lack of quality control...while their high points are very high, those peaks are surrounded by wide plains of mediocrity and some deep valleys of terribleness." Here is love, but not blind love, from fans who have not given their heads to the Dead. Such critical affection points to a way forward for Grateful Dead Studies and to Part II.

PART II 

In Grateful Dead Studies, the distinction is often blurred if not obliterated between the popular usage of the word "criticism" as a synonym for negative judgment and its academic meanings: analysis and argument. That is, much Dead scholarship is written by Deadheads who bring to criticism of the second type very little of the former type. To be fair, we can assume that, say, Mark Twain scholars love Twain's writings – and so too with Dead scholars and Dead music. But there is a difference of degree. Exemplifying the "outspoken partisanship" of Dead Studies, many writers go so far as to begin with a declaration of their love and their identity as Deadheads. Others go even further, moving straight from fandom into solipsism by making their personal attachment to the Dead the subject of their scholarship: writers including Christopher K. Coffman, Nancy Reist, Steve Silberman, and Brent Wood have adapted terminologies and theories from the humanities and social sciences to try to explain why they themselves experience the Dead phenomenon as profound and unparalleled. These authors argued not only that the Grateful Dead experience was exceptional among rock concerts but that the authors' personal experiences at Dead shows were mysterious and perhaps ineffable. Kurt Torell gushed, "At their best, Grateful Dead concerts were immersive experiences, ones that left both band and audience transformed in some powerful though nebulous way." This belief that Dead shows were powerful and transformative kept Deadheads coming back, both to the concerts and to attempts to describe the concerts. As for Dead Studies, the Romantic belief that the experience is inexplicable, that fans, to quote Stanley J. Spector, "could not articulate exactly what happened," invites Dead scholarship to expand asymptotically since, like Romantic love poetry, it will never actually touch that which it yearns to describe. 

This desire to merge fandom and scholarship has attracted Dead Studies writers to terminologies and theories that are, like Dead culture itself, steeped in Romanticism, in the attitude toward artistic production that privileges inspiration, genius, spontaneity, and the ineffable while diminishing practice, planning, aptitude, and craft. The language and beliefs that developed in the Grateful Dead subculture are fascinating subjects for rhetorical analysis, exemplifying what Michael Kaler called "the sacralization of popular culture phenomena." But when the scholarship embraces the sacralized language and beliefs, any insights gained are outweighed by the shortcomings. In Popular Music, Gender, and Postmodernism, Neil Nehring explained that "since the romantics, the fundamental value of art has been the originality or uniqueness of the individual artist, whom Baudelaire, Nietzsche, and other modernists elevated into a superior being. Originality for its own sake...lies in being incomprehensible." Original, unique, superior, and incomprehensible are apt descriptions of the Grateful Dead phenomenon as described by both its adoring fans and its adoring scholars. Dead scholars working in these interpretive vocabularies place expression over explanation, in the impossible quest for language that might express the inexpressible. In fact, such writers are caught in the dilemma of wanting, as scholars, to explain the Dead mystery while wanting, as devotees, to keep the mystery in place, not to reduce their subjective experiences to empirical explanations. 

Thus do we have in Dead Studies myriad essays describing the nature of the Dead phenomenon in term of shamanism, spirits, magic, and mystery. Steve Silberman believed the music "arrived in their lives with an uncanny familiarity, like a true love." So for Deadheads, "loving well was one way of participating in the mystery." Meant as an endorsement of love and mystery, Silberman's words are, in fact, a concise statement of the current problem in Dead Studies: love for the Grateful Dead keeps Dead scholars stuck in the mysteries of their own creation. What follows are three representative papers – by Christopher K. Coffman, Eduardo Duarte, and Stanley J. Spector – that exemplify the grounding of Dead scholarship in idealist and spiritualistic beliefs that lack explanatory value.

CHRISTOPHER K. COFFMAN AND THE X FACTOR  

Christopher K. Coffman's 2019/2020 article "'All That's Still Unsung': Agamben's Potentiality and the Grateful Dead" warrants attention for its language, logic, and argument. I quote here at length from Coffman's introduction. He began his article with reference to the work of Shenk and Silberman, "Grateful Dead listeners give many reasons for their remarkable dedication, but central to many of their most enthusiastic declarations is an element that resists easy definition, usually called 'the zone' or the X factor…The X factor is elusive not only in the sense that no more precise label for it seems appropriate, but also in that it proved difficult for listeners to anticipate if or when it would emerge: it was only rarely present for an entire concert, even when the level of performance was generally high, and more often recognized as a quality of a particular medley, piece, or passage. Likewise, the X factor would sometimes disappear entirely for several performances, only to return at a quite unexpected moment. The musical excellence the term denotes, as well as its resistance to formulation, ensured that this phenomenon would remain a central mystery of the Grateful Dead experience, one that lies at the heart of the Dead's music and the exceptional affective space of community, spontaneity, and transcendence that many feel it engendered." Coffman continued, "This essay uses Giorgio Agamben's thought to articulate not only what happened at moments when the X factor appeared, but also how that phenomenon – the realization of the potential for excellence that kept so many fans returning to Grateful Dead concerts – is consistent with other aspects of the Grateful Dead experience." The acts and words of Dead fandom, once sacralized, take on the characteristics of religious devotion. In this quotation, not only was Coffman's language quintessentially Romantic, but theistic. Both performance and reception are outsourced to the workings of an unseen hand, not God as such but the spontaneous visitation of the X factor. For Coffman, the "central mystery" of Dead shows and the source of fans' devotion was this elusive and undefinable force that appeared as a collective revelation.

In one sense, Coffman was correct: many Deadheads do believe such things. And to reiterate, Deadheads' belief in the X factor, or in a telepathic connection between the band and the fans, or that Jerry Garcia was a shaman, deserves, like any belief, academic study as an anthropological and psychological phenomenon. But such beliefs cannot stand as academic explanations of phenomena. That, for example, Nancy Reagan believed in astrology is of factual, biographical interest. But an essay that uses astrology to explain and interpret Nancy Reagan's personality and actions is without scholarly merit. In exactly the same way, Dead drummer Mickey Hart's belief that "on a very good night, the magic will visit us" and the other drummer Bill Kreutzman's belief that "there is some great power, be it God or whatever, that enters the Grateful Dead on certain nights" have biographical interest but no explanatory validity. In The Tragic Odes of Jerry Garcia and the Grateful Dead: Mystery Dances in the Magic Theatre, Brent Wood believed that the Dead were literally influenced by "divine inspiration." In "Counting Stars by Candlelight," Nancy Reist provided an insightful analysis of Deadheads' beliefs in the "numinous" as a descriptive, communal rhetoric. But Reist oscillated between analysis of this rhetoric and Reist's own belief in the numinous. In academic analyses of the Dead's variability or the shared experiences of Deadheads, spirits and divinities cannot be given literal explanatory power.

Coffman's error in invoking Agamben was not to analyze belief in the X factor as a belief, but to endorse the X factor as an ontological fact. The argument was not strengthened by borrowing Agamben's ethos since those ideas were used merely to validate a nebulous personal experience, which is subjected to no critique at all. Rather, Coffman treated his experience as a sacralized text plumbed for meaning, but not analyzed in any sort of dispassionate way. Meriwether observed, "As the academic discussion [of the Dead] continues, the advocacy and positive bias that emerged in response to stigma will continue to fade, replaced by the kind of dispassionate criticism that signifies the critical and theoretical maturation of the discourse." Even if Dead Studies authors are avowed true believers, they must be dispassionate – to, literally, set love aside.

EDUARDO DARTE AND THE HEGELIAN SPIRIT  

The belief that ontological inquiries must ultimately reveal something ineffable, some non-material essence that lies beneath observable reality, has a long religious and philosophical history. Prominent figures of this dualist/idealist history are frequently cited in Dead Studies: Hegel, Heidegger, Nietzsche, and Plato are among the favorites. In his 2021 article "Driving That Trane: Hegel and How John Coltrane Invited the Warlocks to Become the Grateful Dead," Eduardo Duarte imagined the unseen hand as a "universal power or force moving 'behind our backs,'" and he used Hegel to identify this "absolute Spirit." Duarte's declaration that the Spirit provided "a plan and purpose that moves through our actions" marked his vision as fundamentally theistic. This decision to give explanatory power to Spirit has a couple of consequences. First, since Spirit is claimed as the essence of art, and since Spirit is a vague and unfalsifiable concept, it invites Duarte to make vague and unfalsifiable claims about art and artists: art "emerges from an attunement with the movement of Spirit," and the artist must experience "the willing of non-willing in order to find oneself in the location of poetic possibility." Second, if invoking Spirit makes Duarte's analysis less valuable, then it could be because it spares Duarte from having to explain the actual mechanisms of successful performance and improvisation: the interpersonal dynamics of influence and persuasion, the ontology of collective intentionality, the process of learning, and the meaning of "originality." 

Duarte wrote, "Hegel calls this behind-our-backs propulsion the ruse of reason because it befuddled philosophers who could not fathom that they were not entirely in control of their actions." "Not so artists," Duarte continued, espousing the Romantic belief (asserted forcefully by Nietzsche) that artists are uniquely inspired and that art is the ultimate Truth. However, philosophy outside of the Romantic and idealist traditions is not at all "befuddled" by spirits and universal forces because philosophy has been moving beyond such explanations for centuries. The methodological insight of analytic philosophy is the recognition that some seemingly intractable philosophical quandaries are, in whole or in part, a consequence of the language used to describe them; some things seem mysterious because philosophers are asking the wrong questions and using the wrong words. J.L. Austin singles out words like "really," "actually," and "directly" as red herrings that confuse us about what it means to know or do something. Such words introduce skepticism where there need not be any by implying that there exists an ideal of understanding and knowing beyond the ordinary meaning and use of those terms: that there is a difference between knowing and really knowing, or between perceiving and directly perceiving. Duarte makes this rhetorical move with the phrase "entirely in control," introducing a distinction between musicians being in control of their instruments and being entirely in control. Having created this illusory gap – which is, in fact, just linguistic sleight of hand – Duarte then fills it with a spiritual force acting behind the performer's back. Duarte's error is believing that the limits of human intentionality – of "control," if you will – require us to invoke spiritual forces to fully explain human actions. By rejecting spiritual beliefs, we can recast the question as follows: what are the limits of human intentionality and agency in determining the performance and the consequences of an action, and what other real-world factors and forces are involved? 

This issue of being "entirely in control" of one's actions – which includes acts of speech – is an enduring strawman, as present in the claims of Jacques Derrida and other postmodern theorists as it was 200 years ago in Hegel. And the issue is, ironically, only a problem for those who feel the need to place something in ultimate control, as Duarte does with absolute Spirit. Scholars working in the areas of rhetoric, social ontology, and the philosophy of mind are not at all befuddled by the fact that our intentions do not completely "saturate" (to use Derrida's term) the meanings and effects of our words or unilaterally determine the success and consequences of actions like playing a guitar. One limitation on the role of intention is that our words are only meaningful and effective, and many of our actions only possible, in the context of the collective recognition of social roles, conventions, and institutions. 

To use an everyday example, the utterance "class is dismissed" will only succeed if spoken by a certain speaker in a certain context before a certain audience. Therefore – and because the utterance is a pre-existing linguistic type not invented on the spot by the speaker – the speaker's intentions are "not entirely in control" of the words, their meanings, or their effects. As for the Grateful Dead, the fact that Jerry Garcia's intentions do not solely and entirely control and determine how well he plays guitar, or what the band's collective performance will sound like, or whether the audience will receive it with ecstasy or indifference, provides no support for spiritualistic explanations of performance and reception. Rather, recognizing the limitations on intentionality compels us only to accept that actions and consequences are not entirely scripted or predictable, nor are they entirely explained or controlled by the will of the performer.

STANLEY J. SPECTOR AND DUALISM

In the 2013/2014 article "'Time There Was and Plenty': Ethos and Ontology in Plato, Nietzsche, and the Grateful Dead," Spector sought to explain the moments "when the music played the band." At such times, the intentional self disappears and one experienced being present in a holistic, collective entity. Using the Romantic language of ineffability, Spector reflected on these moments when "the whole room becomes one being," "You cannot look for them, for if you try you will be firmly embedded in a subject-intended object structure of consciousness, and they will elude you. To experience those moments, you have to be present for them, which is how I understand being fully conscious. If you try to think them, you will not find them." Spector described the Dead's improvisation as "allowing the sounds to be heard as a complete relational whole, rather than actively trying to hear them particularly or individually. To listen this way means that each musician is in an independent conversation with the song, while simultaneously listening to the others' conversation, none of which can happen within the temporal framework of consciousness intending an object; they must be present, and presence presupposes a non-dualistic ontology." 

But Spector did pose a dualistic ontology, specifically an ontology of property dualism: the belief that there is one category of physical, empirical entities and an ontologically distinct category of non-physical entities in the realm of ideas, X factors, spirits, etc. Spector's dualism appeared in this claim: "Certainly there were times when the music moved us to rapture or Dionysian ecstasy, but in those moments I would not say that we were fully conscious in the present; we actually were transported somewhere else." Spector believed that "the band and the music and the audience and the venue all formed a relational whole, and we were aware that we were a part of it while none of it became an object for a subjective consciousness." Proficiency or muscle memory may allow us do things like play guitar – or drive a car, or type on a keyboard – without directing our attention to our physical movements. That is, I do not need to think about where the letters are on the keyboard or which fingers to use to strike them; I just know. In fact, paying attention to the task at the level of fingers on keys (or guitar strings) will likely impede my performance. Musical proficiency required musicians to be present in a special way as the non-intentional receiver of the music itself; the musician was a medium, a sort of psychic antenna. Paraphrasing remarks by Phil Lesh, Spector wrote, "If he is thinking about the notes that he or the others are playing, then he is not listening in the sense of allowing the sounds to be received by him."  

Against Spector's spiritualistic explanation, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi's concept of "flow" provides an alternative, non-dualistic explanation of the experience of proficiency and total absorption: "Flow is a subjective state that people report when they are completely involved in something to the point of forgetting time, fatigue, and everything else but the activity itself. It is what we feel when we read a well-crafted novel or play a good game of squash, or take part in a stimulating conversation. The defining feature of flow is intense experiential involvement in moment-to-moment activity." Csikszentmihalyi's description of the subjective experience of flow should sound familiar to readers of Grateful Dead Studies: in the flow, "The ego falls away. Time flies. Every action, movement, and thought follows inevitably from the previous one, like playing jazz. Your whole being is involved, and you're using your skills to the utmost." But unlike the writings of Coffman, Duarte, and Spector, Csikszentmihalyi's explanation is entirely grounded in physical reality: flow is not the visitation of "a presence," but "mastery-related behavior." One experiences flow when one's high level of skill in a desirable activity meets a challenge commensurate to that skill. The task requires great attention, but not the beginner's attention of hunting for the right spot on the fretboard. The skillful guitarist simply knows how to do that. 

Like Duarte and Coffman, Spector made the mistake of thinking that a phenomenon that feels mysterious must actually be mysterious, that mystery must remain part of the explanation. Specifically, Spector reasoned that a non-dualist, biological understanding of consciousness and intentionality was troubled by the everyday phenomenon of flow, of the interaction of task, attention, and aptitude. "The traditional view of consciousness," Spector wrote, "that is, the view of at least the last 125 years of the philosophical conversation in the area of philosophy of mind – is that consciousness always intends an object; that is, thoughts and beliefs are always about something." But this is not the traditional view in the philosophy of mind because Spector confused consciousness and intentionality. Our conscious mental states are often intentional – in the sense of "about something" – but not always. For consciousness also includes pre-intentional capacities and knowledge, unconscious mental phenomena, as well as mental states like anxiety or joy, which may be directed at something but need not be. Intentionality intends – or more accurately, represents – its object; consciousness need not. As John Searle wrote, "Not all consciousness is intentional, and not all intentionality is conscious." The consequence of Spector wrongly thinking that consciousness and intentionality are synonymous is that, as seen also in Coffman and Duarte, he then needs to invent an explanation outside of consciousness for intentionality's leftovers, the non- and pre-intentional mental states and the things that are not the content of my conscious mind at a given moment: like the movement of my fingers on a guitar. This point of view opens the door to the erroneous belief in two forms of reality, matter, or causation, to the dualism at the heart of both religious beliefs and the idealist tradition – and much work in Grateful Dead Studies.

UNDERSTANDING INTENTIONALITY AND IMPROVISATION

Coffman, Duarte, and Spector all misrepresent consciousness and intentionality, so digging deeper into those concepts will further correct some of the recurring errors in the emerging field of Grateful Dead Studies. The English language is partly to blame for these errors, as it invites the conflation of "intentionally" and "intentionality." Intention in the sense of doing something on purpose – intentionally – is just one type of intentionality or "aboutness," one type of intentional mental state. The role of intention and intentionality in musical improvisation is as follows. First, the band members are all intentionally playing their instruments: they are not doing so accidentally. This is obvious. As for intentionality, musical improvisation may be free of what Searle calls "prior intentions," those "formed before the performance of an action," but is still an example of "intention in action": "those [intentions] that we have while we are actually performing an action." The performers direct their attention and movements to the act of playing music together, so improvisation is neither unintentional nor non-intentional. 

Csikszentmihalyi filled in the phenomenological aspect of Searle's account of intention in action: "The phenomenology of flow further suggests that we may enjoy a particular activity because of something discovered through the interaction. It is commonly reported, for instance, that a person is at first indifferent or bored by a certain activity, such as listening to classical music or using a computer. Then, when the opportunities for action become clearer or the individual’s skills improve, the activity begins to be interesting and, finally, enjoyable. It is in this sense that the rewards of these types of intrinsically motivating activities are 'emergent' or a priori unpredictable…What happens next is responsive to what happened immediately before, within the interaction, rather than being dictated by a preexisting intentional structure located within either the person (e.g., a goal or drive) or the environment (e.g., a tradition, script, or set of rules)." The concept of intention in action explains the role of both consciousness and intentionality in flow, and flow's "emergent" quality explains the experience of discovery and surprise otherwise attributed to the X factor, absolute Spirit, divine inspiration, mystery, etc.

Flow also explains the moments of telepathic "one mind" reported between Deadheads and the band. Since flow is a common experience – we know it when we feel it and when we see it in others – the audience could tell when the band members were collectively engaged and motivated, their skills rising to the challenge of improvisation. Or at least the audience members thought they could tell. Jerry Garcia once admitted, "A lot of times too…my perception of what's a good night for us may be totally different from everybody else's perception." So one mind, the X factor, and such may be explained in part as flow or in part as the Deadheads' own experience of pleasure projected onto the performers who may or may not be sharing the experience at all. Thus, not only are the X factor, one mind, absolute Spirit, and the rest dubious as explanations, they are explanations for something that may not even be happening for everyone. 

To return to Coffman, no nebulous X factor is needed to explain the variability of Grateful Dead performances. Instead, the phenomenon can be fully explained by two other factors: inconsistency and improvisation. The Dead's infamous inconsistency did make their moments of excellence particularly exhilarating, in contrast to the weaker moments that preceded them. The Dead's inconsistency can, in turn, have explanations that are entirely worldly and prosaic: the Dead were notoriously averse to rehearsing; often high on psychedelics and/or narcotics; and, in their later years, weary of touring and disinterested in even listening to one another through the stage monitors. Just as the band members' drug use must be considered, so too must that of the Deadheads. It seems perfectly reasonable to assume that the transcendent and supernatural experiences fans attribute to spirits and shamanic musicians were instead the product of the listeners' drug-altered consciousness. A Dead concert provided a safe and congenial setting for the pursuit of mental states that are largely explained by the action of psychedelics. An even more prosaic explanation would be that Deadheads were simply experiencing the euphoria of joy. This experience may be sacralized by fans, but the sacred has no actual explanatory force. From the fact that some fans experienced a Dead concert as a "space of…transcendence," it does not follow that something mysterious or spiritual was, in fact, happening. In the transcendental tradition of Romanticism, Coffman misunderstood his subjective experience of a Dead concert for an objective description of reality – what it was like for him as what it was like for everybody. 

This focus on individual experience as the source of truth prevents an accurate understanding of group improvisation. As Searle explained, "An understanding of collective intentionality is essential to understanding social facts." Understanding collective intentionality does seem challenging – even mysterious – because it cannot be reduced to the sum of the individuals' intentionality since each participant's individual intentionality "is derived from the collective intentionality that they share." Nevertheless, explanations of collective intentionality often "try to reduce 'We intentionality' to 'I intentionality' plus something else," and in Grateful Dead Studies, that something else is likely to be a spiritual or mysterious force. Searle observed: "The argument is that because all intentionality exists in the heads of individual human beings, the form of that intentionality can make reference only to the individuals in whose head it exists. So it has seemed that anybody who recognizes collective intentionality as a primitive form of mental life must be committed to the idea that there exists some Hegelian world spirit, a collective consciousness, or something equally implausible." But even though my intentional states do exist only in my own mind, "it does not follow that all my mental life must be expressed in the form of a singular noun phrase referring to me." Instead, I am able to have "we intend" as an individual mental state, wherein "I intend only as a part of our intending." So the explanation is not, I am playing drums, he is playing guitar, he is playing the keyboards, and the Spirit supplies the X factor that brings it all together. Rather, the explanation is that each of us has an individual intention to be playing an instrument as part of our collective intentionality to be playing together as a group. Spector argued that "the temporal framework of consciousness intending an object" could not explain the fact that "each musician" was "in an independent conversation with the song, while simultaneously listening to the others' conversation." Realism's rebuttal is to say that, on the contrary, such a view of consciousness fully explains this phenomenon. Our brains are able to hold "we" mental states as we engage in acts of collective intentionality, and we do it routinely with no need of divine assistance. 

When the Grateful Dead improvise, individual intentionality seems to disappear not because "the music plays the band," but because the musicians are engaged in an act of collective intentionality. The variability and the element of surprise that strike Deadheads as magical and lead Dead scholars to invoke the spirit world are likewise not mysterious or even surprising. With the Dead's music as with improv comedy, there will be dull moments as well as flashes of excellence, which is in the nature of improvisation itself and results from aptitude and persistence, not magic. Aptitude makes some people better at improvisation than others, yet even with a high degree of aptitude, persistence is required since collective acts of unscripted creation will not be consistently successful. Love them or hate them, the Grateful Dead proved this on a nightly basis.  

PART III 

WHAT'S NEXT FOR GRATEFUL DEAD STUDIES? 

Nascent areas of humanities research arise from a shared desire to bring attention to an author or subject that has been wrongly overlooked. As a result, early scholarship in a new field may be characterized by celebration and exuberant fondness: in other words, love. But over time, collective overstatement gives way to discernment and productive disagreements since there are only so many ways to sing an artist's praises. Scholars move on from hagiography to more analytical, historical, even skeptical analyses. Measured, nuanced critiques supersede the initial indiscriminate praise. Founding beliefs and assumptions are called into question. 

Grateful Dead Studies is an emerging field, facing a history of disregard – even hate – for that which its practitioners hold dear: as Weiner recognized, some people don't take the Dead seriously. Meriwether rightly pointed out that part of the reason "so much of the early scholarship on the Dead can read as advocacy" was that this scholarship was taking on "the burden of providing a corrective to the stigma that prejudiced and even precluded serious consideration of the band's work." Thus, the fervor in Dead Studies is understandable and, academically speaking, age appropriate. But perhaps it is time to mature and move forward. Toward that goal, I offer two responses to Meriwether's observation. First, disparagement naturally accompanies popular acclaim; the stigma against something as popular as the Grateful Dead is neither unique nor remarkable. But if a music critic says the Grateful Dead are awful, it is not the task of Dead Studies to respond, "The Dead are amazing, and here's Heidegger to explain why." As for stigma, I have suggested in Part I that we should consider the extent to which the stigma against the Dead is well-earned. Further, it is questionable how well "stigma" even applies to a band that endured for thirty years and became one of the top-grossing acts in its last decade. As a group of increasingly wealthy white men (and from 1972 to 1979, one woman) who were adored by largely white fans who had the time and the means to attend rock concerts, the Dead and Deadheads are in no way a marginalized community even if the Dead are hated and Deadheads caricatured. Second, the problem as I see it is neither the absence of "serious consideration of the band's work," nor the presence of scholarship that takes the music "more seriously than [the band] did." Rather, the problem I'm identifying is the presence of unpersuasive arguments, resulting in part from defensiveness against perceived stigma, a defensiveness resulting in turn from the authors' unconditional love for the Grateful Dead. 

How might Grateful Dead scholarship free itself from the bonds of love, and move past theistic, Romantic, and dualist explanations of creation, performance, and reception? Since reverence for the Dead is part of the problem, an attitude of irreverence could serve as a critical antidote, allowing scholars of the Dead phenomenon to leave behind their reverence for mysteries and spirits. Once we reject dualism, other observations and explanations – like Csikszentmihalyi's concept of flow and Searle's explanation of collective intentionality – come readily. We might also challenge the belief that the Deadhead experience is sui generis, that – to quote a popular bumper sticker – "there is nothing like a Grateful Dead concert." What kinds of analyses are possible if we accept that lots of things are like a Grateful Dead concert – football games, for instance? Such comparisons can be illuminating: the moments of collective epiphany at a Dead concert, while fascinating, need be no more mysterious than similar moments at sporting events. Such similarity is suggested by Csikszentmihalyi's study of flow among "rock climbers, chess players, athletes, and artists." Though music certainly has a more global human appeal than sports such as football, the experiential differences between witnessing the Dead play the song "Dark Star" and witnessing the 49ers win the Super Bowl may be differences of particulars rather than differences of kind. New opportunities for analysis of the Dead phenomenon may emerge from recognizing what it is like, rather than holding onto the idea that there's nothing like it. 

Part I of this article described how Deadheads' Romantic avowals – how do I express my love for the Dead? – cooperate dialectically with expressions of hatred. Parts II and III argued that Grateful Dead Studies, to achieve academic recognition, will need to embrace criticism in both the scholarly and popular senses of the term, to challenge rather than validate spiritual beliefs and the dualistic explanations that derive from such beliefs. To quote Meriwether again, "a primary metric of the maturity of any discourse – or discourse community – is its ability to include and benefit from disruptive critiques that might be destabilizing to an emerging field."  By learning to love the hate, scholars might accept that the Dead do not have to be sublime to be worthy of analysis; a band that was inconsistent and occasionally excellent can be good enough for its scholars just as it was for its fans. 

Finally, we might shift from the Romantic conception of meaning as being to the rhetorical conception of meaning as doing: what does Grateful Dead Studies want to do? Who is its audience? How can it be of interest and influence beyond the already like-minded? "[Dead Studies] critics must establish their own terms for assessment," Meriwether argued, and it would certainly be in the Grateful Dead spirit to hold the ecumenical attitude that all perspectives and terms of assessment are valid and equal. But in scholarship, there have to be some criteria of judgment and discrimination, and the academic stipulation to leave God outside the door should apply to Dead Studies as well. An attitude of collective reverence will strengthen a spiritual community, but it is iconoclasm that makes a scholarly community vital and enduring. Far more than reverence, such an attitude of iconoclasm and irreverence aligns with the band members' own attitude toward the popular phenomenon called the Grateful Dead.

July 2024

From Guest Contributor Sean Zwagerman, Simon Fraser University, Canada

Photo Credit: Herb Greene  

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