performance at the
Warfield Theatre in
San Francisco in 1980. Left to right: Garcia, Lesh, Kreutzmann, Weir, Hart, Mydland. The Grateful Dead formed during the era when bands such as
the Beatles,
the Beach Boys and
the Rolling Stones were dominating the airwaves. "The Beatles were why we turned from a jug band into a rock 'n' roll band", said Bob Weir. "What we saw them doing was impossibly attractive. I couldn't think of anything else more worth doing." Former folk-scene star
Bob Dylan had recently put out a couple of records featuring electric instrumentation. Grateful Dead members have said that it was after attending a concert by the touring New York City band
the Lovin' Spoonful that they decided to "go electric" and look for a "dirtier" sound.
Jerry Garcia and
Bob Weir (both of whom had been immersed in the
American folk music revival of the late 1950s and early 1960s), were open-minded about the use of electric guitars. The Grateful Dead's early music (in the mid-1960s) was part of the process of establishing what "
psychedelic music" was, but theirs was essentially a "street party" form of it. They developed their "psychedelic" playing as a result of meeting
Ken Kesey in
Palo Alto, California, and subsequently becoming the house band for the
Acid Tests he staged. They did not fit their music to an established category such as pop rock, blues, folk rock, or country & western. Individual tunes within their repertoire could be identified under one of these stylistic labels, but overall their music drew on all of these genres and, more frequently, melded several of them.
Bill Graham said of the Grateful Dead, "They're not the best at what they do, they're the only ones that do what they do." Academics Paul Hegarty and Martin Halliwell argued that the Grateful Dead were "not merely as
precursors of
prog but as essential developments of progressiveness in its early days". Often (both in performance and on recording) the Dead left room for exploratory, spacey soundscapes. Their live shows, fed by an improvisational approach to music, were different from most touring bands. While rock and roll bands often rehearse a standard set, played with minor variations, the Grateful Dead did not prepare in this way. Garcia stated in a 1966 interview, "We don't make up our sets beforehand. We'd rather work off the tops of our heads than off a piece of paper." They maintained this approach throughout their career. For each performance, the band drew material from an active list of a hundred or so songs.
Instrumentation and musicianship (left) performing with
TelStar in 2008 As the band and its sound matured over thirty years of touring, playing, and recording, each member's stylistic contribution became more defined, consistent, and identifiable. Garcia's lead lines were fluid, supple and spare, owing a great deal of their character to his experience playing
Scruggs style banjo, an approach which often makes use of
note syncopation,
accenting,
arpeggios,
staccato chromatic runs, and the anticipation of the
downbeat. Garcia had a distinctive sense of
timing, often weaving in and out of the
groove established by the rest of the band as if he were pushing the beat. His lead lines were also immensely influenced by
jazz soloists: Garcia cited
Miles Davis,
Ornette Coleman,
Bill Evans,
Pat Martino,
George Benson,
Al Di Meola,
Art Tatum,
Duke Ellington, and
Django Reinhardt as primary influences, and frequently utilized techniques common to
country and
blues music in songs that called back to those traditions. Garcia often switched
scales in the midst of a solo depending upon the
chord changes played underneath, though he nearly always finished
phrases by landing on the
chord-tones. Jerry most frequently played in the
Mixolydian mode, though his solos and phrases often incorporated notes from the
Dorian and
major/minor pentatonic scales. Particularly in the late 1960s, Garcia occasionally incorporated
melodic lines derived from
Indian ragas into the band's extended,
psychedelic improvisation, likely inspired by
John Coltrane and other jazz artists' interest in the
sitar music of
Ravi Shankar. Lesh was originally a classically trained trumpet player with an extensive background in
music theory, but did not tend to play traditional blues-based bass forms. He often played more melodic, symphonic and complex lines, often sounding like a second lead guitar. In contrast to most bassists in
popular music, Lesh often avoids playing the
root of a chord on the downbeat, instead withholding as a means to build
tension. Lesh also rarely repeats the same bassline, even from performance to performance of the same song, and often plays off of or around the other instruments with a
syncopated,
staccato bounce that contributes to the Dead's unique rhythmic character. Weir, too, was not a traditional
rhythm guitarist, but tended to play unique
inversions at the upper end of the Dead's sound. Weir modeled his style of playing after jazz pianist
McCoy Tyner and attempted to replicate the interplay between John Coltrane and Tyner in his support, and occasional subversion, of the
harmonic structure of Garcia's voice leadings. This would often influence the direction the band's improvisation would take on a given night. Weir and Garcia's respective positions as rhythm and lead guitarist were not always strictly adhered to, as Weir would often incorporate short melodic phrases into his playing to support Garcia and occasionally took solos, often played with a
slide. Weir's playing is characterized by a "spiky, staccato" sound. The band's two drummers,
Mickey Hart and
Bill Kreutzmann, developed a unique, complex interplay, balancing Kreutzmann's steady
shuffle beat with Hart's interest in percussion styles outside the rock tradition. Kreutzmann has said, "I like to establish a feeling and then add radical or oblique juxtapositions to that feeling." Hart incorporated an 11-count measure to his drumming, bringing a dimension to the band's sound that became an important part of its style. He had studied
tabla drumming and incorporated rhythms and instruments from
world music, and later
electronic music, into the band's live performances. The Dead's live performances featured multiple types of
improvisation derived from a vast array of musical traditions. Not unlike many rock bands of their time, the majority of the Dead's songs feature a designated section in which an
instrumental break occurs over the
chord changes. These sections typically feature solos by Garcia that often originate as variations on the song's
melody, but go on to create dynamic phrases that resolve by returning to the chord-tones. Not unlike traditional
improvisational jazz, they may occasionally feature several solos by multiple instruments within an undecided number of
bars, such as a keyboardist, before returning to the melody. At the same time, Dead shows almost always feature a more collective,
modal approach to improvisation that typically occurs during
segues between songs before the band
modulates to a new
tonal center. Some of the Dead's more extended jam vehicles, such as "
The Other One", "
Dark Star", and "
Playing in the Band" almost exclusively make use of modulation between modes to accompany simple two-chord progressions.
Lyrical themes Following the songwriting renaissance that defined the band's early 1970s period, as reflected in the albums ''
Workingman's Dead and American Beauty,''
Robert Hunter, Jerry Garcia's primary lyrical partner, frequently made use of
motifs common to
American folklore including trains, guns, elements,
traditional musical instruments, gambling, murder, animals, alcohol, descriptions of
American geography, and
religious symbolism to illustrate themes involving love and loss, life and death, beauty and horror, and chaos and order. Following in the footsteps of several
American musical traditions, these songs are often confessional and feature narration from the perspective of an
antihero. Critic
Robert Christgau described them as "American myths" that later gave way to "the old karma-go-round". An extremely common feature in both Robert Hunter's lyrics, as well as the band's visual iconography, is the presence of
dualistic and opposing imagery illustrating the dynamic range of the
human experience (Heaven and hell, law and crime, dark and light, etc.). Hunter and Garcia's earlier, more directly
psychedelic-influenced compositions often make use of
surreal imagery,
nonsense, and whimsey reflective of traditions in
English poetry. In a retrospective,
The New Yorker described Hunter's verses as "elliptical, by turns vivid and
gnomic", which were often "hippie poetry about roses and bells and dew". Grateful Dead biographer Dennis McNally has described Hunter's lyrics as creating "a non-literal hyper-Americana" weaving a psychedelic, kaleidoscopic tapestry in the hopes of elucidating America's
national character. At least one of Hunter and Bob Weir's collaborations, "
Jack Straw", was inspired by the work of
John Steinbeck. ==Influence and legacy==