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 Nixons 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 Johnsons 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 1 Philip Jenkins, Decade of Nightmares: The End of the Sixties and the Making of Eighties America (New York: Oxford University Press), 4. 1

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 Deads 1976 performances in the second volume of The Deadheads Taping Compendium, the bands ability to access the same sort of deep psychedelic realms previously reached through improvisation seemed to have been lostit 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 Deads live music much more accessible for a larger audience.2 In this paper Id 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 Deads 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 groups 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 2 John Dwork and Michael Getz, The Deadheads Taping Compedium: An In-depth Guide to the Music of the Grateful Dead on Tape, Vol. II (New York: Henry Holt and Co.), 97. 2

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-1960sbringing popular music and the avant-garde together in a highly improvised, dance-band contextthe 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 fusionMiles 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 groupthe 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

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 Deads 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 Deads music at this time. An analysis of this musical material thus offers important insights into the Deads 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 Gayes 1971 hit Whats Going On also tonicizes an E major seventh chorda source of inspiration perhaps?), its use as the primary harmonic color in

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 songs 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 textpainting 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 Bjrnberg 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 two major 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. 4 Alf Bjrnberg, 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). 5

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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 songs basic form. As complex for rock music as the songs basic form and harmonic syntax is, however, the outro from 1973-74 pushes the degree of complexity even further. Integral to the outros 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 Deads 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 songs first performance on February 9, 1973 to its last performance on October 20, 1974, during the groups 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

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Ive diagrammed: the lengths of each are highly variable but generally occur in some multiple of four bars. (Ive 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 closeE Ionian shares all but a single note with G# Aeolian, and with G# Dorian all but twowhen 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 modallythat is, as an independent harmony rather than as part of a functional chord progressionit 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.

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 Deads 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

a diminished, octatonic scale in some of the groups 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 Franklins Tower. And on account of their shared time signature and similar rhythmic pattern, it seems likely that the outros repeated 7/8 riff was the origin of the instrumental King Solomons 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 ones individual capacities. These contradict because while the negative form of liberty is highly individualistic, the positive form is highly dependent on others since ones capacity to fully realize oneself, to achieve self-mastery, is very often

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 individuals 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 Ive discussed today, suggests a greater consideration of their audiences ability to realize themselves within the music. Instead of the more utopian

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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 Deads postretirement 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 groups eyes to the world, rather than any claim to know what the eyes of the world might see, that perhaps best defines the Grateful Deads post-retirement musical direction.

Bibliography Berlin, Isaiah. Two Concepts of Liberty. In The Proper Study of Mankind: An Anthology of Essays, 191-242. Edited by Henry Hardy and Roger Hausheer. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1997. Dwork, John and Michael Getz. The Deadheads Taping Compendium: An In-depth Guide to the Music of the Grateful Dead on Tape, Vol. II. New York: Henry Holt and Co., 1999. Jenkins, Philip. Decade of Nightmares: The End of the Sixties and the Making of Eighties America. New York: Oxford University Press, 2006.

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