And We Bid You Goodnight!

the end of an era of Grateful Dionysians

Just got back from San Francisco and the final Dead and Company shows at, of all places, Oracle Park.

Which is a fairly auspicious location to attend the last modern day Dionysian festival we may see for a while.

If you’re a part of that extended Grateful Dead family and down for a retrospective, read on. 

And if you never understood what all the fuss was about, gonna try and unpack:

• the neuro-anthropology of exactly how this thing took off

• why it lasted for over half a century

• how it grossed billions of dollars

• why it counted some of the most powerful celebrities, politicians and academics among its initiates.

• why hating on John Mayer is now clinically indefensible

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Last week, a friend and I were invited to participate in a documentary about this funky little band with unforeseen staying power. 

The point was to take stock of the past sixty years(!) of musical exploration and community and offer some closing perspectives.

We hopped straight off the plane into a car and got dropped off at the corner of Haight and Ashbury to get mic'd up. 

Suddenly we were amidst a throng of pilgrims, staring down the barrel of a film crew. 

It was all a bit disorienting!

The Haight is the well-known Ground Zero of the counterculture movement of the mid 60's. It quickly devolved into heroin and homelessness and has now been turned into a weed and tie-dyed Disneyland for tourists.

But it was where the band first posted up in a derelict old Victorian at 710 Ashbury Street so this was an obligatory whistle stop.

In front of 710 Ashbury Street, the day of the final show

By now, most folks have heard of the band, and have a more or less informed opinion of it.

For those that don’t know the origin story though, it’s kinda interesting.

Back in the early 60’s Ken Kesey was in the writing program at Stanford with literary legend Wallace Stegner. 

On the side, as research for his upcoming book One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest about a mental institution, he signed up for nighttime stints on a ward at the VA hospital. 

He also earned some extra money getting injected with experimental drugs from time to time.

Some super duper sucked. 

Some were kinda awesome. 

So late at night, he went in with the janitor’s keys and lifted out some of the fun ones from the medicine cabinet.

(unbeknownst to Kesey, the whole operation was secretly part of the CIA MK Ultra mind control experiments. Given Stanford and Silicon Valley’s historic and ongoing relationship with DARPA and the military industrial complex it lends a deeply ambiguous tinge to the whole counterculture history)

#evenstrangerthings

From there, these psychedelics (ranging from 50lb sacks of peyote mulch they had shipped up from Texas to mix into venison chili, to vials of liquid LSD that suddenly saturated the Bay Area) pretty much sowed the seeds of the entire hippie movement, Silicon Valley and Burning Man.

Kesey and his band of Merry Pranksters threw Acid Tests wherein they dosed vats of fruity punch with LSD–the “Electric Kool-Aid” of Tom Wolfe fame. 

Then they invited a weird, wobbly bunch of musicians then known as the Warlocks (soon to be rechristened the Grateful Dead) to be their house band.

Sometimes the band was flatfuck too high to play. 

Sometimes they’d belt out a few bluesy numbers and then set their instruments down and go mingle with the crowd.

But sometimes something else happened.

Sometimes, they dropped sideways and backwards right into full fledged communitas.  

An intersubjective mindmeld where no one was in charge, and everyone was exploring.

Band and audience alike. 

(bonus points for anyone noticing the parallels to the SEAL Team 6 notion of dynamic subordination I described last week, it’s the same concept, just a wildly different application)

What emerged was something mindblowing, and utterly new.

They even wrote a song about this curious phenomenon:

They're a band beyond description

Like Jehovah's favorite choir

People joining hand in hand

While the music played the band

Lord they're setting us on fire

They’d jimmied their way into Kairos.

The Deep Now. 

Group Flow by any other name.

While it might have seemed utterly original and even quasi-mystical to this bunch of misfits, a big chunk of the magic was straight up neuro-electric and neuro-chemical.

After all, it was only a few years since Dylan had infamously plugged in at the Newport Folk Festival. Hendrix was coaxing sounds out of his Stratocaster that no human ear had ever kenned before.

Strobe lights, amplifiers, reverb, feedback, and big ass stacks of speakers all made it possible to entrain more humans more powerfully than coffee shop folkies and jug bands had ever thought possible.

In fact, the Dead became so attuned to the power of amplified sound, and its impact on neuroplastic tripping audiences, that Stanley Owsley, the trust-fund acid chemist and patron of the band, engineered a Wall of Sound for them to play through. (not to be confused with Phil Spector’s lush orchestral productions of the same name) 

A forty foot high stack of monster speakers was lugged around the world, specifically designed to be the exact height of an uncompressed bass carrier wave, with highs and trebles so pure, and amplification so powerful that they could rock the crowd at 10% juice. 

Zero fuzz or distortion. 

Just the pure quicksilver tones of Garcia’s guitar taking everyone Home.

An entire generation of “jam band” guitarists have tried to imitate that sound, but even when modern day tech can get them the tone, they simply don’t have as much to say.

But it wasn’t just the acoustic tech that made it all possible. 

The psychotech was essential too.

from Stealing Fire

As Yale’s Molly Crockett has observed “attending festivals like Burning Man (and Dead shows), practicing meditation, being in flow, or taking psychedelic drugs rely on shared neural substrates. What many of these have in common is activation of the serotonin system.’

But it’s not only the serotonin system that makes up the foundation of these collaborative experiences. In those states, all the neurochemicals that can arise–serotonin, dopamine, norepinephrine, endorphins, anandamide and oxytocin–play roles in social bonding. 

Norepinephrine and dopamine typically underpin romantic love, endorphins and oxytocin link mother to child and friend to friend, anandamide deepen feelings of trust, openness and intimacy. 

When combinations of these chemicals flow through groups at once, you get tighter bonds and heightened cooperation.”

Load everyone to the gills on serotonergic psychedelics, throw in a little anandamide-boosting reefer, and sprinkle in all the other feel good neuro-chemicals of tribal primates moving and dancing to two drummers, a roving six string bass, two guitarists, a wailing Hammond B3 organ and unrequited joy…

Nothing knocks out the default mode network so effectively or efficiently than polyrhythmic improvisational music while dancing your ass off, zooted to the moon.

That right there, friends and neighbors, is about as surefire a path to transcendence as we’re ever gonna get.

No biohacking stacks of wankery required.

But there were other factors in the mix that led to this band, out of all the contenders, from Jefferson Airplane, to Janis Joplin to the Beatles and the Stones, to create an international movement that lasted over half a century.

Because their band leader, Jerry Garcia, was of a particular Beatnik bent, he figured “fuck setlists and polishing our performance.  Let’s stay on the trail of this Unameable Thing and see where it takes us.”

He was willing (and this part’s essential) to flail and fail in pursuit of the gold.

So that meant, unlike U2 or the Stones or Taylor Swift and Beyonce, it wasn’t ever a production. 

It was always a creation. 

Never the same river (or setlist) twice.

The band wore streetclothes and sneakers. Not sequins and hotpants.

Because if they got us all There? The music was all that mattered. 

Everyone had their eyes closed anyways.

And in some perverse way, like fly fishing for the elusive permit, or chasing a birdie on the greens, or timing storms for waves and snow, the Magic of Maybe (Stanford’s Bob Sapolsky’s term for the 400% dopamine hit of intermittent rewards) bestowed upon the faithful utter transcendence…

If they hung in there through the flops and flails until they caught a show that delivered on all cylinders.

The result?

Church by any other name.

Even mythologist Joseph Campbell took notice.

from Recapture the Rapture

The band loved Campbell’s book, The Hero with a Thousand Faces, and eventually the scholar broke his normal aversion to pop culture and went to one of their shows.

He agreed to sit on a UC Berkeley panel at the Palace of Fine Arts in San Francisco. The evening was titled “Ritual and Rapture, from Dionysus to the Grateful Dead.”

“Rock music has never seemed that interesting to me,” Campbell admitted up front. “It’s very simple and the beat is the same old thing. But when you see a room with young people for five hours going through it to the beat of these boys [the Grateful Dead] . . . The first thing I thought of was the Dionysian festivals, of course.

“This is more than music,” he continued. “It turns something on in here, the heart? And what it turns on is life energy. This is Dionysus talking through these kids.”

For Campbell, once you could see the deep structures of that death/ rebirth ritual, of that collective uncorking of vitality, you could spot it all over the place. 

It doesn’t matter what the name of the God is, or whether it’s a rock group or a clergy. It’s somehow hitting that chord of realization of the unity of God in you all, that’s a terrific thing and it just blows the rest away.”

Campbell had nailed it–a modern-day Dionysian ritual that “turns some- thing on in the heart . . . life energy . . . that chord of realization of unity.” 

And while many scholars have since critiqued Campbell’s broad-brush universalism, the fact that he spotted something timeless in the Grateful Dead’s postmodern bacchanal was spot-on.

It was what Quakers would’ve called a “gathered meeting,” where members could feel the spirit and “speak when spoken through.” 

What Campbell called a modern-day rite of Dionysus. 

What others might call “Church.” 

Not the place with the steeple. 

The space with the people.

That’s why kids ran away from home to join the traveling circus going on tour with that band. 

That’s what cynics listening to scratchy cassette tapes and claiming the music sucked could never understand. 

This wasn’t a rock ’n’ roll show after all. It was an electric-kinetic lit­urgy. 

The high priest just happened to have an electric guitar instead of a bishop’s staff. 

It was a gnostic initiation ceremony disguised as a concert.

Despite Jerry’s inevitable ordination as high priest/messiah to a bunch of psychedelically impressionable wayward youth, he refused to take the claim.

He stopped saying anything onstage in between songs, knowing that devotees would hang on every word and insinuation.

“I’ll put up with it until they come for me with a cross and nails” he once reflected.  

But his position permeated the lyrics he sang.

“The storyteller makes no choice, soon you will not hear his voice, his job is to shed light, and not to master.”

Or even the ending line to their ultimate campfire singalong, Ripple, 

“If I knew the way, I would take you Home.”

Compare that to the utter shamelessness of Instagram lifecoaches and shamans these days!  

Folks with the tiniest sliver of talent or realization brazenly claiming that they absolutely know the Way. (and will teach you at their next Galactic Wealth Codes Summit)

The band stuck to their commitment that no one should grab the Ring of Power. 

After all, that’s how they got on the trail of the Unameable Thing in the first place.

It was bigger than any of them. And ego would only kill it, or chase it away.

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Like the ancient Greek Eleusinian Mysteries before it, (that counted Pythagoras, Plutarch, Plato, and Socrates among its members), these shows also served a curious dual function as an anointing of the elect.

Case in point: a couple years ago, when I was hosting a small-batch run of interviews to accompany the launch of my last book, I spoke with many of my academic heroes about their contribution to science, culture and research. 

Some totally worthwhile convos if you wanna catch up on some here

And unprompted, half a dozen of them mentioned their formative experience going to a Dead show back in the day!  

Sure, Rick Doblin (founder of Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies) wasn’t a surprise. 

But Amy Cuddy of Harvard Business School and Wonderwoman TED talk fame,

Wade Davis, Harvard anthropologist and Nat Geo Explorer in Residence

Erik Davis, countercultural academic and Yale/Rice scholar

Julie Holland, Weekends at Bellevue psychiatrist

Even Elaine Pagels, Princeton scholar of Gnostic Christianity (and friend of Garcia’s from the earliest Palo Alto days when she was a faculty brat at Stanford)

They all ‘fessed up to being secret initiates into the Grateful mysteries!

Some of the most interesting and varied scholarly careers, all deeply informed and inspired by that electric-kinetic liturgy of the good ol’ Grateful Dead.

Athletes and artists got switched on too. Possibly the most famous Dead Head, NBA hall of famer Bill Walton was right next to us at that final show. (He actually shooed me out of his personal space in a moment of (my) unchecked exuberance. I was suitably chastened)

Action sports icons Teton Gravity Research shot an entire ski flick with athletes who all loved the band and built their lives chasing mountains and oceans listening to their tunes.

It wasn’t just academics and athletes drawn to the scene, either. 

Artists too: That documentary we were shooting last weekend included interviews with actors Luke Wilson, Woody Harrelson, Adrian Grenier and Miles Teller. There are plenty of others, like Martin Scorcese (who produced a recent Amazon doc on the band) to add to the roster whose creativity was fueled by their initiation.

Even Kimbal Musk’s drones were arranged into a pulsing Steal Your Face icon (see pic at top of essay) over the stadium while all sorts of surprisingly accomplished and connected folks from media, finance, and entertainment danced beside each other.

Which sounds like a relentless bit of star fuckery if I’ve ever written one, except WTF???

The Dead were the quintessential countercultural, anti-establishment, anti-capitalist project of all time.  

Dirty hippies who could barely sell enough grilled cheeses in the parking lot to make it to the next show–that scene somehow morphing into a Sorting Hat for Next Top Illuminati???

How on earth did that happen?

My hunch is, in the same way that generic religious membership conveys all sorts of social and health benefits to congregants (believers are healthier, wealthier and happier than non-believers), that the Grateful Dead basically piggybacked all of those advantages on top of the very best of what we’re only just now mapping in the field of trauma relief and psychedelic therapies.

Ecstasis. Catharsis. Communitas.

All in one rollicking rocknroll package.

Does a body good.

A heart and soul too.

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Two final points to make and we’re out of here.

In addition to the sonic technology of pristine electric music, the psychotechnology of the compounds that folks typically took, and the dynamic subordination of the band’s leadership, there’s a final critical element almost unique to the Grateful Dead. 

I think it was essential to their ongoing power and success and why they persisted where so many other entertaining bands came and went.

Their imaginal technologies.

AKA, the stories they told.

The lyrics.

The sacred scriptures of the tribe that showed up on Calvin and Hobbes t-shirts and bumper stickers on the back of old VW buses.

They reflected a surprisingly cogent and coherent series of lysergic Zen Koans, that at the right time during an epic show could SHAZAM tens of thousands into an instant (if impermanent) satori.

“Once in a while you can get shown the light,” as one song hinted, “in the strangest of places if you look at it right.”

While Deadheads know this backstory well, civilians may have never learned that the most significant partnership in the band actually lay between Jerry Garcia, the lead guitarist, and someone who rarely took the stage. 

Robert Hunter, his lyricist and writing partner.

Hunter was the scion of a San Francisco media family, and grew up steeped in books, mythology, legends and literature.

Jerry was a prickly pear, and instructed Hunter to never write him a line that he couldn’t sing a thousand times without getting sick of it. 

Nothing could ever be too on the nose, or Jerry would simply refuse to ever play that song again.

What resulted was an obscure songbook that leaned heavily on Western mythologies, bible stories, Wild West archetypes, and an overarching American Zen philosophy of loss and redemption. 

Samson and Delilah. Sodom and Gomorrah.  

Card games gone wrong.  

Trainrides, outlaws, shootouts, and unfaithful lovers.  

And veering into the more epic and anthemic second set standouts–outright oracles.  

Muses, bards, poets and mysteries. 

Intransitive nightfalls and Dark Stars.

These second set epics weren’t songs to “listen to” so much as extended sonic meditations. The audience would lose themselves for 15-20 minutes only to be deposited gently back where they started, transformed.

Beat the hell out of staring at a wall trying to not think about not thinking!

But in all of these tunes, in all of those tales, you could never pin down the meaning with absolute certainty.  

Those lessons always came with a shrug of the shoulder, the wink of an eye.

“One man gathers what another man spills.”

“The grass ain’t greener, the wine ain’t sweeter, either side of the hill!”

A trickster slipping away just as soon as he’d hinted at the Secret.

In many ways, these boys had uncorked a secret hermetic tradition.

Deeply American.

Utterly subversive and hiding in plain sight.

From Recapture the Rapture

And that’s the thing that we’re really trying to tease apart here: that somehow, buried in this polyglot mishmash tradition of the American songbook (epitomized in the tunes of the Grateful Dead), lies something potentially profound. 

A philosophy, a way of being, a secret scripture—an arcanum—that not only sheds light on where we’ve come from but hints at a way forward for all of us. 

Because these redemption songs aren’t just about looking on the bright side of lousy situations. They’re powerful calls to radical transformation. 

“The question’s not having hope,” Cornel West insisted at a lecture at Harvard Divinity School, “the question is being a hope…Courageously bearing witness regardless of what the circumstances are because you’re choosing to be a kind of person of integrity to the best of your ability before the worms get your body. Boom! That’s it…Beautiful tradition.”

Courageously bearing witness before the worms get your body—and singing about it—is a uniquely American path to salvation. It’s transformative to name the pain rather than minimize it. 

But to take it from broken lament into triumphal celebration as Garcia and the boys did? That’s alchemy.

(And here’s Howard Bloom unpacking how Garcia slipped into a mystic Christic tradition as old as the foundations of this country…)

“Spiritual rebirth in the American Religion . . . is far closer to the patterns of Hermeticism than to doctrinal European Christianity,” Yale historian Harold Bloom writes in Omens of the Millennium. 

Bloom’s saying that American spirituality has always been more subversive, more mystical, and more experiential than either the Protestant or Catholic churches of Europe would have allowed. 

Drawing from the same impulse that prompted Quakers, Shakers, Puritans, Mormons, Adventists, and dozens of other sects to flee persecution and seek their own Promised Land in America—American spirituality is wilder, weirder, and ultimately more subversive than many of the traditions it sprang from.

The Grateful Dead were just the latest and strangest expression of that longstanding tradition.

It’s what Joseph Campbell was getting at when he connected the rock concerts of the band to the Dionysian rituals of ancient Greece.

As Zora Neale Hurston once said, “You’ve gotta go there to know there!” This is the secret scripture, the alchemical instruction manual, hiding in plain sight in the American song tradition and especially brought to life by the Grateful Dead. 

Hermetically sealed. Secretive. But accessible if you have the key (often little more than a record album or concert ticket). 

Think of it as the Arcana Americana. We don’t need to pen new verses or gin up new stories to guide our way forward. They’ve been with us all along.

“Sometimes the lights are shining on me,” their most radio played tune Truckin’ goes, “other times I can barely see, lately it occurs to me, what a long strange trip it’s been”

Picking ourselves up, and doing it all again. 

Dancing to forget. 

Singing to remember. 

That’s what the Grateful Dead offered, and that’s how they remained one of the top grossing touring acts of the past decade. 

For over 50 years, people yearned for (and were willing to stump up and pay for) one last lap of those cathartic Redemption Songs.

It was therapy, church, family reunion and celebration all wrapped into one wonderfully weird, surprisingly effective package.

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Final Note:  The Mayer Paradox

Listen, I was right there with you.

Scan John Mayer’s Spotify and you might conclude with a sneer that Your Body’s a Wonderland soccer-mom/yacht rock just isn’t your thing.  

But spend 15 minutes on Youtube, searching specifically for a fresh faced early twenty something Mayer trading licks with Eric Clapton and BB King, and you might pull up and wonder how the same young laddie could sit knee to knee with those legends and hold his own.

Fast forward to the past eight years, and you’ll see something else entirely again.  

A few years back, I was invited down to the Hotel Boulderado after the Saturday night show in Boulder. 

I thought we were popping into a late-night acoustic set with John, who still had plenty of gas in the tank after the old fellas tucked in for the night. 

But when I got there, there wasn’t a show. It was just five of us hanging out in an upstairs room above the bar.

We were coming down off a super fun night, and John was ramping up into a super fun night of his own.

But the convo was all-time epic and hilarious and ranged from how he strong armed luxury brands into creating signature lines for him by buying off the rack shoes and bags and bedazzling them at home, posting on Insta and then showing the companies millions of likes as proof of concept. 

To telling a tall tale about some of the finer points of tantric onanism too outrageous to repeat, that began with the disclaimer, “this is gonna sound super gay, but it’s not.” (#lookitup)

And finally describing how he would retire to his cabin in Montana to “upload” all of Garcia’s musicality into his mind, and then download it again when he was on tour with his own band playing different tunes.

Bottom line: there are few guitarists with the theoretical sophistication (he went to Berklee College of Music) and the technical proficiency to map, model and match Jerry Garcia.  

Mayer is one of them. And he led this latest incarnation of Dead and Company into utterly novel terrain.

He recently described it thusly “in past tours, I’d be “on a plane” (in flow) for a song, maybe two. But on this tour, the whole band was getting there, and we’d just take off and never come down.”

He linked up the young guys in the band (the “Co” of Dead and Company) into a Millennial Mind Meld. They dragged the veterans kicking, screaming (and shit-eating grinning) back to the Promised Land.

It was an open hearted delight to watch and be a part of.

Chatting with their manager after that final show (he’s the one who had the genius insight to put Mayer’s chocolate into the Dead’s peanut butter in the first place), he reflected, “most bands fizzle out and fade away, but these guys are going out at the top of their game, in peak flow together, and that’s incredibly rare.”

But talking about music, as Elvis Costello once quipped, is like dancing about architecture.

So as you go, check this out–an absolute moment of peak joy from the last set they ever played.

  (starting at the 48:00 mark with liftoff at the 51:00 mark). 

Just listen to the utterly bouncing composition that Mayer pulled off . 

Watch his coiled spring kinetic energy.

Check the bass player’s wiggle-waggle duck walk when he can’t keep the groove at bay.

Keep your ears open for all six musicians, furiously soloing, seamlessly together.  Full floating in musical flow.

And notice the wide shots of the entire Oracle stadium, oversold to the actual rafters.

The entire city of San Francisco, vibing in joyful ecstatic celebration of the community they forged that in return, forged them.

Fans so blown away they were getting knocked out of their boogie-down reveries to stare in gobsmacked amazement at each other.

It was that much fun!

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So that’s it folks.

The ancient mysteries of Dionysius dusted off, plugged in and blown out.

And as that final tune reminds us all,

If you get confused, listen to the music play.

(and may the Four Winds blow you safely Home).

Jamie