The Stoic Philosopher’s Band: What the Grateful Dead Can Teach Us About Death
Stoic philosophers often contemplate, perhaps obsess, about death. They welcome death as a friend to life. The stoic philosopher Seneca wrote over 2000 years ago that “Philosophy bestows this boon upon us; it makes us joyful in the very sight of death.” The latter can be said about the Grateful Dead.
In 1970 the Grateful Dead released their classic album American Beauty, ranked number 261 on Rolling Stone magazine’s list of the “500 Greatest Albums of All Time.” The Stoic view of death calls to mind the sweet, somber lyrics of “Brokedown Palace” from the album — maybe written with death in mind.
Goin’ home, goin’ home, by the waterside I will rest my bones
Listen to the river sing sweet songs, to rock my soul
Penned by poet, musician, and Grateful Dead lyricist Robert Hunter, the song’s river symbolizes death. The riverside is a final resting place after “going to leave this brokedown palace,” which represents life — a treasure, a palace, yet always flawed. The river of death is interminable, and ubiquitous in nature and life. Yet the singer looks on departing life with congeniality, as one would look to a companion. To him the river is home, and to hear its sweet songs is medicine for his soul.
This motif appears in many Grateful Dead songs. Released in 1987 around the same period as the death of Hunter’s teenage son, “Black Muddy River” from the Dead’s only top 10 album In the Dark is a darker perspective of the river. The title evokes a slogging, shadowy river of a brand different than in “Brokedown Palace.”
Though the first song looks on the river as a final home, in “Black Muddy River” the singer’s words reflect a grim relationship with death: perhaps the death of a loved one. The singer clearly grapples with reconciling this death, affecting him so deeply it has distorted his senses — “I can’t tell my pillow from a stone.” There is however an innate understanding of the necessity of coming to terms with inevitability of death, or one cannot continue with life. The singer walks alone because the reconciliation must happen first within the self:
I will walk alone, by the black muddy river
However haunting the river may be and slow the passage of time one may feel after the death of a loved one — “when it seems like the night will last forever” — the singer must approach it to overcome the sadness and move on.
And later: “Black muddy river, roll on forever,” a nod to the perpetuity of death as a part of life. Hunter explained to Rolling Stone in 1987 that he was “making a decision about the necessity of living in spite of a rough time.” Could the writing of “Black Muddy River” suggest the reconciliation had begun?
Though hippies of the counterculture movement around the world tout peace and harmony and happiness, their battle cry is often the music of the Grateful Dead. Ironically many of their songs are about the opposite: death and tragedy. On the 1981 live double-album, Grateful Dead rhythm guitarist and songwriter Bob Weir says to the crowd, “it’s another in our long list of tragedy songs.” The album, aptly named Reckoning, has a definition of “the avenging or punishing of past mistakes or misdeed.”
The hippie epoch drips with songs about drugs like Jimi Hendrix’s “Purple Haze,” love and sunshine like the Beatles’ “Here Comes the Sun” and “All You Need Is Love,” and more serious topics like Bob Dylan’s “Blowin’ in the Wind” — considered a counterculture anti-war protest anthem, though Dylan would refute such a notion.
The Dead indeed sing of love and sunshine like in “Sugar Magnolia,” also from 1970’s American Beauty, the most performed Grateful Dead original in their long touring career. The song’s story could be a main force behind the peace-love-and-happiness perception of the band’s music:
Sugar magnolia
Ringin’ that blue bell
Caught up in sunlight
Come on out singing
I’ll walk you in the sunshine
Come on honey, come along with meShe’s got everything delightful
She’s got everything I need
A breeze in the pines in the summer night moonlight
Crazy in the sunlight yes indeed
Friend of the band, author of One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest, and evangelist of LSD — which helped fuel much of the philosophies of the hippie era — Ken Kesey wrote in a letter to Garcia after his death in 1995 that the singer never used his “microphone as a pulpit. No antiwar rants, no hymns to peace. No odes to the trees and All Things Organic.” Garcia and his band-mates instead had an inward focus.
The Grateful Dead had an inward focus. Unlike most bands at the time that focused on record sales, chart performance, and ticket sales — public perception — the Dead were famous for not caring about any of that. They focused on pushing their music to new heights and putting on great shows — things they could control. This internal locus of control is a foundational tenet of Stoicism.
Hippie music traversed both ends of the spectrum from levity to seriousness, the Dead partaking in both as did other artists of the time. No band danced as playfully with the topic of death as did the Grateful Dead.
They sing of death and loss and tragedy yet the Grateful Dead’s music casts a bright light on generations of listeners. They bring joy to music lovers, while subtly keeping top of mind the idea of death: perfectly encapsulated in the name Grateful Dead. If the ancient stoic philosophers lived in the time since 1965, the Grateful Dead would be their band.
The band’s “He’s Gone” from their live triple-album Europe ’72 tells a story about a band-member’s own father who embezzled band funds then split. Over the years it has mutated into a heartfelt ode to the many passed loved ones close to the band. Audiences usually chime to sing along when Garcia reaches the line “there’s nothing left to do but smile, smile, smile.” Stoics likewise believed in the importance of separating in one’s mind things internal and external — those in or out of our control. If external and therefore out of one’s control, all one can do is let go. The objective is to untether oneself from outside forces.
Two millennia earlier Marcus Aurelius, the most powerful man on earth as Roman Emperor, a prominent figure in Stoic Philosophy, reflected on a similar idea in his personal wartime journal. In his famous Meditations, which was posthumously published and has endured the erosion of time, he writes “Death smiles at us all; all we can do is smile back.”
The musical key in which the song was written reflects the philosophical mindset of the band. A song about betrayal is likely a sore subject, naturally lending to the minor key, which breeds dark emotions like sorrow, remorse, and contempt. “He’s Gone,” composed instead in a major key, brims with optimism and ends with all the band’s singers harmonizing with conviviality, celebrating rather than lamenting that “he’s gone” and “nothin’s gonna bring him back.” An enlightened perspective that you wouldn’t expect from a rock-and-roll band.
Aurelius believed in the advantage of accepting circumstances out of your control, specifically relating to death, one of them being: “the kind of people you’ll no longer be mixed up with.” This is where the optimism in “He’s Gone” comes from. Yes, a band-member’s own father stole their money. Good, they no longer have a thief hiding in their midst.
A fan or not, we can all learn from this idea of being a grateful dead. Recalling the Taoist idea that without death there is no life, fearing death handicaps one’s ability to live. At the extreme a crippling fear of the possibility of death may confine one to the delusional belief in the absolute safety of one’s home. Fearing that what’s out in the world can cause death will prevent living a full life — without enjoying nature, traveling to new places, sharing new experiences with loved ones or meeting new friends.
The Dead gave people the opportunity to travel, hear thoughtfully crafted and beautiful music, dance and meet fellow fans, and thoroughly party — to have fun and be happy. All the while their lyrics of death and loss constantly remind us of the omnipresent idea that is the second half of the band’s name.
An understated beauty of philosophy is how it can replant one’s perspective toward such deeply rooted ideas like life and death. Seneca believed “we do not suddenly fall on death, but advance towards it by slight degrees; we die every day.” He continues:
“For every day a little of our life is taken from us; even when we are growing, our life is on the wane. We lose our childhood, then our boyhood, and then our youth. Counting even yesterday, all past time is now lost; the very day which we are now spending is shared between ourselves and death. It is not the last drop that empties the water clock but all that previously has flowed out; similarly, the final hour when we cease to exist does not of itself bring death; it merely of itself completes the death process, but we have been a long time on the way.”
This idea that every passed day a little bit of us has died refocuses the preciousness of time. Living life knowing we die a little each day is practicing being comfortable with death. The suddenness of death becomes the completeness of death.
In “Black Peter” on their first 1970 album, Workingman’s Dead — number 264 on Rolling Stone’s “500 Greatest Albums of All Time” — the singer is literally on his deathbed. Yet he seems to share this philosophy of death, that it completes life and can bring peace:
Just want to have
A little peace to die
Not only can this catalyze us to live our lives but also to look upon death of loved ones differently: with more acceptance and less resistance.
Abraham Lincoln once wrote that loss of a loved one “instead of agony, will yet be a sad sweet feeling in your heart, of a purer and holier sort than you have known before.” As the teachings of the Stoics have radiated into the thoughts and actions of thinkers and doers since the inception of the philosophy, it’s no surprise as an avid reader of Shakespeare, Lincoln shared similar beliefs.
Philosopher in his own right and writer of the Aurelius-inspired The Obstacle Is the Way, Ryan Holiday explains the ties between Shakespeare and the Stoics: “Shakespeare encapsulated it well when he said, ‘Nothing either good nor bad but thinking makes it so.’” The writings of the Stoics and the message of the Grateful Dead can help us shift our perception of death to soften its blow.
As the singer lies dying his words, a true philosopher’s, are an eerily accurate distillation of words written 2000 years prior:
See here how everything
Lead up to this day
And it’s just like
Any other day
That’s ever been
Sun goin’ up
And then the
Sun it goin down
Shine through…
Perhaps this singer knew the lessons of Seneca and the Stoics.
“See here how everything / Lead up to this day” mirrors “the final hour when we cease to exist does not of itself bring death; it merely of itself completes the death process.”
“And it’s just like / Any other day / That’s ever been” parallels the Stoic thought being that “every day a little of life is taken from us.”
Death in the singer’s mind is not a world-ending tragedy but just another day, as death is part of life. With death we share life. If grateful for life we must be grateful for death.
And with this gratitude we are one of the Grateful Dead. It’s not just a band but an idea, a philosophy, something we all share and experience.
As the sun dips below the horizon, another day is released to death and another page in your personal history is written. How do you want yours to read?
This article was originally published at thoughtmedley.com.
(This article contains Amazon Affiliate links to show you where to purchase the incredible music discussed within, if you’re so inclined — although you can just find it on YouTube.)
