Measuring Magic: Why and How the Jam Band Scene Exists Beyond the Confines of Contemporary Music Criticism
As the leader of the Grateful Dead, Jerry Garcia played a critical role in the countercultural movement of the 1960s and beyond that, in developing the template of improvised rock music that would come to be known as the “jam band” genre. While the jam band genre was initially intertwined with the greater psychedelic music scene (thanks in most part to the Dead), after the dawn of the 1980s it became a fiercely cultish entity almost entirely associated with and led by Garcia and co. The band’s disciples, known as “Deadheads,” were seen as a delusional band of drug-fueled jokesters clinging to a movement of yesteryear. Even after bands like Phish and Widespread Panic offered fresh new interpretations of the music in a post-Garcia world, the public perception of jam band devotees saw little change. To many people, these devotees are hippies living in their own world, like pirates on an endless quest for a treasure that may not even exist in the first place.
Phish revolutionized the scene by introducing the concept of band-centric festivals, starting with the Clifford Ball in 1996. In keeping with a culture steeped in live performances, this new festival template pushed the scene further into the mainstream and helped inspire festivals like Bonnaroo, which is now one of the largest festivals in the United States. Still, apart from legacy acts like Phish and the Grateful Dead (and their numerous contemporary analogs) who can enjoy the spotlight simply by being legacy acts, jam bands almost never receive critical coverage outside of genre-specific publications like JamBase and Relix. And while the scene is now stronger than ever, it’s still relatively insular. In terms of mainstream perception and appreciation, the legacy factor largely masks the intricacies and scope of the music and the symbiotic relationship it has with its culture. So what exactly makes the music so special in the first place? And if it’s so special, why has the critical perception of the jam band scene stayed relatively the same throughout the last half century? Through mixing sacred tradition, profound psychedelic energy, and subtle but advanced musical technique, these performances become bowls of cosmic soup with vibrant flavor profiles that can defy formalized critique. The music is difficult to understand within the vacuum of a sonic profile alone. An all-encompassing dissection of it within its cultural context must be conducted in order to measure its true significance.
Jam band music is an appreciation of a longstanding culture. It involves reaching into a contextual bag of nostalgia that’s largely rooted in Americana. In an era where the lines between covers and originals were a bit blurrier, the Grateful Dead did not shy away from re-interpreting the work of other artists. Songs like Chuck Berry’s “Johnny B. Goode” and Roger Miller’s “Me and Bobby McGee” were regularly included in Grateful Dead set lists. The main draw of this music isn’t musical or lyrical progressiveness, which are key components when it comes to understanding what constitutes “good” music. Rather, its main draw is quite the opposite; Familiarity can be seen as the driving factor for it to be understood and celebrated. The key concepts that go along with this idea of familiarity are repetition and re-interpretation, and they can come from many different musical sources. The overarching source of musical motifs within jam band music is and has been roots rock (i.e. blues, folk, and country) with funk having gradually seeped in over the years. In the 21st century, bands like Umphrey’s McGee and STS9 have approached the genre from its traditional improvisational angle, but have added in new musical flavors like progressive metal and electronica, respectively. Thus, they have expanded that contextual bag and pushed the genre forward while still sticking to the formula of jamming songs and emphasizing the live performance aspect of their reputation. Once the listener becomes familiar with the band’s musical repertoire, they can begin to form a more well-rounded understanding of where the band is coming from and in turn judge how well they use that repertoire to truly demonstrate their artistry.
Contemporary music criticism is largely based on static bodies of artists’ work. This takes the form of album reviews, track reviews, and listicles that serve as retrospectives for those works. Think of it like paintings in a museum. Jam bands, on the other hand, can be thought of as performance artists, where the artwork is meant to be experienced in person. The improvisations (jams) create pieces of music that are nonlinear and tend to stray from traditional performance structures. This takes the form of segues, teases, interpolations, and sometimes the cutting and pasting of partial songs within a set. Such a strong emphasis on unpredictability has created a subculture of amateur tapers who collect live performances and actively help to not only document but literally expand these bands’ bodies of work. Thus, critiques of bands within the jam band scene develop over time as the artists prove their worth, firstly through the quantity of works in their musical portfolio, but ultimately through the quality of those works.
While studio albums are important in the scene, they more so provide a basis on which to be worked off of, rather than serving as artistic ends in themselves. Contemporary music criticism is not designed in a way that seeks to honor each and every genre’s unique parameters of quality. There’s even some acknowledgement of this outside the core community’s journalistic outlets. For example, in a review of Umphrey’s McGee’s album it’s not us on the rock blog Louder, writer Chris Cope references the necessary emphasis of the band’s live dynamic:
“A big part of Umphrey’s McGee’s magic is their love of going off on tangents with gusto — check out some of the track times of their live releases for an indication of their hell- bent adventurism — and on the whole it’s not us feels almost a little too concise and considered…”
Additionally, contemporary music criticism seeks to pigeonhole artists and their unique sounds for the sake of journalistic narrative. That isn’t necessarily a bad thing, although the jam scene seems to bear the brunt of this practice. Jam bands exist in a flyover area of music when it comes to widespread critical attention. The all-important improvisational factor often gets overlooked and the bands get tossed in with a scene that gets passed off as tacky and passé. The fact of the matter is that the jam band world is not just a circus overrun with hippies; It’s much more diverse today than it ever was. Perhaps the notion of what a “jam band” is was never quite clear in the first place.
“The real irony of this discussion is that the word Jamband has never actually been fully “embraced” per se, because it didn’t always exist in the community’s vernacular for a long enough period of time for people to fully ingest it,” writes jambands.com columnist Dan Greenhaus.
Now, that’s not to say that hippies and their psychedelic drugs didn’t have an integral role in the scene’s rise. They absolutely did, and refusing to acknowledge that would yield an incomplete analysis. After all, the Grateful Dead essentially came into their true form by way of Ken Kesey’s famous Acid Tests. The use of psychedelic drugs in conjunction with music creates deeply personal and profound experiences. As music has progressed however, contemporary artists pushing the psychedelic genre forward are awarded more widespread attention. Artists such as Toro y Moi, Tame Impala, and Pond regularly receive praise from authoritative tastemakers (aka the “indie establishment”) like Pitchfork and Stereogum. Deservedly so though, and perhaps much more so than their counterparts in the jam band scene. Their retro-futuristic sounds evoke the right mixture of hazy 60s and 70s nostalgia coupled with modern production centered on synthesizers. And so a tough question is presented: Is jam band music just basic roots rock that’s been overly glorified through the incorporation of psychedelic drugs? Well, on the surface, sure. In fact, psychedelic music as it has come to be known is heavily rooted in blues. During the 1960s, artists such as Jefferson Airplane, Jimmy Hendrix, and The Beatles used blues, which reared its head in much of the popular music of the era, as a springboard for their innovative ideas.
From a mechanical standpoint, the electric guitar proved to be the primary conduit for many of these psychedelic musical concepts and continues to be the focal point of most jam bands today. This manifested in the prevalence of reverb, distortion, feedback, and the wah pedal across many recordings of the era. Effects such as these can were disorienting and “trippy” in nature. Eastern scales, rhythms, and exotic instruments like the sitar and djembe also helped form the “psychedelic sound.” So yes, when broken down to their most basic components, The Grateful Dead are mostly just playing traditional American music. In a monumental interview with Rolling Stone, Jerry Garcia explains how the use of LSD played a crucial role in helping the band develop a signature sound and style from the roots rock template they were used to.
WENNER:
“How did the music change? You’re still playing country music and you’re playing blues and…”
GARCIA:
“Well, we got more into wanting to go…to take it farther. In the nightclubs, in bars, mostly what they want to hear is short fast stuff, uhm…and we were always trying to play a little, stretch out a little…”
REICH:
“So like would you take something you’d played before and just make it longer and longer and louder and louder? And you were improvising?”
GARCIA:
“Of course, we were improvising cosmically, too. Because being high, each note, you know, is like a whole universe. And each silence. And the quality of the sound and the degree of emotional…when you’re playing and you’re high on acid in these scenes it is like the most important thing in the world. It’s truly, pshew, cosmic…”
The fact that psychedelic drugs had such a direct role in creating this distinct genre of music almost necessitates that it be analyzed within the context of these substances’ effects. Of course that doesn’t literally mean dosing just to understand the music. In many ways though, the musical journey on which a great jam band takes its audience is analogous to a psychedelic trip. The significance and profundity of a psychedelic experience does not always reveal itself immediately, especially since the effects of the drugs often last upwards of 10 hours. Much like a jam, a psychedelic experience is lengthy and filled with dips and spikes, at times meandering about without any clear direction. This is part of what sets jam band music apart from other genres. Jam band blogger Amar Sastry explains this idea more succinctly using Phish as an example:
“This is one of the biggest struggles for non-Phish fans to understand. Most of us, when we listen to our favorite music, are used to the experience of every moment being a transcendent one. A Phish jam is closer to a hike in the woods. You maybe take a path that doesn’t necessarily seem attractive or exciting. But at the end of the trail, you end up on a beautiful overlook that you would have never discovered, had it not been for the seemingly boring turn you took a half mile back.”
This exciting sense of unpredictability creates a uniquely organic feeling that grabs the listener and lends itself to powerful, often deeply personal experiences. The same is true with a trip. While music in general can of course create significant emotional experiences, they are methodically composed over long periods of time in a controlled studio setting. Thus, desired emotional effects can be carefully calculated by the band and studio personnel, and then methodically dissected by journalists. As I detailed in an earlier piece about music criticism, to truly analyze a piece of music requires at least some degree of active listening. Jam bands, on the contrary, require the lister to practice more of the opposite: passive listening. When the main musical component of an artist’s reputation is constant improvisation, the musical merits of their works become much less clear. Instead of trying to create something new, the artists’ mentality when improvising is to expand the definition of a body of work that’s already been created. The same can be seen as true for the listener. The listener is forced to let themselves be enveloped by the experience and make their own meaning. This sort of two-way street creates an interactive experience that’s at the core of what makes the music so special. In a piece for phish.net, Charles Dirksen explores the concept of “the hose” (aka “IT”), which has been used by the members of Phish (and originally Carlos Santana) to describe the interplay of energy between the band and the crowd:
“IT is an aspect of the experience of improvisational music in general…Tunes/songs, in order to be “tunes” or “songs,” follow a plan: a structure that controls and holds the melody and rhythm, the measures and the lyrics. This structure is objectively based, but our appreciation of its merits is obviously subjective. Hose to me, though, necessarily loses the structure of the tune — at LEAST in the sense that the jam or composition has created repercussions more significant than it ever had before.”
The idea of an energy exchange between performer and listener is rather abstract. However, it plays a crucial role in giving improvisational-based music its potential to create transcendental experiences. This transformative process applies to both the listener and the performer and is key in understanding and accepting the jam band genre. For the most part though, those outside of the jam scene just don’t get it. In order to truly gain the necessary insight required to judge this music, one must take the time to be immersed in a live set, if not in person then through a high-quality live recording. The omission of the jam band genre from many notable music publications is a result of a common lack of understanding among music critics. At the same time, that’s ok. If lyrical depth and novel application of musical technique serve as the basis on which pieces of music are to be granted merit, perhaps it’s only right that jam bands continue to create art that serves their scene’s own unique markers of quality.
This is not all to say that jam bands can’t be understood on concrete music theory terms. After all, these are still mere mortals playing man-made instruments. Even though the “magic” of a great jam manifests as a subjective experience on the listener’s end, an exceptional jam can serve as an objectively true instance of musical greatness. Jam bands serve as prime examples of how utilizing certain chord progressions, rhythms, and playing styles at the right times can paint vivid emotional landscapes. Sastry dives into these sonic nuances using famous Phish cuts as case studies in his “Anatomy of a Jam” YouTube series. For instance, in the 4/3/98 version of “Roses Are Free” he explains how chordal cues help steer the peak of the jam from major scale territory into Mixolydian, creating “a grounding feeling of coalescence.”
At the end of the day, greatness isn’t apparent from the get-go in this scene. One’s reputation is defined by how the audience experiences the music. Jam bands are uniquely selfless in the fact that they’re not trying to reinvent the wheel — rather, they’re using it to move the audience into such strong emotional territory that the experience starts to become spiritual. A jam band’s legacy is built not only on relentless touring, but a relentless pursuit of improvisational ascension. As far as the future of the genre is concerned, it only seems to be branching out more and more, as are those who decide to listen. For example, a band like Vulfpeck, who tend to attract attention from more diverse audiences due to their unique blend of funk and pop, are seeing more and more appearances at jam-centric festivals and events. In 2017 they even opened for the Trey Anastasio Band at Red Rocks Amphitheater. Promising funk jammers Pigeons Playing Ping Pong recently played on Adult Swim’s Fish Center, the former being a media outlet that has long been a key tastemaker in the indie music landscape. Additionally, post-rock duo El Ten Eleven have shared the stage with jamtronica band Lotus on numerous occasions.
“By now, everyone is aware that the musical tastes of both the musicians and the fanbase has changed, adds Greenhaus. “The umbrella is open wide enough for everyone, even if everyone doesn’t necessarily want to get underneath.”
For what it’s worth, Greenhaus’ piece was published in 2005. 14 years later, and nearly 55 or so years after the genre’s inception, the massive musical bubble that is the jam band community looks ready to burst. Walls between genres are being knocked down every day and the average listener is much more open-minded than ever before. If there was ever a time for jam bands to get proper recognition and respect, it’s now.
