40 years ago this month, the Grateful Dead went from hippie holdovers to true stadium rockers
May of 1977 transformed the group forever
By 1977, the Grateful Dead were in an odd cultural position. A band so one-of-a-kind that it blurred the distinction between relic and relevant, the hippie icons were nonetheless searching for their place in a new era of American music.
That was a strange, transitional year for America as well. One year after the country celebrated its bicentennial, it seemed stuck in a weird and fractured place. Despite the war in Vietnam finally being over, the utopian aspirations of the previous decade’s youth culture seemed to have fizzled out. Star Wars was released that year to became the highest-grossing film of all time. Crime was on the rise. Punk was in its infancy. Studio 54 and cocaine had replaced the Be In and psychedelics. The whole hyper-materialist, well-coiffed, Saturday Night Fever (also released in 1977) feel of the times make it even more improbable that a band like the Grateful Dead — so closely associated with the ethos of the 1960’s — would be able to regroup and find a new register of its voice. In retrospect, it seems almost unbelievable that the band could peak in May of 1977, but according to some, that’s exactly what happened.
Despite their reputation as hippie goofs charging burnouts to listen to them noodle around, the Dead were serious students of musical tradition. More than most bands, they stood at the nexus between America’s cultural past and the promise of a wide open future. Lead guitarist Jerry Garcia had a background steeped in bluegrass and jug bands. Rhythm guitarist Bob Weir began as a kind of coffeehouse folk strummer while bassist Phil Lesh studied avant garde composition and played the trumpet. Original organist Rod “Pigpen” McKernan was a hard-drinking bluesman. All of these varied traditions melded together in the music of the Dead to create a kind of weird Americana wildly fluctuating along a spectrum between sorrowful “high and lonesome” country and the ecstatic liberation of free jazz.
The Dead were students of the past, but they were also at the forefront of a lot of things. The band earned their counterculture bona fides playing as the house band for Ken Kesey’s famous Acid Tests. LSD chemist and band supporter Oswald Stanley pioneered his Altec Voice of the Theater sound system at the Tests, beginning what would turn out to be a seamless blending of pioneering both drugs and technology (usually simultaneously). They would go on to create the “Wall of Sound” in the early 70’s — a revolutionary behemoth stack of tube amplifiers that could push sound out up to half a mile completely free of distortion. Then, of course, there were also the ubiquitous “tapers” of Dead shows, creating a kind of free and underground economy of sharing media that in many ways anticipated the Internet itself.
But if America was in a strange place in 1977, so was the band. After the heights of Woodstock and the early 1970s, the band sort of burned out in 1974, going on a hiatus through most of ’75. Returning to the road in ’76, the Dead were still searching to reestablish their voice. Signing to a new label, Arista, in late ’76, they went into the studio at the beginning of ’77 to record a bunch of new material which would eventually become the album Terrapin Station. Keith Olsen, their new producer, cracked the whip and put the band through their paces. An apocryphal story has it that the studio door was even occasionally nailed shut. But the forced discipline worked. A band notorious for being slacker hippies forged an identity in the studio that was updated, cleaner, and harder rocking to fit the times. Their spring tour, especially the month of May, was the culmination of that project.
Ask any Dead Head what the band’s most famous show is and they’ll tell you (whether they agree it’s deserving or not) Barton Hall. Played at Cornell University smack in the middle of their Spring tour, the show is legendary among fans for offering what could be the Dead’s most consistent performance. The first set offers flawless renditions of classic Dead tunes such as “Jack Straw”, “Deal”, and “Row Jimmy”. But that second set. Howard Weiner describes it in his book Grateful Dead 1977, writing, “There are many signature moments in this Scarlet > Fire (“Scarlet Begonias” into the reggae-inspired “Fire on the Mountain”), but when I hear this version…it’s easily identifiable by that blast off [of Lesh’s bass]. The tempo and timing are sublime.”
And maybe that was the main difference between the old, dead Dead and the new incarnation that fully blossomed in May of 1977: tempo and timing. Instead of the churning, cosmic cacophony of the late 60s or the mellow and meandering, seemingly endless sets of the early 70s, these shows were ebullient but tight. They sounded massive, but were still quirky and weird. There was more than a little bit of the energy of mid-70s stadium rock, mixed with the complex musicianship of the decade’s more accomplished progressive rock acts. The days of psychotropic exploration and soft stoned country rock were over. This was tight, brash, cocaine-fueled rock that fit the decade like a glove.
May of 1977 was a turning point for the Dead, but fans continue to debate whether it was the high water mark or just another waypoint to the weird, dark 1980s (not a popular opinion, but personally my favorite era of the Dead) and clean, crisp, mega-show rebirth of the 90s.
And in a way, that evolution echoes the debates we continue to have about the course of American history from that time as well, which sort of keeps the Dead as relevant as ever.
