Hallock Hill

Bring Out the Dead: Ben Ratliff in the New York Times

Ben Ratliff writes some of the most consistently perceptive and penetrating music journalism. His book on John Coltrane, Coltrane: The Story of a Sound (New York 2007) provided one of the most interesting portraits of any musician in print by detailing what it is a musician does, i.e. make music, and not merely take drugs, give interesting interviews, etc. etc. Ratliff writes about what gets listened to, not about what gets written about, and in music journalism that is refreshing. This is as close to Formalism as it gets for most music critics.

I’ve never been a huge Grateful Dead fan. To “go there,” as they say, seems to require an immense effort—an effort that principally has entered the realm of historiography now. What was once a pure pleasure, listening to their extensive readings of their catalogue in search of a greater power (in one incarnation of an explanation of their art) somewhere along the way became an act akin to stamp collecting. One tries to find the best show, the best version of a song, the best sound quality, the best guitar solo, the most unusual inversion, the most distinct variation. In today’s piece in the Times, Ratliff condenses this morass into a comprehensible moss. Imagine yourself a 14-year-old just getting into music and you hit the wall known as the “Grateful Dead.” This monolithic figure looms too large, and quantity is not always quality. Nor is it ever quality, for that matter. Ratcliff’s piece on the nature of their live shows and the value of the band gives us a better way in, perhaps.

The extended jams, the exploration. What has always appealed to me ultimately is the mystical nature of this musical plane. Just as trance and drone can be used to free the mind of constrictions, so too can the blueprint drawn by the Dead. Philip Glass and Steve Reich though have always spoken to me more directly in this mode. Stephen Malkmus to my ears finds a more accurate transcendental language in his adoption of this philosophy. So too do Can, Faust, the instrumental Zappa, and another 25-35% of my record collection. Where the Dead faltered, I believe, is in their substitution of “looseness” for “freedom.” Not tuning your guitar is not an expression of some Hippie tenet. Where the ideal breaks down is often in its execution. Theory is better than practice.

That being said, there are moments when I listen to the Dead and I am as swept away as with anything. When they are clicking and the pulse takes over, there are moments where time gets lost, as the blueprint designed. As déclassée as the Dead may be in some indie circles (another irony of the indie scene can be a knee-jerk rejection of anything broad or classical, and the perverse inversion of that, the adoption of absolute kitsch and bubble-gum), there is value in what they did, how they did it and the manner in which the legacy remains. The stamp collecting crowd who deal in their currency the most are, after all, listening closely to the music. Sure, they may also care about Jerry’s shirt and Bob’s hair, but without the music there’d be little to talk about. Ratliff nails the dichotomy of the Dead. His parting words are brilliant: “Maybe that’s the best one can do at the highest level of engagement. Not to try to listen for the best night ever; not even to listen for the best period ever. But to try to figure out why we’re listening at all.”