The Dead

Were selling culture.

We're bombarded with stories talking about the Grateful Dead paradigm, how to be successful. Most focus on allowing fans to tape and share live recordings.

But the real story is the Dead created a culture. BY ACCIDENT!

It's hard to create a new paradigm intentionally, it usually happens by accident. As a result of you following your inner turning fork and declining to do that which doesn't feel right.

Now it's possible to have hit records and then a culture, but usually it happens in reverse. It's the little engine that could. You start from outside and you grow steadily and you may never cross over to the mainstream, but you end up with a big enterprise.

The best example of this today is BTS. They call it the BTS Army. Did they get turned on to the music via radio? Traditional marketing outlets? Was it a PR campaign? No, the internet broke BTS the same way it broke One Direction.

And BTS was ready. You might see it as fanciful KPop, dancing fools, but fans...each member of BTS has a backstory, you can have your favorite, you can become involved and invested in the act. Furthermore, you can find your tribe online. And part of being a member of the BTS Army is putting down those who are not members, who pooh-pooh the act, but the true satisfaction comes from being a member of the group, like-minded people who feel the same way who you can interact with online.

And culture is never instant. And it's hazy until it ultimately comes into focus. It looks like nothing is there and all of a sudden there's a monolith. Like KPop itself. We've been hearing it's going to cross over to the U.S. for in excess of a decade. Seemed hard to believe, but then it did, ferociously. You've got to work at it and work at it to gain critical mass. Those looking for overnight success today...good luck having traction tomorrow, fans become dedicated over time via more music and more information. You might be able to sell out arenas on your first tour but never come close to that again in the future.

So the Dead did not have a great singer and didn't play commercial music. They were the antithesis of the Airplane...and it's funny how no one talks about the Airplane anymore. The Airplane had Grace Slick and "Somebody to Love," but how many hard core fans did the band truly have?

The vocals were better in Quicksilver Messenger Service, but they did not have the live rep the Dead did.

Not only did Big Brother have Janis Joplin, its biggest success came with covers. But before she passed, Joplin's career was on a downswing. Then again, it's hard to be a woman in music, the media focuses on you, you can't stay off the radar...how you look, what you say is reported, people form an opinion on you oftentimes without even hearing your music.

It's a Beautiful Day? Good vocals and more traditional song structure.

While other bands were champing at the bit for success, the Dead were going their own way. If you believe Joe Smith, who signed the band to Warner Brothers, he finally convinced them to make something commercial, i.e. "Workingman's Dead." Although he told me this more than once, I'm not sure I believe it. However, one thing is for sure, every Dead album before that was uncommercial. The songs were long and meandering and the rap was you had to hear the band live. So they cut a live album, "Live/Dead," which got better reviews than anything previously released but was still a commercial stiff.

But if you were paying attention, and those who start a culture always are, there was a buzz about the band's live performances, primarily in California, the Dead didn't mean much in the east.

But ultimately Bill Graham threw down the gauntlet. Not only did he book the band at the Fillmore East, he promoted them in the program distributed to every attendee. The back page had a photograph of people standing at the show with the caption "2600 Happy People at the Grateful Dead." 2600 was the capacity of the Fillmore East, as for the photograph, here it is:

https://morrisonhotelgallery.com/products/grateful-dead-at-fillmore-east-january-2-1970-hm8gi5

So you saw this picture and you felt LEFT OUT!

Furthermore, the ad was for shows beginning at midnight. When traditionally there were two shows a night, at 8 and 11:30. This was something different.

So Bill Graham helped. But you can never do it alone, you always have help, people who believe want to aid you in your journey, because there's very few people you can believe in.

And then came "Workingman's Dead." Suddenly you heard "Uncle John's Band" on the radio. But, the true breakthrough did not come until the fall of 1970, with "American Beauty," that's when all those interested in album rock, not those addicted to the Top 40, took notice.

And when you took notice of an act back in the day, you went to see them live.

And the nascent rock press told you the New Riders were going to open and the show was going to be long and you went and...

It was not a typical show. It was not exciting from beginning to end. People wandered around in a haze.

But the show built and built to a finale, you'd experienced something, and one thing was for sure, you couldn't experience it anywhere else, especially as music was being consolidated, as songs were written to cross over from AM to FM. Which the Dead wanted to do, but were unsuccessful at.

And then they started their own record label. A horrible idea, but it endeared them to their fans, the band was doing it their own way, they were sticking it to the man, and they were hemorrhaging money doing it.

And this is an important point. There were very few record/publishing royalties, it was all about the money made on the road. And this was a big band with a big entourage and... Sure, they were different, but, once again, they were sustaining, they were not getting rich, nowhere near as wealthy as the FM rockers of the day.

And that's when the shows and the taping became legendary.

So there were the original Deadheads. Most of them truly dead at this point. The ones in the picture on the inside of "Live/Dead." They're pushing eighty, if the drugs and low economic status haven't gotten them already.

So really, it was about the Boomers.

But what put the Dead over the top was Gen-X, which came online during the days of MTV. The Dead were the antithesis. They were scruffy, they didn't wear spandex, AND THEY DIDN'T HAVE ANY HITS! It wasn't even about the recordings...which were not released that regularly. The thunder had been stolen from Gen-X, they lived in the wake of the Boomers, and as greed took over in the eighties, the Dead pointed in another direction, they were something to believe in.

And the road goes on forever.

So the point here is there was no plan. As well as a lot of bad decisions, like the aforesaid independent record company.

And the Dead did not play by commercial rules. And were unsuccessful as a result. Their albums were never juggernauts or big sellers. Oh, they tried, making "Terrapin Station" with Keith Olsen and "Shakedown Street" with Lowell George, but it didn't work. So they kept on doing what they were doing, going on the road and improvising.

Of course eventually the Dead had an MTV hit with "Touch of Grey," but that was already 1987 and it was kind of a joke, a laugh, that this old band finally broke through.

So it was all an accident. Run on instinct and perseverance. And if you're sitting at home trying to replicate it...

Are you willing to walk into the wilderness? Are you willing to experiment? Are you willing to starve?

Most people are not. But the Dead were rooted in the hippie culture of San Francisco, and by time that evaporated, they were finally on their way. The band was a product of its time.

Making music unlike anybody else. Slogging it out on the road endlessly before it broke through.

Now you can point to modern jam bands and say it's the same thing, but it's not. Sure, there are Phishheads, but Phish doesn't penetrate the world outside its borders. You either adore Trey or have no idea who he is. And the rest of the jam bands...they may noodle, but that does not mean there's a culture.

So if you want to replicate the Dead paradigm you've got to focus on culture, you've got to grow culture.

And you've got to nurture culture. Pour too much water on the plant and you drown it. People have to feel ownership. That they came to themselves. If something is overhyped, embraced by the mainstream early, culture is eviscerated.

Once again, it's KPop that is doing the Dead better than any jam band, better than any other act out there. Because KPop focuses on the fan first. Not going on television and saying they love their fans, they owe it all to their fans, but superserving the people who care with endless information, even if no one else other than the hard core is paying attention! Even the Dead, they didn't reach out, you had to come to them. As for philosophy, Jerry was labeled "Captain Trips" and would drop philosophy in periodic interviews and the band's fans took it as guidance, because unlike seemingly everybody else, he was not caught up in the starmaker machinery behind the popular song.

You don't have to do it the Grateful Dead way. There are tons of successful acts who haven't. But if you want to emulate the Dead, don't look at the specific steps the band took, but rather focus on the end result, culture, how can you establish a culture?

You must have an identity. And share it and stay true to it. And put the fans first, not take sponsorships, endorse something just for the money. The benefit must be for the fan. And you can't complain when others leapfrog you and have success. You have to stick to your guns, playing the long game. Knowing you can't really have a plan anyway, you've just got to keep on truckin'.

Sound like an easy formula?

NO!

So stop looking to the Dead for guidance unless you're truly going to do it their way, as delineated above, playing without a net, which very few people are willing to do.


--
Visit the archive: http://lefsetz.com/wordpress/
--
Listen to the podcast:
-iHeart: https://ihr.fm/2Gi5PFj
-Apple: https://apple.co/2ndmpvp
--
http://www.twitter.com/lefsetz
--
If you would like to subscribe to the LefsetzLetter,
http://www.lefsetz.com/lists/?p=subscribe&id=1

If you do not want to receive any more LefsetzLetters, http://lefsetz.com/lists/?p=unsubscribe&uid=0eecea7b60b461717065cbde887c8e25

To change your email address http://lefsetz.com/lists/?p=preferences&uid=0eecea7b60b461717065cbde887c8e25