Liveness and the Grateful Dead (original) (raw)

American Music, 2019

Abstract

The Grateful Dead are very much alive. often considered relics of a formative era in the history of rock, the Dead have always been known as a band in the flesh, a group to see in a live environment. “There’s nothing like a Grateful Dead concert,” goes the adage among devotees of the group who often followed the band around, sometimes seeing multiple concerts in a single season and creating a largescale cultural following that was unlike anything that came before in rock music. The group was well aware of its own liveness. members often cited live shows as the central statements of their work, and the band played with aspects of performativity in album titles like Live/Dead and Go to Heaven, revealing ironic connections between ontologically fixed, carefully crafted rock albums and the concerts that made them famous. unlike many of the group’s counterparts that formed in the mid1960s, the Dead’s performance practice helped to form the basis for the live rock concert as we know it, and the band’s music continues to be received in a manner that accounts for a complex and nuanced history of performance practice. The scene surrounding the Grateful Dead was segregated from mainstream rock. Although the band’s tours were among the highest grossing in the business for about ten years during the late 1980s and early 1990s,

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