Quotations, selected by DEW:
The sudden eruption of harmony in the midst of chaos is a leifmotif of the Grateful Dead's music. p51
Jerry Garcia: "The root of my playing is that every note counts, every note has a personality, every note has a little spirit." p58
Alan Lomax's Folk Songs of North America introduced [Garcia and Hunter] to an oral tradition that, over centuries, might strip a ballad of narrative verses that were extraneous to its core, and leave a stray line traveling through time, like "black eels and eel broth, mother", or "I fain would lie doon", in Lord Randall. They were tag lines, with bits of flesh still clinging to them, alerting anyone who paid attention that something momentous had happened long, long ago. For Hunter and Garcia, these fragments were a passport to a wider, deeper pool of allegory than was available to most up-and-coming rockers --- one that might nourish them when the acid-induced flashes of recognition wore thin. For them both, the half-told tale, "rich in weirdness" was a folk tradition they admired in any tune .... p64
New York Times critic Jon Pareles on Jerry Garcia's guitar playing: "He played the way a dolphin swims with its school. His guitar lines would glide out, shimmer and gambol in the sunlight, then blend into the group as if nothing had happened." p311
Cumberland Blues:
The best compliment Hunter ever got for a lyric was from an old man
who had actually worked in the Cumberland mine. "I wonder
what the guy who wrote this song would've thought," the fellow said,
"if he'd ever known something like the Grateful Dead was gonna do it." p65
Over time, Garcia and Hunter wove together strands of bluegrass, English and American folk motifs, California country and western, gospel, blues, the Beatles, Dylan, and the Band into a Whitmanesque sampler that was Greek to prime-time DJs.... But like no other popular music before or since, it spoke to the dailiness of experience, the experience of getting by, which is largely overlooked in the lyrics of other bands; and it satisfied a longing for songs that come from somewhere, that have a past, if only a sense of the past. p68
In Deaddom, the dreamy, folkish romanticism occupies the imagination's inner tract while the Beat sensibility patrols the perimeters.
It's the "collective good stuff" that remains the Grateful Dead's most influential legacy. The band's taste for ambiguity ... wears its modernity with amazing grace. The celebrated noodling of the gods, or the memory of it, is a deposit the Dead has made in the central bank of symbolic forms, along with the reinterpretation of traditional American motifs, roots music flying high. p150
