Reading the Grateful Dead by Nicholas G. Meriwether

Author:Nicholas G. Meriwether [Meriwether, Nicholas G.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Scarecrow Press
Published: 2012-04-24T16:00:00+00:00

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The Grateful Dead Religious Experience

David Bryan

Jerry Garcia once said, “Music goes back way before language, and it’s the key to a whole spiritual existence which this society doesn’t even talk about. Essentially, the Grateful Dead plays at religious services. We play at the religious services of the new age” (Stuckey 32). Through the music created at Dead shows, the band and their fans came together to create a space in which a religious experience could occur. This article explores the possibility of a Grateful Dead concert as a concrete example of such religious experience, using William James’ theories and interrogating them in the light of more recent theories propounded by Michael Martin, Aloysius Pieris, and Chung Hyun Kyung. Taken together, their arguments suggest that these concerts provided the potential space in which religious experiences could occur. Ultimately, the Grateful Dead phenomenon can provide a new lens for our understanding of the divine in religious and philosophical discourse.1

One

In The Varieties of Religious Experience, William James contends that “personal religious experience has its root and centre in mystical states of consciousness” (379). Although he speaks of personal experience, the communal aspect begs consideration, which I explore below. For the personal aspect, he enumerates four characteristics that justify an experience as mystical: ineffability, noetic quality, transiency, and passivity. Ineffability means that a mystical experience “defies expression, that no adequate report of its contents can be given in words. It . . . must be directly experienced” (380). A Dead concert experience revolved primarily around music. How could one adequately report this experience? Garcia spoke to this issue of ineffability: “It’s tough to talk about. . . . It doesn’t lend itself to articulation very well. But musicians know about this stuff and [so does] anybody who’s ever done something where being ‘on’ counts” (quoted in Jackson, Garcia 386).

One attempt at articulation would be through sharing a set list or writing a review, or perhaps giving away a recording of a show (the band had a long-standing policy of allowing fans to record their concerts). However, missing from this attempted articulation would be evidence of the energy of the event, the physical aspect of being surrounded by tens of thousands of fans. As well, one could argue that no description can adequately capture a sense of the “magic” of a show—suggested by the Deadhead adage, “There is nothing like a Grateful Dead show.”

Next, for James, mystical states “seem to those who experience them to be also states of knowledge. They are states of insight into depths of truth . . . [and] illuminations, revelations” (380). This noetic quality, as he calls it, surely pervades much music, as the topic of music and how it touches us is found in religious and intellectual discourse throughout history. The question is, what is this touching, and where does it come from? Deadheads would say that this is the “magic” of a show, as Steve Silberman suggests, even using language that explains what this touching is: “[S]ome nights,

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