Thoughts on the Grateful Dead, the Beatles, and Collective Consciousness

Suddenly people were stripped before one another and behold! as we looked on, we all made a great discovery: we were beautiful. Naked and helpless and sensitive as a snake after skinning, but far more human than that shining nightmare that had stood creaking in previous parade rest. We were alive and life was us. We joined hands and danced barefoot amongst the rubble. We had been cleansed, liberated! We would never don the old armors again.

Picture yourself on a slope overlooking a broad amphitheater. Sunset. Below you, the tribes are gathering from far and wide. Many thousands make their way into the sanctuary, beating drums, burning incense. It is time for the ritual of return. And you—threads of kinship weave through you as through the others. Unbinding your hair, you run to meet the growing crowd. High priests on the altars strike up the ancient songs, and everyone starts to move in patterns that you've never seen, but that seem familiar. It is a dance whose origins none remember, as old as the tribe itself. But instinct leads you into sync with each other in a sudden togetherness. The music enters you as if in slow motion, flowing with a pulse that both is and is not your own. No, this isn't 15,000 BC on the eve of the summer solstice. Nor is it the Zion orgy scene from The Matrix Reloaded on the eve of the final battle with the machines. You're in twentieth-century America: this is a Dead show.

Religious historian Mircea Eliade referred to shamans as “technicians of ecstasy,” and that's exactly what San Francisco's Grateful Dead were, on a grand scale. Their hands held instruments, but they played the crowd, captivating masses of people into a high that I could only call spiritual. From the beginning, it just came through mysteriously—came through everyone into a life of its own. Even those Deadheads of my own generation, who missed the sixties bus by a long shot, had this same experience. I saw my first show in—get ready—1992, when I was in high school. I grew up in the eighties; I needed to believe in something. And the Dead were astonishing, playing like Titans or gods beyond the borders of the mundane and the everyday. Like magicians, you couldn't figure out how they did what they did, but it worked, and you wanted in on the secret.

Shamans, or magicians—they created an atmosphere of wonder. Their music was a gateway to another mind entirely, a mind with fewer boundaries, full of space and unexplainable inventiveness. At a Grateful Dead show, you weren't who you thought you were. Some startling being was there instead, strangely recognizable. You'd close your eyes and follow where it led. When you opened them, surprise! Somebody else was always there, right next to you, making contact. You'd thought you were in it by yourself, blessed with a private experience, but the Dead proved you wrong. If heaven were a dance party, this would be it—I'd never seen so much joy in my life, surging up through people. It just made you want to move toward others. Joy out in the middle, between everything, that no one could own, but that was there for everyone—there to catch and twist and chase breathless. “What possesses our audience I can never know,” drummer Mickey Hart writes in Drumming at the Edge of Magic. “But I feel its effects. From the stage you can feel it happening—group mind, entrainment, find your own word for it—when they lock up you can feel it; you can feel the energy roaring off them.”

We all felt it, something we'd never felt anywhere else. What was it, though? What was the secret of that magic identity we all took part in, that thrilling, almost unbearable loss of control? Usually, the thought of losing control is terrifying. But the Dead made it easy to jump into the center, extended and vulnerable. They played and our attention leapt away from ourselves; there was a whole world there to meet, to encounter. Most of us are so used to thinking of ourselves as fundamentally independent creatures, with independent psyches, that the mere mention of “collective consciousness” or “group mind” is usually cause for a quick change in the topic of conversation. But with the Dead, these questions became interesting. Who am I really? you had to ask then, as your assumptions fell to pieces and the familiar sheaths of anxiety and isolation dropped from your shoulders. What am I so afraid of? The Dead themselves surely had all the same questions. They were regular boomers, if a bit on the fringes—rebellious kids into the Beats, blues, and jazz, leaning over the cusp of an era. That is, until they stopped playing bars and started playing the Acid Tests.

Actually, the Grateful Dead were taking LSD before Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters organized the first of their infamous Acid Test parties in August 1965. But it was as the Pranksters' house band that they stretched their fledgling wings and took off into the uncharted stratosphere. As Tom Wolfe writes in The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, they weren't the only ones going airborne:

Suddenly acid and the worldcraze were everywhere, the electric organ vibrating through every belly in the place, kids dancing not rock dances, not the frug and the—what?—swim, mother, but dancing ecstasy, leaping, dervishing, throwing their hands over their heads like Daddy Grace's own stroked-out inner courtiers—yes! . . . Everybody's eyes turn on like lightbulbs . . . fuses blow, minds scream, heads explode, neighbors call the cops, 200, 300, 400 people from out there drawn into . . . a mass closer and higher than any mass in history.

Indeed, it was these prototypal, expect-the-unexpected hippie raves, presenting a garbage can's worth of dosed Kool-Aid to all comers, that gave the Dead the freedom to play without expectations. Instead of sticking to individual solos over background accompaniment, like most rock bands of the day, they took the lessons of John Coltrane and free jazz to heart, improvising all together, all at the same time. To do that successfully, they had to listen intently to each other, each individual responding spontaneously to the movement of the whole. And it was while jamming this way—having no idea where they were going but intending to go there together—that they stumbled upon the fantastic sense of a creative intelligence far greater than themselves as individuals, an intelligence that enveloped the group. When it was really happening, lead guitarist Jerry Garcia remembered, the music “had the effect of surprising me with a flow of its own.” When it was really happening, they flew as one. “Those hookups are like living things,” bassist Phil Lesh said. “Like cells in the body of this organism. That seems to be the transformation taking place in human beings. To learn to be cells as well as individuals. Not just cells in society but cells in a living organism.”

This collective mind knew no boundaries and created a deep togetherness, not just between the band members, but in the audience as well. “The audience is as much the band as the band is the audience,” drummer Bill Kreutzmann said. “There is no difference. The audience should be paid—they contribute as much.” Even more surprising is the fact that the musicians themselves couldn't enter that space without others there to listen. Jerry confessed that he'd “never experienced the click of great music without an audience. . . . We exist by their grace.” It's difficult to imagine the conscious attention of an audience being that crucial to the performers' ability to perform, though perhaps the Dead could be seen more accurately not as performers at all but as key participants in truly synergistic events. Jerry described it this way, in a 1972 interview with Rolling Stone:

To get really high is to forget yourself. And to forget yourself is to see everything else. And to see everything else is to become an understanding molecule in evolution, a conscious tool of the universe. And I think every human being should be a conscious tool of the universe. . . .

When you break down the old orders and the old forms and leave them broken and shattered, you suddenly find yourself a new space with new form and new order which are more like the way it is. More like the flow. And we just found ourselves in that place. We never decided on it, we never thought it out. None of it. This is a thing that we've observed in the scientific method. We've watched what happens.

Though LSD was the mother that gave birth to this experience of communion, the experience itself gained independent life through the Dead's music. I myself went to a whole host of shows before I'd ever done drugs, and I still came back transfigured. “Music is a thing that has optimism built into it,” Jerry said. “You can go as far into music as you can fill millions of lifetimes.” Many people never, or only rarely, touch into such a “flow state” in their lives—a state that, as religious and spiritual traditions the world over explain, is the ecstatic reflection of a higher level of consciousness and represents the unknown, boundless potential lying dormant in all of us. That's why it's so striking that the Grateful Dead continued providing such experiences to people for thirty years, up through Garcia's untimely death in 1995. Perhaps today they are doing so once again, back together on the road for the first time since then.

And they're not alone. Now, hundreds of so-called “jam bands” formed in the Dead's mold are out there, too, bands whose dedication to collective improvisation is equaled only by their fans' Deadhead-level devotion. “For many people these days,” says Grateful Dead scholar John Dwork, “jam band concerts are . . . the equivalent of church, or at least that's what they go looking for. That's what we need in our lives—community, ecstatic dance, soulful singalongs, communion with something sacred or special, a heroic adventure, a place to hang our hearts.” I saw thirty Dead shows in three years for those exact reasons—the Dead were my heroes, standing resolutely against the tides of superficiality and materialism that threatened to sweep me off my feet. I wanted the myth of the sixties to be real—that idealism, that sense of a higher purpose. I wanted to believe in something, and I found it in the Dead. Fittingly, renowned mythologist Joseph Campbell found something there too. Despite his extreme distaste for popular culture (he only ever saw two movies, didn't read the newspaper, and hadn't attended a pop concert in decades), he went to see the Grateful Dead and felt “in immediate accord” with them. “I just didn't know anything like that existed,” he said—anything like “25,000 people tied at the heart” in a truly contemporary mythic ritual. It was, he felt, the “antidote for the atom bomb.”

What Campbell discovered was something Deadheads have always thrived on: an archetypal spirit of intimacy and ritual celebration, carried through music. In truth, music of all kinds has borne just such a spirit throughout human history. Much of indigenous and shamanic ceremony is based on this very capacity of sound and rhythm to transport individuals together into extraordinary states of consciousness. Classical Indian musicians consciously reach toward their audiences in improvised performance, stretching themselves to meet—and lift—the mind of the whole. Even the simplest song can gather people inexplicably to each other, as in December 1914, when German and Allied soldiers on the front lines in France put guns down and left their respective trenches to meet briefly as friends. These “Christmas truces,” as they came to be known, started in many cases with common carols sung, across the intervening distance, in the troops' different languages.