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.

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.

But it was the sixties, and rock and roll, that elevated this age-old phenomenon to a new scale of popular intensity. At Watkins Glen, New York, in 1973, the Grateful Dead played to some 600,000 people, a crowd that stretched over two miles from the stage. It was an occasion that still stands as the largest rock concert in history. (Woodstock, by comparison, hit roughly 400,000.) “We have four or five times as many people here as we have at our [auto] races,” said the county sheriff, “and we are getting less than half the trouble. These kids are great.” I can scarcely imagine that many people in one place, much less that many people in one place with their minds trained on a single object. If you want to try, consider that the average sports arena holds only 50-60,000—and multiply by ten.

Who knows what unseen influence such gargantuan incidents might have had on the culture at large? Is consciousness a cumulative thing? One person meditating alone can have a tangible effect in a room. Even the Trips Festival of early '66, the largest-ever Acid Test, involved only 3-5,000 people. Up until that point, Phil recalled, “nobody could have guessed that you could give thousands of people acid in one room and not have it blow up from the psychic energy . . . the cords of our equipment were literally jumping out of the wall sockets.” So, 600,000 at Watkins Glen? What unknown miracles of consciousness might have broken forth then, subterranean, invisible?

Of course, the Grateful Dead weren't the only sixties band to work miracles. How about the Beatles, whose fans, admits Grateful Dead publicist Dennis McNally, “made the enthusiasm of Deadheads look quite demure”? If the Dead can be measured on the Richter scale of their psychic influence on large numbers of people, then surely, so can the Beatles. And by this standard, are the boys from San Francisco even in the same league as the lads from Liverpool? As far out as the Dead were, they never broke free of a relatively marginal counterculture. The Beatles, on the other hand—everybody loves the Beatles. “There was an alchemy in the way they came together that made two plus two equal not four but forty,” journalist Mark Hertsgaard writes. They gave the words “come together” a whole new meaning.

In the summer of 1965, when the Grateful Dead (then known as the Warlocks) were still earning their first stripes in the bars and clubs of the San Francisco peninsula, the Beatles played not the largest, but the first-ever concert held in a sports arena in the U.S., at Shea Stadium in Flushing, New York. This was ten years before I was born (yep, I had to watch it on DVD). But in spite of all the decades in between, I could hardly believe what I was seeing. Here were four kids barely into their twenties, caught in the midst of a passion that had everything—and perhaps very little—to do with them. They were at the eye of a cultural hurricane; how could four people alone cause such lunacy? To see otherwise decorous young women unleashed as hysterical, sexual beings—en masse—would have frightened me if it hadn't so furiously held my attention. The marvelous thing was, none of it seemed to be going to the Beatles' heads, though it did go to John's elbows, with which he played a madcap keyboard solo. “We like lunatics, it's healthy,” he quipped. Beatlemania got so big, so fast—bigger than they could handle, really. But for some mysterious reason, they didn't have to handle it, that pressure high enough to launch Paul's Hofner bass to the moon. They just climbed aboard and rode it straight to the center of the unexplainable. At Shea Stadium, I could see the boundaries between them broken and obliterated; and them, sweating, reeling, singing, helplessly amazed. It set the crowd on fire with a kind of innocence I'd never seen at a Dead show, another kind of wonder.

There were 55,000 people there, screaming so loud the Beatles could barely hear themselves playing. At least Deadheads listened to the music; Beatles fans couldn't even get to the first note without succumbing to something like a virus that made them yell till they were hoarse, some sort of “emotional epidemic.” It was as if they were ripping holes clean through the walls between them: Who knows the depth of impact this had? How about when the Beatles first performed on the Ed Sullivan show in February 1964, a year and a half earlier? Seventy-three million people were watching. That's forty percent of the U.S. population, roughly equal to the total number of televisions in the country that year. During that hour, precincts across the nation reported the lowest crime rate in half a century—even thieves, thugs, and malcontents took a timeout for the Beatles. Billy Joel thought, “This can be done. I can do that.” He was fifteen. Billy Graham, forty-five, even broke the Sabbath to watch.

Who knows how they did it. “Probably not since Shakespeare has so much intellect been invested in explaining something so simple,” Robert Burt writes in The Beatles: The Fabulous Story of John, Paul, George, and Ringo. “The Beatles were four guys in a pop group who made happy music and gave everyone a good time for a few years.” A few years? The Beatles were still topping the charts at the turn of the millennium with “1,” their album of singles. It had to be more than that. How did they manage to be so fully with each other, in such a way that everyone felt it? Not like the Dead were, not as shamans or warlocks, but as ordinary young men? Simultaneously down-to-earth and larger than life, the Beatles swiftly took on the power of a tidal wave in mass consciousness. “They are very like children in many ways,” producer George Martin said. “They love anything magical.” And the magic of being together, with unusual joy and uncommon trust, fed their music with irrepressible enthusiasm and unceasing originality. As they evolved and matured, a whole generation grew up with them. In the process, they helped chart a course through the changing tides of a turbulent era. From Motown to R&B, straight-ahead rock and pop to wide-ranging psychedelia, the Beatles spanned what seems like eons in a few short years, tugging an emerging youth culture right behind. That speed of change was almost too much to take, but take it young people did—and so did many of their parents. “It was up to you—which is to say, all of us—to make changes, and you could do it,” Hertsgaard writes. “That message resonated deeply and powerfully in the mass psyche, for it put people in closer touch with their higher selves and made them feel part of a larger project of human renewal. The Beatles, in short, brought out the best in people.”

Whatever their secret was, Paul McCartney still has it in spades. “I don't feel like finishing or stopping,” he said recently, after his 2002 “Back in the U.S.” tour, his first in the United States in nearly ten years. And this time, I had the rare fortune to see him in person. Just into his sixties, his talent, sparkle, and poise all seemed only to have grown, captivating whole new generations of fans with the same enchantment that made the Beatles what they were. It seemed impossible; I still can't quite get my mind around it. Even Jerry Garcia, gallant ship's captain, broke slowly under the pressure of a lifetime as a mythic hero, losing the fight after nearly twenty years of heroin addiction. Paul, by contrast, was more in command than ever, playing and singing like a man half his age. Out in front of a band that was tearing and jumping fresh all over his Beatles and Wings songs, he boosted everything he touched into a sort of intimate glory, whether or not you even knew the tunes. Little Gen-Y kids were bursting like popcorn; college students, parents, and grandparents were crying, gasping, dancing, and basking in the sheer generosity of it all. One fan held up a sign, “NYC 1965 Shea Stadium,” and somehow I, as a twenty-eight-year-old, knew why—I felt the same, at the hands of Midas, exhilarated for the first time all over again.

“Listening to his music,” Gen-X actor John Cusack remarks on Back in the U.S., a DVD chronicling this same tour, “is part of the whole fabric of becoming conscious.” The most surprising thing of all is that McCartney is no mere footnote to history, his music no romantic allusion to the timeless relevance of sixties sensibility. Rather, his influence is still active today, still pointing forward in the year 2004. Just last year, for example, he took the residents of Copenhagen somewhere they'd never been before. A Danish friend who lives in Østerbro district, near the Idrætsparken where Paul's concert took place, told me the story: “After the show was over, the city was saturated with affection,” he said. “The whole place was humming. We've never had that kind of experience in Denmark, at all.” Crowds that spanned the generations filled the streets, he described. Retailers and merchants across Copenhagen, like the bicycle shop on his corner, opened their doors and put out tables, serving beer and refreshments. Most of the city, it seemed, was out until four in the morning, singing Beatles songs, laughing. “People were just drawn to each other. They gathered in groups. The whole town was one big meeting place.” Though the boomers among them felt a swell of nostalgia for the good old days, it was not accompanied by the usual sense that life was better then than it was now. There were no lamentations for a past lost to the cruelty of time, no sad ruminations on a fall from grace. Instead, he concluded, “It was completely fresh. There was no wrong in this, everything was right. Life is good and love is sweet.” It was as if Paul made everyone young again—not in imagination but in fact, transformed inside their own bodies.

When I was eighteen and a bit younger myself, I went to sing in Russia on a sort of musical peace mission with my United Methodist choir. By then, I was already into the Dead; I remember playing “Uncle John's Band” in Red Square on a five-dollar Russian guitar. Ten years later, in May 2003, Sir Paul put on his first-ever show in Russia, also in Red Square. Meeting with the ex-Beatle before the concert, Russian President and ex-KGB agent Vladimir Putin “confessed that in Soviet times the Beatles were considered 'propaganda of an alien ideology,'” CBS reported. When asked if he'd listened to the Beatles anyway, Putin replied, “Yes, of course—it was wildly popular. . . . It was a taste of freedom; a window on the world.” Beatles music, it appears, was strong enough to puncture even the Iron Curtain. And for a hundred thousand Russians—some of whom fit into the storied quadrangle in front of the Kremlin, the rest of whom gathered behind police barricades to listen—this was the chance of a lifetime, the chance to see a hero who, for decades, was only accessible by bad radio or bootleg. “Next stop the moon,” said Paul. And who would stand in his way?

“I like the fame because of what you can do for charity,” Paul comments during Back in the U.S. “And I think if your heart's in the right place, you can do a lot of great stuff.” Yes, indeed, and he has. As for Jerry, whose creative incandescence will undoubtedly stand the test of time . . . to be honest, I'm ashamed of him. “Fame is an illusion,” he complained in one of the last interviews he ever gave, before a junkie's isolation became a dead man's coffin. “It's very hard to take the fame seriously, and I don't think anybody wants me to. What's it good for?” I guess we'll never know. But what are the moral implications of being a hero? If the power of consciousness itself can elevate whole groups of people so dramatically, who's to say it can't push them down with equal weight? “The Dead do something no other musicians of their stature or influence can,” observed the Village Voice in 1987. “They suggest the possibility of utopia in everyday life . . . indirectly nurture humanity, goodness, joy, truth, and solidarity among their devoted audience. . . . [They] do no less through their music than espouse the quaint notion that art can save your life.” Isn't it ironic, then, that Jerry couldn't save his own from whatever demons beset him?

Jerry's bandmate Phil once said, “we were on the tip of the arrow of human consciousness flying through time.” Perhaps the Grateful Dead, or at least their ambivalent leader, fell off that arrow years ago, while Paul fashioned his into a jet, somehow managing to keep the wind in his hair. But what if that arrow itself—the arrow they both pulled and fired—yet flies, gathering speed, about to break the sound barrier? Back at the Trips Festival in '66, back in '67 when the Beatles released Sgt. Pepper's, a mass revolution in consciousness seemed just around the corner. Might it still be there waiting, working even? I don't know. Maybe none of us do, yet. Nevertheless, merely the potential these bands suggested—the potential makings of a more lasting, collective entry into higher states of holistic awareness—is enough to make us think twice about who we are and what is possible. Think, and wonder, as we walk out the amphitheater gates after the last notes of the encore, wrapped in a blanket or two, looking at the sky, asking questions the Dead and the Beatles made so compelling.