Today, "Five Questions" were put to David Gans, co-author of This Is All A Dream We Dreamed: An Oral History of the Grateful Dead. Gans is also the author of Conversations with the Dead: The Grateful Dead Interview Book and Playing in the Band: An Oral and Visual Portrait of the Grateful Dead. Gans is also the host of two nationally syndicated radio shows about the band. So...let's talk some Grateful Dead!
I thought the oral history format worked as a wonderful metaphor for the collective experience that was the Grateful Dead. It made for a highly enjoyable read, that provided a lot of cultural context. Who came up with that direction and what was the process of piecing it all together like?
Our agent, Sandy Choron, was after us to do this for a few years. It is, as you note, the perfect way to do this particular story: collective creativity was at the core of the Dead’s way of being in the world, so a collective narrative just makes sense.
The process was simple: Blair and I worked separately for several months, after setting up a few basic principles (most notably, as we went through the interviews in our archives we avoided material we had used in previous books). I put up a Google docs site for us, with a bucket for each year, and we just dumped bits in there as we went. At a certain point we roughed out the chapter structure and then started redistributing the selections into those bins, reducing as we went. And then we sort of split up the chapters and went to work, refining and organizing and developing the narrative.
Because we are such good friends and long-term colleagues, and because our narrative voices are pretty similar in tone – I would characterize our style as sober, fact-based, and witty but not snarky – we had no trouble at all generating a unified text. Of the few bits of connecting text we put in between the quoted material, I think you’d have a hard time figuring out who wrote what.
I started the intro, handed it over to Blair for additions and rewriting, and we passed it back and forth a couple of times.
I am proud to tell you that there were zero incidences of conflict in our collaboration. Blair was a dream to work with, and so was our editor, Bob Miller (who gets the credit for the title of the book, by the way).
The women around the Grateful Dead —Mountain Girl, Rosie McGee, Sue Swanson and many others — have a real presence in the beginning of the book, with wonderful insight. That tails off towards the end. Was that just a natural progression of the relationships, or did the Dead become more of a closed boys club in those later (and darker) years?
The latter, to some extent – although Jan Simmons (assistant to manager Cameron Sears) is an articulate and soulful voice in the later chapters.
OK. I was blown away by the disclosure that the Garcia Band had a “brief dalliance” with legendary New Orleans pianist James Booker. What can you tell us about this? Does any recorded output, live or otherwise, exist?
There are bootleg tapes of a rehearsal and a gig or two. Blair can tell you more.
I found the comments on the adoption of in-ear monitors (by Rob Eaton and soundman Don Pearson via Dennis McNally) startling. They seem to indicate the band had — literally — stopped listening to one another. Were they doing things by rote by then, as some of those 90s show sound, or am I reading too much into this?
The text speaks for itself. And it’s in the music: much of those last couple of years is pretty hard to listen to.
In the 90s, the band, in large part, felt they simply had to head out on the road to support the Dead “corporation.” I was amazed to read that they had encountered this same problem as early as 1971, eventually leading to their “retirement.” To me, the real tragedy is that this group of highly creative outsiders were unable to solve this problem and, in some ways, were stuck in a dead end job towards the end. Fair?
I think that’s a little harsh, but maybe only a little. The band ran on instinct and wit, with Jerry’s instinct and wit dominating throughout the band’s history.
I once wrote, in the liner notes of a Garcia Band release, “propinquity is destiny in the Grateful Dead.” Some of the band’s personnel decisions happened because somebody showed up with a good idea or a good rap, or because a given person happened to be nearby when a need arose. Sam Cutler is an excellent example: they met him during the weirdness of Altamont, and when that was over he went to ground at Jerry and MG’s house and talked his way into a job. Similarly, Brent Mydland was playing in the Bob Weir Band when the keyboard chair opened up so he wound up with the gig. They got hustled a bunch of times, and they sometimes wound up with brilliant and inspired collaborators.
#gratefuldead #thisisalladreamwedreamed #davidgans #blairjackson
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