The Grateful Dead and their world: popular music and the avant-garde in the San Francisco Bay Area, 1965-1975

This dissertation explores the cultural conditions for the popular appreciation of “high” art, experimental, modernist and avant-garde elements, and the resulting incongruous mélange of genres, through a study of the history of such transgressions of aesthetic boundaries in the San Francisco Bay Area from 1965 to 1975. Based on archival research, interviews with participants, as well as the analysis of key musical works and practices that influenced and realized such boundary crossings, it offers new insights into the role of this particular time and place in creating the more inclusive musical world of today. Particularly underexplored in earlier scholarship on popular music from the Bay Area at this time is the way in which this type of performance practice has functioned to challenge distinctions between large categories of music, specifically those broadly categorized as popular that are defined, at least partly, in opposition to those considered “high art.” Though undoubtedly popular in terms of performance environs, audience, and many qualities of the music performed, the use of musical elements normally understood as outside the usual purview of popular music were quite common during this period in the Bay Area. Yet, in spite of the exceptional nature of this stylistic hybridity, there has been comparatively little prior scholarship about the specific ways in which those involved negotiated between musical traditions previously understood by many people as irreconcilable, as well as detailed analyses of the techniques and practices used to realize such connections. Because the rock band the Grateful Dead is the most significant example of these various issues from the time and place that form the focus of this study, as well as the most influential, they are the primary concern of this dissertation, though the work of some other related musicians and ensembles is also discussed.