Inheritance and the Grateful Underground
Published April 10, 2007
By Elias Altman
Innovations can take place simultaneously. The need to calculate the area of a curve became a necessity in the 17th century due to advances in astronomy and physics. Both Sir Isaac Newton and William Leibniz, working independently and from different starting points, solved the problem identically. They created calculus.
Such an instance of simultaneity demonstrates that there are large forces at work in any epoch. These diverse forces propel societies in one direction and lead different people to reach similar conclusions about the world, though their methods may differ.
A more subtle example of this process took place in the U.S. during the 1960s, a time when people seriously questioned the way in which the world operated. However, within this upheaval there was a serious clash between social movements (anti-war, civil rights, black power) and feelings of disillusionment and assumed hopelessness in the face of an uncaring world.
This decade continues to haunt our culture memory. We look at it nostalgically as a time when people experimented with art, politics, and music. It remains our romantic model for youth rebellion.
New York City, NY, 1966. Andy Warhol and Pop Art are international sensations. His huge hyper-industrial studio, the Factory, is a social hub that not only churns out Marilyn Monroe silkscreens but also heroin addicts and avant-garde music. The latter is provided by the noise-loving rock n’ roll group, the Velvet Underground.
The Factory is a unique place featuring constant, speed-fueled activity and the social blending of college dropouts and cross-dressers from Uptown. The Velvet Underground is the sound of this gritty urban happening. Warhol produces the debut album and creates The Exploding Plastic Inevitable, a light show, to go with them.
La Honda, CA, 1966. Ken Kesey, with profits from his novel One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, wires his estate with sound equipment and film cameras. Idealistic hippies and reactionary Hell’s Angels mingle, smoke pot, and drink. Kesey sets up psychedelic light shows accompanied by the soon-to-be Grateful Dead.
Kesey’s commune in La Honda and his Dead-assisted Acid Tests in San Francisco meld the on-the-road mentality of the Beat generation with the free-love of the emerging hippie movement. His cocktail of LSD and the Dead becomes the major strain of West Coast, and soon national, hedonistic youth revolt.
Most people with an affinity for either group or counter-culture hero will contest these similarities. The introverted, East Coast artist Andy Warhol with the amphetamine-driven Velvet Underground is miles away from Ken Kesey’s West Coast, acid-infused Grateful Dead jam sessions.
While there are marked differences in method, the end results are striking. Both charismatic leaders utilized new film and lighting equipment in conjunction with radical musical groups to invent new worlds to escape the one with which they were confronted. They reacted to the changing times with the same abandon, and they hoped to carve out something new.
The movements also created the two poles of American rock sound: the stripped-down basement sound of the Velvet Underground and the wandering solo essence of the Dead. The average UVM rock listener, in his/her most reduced form, either loves the Strokes/White Stripes/Indie-rock or Phish/Widespread Panic/Jam bands.
Along with the sounds, we have inherited their spirit. Both groups advocated a disdain for the phony world and its situations, revisions, and decisions. They reacted to the political tumult of the Vietnam War and the civil rights movement with different forms of detachment. They were both anti-protest music; in fact, they are both overtly apolitical.
The two bands employed different notation, but both have left us with the same solution for the problem of adolescence in America. Just like the discoveries of Newton and Leibniz, those two methods still affect us today – they are two sides of the same coin.
And so we inherit their escapism. The Velvet Underground and the Grateful Dead’s lyrics become virtually indistinguishable: “There are problems in these times, but oh, none of them are mine” = “I don’t know, don’t really care, let there be songs to fill the air.”
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