Dead Beatles

DEAD BEATLES The best musical improvisation, in ensemble, re-creates the play of animals and children. This musical playfulness can be experienced by listeners and dancers, and can serve to connect us with the playfulness of The Trickster archetype. And the more the Trickster is welcomed into the collective psyche and political reality, the more irrational play is embraced, the more society advances. I forego definitions of music, though I will explore the nature of improvisation as this proposition unfolds. But let’s begin by answering the question What do I mean by play? since play is less commonly understood. Play of the non-competitive sort, Original Play (Donaldson 14-21), is what happens when one or more beings get together to have fun and experience belonging and acceptance. Nobody gets hurt. All animals, including humans do it, but humans are best at it during their first few years. Play is intrinsic. It pre-dates culture but doesn’t rule it. All players know that they are playing and observe the rules of an imagined reality, though those rules are flexible and can be changed by mutual agreement. Thus play is founded on transient, not studied, competence. Players are spontaneously creative, and they play, irrationally, with no internal moral objective and no external judgment. They have no goals, winners, losers, or products. Their play has meaning, but not purpose. There is play in the pretend-fighting of dogs, where the dance of I am going to bite you is feigned and then suspended before any harm is possible. There is play in the life of dolphins, that “[i]t has been observed by many scientists that [dolphins] are pranksters, that they have a sense of humor…[p]lay seems to be their default state (Casey).” There is play in infants and toddlers. If you get down on the ground with a child under the age of four, and roll around without clutching, 1 tickling or hitting, you can have great fun without it ever becoming an actual game or without any moral lessons attached to the cavorting. For the purposes of this investigation, we synthesize a definition of original play from those of Diane Ackerman, Johann Huizinga, and O. Fred Donaldson: 1. Play is voluntary. Players are free to choose to play and free to choose to quit playing. Players can recognize when playing has ceased. 2. Play exists within AND apart from culture, it is beautiful and it is fun. It has no moral function, and it is irrational. 3. Play is actively engaged in, so it is not lounging or boredom, but it does include daydreaming and fantasy. 4. Play has rules that emerge, they are not imposed. Players can do the unexpected, change the rules, and experiment with novel behaviors and ideas. As a pure form of creativity, competence is not judged, and play is more accurately described as loosely structured than as unstructured. 5. Play frequently has an as-if quality defined by its rules and the marking off of a sacred circle that all the players understand—for example, the boundaries of a playground; entering a fantasy world; when pretending that a cardboard box is a car; or when dogs pretend to growl and bite but do not harm. Play is about means, not ends, and the meaningfulness of the activity itself, not of anything that is goal-directed or purposeful. Intrinsically motivated goals are within the process, not extrinsic to it. Though play is prevalent in the behavior of animals and infant-to-toddler children, it’s energy is retained and sustained by some youth and adults. This most frequently manifests in the arts, and theories of play offer a critical insight into musical creation and performance, and implications for society at large. While it is universal, even across life forms, and life-nurturing, the irrational and unpredictable nature of playfulness challenges the conception of society as an orderly state run by adults following rules and norms that sharply divide adulthood and childhood. The normal functioning of our society relies on the enforcement of generational identities that separate play from the so-called real world. Imagine the harsh consequences of presenting a case to the Supreme Court dressed as a clown. Or broadcasting that due to a mild winter and a decrease in the spaghetti 2 weevil population, Swiss farmers were enjoying a bumper crop of spaghetti.1 Or throwing a pie at the richest man in the world. Or throwing dollar bills from the gallery onto the floor of the NY Stock Exchange. Or making fun of war. We haven’t found the way to open that box and allow a more pervasive role for Play, for fear the chaos or different social arrangements it might bring. Playfulness calls the forced orderliness of society into question. Yet history is dotted with nervy, silly, and bold tricksters and pranksters who pull down the pants of the social order and rip open rationality, just to see what might emerge. Improvisation Play can bubble up at a live musical performance. Jazz established an improvisational style, primarily imported from West Africa, of sensitive interplay traced to Congo Square in New Orleans, the earliest Dixieland, and the seminal jazz performances of Louis Armstrong’s Hot Five and Hot Seven (1925-28). This jazz ethos of collective improvisation never went away. In bluegrass as well, “the instruments talk to each other” (Pooley 9). But to attain this level of playfulness generally requires, among other things, instrumental competence and advanced musicianship. That is, the practiced ability to express musical ideas fluidly, and the hours of ensemble playing required to become responsive to other musicians. And then, with the added element of right-stuff attitude and simpatico audiences, musicians can recreate interactive play in live concert performance settings.2 So the concept of “transient competence” in play is rendered here as the transience of a musical idea, not the transient competence of the musicians.3 In play, no idea or ‘game’ is allowed to dominate for too long, and in the best jams—jazz, rock, and otherwise—ideas bounce around for a little while, and after they’ve been played with, experimented on, and exhausted, the musicians move on to another corner of the playground. In 3 other words, in the best improvisational music, the musical ideas are playing with each other in the same way that animals and infants do. In the best improvisational music, play is fully animated and present. In the following comparison of the Beatles and the Grateful Dead, I will describe how the play element manifested in each, specifically in terms of how their respective careers did or did not allow for improvisational skills to develop and the consequences of such. These two bands’ stories seem wildly divergent, but their intentions as they embarked upon their journeys and their songcraft were remarkably comparable: exquisite ensemble playing to loyal, regional audiences; traceable lines to traditional roots; advanced and innovative chord progressions and voicings; seamless changes in and out of odd time signatures; heartfelt, honest and sophisticated melodies and lyrics; and bold vocal harmonies. Playing with the Band Play, in this very nuanced form, best describes what the Grateful Dead were able to manifest on a regular basis for thirty years. At their shows, the interaction, or play, between audience and musician was intense, archetypal and visionary. The seed of this phenomenon was sown in the Sixties. The Dead had observed the hazards of the starmaking machinery, and they resolved to avoid them and sustain their lifeblood, the live show. They drew their own community around them, maintained an ideological distance from their record company, and an aversion, intended or not, to overnight popularity. By building their audience gradually through live performance and avoiding pop wars for domination that require image-building and combative ambition (like any capitalist enterprise), they were able to cultivate an approach to song, improvisation, and mutual musical response that nurtured and sustained play in their music. They had their ups and downs, 4 and even broke up for a short time, but overall, they invoked the carnival, as “…a band beyond description…a rainbow full of sound… fireworks, calliopes and clowns…” [Grateful Dead (Blues for Allah), The Music Never Stopped, Grateful Dead Records, US, September 1975/UK, September ‘75]. Their legendary longevity was held aloft on the breath of the musical playfulness that ebbed and flowed at their live shows. By some counts, they held the record for most live performances of any band.4 *************** Whether as children or adults, if you and I are rolling around on the ground and getting into Original Play, a scenario might proceed thus: we wrestle gently, laughing, rolling around, pushing, arching, squealing, not clutching at each other, not tickling, not sexually arousing, just playing. At one point the energy might change, and we could get involved in a game with our hands, where I would make a gesture and you would mimic it, I would mimic back, you again, adding an improvisation, me again, adding yet another variation. This would continue until the game morphed into something completely unlike what we had begun, then perhaps returning somehow to the original theme; or, before the interaction became tiresome, predictable or boring, we would bring it to a climax or a fizzle, and then try something novel and in a different direction. This playfulness is not dissimilar from the musical interplay of a Grateful Dead concert. A jam that to the uninitiated might seem like interminable wandering and noodling was, to those in on the conversation, a musical invitation to play, virtually identical to Original Play.

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