Louisiana State University LSU Digital Commons LSU Master's Theses Graduate School 2004 "Never could read no road map": geographic perspectives on the Grateful Dead Daniel R. Culli Louisiana State University and Agricultural and Mechanical College, [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalcommons.lsu.edu/gradschool_theses Part of the Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons Recommended Citation Culli, Daniel R., ""Never could read no road map": geographic perspectives on the Grateful Dead" (2004). LSU Master's Theses. 2331. https://digitalcommons.lsu.edu/gradschool_theses/2331 This Thesis is brought to you for free and open access by the Graduate School at LSU Digital Commons. It has been accepted for inclusion in LSU Master's Theses by an authorized graduate school editor of LSU Digital Commons. For more information, please contact [email protected]. “NEVER COULD READ NO ROAD MAP”: GEOGRAPHIC PERSPECTIVES ON THE GRATEFUL DEAD A Thesis Submitted to the Graduate Faculty of the Louisiana State University and Agricultural and Mechanical College in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Science in The Department of Geography and Anthropology by Daniel R. Culli B.A., Southern Illinois University at Edwardsville B.S., Southern Illinois University at Edwardsville August 2004 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I would like to thank all of my family and friends, especially my parents and Sandra, for their support while continuing my education and writing my thesis. I must thank Dr. Kent Mathewson for agreeing to take me on and allowing me to pursue this topic, as many professors would frown upon such research. Thanks also to my other committee members, Dr. Craig Colten and Dr. Andrew Curtis, for their support and advisement. I would also like to thank Dr. Roger Leonard for employing me during much of my time at LSU while I was pursuing research in a completely unrelated topic. Dr. Paul Burger deserves thanks for his teaching, advice, support, and encouragement to attend graduate school during my years at Southern Illinois University at Edwardsville. I can not forget to mention all of the other Grateful Dead scholars, some of whom offered their support via email, such as Dr. Rebecca Adams, Rob Weiner, and David Dodd. A special thanks also goes to Marc Evans and especially Kevin Weil of www.deadlists.com for graciously providing the tour data in digital format. ii TABLE OF CONTENTS ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS……………………………………………………………….ii LIST OF FIGURES...…………………………………………………………………….iv ABSTRACT……………………………………………………………………………….v CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION AND LITERATURE REVIEW……………………...1 2 CONTEXT: SAN FRANCISCO AND ACID ROCK…………………..14 3 THE GRATEFUL DEAD CARNIVAL…………………………………36 4 TOUR GEOGRAPHY……………………………………………...……69 5 LYRIC GEOGRAPHY…………………………………………………..99 6 CONCLUSIONS AND FURTHER RESEARCH…..………………….110 REFERENCES………………………………………………………………………....116 VITA………..…………………………………………………………………………..127 iii LIST OF FIGURES 2.1. Acid Rock Places 1...……………………………..…………………………………31 2.2. Acid Rock Places 2.…………………………………………………………………32 4.1. Locations of Grateful Dead Concerts, 1965 – 1995...………………………………72 4.2. Locations and Quantity of Grateful Dead Concerts, 1965 – 1966…..…..…………..76 4.3. Locations and Quantity of Grateful Dead Concerts, 1967………...………………...77 4.4. a. Location of Grateful Dead Concerts, 1965 – 1968; b. Location of Grateful Dead Concerts, 1965 – 1969; c. Locations and Quantity of Grateful Dead Concerts, 1965 – 1969..……………………………………….81 4.5. Locations and Sequence of Grateful Dead Concerts, Europe 1972………….…...…84 4.6. Locations and Quantity of Grateful Dead Concerts, 1965 – 1972 (excluding Hawaii and Europe)………………………………………………….85 4.7. Locations, Quantity, and Sequence of Non-California Grateful Dead Concerts, 1985……………………………………………………………..89 4.8. Average Number of Grateful Dead Concerts per Year per State, 1965 – 1995 ………………………………………………...……………………93 4.9. Number of Grateful Dead Concerts in Each City Played, 1965 – 1995…………….93 4.10. Number of Grateful Dead Concerts per 100,000 People in Each State Displayed by Standard Deviations Above or Below the Mean, 1985 – 1995………………………………………………………………………95 iv ABSTRACT The Grateful Dead hold a unique niche in the musical, social, and cultural history of the United States. However, while the volume of available academic literature concerning the band is increasing, the Grateful Dead remain to be nearly ignored by academia and, to this point apparently, completely ignored by cultural geographers. This paper introduces the Grateful Dead into the field of geography. I analyze the geography of certain aspects of the band, such as its context in San Francisco, the carnival atmosphere of the entire phenomenon, the over 2300 tour dates, as well as the huge catalog of lyrics sung by the band throughout their thirty year career. I intend this thesis to serve as an introduction to geographic research of the Grateful Dead phenomenon as well as a basis for further geographic research of it, offering some ideas for further research in the final chapter. v CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION AND LITERATURE REVIEW Introduction The band the Grateful Dead holds a unique niche in the musical, cultural, and social history of the United States. While coming from various musical traditions, including the American popular styles such as folk, bluegrass, rock ‘n’ roll, and jazz, as well as European classical and marching band training, the members of the Grateful Dead banded together to create an original acid rock sound. The Grateful Dead as band and as phenomenon evolved to a certain extent out of the beatnik movement, but especially with the hippie and counterculture movements of the 1960s which were most prevalent in San Francisco, California. As time went on, the band experienced changes in their often evolving musical style, choice of drugs, and band personnel. Yet they continued to tour extensively for much of their thirty year career, establishing a unique and extremely devoted following along the way. Inherently tied into the musical, cultural, and social history to which the band is so connected is the field of geography, which, generally speaking, attempts to locate phenomenon in space and (usually) time. Cultural geography is one of the discipline’s long established fields. However, music has only in the past forty years become a topic of interest to cultural geographers, and the Grateful Dead have received little if any attention in the field. Because of the obvious vital connections between music and culture, and because of the band’s significance in both time and place to the social, cultural, and musical history of the United States, the Grateful Dead (both as a group and as a phenomenon) lends itself well to study in the area of geography of music. 1 This thesis looks at several aspects of the Grateful Dead phenomenon, to my knowledge for the first time, from a geographical perspective. First, I offer reviews of the history and literature of music geography and the academic study of the Grateful Dead, pointing out the lack of and importance of geographic work on the band. In chapter 2, I discuss the geographical concept of place, especially as it applies to acid rock as place music in San Francisco. In chapter 3, I present the idea of the carnivalesque, as elaborated by Mikhail Bakhtin, and apply it to the Grateful Dead phenomenon and its geography, emphasizing the spatial aspects of the Grateful Dead carnival. In a related fashion, I look at Grateful Dead concerts and the adherents’ (“Deadheads”) patterns of migration or quasi-pilgrimage as they follow the band’s tours from show to show, briefly touching upon religious qualities of the phenomenon. Analysis and mapping of these tour patterns yields yet another Dead geography, which I present in chapter 4. Finally, in chapter 5 I demonstrate the textual geography which can be found in the multitude of lyrics of the band’s repertoire. History of Music Geography The following section provides a brief review of the work in music geography. George Carney (1994a, 2), the most notable music geographer in the United States, writes: Human geography research has focused on virtually every segment of human spatial behavior ranging from industrialization to settlement patterns. It has concentrated on the material (tangible/visible) and nonmaterial (oral/spiritual) elements of human spatial behavior including the distributions and effects of value systems, languages, religions, architecture, politics, sports, and foodways. But for years, cultural geography largely ignored the spatial and environment components of one of the most significant traits in American [and, for that matter, World] folk and popular culture – music. 2 Lily Kong (1995a, 183-84) similarly points out the lack of interest in music and popular culture in general, claiming the existence of bias in geographical research towards elite culture. While this lack of interest in popular culture has declined over the years, there most certainly remains a partiality towards the visual. So, while relatively little work has been done in music geography, this is not to imply by any means that the connection between music and culture has not been studied in other academic areas. Perhaps the best example - the field of ethnomusicology - began to emerge in the 1880s and 1890s and is often associated with but not necessarily contained in anthropology. This was approximately the same time as both academic anthropology and geography emerged as professional disciplines. Though the field has now expanded, ethnomusicology