THEY INVENTED A NEW FORM OF MUSIC

You couldn’t call it fusion. Fusion implies a conscious melding of two or more types of music. You could listen to the Dead with a categorical ear, and say: “That’s bluegrass, that’s jazz, that’s classical, that’s rock ’n’ roll, that’s cowboy.” But don’t think for an instant that’s how they thought of it. This isn’t what the Dead did, simply because they didn’t recognize the borders between types of music to begin with. They didn’t fuse genres as much as crossbreed them to make them organically linked. Their mode is stylistic polyrhythmic innovation, a civilized musical argument between the musicians, sometimes an argument between two sides of the same thing, like a fugue, with a potentially ecstatic resolution that either does or doesn’t resolve on any particular evening, a freewheeling house blend, a dash of magic, Wiccan without the bitter. Phil says that the band is a paradigm of something, a model of homo gestalt, a phrase that for some reason didn’t catch on with the other band members. Point is, you throw a sponge into a bucket of water and it’s going to swell up and grow. Throw a bunch of ingredients in a pot and cook it up and you’ve got gumbo—and the ingredients aren’t all musical. Some are social, philosophical, psychological, historical, and mythical. Sure, after playing on the same bill with Miles Davis for multiple shows, mostly at the Fillmore, the sad urban cool of Miles’s horn began to seep into Jerry Garcia’s solos, like osmosis, but it’s doubtful that it was schematic, it just happened. It was music, man—and it was beautiful. One time Jerry and the devils jammed on a rhythmic extract from Miles’s Sketches of Spain. Afterward Jerry said, “I play a great trumpet.” Phil tried to reject Miles, told himself he didn’t like the breathy notes, but Miles fought his way into Phil’s playlist with his musical speedball, a seemingly paradoxical combination of wired, nervous riffs and a smooth vibe.

Miles was like the Beatles in the sense that he kept finding new ways to blow your mind. He kept changing his game, stepping it up, pushing the boundaries. Late in 1970, the Dead played a four-night stand at the Fillmore West, with Miles and a brand new band promoting his new record Bitches Brew.

Some saw it as the birth of something brand new, fusion jazz, and of course the Dead soaked it up. Miles was simply coming at it from the other direction. The Dead had been doing their version of it for five years already. There is an argument that fusion jazz was born the day Phil Lesh joined The Warlocks and explained that sometimes magical things happen when a band plays not as they have rehearsed to play, but rather by finding a groove and ad-libbing. The notion might have crashed and burned during early gigs in pizza parlors, where audiences and bosses alike told them to cut out the noise, but for the tenacity of these musicians who forged on until they found their audience, freshly dosed, all receivers open, at the first acid tests.