“Grateful Dead Origins is a Staggering Achievement and an Authoritative Classic”

Joining the ranks of From He**, Ghost World and X-Men: God Loves, Man Kills, Grateful Dead Origins (writing by Chris Miskiewicz, art by Noah Van Sciver), released in 2020, will go down as one of the great graphic novels of our time. 

Now, as any Deadhead or any person whatsoever in the know surrounding this project will readily tell you, the mission statement of Grateful Dead Origins was a little unusual, a little particular. It is to Miskiewicz’ credit, then, that he acknowledges this in the outplay of the “plot,” and doesn’t strive to write a story, per se, but rather relate the Grateful Dead story. GDO is undeniably a music-lover’s work, free of, say, long escapades with groupies or mind-expanding drug binges out in the wilderness (ok there is one of those, to be fair). All in all, there’s very little content to Grateful Dead Origins that doesn’t seem to directly represent a benchmark moment of the band’s growth or the immortalization of their identity. 

The book, in its opening chapter, makes expedited progress toward a meeting of Jerry Garcia and Phil Lesh. Jerry Garcia is the Grateful Dead’s lead guitarist and co-lead-singer and Phil Lesh, at this time, is a nerdy classical trumpeter whom Garcia convinces to switch instruments with the pithy command of “Listen man… you’re gonna play bass in my band” (at this time Lesh had never picked up a bass). His reasoning for kicking out his current one, Dana Morgan, is “(He) is a great guy, but he isn’t really a musician” [1]. With the help of this exchange, which takes place after a Warlocks concert (a band that would change its name to Grateful Dead partly on account of another band being called The Warlocks on the East Coast), Miskiewicz projects the quality of Jerry Garcia as being driven, perfectionistic and of putting the music above all else in life, an illuminating angle and a refreshing endorsement of the art itself amidst all the unflagging stereotyping of hippies as lazy or airheaded.

By and large, Grateful Dead Origins reinstated my fandom of the band, and made me proud to be such, but I even learned a couple of things too (I’d pretty much already read about the above episode in Phil Lesh’s memoir Searching for the Sound: My Life with the Grateful Dead). One of these is that, lo and behold, Anthem of the Sun (1968) really grooves! Now, along these lines, in no way is GDO a commensurate snapshot of the band’s entire lifespan. In fact, it focuses solely on the four-year span of their formation — in 1965 — to 1969, a date which as far as I observe carries the sole purpose of earmarking the performance of the material from Live/Dead (“St. Stephen”; “Turn on Your Lovelight”), which many would consider an artistic plateau of sorts. For whatever reason, though, Anthem of the Sun, the band’s second album, is never heralded by fans as one of their finer moments in the studio. We have GDO to thank, then, for clearing the air on this, showcasing the critical feedback attached to the record, on the part of some pretty reputable journals, no less. The Rolling Stone review for AOTS is cited directly within the text, in quotations marks and everything, as follows: “The Grateful Dead’s sophomore album Anthem of the Sun is an extraordinary event in its blend of electronic and electric music which could only be compared to Edgar Varese” [2]. The NME review reads in identical citation format within the graphic novel as “It’s so completely unlike anything you ever heard before that it’s practically a new concept in music. It’s haunting, it’s pretty, it’s infinite. It’s a complete mind-blower.” And this is just kind of an unrelated side-note but I am completely embarrassed by my, and everybody else’s, it seems, failure to name Anthem of the Sun as the band’s best album. it’s an exhilirating, avant-garde melding of Beatles “I am the Walrus” musique concrete and the swarthy psychedelia of Jefferson Airplane around this time, with just enough structure (I’m talking some of the songs have repeated vocal rhythms, short of the rigidity of verse/chorus interfaces, to be sure) to bring you back to a triumphant take on reality. And I have Miskiewicz’ and Van Sciver’s work to thank for my long-belated perspective on this blitzkrieg of quintessentially Dead-like greatness. Indeed, Anthem of the Sun, with its unbridled approach to structure and verbose penchant for “jamming,” plays like the perfect precursor to the authoritative Live/Dead and, what’s more, sounds almost exactly like that live album, thanks to the everyman’s approach to production on the part of David Hassinger and of course the band members themselves.

Now, one thing Grateful Dead Origins doesn’t do is shy away from diagramming mishaps, calamities and complications that the band encountered or incurred. The book does a punctilious job of noting how the band went way over their studio budget for recording Anthem of the Sun, hence almost implying that the materialization of an album like is really an existential anomaly, probably not feasible for most mortals, just on a logistical level. There’s this one funny anecdote, for instance, in GDO, where Garcia, blissed-out in studio with joint in hand, asks of Hassinger, “How can me make it sound more purple?”

There are a couple of other dark moments — a minor skirmish between Garcia and Lesh during a fomenting period in the band’s development of their live show, and a slight existential crisis on the part of Garcia at the fact that the aural manifestation of his music will never live up to the ideal he, probably psychedelically, carries in his head, of said music. Still, it makes for a wacky ride that successfully transmits how the Grateful Dead invented not only a new style in rock music, jam, but a lifestyle — a vivacious dedication to the music as expansive art form accompanied by a refusal to pander to radio and commercial objectives, as well as of course the emphasis on the live show as an unique event and one that should excusably be replicated a thousand times over, if need be, by bootlegged tapes. At one point in GDO you get a portrait of the band’s touring van and on the back is depicted a sign that says “Weird Load,” to apparently stand in juxtaposition to the “Wide Load” trucks that can sometimes make a hindrance on the highways of our great nation. Part of the beauty of the Grateful Dead, though, is that their left-field originality, their revolutionary approach to rock music and their tenets of stoner zen seem so internalized, approachable and familiar to us Deadheads by now that the only thing that seems “weird” would be to actually do something in your life on anybody’s terms but your own.  

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[1] Frustratingly enough, Grateful Dead Origins contains no page numbers… what were you guys high when you wrote this book or something (finger wag)? 

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[2] Varese was a classical composer esteemed by Frank Zappa and many other progressive song-structure revolutionaries.