Music fans have been listening to David Gans playing Grateful Dead music on the radio for decades and reading his books on the band. Now they have a chance to study the band’s 60-year career in a Stanford extension course online, starting in April.
1. What is your goal in teaching a Grateful Dead course? What do you want students to learn? What makes the Dead worth a course?
I am a musician and a journalist. I bring to this gig a unique combination of assets: I have been listening to this music and playing this music for more than 50 years. I spent ten years as a music journalist (BAM, Record, Mix, & freelancing), during which time I interviewed members of the band many times. I have been curating this music on the radio for 40 years, and I have produced boxed sets and compilations for the GD and the Jerry Garcia estate. My work as a broadcaster and music producer has led to dozens and dozens of interviews with the musicians and their collaborators.
These things all add up to a deep knowledge of this music and this culture. My approach to teaching—which, by the way, is very new to this college dropout—is to focus on the experience of making and consuming the music. We listen to music in the class and we talk about how it’s made. I often share bits of interviews from my archive.
This iteration of the class will focus almost entirely on guided listening sessions, each co-curated with a musician who plays the music (and two scholars who are also musicologists, but we don’t go too deeply into that stuff).
2. How did the idea come about??
I owe it all to Joel Selvin! He called me a year and a half ago and told me Stanford was looking for someone to teach a class on the GD for Continuing Studies. I reached out to the guy, showed him my GD CV, and he gave me a shot!
3. What first got you into the Dead? What was your first show? If you could go back in time to any show and see it again, which would it be?
I became a Deadhead almost against my will. In early 1972 I was a young singer-songwriter in San Jose, smoking pot and writing songs and playing gigs in coffeehouses. I was into the Beatles, Dylan, CSN, Cat Stevens, Jackson Browne, Elton John, et al. What little I knew of the Grateful Dead did not appeal to me, although I later figured out I had heard and enjoyed some of their songs on the radio without knowing it was them. Song titles like “New Speedway Boogie,” “Ripple” (a song about cheap wine? I think not!) and “Cumberland Blues” put me off, because I wasn’t much interested in blues and boogie. Imagine my surprise when I eventually heard those songs!
4. What’s your favorite Dead album?
I tend not to make lists nor rank stuff, so this is a question I might answer differently from time to time. I suppose I would recommend Europe 72 first, because it shows the band at one of its creative peaks, which also happens to be the edition of the band that I first saw. The album shows the band’s range as songwriters interpreters and improvisers—with the caveat that you’d need to hear the other live albums to get the full picture of their evolution over time. And evolving was constant.
5. On Sirius, you are the voice of the Dead fan community. You started on KPFA and now have a strong, faithful national audience. What’s that like for you and how’s it different from the KPFA show? What made you start the first show on KPFA?
I appeared on the KFOG Deadhead Hour on Feb. 18, 1985, too promote Playing in the Band: An Oral and Visual Portrait of the Grateful Dead. I produced a short documentary on “Greatest Story Ever Told,” using bits of interview with Hunter, Hart and Weir, plus audio excerpts from “The Pump Song” that Mickey was kind enough to give me. That got me hooked! M Dung was the host; he was also the morning drive DJ and the host of the Sunday Night Idiot Show, so he had a full plate and was delighted to have help from me and a couple of other heads. Eventually the station asked me to take over the show, and that led to other stations asking if they could carry it. I had made no such plans, but I was happy that the opportunity arose and thrilled that the band gave me permission.
KPFA called me in 1986 and asked me to help with a weekend of remote broadcasts from the Greek Theater, which were based as fundraisers for KPFA. After that I was invited back to host more fundraising broadcasts, and when KFOG dropped my syndicated show in 1990 I moved it over to KPFA (not the canned show, but a live version of mostly the same material). The KPFA GD Hour became Dead to the World in 1995, when they redid the music schedule and made all music shows two-hour slots).
Being the host of the GD Hour and the author of several books led to my being invited to consult with Sirius when they launched the Grateful Dead Channel. We started the talk show, Tales from the Golden Road, in January 2008. I had been working with Gary Lambert on KPFA programs for years, and so I invited him to co-host.
Tales is nothing like any of the other programs! The syndicated show is a music program, as was Dead to the World from which I retired in November 2015, handing it over to Tim Lynch, who was the perfect successor. This is a talk show! We listen to stories from fans, answer questions (Lambert is a dang encyclopedia of music, theater, movies, TV and especially jazz and GD), and quash the occasional false rumor. It’s been a wonderful experience.
6. How many shows have you seen?
I stopped counting in the 300s, 40-ish year ago!
7. What makes the Dead community different from other bands’ fan bases?
The Dead’s music is hugely eclectic; their repertoire is immense, and they played every song and show differently every time. This was a format that (consciously implemented or not) promoted repeated and sustained engagement. You wouldn’t likely go to three Eagles shows in a row, knowing that each would be series of carefully rehearsed and perfectly executed replicas of their studio recordings, and the exact same show three times in a row. By contrast, the Grateful Dead could (and occasionally did) go six shows without repeating a single song—and we loved it! They conditioned us to appreciate novelty and spontaneity.
I wrote about it in an essay, “Grateful Dead Concerts Are Like Baseball Games,” published in The Official Book of the Dead Heads.
8. Why have they survived for 60 years, despite losing so many key members?
The GD created a musical language that has taken on a life of its own. The original members appear to have sworn some kind of blood oath that kept them together through the struggling years, the addiction years, etc. And the music itself demands to be played and heard. The commitment appears to have been a strong one, and we who love the band and the music have accepted and encouraged them to continue.
9. What’s your feeling about all the Dead cover bands?
I consider myself a direct descendant of the Grateful Dead: like the GD, I combine my own music (first thing I ever played on a guitar was a song I wrote with my brother) with new interpretations of songs from various sources, and I string them all together with improvisation. My repertoire includes a lot of Grateful Dead material, but very little of it presented in canonical forms. My interpretation of Jerry Garcia’s most important legacy is: TELL THE STORY IN YOUR OWN VOICE. I don’t think I have ever been in a band that only played GD music; my pals and I always had our own songs and our own favorite “covers” to do along with the Dead stuff.
That said, I also have plenty of respect for those who do strive to replicate the Dead’s sound. I can’t begrudge anyone playing the music they love the most in front of audiences that love it along with them.
10. Did you ever think it would get this big and last this long?
Nope! After Jerry died I thought I might have to wind down the GD Hour and look for a new job. I was wrong. My station list continued to grow for a few years after Jerry’s passing, and although it has been shrinking a bit in recent years I am still picking up new stations here and there.
I knew the music was going to live forever because this immense national subculture of tribute bands has also continued to grow.
Some of us thought Fare Thee Well might be something of an ending, but no! All those tribes that got together for one more wild weekend in 2015 decided they weren’t ready to disband—and then Dead & Company came along and the caravan of buses resumed!
To find more about David Gans’ books, visit perfectible.net. For information about the Stanford class, visit continuingstudies.stanford.edu.