David Gans’ musical activities first came to my attention when I was asked to review his 2008 album, The Ones That Look the Weirdest Taste the Best, for this site. The title referenced fresh produce and how items that don’t look pleasing to the eye are still delicious.
I mention this during our recent conversation, and how mainstream food culture has caught up to him. The low-key Gans shrugs off that viewpoint. “There’s nothing even slightly new about that. My wife was part of an organic grocery collective in San Francisco in 1976. Eating healthy is one of the central tenets of hippiedom going back to the ‘60s. So, there’s nothing novel about that.”
Gans has made good with his allegiance to hippie ways and a creative life. He’s put together a comfortable career that involves writing (songs and books), recording and performing, as well as focusing on the Grateful Dead as host “The Grateful Dead Hour” and “Dead to the World” and co-host of “Tales from the Golden Road” on SiriusXM’s Grateful Dead channel. He also incorporates the group’s catalog in his solo and band concerts.
Already an author of three books on the beloved San Francisco act (plus one on the Talking Heads), Gans is now supporting a new take on the band. Co-written with Blair Jackson, This Is All a Dream We Dreamed: An Oral History of the Grateful Dead offers a breezy read and exhaustive account that features the perspectives by more than 100 new and archival interviews including band members, associates and Heads.
Simultaneously, he released his 11th album – It’s a Hand-me-Down – which consists of his interpretations of 13 numbers originally performed by the Dead. Numbers such as “Lazy River Road” and “Attics of My Life” are presented as intimate solo acoustic versions while “Ship of Fools,” “Stagger Lee,” “Brokedown Palace” and others use multi-tracking to mimic his guitar looping technique when he plays these songs live.
As Gans explains, the two works were meant to link up in multiple ways.
JPG: You’ve been touring in support of the album and the book, of course. Both are connected by using a crow in the artwork of the album and sporadically in the book. Why that imagery?
DG: Blair Jackson and I were fortunate to be able to participate in the design of the book. Sometimes, the publisher will either have an in-house or outside designer do the work and not allow the authors to participate. We wanted to make sure they that didn’t doll this thing up in a cheesy psychedelic graphics. We didn’t want any trippy lettering. We didn’t want dancing bears. We didn’t want any of that hokey stuff on our cover because we figured it’s a serious document about an important cultural phenomenon. It was more important to…we just didn’t want it to be loud and stereotypical.
We collaborated with the designer, Harry Choron, and…in textbooks you need a little graphic device like at the end of sections so it divides the text. So we said, “No, we don’t want to use skulls. We don’t want to use dancing bears.” We thought the crow would be cool because “It’s the same story the crow told me…” (from “Uncle John’s Band”). That crow. If you look through the child ballads and all the folk stuff from the ‘50s and ‘60s, the crow is a recurring image. It shows up in folk tales. We thought that would be a really cool object to use. And Harry worked it into the design beautifully as the marker between text and he also put it on the title page in a shadow.
Harry Chorpn also did the cover for my new record, It’s a Hand-me-Down. I released the album in the same month as the book because it made sense to do so from a marketing standpoint. I needed to put out a new record because the last time I put out a new studio album was 2008. So, I was definitely overdue for a new record. Harry was kind enough to do the cover design for me, and we both agreed it would be fun to have the crow on the cover as the unifying graphic device to tie it to the book.
Then, I put out another record at the same time as part of my Kickstarter called You Are Here with all original material. I wanted to do that so it didn’t appear that I was putting all my eggs in the basket of the Grateful Dead. “Hey, I’m doing all these Dead things but I’m also a composer of original music!” It’s just a quiet way to assert my originality in the context of all this Dead stuff. And Harry was kind enough to let me borrow the crow to use on the back cover of that record as well just to tie them altogether.
The crow is just a wonderful image. “It’s the same story the crow told me…” It’s on the cover of Wake of the Flood. It turned out to be a beautiful image to use and I feel good about it. Oddly enough, this morning my wife and I were just out taking a walk here in Alabama [where he inducted Donna Jean Godchaux-MacKay into the Alabama Music Hall of Fame] and we were walking around in the neighborhood and I took a couple pictures of a pair of crows on a branch. I got that from the hike and dropped that on the Facebook page for the book. It’s a perfect picture of two crows looking like they’re having a conversation.
JPG: Then there’s the book’s title, which is taken from “Box of Rain.” Any reason behind that choice?
DG: The editor and publisher of the book thought of that. One of the great things about this book project was that we did it for Bob Miller, the head of Flatiron Books, who was the editor on my very first book 30 years ago, Playing in the Band. I was just starting out in the business. That came out on St. Martin’s Press. So, we stayed friends over the years and he signed us up to do this book. He thought of the title because he’s a big ol’ Deadhead, too.
Again, we were incredibly lucky to be part of a team putting out this book in that we’re entirely on the same page. There was not one bit of friction. The editor was great to work with, our agent was great to work with, Harry who did the design was great to work with. Blair and I had no conflicts at all doing this book together.
So, when Bob suggested that title we both said, “Yeah. That’s great.” Saved us having to think of one! I don’t know exactly what the reasoning is but why not? It’s a perfect title; a wonderful, hallucinatory quality of the story being told.
JPG: Then, what about the title of your album, “It’s a Hand-Me-Down?” It makes me think of it as a folk reference, which can also relate to the Grateful Dead’s use of folk music and the band’s catalog being in a sense folk music.
DG: It’s a line from “Ripple,” which is not on the album. Again, it’s just a perfect description of the transmission process of music from one generation to the next. The Grateful Dead were folk musicians and played a lot of other people’s music and made it their own. And this is what happened in the process of doing this record. It’s telling those guys’ story in my voice.
JPG: Speaking of one generation to the next, what are your thoughts about so many people coming out of the woodwork claiming to be Dead fans – actress Helen Mirren wearing a Grateful Dead t-shirt and how suddenly on the third season of “Broad City” there are these Dead connections and indie rock bands, that in the ‘90s wouldn’t want to be associated with the Dead or admit it publicly, are embracing the band?
DG: Well, it seems to me that guys like us, have always tried to tell the world how great this music is and now the rest of the world is figuring that out. That can’t possibly be a bad thing. There’s no sense of, “What are you doing here?” to those people. If they dig it, they dig it. I don’t have any right to kick them off the bus ‘cause they’re newcomers. That’s not how culture works.
JPG: Oh, no. I don’t want to kick them off the bus. It’s just strange and interesting to see that happening.
DG: I have this theory that the generation that immediately followed the hippies was reacting against what happened before, right? So, the punks were kind of like, “Screw you, hippies! We’re going to make our own loud simple music and just beat people over the head with it.” And the Dead were doing sophisticated multi-cultural music.
It also is true that a lot of people who think that they hate the Grateful Dead, basically, are reacting to the stereotype Deadhead. They find the positive attitude of hippies annoying so they reacted against it. Now, 20 years after Jerry died we’re a couple of cultural waves past all that shit and now all these people are just listening to the music going, “Wow! This is great! I’m sorry my dad thought it sucked because he was reacting to the hippies but I’m digging it now.”
I knew 30 years ago that this music was going to live forever. So, this was very gratifying to see young musicians discovering it and getting deeply into it. We discovered and got deeply into it, so why should we be surprised when other people do? It’s a wonderful thing.
JPG: In spite of the growth and diversity of its fans, the media still puts out the “tie-dyed hippies” scenario in its coverage.
DG: That’s the easiest way to get a handle on it but it’s getting a different kind of attention. Again, it’s in the grooves. What the media do is less important than what’s in the grooves. Musicians are making this music. They’re doing tribute records. They’re adopting these songs into their own shows, and that’s the way the music lives forever. Magazines will be pulped in a month but the fact that the music is being continued and carried forward by younger musicians means it’s going to live for more generations and that’s a good thing.
JPG: Could you address the Dead’s fandom and its effect on the band as far as how that support made the group very popular yet in the post In the Dark era – the size of the audience and the party atmosphere sideshow it attracted became stifling, particularly for Jerry.
DG: I think Jerry grew very weary of being That Guy. He was the focus of an immense social and economic circle, with dependencies of all kinds everywhere he turned. And once he started to retreat, the music began to suffer even as the crowds got bigger. The anarchy that worked so well in the early years led to an overwhelming excess of everything in the final half-decade.
*JPG: There have been some thoughts as to what would have happened had Jerry not passed away (one author who wrote about the Dead conjectures that he was going to give up music and devote himself to painting). Any thoughts or knowledge from others of what might have possibly happened if Jerry had a successful rehab and his heart condition was fixed? *
DG: Really hard to say. As is made quite clear in the book, things are pretty close to unmanageable and the tour might have come to an end even if Jerry hadn’t died when he did.
Photo by Scott Peterson
JPG: I read your essay in the album’s booklet. You chose songs that mean something to you. Were they numbers that developed meaning prior to recording them?
DG: Oh, I’ve been playing all these songs for years. The first choice in making a record is you have to pick the songs that are appropriate with the format you are working in. So, I began with songs that I perform in my solo show because essentially the mission of the record was to document what I do in my solo guise. It’s fundamentally solo performances with the additional overdubs that are made possible by my use of looping in my live show.
The selection criteria already left out a whole bunch of songs that I don’t perform. If I’m playing with a band I’ll do a bunch of other songs that are not possible or that don’t sound good performed solo. I’ve never tried to work up a solo acoustic arrangement of “Help on the Way” and “Franklin’s Tower” is too long and monotonous a song for a solo performer. Maybe I’ll play that one sometime.
So, the selection criteria were what work in this format and then what are the strongest performances. I tracked 15 songs and wound up leaving out two of the more upbeat ones just because they weren’t working. I have a solo arrangement of “Keep Your Day Job” but it just works better with a whole band. I’ll record it later with a full band. It sounded kind of cheese-oid with me doing a rhythm guitar then overdubbing kind of Chuck Berry style guitar over it without a rhythm section. So, I had to leave it off. I had some friends and colleagues listen to it and give me feedback. There was one particular guy who thought it was too weak a track. He became the veto.
It’s just, basically, the songs that worked in my format, which means that it was fairly heavy on the ballads and didn’t have as many upbeat tunes. I couldn’t figure out a way to make “Shakedown Street” work as a solo song either. It’s what works and they are all songs that I love. I didn’t have to stretch to put any of these on. They’re songs that I perform with relative frequency. Some of them I do every show or close to every show. Some of them I do in rotation. But, I just picked the ones that I loved the most that I perform regularly.
JPG: I didn’t know if there was something on it that you may not have done before and recorded it now as a bit of a challenge, say “Dark Star.”
DG: That could have been a possibility but I just went with stuff that I was comfortable with. When you go in the studio and spend a lot of money you don’t want to have to do a lot of trial and error. You want to go in with solid stuff that you already know really well. You want to be well-rehearsed. Since it’s just me I went in there and laid down the stuff.
I had a pretty good time recording because I do know my stuff and I was working in the studio with a guy that I really trust (Jeremy Goody). You don’t want to waste a lot of time trying to get it right. You go in with stuff that you already have solid.
JPG: Back to the book, when putting together the oral history in This Is All a Dream… after you wrote previous books on the Grateful Dead, was there anything new that you personally discovered or was revelatory for you?
DG: Our job was to present a whole book full of discoveries for other people. My reaction to it is less important than what we are delivering to the reader. Blair and I spent a year gathering material, collecting new interviews, going through our files, looking at things from other sources and accumulating scraps of paper, as it were, in a google document. Then, we started stringing them together into order to tell the story. We knew where we were going with a lot of it but along the way we heard lots of new stories we hadn’t heard before and so we dropped those in.
The book is full of those. I couldn’t single one out for you. That’s what it’s all about. It’s not meant to be a definitive and exhaustive biography because it’s an oral history. We wanted it to be a collection of stories that deepen your understanding of what you already know about these people. So, it’s less about laying out the facts and more about painting the colorful details. It’s loaded with those things.
JPG: When I think about the book and all the interview subjects and their different perspectives on events it made me think of Akira Kurosowa’s Rahsomon .
DG: Exactly. It’s not so intense as seven different people’s version of the same crime. We figured since the Grateful Dead was a tribe of people sharing experiences and building a collective story, it made perfect sense to tell the story that way and let everybody participate and let everybody tell a piece of the story exactly the way Grateful Dead music relies on everybody telling a piece of the story.
JPG: Because you had past interviews, and added new interviews, was it like putting together a major puzzle?
DG: It wasn’t a difficult task in any way. The only problem is that we had to cut things out. We strung together a huge document, spent quite a bit of time sitting together in my living room reducing it to a manageable size. We turned in a manuscript of 220,000 words, which was probably double what he was expecting. Bob, the editor, was kind enough to say, “Well, we love this but we can’t print all of it. Would you be willing to cut 40,000 words?” We agreed to do that, which we both agreed improved it by making it more concise, and wound up with a document that was still significantly longer than they were expecting. But, we thought that it did a really really good job of telling the story in this multiple point of view kind of thing.
There was no aspect of struggle to it at all. Blair and I have been friends for 40 years. We’ve been colleagues for 40 years. We have very similar styles of writing. We handed material back and forth. I wrote the first draft of the intro. I gave it to him. He rewrote it, handed it back to me. We bounced it back [and forth] four or five times, and then wound up with a document that we both agreed on from every single jot and tittle of it.
JPG: The book finishes with a number of codas. How did those come to be?
DG: We had several set pieces like that that we thought would be important to have but they were too long to put into the regular narrative. We called them sidebars but some of them were too long to even be sidebars. So, the designer had the idea of “Why don’t we put them all in at the end as codas to a musical document?” That worked out by agreement. If we put them in the flow of the text they would be too long and they would interrupt the narrative. So, we stuck ‘em in at the end where they can be read as individual vignettes without disturbing the flow of the main story.
JPG: I saw you at the second night of Fare Thee Well. What are your thoughts on those shows as well as the next chapter in Grateful Dead history in Dead & Company?
DG: I have not seen any Dead & Company live. I had a great time at Fare Thee Well. I wasn’t really expecting the music to be particularly memorable. I thought it was really good. I thought they did a fine job for what it was, and what it was was a last…a fare thee well from all those guys. And I think they had mixed feelings about playing together at all and I think they worked hard enough at it to make it good and gave everybody a wonderful excuse to gather one more time and have a good time.
Everything else about it was incredibly sweet. The whole city was welcoming. Everywhere you went there were Deadheads on street corners. I was having breakfast with a colleague and this guy at the next table picked up my tab because he recognized me; strangers stopping strangers all over town.
The stadium was fun and doing the broadcast was fun. When they told me we were doing three hours of pre-show every day I thought, “Oh God, kill me now.” [Laughs] But it wound up being just great fun because people kept falling by and we’d grab ‘em and pull ‘em in and interview them on the air. Just having a wonderful time. I had a gig in the afternoon. I had a gig in the evening. I had things to do every day over and above being part of the Fare Thee Well thing. So, I got to play my own music. I got paid by SiriusXM to be there and I got to enjoy the show from the press box. I just had a completely glorious weekend.
As for Dead & Company we broadcast one of the shows. I listened to it all the way through and I really enjoyed it. I’m looking forward to hearing more from what those guys do. John Mayer has really gone to work learning this music and he’s doing a pretty good job with it.
JPG: It seems that popularity and awareness has shot up again with Fare Thee Well and now Dead & Company.
DG: The Grateful Dead “brand” is probably stronger today than it was while the band existed. Not sure exactly what caused it, but the marketing of that 50th-anniversary “reunion” was ingenious and I think it stoked things amazingly well. The John Mayer collaboration is carrying it forward yet again, with another expansion into the mainstream culture. It’s fascinating.
Also worth noting is that the music has a life of its own. Younger players are adopting these songs and this way of collaborating. I find that tremendously gratifying.
