All the Years Combine: a very short review

Ray Robertson, a Canadian writer best known for other genres, joins the long list of people who have written books about the Grateful Dead and their music with his All the Years Combine: the Grateful Dead in Fifty Shows.

Robertson has the clever idea to orient his book around the band's concerts. Most other books about the Grateful Dead take much more traditional approaches:

• many are memoirs, by members of the band themselves (Lesh, Kreutzmann, etc.) or by members of the larger organization (road crew, managers, engineers, etc.)
• some are biographies, of individuals and of the band as a whole
• others are directly about the songs and music themselves, as more conventional music criticism

But very few have written directly about the band's enormous thirty year catalog of concerts (a notable exception to that is Cornell '77, an entire book about a single concert).

There are at least two good reasons why this is indeed a clever idea:

• Firstly, the material is unusual. The band made the decision very early on to encourage and emphasize recording and preservation of their live concerts. This was performed by the band themselves, who invested heavily in both equipment and personnel to enable capturing the shows as accurately and completely as possible, and then preserved that collection of material over the following six decades. But it was also performed by the fans, first rather anarchically, then later under the acceptance and support of the band, who made and curated and traded their own recordings of the shows. I have fond memories of friends who knew tapers and shared tapes of their favorite shows.
  
  Moreover, although Robertson doesn't overly dwell on this, the Grateful Dead were present at many of the seminal live performances of popular music during an extended period of several decades: the Summer of Love concerts, the Acid Test events, the Altamont Free Concert, Woodstock, Watkins Glen, the Concerts at the Pyramids, etc.
  
  This is rare, at least in popular music, and this rarity by itself makes it noteworthy.
  
  
• Secondarly, the concerts were important to the entire artistic process for the band. The Grateful Dead had a very unusual creative process, with multiple composers, multiple songwriters, influences from many other popular music genres, and so on. But also they had a very strong culture of music performance. In this respect the band drank deeply from musical areas such as jazz, blues, gospel, and bluegrass, in which improvisational performance, audience interaction, and other techniques were practiced in their music to a much greater extent than most people realized. As Phil Lesh noted, the studio recordings that the Grateful Dead made were generally viewed, even by the band themselves, as just advertisements for their live performances.
  
  This totally inverts the general approach taken by most popular musicians over the past 50 years (and still now): whereas the typical musician tours in support of the new album, the Grateful Dead nearly always issued a new album to support the upcoming tour.
  
  Understanding this is critical to undertanding why attending a Grateful Dead show in the 60's, 70's, and 80's was such an unusual experience: you weren't just hearing songs that you already knew and loved being performed by the artist in a live setting, you were actually participating in the composing, refining, and elaboration of works that were still in progress, still in the process of development.
  
  Very few artists had the willingness to experiment with unfinished new material live, in front of a large paying audience, before it had been thoroughly worked through and rehearsed and revised behind closed doors. And fewer still would see this as a process that they wanted to use. So this makes it worth describing.
  
  

Robertson is enthusiastic about his subject, and he's an enthusiastic writer, and reading All the Years Combine you get a good dose of his passion and enthusiasm and excitement.

It doesn't make for great literature; it's more like sitting around in some late-night diner after the show has ended, swapping observations about the event with your buddies, reveling in the high points and laughing about the missteps.

It's not the sort of thing that translates well to the printed page, and I think it's unlikely we'll see a lot of additional works attempting to do what Robertson has tried to accomplish.

But I definitely enjoyed the book, and happily sent it on to another Deadhead friend of mine.