Tune in, turn on, but don't drop out: UMass class digs into Deadhead culture

By Kristin Palpini
Staff Writer

Published on December 21, 2007

A wandering guitar riff recently greeted students slogging in from the wintry cold to a University of Massachusetts class on the Grateful Dead.

With student notebooks and pens at the ready, Robert E. Weir (no, not Grateful Dead singer/guitarist Bob H. Weir) fired up his morning PowerPoint presentation, turned up the Dead's "Uncle John's Band" and dipped into a lecture on the band's legacy and impact on American culture - jam bands, zealous merchandising and Deadheads.

UMass has caught flak from people who question offering academic credit for a course that ponders the implications of a traveling hippie band. But the criticism isn't warranted, students said.

"There's a lot to learn from this class about history and culture," said Jessica M. Weinbrenner, a senior sociology major, during the last week of classes. "It was fairly hard. I mean, it wasn't biology or something, but it was pretty hard."

Weir contends there is more to music than notes plucked on guitar strings and more to some bands than records and concerts. Music, Weir said, is either a reflection or an attack on/escape from a society's culture, and throughout the Dead's 30-year musical career, the band's tunes acted as a living mirror for the era.

"All music has a social, political, economic and cultural context," Weir said. "As a historian I wanted to look at why music exists the way it does in a particular time.

"People like to take potshots at the class, no pun intended," Weir said, "but they just don't see the underlying value in music and popular culture."

Weir's undergraduate class, "How Does the Song Go?: The Grateful Dead as a Window into American Culture," is no Deadhead reunion, no long strange trip.

Patchouli oil does not permeate the air, no one is grooving to tunes between desks, and hardly anyone is wearing tie-dye.

This is academia, man, and UMass has found a way to intellectualize a band well known for its political indifference, drug use and hit-or-miss concerts.

"I didn't want to do the academic equivalent of a cover band," Weir said of his class. "I wanted to wake people up, to show them that music has a context. What they conclude from that is up to them."

The Dead's music is a psychedelic reflection of the civil rights movement, folk revival, the war on drugs, the general attitudes of the '60s and '70s and the development of consumerism, Weir said.

Within this music, the Grateful Dead gave rise to a thriving and remarkable subculture of fans, the Deadheads, who include notables such as former President Bill Clinton and right-wing rabble-rouser Ann Coulter.

"Music is merely a social tool that helps in social change," Weir said. "Social change happens through the collective energy of a group working towards a collective goal."

This semester UMass hosted what might have been the first weekend-long academic symposium dedicated to the Grateful Dead, "The Unbroken Chain," as well as two classes, at the undergraduate and graduate levels, on the band and its impact. Both classes are being hailed by UMass as academic firsts.

The class "was better than I expected," said Nathaniel E. Dyer, a resource economics student and Grateful Dead fan. "I learned not to trust the given historic perspective and challenge preconditioned notions that permeate our learning."

In his class, Weir wove a tapestry of Americana with the Dead's music as the pattern. In addition to studying the group's social impact, students learned about the political, economic and cultural aspects of the years 1965 through 1995.

Students read John F. Kennedy's inaugural address, Martin Luther King's "I have a dream" speech, Arthur Miller's "Communist Fear," the judge's decision in the Brown vs. Board of Education Supreme Court case and Norman Mailer's "White Negro" - all set against the backdrop of the Dead's improvisational, jazzy, acid rock.

"It was a retelling of history and the culture of the time period," said Michael E. Misiaszek, an accounting major. "It was pretty interesting and exciting."

In addition to providing a window into American culture filtered through the psychedelic lens that is the Grateful Dead, Weir's class stands in defense of popular culture as a useful field of academic study.

"It's risky to teach popular culture. People still look down their noses at it," Weir said. "People need to get over it. Pop culture is American culture."

Semester-long, multidisciplinary projects on aspects of American culture are expected to continue as a UMass tradition, said John R. Mullin, dean of the graduate school. Who or what will be at the center of next year's study is yet to be released.

"Universities like ours need to be courageous in propelling serious scholarship in new directions, and in reaching out to communities far and wide," Mullin said. "When we are timid in academia, we miss real opportunities. We hope that the Grateful Dead is just the beginning."

Kristin Palpini can be reached at kpalpini@gazettenet.com.