Fear Of The Dead
I have a pretty long commute by most standards, but most of the way is by train so there is very little stress involved. As long as I get my shit on the right train at the right time, I’m good. All that’s really left to do then is get some work done or listen to music and stare out the window. I listen to a lot of music and stare the hell out of the Jersey landscape.
I go through cycles of airplay on my MP3 player. During the winter I was playing a lot of Nick Cave, Bauhaus too. I must not have been feeling well. You can see a kind of a link between Nick and Bauhaus, a penchant for pirate shirts and “the dark-side of humanity”, whatever that means. The music these people make and made can be linked also to a sort of a mood, roughly, maybe. I guess it happens to a lot of people, you get to wanting a certain type of sound, you look to groups that provide it. Lately I have had two bands on constant play during my morning and afternoon trips; The first albums of The Grateful Dead and Fear. And because I refuse to get anything productive done, during my commute or at any other time, I have put some effort into putting together points of commonality between these two entirely dissimilar groups. Wanna hear it? Hear it go:
Fear and The Dead both are products of very California-type subcultures; The Dead coming out of the Haight Ashbury “Acid Rock” enclave and Fear coming out of the So. Cal hardcore scene. Both bands were known for their musicianship in a genre of music that didn’t necessarily require it. In the case of Fear, the fact that they were so proficient was actually held against them. Both Fear and The Dead had amazing rhythm sections; Mickey Hart, The Grateful Dead’s drummer and Fear’s drummer Spit Stix both had been drumming since they were kids and put in time in Drum and Bugle Corps. Both bands had a lot of lineup changes through the years, Lee Ving is the only original member of Fear and The Dead keep on straight dying. That is about all of have for solid, objective and verifiable fact, it’s a lot better than I normally do. Here comes my actual, entirely made-up argument.
Fear and The Grateful Dead sound exactly nothing alike. Not even a little bit. Yeah, there is some blues/country base to a lot of their stuff owing to Lee and Jerry’s backgrounds, but basically they are night and day. Their fans are distinct, their philosophies are way different, and if the surviving members of each band were to meet they’d probably hate each other. But there is one thing that links these bands inextricably, some thing more important than all that nonsense I numbered a paragraph before. What links Fear and The Dead is their sheer American-ness.
Think about it, it would have been impossible to create bands like these anywhere else. Punk Rock and Hippie business got exported worldwide real quick. There were a thousand Jefferson Airplane-like acts after 1969 all over Europe, or so I was told, and now you can find more Lower East Side Crew AF tatts in Bologna,Italy than on the Lower East Side. What can be created can be copied. Usually. What Fear and The Grateful Dead offered was not formulaic even if it came from a formula, and it wasn’t designed to be embraced even though it was. The lyrics of both of these bands are laced with American inside knowledge, stuff about assassinations of our presidents, our luncheon meats, our fascination with schoolgirl uniforms (the Japanese dig them something fierce though too), songs about war and fucking. Fear and The Dead both came up in generations when people thought it was time to eliminate the musical past, both bands ignored the idea, took what they wanted from their blues or folk roots and freaked it the hell out. And they did it with smiles on their faces. Both bands had the uniquely American quality of not giving a shit. So there it is, go dust off their albums and see if I’m wrong. I’ll wait
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