The Deadhead radio host and musician riffs on.
While David hosts three very popular weekly radio shows (on KFOG, KPFA, and XM) about the Grateful Dead, it’s easy to forget that he’s also a musician in his own right. Evidence of this passion is his 2008 CD, The Ones That Look the Weirdest Taste the Best, a collection of tunes featuring Gans on vocals and guitar that, while reminiscent of the Dead, are very much his own. Still, talking to Gans, it’s difficult not to want to tap into his vast knowledge of Dead lore, amassed over 30 years of being in and around the realm of Jerry. That Deadful history, though, doesn’t mean he comes gift-wrapped from Central Casting with greasy dreads or views the once-great, arena-filling band as sacrosanct. Au contraire, Buckwheat. You see, David is just a regular guy (or “schmuck,” as he prefers) who really knows his Dead. Dig?
Paul Kilduff: Are people disappointed when they meet you and you’re not all “Deaded out” with some tie-dye on?
David Gans: I’m not nearly as obsessed with the Grateful Dead as many of their fans are. I’m very happy that the romance of it and my love for the music was never diminished. But the fanatical obsessive Deadhead thing, I never gave up my life and went on the road for six months at a time following the band. I brought a musician’s perspective to my journalism of the subject and that led to many opportunities. I wound up getting to produce compilation CDs for them and box sets and things like that. But I don’t wear tie-dyes. I don’t have Grateful Dead stickers on my car. I’m not the same kind of Dead fan some people might expect given my day job.
PK: Wasn’t Jerry Garcia a little bit dismissive of that whole scene anyway?
DG: Jerry was incredibly respectful and kind to the people who adore(d) him. It did become difficult for him. I saw him do kind of weird things once in a while but only when he was in a bad mood and tired. He was incredibly gracious to those people, as well you should be to the people who’ve made you a wealthy man. I think there was a burden in being Jerry Garcia, being the focus of incredible amounts of intense attention and analysis and let’s face it, kind of mindless adoration.
PK: It’s refreshing what you’re saying. I really didn’t know what to expect.
DG: I’m just a schmuck trying to get through life.
PK: Well, you’re doing a good job, David.
DG: I’m having a great time.
PK: No one’s really filled the void of the Grateful Dead. Why do you think that is?
DG: Well, I think the Grateful Dead had a really, really unique and kind of interdisciplinary thing going on and they appealed to a lot of different kinds of people. I say that despite the fact that The Grateful Dead’s demographic is overwhelmingly white and middle-class and educated, but the Grateful Dead were several different bands. They were this fierce sort of monumental psychedelic warrior thing during their Baroque period, what you hear on Live Dead. and then they became this Americana band. Starting in 1970 with Workingman’s Dead and American Beauty, they were more in the vein of The Band and the Allman Brothers, making great American country rock with a tinge of blues. In 1975, they made this kind of jazz fusion record, Blues for Allah. In the ‘80s they had all these songs that were sort of more reflective of the beer-drinking frat boy mentality and attracted a different audience. So In each of [their] phases, they brought different kinds of sounds on board. People loved the Grateful Dead who also loved jazz; people loved the Grateful Dead who also loved country; people loved the Grateful Dead who loved like avant-garde orchestral music. Do you know what I mean? It overlaps in a lot of ways with a lot of different kinds of music and in the wake of the Grateful Dead their audience kind of wandered off and saw new favorites.
PK: That last period, though, where they became a mega-popular, stadium rock band, did that ruin it for the purists?
DG: Well, yes and no. Everybody gets a little bit miffed when they’re not able to get close to the band, when the audience gets so big that it gets harder to buy tickets and things like that, but everybody also wants their favorite music to be shared by others. I think that’s a classic pop culture thing. You want your guys to succeed and then you resent it when they get so big that you don’t have your exclusive access anymore.
PK: Did you ever get the impression they secretly lamented the fact that they had become such a big draw?
DG: I think that’s inevitable. There’s a certain amount of regret at the loss of intimacy but they also did their job very well and it’s kind of hard to say no to $50 million a year. As your audience gets larger, the number of people who really know what you’re doing musically gets eclipsed by people who are there because their friends are there; because it’s cool; because of the scene in the parking lot.
PK: One of the things that’s crippled the music industry in terms of selling CDs is illegal downloading. With the Grateful Dead allowing all the taping early on, it would seem to me that if Jerry was still around, he would be fine with free downloading of the Grateful Dead’s music and would probably encourage it.
DG: They did. First of all, they made taping formally tolerable, acceptable, around 1984, and they did that as a matter of facing reality because they had tried to stop it. [Though at one time] they had their road crew who went after tapers with great gusto.
PK: I had no idea about that. I thought that they always had encouraged it.
DG: Oh no, no, no. It wasn’t allowed at first but their soundman, Dan Healy, kind of encouraged the tapers because he used to be a techno geek. He liked comparing notes with those guys. He liked the feedback and support he got from the tapers who were audiophiles and all that and he also got really tired of fighting it. They all got tired of fighting it. And they realized if they tolerated it, put all the tapers in a place where they could keep an eye on them and where they wouldn’t be bothering the paying customers, it would be a good thing for them from a marketing standpoint. It was a brilliant marketing move. Tape trading and the circulating of recordings of the shows built their mystique and built their audience and a lot of bands that followed in their wake adopted that as a way of building their own grassroots audience. On the other hand, the Grateful Dead were making millions of dollars from their performances and were not relying on record sales to make any money, so they could afford to be generous with the recordings because their copyrights weren’t worth that much compared to what they were making from ticket sales. The Grateful Dead made their money on the road, not from records, and so they could afford to be more generous with the recordings. Now that the Grateful Dead don’t exist, and they’re trying to merchandize music from their archive, they’re seeing the down side of that because they created a whole culture that doesn’t believe in paying for a recording.
PK: Music is free.
DG: Right, they’re still putting stuff out. They put out four releases a year on the road trip series. They did this video. There are still products coming out and I think they’re doing okay. I have no idea what their sales figures are. A certain portion of the audience has always understood that the social contract about taping is you can trade these recordings freely but you’re going to buy the release when it comes out too, right? And a lot of people, certainly people my age, believe in paying for music.
PK: But not people in their 20s. They don’t buy CDs.
DG: Yeah, well, I think they do. They buy things here and there. They buy a song at a time rather than an album. I read an interview with Brian Eno in an English paper a year-and-a-half or so ago where he talked about that there might have just been this golden age where recordings were profitable and he likened it to the guy who controlled the whale blubber market in the 1840s. If you controlled the whale blubber in those days, you were the richest man on earth until incandescent lighting came along and then all of a sudden your whale blubber wasn’t worth that much. Now that music can be duplicated infinitely for nothing, the artifact itself is less and less valuable. Making a living from selling recordings of your music—it remains to be seen whether that’s possible. We’re all trying to figure out how to earn money from our performances and our recordings. A friend of mine and I were talking about this in New York a couple of years ago and we were wondering, “Would there be a Steely Dan today if Donald Fagen had had to do meet and greets?”
PK: Yeah, not the most personable guy.
DG: But in those days, musicians were mysterious and inaccessible figures and now you have to be a gregarious and incredibly accessible figure in order to succeed. Which is great for me because I’m a pretty gregarious guy. And because I’m on the radio in this personal voice all the time, there’s no freaking way I can ever be a mysterious guy.
PK: People love you, David. They want to take you home.
DG: I’m not so sure of that.
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For more Kilduff, go to thekilduff-file.blogspot.com.
Age: 56.
Birthplace: Los Angeles
Astrological sign: Scorpio
What extinct species would you like to be reincarnated as?: Something that roamed the inland seas in Utah, my favorite place in the world.
Planet I’d emigrate to: Vancouver
Website: www.dgans.com