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Author Ray Robertson feels strongly about the music of The Grateful Dead, the rock ‘n’ roll band founded in Palo Alto in the 1960s. In fact, he feels strongly enough to have spent the bulk of his time during the pandemic sitting in his backyard listening to recordings of 50 of the band’s most prominent live shows on loop.
The result of 18 months of tireless musical toil is a book titled “All the Years Combine: The Grateful Dead in Fifty Shows.” This is the Toronto-based Robertson’s 15th book; his oeuvre so far comprises nine novels, five non-fiction collections and a book of poetry.
Published last month by Biblioasis, a Canadian literary press, his latest work is delightfully genre-fluid – part critique, part review, part biography, part journalism. “I think it’s more of a story that uses novelistic techniques,” said Robertson, filling in the missing descriptor. “There are a lot of Grateful Dead biographers. I’m not one of them. But I tell the story of their music.”
The concerts he writes about took place between 1966 and 1995. “You’ll see a narrative about their rise, peak and fall – the music changes, the world changes, the kind of drugs they take change, the amount of money they make changes,” said Robertson about the band’s evolutionary arc he draws through 50 essays.
The idea to take on this unusual project came from the intellectual residue of his recent work. Last year, he published a novel called “Estates Large and Small” in which his lead character is a Deadhead. “But I don’t think I got it out of my system,” he said.
Besides, he felt an intense need to better understand their music and journey. “I only write books that I really, really want to write. It’s never an obligation, never a job. I needed to write it. It was a process of discovery.”
He also wanted to challenge the way The Grateful Dead are perceived. “They weren’t really hippies; they were beatniks,” he said, underscoring the influence of Beat Generation writers like Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg on the band. “Palo Alto was a haven for the Beatnik movement. And that informed their musical philosophy.”
Despite its specialized subject and arguably esoteric appeal, the book has found a market outside of the circles Robertson usually finds himself in. “What’s refreshing is that it has resonated with people outside the narrow world of literary fiction,” he said.
There’s a flipside to the popularity, however. Passionate fans of the band have objected to Robertson’s critical analysis. “I got into some trouble. A lot of Deadheads are very protective of the music. For them it’s a religion. They think if you criticize it, you’re a ‘hater’,” he said. In the literary world, though, critiquing art is a big part of appreciating it. “It doesn’t mean you’re being nasty.”
Some readers with technical knowledge of music are not very pleased either. But Robertson thinks his lack of musical expertise is an advantage, one he discovered seven years ago, when he wrote a book titled “Lives of the Poets (with Guitars): Thirteen Outsiders Who Changed Music.” When a writer who is not a musician writes about music, Robertson said, he is better able to create the “immediacy of the music” for the reader through meaningful similes or metaphors that help the reader experience the music thoroughly.
Robertson talks about The Grateful Dead in an almost spiritual way. He likens the process of listening to their music with Zen concepts like meditation and mindfulness. “I think listening to The Grateful Dead will make you a better person. You have to intensely listen to the minutiae, sometimes there’s long periods of boredom even, some points are insipid, some inspirational …just like life.”
With a year and a half of listening to and writing about The Grateful Dead’s music now part of his own life story, this publication asked Robertson how the process of writing this book changed him.
“I realized how difficult it is to maintain your artistic integrity in the big business world of popular music,” he said. “When The Dead began in Palo Alto in the ‘60s, they were just a bunch of Bay Area friends playing in clubs and restaurants.”
Robertson hopes his book will help people either revisit or discover their music and keep their legacy alive.
For more information, visit rayrobertson.com.
