"Deadhead Social Science: You Ain't Gonna Learn What You Don't Wanna Know" edited by Rebecca G. Adams and Robert Sardiello
AltaMira Press, 2000. 299 pages. 

Walking around, observing the scene, at a show, one is left with distinct impression of connections -- lots of people know each other. Each person is a member of a number of social circles, all of which overlap. Mapping them out, one could use a Venn diagram: interlocking circles with certain entities present in numerous ones. That would just be a frozen moment, though. Any social scene evolves rapidly, turning the Venn diagram into a series of outwardly expanding ripples.

Physicists study the way water acts on itself -- which is to say: oddly, but not unpredictably. Nothing is unpredictable, let alone nature. Things may act in a complex fashion, but with the proper formulae one can predict the very path of each and every particle in the universe, brain cells included. Sociology studies the relationships between these ripples of interaction in a more humanistic way, exploring different ways that they effect each other. Deadheads and sociology seem a natural mix, Deadheads providing a constantly morphing group of people, mostly outgoing (some might say overly friendly) and willing to be the object of study, raw data to be crunched.

When most people refer to the Grateful Dead as an entity, they are really referring to two things: the music that the band produced and the scene that surrounded them. In the former case, when most people refer to the Dead, they mean to talk about the boundary pushing Grateful Dead of the 1960s and 1970s, the one that created its own language and rules. From a musical standpoint, the early stuff is certainly more interesting (though a study of the musical ossification process can certainly be rewarding). In the latter case, when people refer to the Dead, they mean to talk about the social system that existed in the 1980s and 1990s.

As such, the bulk of the research for Rebecca G. Adams and Robert Sardiello's new scholarly volume - Deadhead Social Science: You Ain't Gonna Learn What You Don't Wanna Know - took place in and around the Grateful Dead scene of the late '80s and early '90s. In his foreword to the book, Grateful Dead publicist and official historian, Dennis McNally traces the origins of the parking lot scene surrounding Dead shows "which began when camping was permitted at the 1979 New Year's Eve run" (iii). By 1989, when Adams introduced her course entitled "Field Research Methods and Applied Social Theory" (aka "Deadhead Sociology") at the University of North Carolina, the scene was ripe for analysis.

This collection of essays is made up of papers by students who took Adams' original course, though some of the papers have been assembled in the decade since the class ran. The works cover a wide range of topics within the field, from the way subjects interacted with music, spirituality, law, and identity -- in other words, the elements that make up a society. Deadheads exist as a pocket. In some ways, they are self-sufficient. For the most part, though, despite a predilection towards "counter-culture", they can only exist relative to the society outside. Very few have managed to get outside of the system. To some, thus means that Deadheads are a microcosm. To others, this means that they are a parasite.

Brent Paterline's "Community Reaction to Deadhead Subculture" functions as a sort of conceptual centerpiece to the book by attempting to systematically figure out where the Grateful Dead subculture fits, suspended by puppet wire, in the middle of the broader American sociological scene. Through interpretation of data gathered from newspaper reports about the band's visits to various communities, Paterline begins to paint a picture of what behaviors are considered deviations from the societal norm. By comparing these impressions, Paterline shows that the norm, too, is in flux. In a way, the behaviors and value systems of the Deadheads examined in this book are considerably more consistent, far less self-contradicting, than those of the society they are supposedly deviating from.

This is the second volume of scholarly essays about Deadheads to be released recently. The first, the Robert G. Weiner-edited "Perspectives On The Grateful Dead", attempted simultaneously to justify the existence of a body of scholarly work about the Dead and the Deadheads while providing an entrance point into it. Adams and Sardiello's volume us a little less self-conscious about it, though not to say unconcerned. The book is unashamedly packaged in a tie-dyed cover. Each chapter begins with the author's statement of Deadhead and academic credentials (and, often, how the two overlap). In places, the book dances dangerously on the brink of what academics refer to as "going native".

In "'We Were Given This Dance': Music and Meaning in the Early Unlimited Devotion Family", Jennifer A. Hartley writes that her work "dramatically highlighted the difficulties inherent in doing anthropology in one's own culture with none of the real or symbolic boundaries that have traditionally separated the ethnographer from her 'subjects'" (129-30). A certain tension can be perceived in her fascinating study of the Spinners - a cult who practiced their devotion to the music through spinning - makes is well worth reading for any anthropologist or sociologist -- Deadhead or not. By precisely examining the friction between parties, she brings the brunt of that problem to the forefront. In places, it is this humanistic approach that keeps the book strong.

"The Grammar of the Grateful Dead", for example, acts as a perfect compliment (and antidote) to a particularly inane piece featured in Weiner's volume, written by Robert K. Toutkoushian entitled "Is There a Day of the Month Effect in 'Beat It On Down The Line'?" While Toutkoushian's piece takes on his problem in the most detached way possible (through the force of sheer mathematics), Gary Shank and Eric J. Simon examine the social interactions that produced the problem examined in Toutkoushian's piece.

There are places in the book where I would've liked to see a bit more of a connection made by the authors between the subjects. In many realms of academia, people tend to stick to their guns, the subjects they know. Sometimes, an extra step between categories is needed to tie issues together, to bring matters to a logical conclusion. Often times, this fusion is similar to the kind required to make Grateful Dead songs make logical sense -- the combination of genres that makes a song like Eyes Of The World work.

Robert Freeman's "Other People Play the Music: Improvisation as Social Interaction" discusses the trend of Grateful Dead cover bands, focusing specifically on North Carolina's Other People. The subject matter is exactly as it sounds, focusing on the relationship between the way Deadheads converse with each other and the way improvised music fits together -- through a series of rules just slightly alternate to traditional social and harmonic theory. Unfortunately, in many places this essay doesn't do much more than state the obvious. A step over the line to examine the identity issues raised by a Deadhead playing the Grateful Dead's music would've made for an interesting discussion.

Overall, though, this book provides a nice middle ground between the Grateful Dead and the world of sociology. For Deadheads (and Phishheads) unfamiliar with social theory, it will raise consciousness about where they might fit in a systematized conception of the world. For scholars, it provides a nice map of some of the fractals within the larger ripple of the Grateful Dead community.

JESSE JARNOW is a creative writing major at Oberlin College, where he is working on a concentration in fiction. He is a writer and editor at JamBands.com. His work has appeared in Signal To Noise, Dupree's Diamond News, the Oberlin Review, and the Anonymous Church Of The Hypocritical Prophet.