At some blurry point in their evolutionary unfolding, the Grateful Dead became like a tree: rooted in the earth yet ever lumbering upward and outward in all directions, at once terrestrial and celestial, visceral and spiritual, wooden and sappy, with myriad branches serving a single trunk, a body comprised of concentric rings, the inseparable fusion of past, present and future, sustaining growth with unwavering patience, in no hurry to go anywhere in particular. Now, in its fullness, that tree is bearing fruit in the form of the increasingly popular and diverse jambands--or "Gobi" bands, as they are called in some circles--currently profilerating in the clubs and festivals that comprise the American grassroots underground.

Like the music of the Grateful Dead, Gobi music is music that flies below the radar, or perhaps more accurately, "too high" above the radar. As critic Richard Gehr puts it, this is music that is "flourishing outside pop culture's surveillance mechanisms." And yet, despite the lack of mainstream media coverage, the popularity of these post-Dead jam bands is, according to Gehr, "fueling what may be America's hottest underground rock scene." There is much about the Gobi Scene that bears resemblance to the Grateful Dead Scene, but there are also stark divergences.

To continue the tree metaphor, one wonders how many, if any, of these bands will take root and thrive as organically, self-sufficiently, and completely as the Grateful Dead. Will the Dead phenomenon be duplicated in some mutated form? Or will the fruit remain just that, merely offspring, never growing to full maturity, never equalling the stature of the parent? Which of this fruit will be picked off the branch, perhaps prematurely, and consumed by the music industry's corporate machine? Which of this fruit will fall to the ground and rot from from long years of touring and playing to a tiny audience of diehard acolytes but struggling terminally amid the indifference of the mainstream pop music audience?

The Gobi Scene has its origins in the unique flowering of family fandom that was the essence of the relationship the Deadheads had (or imagined they had) with their favorite band, The Grateful Dead. Typified by a willingness to follow the group anywhere, lured by the constant promise that the next show would produce nothing less than the shining forth of the very Divine spirit, comforted by a treasured bond with fellow outcasts, freaks, and diligently nontraditional citizens of the "other America," Deadheads developed a coherent subculture, replete with a private shared vocabulary, part code/part slang, a symbolic and resonant iconography, a tacit set of social customs for interaction both outside the venue, where the congregants gathered for prophecy and storytelling, and inside, at "the show," where the ark of the covenant was opened and God spoke: the music as Eucharist.

Sociologists have studied and continue to study the various aspects of this alternative society that coalesced in its nomadic devotion to the band. The music became scripture, and Jerry Garcia, against his own wishes and tendencies, was endowed with, depending on the individual Head, the role of either Guru or, in more extreme cases, Deity.

Nothing so extreme nor fully realized has occurred in this Gobi Scene, but, as publisher, author, and scholar Dean Budnick observes, "Something is in the air." An energy and an impulse reminiscent of Deaddom is omnipresent in the clusters of fans that follow the Dead's descendents around the country; however, something is missing, something essential, to complete the picture, an intangible lack, not so obvious as, say, the absence of a charismatic genius of Garcia's stature, no, something deeper down, something that doesn't quite shine all the way through. And although, as Budnick observes, "these groups are stretching, allowing their inspiration to lead them into some fascinating realms," none of them has yet achieved the "utterness," the total picture provided by the 30 year saga of the Grateful Dead.

This is not to say that the Gobi Scene isn't brilliant in its own particular way. I was an early fan of the genre and one of the first people to start playing these bands regularly on the radio. Therefore, my questions and criticisms come from a place of tremendous faith and devotion to the form. Obviously, the Gobi scene is fulfilling a profound need in an growing number of music fans. But what exactly is this "scene?" Why the term "Gobi?" First, the term "Gobi" (thought to have originated among the devotees of longtime jam freaks the Ominous Seapods) refers to the essentially nomadic, relatively unwashed and spare lifestyles of the genre's most avid and active followers, as if they were wanderers in the vast desert-hence the "Gobi" reference-of mainstream American culture, seen by these disaffected and marginalized pilgrims as soulless, devoid of the potential for spiritual transformation and ultimate ascendence into some exalted realm of being.

The Gobi Scene, interestingly, overlaps with the latter years of the Grateful Dead and is often broken down into "Second-Generation" bands and "Third-Generation" bands. The Second-Generation tends to be thought of as bands that established their professional reputation while the Grateful Dead were themselves still touring. This would include, but is not limited to, bands such as Phish, The Blues Traveller, and Widespread Panic. The Third- Generation is most often thought of as bands that may have started playing while the Dead were still active but came into real prominence following the death of Jerry Garcia and the dissolution of The Grateful Dead, in 1995. As there are hundreds of these bands, and as this is not intended to be an exhaustive study (but rather an overview) of the the Gobi Scene, I will identify several bands that I consider of primary importance: moe., Ominous Seapods, Disco Biscuits, and String Cheese Incident. As with all filtered studies, my own personal aesthetic biases are evident, but such is ever the case.

Another term we should look at is this term "jam band." What is a jam band? In its simplest terms a jam band is a purveyor of exploratory rock and roll. By this I mean a tendency toward a relationship with music that is geared toward transcendence; this most commonly includes an underlying improvisational aesthetic, a belief in the power of the always present moment, a faith in the spontaneous wisdom of Now. Not knowing in advance every note in an exact sequence is seen as crucial to the openness of mind that allows the music to expand and inflate, to crack open a new vista on eternity. This basic aesthetic, music as transport, requires that each show be different, a guarantee that one will never have the exact same experience twice. Furthermore, jam bands tend to share the idea that the music is made as much by the audience as it is by the players, involving the participation of the entire room, so that everyone is complicit in the act, the magic happenstance. For this conjunction and subsequent synergy to occur, there must exist this natural tendency to engage the kind vibe, a willingness to embrace everything, including the freakish and the mutant, an openness to the Other, the extension of us. Also typical in jam bands is an attraction to mystery and surprise, the accidental progeny of hybrid forms, misfit children in exile from the mainland.

The Gobi aesthetic is not new, of course. The tradition originates, at least in the rock and roll world, with the Grateful Dead, this emphasis on musical improvisation as well as generous borrowing and appropriation from a variety of musical genres synthesized into a modern sound. For the Grateful Dead these influences included bluegrass, country/western, folk, rock and roll, jazz, and classical music. For the contemporary jam band, influences also include zydeco, funk, punk, heavy metal, progressive rock, electronica, and hip-hop. The Grateful Dead, of course, developed an unusually devoted audience through their ability to use music as a vehicle for psychic/emotional/spirtual catharsis and as a portal to altered states of consciousness, artificially induced or otherwise. The young jam bands (and their audiences) share this bent as well.

Critically, too, these bands share the same sad fate as the Grateful Dead. The psychedelic jam has long been and will remain an underappreciated art form, usually dismissed as indulgent, irrelevant, inconsequential muzak for people on drugs. Bands that produce such epic stories in sound are not taken seriously as factors in the development of popular music, and are, when not totally ignored, often an object of derision or the butt of some silly joke. This will probably always be the case. Jam music requires an attention span that the majority of the American audience does not have and is not likely to develop. There's too much simple and instant gratification available in pop music for any significant number of people ever to prefer the Gobi Scene's more complex and laborious mindful pleasures. Another reason is that the extended format of jam music does not lend itself well to the time constraints of commercial media. That avenue of communication is sealed shut to most jam bands.

The inbred anti-corporate attitude of the bands in the scene does not create an atmosphere that is conducive to success, at least not in the traditional capitalist sense of the word. For this reason, I believe Gobi music will remain underground, as a vibrant subculture, happening but hidden. The economic reality of the contemporary jam band is one of pretty bleak financial rewards. On the other hand, these hardships create, to a certain extent, a spirit of cooperation among the bands because they sense that none of them are likely to get real recording contracts, hence no reason to compete. If we want to romanticize their plight, we could say that the jam bands maintain a certain purity which ennobles the eternal outsider, moving through the harsh reality of shadows and phantoms, protected and blessed by "misfit power."

With this foreknowledge of probable relative oblivion, the ordeal of being a rock and roll band must include creative handling of the band's economic affairs. Taking their cue from the Dead, most young jam bands remain completely independent of corporate culture, including the mightiest media outlets, and employ a "do-it-yourself" ethos that involves the recording and distribution of music, selling one's own tickets and merchandise during self-promoted and self-financed touring back and forth across the country, relatively free from the control of professional management companies, publicists, promoters, and other middlemen who plague the music business.

Allowing audience members to record and trade tapes of live performances is another widely practiced aspect of the scene derived from the Grateful Dead. Rather than viewing bootleg tapes as a threat to album sales, the Dead learned fairly early on that free taping and trading could spread the word about the band far more cheaply than traditional advertising and without the need to rely on radio airplay and press reviews (that were unlikely to come anyway). Add to this the use of telephone hotlines, newsletters, and, now, websites and internet listserves (which allow new bands to establish a presence on the scene with unprecedented swiftness), and one finds a vibrant, efficient, effective underground economic community. Contemporary jam bands owe a debt to the Dead's trailblazing work in making the independent artist a viable commodity in today's Gobi marketplace.

As the Second-Generation jam bands have been long established, I will not be lingering over their accomplishments. Phish, of course, is the reigning monarch of the Gobi scene, a Phish show being, in the words of Richard Gehr, "Gobi Mecca." Fifteen years of honing their sound has resulted in a presentation that is familiar yet surprising, and though their music bears very little resemblance to the Grateful Dead beyond the penchant for extended improvisation, still the scene and vibe that surround a Phish show is probably the closest approximation we have to the source experience.

Less known but in many ways more interesting are the Third-Generation jam bands. It is here that we see even greater divergence from the essential Dead sound, the apple falling "furthur" from the tree, as it were. Whereas most early jam bands closely mirrored the Dead's sonic palette- many of them actually began as Grateful Dead cover bands-now diversity is the order of the day.

An increasing number of jam bands are emerging who play what is, essentially, instrumental jazz music, which makes sense, since jazz is the very embodiment of the improvisational aesthetic. It's difficult to predict whether a true hybrid form will be born of this union or whether these young bands will simply be absorbed into the modern jazz world.

Appalachian music plays an important role in the music of many jam bands, especially bluegrass music, which, again, is not surprising, as Jerry Garcia began as a bluegrass player and maintained that tinge and color throughout his tenure with the Dead. Jazz and bluegrass, of course, are heavily associated with the Grateful Dead. It's the other genres that are creeping into jam music which pull the Third-Generation bands away from the mothership. New Orleans swamp-funk, Seventies guitar-rock, progressive rock, zydeco, and now techno/rave and hip-hop stylings are finding their way into Gobi shows.

Although there are hundreds of great jam bands zig-zagging across the country today, I shall mention the four that I consider the most significant at the present time. I choose them because I believe they are doing the most significant work in moving the genre forward and in appealing to a fairly broad audience, at least by Gobi standards.

First of all, moe., out of upstate New York, have developed a large and loyal audience through their balls-to-the-wall intensity, coupled with virtuoso playing and excellent songwriting. Combining Seventies guitar-rock flavors with Progressive Rock time changes and complexities, moe. is spacy and rocking, earthy, engaging, quirky, funny, creating a thrilling space in which to boogie and float. The guitar pyrotechnics of guitarists Chuck Garvey and Al Schnier drive the band in several directions at once, building to climaxes-or "moe.gasms"-while Rob Derhak's burly-buddha voice and a stable of interesting, artful, well-crafted songs complete the moe. presentation.

On the darker, punkier side of things are The Ominous Seapods from Albany, New York. A mixture of funk, psychedelic, and porno-soundtrack styles, the music of the Ominous Seapods bubbles up out of some primordial darkness, like a skanky ooze that is at once frightening, profound, archetypal, erotic, incendiary, purgatorial. They map out a territory not for the faint of heart or mind, a place of irrational longing and lostness. For most of their decade-long career, the Ominous Seapods were led by the ingenious and fearless guitar playing of Max Verna, whose dizzy explorations of the heavenly depths gave the Seapods their distinctive signature. With his departure at the end of 1998, the band was forced to call upon their inner resources, each attendant member stepping up to new levels of performance. Rhythm guitarist, singer and chief songwriter Dana Monteith churns like a holy funkmeister and continues to write some of the best songs in the genre. Tom Pirozzi's melodic basslines complement Ted Marotta's crystalline drumming accompaniment, while Todd Pasternak's sizzling and poetic lead guitar, and Brian "Dark Horse" Mangini's wizard-stew organ textures provide the mutant menace which is The Seapods' forte.

Perhaps the most adventurous of the Third-Generation Gobi bands is Philadelphia's Disco Biscuits, who have taken a bold step away from the earthier "hippie rock" of the majority of jam groups and are mapping out a territory much closer to techno/trance music. A Disco Biscuits show has the feeling of a Rave party. When keyboardist Aaron Magner introduced a synthesizer into the repertoire, many Gobi enthusiasts were appalled, a reaction similar to folk purists who revolted when Bob Dylan plugged in his electric guitar at the Monterey Folk Festival. With the addition of the synthesizer and Jon Gutwillig's trippy repetitive guitar lines, the Disco Biscuits are really pioneering a sub-genre that I have been calling "technodelia" but which detractors are jokingly referring to as "hippie-hop." In my estimation, they are exploring deeper space than any jam band on the planet right now. I predict that in the coming couple of years we will see a slow merging of the Gobi and Rave scenes (for both "events" emphasize extended mind-altering experiences) and that the Disco Biscuits will be an instrumental player in that convergence.

Finally, the band most likely to break through to an acceptance much closer in size to that of the Grateful Dead is a bluegrass-oriented outfit called String Cheese Incident. Their masterful musicianship and user friendly lilting jams invite the audience to a big infectious "hippie hoedown." The popularity of String Cheese Incident is expanding exponentially with each tour they make across the country, and word is spreading that these guys offer a good time akin to the good times felt at a Dead show. They have an easy-going accessibility that is less intense than moe., less dark and disturbed than the Ominous Seapods, and less cutting edge than the Disco Bisuits. Led by Michael Kang's mandolin and fiddle and Kyle Hollingsworth's piano and organ, String Cheese Incident sits poised to join Phish as the preeminent act to catch along the Gobi trail.

But will Phish or String Cheese Incident or moe. or the Ominous Seapods or the Disco Biscuits or the numerous other talented bands treading the jam circuit ever achieve the all-encompassing fully realized artistic journey that was the 30 year trek of the Grateful Dead? In my opinion, the answer is a resounding NO. Why? For one thing, all of these bands lack a multi-faceted artist like Jerry Garcia, someone with a truly wide-path mind, who, all arguments aside, really was the central figure in the Grateful Dead. Second, although bands like moe. and the Ominous Seapods write excellent songs, none of the Gobi groups has produced a lyricist with the broad vision of Robert Hunter, a true poet capable of expressing the full range of human emotions. The younger songsmiths, though talented and clever, tend to shy away from the more tender expressions one hears expressed in a Garcia/Hunter tune and resort to a kind of ironic distance, wherein humor replaces sentiment, enigmatic riddles substitute for meaningful statements, and the more sincerely thoughtful words are too often grounded and prosaic and didactic, lacking the dance of the music they are supporting.

As my friend David Gans said to me once during a conversation we had about the contemporary Jam-Rock Scene, "These bands can make you dance, and they can make you laugh, and they can even make you think. But none of them can make you cry."