Soon we'll be in another country.

After Live Dead, however, there was a curious turn in the Dead's style. Tom Constantine, one of the strong forces of musical experiment, left the group. Their next albums, Workingman's Dead and American Beauty, were pleasant indulgences paralleling the post-Wood stock "back to the country" bulls being issued by the Papacy of hip AM radio and sundry rock publications. Indeed, with "Uncle John's Band", the Dead had something distressingly close to a hit. A non sequitur for many.

And there was a concomitant adjustment in the Dead's following. They were now a real popular group, a "people's band." Their shift to a terse country format made the music accessible to everyone, not merely that weird enough to sit enraptured by sixty-minute musical explorations of inner space. The bovinization of the Grateful Dead; Nietzsche would love it.

Dead concerts, once a revered institution, underwent similar changes. The fabled rapport between the group and there fans (and Owsley) was no longer in evidence. Jerry Garcia once said, "The perfect Dead concert would be one in which everyone is onstage playing." (That, I would suggest, is much more to the heart of the notion of "Art for the People" than free, passive enjoyment of the creative efforts of a few.) Unfortunately, the People made the band into unreachable objects of adulation. They were heroes of the media, the center of as much creative energy as applause can ever represent. The Social Contract of the Woodstock Generation read: "You create the music and we'll get stoned."

And so I was wondering how the Dead has reacted to it all. I went to the Music Hall eager for some sort of statement from what many consider to be the foremost artistic personalities of our generation. I have always been fascinated by the fact that for some reason (ostensibly because of the political connotations of the art form), rock musicians have never been considered genuine artists--of the same order as a Casals, a Picasso, a Rubinstein, or (God forbid) a Beethoven or a Bach. Yet I would suggest that the work of the Dead compare favorably with the work of any of these. Listen to the early recordings. For the last six years, every concert something else--a musical manifestation of a unique juncture in time and space, with thematic relevance to all others. Not only were they creative, but each (with Pigpen standing at the side guzzling beer or reaching for his harp) a technical virtuoso. And just exactly why can't one be considered a virtuoso on the electric guitar or bass? (Just check out any of Jimi Hendrix's last albums for the word on encompassing the creative possibilities of a particular instrument). They made it up as they went along, and it came out beautiful.

The last four times I've gone to the symphony I've pined in my seat wistfully hoping for an original and not simply creatively interpretive (whatever that means) statement from the orchestra. Could you get into a tape of a jam featuring Beethoven, Bach, and Brahms, just to see what they might have come up with, had they ever gotten it on together?

So when I went to hear what the band (a term used with the greatest affection) had to say this time around, I came away quite disappointed. I was particularly saddened by the degree to which the extraordinarily creative can become alienated from a mindless following. Pete Seeger said it with just a bit more patience. (One wonders exactly how Wagner might have looked at Nietzsche when it was all over.)

The first thing that became apparent was that the New Riders of the Purple Sage have no business on a stage with the Grateful Dead. They are a very neat group within the limitations of tight, well-rehearsed material. But I would be reticent about endeavoring to present any of my own compositions as back up at a Bob Dylan concert. Unfortunately for Marmaduke et al. (Garcia was sorely missed on pedal steel), when they put their musical cards on the table, they simply did not have the hand. Only once did they attempt to break out of the dreary cowboy framework that shackled their entire presentation, and then they found themselves unable to extend their creative instrumentation beyond the solitary musical idea that constituted their two-minute jam.

The Dead followed them, complete with a new piano player, Keith Godcheaux, who fitted into the band quite comfortably. The crowd was wrecked, on their feet, and screaming with unbounded enthusiasm before the first number. They were here to have a good time regardless of what came out of the performance. There were faint echoes of prepared laughter like the canned hysteria of television comedy. Significantly, the concert hadn't started yet because of a Dead equipment failure. Weir and Leash took the opportunity to make some condescending remarks to the kids, suggesting helpfully that they might amuse themselves by "scratching each others' butts" during the interlude in the entertainment. The show that ensued can only be described as a nominal discharge of the group's concert responsibilities. They played many of the songs off their recent hit album, as the crowd knew and loved them, just like on the record.

There was little attempt at innovation and an air of bitter resignation hung over the performance (which leads me to believe that had Pigpen been featured in Woodstock doing "Lovelight," the Dead might have become Ten Years After three years earlier). The new material was melodically simple and tendentious, as if the band's creative energy had been applauded out of it. The vocal harmonies were, as always, technically impeccable if not particularly enthusiastic. The mood seemed typified by a new work entitled "Knocking' it Up"; a crassly liberal protest song coming from Hunter. There was a righting persuasiveness in Garcia's delivery of the lyrics.

Gotta make it somehow,

On the dreams you still believe,

Got an Empty Cup,

But still knock in' it up.

Only once did the Dead come to life. Late Wednesday evening they did an "Anthem" which opened onto forty minutes of brilliant musical improvisation. The unruly crowd was awed in silence as Godcheaux and Garcia led the band into a coldly crystalline atonal frame of mind. Winding on through "Me and My Uncle," they eventually ended the place by returning to "Anthem." A cathartic ooze slid over the hall, exactly the kind of communal satisfaction that follows the successful completion of any artistic whole. Renewal. Too bad that the Dead slipped back into a perfunctory closing of the concert.

The other highlight of the visit was a tape the group had played during the intermission. It featured piercing guitar feedback and cavernous waves of applause. For twenty minutes. Barren of thought, grating, annoying--and after a while maddening. Nietzsche once wrote. "The voice of disappointment: I listened for an echo; but heard nothing but praise."

I'm not sure what to make of Jerry Garcia's reported comment that he dreamt of taking the Dead to sea in a large boat and playing endlessly for their friends. It would be too bad, but I wouldn't blame them