Of all the people to have the quasi-religious devotion of Deadheads transferred upon him following Jerry Garcia’s death, David Grisman seems like the most unlikely candidate. Sure, he and Garcia palled around for the better part of four decades, changing the course of bluegrass music by making several records together in the early 1990s. And Grisman is actually the guy playing mandolin on “Friend of the Devil,” one of the staple classics in the Grateful Dead canon. The two even grew to resemble each other in their middle age — husky, grizzled, gray-haired — “beards of a feather,” as mutual friends called them. Yet even with this shared history, it still comes as a bit of a surprise when Grisman’s live shows begin to swell with refugee Deadheads — lithesome, undulating dancers who now rub shoulders with his more sedate, sit-down folkie crowd.
“When it first started happening,” says Grisman with a laugh, “there was a controversy among my fans, where they were complaining about these Deadheads coming to the shows. [The Deadheads would] get a little out of control and make a little too much noise, dancing around and stuff. It still happens. I saw people at a recent show in Eugene, Oregon getting pissed off about these people dancing in front of their seats.”
Grisman is a mandolin player’s mandolin player, an innovative performer who is almost single-handedly responsible for revolutionizing bluegrass music. Originally from New Jersey, he began his career in the early-’60s Greenwich Village folk scene, playing alongside urban folkies such as John Sebastian and Maria Muldaur in a series of influential bands such as the Greenbriar Boys and the Even Dozen Jug Band. Like many young Americans, Grisman came to folk music almost by default, searching for something vital and engaging to fill the void after the first wave of rock ‘n’ roll fizzled out in the late 1950s.
“There were a whole bunch of us who were really into rock ‘n’ roll when it was first happening,” recalls Grisman, speaking by phone from his Marin County home. “Chuck Berry and Buddy Holly, y’know — the real deal that was happening around 1956 to ’58. Then all of a sudden it kind of disappeared, because some of ’em ODed, some of ’em went to jail, some of ’em went to the Army. By 1960 there was nothing left. Then the Kingston Trio came in and we were all taken by folk music, and as a byproduct of that we stumbled onto bluegrass.
“You had to be really hip [to be into bluegrass],” he continues. “There were little groups of kindred spirits around the country that were aware of each other, because different musicians would travel around. I was in the New York scene, but there was also a Cambridge scene, and a Berkeley, California scene, and an LA scene and a Chicago scene. We were all members of the bluegrass club.”
By the 1960s, only a handful of traditional bluegrass stars had successfully weathered the commercial onslaught of rock ‘n’ roll, among them the acknowledged creator of the style, mandolinist Bill Monroe. Grisman was first introduced to Monroe’s music by his friend and mentor, folklorist Ralph Rinzler, who was one of the first promoters to stage old-time music shows for the urban folkies in New York City. Ironically, when David Grisman first got into bluegrass, he was anything but smitten by Monroe’s style.
“Ralph had played Bill Monroe’s records for me, but it was too strong,” says Grisman. “I didn’t really like his singing, or even a lot of his records. At first, the banjo is what sucked me into bluegrass — it’s just more virtuosic, more mind-blowing; that Earl Scruggs style of banjo playing, it’s just otherworldly! It didn’t sound like anything I’d ever heard. [But] one day in 1961 Ralph called me up and invited me to go down with him to a place called New River Ranch in Rising Sun, Maryland to hear Bill Monroe. When I went down and [heard] Monroe’s voice [actually] come out of a body, it kind of turned me around. Plus, the opening band had Frank Wakefield in it, and in 1961 he was pretty much the closest thing to Bill Monroe on the planet. I got the mistaken impression that all mandolin players sounded like them, which wasn’t really true, but it made a big impression on me.”
Another member of that far-flung old-timey in-crowd was the young Jerry Garcia, who Grisman first met at a parking-lot jam session outside another Bill Monroe show. The two hit it off, and later, when Grisman made his first trek out to the West Coast in 1965, he visited Garcia and friends who were living in a large house in Palo Alto. Garcia had already graduated from the bluesy jug band scene and had formed a hard-rock band called the Warlocks, which eventually mutated into the Grateful Dead. Years later, while working as a session musician, Grisman was invited to play mandolin on the Dead’s breakthrough album, American Beauty.
Thus began the musical relationship that is the subject of a new feature-length documentary, Grateful Dawg, opening this month. The film was produced by Grisman’s daughter, Gillian, who painstakingly pored through hundreds of hours of archival footage and hippie home movies shot during the years when Grisman and Garcia collaborated onstage and in the studio. Prominently featured is the legendary stoner bluegrass band, Old & in the Way, which Grisman and Garcia formed in 1973. The group was short-lived but quickly stirred up ripples in hippie music circles. Simply by dint of Garcia’s participation, Old & in the Way created a durable bridge between the Deadhead hordes and the newly booming bluegrass scene, inspiring countless fledgling pickers and fiddlers to delve into old-time mountain music.
Grisman, meanwhile, had been developing a radically different kind of acoustic music. It was a new style that would draw on a new generation of bluegrassers, hotshot pickers like himself who had apprenticed in older, established bands and had gotten the nod from elders such as Bill Monroe and Jimmy Martin.
A series of projects led to the formation of the David Grisman Quintet around 1977, a group that left many bluegrass fans with their jaws agape. In his new ensemble, Grisman fused bluegrass instrumentation with classical-style composition, jazz improvisation, and a rock-like intensity. The dynamic “gypsy jazz” acoustic swing music of guitarist Django Reinhardt and violinist Stéphane Grappelli was a direct inspiration: In addition to covering songs from their 1930s Hot Club sessions, Grisman also worked with Grappelli on a number of recordings. Although numerous “newgrass” crossovers had been attempted in the early ’70s, nothing as innovative or accomplished as Grisman’s sleek, expansive “dawg music” had been heard before.
As Bill Monroe and Ralph Stanley had done before, Grisman found himself in the role of groundbreaking bandleader who inadvertently bred his own competition. Many Quintet alumni went off to form their own groups, many with small, jazz-oriented, soundalike ensembles. Lavish stylistic fusions became commonplace in bluegrass, as pop-oriented performers such as Alison Krauss and Bela Fleck reached out to a wider, more mainstream audience, often backed by musicians who had apprenticed in Grisman’s band. While he says he is not a fan of these pop crossovers, Grisman also doesn’t see it as his duty to be an arbiter of how bluegrass should evolve.
“Music’s never going to stay the same,” he says. “I’ve got my voice and my vote; but I can’t control what happens with other people’s music. Nor would I want to. But there’s nobody really featuring instrumentals that much in modern bluegrass, so what I do is still unique.”
In 1989, Grisman stepped back from the grind of touring and recording one-off albums with various record labels. Tired of haggling over payment, promotion, and distribution, he made the leap from virtuoso to impresario, forming his own independent Acoustic Disc record label, and set about releasing a series of records that reflected his own personal taste.
The first album on his new label was an update of his own “dawg” music, but the second release took Grisman back to an earlier partnership, and a simpler way of making music. Garcia/Grisman was a lighthearted, loose-limbed set of recordings made with his old pal, Jerry Garcia. The two offered each other a welcome respite from the musical confines each had found himself caught in — Garcia from the pressures of being a world-renowned hippie rock icon, and Grisman from his reputation as a perfectionist acoustic-jazz maestro. On a series of casually recorded albums, the duo delved into traditional tunes from their old days as earnest ’60s folkies, and cannily fused their unique styles.
The documentary footage of Grateful Dawg shows how, in Garcia’s waning years, Grisman’s home became a safe haven from the hectic demands of life as a rock god. The two gray-haired alpha pickers spent peaceful hours together caught up in the enjoyment of creating music and just being together, moments that were captured by Grisman’s daughter.
“Gillian and some of her friends filmed several concerts,” says Grisman. “And a bunch of footage in the studio and living room. There was a box of videotape, and after moving it around from place to place I asked her if she was ever going to do anything with it.” Grisman originally envisioned the project as a modest DVD release, but his daughter wanted to expand it into a full film, with interviews and other footage that showed the growth of the Grisman-Garcia partnership.
At first Grisman was resistant to the idea, but as he was gradually won over, he began to give more input into the film’s direction. Having seen countless music films that he felt shortchanged the music itself, Grisman insisted that each song be played in its entirety; as a result the film has a slow, deliberate feel, interspersing archival footage and interviews with live footage from a series of shows Garcia and Grisman staged over the years.
The film also offers a glimpse into a surprisingly tender relationship between two guarded, grizzled old-timers. Garcia remains largely a cipher, warm and playful in his music, but enigmatic as a person, and quoted only briefly in interviews made prior to his fatal heart attack in 1995. Grisman, too, seems aloof, although his affection for Garcia is evident, particularly in one scene where he speaks about Garcia in the present tense, as if he had never left.
“Well, he’s not gone,” says Grisman. “I mean, as I’ve gotten older, I’ve lost more and more people in my life and I’ve come to realize that part of being alive is keeping these people with you spiritually, or in your memory. We’re all just standing in line for the great checkout counter in the sky. It’s not that I don’t miss him, or haven’t accepted it, but he’s just a presence. I think about him every day.”
Grisman says he’s somewhat surprised by the attention Grateful Dawg is getting, but hopes that the film will give fans an impression of the warmth and affection he felt for Garcia while they made music together.
“It was a great thing to look forward to,” he adds. “I never knew when we would get together because it wasn’t a very formal thing. I wouldn’t call him, instead I would always wait for him to call me, then he would always say, ‘Oh! You should call me!’ I always felt like he was so overwhelmed with stuff, I didn’t want to bother him. But the important part, the main part — the music — is still here, and that’s what really matters.”
