REFLECTIONS OF MATTER: THE GRATEFUL DEAD'S "DARK STAR" AND THE SECRET SIXTIES

By: Tony Price

The Grateful Dead’s “Dark Star” is not only the definitive musical expression of West Coast psychedelia, but the only artifact from the scene that came close to capturing the vast expanse of the new frontiers of inner space being that were being explored, exploited and experimented with in the 1960’s.

“We live in a very strange time”. A statement pasted against the walls of our United Mind, lining the curvature of our increasingly individuated reality tunnels. If you chase the various currents of our contemporary derangement, you soon find that they lead you westward.  

1960’s California was a sort of nexus point where the burgeoning strands of Cold War imperialism, techno-fetishism, and mass media converged into a new form of power. Somewhere in between the military-funded genesis of what we now call the internet, large scale experimentation with altered states of consciousness and the arch individualism and mass consumerism of the 1960s we find the contours of our current reality beginning to take shape. 

Our collective nostalgia for the Sixties, as anthologized in antiseptic Time Magazine retrospectives and vaseline-lensed music documentaries, presents us with a pastel-hued slideshow, snapshots of a time where “we almost changed things”. Be that as it may, we never truly stood a chance against Them. What the Sixties did offer us was a glance behind the curtain, a peek at the inner machinations of an empire in flux. 

An alternative recollection of the 1960’s recognizes the vast influence of intelligence research and the military-industrial complex undergirding the key political, cultural and economic shifts of the decade and the State’s shift of aim towards a frontier previously unconquered: inner space. 

The Grateful Dead formed in 1965 in Palo Alto, California. That the house band for the so-called counterculture should be born in one of the principle cities of Silicon Valley comes as no surprise. While popular mythology suggests that there was something Promethean in the air, the existence of programs and projects like MKUltra, CHAOS, COINTELPRO and ARPANET show us in retrospect just how inter-tangled the various facets of early internet research and the nascent counterculture were with military-intelligence interests.

The degree to which the Grateful Dead were an intelligence facet has been analyzed and debated to death in the nether regions of the internet. What cannot be denied, however, is that the early history of The Dead and their milieu is inextricably stitched to MKUltra and government LSD research. Dead lyricist Robert Hunter was an early volunteer test subject for psychedelic chemicals at Stanford University’s covertly CIA funded MKUltra program where he was paid to report back on trips on LSD, psilocybin and mescaline. John Perry Barlow, early cyberlibertarian internet advocate and lyricist for the band, admitted in 2002 that he had spent significant portions of time at the CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia. One of the counterculture’s more interesting characters, Owsley Stanley, the Dead’s early sound engineer and financier, was also a clandestine chemist notorious for being a principal source of LSD in the Haight, producing millions of legendary hits of the most potent ‘cid available. Owsley was the son to a government attorney, the grandson of a US Senator, and worked within the military-industrial complex, doing stints at Rocketdyne, the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and Edwards Air Force Base. While studying at Stanford, Stanley began producing LSD. By 1965, he was producing hundreds of thousands of tabs of acid, becoming the primary source of LSD in the Bay Area. One must wonder where the means and funding to embark on such an endeavor might have come from, but that might just be a bit of the ol’ paranoia speaking. During his time at Stanford, author and fellow psychonaut Ken Kesey was also paid to serve as a guinea pig for studies in psychotomimetic drugs under MKUltra at the Veteran’s Hospital in Menlo Park. Kesey was the key architect behind the infamous “Acid Tests”, a series of Bay Area parties in the mid 60’s centered around the advocacy of LSD where hundreds of people “turned on” with the help of Owsley acid and wiggled away to the tune of the Dead’s electric excursions. 

Make what you will of this information, but there is no denying that there was an electricity pulsing through California at this time. The side effects of maniacal Cold War electronics research created a booming consumer electronics industry that allowed for advancements in sound recording and amplification technology. Inspired by the boundary pushing sonic developments being conducted by Joe Meek and George Martin + company across the pond, West Coast psychedelia found an entire generation of musicians mutilating speakers with transistor fuzz shrapnel and tape echo derangements in efforts to replicate in sound those technicolor visions swirling around their freshly fried minds. The Dead’s early studio recordings were groundbreaking in this regard, and worthy of investigation in their own right, but “Dark Star” was the only artifact from the scene that ever came close to encapsulating the terrifying vastness being encountered during those early inquisitions into the frontiers of our collective interior.  

The Grateful Dead - Dark Star (Single) (Warner Brothers 7186, 1968)

Released in 1968 on Warner Bros. as a two minute and fifty second single, the song was lyricist Robert Hunter’s first collaboration with the band. The track, noodly, drumless and stoned, features Hunter’s lysergic ruminations sung in harmony overtop a couch-locked arrangement of various guitars, organ and tambura. The track hangs like a sedated cloud, moving slow like ribbons of smoke off incense. It is one of the most understated and underrated singles of the late 1960’s. The band started playing the song live in 1968, and it would eventually become a centerpiece to their live sets up until 1974 when the song disappeared from setlists, save the odd occasion, until the 1990s. Live recordings of “Dark Star” from the late 1960s and early 1970s are unlike anything in the recorded history of rock and roll. 

It has been said of the I Ching and Tarot that within them one can find a model of the entirety of the universe. One is inclined to apply a similar mode of expression when trying to talk about these live recordings of “Dark Star”, for it as if every thread of American music finds itself unspooling simultaneously within them. “Dark Star” is endlessly suggestive; often expanding outward beyond the 20 minute mark, the Dead’s live extrapolations on the tune seem to have no beginning, middle or end. Sprawling, nonlinear and quantum, the band circles, swirling around the peripheries of a theme endlessly. Jerry Garcia’s spidery guitar spills out weblike; Daddy Long Legs like Uncle Sam on stilts; Appalachian triplets clogging through mists of feedback infinitum; silicon chip blues bends weeping in electric indigo; snaking sativa bebop figures in slow motion that tangle like a mess of live wires. It never moves, yet it never sits still, endlessly flowing into itself. 

Whatever it is that actually went on in the 1960’s we may never fully be able to comprehend. All that can be known for sure is that many of the textures that make up our current predicament can be traced back to happenings, developments and clandestine maneuvers of that time and that somewhere inside the meandering pathways and black holes of “Dark Star” lies the secret story of the 1960’s.

The Grateful Dead - Dark Star (Live) - 11/2/69 - The Family Dog at The Great High Way, San Francisco