The internet is a funny place.

You can write a whole blog post for the Wednesday a week in advance, you can entertain the idea that it will be somewhat relative to your near future. Then you peruse Reddit like an addict and someone posits a question that immediately railroads your hands to write on a completely different topic.

That’s what happened when I stumbled across this post.

The topic was simple: name the best band that starts with the letter “G.”

This is exactly the kind of topic I love. First of all, it pertains to music, but even more specifically, music history. I’m not the guy to come to when speaking of chord phrasings and the merits of Doric versus Ionian modes. I still suck at all the different tempos. But fuck if I don’t stick my nose into rock critique like a raccoon licking the bottom of a dumpster.

Before anyone is offended, I have to say the critique is literally the lowest form of art. As someone who wrote music critique without a lick of critical music theory knowledge, the bar for entry is demonstrably low. There are some amazing critics out there—Lester Bangs, Ellen Willis, Robert Christgau to name a few—and some of the best critique is not engaged in any part with the music theory, but with the experience of the music itself¹.

As with all art, the experience is almost always subjective, and that subjectivity is what gives a discussion like this some legs. And the second reason why this particular topic is something I love is because G has some pretty formidable bands to consider.

Just to name a few, there’s Genesis, Green Day, Gorillaz, Grand Funk Railroad, Guns n’ Roses and Gojira. However, I did appreciate the shoutouts for the Guess Who, Gang of Four and Godspeed You! Black Emperor. In the spirit of post-rock, I might just follow this series of threads and give Mogwai a mention for the sake of variety.

Mogwai are, nevertheless, not a “G” band. Not until you feed them after midnight².

I digress though, because I surfed the comments before making my suggestion and I was glad to see it at the top rung (at the time): the Grateful Dead. I gave a hearty comment of support, suggesting that there was no other answer and then proceeded to log out so I could write this post.

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No I didn’t.

I probably should have closed the tab after making one comment. But like a drunkard who just wants to argue at the bar, I stayed well past closing time, pushing the merits of Jerry Garcia, Phil Lesh, Bob Weir, Bill Kreutzman and Mickey Hart to which ever fellow red-eyed commenter would read.

And then I had the brilliant idea that instead of arguing this, I should just write a blog post³. So here it is, my thoughts on why there is no other answer than the Grateful Dead when it comes to the letter G.

The thing with the word “best” is that it is most often construed for “most influential” rather than “most technically gifted.” If it were the opposite case, John Coltrane, Miles Davis, and a whole host of jazz artists would wipe the floor with answers. But as of right now, each band selected by the post has largely centered around seventies and eighties rock, because like it or not, the Cure are more influential on a cultural basis than the Cannonball Adderly Quintet.

Which brings me to the tricky thing with the Grateful Dead.

Yes, the group have sold less records than any on the aforementioned list of Gorillaz, Green Day and Genesis. Yes, their music is not nearly as ubiquitous as their contemporaries, Led Zeppelin or Rolling Stones, when it comes to radioplay. Yes, they probably don’t have quite the same influence outside of the United States as other bands in the same alphabetic. Yes, they are like black licorice. But I’d argue that this kind of influence is something that literally cannot be bought.

“My reputation is far bigger than my sales,” Brian Eno once said of his influence in an interview with the Los Angeles Times. He then hammered the point home with an ancedote of him talking with Lou Reed. Reed opined that his first record, The Velvet Underground & Nico may have only sold 30,000 copies.

Eno politely reframed Reed’s statement, saying “I think everyone who bought one of those 30,000 copies started a band!”

That’s the kind of influence the Grateful Dead had.

To wit, here’s some of the influential things that the Dead had a hand in:

(1) they are responsible for or aided the development of four separate genres, Americana, jam rock, psychedelic rock, and “new-grass⁴;”

(2) they helped foster the psychedelic revolution of the Sixties, popularizing the Acid Tests;

(3) they proved that the touring cycle was a viable alternative form of income to the album cycle;

(4) they created an alternative economy based around the recording and trading of taped concerts;

(5) the basis of this economy helped provide a proof of concept for the early internet as a digital community—some of the earliest websites were none other than tape trader sites where users could digitize and upload tapes in an act of great preservation⁵;

(6) there’s an entire industry of Grateful Dead tribute bands that extends through almost every major American city. Oregon, as a state, boasts 18 such groups according to Grateful Dead Tribute Bands (.com).

This is influence that cannot be bought. Literally, those tapes probably sunk album sales. They might have even made it harder for the band to expand into Europe. They still sold out every European venue they set foot on, mind you, but those live shows were everything. And those tapes are made the influence so persistent and pervasive, keeping them just under the surface. They formed the mycellial network that could weather any storm, any death, including those of Garcia, Lesh, Mydland, Pigpen or any other member of the Grateful Dead.

And every once in a while this mycelium pops up like a mushroom, whether that’s in the form of a Stealie sticker or some one writing “Weir Everywhere” in chalk on the sidewalk. Somewhere, some how, there’s probably a Grateful Dead tribute show happening in America tonight.

Compare that to any other band in the “G” category and you’ll probably find them wanting for that kind of influence. For the Grateful Dead, the music never stops.

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1 For the curious, one of the best books of music critique I’ve ever read was Stranded: Rock and Roll for a Desert Island. It was collection of twenty essays compiled by Greil Marcus from an absolutely formidable cast of critics. The passages in there will make one laugh, or cry, or ponder, or do all of the above. The most boring one though has to be John Rockwell’s detailed breakdown of Linda Ronstadt as a singer. Technically interesting but prosaically sterile.

2 It was right there and I was taking it. The goal is not to make you laugh, the goal is to make you roll your eyes so hard that they pop out the backside of your head with the force of a spud cannon. I have had that goal on my bucket list for two years by now. It sits right under “dance so hard someone has to drop a cape over my shoulders like I’m James Brown (does not have to be my cape).”

3 Seriously, if there’s one thing I want to improve upon writing wise, it’s just finding these topics, saying my piece, then taking those words and expanding upon them in the blog. It’s not like I can plagiarize myself.

4 New-grass is just a neologism for new millennium bluegrass artists such as Billy Strings.

5 It’s also worth mentioning that John Perry Barlow, one of the band’s lyricists, was an early advocate for the internet and even wrote a Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace.