That's When It All Began

Members of the Grateful Dead were friendly with and, in many people’s eyes, the appointed descendants of, the major figures of the Beat generation. Chapter 1 explores the band’s social connections to Beat authors and the degree to which Beat personalities, values, and texts shaped the band’s lyrics, particularly insofar as its songs are marked by an impulse to contemporaneity and a distinctly American voice. Sascha Pöhlmann’s notion of American poetry as “future-founding,” or concerned from the first with envisioning and establishing the terms of possible future Americas, is especially helpful in describing the difficulty of such productive visions in the mid-twentieth century, when mass destruction seemed increasingly in reach, and increasingly likely. The Beats’ response to this pressure drew much on predecessors such as William Carlos Williams and Walt Whitman, and the legacy of those writers, chapter 1 demonstrates, consequently informed the American vision of the Grateful Dead.