Just Like Mary Shelley

As the 1960s turned into the 1970s, the Grateful Dead considered what the new decade meant for the band. It undertook this look into the future by turning to the past, an effort that demanded it face the violence that is an unavoidable part of American history. Chapter 2 assesses its engagement with the unsettling aspects of this historical moment and with the darker corners of the American past. It reads several lyrics in relation to such grim, and even sometimes properly gothic, literary touchstones as Frankenstein, The Hound of the Baskervilles, “Tam O’Shanter,” and Faust. These eerie tales, plays, and poems sat well with the interest in speculative fiction that many in the band shared. Furthermore, both canonical and popular texts helped the band engage the gothic as a means to open American history to the repressed, a conceptual space to which many characters in its lyrics were native.