The Grateful Dead Synthesis Essay

The point I want to bring to light is that The Grateful Dead were proficient in creating instrumentals through improvisation while Bob Dylan was proficient in writing lyrics through both scrupulous and haphazard methods.

Music was created and embodied in many different ways during the 1960’s and 1970’s. This was a time for innovation that musicians were allowed to, and encouraged, to reach for and grab. A musician that stood out was Bob Dylan, and a band that stood out was The Grateful Dead. Bob Dylan pushed the bounds of the writing and lyricism with his often poetic songs which were able to reach young audiences in the 60’s. With that being said he had an almost complete disregard for the instrumentals that were placed behind these lyrics,

This makes them appear to be fairly unskilled at their instruments as they would spend much of their time noodling and just getting ready to play a song. However, once they got into the flow of the songs they were quite good at playing off of each other. “Quote about improvisation from It All Rolls Into One”. As much as the band appears to be a bunch of potheads they did practice their playing and were dedicated to the music they make as well as the people they were influencing. The Deadheads are what followers of The Grateful Dead are called, and there were a lot of them. With their numbers reaching tens of thousands, and of all the bands they were probably the most dedicated following. Wherever The Grateful Dead would go the Deadheads would go. It would even be unfair to talk about The Grateful Dead without mentioning the Deadheads. As a group they had a sharing mentality which would later lead to being a main proprietor in the spread of The Grateful Dead’s music. Deadheads would routinely tape concerts and share them with each other, and The Grateful Dead were more than happy about this. They even set up sections where people could record. “Quote about The Grateful Dead taping 56”. Taping was a way to relish the concerts as well as a way to spread around what it meant to listen to The Grateful Dead. These tapes were able to capture their ever changing sound which The Grateful Dead's albums could not.

So much so that he even won a Nobel Prize for literature in 2017. This was an amazing feat for a musician, even for one of the first singer-songwriters. Before I dive into his lyricism I would like to talk about his lackluster instrumental playing. He was not known for any of the instrumentals even to the point where he gave the band he was playing with full control. An example of this is when he sang like a rolling stone he gave the band complete control. We see this in the organ being played which was the idea of the organist and Bob Dylan just kept telling him to play the organ louder with each take they recorded. With that being said Bob Dylan did play the guitar, but wasn’t anything special. His strong suit was his writing, which was quite different for the 1960’s. His songs had lots of depth and meaning, and were a way to reach a younger audience. His songs were also filled with words, as if they don’t ever really fit with the instrumentals. Many of his songs have way too many words per line creating a rushing feeling, and his voice while singing them was nothing special. Bob Dylan was very much a writer and poet as opposed to a songwriter. He used music to get his message into the open, but not as a way to write proficient music. Bob Dylan didn’t just write the songs and go on his way he spent a lot of time crafting the correct lyrics and form, “The changes across the four days are generally small, slight changes that help the