Searching for the (Sacred) Sound: Phil Lesh, the Grateful Dead, and Religion
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract: In addition to being recognized for their musical contributions, the Grateful Dead were also well known (indeed, notorious) for espousing a world view that can in many ways be described as religious, and for inspiring great devotion among their fans. There have been a number of scholarly discussions of religious aspects of the Grateful Dead phenomenon, but these discussions usually have to do either with the interpretive lens through which their lyrics are understood, or with sociologically based analyses of the behaviour of their followers. Both of these approaches are explicitly or implicitly etic, and they neglect the abundant testimony from band members themselves about the nature of this new religious movement masquerading as a rock band (or vice versa). In this paper, I attempt to correct this neglect by discussing some of the religious aspects of the Grateful Dead phenomenon from the perspective of the band members themselves, particularly the bassist, Phil Lesh. Drawing on his recently published autobiography, Searching for the Sound, I will describe his model of Grateful Dead's religiosity, and show how it is reflected in the Grateful Dead's performance practice. I will also discuss briefly the ways in which the Grateful Dead's attitude toward these religious ideals can be seen as efforts to resist the “routinization of charisma.”
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".