ABSTRACT
Chapter 9 offers a broad historical and philosophical framework within which to view the preceding analysis by examining the prehistory of the Grateful Dead beginning with Friedrich Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy out of the Spirit of Music, a blueprint for “a theater of the future” despite its speculations on the archaic past. The chapter traces the story from the Weimar Republic to the nuclear age and the psychedelic renaissance, exposing integral threads of cultural evolution that set the stage for Garcia’s Apollinian artistry at the heart of the Dionysian phenomenon of the Grateful Dead, a postmodern American manifestation of Nietzsche’s dreamed rebirth of “tragic culture.”
