sorry if this has already been mentioned, but i had an idea that i didn't want to lose hold of while reading all the way through this (awesomely) long thread. we have to look at historical context (musical and otherwise) if we can even begin to compare the emotional weight of the respective bands without problematic anachronisms. hate to sound all hippy-dippy here, but the world was wiiiide open to new levels of expression when the dead started out; add a fair amount of acid and fearlessness and the love of disorder will bloom. the repression and post-atomic bomb paranoia of the fifties was clearly not resonating with a generation that was stuck with the choice between disillusionment and new creative orders. that it failed to bring established order because freedom itself can never be a guiding unifier (only the prerequisite for its impetus), is the point to me.

the emotional maturity of the dead came after the wildness of the *free-form only* was over, and this is why they needed a late-70, 71, before the glory of 72. the batch of hunter/garcia songs that came out of workingman's etc. came after the chaos of 68-early 70 because they intuited that the unit could not hold without an anchor, and that was precisely what enabled 72-74 to be as amazingly effortlessly spiritual in jamming and emotive balladry. reconnecting with archetypal americana didn't need to be ironic or post-ironic because it was a genuine connection made possible by the symbolic earlier rejection of the roots of the country. the anchor that connected them to reality was in place, and genuine emotional resonance was possible because they had already been through the formlessness of the edge of madness and stepped back to embrace the simple feelings of life.

this is my take on the simpler chord structures and lyrics of hunter that blossomed in an era where the rest of the country was falling into its own brand of disillusioned nixonian-induced chaos. the hippies didn't work, the world didn't change, lets try "conservative" values, watergate/cambodia/inflation/energy crisis/et al.> oh shit that doesn't work either. the dead had the confidence to express themselves in a truly authentic manner because they were truly establishing their own new order in a world whose disorder allowed for it. there needed to be no humor because the genuine seriousness were in the lyrics and the joy was in the music. a good counterpoint is zappa who seethes with humorous satire. his response was the template for phish, just look at the involved composition and humorous release.

the difference between phish and zappa though, was that zappa had already happened by the time phish came into being. so if the world had become post-modernly self-referential and zappa had mastered the art of musical humor through satire, where does that leave phish? the increasing information with no authentic cultural guideposts, the lack of essence or zeitgeist, the deconstruction of art involving the necessity of self-referential creation, all of this leaves a band in a place where there are no wharf rats, casey jones, or scarlet begonias. the "nerdy" self-enclosed response that phish seemed to be having in its formative years were a response to the fact that simplicity was increasingly hard to be true or beautiful. the world had changed in a big way between 1967 and 1987, and it would be almost impossible to compare the two bands without this GIANT asterisk of a post. trey went so far as to creative a fictional narrative to deploy themes of post-modern alienation after failed freedom; you want simplicity and beauty ala the dead, then try out the toure de force of gamehenge.