Grateful Dead goes classical

LOS ANGELES — It may be the longest, strangest trip the Grateful Dead's music has endured — a performance by a symphony orchestra under the baton of a classical composer.

But to Lee Johnson, the guy with the baton, the real surprise is that his world of high culture took as long as it did to embrace the world of counterculture for which the Grateful Dead provided so much of the soundtrack.

Born in San Francisco in 1965, two years before the legendary Summer of Love it helped usher in, the band was dismissed by critics for years as a footnote to pop music's Psychedelic Era. But by the time its 30-year run ended with the death of guitarist-composer Jerry Garcia, the Dead had morphed into one of the world's most popular concert attractions.

"The Grateful Dead embodied such a huge swath of the late 20th century ... that they are just a wonderful place from which to have a symphony in which you can explore and come out with a response to American popular culture," says Johnson. His composition: "Dead Symphony No. 6: An Orchestral Tribute to the Grateful Dead."

The work, assembled from nearly a dozen songs and recorded by the Russian National Orchestra, was released as a download in May and is now on CD.

Although a basic five-chord rock 'n' roll band, the Grateful Dead's multiple-time signatures, harmonies and rhythms have had its fans swearing for decades that they could hear the sounds of Beethoven and other classical composers echoing throughout the music.

No one took them very seriously, apparently, until Johnson; perhaps, he says, because adapting the music to a classical format was no simple task. If there was one constant in the Grateful Dead's approximately 2,500 concerts, it was that the band — partial to long, experimental jams — rarely played the same song the same way twice.

"How do you transform that into an orchestra that lives not in the moment but off the page?" he asked.

In the case of a movement based on the song "Stella Blue," Johnson told the Russian National Orchestra to do what the Grateful Dead would do — improvise.

"They were primed and ready," the Emmy-winning composer recalled with a laugh as he spoke by phone recently from his home in Atlanta. "I explained what we wanted to try to do. They politely listened, nodded their heads and off they went."