The Grateful Dead song inspired by Kurt Vonnegut
So it goes. How can an anti-war book be life-affirming while still reflecting the true horrors of that which it condemns? It is a difficult question for mere mortals, but giggling God-like Kurt Vonnegut achieves it with aplomb by involving aliens of all things. By invoking the surreal, he captures the true senselessness of war, which, for some reason, is a message that still needs stating.
However, beyond his whimsical approach and every other element he joyously clusters into his kaleidoscopic novels, the effect he has, above all, is to have you break from reading to proclaim, ‘He’s put in print the thoughts I didn’t even know I was already thinking!’ To use the horrid parlance of our times, he makes you ‘feel seen’ and shows you the absurdity of human comedy with just a little more clarity and a crisper punchline than before.
Slaughterhouse-Five was a masterpiece presented to the Grateful Dead’s Jerry Garcia at an early age. Though ostensibly an anti-war novel, it is more so a message about the “impermanence of life” and “how this very moment is as real as the next”, as the writer puts it himself. The minuscule concession of all tragedies is that they bore out a message for the future, and if war teaches us anything, it’s that surely all life is to be cherished; as Vonnegut puts it, “That’s one thing Earthlings might learn to do, if they tried hard enough: Ignore the awful times and concentrate on the good ones.”
As his uncle once told him, when things are going swimmingly, you’d do well to pause, realise your windfall and exclaim, ‘If this isn’t nice, what is?’ Although sometimes Vonnegut can seem curmudgeonly as he holds society over the coals, this inherent joie de vivre always saves his discerning from cynicism, and ultimately, his works are a triumphant celebration of our dogged and damned existence.
This is what Garcia and the Dead had in mind when concocting the character who skips through ‘Uncle John’s Band’. In truth, the Grateful Dead were such big fans of Kurt Vonnegut that he undoubtedly inspired many of their songs. In fact, Garcia even held the filming rights for Cats Cradle and tipped his hat to it with a nice Ice Nine reference from the band’s publishing company.
However, ‘Uncle John’s Band’ sports one very clear link that proves handy to work another of his most brilliant quotes into this piece. In the track, the protagonist has very few cares to give, but, much like Billy Pilgrim as he slips through time and space in the confusing eruption of counterculture, there is one thing he must know: “What I want to know, is are you kind?” This notion of finding simple truths in confusing times is lifted straight from the pages of Vonnegut, and it makes for an afforming song.
It is also a lyric that sets it up nicely to close things with Vonnegut’s message to the world: “Hello babies. Welcome to Earth. It’s hot in the summer and cold in the winter. It’s round and wet and crowded. On the outside, babies, you’ve got a hundred years here. There’s only one rule that I know of, babies-‘God damn it, you’ve got to be kind’.”
