‘Grateful and Dead’: Strange Bedfellows

Expect several surprises from the upbeat documentary “The Grateful and the Dead” on KOCE Channel 50 on Monday night.

The first is that the Grateful Dead, quietly and anonymously for about a decade, have been subsidizing a number of British classical composers. The second and third surprises, and maybe the fourth, fifth, sixth and so on, well may be the composers themselves, whom few ever have heard of and who are writing music of very high quality. The final surprise may be how articulate and sensitive the Dead are about the nature of the music they are sponsoring.

Prompted by bass player Phil Lesh, who studied with avant-garde composer Luciano Berio before starting a rock career, the band formed the Rex Foundation in 1984 in response to numerous requests for benefit concerts for various causes. The foundation has distributed money to dozens of charities and social causes. It has also doles out grants for reviving and commissioning music by ignored, out-of-the-musical-mainstream composers.

A single Dead concert in Sacramento last year generated $450,000 for the foundation.

“If you get some, you give some back,” explains singer/guitarist Bob Weir.

“The fans know the money is going somewhere else besides our pockets,” adds bandleader Jerry Garcia, noting that “if you have to call the Grateful Dead for charity, you’re definitely falling between the cracks.”

The recipients of the musical grants fall into two widely separate age groups--a crusty generation that includes Bernard Stevens, Harvergal Brian and Robert Simpson, and a younger, fresh-faced experimental one that includes Michael Finnissy, Richard Barrett, James Dillon and Chris Dench. What they--and the Dead--have in common, says Lesh, is that “none is part of the musical establishment. The Grateful Dead is made up of outsiders, (too). . . . Many rock ‘n’ rollers are outsiders in their culture.”

The KOCE show includes Dead music and samples of the music by the Brits, each of which should prompt a desire to hear more. Stevens is represented by his austere yet lyrical “Sinfonietta,” Brian by his enormous “Gothic Symphony” (listed in the Guinness Book of Records as “the largest symphony of all time”).

Brian, 94, reacts scornfully when asked whether he thinks of himself as a “failed composer.”

“What’s success?” he responds. “What’s failure?”

Simpson, confined to a wheelchair, speaks coldly of being regarded as out of the mainstream.

“The function of a composer,” he says, “is to spread as much sanity around him as is possible.”

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The music by the younger generation includes eerie, hallucinatory work by Dillon; Finnissy’s arching lyricism that explodes into anger; explorations of industrial noise by Barrett, and would-be shamanistic efforts by Dench.

Several of the composers comment on Lesh’s serious insights into their music. Barrett says it is very important to him to be appreciated by someone like Lesh “rather than an Arts Council bureaucrat.” Dench notes that the Rex grants have “enabled people like myself to stay alive.”

“Whole genres of music are only subsets of music itself,” says Lesh. “For me, there are no divisions like that.”

* “The Grateful and the Dead” airs Monday at 9 p.m. on KOCE-TV Channel 50.