The indie/jam band merger

This past week, Chris Richards detailed the slow conversion of indie rock bands into jam bands in an article for the Washington Post.  Certain bands with which he chose to make his point are questionable (The National aren't jammy at all, curating an album of Grateful Dead covers was a side interest and doesn't feed back into their music) but his thesis is sound.  Ten years ago, everyone was talking about "corporate indie", i.e. the commercialization (and/or watering down) of indie as masterminded by major labels looking to capitalize on indie's cultural cachet.  Now?  Indie bands are jam bands.  Liking the Dead is certifiably OK in the indie scene, as noted by Richards, the only problem is that indie (and rock in general) has never mattered less as a cultural force.

The mainstream mostly ignores the jam band scene, except when they rake in obscene amounts of money (see: the 50th anniversary Dead shows), which I guess makes them truly countercultural again after all these years?  At the very least, today's indie jammers can look forward to many more decades of successful concerts if they play their cards right.

I first became attuned to this issue when reading a Yo La Tengo message board probably about fifteen years ago.  Somebody made the point of comparing YLT and the Grateful Dead, and sure enough, they ticked off many of the right boxes -- concerts stretched out to epic lengths, long and improvisational concert jams, different set lists every night, covers, covers and more covers, tolerating and even promoting tape trading of their live shows, etc.  I was slightly horrified, less so because of the Dead comparison, and more because the comparisons were completely on the money.

There wasn't a specific incident that helped the Dead became more "palatable" for indie fans, as noted by Richards, it was a glacial process.  The prior generation of music critics had exhumed and dissected the music of the 60's one too many times, and the Gen Y and millenials were tired of hearing about how nothing would ever be better than the 60's.  They moved onto examining the critically underrated pre-punk 70's, the Dead released their most well known albums during those years, and away we go.  Along those lines, the new Scorcese documentary about Dylan's Rolling Thunder Revue (which I am itching to see) couldn't have existed fifteen years ago.  Dylan's "indie phase" ended after his motorcycle accident, and save for "Blood on the Tracks", 70's weirdo troubadour Dylan was too jammy and weird to be taken seriously next to his 1962-1966 output.

Finally, I think Wilco's crossover happened a lot earlier, as I recall them getting a lot of cred with the hippie crowds through their album of Woody Guthrie songs with Billy Bragg.  This may have contributed to their breakthrough with "Yankee Hotel Foxtrot" many years later, that is, Wilco had broad, underappreciated appeal beyond the usual indie scenes. Oh, and how did War on Drugs not get mentioned in the article?