Being Away

September 4, 2009 in The Grateful Dead | Tags: | 3 comments

Well, it’s been a while.

I guess being middle-aged means that sometimes middle-aged things need to be done.  I spent two months away from my house on the road, for a variety of reasons which are not really too relevant here, but which caused a big crimp in my Grateful Dead listening.

Most of the time I was on the road with two teenagers, which meant that I was self-censoring much of the time.

It is no exaggeration to say that I could have listened only to the Dead for most of the trip and the 8600 miles . . . .  If I were alone.

What I realized, among other things, was that I had become proprietary about the Grateful Dead and sought to find appropriate driving situations to work them into the mix.  I also realized that it’s hard to pick out single tunes to play, because few of the performances work in a stand-alone kind of way.  At least to my ears now.

I felt more comfortable putting on live shows for at least 45 minutes or an hour, in order to get the groove going.

When I did, I found I was missing the attitude that my prior intensive months of Dead listening had provided, peace of mind-wise.

And while there are panoramas in the East amenable to the music, nothing beats California for a listening background for the GD.

Not being able to approach the music comprehensively and academically, I found that I learned relatively little about particular shows or tracks on this trip.  More or less I was choosing amongst recently-discovered favorites, and learned that the late 70s goes down a little easier than the early 70s boogie with teens.

Maybe that’s what I learned more than anything — how the boogie rhythm that underpins my 60s and 70s rock is completely gone from today’s popular music.  Funny that I didn’t realize that.

From listening to the radio I also got over my aversion to Dave Matthews.  “Funny the Way it Is” was everywhere and opened me to giving the guy the respect he is due.

Sorry for those of you who have been following my journey in real time, I recognize this might have thrown you for a loop.  Ultimately, I decided that I was not posting for an audience but for the purpose of chronicling my fall into the Grateful Dead.  Accordingly, since I was largely in summer reruns, I decided not to turn the blog into a travelogue or discourse on the fragile state of mind of a wandering fortysomething.

Oh, by the way, I got hung up in a positive way on Knocking on Heaven’s Door from Dylan and the Dead.  I always like the song no matter who does it, but Dylan sounds desperate and lost and the song just works due to that.  I understand that reviewers think the whole record is a travesty.

Vacation (fron the Dead)

July 20, 2009 in The Grateful Dead | Tags: | 2 comments

A driving vacation provides a lot of chance to either listen to the Dead, or not.  In my case, not wanting to fray tempers, I am being democratic with the music selection.  So, not much Grateful Dead.

I DID have a nice moment on the Mass Turnpike yesterday when I passed a van pulling a trailer festooned with GD stickers and sayings.  In the past, I might have been tempted to say “look at that whack-job”, but instead, I smiled and gave a thumbs-up to my fellow traveler!

Made my day!

Ambassador for the Band

July 10, 2009 in The Grateful Dead | Tags: | Leave a comment

Being on vacation, and able to inflict one’s musical choices on others, had led me to an odd new feeling.

I feel I need to carefully choose what Grateful Dead I play, so as to put their best foot forward.

It’s a good sign of how far I have come to the other side that I feel this responsibility.  I’m sticking, for now, to strong, on-key vocals, shorter songs with shorter jams (Hundred Year Hall is a good CD choice, it seems) and not playing them every waking hour.  It’s hard, but the complaints have been limited so far.

So Many More Roads

July 1, 2009 in The Grateful Dead | Tags: , , | 1 comment

Coming to grips with the decline of Mr. Garcia post-70s, much in the vocal department is a depressing side road for me.  Maybe because, as I tout so openly, I am middle-aged.

The 1984/85 New Year’s Eve performance of Shakedown Street, a song I always liked on the radio, on the So Many Roads collection, has to contain the worst vocal performance of a lead vocalist on any officially released album ever.

Jerry, by my calculation, was 42 or 43.

Now, maybe that night he was famous for having a cold or something, but come on.  The Scarlet Begonias from Hamilton, Ontario, 1990, a few tracks later on So Many Roads isn’t much better.

Then I get to Terrapin Station, 9/12/1991 a couple more tracks in, and I find myself moved.  Before I have a chance to read the date, the melody grabs me as it always does and immediately I find myself in another state of mind.  Then the singing.

I am listening to a dying man.  Easy to say now, but he didn’t die for another four years.

Yet he’s dying there.  No man who wasn’t dying would be allowed to sing in that vocal state – he’d hurt his vocal cords and do permanent damage.  Only a man with no future would have been permitted to push himself like that.

I cannot get beyond the line “I will not forgive you”, although I know its a trick played by retrospect.

Then, later “The storyteller makes no choice, soon you will not hear his voice . . . “

If you have any love for what Jerry Garcia created, or for the man, take a listen to this vocally painful version if you haven’t in a while.

All but despondent, I then stumble upon Whiskey in the Jar, a gem in so many ways.  If the chatter mid-rehearsal in 1993 is to be taken at face value, Garcia begins playing this old Irish folk tune from deep memory, then singing along.  If  I had any doubt that Garcia’s first love was bluegrass and that he was a genius, it is dissolved here.

His banter with Bob Weir about the song and its lyrics captures what so many have written about him — he is enraptured by the music, a bit of a wise guy in the process — “I haven’t [heard it in 30 years] either, I just remembered it” he responds to Bobby, with either a bit of prodding one-upsmanship in his voice or maybe he’s just on something.

When he says “great lyrics, it’s a cool song” he sounds like a teenager.

He would later, some research reveals, record the song with David Grisman later that year — adding another must-hear to my long list.

So Many Roads, performed with the Grateful Dead that final show in Chicago in 1995, closes the CD.  I recognize that there are a lot of interesting coincidences and foreshadowings going on, and as a novice I will not attempt to put it all together.

I will simply note that I have read Garcia idolized Dylan, and that the ending background vocals are quite reminiscent of Knocking on Heaven’s Door.  That The Well has some really great message board threads organized by song, and that I read somewhere that Robert Hunter sometimes wrote lyrics for Garcia to serve as a message to Garcia.

And that there are many oblique references to other Dead-repertoire songs in the lyrics to So Many Roads.

My favorite is the one I caught on my own, the first line:  “Thought I heard a blackbird singing”, reminding me of Morning Dew.

Consolidating My Thoughts

June 30, 2009 in The Grateful Dead | Tags: , , , | 3 comments

Dear Dead Diary:

So I’ve taken a little break from posting.  It doesn’t mean I haven’t listened to the Grateful Dead non-stop since my last post.

I just needed some time to consolidate my thinking.

I’m sure I’ll drop my standards soon, but it will be fun someday to look back and see my earlier, obviously wrongheaded views in print.

So here goes.

First, this band played way too many shows of much too long a duration for way too many years.

Second, this band and its fans enthusiastically killed the golden goose.

Third, the golden goose had his own issues that led him to prefer working himself to death (by playing music) rather than doing something else.

Fourth, something happened to Jerry’s voice somewhere between 1978 and 1981, I haven’t worked through that era yet, but his vocals pre- and post- that event, whatever it was, are completely obvious within 5 seconds of listening.

Fifth, starting in the eighties, the crowd sounds more like a typical rock crowd, in terms of the intensity of the cheering, you can hear the hero worship and stridency (it happened across many bands, if not all of them).  It’s pretty stunningly obvious after having listened to a couple of months of 70s shows exclusively.

I could go on, Dear Diary, but there’s the gist of it.

My basis for being a curmudgeon is all right there.  But at least no one can say I only like the era I recall from my youth, or of the shows I attended, or the music that accompanied my young romances, because there was no Grateful Dead for me in any of those years.  Well, almost none.

I have probably listened to only 20 songs where Brent sings, thus far.  I recall that the Eighties were keyboard-centric, and hated them contemporaneously as well as ever since.

It is not a good sign that I don’t like Mr. Mydland’s singing at all.  Very Eighties, over-singing without a good voice drives me nuts.  And the Dead’s originals from that era are too keyboard-driven for me.

So I’m worrying here a bit, although it would be a relief not to have so much to wade through in such detail.

I think the path here is to stay focused on the Seventies for now, with brief forays into the late 60s and the Pigpen era for some relief.

I’m listening to Hey Pocky Way, whatever that is, from So Many Roads, if that helps explain anything . . .

The Wit and Wisdom of Jerry G.

June 19, 2009 in The Grateful Dead | Tags: , | 1 comment

A surprising element of learning more about how the Grateful Dead wrote its original material regards the authority of their voice — or in their case, their multiple lead-singing vocalists.

Other than the Allman Brothers, I can’t think of an important rock band that split its lead vocal duties as evenly between two major players as did the Dead.

Nonetheless, to the tourist-level fan, there is no doubt that the voice of Jerry Garcia represents the vocal “signature” of the Grateful Dead.  His particular thin, straining, quavering high voice paradoxically spoke with an authority that a better, stronger, more typical rock front-man’s voice would not have.

A cross between mystical, all-wise guru and wiseguy “head”, Garcia’s pronouncements gained by their utterly authentic delivery via his “flawed” vocals.  (I already know “we” Deadheads wouldn’t change a thing, at least until the 80s).

So it is a point of inquiry for me that the original words he sung were not usually of his own creation, but of Robert Hunter or other collaborators.

Now, I’m not saying he was just a lyric reader.  Surely he and Hunter worked in a collaboration that, at least in myth, was simultaneous and inseparable.  Surely we can hear the sentiments of a Hunter lyric and assume that he was writing along the lines ol’ Jer had inspired.

In truth, Garcia probably was more of an editor, in selecting what songs to put to his music, how to arrange them and which lyrics to keep and which to throw out, or modify.

The musical contribution alone stands as a towering achievement on so many classic tunes.

In some ways, Garcia’s interpretation of Hunter’s words might make the lyrics even more meaningful than if Garcia had penned them himself.  Few bands worked with such talented and numerous off-site lyricists while writing their own music.

It’s an odd formula but one that created catch-phrases that may have never lived had the band wrote more of its own lyric material.  “One man gathers what another man spills.”

Somehow, it may have been easier for Hunter to come up with those gems when he was not standing on stage so many hundreds of nights, watching how the audience reacted to them.  Being closer to the reaction may have impeded his creativity.

On another day, I will consider the impact of the unusual songwriting tandems of Garcia-Hunter and Weir-Barlow, and how competition may have served the fans and band favorably, without the typical rancor seen in so many other outfits in the rock era.  Right now, it’s a puzzlement to me, on a human level, as to how it stayed together and positive.

Learning to Drive

June 18, 2009 in The Grateful Dead | Tags: , | 1 comment

There’s a short period when a teenager is learning to drive where they describe the sensation as the world rushing at them and admit, in a very un-teenager like way, that driving is harder than it seems.

Of course, this admission is never repeated. The human brain, it is said, may be best at filtering out unnecessary information rather than gathering it or even processing it.

Within minutes, the overwhelming onrush of data gets filtered down into a managable stream of only the most pertinent bits.

For me, jumping into the Grateful Dead with both feet at this late date in their career and in my extended adolescence has felt much like the young driver feels at first.

The sheer volume, thousands of shows, over four decades, often three hours long, over several dozen songs typically played at each, never a repeated set-list, nearly every show available online for downloading or streaming, in various incarnations, soundboards, audience and matrix, from various sources (board mixes from Betty Cantor, Bear, Dan Healy and others), it’s just total overload.

There’s just no way to stick to an organized dive through the pile, and no fun in resisting the natural urges to follow hunches and personal peccadilloes. I tend to like repetition. If I like a song or a specific performance, I want to play it to death before moving on.

Having struck a rich vein in the May 1977 shows, I have moved laterally amongst them.

Urges abound, such as to become a reviewer, a teacher, a polemicist, a scold. Urges to be resisted.

In retrospect, I think my fear as a teenager — that my personality would not allow me to be a reasonable part-time Grateful Dead fan while maintaining other passions — was well-founded. My decision to defer exploring was a wise one, if only from the perspective of a guy now listening to the Dead the entire 18 hours he is awake, whether by iPod, computer, car or sometimes computer and laptop simultaneously (playing a download while surfing the Internet Archive for specific points of comparison).

Since it is impossible to be unaware of the archivist’s dream that is the Grateful Dead live canon, I wonder whether those coming to the band post-Jerry (and post-Internet age) are all self-selecting obsessive-compulsive completists?

In other words, are we attracted by the data structure or by the music? Not to say the music isn’t keeping me here, it is way beyond my expectations and brings repeated and great joy, but is the obsession fueled by the fact that the music is there in such overwhelming volume to be surmounted?

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