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Stockholm Syndrome

June 7, 2009 in The Grateful Dead | Tags: , , , , , | 2 comments

One of the detriments of reading so much interesting writing about the Grateful Dead (and the fan experience in particular) available online is that it accelerates the development of and maybe even pollutes the purity of my own thoughts as I experience this trip into the music.

I am not a neophyte as far as rock music, fandom or even Internet writing/community go, so while I may be relatively fresh to the music of the Dead, I am not at all fresh to the patterns that have evolved around how popular music works its way into society.

At my dedicated observer’s post, it is my duty to try to record thoughts that might have fleetingly passed through more experienced folks’ minds long ago.  I fully expect most readers who have already been there to think “ah, yes, I remember thinking that way for all of ten minutes, a long, long time ago.”

One salient observation, I hope, is that I am already feeling an internal censorious voice warning me to avoid blundering into giving offense to the fan base.  I didn’t feel it earlier, when I was clearly in that taking off the wrapping paper and opening the box mode, becuase I knew I would be forgiven.

Now that I’m into it a bit, however, certain sensibilities have crept into my thinking and I am worried about violating the social norms of Grateful Dead observation and critique.

Please note — it’s not a result of any unkind comment or response from a reader, although I am sure those will someday come (if they didn’t I’d be disappointed with my lack of trenchant observations).

Simply put, I sometimes wonder whether folks writing about the Dead have completely foresworn their involvement with other music such that they think the Dead invented everything they are doing.

My favorite example might be references to Playing in the Band, aka Playing, Playin’, or PITB.

A reader unfamiliar with the GD might read something and think that Playing will just knock their socks off.  The references to the song, and the almost always accompanying jam therein, are rendered in a shorthand that lend huge weight and import to the song.

A newbie listening to nearly any version of PITB would hear a singer, Mr. Weir, laconically and somewhat disinterestedly (and sometimes a little off-key) , talk-singing through some pretty pedestrian insights about what it means to be part of a collective enterprise (like playing in a band, or life in general).

Musically, it would be hard to describe accurately, other than to say it’s pretty melodically uninteresting, although I did come across a reference to Creedence perhaps liking the beat (I think it’s the opposite, that Creedence would do a pretty nice job upgrading it into something more memorable).

The song is more of a vehicle for setting a mood of modest introspection, and for some improvisation (funny, but the improvisation on PITB strikes me as quite formulaic as far as Dead improvisation goes).

As an outsider, one might look at Playing and say it’s a pretty big chunk of time to spend going nowhere in particular.  Dare I say filler?

But filler is not a concept that seems to exist in Grateful Dead fandom.  It seems to go against the creed to even presume that every note is not dealt by the gods themselves, on a path seeking the ultimate transcendence, if not ultimately achieving it in all cases.

The Dead have written songs of exquisite beauty and originality, and have unearthed and popularized American traditionals of equal import.  Surely they know (knew) that some of their repertoire was not to that level.

I have come to think that the choice of droning tunes, extended by jams, is a conscious one.  At some point, the uninteresting becomes interesting, the boring becomes fascinating, it reduces the scale of what it takes to create an interesting counterpoint.  The less you are doing musically the less you need to do to create an exciting moment.

I feel the same way about El Paso, a tune that Weir seems to race through with a combination of compulsive love and complete boredom.

The El Paso jams are way more interesting than the Marty Robbins song itself, a way station to get past before the fun begins.  Fun being a relative term.  Although you will see El Paso on a lot of set lists, impassioned analyses of the jams are a little more rare.

Other bands — remember those — have their own standard tunes that they play most of their shows in a given era, and you don’t see reverence for those particular live performances among their fans.

The Rolling Stones might have played Rocks Off and Bitch every night of their 1972 U.S. tour, but the avid tape collectors aren’t discussing any of those particular performances.  The songs were played to represent major album tracks from recent LPs, but were not intended to, nor were they played, in a way to do more than merely mark time in the show.

So, we have one observation regarding the Dead here — that there is frequently seen a reverence for every note that simply does not pertain to other bands.

When reading online commentary, it can sometimes appear that the Dead invented everything for the first time.  Coming into this late, as I am, I have already had exposure to free form jazz, bebop, post-bop etc.  The idea of the musicians playing off each others’ ideas is not very revolutionary, and it doesn’t need much pointing out that the jazz guys were doing that way before the GD came along.

I’m not saying that other major rock bands incorporated as much jamming as did the Dead, but I do think they band gets too much credit for playing a nice jam.

I have had the pleasure of speaking to musicians who regularly improvise, some who have improvised at, let’s say, a very high level, given who they played as a part of, and very few consider the gift of transcendent improvisation to be one of conscious thought as much as being the result of good musical chops and doing what the fingers are practiced to do.

Truth be told, an unspeakably sad guitar solo for the ages in a song about sadness may have nothing to do with sadness in the mind of the guitarist.  He may be thinking of the post-gig sandwich while playing the in-scale notes that are available to him from the part of the fretboard his hand happens to be sitting at.  (At least that’s what I have been told.  That kind of ruins it for me).

To be clear, a good jam is a good jam, and a great one may be great.  But it’s not a miracle.  And it’s not even that unlikely if you played 3000 3-hour shows, that’s 9000 hours of music to make some noteworthy things happen.

And even when things are good, it needs to be recognized that there are lots of bands that have rocked, rolled, inspired, educated, and moved us over the years.  So much of the fan’s view is a function of the definition established by the band-fan relationship.

Patti Smith, say, expands the rock and punk idioms into that of the beat poet.  Her fans have their minds blown by being exposed to poetry and art in that context of rock music.  I daresay that there are fewer poetry fans getting their minds blown by the rock music accompanying her poetic instincts.  She’s moving people largely in one direction.

Implied in that is that in my example, Patti Smith fans are probably not experts in poetry when they first get started.  The poetry they hear from Smith garners the benefit of their excitement for the new medium (poetry) in general, rather than because it is necessarily the most outstanding or notable poetry.

For a band that spent a lot of time playing generic boogies and Chuck Berry tunes, plodding Western and pop dirges, and traditional folk songs, the Grateful Dead gets huge play for being out at the edge of the musical cosmos when they jam or create more original material.

I wonder if some of this does not simply reflect listeners’ previous unfamiliarity with those other genres.

Indeed, I think the “mislabeling” of the Dead, that I alluded to in an earlier post, as “acid rock” or psychedelic music leads to or enhances this tendency to aggrandize just how revolutionary the Dead’s music was at the time.

Everyone knows some old dude (hopefully that’s not me) who got turned on the the Dead when they realized that the Dead was playing songs their own grandfather used to play.  There’s not a huge amount of music played in a Dead concert that a folkie or bluegrass fan couldn’t stand to listen to.

If anything, when I was a younger whippersnapper, it was the Grateful Dead’s relatively flaccid and laconic boogies and Berrys, not to mention the heavy focus on historically-laden and musically astringent traditionals, that turned me off a little.

I suppose a tag-line such as “The Grateful Dead, making Grandpappy’s music cool again for you Hippies” would not have worked very well.  But it’s not all that far from the truth.

My thoughts on this matter have been stoked by listening to Peggy-O, a traditional Scottish folk song covered by the Dead.  The melody is heart-wrenching and may even exceed the sentiment generated by the lyrics (although there is a death, even a cursory scan of the lyrics reveals some venality and self-interest on the parts of all parties involved, thereby dampening the sympathy the listener might have).

Jerry Garcia, like many able guitarists, can embroider a melody line and multiply its beauty.  As you would expect, many live versions of Peggy-O soar with lovely solos, and emotive singing from Jerry.

As a capable musician who selected the obscure song, perhaps to popularize it, it is not surprising that Garcia saw qualities in it which would make for an affecting performance.  That his renditions can bring a tear to your eye, as you imagine the exploits of marauding sea captains and their manipulations of the local lasses, should not be either surprising nor constitute conclusive proof that Jerry knew he would die young in 1995.

That’s where I draw the line on becoming captive to the fan’s catechism.

But I have reached the point where I don’t hit skip when Playing comes on, nor do I fast-forward through El Paso.  I have come to appreciate the depth of Bobby’s philosophy in PITB (or I am trying hard to find it), and I enjoy what I infer is some campiness and smirk in Weir’s reciting the stilted words to El Paso.  Then I wait for the jams, and enjoy the drone if nothing else arises to capture my fancy.

I’ll assume I’m in good company.  That is, until the day I see a web site devoted to ranking the PITB jams . . . .

Coming into Focus

May 23, 2009 in The Grateful Dead | Tags: , , , , , , | 1 comment

Now that I am over a month into my intensive focus on the Grateful Dead, I have confirmed my suspicion that my perspective will change wildly in small amounts of time.  Things that completely baffled and intimidated me are now commonplaces, and I see how quickly things that were at one moment for me insights can disappear suddenly into the obvious, not worthy of comment or reflection.

But the point here is to document that exact phenomenon, so here’s a small stab at reflecting on impressions gleaned thus far.

Jerry Garcia

Garcia’s reluctant charisma appears to be a self-reinforcing phenomenon.  The more reticent he is, the lower his mic volume, the more still he stands, the less he says, the more we love the things he does do that stand out.

The big, dark arrays of hair and beard allow him to hide.  There is a sparkle to his eyes and voice that is at odds with the countenance we otherwise see.  The effect is of a sage or oracle.  Easy to see how the lay, mainstream view became that Jerry was a guru to be followed.  The knock from that camp was that Jerry was a pied-piper leading youth astray in a sort of willful gambit.

Most individuals with such an intent would have been much more direct, I would think.  The Grateful Dead phenomenon could never have been predicted to end up where it did, growing holistically after so many years.  Tyrants and tricksters simply aren’t that patient.

The answer seems to be in a basic personality type, and a love for playing the music above all else.  The personal appetite for drugs, which came to be so closely associated with the band both among outsiders and fans, really was a function of his personality rather than some overarching agenda.  I say this despite the video clip I referenced earlier, where Garcia and others do pin some “hope” for human progress on drugs.  That clip, from 1967, represents a point in the 60s when there was such a broad-based optimism about consciousness expansion via drug experiences.

At this point in my journey, I see Garcia as a modern exponent of a collective model of artistic creation.  He was clearly the most charismatic and musically talented of the band’s members.  But he really did as much as he could to sublimate himself to the collective whole.  We would see this attitude get more play in later decades, in flattened corporate org charts, going green, charging less for tickets than the market would bear and other seeming acts of beneficence where a person with power “leaves money on the table” in a way puzzling to those fixated on profit and power maximization.

Jerry Garcia was a sage, but he was singing someone else’s words almost all the time.  The music he created to propel these words was a perfect match, in that we cannot imagine the songs with different melodies (but of course they could have been different, but maybe then we would never have heard them).  So much of the 60s and 70s was about authenticity of the singer-songwriter’s personal experience, that I remain fascinated about the division of songwriting labor between Garcia, and Robert Hunter as lyricist.

More to come, as I try to figure it out.

Bob Weir

Weir has an interesting charisma.  Not nearly as strong as Garcia’s, nor really close to any of the other “frontman” type in contemporaneous rock music — Jagger, Stewart, Tyler, Page, Mercury, etc.  He has a much more typical masculinity than most rock stars, who on stage play exaggerated visions of macho but who in real life would have been the least masculine on the spectrum back in high school (imagine Mick Jagger standing next to a rugby player in high school).

I am struck by pictures of Weir onstage in an Izod and jeans in the late 70s or early 80s.  Utterly casual in what would have been termed preppie attire, singing Estimated Prophet.  What a strange dichotomy.

An all-Garcia or all-Weir fronted band would have had a very different impact.  I know that much.  I am guessing neither would have been as successful as the Grateful Dead was.  Maybe Ratdog and the Jerry Garcia Band existed to prove the value of that synergy.

Coming into this project, I assumed that Garcia was amazing, I just didn’t know the exact evidence yet.  I wasn’t really familiar with exactly what Weir contributed.

Bob Weir has impressed me, for one because I really like rhythm guitar, and he is a revelation, but also because his very limits as a vocalist are what make him so enjoyable to listen to.  I don’t think it’s an accident that one of the songs he is most associated with is his One More Saturday Night.  The spirit of that song is the everyman deciding to let it loose.  He never sings anything that we couldn’t replicate ourselves in the car or shower.  Let the party begin.

I also think that he provided a slightly different model from that of Garcia — a more grounded version of the Grateful Dead lifestyle, which served to broaden the appeal beyond hard-core consciousness-expanders and seekers.  Weir seems to indicate that you can be a regular guy and still stick a toe or more into the waters of the Grateful Dead and come out the better for it without completely writing off the straight life (for you youngsters out there, that’s not straight in the straight/gay sense of today but straight/hip sense of yesteryear).

The addition of Donna Jean Godchaux as a vocal foil for Weir for much of the 70s only underscores Weir’s role in the band as the hip captain of the football team.

Phil Lesh

How many fans of major bands have such passion for their bass player?  Sorry, bass players, but you don’t generally rise to the level of our consciousness.  Even the great Motown hits, many featuring the uniquely melodic and propulsive bass playing of James Jamerson, are not known for the great musicianship among most fans.

A casual reading of the literature indicates that Phil Lesh holds a high place of distinction and honor among Dead fans.  I have certainly heard moments where Lesh’s bass adds something distinctive and good, but I am not at a place yet where I can say that without him, the band would not have had its success or even would have lost something truly distinctive.

Of course, behind the scenes may be a different story.  Maybe Phil has been the glue that has held the whole strange trip together for so long.  I just don’t hear it yet in my tour through the music.

I do hope to get to a point, especially in the jams, where I see the uniqueness and come to appreciate it.  But like with the drummers, my ability to listen is just not there yet where I can appreciate it.

If we base impressions solely on his looks and interest in the technical, Phil Lesh presaged and foretold the rise of Silicon Valley and the high tech boom that would come out of Northern California.  I think he defined “business casual attire” decades before it became commonplace.

Bill Kruetzmann/Mickey Hart

Sorry guys, I tend to hit skip when Drums comes along.  Too much other sweet candy to consume before taking on the rice and beans.  Someday, though, I hope to be able to savor the differences in your performances and distinguish between these forays on the skins.

And to understand exactly how your particular contributions underpin the Grateful Dead’s canon.

Donna Jean Godchaux

I have to admit if you are a stickler for pitch, you might be amused by some of the things that happen live.  I chalk it up to bad monitors and the general difficulty of singing only sporadically over three-hour shows.

On the other hand, after you get over the technical elements, and come to appreciate the fact that the Dead had a female (known then as a girl) onstage with them, her contributions not only add a welcome musical element but also a crucial social element.

The Grateful Dead must have realized at some point that their seeming social values suffered from the lack of gender diversity onstage.  If the band’s methods and optics lent themselves to comparison with communal life, how could the whole shebang be run wholly by men onstage?

Not to say that with Donna onstage that the whole hippie thing was not still rife with misogyny, because it clearly was in those days.  But the hat-tip toward inclusion of women certainly scored a lot of points for the boys.

Donna Jean’s limited role (vocals) and limited singing time sort of sums up the vision of equality in place at that time.  And don’t forget, it was an improvement from before.

Over the years, I have met ten times the women heavily into the Grateful Dead than into any other rock band.  I don’t think it was all due to Bobby’s good California looks either.  Being represented onstage had to mean a lot.

As far as Donna’s musical contribution is concerned, I think if John Lennon had fallen for Donna Jean rather than Yoko, we still might be buying tickets to see the Beatles.

Pigen/Keith Godchaux/others

I have quickly come to understand why the Pigpen-era fans have never gotten over his departure and death.  He renders a much more rugged, blues-based feel to the Dead’s music.  Sort of like the difference between alcohol and acid.  His departure created a void that seems to have been filled by more focus on Garcia and Weir, rather than by bringing in another vocalist with a strong creative view.

Bands under dual leadership are fragile enough, I have to think ultimately the tripartite structure with Pigpen would have been even more subject to problems.  I don’t know close to enough yet, but I wonder whether the Pigpen version of the band would have worked the way it did in the 70s and 80s and 90s.

On the other hand, I would have been much more likely to come into Deadhead status as a teen in the 70s with his deep focus on rhythm and blues and blues music.

Keith played a mean boogie piano when he first joined the band.  Some have written that he lost some verve over the years, I would say my limited listening of some 1977 shows indicates that may be true.  Playing keys in the era of guitar is an exercise in frustration.  Another subject to give more thought to.

I haven’t gotten beyond the Godchaux years so we’ll have to wait for the Mydland, Hornsby and Welnick eras for a while.

Beat It on Down the Line Feelin’ Bad

May 18, 2009 in The Grateful Dead | Tags: , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Key to my introduction to the Grateful Dead has been the intro point provided by Beat It on Down the Line and Goin’ Down the Road Feeling Bad, two boogies fronted by, respectively, Weir and Garcia as lead vocalists. The 1971 Gaelic Park show features both tunes, and the songs appear to me as bookmarks in that their provenance (Jesse Fuller and a traditional, respectively), similar lonely laments and general musical attitude are similar but with different vocalists.

Both performances feature sprightly rhythm guitar from Weir, and nice lead work by Jerry in a clear two-guitar configuration of the time. The appearance of one or both of these tunes in a show provide me with a benchmark or baseline against which to measure the likely energy and inventiveness of the rest of the performance around them. Both songs also provide a showcase for the Dead Sound in a very traditional context. Whether an outsider will like the Dead or not might well come down to the enjoyment they get from these songs, before venturing into more proprietary creations of the band further afield musically.

The way the performance of these songs mutated from 1971 to 1973 mirrors the changes happening during those years. It’s easy to forget just how much happened in the music world in that three year span.

I came across a brilliant piece of video of the band performing Beat It on Down the Line on European TV. While I might already be able to point to a couple of even better versions in my small but growing collection, it would be difficult to find clearer video or sound from 1972. Check out Pigpen and Keith Godchaux both tinkling the keys. I love Jerry’s facial expressiveness from behind all the hair, even when it’s a stone cold poker face. I’ve watched it seven times already.

And if that doesn’t rock you, try One More Saturday Night, from the same TV broadcast.  Another song in the same boogie vein, which could be a traditional or a cover of an old tune atmospherically, but which Bob Weir wrote solo.  Although there is an interesting story that Robert Hunter actually started the song, and disavowed it after Weir rewrote his lyrics.  Hunter cost himself some royalties there.

Eating My Oatmeal

May 12, 2009 in The Grateful Dead | Tags: , , , , , | Leave a comment

I have been racing to write what I can to get caught up to real-time in my commentary.  I still have a few observations I wanted to capture for myself regarding some of my early reactions and favorites, but I noticed some things this afternoon that I want to record while they’re fresh.

I have been trying to play shows all the way through rather than just cherry-picking my favorite tunes.  This has yielded some nice finds for me.  Normally, a tune like Row Jimmy can just be too dirge-like and unvarying to look forward to, and the temptation is to skip to the next track.  But “eating my Oatmeal” can be good for me.

The stately nature of Row Jimmy allows for some things to happen which you normally don’t have the patience for in rock and roll.  From these positive experiences, I am coming to trust the band a bit more when it decides to stretch out on something that seems intentionally dull musically (or melodically, I’m a big melody fan).

I have obtained way more music than I can reasonably digest right now, in the eras 71-73, 77 and 69 and have listened intently the past two days to Denver Coliseum 1973-11-20.  It has wonderfully clear sound.

The performance has contrasts with the shows I have already become familiar with.  Jerry’s playing seems a little off, and even more interesting to me, there are some indications to my ears that he was trying to shape the band’s performance in some ways I found unusual.  Of course, I could be totally off-base, but I am happy to be familiar enough to at least form a opinion on a “new” show, regardless of how wrong it might be.  Maybe the difference is between 1971 and 1973 — in retrospect, they seem quite contemporaneous with each other but we all know ’73 was a long ways from ’71 musically, socially and politically. I will pay more attention to 1973 shows as being distinct from the ’71 and ’72 shows in the future.

On Mississippi Half-Step it sounds like Jerry is trying to shape and organize the vocal harmonies on my favorite Rio Grand-eo part.  Unfortunately, his playing lacks some of the carefree spirit of other versions of these songs.  All in all, I would guess that Mr. Garcia was a bit off his game for some reason.  No biggie when you do so many shows of such length.

And Garcia’s solo in the later-show Bertha utterly lacks the total joy of the lead-off version from Gaelic Park (1971-8-26).  That version of Bertha symbolizes the live show experience.  The band gets its legs chugging underneath it for 3 1/2 minutes before Jerry tees off with that high-starting solo that immediately sets the crowd off into ecstasy.  It screams “Jerry is on today and it’s gonna be a good one.”  Indeed the whole Gaelic Park show is fabulous beginning to end.

On the other hand, in the Denver 1973 show I felt like Bob was in good form, and I absolutely have fallen in love with the WRS Prelude from this listening to this Denver 1973 show.  I must have heard it a few times before over many years of radio listening and hanging out with friends, but I never knew exactly what it was.  It’s ike the return of a forgotten long-lost friend.  The part that goes:

Winter gray and falling rain
We’ll see summer come again
Darkness fall and seasons change
(Gonna happen every time)
Same old friends the wind and rain
(We’ll see summer by and by)
Winter gray and falling rain
(Summers fade and roses die)
We’ll see summer come again
(Like a song that’s born to soar the sky)

is sublime and gives me goosebumps.  I can’t wait to focus in on this confusing WRS (with its Prelude and Part 1 and Let it Flow) as I devour more shows.  At least I know now that it has nothing to do with the jazz band Weather Report.

And I may have experienced my first “Phil bomb” at the start of this The Other One — had it not been so clearly recorded it would definitely have blown out my car stereo woofers.  Cool.  Gotta be more careful in the future.  Off to research the Weather Report Suite.

Not to Mention Bobby . . .

May 12, 2009 in The Grateful Dead | Tags: , | Leave a comment

Since my last Garcia and guitar-centric post, I have felt bad about not mentioning Mr. Weir.

As a huge fan of great rhythm guitar, Bob’s playing has been a revelation to me.  I would not have put him in my personal top 100 guitarists until starting my study of the Dead’s music.

If only for his boogie playing, on those Chuck Berry numbers and on Going Down the Road Feeling Bad, I would put him in company of other more famous strummers.  As befits the Grateful Dead, Weir’s style is more laid-back than most, but his “walking” style Berry riffs (based as they are on direct translations of Berry pianist Johnnie Johnson’s boogie woogie piano figures) have a lot of rhythmic punch to them without requiring heavy syncopation in the strumming.

In the tunes where Garcia is not playing single-note leads, I am still learning who is playing what.  But I have come to appreciate the interplay of Garcia and Weir and to appreciate already Weir as a glue that holds much of the sound together.

This of course raises the issue of someone I have not mentioned yet in my posts, Phil Lesh.  I know from just existing that Phil has a huge following among Deadheads and that I am likely to develop enough of an ear to see how Phil influences the band through his bass playing.

I am simply not developed enough as a fan of bass playing to be able to say much yet.  I am hip enough to love James Jamerson’s bass playing on those Motown records and I have endured a few bass solos in my time while listening to jazz or jazz fusion.  But I’m just not there yet to appreciate exactly what Mr. Lesh is contributing to the overall sound.  I’m sure it’s there.  Just being honest at this early stage of my project.

I did read somewhere that the Dead is about the three guitars, Lesh down low, Weir in the middle and Garcia up high.  I am looking forward to moving beyond my two-guitar paradigm to thinking in that third dimension.  I hope my brain is elastic enough at this stage.

Downloading My First Shows

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

Finally I can talk about the music.  While I was reading the McNally book mentioned earlier, I decided I needed some Dead music to listen to.

The two shows I downloaded ended up serving as my exclusive Grateful Dead music for over two years. The multiple CDs I burned for each show never left my car.

Knowing I wanted to relive the days of hearing Europe ’72 with my friend, I selected largely at random the Berkeley Community Theater show of August 21, 1972 and the Gaelic Park show from NY of August 26, 1971.

My reaction to these shows was to be stunned.  Perhaps my decade-plus enjoying Americana (Alt-Country) had softened me up, but I was shocked at the breadth of the song selections, the rocking element, the clarity of the soundboards and the fact that the performances did not sound dated in any way.

A relatively obscure (to me) Chuck Berry number Promised Land smokes.  The lyrics exalt the trip to California from the American South, and I raced to learn about who was playing that amazing Jerry Lee Lewis-style piano.  I learned quickly that Keith Godchaux joined and overlapped with the late Pigpen, who died in late 1973.

Pigpen, I soon figured out, was the guy singing the emotional and earthy blues numbers prevalent on the Gaelic Park CDs.  One of my first “revelations” was that Pigpen’s illness/death deprived the Dead of a rougher blues element that would have made them more attractive to me in the 70s as a blues-rock fan.

His Empty Pages on Gaelic Park is stunning, especially the emoting at the ending.  The Dead sound like Big Brother and the Holding Company on the tune, it’s completely San Francisco psychedelic blues a la Janis Joplin.

Back to Berkeley, I fell in love with almost every song.  He’s Gone tied into the story about Mickey Hart’s father, and the song’s languid and mournful pace made a lot more sense after I knew the story.

Jack Straw sounds almost like a Broadway show tune in its complex multiple parts and lyrical wordiness, and has great playing by Jerry.  It also always gets a rise from the crowd with the “we can share the women we can share the wine” line, which gave me a sense of how the lyrics are taken to heart by the fans.

I also got a kick out of the following line that shows a concern for “sharing” one’s own with others when maybe they haven’t shared theirs yet.  The cheer after that line indicates that the 60s ethos clearly didn’t wholly eradicate normal human behavior as far as selfishness goes.

Me and My Uncle turns out to be written by John Phillips and is a staple of these shows from that time.  The storytelling is fun and fits well with the Dead’s themes of western cowboys, poker games, theft and treachery.  Bob Weir seems to enjoy portraying the evil nephew in a way that makes each version a unique performance.

I could go on and on and am just scratching the surface.  I can’t think of a better era than 1971-72 for a newbie to digest.  The bands’ classics/staples, such as Uncle John’s Band, Sugar Magnolia and Playing in the Band are all there and sound fresh and inspired.

The shows are so long that digesting them can take weeks of casual listening.

Mississippi Half-Step Uptown Toodeloo was a revelation for me in the Berkeley show.  The multiple voices repeating the “across the Rio Grand-eo” line are ragged and sometimes off key (Donna Jean) but majestic nonetheless, then Jerry resolves the tension with a great solo dancing simply around the same melody line.

It makes you want to sit around a campfire and sing, regardless of whether you can sing or not.  Well, some people.  In my car, two of my family members who can sing were sort of appalled at the harmonies.  Meanwhile, I had a lump of joy in my throat from the feeling of the entirety.

At that point, I realized that I would be going this path largely alone, and that I was indeed falling into Deadhead-hood.  Better late than never.

I also suddenly understood that there were hundreds, maybe thousands of these multi-hour shows over decades.  How would I ever penetrate the catalog?

I punted for a while on the project and simply enjoyed MY two shows.  These two will always be the standard I use for evaluating new shows I obtain — do they make it into the circle of that Berkeley date and the Gaelic Park show “on the whole”?

A normal person might be satisfied with two great shows from an era.  The obsessive in me has very recently gone back to the archives to experience a slew of other shows from that time.  It will be some time before I can compare the other shows against the others, but what I am realizing is that I can sit and enjoy 3 hours of any show without getting restless to hear my old standbys.

The sheer volume may in fact be a curse of sorts.  We’ll see.  But the human desire the find the best show, the best performance of each song, begins to snake around me and interfere with what I have, an embarrassment of riches in terms of free, fantastic quality Grateful Dead.

Time to start thinking about other eras to explore as well.

A Long Strange Trip: McNally’s Tome

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

My long-deferred journey to discover the Grateful Dead resumed, or began in earnest, a few years ago during a random review of the popular music section of my Barnes & Noble bookstore.  Unable to get excited about shelling out cash for another variation on rehashed exploits or for another coffeetable bible of pictures and memorabilia of the bands I have loved and followed for decades, I spied a healthy-sized trade paperback on the Grateful Dead, lots of text, few frills.  I had heard the name Dennis McNally and figured he was a good place to start. for the semi-official burnished history

While I knew reading a book about music that I barely knew would be a grind, I found A Long Strange Trip . . . to be quite an interesting read.  I stayed up all hours to finish it in a weekend.  While I was reading it on two levels — one as a rock fan looking for the expected excesses of the profession and another as a person familiar with the business world and how people in organizations battle over money, prestige and power, I also knew I would need to read it again after becoming familiar with the music.

McNally walked a fine line between telling tales and keeping secrets, and ironically he was more free with the stories of dosed punch than with how the intra-band dynamics worked.  I can certainly understand not wanting to burn such important bridges, but there’s a dog that didn’t bark, so to speak.

I came away with three big questions I will seek answers from in the music.

First, few bands’ lyrics more directly influenced their fans and spoke to (or were believed to allude to) an enlightened value system than those of the Grateful Dead.  Yet the band’s own songs lyrics were largely written by two non-performers in the band, Robert Hunter, who was considered a non-performing member, and John Perry Barlow, who may or may not have been granted that same exalted status.

Each man wrote mostly with one of the two guitarists/vocalists, Hunter with Garcia, and Barlow with Weir.

How were the Dead able to achieve their level of success while being dependent on such designated “wise men” to write the lyrics, where other major bands appear to have written their own?

Second, what was the dynamic between Garcia and Weir personally?  I did not find a lot of speculation or light shed by McNally on this most central topic.  I would expect the Lennon/McCartney, Jagger/Richards or Page/Plant relationships to constitute the focus of books on their respective bands, so I was puzzled and frustrated by the lack of insight provided by McNally where he obviously was in possession of some.

Third, while he alluded to Garcia’s reluctance to be seen as the leader of the band or the “movement” around the band, Garcia clearly acted with authority on many occasions, perhaps passive-aggressively, but not on others (perhaps crucially in not being able to slow the juggernaut to save himself).

What makes the Dead different than all their peers was the lack of a leaping, charismatic front-man, or in the case of the Beatles, the lack of one or both leaders willingly taking the role foisted upon them by the media and public.

What were the personal issues or 60s cultural issues that informed Garcia’s reticence — a reticence I hear nearly every time he sings on the live soundboards, where his vocals are apparently calibrated to be just loud enough to be heard over the music, but leaving the listener straining to hear more.

Listening to the tapes of shows, the balance between the vocals handled by the two frontmen and the balanced origins of the songs they sing, seems amazingly casual but also cunningly calculated.

The survival of the band for such a long time as a true working outfit on the road is amazing given the difficulties of such in the music business and especially where large sums of money are involved.

While it seems the real-world issues faced by the Dead could be seen as a repudiation of some of their professed values, those values could also be seen as the reason for extraordinary longevity and productivity.

I am nowhere close to having answers to my questions, but it should be fun trying to develop them.

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