Tag Archive

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 . . . .