Good old Grateful Dead
I have a long history with cult-like mass-media obsessions:
Star Trek, Dungeons
and Dragons, Monty Python, Douglas Adams, the
Big Lebowski, the Simpsons, Family
Guy, Katamari Damacy
- I've been a slavish devotee of all of them. But nothing
compares to my devotion to the Grateful Dead. It's not about
drugs. I've never even tried the serious hallucinogens, much
less anything harder. I really do like the music, a lot. I'll
be the first to admit that there are many reasons not to like
it. The GD don't reward close, analytic listening the way
that Monk and Coltrane or
Bach or Lennon and McCartney
do. But Jerry Garcia was a remarkable musician, and if I've
had to filter out a certain amount of noise to get his signal,
it's been well worth it.
The biggest idea that Jerry Garcia contributed to white American
culture was that music should be slow-to-medium
tempo, danceable, intellectually challenging at times and
reassuringly simple at others, and at all times open for
improvisation. Jerry's best playing and songwriting were built
on an African base: hypnotically repetitive, harmonically
cyclic or static or wildly open, rhythmically dense, percussion-oriented.
Group singing, clapping, dancing - this kind of mass participation
in music from the neck down used to be a part of daily routine
in human societies. White Americans in particular are starved
of this essential emotional vitamin, and it stunts our social
growth the way lack of food vitamins stunts your bone growth.
The culture that produced the Dead and that they helped perpetuate
is an ugly and childish one, but as sleazy as the parking
lot scene was, I saw it as the cost of business to get to
be in a building full of African-derived music and people
dancing to it.
The band liked to close with Not Fade Away by Buddy Holly,
basically just a modal I7-IV groove over a distinctive beat:
clap, clap, clap, clap clap; clap, clap, clap, clap clap.
Rock musicians call this the Bo Diddley beat. The Dead loved
the Bo Diddley beat and used it in about every sixth song,
and they're not the only ones - it's a cornerstone of all
American popular music. Like so many such cornerstones, the
Bo Diddley beat arrived here with African and Caribbean slaves.
The beat descends from a ubiquitous Afro-Cuban figure called
three-two son clave:
This beat is not as simple as it looks, but by the end of
the song, the Deadheads were all clapping along. They certainly
had ample opportunity to practice it during the long Jerry
solos between each verse. During the very extended tag out,
while singing "Love is real, and not fade away"
over and over, the band would pull the volume back quieter
and quieter until all you could hear was the crowd's clapping
and singing. Then they'd simply wave goodnight and walk offstage
as the crowd continued. Sometimes you'd get all the way out
of the stadium, across the parking lot and into the car, surrounded
the whole time by people still clapping son clave. As I think
back, the couple of times I experienced this were a better
learning experience than all of my pre-college formal music
education combined.
Many people dislike the Dead very strongly, and this Deadhead
will be the first to acknowledge the many valid reasons to
dislike them. The Dead themselves never tried very hard to
be liked. They never could sing in key, they routinely trainwrecked
on complicated passages, their arrangements were ad-hoc and
messily indifferent a lot of the time, their lyrics were mostly
stoner-poetry malarkey, and after 1977 they were nearly always
phoning it in. They let Phil Lesh, Donna Godchaux and Bob
Weir sing, sometimes all at once; they let Keith Olsen put
orchestral-prog strings on Terrapin Station; they let Bobby
teach himself slide guitar in public; they did way too much
formless horsing around with MIDI. Lord knows, my fellow Deadheads
have been a major embarrassment to me: Jeff Lebowski-esque
sixties relics, rich white kids with dreadlocks huffing nitrous
oxide out of Hefty bags in football stadium parking lots,
Hell's Angels and (ugh) Tucker Carlson.
And yet. For brief intervals during their long and checkered
career, the Dead could be the most amazing band in the world.
Widely scattered though these intervals might be, they're
increasingly easily available through the magic of the Internet.
The Dead are one of the best-documented groups of musicians
in history, with just about every public note they played
meticulously archived and recorded by fans, with the professionally-mastered
high points commercially available from the band themselves.
One important reason for the ubiquity of Dead recordings is
the band's famously permissive attitude toward concert taping.
They had a special seating area reserved for tapers, and invited
people to plug directly into the soundboard for maximum recording
quality. Jerry was inspired by a similar custom at the bluegrass
festivals he attended as a young man. One of my most treasured
possessions in high school was my cassette
copy of 5/8/77 set II with its labels in my friend Ellie's
handwriting. As I recall, the encore cut off halfway through,
the kind of compromise we had to routinely make back in the
pre-digital era.
My friend Josh
Koppel talks about "digital things in analog form."
In retrospect, the loose network of GD concert tapers prefigured
mp3 blogging, using snail mail no less. The pleasure of seeking
and finding good Dead shows, or being given them by friends,
was a direct antecedent to my experience of
Delicious and iTunes and Amazon and many other staples
of my cultural life on the web. The non-Internet music industry
has suffered dire financial consequences for being slow on
the uptake about memetics.
Jerry Garcia accidentally discovered viral marketing, and
by insisting on giving away so much of his recorded music
for free, he died a multimillionaire.
So who was this guy Jerry Garcia, and why was he so important
to me and a jillion other people? Before getting deeper into
the music, let's talk for a second about Jerry's look, and
the GD look in general. Here's the maestro the way I remember
him from GD and Jerry Garcia Band shows in high school:
The purple t-shirt is misleading, he mostly wore black ones,
with black sweats or black jeans. The rest of the band similarly
made no effort whatsoever to have an 'image' or a 'look',
unless you count utter indifference to your appearance as
a look. Phil Lesh would perform in red-white-and-blue wristbands,
a tie-dyed t-shirt tucked into khaki slacks and running shoes.
Taken together, the late-period GD looked like my parents'
friends, or the English department at a small liberal arts
college. Onstage, Bobby made an effort to look alive, move
around, engage the crowd a little, but the rest of the band
just looked at their feet, Jerry especially. A less MTV-friendly
bunch of musicians, you could not imagine. The GD's flamboyant
lack of concern for their own appearance was, in fact, a big
part of what drew me into listening to them in the first place.
I figured that they must have been genuinely badassed and
important, since they were obviously making no effort to draw
people in, and yet people were still so fascinated with them.
Here's a good close look at Jerry at the high point of his
shamanistic fame:
He looks like a cult leader, but his hair and beard aren't
a spiritual statement, they just represent slovenliness. The
New Yorker once aptly described him as "an unmade bed."
Other likenesses, off the top of my head: Santa, Gandalf,
Jesus,
a grandpa, a caveman,
a guru, a homeless person, a hermit. The main thing he looks
is: old. Jerry was only fifty-three when he died, but due
to his hard living looked more like eighty-three. He may not
have been the first geriatric rock star, but he certainly
most looked the part, and he's one of the only major rock
stars to have become steadily more popular and influential
as his hair got whiter.
Homely though the musicians themselves were, the Dead were
a highly visual band, with exquisitely good taste in psychedelic
graphic design. Here's the now-ubiquitous Stealie logo, so
named because it appeared on the cover of the GD's Steal Your
Face album. It's dreadful record, possibly the band's worst,
but it does have a devastating cover. The logo was designed
by the Dead's notorious sound engineer and in-house LSD provider,
Owsley "Bear" Stanley, as a sticker to put on the
band's equipment, making it easier to tell it from the other
bands' gear in the dark.
Why did I draw this symbol on my notebooks in high school
about forty thousand times? Why is it on a sticker on my guitar
amp? First of all, it's fun to draw. It's an easy little visual
algorithm to memorize, but you have to really pay attention
to get the execution right. It looks dangerous and occult,
ancient yet modern, funny yet sinister, symmetrical yet asymmetrical.
It's a play on the American flag, a rarely-seen perspective
on the set of bones inside every person's head, a tidy graphic
representation of the lightning strike of inspiration. Its
meaning is, as my shrink would say, highly multiply-determined.
What makes it an even more effective meme is that the skull
can be filled with anything: a dancing bear, a turtle, Jerry's
face, the name of your frat, an infinitely recursive series
of smaller skulls-within-skulls, whatever you want. The logo
can also be extended, as on this t-shirt that I wore every
four days in high school:
I didn't consider myself to be much of a fashion plate as
a teenager, but I recently saw this same shirt for sale in
a devastatingly hip boutique in Tokyo's
Harajuku district, where Gwen Stefani shops, so that was
a nice bit of validation for me.
Next, check out the cover of Blues
For Allah, painted by Philip Garris:
My stepbrother stored a bunch of his vinyl in our apartment's
closet when I was growing up, and eventually I got curious
and started poking around them. Blues For Allah practically
radiated menace, alongside the equally sinister-looking What
A Long, Strange Trip It's Been, which by the way, if you're
looking for a greatest-hits compilation of the Dead, don't
bother with Skeletons From The Closet, get WALSTIB instead.
When I finally worked up the nerve to listen to both records,
I was surprised to hear not the death metal I was expecting,
but rather agreeable spacy jazzy-country-rock.
A much less frightening album cover from the vinyl stash,
Europe '72, a Stanley
Mouse painting nicknamed Ice Cream Boy:
I get a MAD Magazine vibe from this image, a Don Martin meets
R Crumb flavor. Jerry was an avid MAD reader as a kid, as
was I.
Here's Mouse's skeletal jester, from the cover of a staggeringly
gorgeous book of transcriptions from American Beauty and Workingman's
Dead:
There's probably some Tarot nonsense associated
with this image, which, I know, is lame. As Bobby
Hill once put it, Tarot cards are "like baseball
cards for Hobbits." Nevertheless, I do find this picture
arresting. I painted a faithful large-scale reproduction of
it on an out-of-the-way wall in my mom and stepfather's house,
much to my enduring embarassment.
Okay, so that's the imagery. What's the big deal with the
music itself? The Dead were originally conceived as a blues-oriented
bar band, playing an accompaniment for dancing and other forms
of group bodily pleasure. By the band's stadium-packing commercial
peak some decades later, the music had lost nearly all of
its resemblance to rock and had turned into jam-band, a genre
that the GD largely invented (along with the Allman Brothers
and P-Funk.) The main thing that sets the jam bands apart
from the rock mainstream isn't so much the jamming - every
flavor of halfway decent American music has improvising. What
makes the Dead different is their loose, laid-back, non-urgent
feel. The GD rarely kicked ass, but there are things a band
can do other than kick ass. For one thing, for such a big
lumbering animal, the GD could play remarkably quietly. Check
out the Jerry ballads like He's Gone or High Time. It's no
small accomplishment to bring two electric guitars, a six-string
bass, one or two keyboards and one or two full drum kits with
assorted ethnic and electronic percussion down to total silence
at the end of each measure, especially in a stadium packed
with people.
The spaciousness in the GD's best stuff was made possible
by their slow-tempo, groove-oriented songwriting. The Dead
could play slower than any other all-white band I can think
of. This might not sound like much of an achievement, but
ask any musician how hard it is to play slow without losing
energy. Nobody played relaxed, loping swing like the Dead.
In the late seventies, Jerry was in his early thirties, the
same age I am now, and his playing wasn't about being a teenager
anymore. The ambling pace of tunes like Sugaree, He's Gone
and High Time annoyed me as a teenager, but the older I get,
the more sense the unhurried, conversational tone makes.
The really breathtaking moments of 5/8/77 and many other
Dead shows nearly always center around Jerry's guitar playing,
though sometimes his singing and songwriting are the key factor.
The musical story of the Grateful Dead is a series of snapshots
of Jerry's psyche, variously bouyed and hindered by his bandmates,
variously bouyed and hindered by himself. At this point, some
of my fellow Heads might be huffily interjecting that the
Dead were more than Jerry. It's true that some of the other
guys in the band are respectable musicians in their own right,
especially the rhythm section. Mickey Hart and Bill Kreutzman
are both solid drummers who sound especially tasty in their
dual drum-kit-plus-ethnic-perc-plus-live-electronica configuration.
Phil Lesh's relentlessly eccentric bass playing is not to
everyone's taste, but his jazzy lines meshed well with Jerry.
Bob Weir and the various keyboard players have had their moments
here and there. Be all that as it may. Without Jerry, the
Grateful Dead would have wound up like the Doors without Jim
Morrison, a period act without much present-day relevence.
The mid-seventies were a crisis point for the band, the closest
they came to hanging it up, and the consensus is that they
never recovered. But I have a particular fondness for the
Dead's shows in the mid to late seventies. The bloom was off
the rose by that point, as the band slid from hallucinogens
into cocaine, heroin and alcohol, but they still had the essential
sound together. The seventies were the advent of the most
musically ambitious tunes in the repertoire - Estimated Prophet,
Terrapin, Help/Slip/Franklin's. Mickey Hart was back in the
second drum chair, St Stephen was back in the set lists, Bobby
had learned how to play the guitar in a more serious way,
and Donna's high harmony singing, while not exactly good,
was at least an improvement over Phil's. The tempos were nice
and rubbery, the emphasis was on groove and polyrhythm, and
when Jerry was paying attention, he did some of his best playing
during the long, languid jams.
Let's talk about those guitar lines, where Jerry's truest
greatness lies. It isn't so much a matter of technical complexity
- while JG's chops were impressive by rock standards, by the
standards of jazz or country, he was no virtuoso. What he
had in abundance was touch. Compare JG's delicate, spidery
lines to the rectangular slabs of sound laid down by mainstream
rockers like Eric Clapton. Jerry massaged and squeezed individual
notes into curvy shapes, like a jazz or country player, and
you can hear the effect of his experiments on pedal steel.
Jerry's most-heard recording may well not be with the Dead
at all; my guess is that it's his pedal steel part on a Crosby,
Stills, Nash and Young song.
Teach Your Children
Another unusual aspect of JG's sound was his sense of time.
Rockers tend to lean ahead of the beat, but JG was exquisitely
relaxed, sitting comfortably behind the beat, again, more
like a jazz or country musician. His tone was mostly clean
and nondemonstrative, even hesitant, surprisingly quiet and
unobtrusive for an ostensible guitar hero playing to packed
stadiums. His improvising was full of harmonic color, too,
spiced with ninths, elevenths, thirteenths, microtones and
intentional "wrong" notes like the natural seventh
against dominant seventh chords.
Jerry shone brightest in three situations:
Interpreting a specific melody, as in Ramble On Rose and
Tennessee Jed, vocally and on the guitar.
Improvising on a medium or slow one-chord groove, as in
the majority of better Dead songs, including tunes like
Franklin's Tower and Fire On The Mountain, where the chord
progression is so minimal and repetitive as to be basically
a patterned modal drone.
Improvising in freespace, as in the more adventuresome
passages in Dark Star, The Other One, Playing In The Band
and the between-song connective jams.
Perhaps even more valuable than his original work was Jerry's
ability to synthesize seemingly disparate sources into single
ideas. He drew inspiration not just from rock, but from R&B,
blues, swing, bebop, free jazz, bluegrass, assorted world
musics, ragtime and electronica. JG hipped me to a few figures
in the histoy of American music that I might otherwise have
missed out on. One such is the great Elizabeth
Cotten. JG covered several of her tunes, both with and
without the Dead. Do yourself a favor and check her out, she's
one of my favorite guitarists ever.
Elizabeth Cotten
Jerry also helped point me in the direction of Howlin'
Wolf, though I think my first exposure may have been my
dad.
Howlin' Wolf
Hubert
Sumlin, the lead guitarist on many classic Howlin' Wolf
and Muddy Waters records, was a big influence on Jerry's playing.
Other musicians Jerry raved about, to my everlasting
benefit when I went to investigate them myself: Peter
Tosh, Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Robbie Robertson, Bill Monroe
and Carlos Santana.
Much as I love Jerry, I haven't been able to get interested
in many of the jam bands he inspired. The jammers have JG's
amiable eclecticism, but they lack his sinister edge. Taking
the darkness out of the Summer Of Love misses the point of
that troubled and turbulent period of our nation's history.
Bands like Phish prefer to evade the depression at the core
of hippiedom. The Dead derived a lot of their power from their
surprising nihilism, the teddy-bear T-shirts notwithstanding.
The skull imagery is more apposite, as is the fact that Jerry
wore all black all the time for the entire second half of
his life. Jerry mentioned at one point that the name Grateful
Ded was specifically chosen to "repel curious onlookers."
JG had a troubled inner life - he was five when his father
drowned, and he had a difficult relationship with his mother
and stepfather. He was married many times, never happily,
and he was visibly indifferent to his own health and well-being.
He self-medicated his depression with a variety of increasingly
ineffective drugs, and while the ostensible idea may have
been gratification, his heroin and cocaine use look more to
me like gradual suicide. The surviving members of the GD have
mostly cleaned up and will probably live forever, but the
band suffered many casualties besides Jerry. Ron "Pigpen"
McKernan, the band's original frontman, drank himself to death
at age twenty-seven. Brent Mydland, the keyboardist through
the eighties, capped off a longstanding cocaine addiction
with a fatal overdose, and his replacement, Vince Welnick,
recently committed suicide. In interviews, some of the band
members (Bob Weir and Phil Lesh particularly) come across
as spectacularly misanthropic, and none of those guys have
a reputation for being very nice in person.
GD music is joyous for the most part, but it's heavier than
casual inspection would suggest. GD songs, the good ones anyway,
are saturated with blues feel, with calls to bluegrass and
reggae and Afro-Cuban and many other musics of oppressed peoples.
The band's flamboyant indifference to singing and other aspects
of their craft had an almost punk quality to it, motivated
by a punk-like anger at parental authority. At no point did
the Dead ever convey themselves as a bunch of people you'd
really want to hang out with. The band made a good-faith effort
to help the paying customers have a good time, but their music
was frequently impersonal, emotionally closed-off and inaccessible,
much like America itself.
The best musicians take tragedy and transform it into pleasure.
From Billie Holiday
to Cee-Lo Green, the smartest unhappy
people have used music to make their lives tolerable, and
thereby their listeners' as well. Jerry really matters because
he was an extremely unhappy person who nonetheless created
some valuable musical algorithms for making himself and others
happier. Really, what greater contribution to humanity could
you ask for?
Here are some of my favorite JG recordings.
Compilations/Greatest Hits
Like I said, don't waste your time on Skeletons From The
Closet. What A Long, Strange Trip It's Been is way better.
It was assembled by a couple of stoned hippies, not a faceless
label executive. Lots of non-obvious choices that together
tell the band's musical story quite well. Sadly not on iTunes
- what's up, Warner?
Starbucks, of all companies, has just put out their own
two-CD Dead compilation. It also makes a lot of very surprising
choices: The studio version of Shakedown Street! Cream Puff
War, the one tune in the entire vast GD repertoire that
Jerry wrote the lyrics to, from their very first album!
Followed immediately by Touch of Grey, recorded twenty years
later! The calculation seems to be, "Let's find tracks
under five or six minutes, that aren't excessively irritating,
and we'll sequence them out of chronological order if it
helps the flow." Does it work? Better than you'd think.
Seek out any live version of these tunes
Dark Star
Morning Dew
The Other One
Recommended albums
Live/Dead
American Beauty
Workingman's Dead
Blues For Allah
One From The Vault - Blues For Allah performed in front
of an audience, mixed in with some Dead classics played
as well as they ever got played.
Reckoning - basically the GD Unplugged, sadly not on iTunes.
Jerry Garcia Band - double live album from 1990, also
sadly not on iTunes.
Garcia/Grisman
hot shows available on the web
There
are more shows on this site than you can shake a stick at.
2/28/69 Fillmore West
2/13-14/70 Fillmore East
5/2/70 Harpur College
12/31/71 Winterland Arena - check out Space -> Other
One
4/8/72 London, England - check out Dark Star -> Caution
8/24/72 Berkeley, CA
9/27/72
Stanley Theater
Dark Star segues smoothly into
Cumberland Blues!
12/19/73 Tampa, FL - dig Playing In The Band.
2/23/74
and 2/24/74
Winterland Arena - The first
one is slow to get going, but once they've warmed up,
wow. The second
one pretty much kills all the way through.
5/8/77
Cornell U, set II - a Deadhead cliche for good reason, it's
the bomb. The previous and following nights were good too.
9/3/77 Englishtown, NJ
12/29/77 Winterland
12/26/79 Oakland Auditorium
good individual tracks from wildly uneven albums
Grateful Dead (the first album)
New New Minglewood Blues
Viola Lee Blues
Grateful Dead (Skull & Roses)
Not Fade Away -> Goin' Down the Road Feeling Bad
Europe '72
Cumberland Blues
He's Gone
Tennessee Jed - One of the funkiest JG solos.
Ramble On Rose
Jack Straw - a really nice Robert Hunter lyric, and
one of Bob Weir's standout moments as a songwriter.
Mars Hotel
Ship Of Fools - Jerry didn't have enough jazz theory
to know how to use diminished chords
in the conventional ways, but he knew that he liked
them. Early versions of this tune are all square rock and
roll harmonies, but then Keith Godchaux helped Jerry reharmonize
it to give it that nice gospel flavor.
Terrapin Station
Estimated Prophet - Reggae in seven-four time, with
many abrupt key changes! Sounds like a recipe for disaster,
and yet it's easily the best GD song written post 1975.
Bobby gives the lead vocal of his career, Jerry discovers
envelope filter, the whole thing hangs right together.
Samson And Delilah - Mickey Hart and Bill Kreutzmann
got to use their entire Afro-Cuban arsenal for this track.
These two cats could really cook when sufficiently motivated.
The intro is, like, my
favorite hip-hop sample right now.
In The Dark
Touch Of Grey - The band's only top ten hit. A remarkable
pop song for its discursive length and odd structure.
West LA Fadeaway - Sometimes the Dead came within shouting
distance of funky. This one is right in the pocket. Dig
Jerry's second solo, and Mickey Hart's triangle part.
Without A Net
Althea - Jerry clearly conveys on this tune what a chore
it must have been to have been married to him. No wonder
he got divorced four or five times.
Bird Song - a tribute to Janis Joplin, who the band
was friendly with. One of the saddest moments in the documentary
Festival Express is a shot of Jerry and Janis, both so drunk
they can barely speak, and Jerry is telling Janis how beautiful
she is, and you know how soon after that she'll be dead.
Mississippi Half-Step Uptown Toodle-oo - Vaguely named
after a great Duke Ellington tune. Tagging on the "Across
the Rio Grandeeeo" thing was a very strange songwriting
maneuver, and a brilliant one.
Built To Last
Standing On The Moon - a depressive masterpiece.
Not For Kids Only (with David Grisman)
A Horse Named Bill
Teddy Bear's Picnic
Jenny Jenkins
Happy listening!
© ethan hein 2007 | back
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