After spending their first few years writing abstract psychedelic tunes, the Grateful Dead took a hard turn into Americana. They wrote a bunch of songs inspired by blues, country and folk, and in doing so, they massively expanded their listener base. Several of these songs involve outlaws and drifters in the Wild West. I think …
Tag Archives: Jerry Garcia
St Stephen
St Stephen might be the most “Grateful Dead” of Grateful Dead songs, the one that (for better or worse) sounds the most like them and the most unlike anyone else. It’s a cliche with the Dead to say that the live version is better than the studio version, but in the case of “St Stephen”, …
Althea
Here’s a Grateful Dead song that I loved as a teenager. As with many things I loved as a teenager, I did not know why this spoke to me. Now I do, so I get to share that knowledge with you.
Elizabeth Cotten’s fingerstyle ragtime
Dust-to-digital posted this lovely performance of “Washington Blues” by Elizabeth Cotten. It reminded me that she is the greatest and that I should write more about her. If you are a guitarist, you might notice that there is something strange about her technique. She was left-handed, but rather than stringing a guitar in reverse the …
Morning Dew
Do you ever think about how there are several thousand nuclear missiles sitting in silos around the world, ready to launch at a moment’s notice? When I was a kid in the 1980s, that was the main macro-level anxiety lurking behind day-to-day life. Now we worry about different things: the climate, the pandemic, the impending …
Brokedown Palace
My stepfather died a year and a half ago, but thanks to the pandemic, we’re only now able to have a memorial service for him. My sister, stepsiblings and I are going to sing a Grateful Dead classic: For me, “Brokedown Palace” represents the high point of the Dead’s acoustic folkie side. On American Beauty, …
Groove melodies
Like harmony, melody works differently in grooves than it does in linear songs or Western classical compositions. In this post, I try to figure out what makes a good groove melody, and how to write one. Update: Joshua Horowitz made an interactive animation of this image! It’s so cool.
Remixing the Grateful Dead
There is no corpus of music I know better than the albums and concert recordings of the Grateful Dead. Some people memorize the works of Shakespeare; I, for better or for worse, spent my youth memorizing the works of Jerry. This puts me in a great position to sample and remix them. However, while I’ve …
My favorite Jerry Garcia riff
Before he wrecked his brain with heroin in the 1980s, Jerry Garcia was my favorite guitarist in the world. I was so saturated in his music during my key guitar-learning years that now everything I play tends to sound like him, up to and including Bach violin partitas. Here’s my single favorite four-bar passage of …
Help on the Way -> Slipknot! -> Franklin’s Tower
In this post, I talk through my favorite Grateful Dead prog epic, the three-song suite of “Help on the Way,” “Slipknot!” and “Franklin’s Tower.” The Dead wrote many of these epic suites, which usually consist of a few short through-composed sections that act as anchor points within long open-ended modal jams. “Help>Slip>Frank” is the most …
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