It’s on my mind because Dangerous Minds posted the isolated tracks, and they’re a lot of fun. It’s fascinating to hear the separated vocals, guitars, bass and drums. The Youtube videos containing the tracks were swiftly taken down by the Stones’ lawyers, of course, but as of this writing you can still download the stems in multitrack Ogg format. You can open and edit the Oggs in Audacity, and export pieces in other formats.

Whenever a guy like me hears “isolated tracks” I know it’s remix time. So here are some samples from “Gimme Shelter” along with various other sounds, enjoy.

Rock With Shelter

Me vs the Rolling Stones vs Michael Jackson

mp3 download, ipod format download

Shelter Guitar

Me vs the Rolling Stones vs Michael Jackson vs Glen Velez vs Britney Spears vs Charles Mingus

mp3 download, ipod format download

There’s such a business opportunity with these kinds of isolated tracks. I haven’t bought too many recordings lately, but I’d happily plunk down money for easily-remixable stems, especially if they came pre-sliced in Recycle format. I doubt the Stones would be interested in selling such a thing, since they have plenty of money already, but I could see this being a great revenue stream for younger, hungrier bands. A big part of the reason people like music-based video games is that they get you inside familiar songs in a new way — you’re focused on the guitar or bass in a way that casual listeners rarely do. I could see the Guitar Hero generation eagerly embracing a simplified version of Ableton Live or Reason.

Anyway, “Gimme Shelter.” The female vocalist on the track is Merry Clayton, and she kills it. Aside from this song, she’s had a colorful career. She’s sung on various movie soundtracks, and did backing vocals on songs as diverse as “Sweet Home Alabama” by Lynyrd Skynyrd and “Cornflake Girl” by Tori Amos. During her solo verse on “Gimme Shelter,” her voice cracks on the word “shot” from the last line, and then again on the word “murder.” That’s the kind of total emotional commitment that grabs the listener hard. On the isolated vocal you can clearly hear Mick give an appreciative “Yeah!”

The isolated tracks highlight how sloppy the Stones were even at their absolute best. The Dangerous Minds post describes Charlie Watts as sounding like “a human metronome here.” This is completely wrong. I put those drums on the grid and can assure you that Charlie Watts’ time is all over the place. So are the rest of the Stones. That’s the point. Sloppy chic runs directly counter to the musical sensibilities of the digital audio era. I sincerely doubt that any producer would permit such raggedy playing onto a commercial release in this day and age.

I’m no big lover of willful sloppiness. The Stones’ superficial casualness on their best stuff is underpinned by a very disciplined sense of groove and restraint. Later in their career, they got genuinely careless, and that’s when they started sucking. It’s a fine line between insouciant confidence and plain indifference. On “Gimme Shelter” the Stones walk that line perfectly.

Mick Jagger is amusing and everything, but Keith Richards is the Stones’ main point of musical interest for me. He plays simple, well-worn cliches, but he has a totally distinctive touch and approach that keeps his licks fresh all these decades later. Keef gets some of his signature sound from an unusual guitar tuning. He tunes to open G, which is common enough for slide players, but then he takes the low E string off, so he’s left with D G D B D. (On “Gimme Shelter” he has a capo on the second fret.) If you’re a guitarist, try it sometime, it’s fun. Here’s a detailed guide to Keef-style guitar.

Keef supports my assertion that songwriting is not about having original ideas; it’s about recombining existing ideas. When asked about his songwriting by Guitar World, here’s what he said:

Personally, I don’t consider that you create or write anything. The best way to think about it, for me anyway, is that you’re an antenna. I sit down at an instrument-guitar, piano, bass or whatever-and play somebody else’s songs. And usually within 20 minutes, more or less, suddenly something’s coming. And that’s when the antenna goes up. [He wets his finger and raises it in the air.] Incoming! So you get this sort of gift. You work it up a bit and then transmit it. The idea that “I wrote that,” or “I created that” is an overblown artistic sort of thing that people love to put on writing songs. It can screw you up. If you think that it’s all down to you, you’ve got another thing coming.

Words to live by. Too bad the Stones lawyers are so sampling-unfriendly. If Keef was a young up-and-comer right now I bet he would skip the imitation of his blues heroes and just sample them directly.

Infrared Roses is a better idea in concept than execution. Freeform electronic improv is a great idea in the right hands, but sadly by this point in their career the Dead were just fooling idly around. Still, Infrared Roses has some moments of sonic intrigue, and I’ve pulled a few interesting samples out of the noodly morass. It inspired me to do some freeform electronica improvising of my own, though I preferred to do it over four-on-the-floor dance beats.

While the Dead didn’t do anything too musically exciting with their gadgets, just the fact of them was eye-opening for me. It was fun to hear Jerry play synth flute and such via MIDI guitar. His playing was a lot more adventurous back in the sixties by feeding back his regular old guitar Hendrix-style, but the MIDI sound had its own charm. Real guitar nerds will enjoy this exhaustive rundown of every guitar Jerry ever performed or recorded with.

The Dead’s actual music didn’t sound much like the hip-hop and electronica I mostly prefer now. But there were some formal similarities. One of my favorite aspects of DJ music is the seamless transitioning between songs. At their best, the Dead performed some nice transitions of their own, some planned, some spontaneous. These transitions became integral to the Dead’s repertoire, which came to revolve around suites like Scarlet Begonias -> Fire On The Mountain. The most exciting transitions were the spontaneous ones, as songs dissolved into a freeform jam that coalesced unexpectedly into new songs. My favorite of these is from 9/27/72 at the Stanley Theater, when they segued smoothly from Dark Star into Cumberland Blues.

The Dead were pioneers of PA system technology, especially with their epic Wall of Sound. Their system was more conventional by the time I went to see them, but it was still pretty slick. Because they used wireless in-ear monitors and foot switch controls for the vocal mics, there wasn’t any extraneous sound bleeding into the stage mics. The PA broadcast noise-canceling frequencies, the way fancy Bose headphones do. All the way around, the sound at Dead shows was crystal-clear, even in giant echoing stadiums, without extreme loudness. It was a huge disappointment to go hear other bands with lesser systems in the same venues. Like, after seeing the Dead at Giants Stadium a few times, I saw U2 there and it was like having a bucket over my head. Techno-hippies for the win.

Mad Men is well-made television, but so is plenty of other television. Why is this particular show so compelling to me and so many of my buddies? I think it’s that watching Mad Men is like watching a documentary about our parents and grandparents. In particular, Don Draper is a window into our emotionally inaccessible fathers. For me, the generations don’t line up exactly right – in 1963 my dad was only 21 – but it’s close enough for some intense emotional resonances. I feel like I’m looking through a magic window into events that the old photo albums only hint at.

My dad and Don. There’s so much overlap. Both were authority-resistant guys disguised by suits and corporate jobs. Both underwent name changes and had complex parentage. Both earned a lot more money in New York City as adults than they grew up with in middle America. Both were divorced parents of young kids.  Here’s a more detailed rundown of the similarities and differences.

Name changes
Don changed his name from Dick Whitman as a young adult, voluntarily, to escape an abusive family and general abject misery. My dad’s name change was involuntary and happened when he was an infant. He was born John Arthur Rammer, and was given up by his birth parents when his biological father had to go fight world war II. He was named Michael Hein by his adoptive parents, Milo and Phoebe, who raised him in a stable and relatively loving environment. Still, Dad never quite resolved the issue of his adoption. Like Don, he had problems with commitment, with authority, with connection and a sense of belonging. Like Don, he was a smart and talented guy whose rise up the corporate ladder was slowed at times by an unwillingness to be a team player.

Divorce
Again, not quite the same circumstances. My mom is much more Peggy Olsen than Betty Draper.

To my knowledge, Dad never cheated on her (though he did have some serious infidelities in his subsequent relationships.) But there’s some overlap. My sister and I were about the same age as Sally and Bobby Draper when our respective parents split. I don’t remember this scene from my own childhood but it remembers me. With us and the Drapers, it was a similar slow build to a swift and matter-of-fact resolution.

Politics
Dad was younger than Don and more liberal. He went to civil rights marches and in youth was kind of a rabble-rouser, at least by Wisconsin standards. Like Don, he was intrigued by the counterculture but not a member of it.

Fashion
Dad wore standard-issue gray suits to work, not quite as dapper as Don but presentable. On the weekends he lapsed somewhat into his Wisconsin roots: jeans, sweatshirts with cows on them, caps with logos of machinery makers worn without irony. Hard to imagine Don wearing any of that stuff.

Smoking
Dad smoked a pipe in the office, back when that was still allowed. In that regard he was a little more like Paul Kinsey.

Dad wasn’t a cigarette smoker that I’m aware of, though Grandma and Grandpa were. Grandpa eventually quit after jaw cancer, but Grandma was a Draper-level chain smoker until she died.

Drinking
I never witnessed Dad pounding back hard liquor like Don; he was more of a glass or two of wine with dinner kind of guy.

Recklessness and risk-taking
My dad shared Don’s fondness for reckless driving. Dad rode a motorcycle; Don was a half a generation too early for that. Dad didn’t drive drunk that I know of but he did love speeding. He also loved fireworks, which I could imagine Don having a thing for too.

General emotional inaccessibility
I saw Dad bury both of his parents and his second wife and I never saw him shed a tear. I barely remember him ever even mentioning his emotions, much less frankly discussing them. Very Don Draper in that respect.

A couple of other weird similarities between the Mad Men universe and mine. Dad had an accordion and did a little playing. Not as well as Joan, but still.

Any TV show you want to make that functions as an alternate-universe documentary about my family and friends, I’ll obsessively watch it. King Of The Hill has that quality for Dad’s midwestern ancestors. Seinfeld is a window into Mom’s Jewish relatives. Six Feet Under captured some of my family dynamics early on before it exploded into ridiculous melodrama a few seasons in. It’s lonely in modern life. Our tribes are scattered. If I have to use TV as a way to stay in touch, evidently I will.

Whenever I play guitar, it comes out sounding a lot like Jerry Garcia. I can’t help it. From the ages of fifteen to twenty, my guitar-learning years, there was no musician I cared more about in the world than Jerry. It’s not about drugs; I’ve never tripped on anything. I really like the music.

Jerry was a groove player

The biggest lesson Jerry taught me was to play at slow to medium tempos, using beats you can dance to. He did his best work over relaxed one-chord or two-chord Afrocentric grooves with a free jazz flavor. He played okay country and white R&B, and I guess he very infrequently rocked. But mostly he was devoted to trance-like grooves.

I went to see the Dead several times in high school, and a few increasingly depressing times my freshman year of college. Jerry was completely phoning it in at that point, and the rest of the guys were uneven at best. And yet, those shows were still pretty magical experiences. There was a lot of audience participation, group singing and dancing and clapping. I’m a nerdy white guy, and I spend a lot of time alone or with strangers. I don’t do a lot of group singing and dancing and clapping. Those activities are an essential social vitamin, and I feel the absence of them in my life now. Dead shows could be messy and lame, but they were a reliable source of  tribal-feeling ecstatic experience. The Dead frequently compared their following to a religious cult. If church was more like a Dead show, I’d probably go.

The best thing the band did during the years I went to see them was to close their shows with “Not Fade Away” by Buddy Holly. The song is a modal I7-IV groove over a distinctive beat: clap, clap, clap, clap clap; clap, clap, clap, clap clap. It’s an Afro-Cuban pattern called son clave — rock musicians know it as the Bo Diddley beat. Jerry loved the Bo Diddley beat and used it in song after song. Over the course of “Not Fade Away,” the Dead taught the entire crowd to clap son clave. 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. I remember one show at Giants Stadium in high school, the crowd kept the chant going all the way down the ramps and across the parking lot. Powerful!

The Dead weren’t a good band, but they were a great one

The Dead didn’t try very hard to be liked. They could never be bothered to sing in key. They wrote convoluted arrangements and didn’t rehearse them, so they routinely trainwrecked. The music was ad-hoc and messily indifferent a lot of the time. Some of the lyrics are pretty, but a lot of them are empty stoner poetry.

And yet. For brief intervals during their long and checkered career, the Dead could be the greatest band in the world. At their best, they were daringly inventive, and they performed some dazzling feats of group improvisation. Their frequent risk-taking necessarily involved a lot of failure, but also made possible big musical successes. The band’s musical successes were widely scattered, but they played for so many years that they managed to rack up quite a bit of inspired playing.

The Dead as viral marketing pioneers

The good news for the fans is that searching for the magic moments is extremely easy. Just about every public note that Jerry Garcia ever played is meticulously archived and available. The professionally-mastered high points can be downloaded commercially, and the band lets the fans give the rest away free.

From the beginning, the Dead had a famously relaxed attitude toward concert taping. At shows there was a special seating area reserved for tapers, who were invited 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 guy. This practice of encouraging people to tape Dead shows started out as a bit of hippie idealism, but turned out to be a brilliant viral marketing strategy.

In high school one of my most treasured possessions was my cassette copy of 5/8/77 set II with its labels in my friend Ellie’s handwriting. The encore cut off halfway through. A lot of tapes like this circulated through the hands of a lot of obsessive fans like me, spreading the band’s music through word of mouth, until in the 1980s the Dead suddenly emerged one of the biggest moneymakers in the live music industry.

The Dead concert tape trading network got a lot more efficient once it got a hold of the internet, but even before the web it was surprisingly robust. Using snail mail and word of mouth, it was possible to get your hands on pretty much any of the most widely-traded shows. You mailed cassettes off in padded mailers with return postage, and a few weeks later, there would be your fresh tapes. It was like a very slowly-paced mp3 blog. The Dead’s fan base was never that big compared to that of the Stones or the Beatles, but it was deep, and obsessively devoted. By insisting on giving away so much of his recorded music for free, Jerry died much wealthier than he was born.

The image of no image

The Dead’s popularity peaked at a time when they were the least telegenic bunch of rock musicians imaginable. They were middle-aged, homely and flamboyantly uncharismatic. Onstage, Bob Weir made an effort to look alive, move around, and engage the crowd a little, but the rest of the band just looked at the floor, Jerry especially. The Dead’s pointed indifference to their look was a big part of what drew me into listening to them in the first place. I figured that they must have been seriously badass to have so much celebrity with so little image. I didn’t yet understand that lack of image is itself an extremely compelling image.

Here’s how I remember Jerry looking those years I was going to shows.

Jerry had a cult leader quality that he tried to discourage, without success. Americans are suckers for a messianistic beard. The New Yorker once aptly described Jerry’s look as “an unmade bed.” Other likenesses: Santa, Gandalf, Jesus, a grandpa, a caveman, a guru, a homeless person, a hermit. The main thing he looked was: old. Jerry was only fifty-three when he died, but due to his hard living he looked more like eighty-three. He may not have been the first geriatric rock star, but he most looked the part. He’s the only major rock star I can think of who became more popular and influential as his hair got whiter.

Jerry’s wardrobe was mostly limited to black t-shirts, with black sweats or black jeans. The rest of the band were similarly not fashion-conscious. Phil Lesh performed in red-white-and-blue wristbands, a tie-dyed t-shirt tucked into khaki slacks, and running shoes. Taken together, the late-period Dead looked like my parents’ friends, or the English department at a small liberal arts college.

This photo comes from the liner notes to In The Dark, which contains the Dead’s one and only top ten hit song, “Touch Of Grey.” The phrase perfectly describes both the band and their core fan base.

Iconography

As people, the Dead may not have been very image-conscious, but they had exquisitely good taste in graphic designers. They had a killer logo, the Stealie, so named because it appeared on the cover of the Steal Your Face album. It’s a dreadful album, possibly the band’s worst, but what a cover.

The logo was designed by the Dead’s sound engineer and in-house LSD provider, Owsley “Bear” Stanley. He devised it for stickers that he put on the band’s equipment, making it easier to tell it from the other bands’ gear in dark backstage areas.

Why did I draw Stealies on my notebooks in high school about forty thousand times? For one thing, 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, the bones of the head, the lightning strike of inspiration. Its meaning is, as my shrink would say, multiply-determined.

The Stealie is a stupendously successful meme. You can put anything in it in place of the lightning bolt: a dancing bear, a turtle, Jerry’s face, the name of your frat. Some clever person did a t-shirt that had an infinitely recursive series of smaller skulls-within-skulls. The skull can anchor all kinds of cool new designs and adventurous typography, like on this t-shirt I wore on a weekly basis through high school and into college.

I was exposed to the Dead’s iconography long before I heard any of the music. My stepbrother stored a bunch of his records in our apartment’s closet when I was growing up, and eventually I got curious and started poking around them. Along with the Allman Brothers and Steely Dan, there were a couple of Dead albums whose covers practically radiated menace.

When I finally worked up the nerve to listen to one of them, I was surprised to hear not the death metal I was expecting, but instead, agreeable spacy jazzy-country-rock. Here’s a much less frightening album cover from Europe ’72, a Stanley Mouse painting nicknamed Ice Cream Boy:

I get a MAD Magazine vibe from this image, like Don Martin meets R Crumb. Jerry was an avid MAD reader as a kid, as was I.

Along with eye-catching album covers and t-shirts, the Dead also put out some gorgeous books. A standout: this book of hand-lettered transcriptions of every tune on American Beauty and Workingman’s Dead:

The Dead’s music

What sets jam bands apart from the rock mainstream isn’t so much the jamming — every flavor of halfway decent American music has improvisation. The Dead are distinctive because of their loose, laid-back, non-urgent feel, a vibe that has more in common with jazz or country than rock.

The Dead didn’t kick much ass, but there are things a band can do other than kick ass. For such a big lumbering animal, the band could play remarkably quietly. On the Jerry’s ballads like “He’s Gone” or “High Time” they could bring two electric guitars, a six-string bass, one or two keyboards and one or two full drum kits down to total silence at the end of each measure, in a stadium packed with people. This is no small accomplishment. Playing loud and hectic is easy; playing restrained and quiet is hard. The Dead could play slower and quieter than any other rock band I can think of. Ask any musician how tough it is to play slow tempos without losing energy. 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.

Jerry’s guitar style

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. The mid-seventies were a crisis point for the band, the closest they came to breaking up, and the consensus is that they never recovered. But I have a particular fondness for the Dead’s music of this period. 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 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 and grooves.

Jerry’s greatness as a guitarist isn’t so much a matter of technical skill. He had good chops by rock standards, but he was no virtuoso. What he had going for him was touch and phrasing. He massaged and squeezed individual notes into curvy shapes, in a style informed by his pedal steel playing. Jerry’s most-heard recording is probably his pedal steel part on “Teach Your Children” by Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young. Rockers tend to lean ahead of the beat, but Jerry played behind the beat, sometimes way behind. Again, this was due to his close study of jazz and country. His tone was mostly clean and nondemonstrative, sometimes even hesitant. Guitar heros playing to packed stadiums usually aren’t so quietly unobtrusive.

Jerry’s improvising was harmonically adventurous, spiced with ninths, elevenths, thirteenths, microtones and intentional “wrong” notes like the natural seventh against dominant seventh chords. He favored a spicy diminished scale lick that he learned straight from Coltrane. Jerry was a tremendous music dork with keen insight into his own approach; see, for instance, this terrific interview in Guitar Player.

Maybe even more valuable than his original work was Jerry’s ability to synthesize seemingly disparate sources into idiosyncratic new ideas. He drew inspiration not just from rock, but from R&B, blues, swing, bebop, free jazz, bluegrass, assorted world musics, ragtime and electronica (Jerry loved controlling synths with a MIDI guitar.) He would have been an incredible music blogger or DJ. His interviews were an excellent guide into the more obscure corners of American music. For instance, Jerry loved Elizabeth Cotten and 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.

Jerry’s recommendations also led me to Howlin’ Wolf, Peter Tosh, Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Robbie Robertson, Bill Monroe and Carlos Santana.

Jerry and depression

The Dead derived a lot of their power from their surprising nihilism. Jerry mentioned at one point that the name Grateful Dead was specifically chosen to “repel curious onlookers.” Forget the dancing teddy bears; think of the skulls, and the fact that Jerry wore all black all the time.

Much as I love Jerry, I haven’t been able to get interested in many of the jam bands he inspired. The jammers have Jerry’s amiable eclecticism, but they lack his sinister edge. Taking the darkness out of the sixties misses the point of that troubled and turbulent period of our nation’s history. Bands like Phish prefer to evade the despair at the core of hippiedom.

I was saddened but not surprised to learn that Jerry 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 hard drugs. Maybe Jerry thought he was using heroin and cocaine for pleasure, but it looks more to me like a gradual suicide.

The band suffered many casualties besides Jerry. Ron “Pigpen” McKernan, the Dead’s original frontman, drank himself to death at age twenty-seven. Keyboardist Keith Godchaux died in a motorcycle accident after quitting the band. His replacement, Brent Mydland, capped off a longstanding cocaine addiction with a fatal overdose. His replacement, Vince Welnick, committed suicide a few years after being edged out of the reconstituted post-Jerry band.

In interviews, some of the band members (Bob Weir and Phil Lesh particularly) come across as spectacularly misanthropic. At no point did the Dead ever convey themselves as a bunch of people you’d want to hang out with. They 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.

But Jerry’s playing had a way of transcending his environment. The best musicians take tragedy and transform it into pleasure. Jerry matters to me because he was an extremely unhappy person who nonetheless created some music that could make you happier. Really, what greater contribution to humanity could you ask for?

Recommended listening

All of the shows by the Dead and Jerry’s various side projects are archived here. Some high points:

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 and spontaneously into “Cumberland Blues,” an amazing display of group cohesion.

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 — 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

Any version of “Dark Star,” “Morning Dew” or “The Other One” is going to be worth a spin.

The best albums by far are Live/Dead, American Beauty and Workingman’s Dead.

Blues For Allah is good too, if you like the weirder, more spaced-out stuff. One From The Vault is Blues For Allah performed in front of an audience, mixed in with some Dead classics played as well as they ever got played.

Reckoning is basically the Grateful Dead Unplugged. There’s a nice version of “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.

Jerry Garcia Band is a double live album from 1990. Nice choice of material, ranging from the Band to the Beatles to Peter Tosh to Hoagy Carmichael.

Europe ’72 has a few choice cuts: “Cumberland Blues,” “He’s Gone,” “Tennessee Jed” which has some of Jerry’s funkiest playing, “Ramble On Rose,” “Jack Straw.”

Terrapin Station is way uneven, but it has a few tracks worth checking out. “Estimated Prophet” is reggae in seven-four time, with many abrupt key changes. It sounds like a recipe for disaster, and yet it’s easily the best Dead song written post-1975. Bobby gives the lead vocal of his career, Jerry discovers envelope filter, the whole thing hangs right together. The other standout cut is “Samson And Delilah.”

In The Dark is interesting for including “Touch Of Grey,” the band’s only top ten hit. The high point is “West LA Fadeaway” which is within shouting distance of funky.

Update: check out this artwork made of cassette tape made by iri5. Nice pairing of subject and medium, don’t you think?

The compilation is named for a breakdown section that appears in “Give It Up or Turnit a Loose.” James Brown quiets the band down to handclaps, footstomps and congas played by Johnny Griggs. After he raps a little, James Brown cues drummer Clyde Stubblefield back in, followed by bassist Bootsy Collins and the rest of the band.

James Brown wasn’t intentionally trying to create a perfect batch of hip-hop samples in the late sixties and early seventies, but he couldn’t have succeeded any better if he had been. The “Give It Up” breakdown has been sampled by everybody from Public Enemy to Doug E Fresh to NWA to Big Audio Dynamite to Miles Davis. It takes a powerful piece of music to inspire so much new work in such a variety of styles.

There’s an ugly history of racial slurs for African-Americans around jungles. James Brown made it a point to reclaim jungle imagery in a context of joyful pride. He has several songs that include a break where it’s just the congas and his chanting about being in the jungle, brother, swing on the vine, check out your mind. The history of agriculture and high tech societies is short. The stone age was long. We’ll never know exactly what music sounded like in the stone age, but I’d guess that James Brown’s jungle breakdowns give a good idea.

It’s wrong of white racists to degrade black people by comparing them to monkeys because it denies the fundamental similarities that we all share with our primate cousins. As I try to imagine how our more monkey-like ancestors first started inventing music, I think it’s reasonable to assume they started with rhythm, with clapping their hands and stomping their feet. I’m convinced by Steven Mithen’s theory in The Singing Neanderthals that dance was the precursor to walking on two feet.

Rhythm is the most fundamental component of music. Every other aspect emerges from it. Pitches are very fast rhythms. If you play a series of clicks faster and faster, eventually they appear to fuse into a whir, then a thrum, then a low-pitched tone. The faster the clicks, the higher the pitch. Combining different pitches gives you melodies and harmonies.

Clapping your hands, stomping your feet and chanting are the easiest entry points to music making, and they never get old. With all of our technology, we still aren’t tired of that stone age sound. I’m thinking about Queen and “We Will Rock You”, about Lil Mama and “Lip Gloss”, Michael Jackson and the end of “Wanna Be Startin’ Something.” Swing on the vine, check out your mind!

Here’s a mashup of “Give It Up or Turnit a Loose” with “Clapping Music” by Steve Reich.

Clap Your Hands by ethanhein

Probably my favorite Miles album out of many great ones is In a Silent Way. It’s from early in his jazz-funk period, when his music consisted more of open-ended grooves than traditional songs. Each side of In A Silent Way is a single long track, pieced together by Miles and producer Teo Macero from excerpts of long improvisations. Earlier Miles albums had used tape editing to create seamless suites and to composite different takes of the same tune together, but In A Silent Way was the first to use the mixing desk as a fundamental compositional tool. Miles and Teo remixed the improvs into something unambiguously new.

The live performances were recorded in a single day in February of 1969 by a top-flight band, a veritable who’s who of jazz fusion. Wayne Shorter played soprano sax, in a style closer to Coltrane than Kenny G. The teenaged John McLaughlin played electric guitar — he had met Miles for the first time the night before, and he gave the performance of his career. The rhythm section was another pair of teenagers, bassist Dave Holland and drummer Tony Williams. Both of these guys were already dazzling virtuosos, but Miles had them play extremely simple, repetitive, uninteresting parts. Had this album been made twenty years later, my guess is that he probably would have used sampled bass loops and a drum machine. In another particularly futuristic choice, Miles included three keyboard players: Chick Corea and Herbie Hancock, both on electric piano, and Joe Zawinul on organ.

The suites on each side of In A Silent Way each contain three sections. The first and last sections are identical copies of the same stretches of tape. This decision was prompted by the original edit being too short for a full album. The duplication was a lazy solution, but sometimes the lazy solution is the right one. In this case, the move transformed In A Silent Way from a pleasant jazz fusion album into a milestone of electronic music production.

Repetition of musical material is nothing new. Mozart used the “A, B, A again” structure for dozens, if not hundreds, of his compositions. What’s new about In A Silent Way is that the A sections are perfectly identical copies, not just repeat performances of the same score. Copying and pasting recordings has become a common music production technique in the computer era, but there was nothing ordinary about it in 1969. And while copying and pasting has become a mainstream idea, contemporary producers usually copy and paste single phrases. It’s rare to duplicate such long passages.

In 2001 Columbia released the unedited recordings from the Silent Way sessions. Miles nerds got to hear firsthand what had gone into the album and what got cut. Side one, “Shhh/Peaceful”, was originally a conventional sixties jazz tune by Joe Zawinul, a complex melody played in unison on the horns, followed by a solo section. The final edit cuts the melody entirely, jumping from a short ambient intro right into the first beat of the solos. Poor Joe Zawinul was probably pretty upset at having his entire composition wind up on the cutting room floor. In interviews he also griped that Miles reworked the solo sections, replacing their chord progression with a simple, open-ended D pedal. Listening now, I side with Miles. The frenetic density of Zawinul’s writing hasn’t aged well. To my ears it sounds anxious and underdeveloped. Miles made the tune more spacious, groove-oriented and repetitive, more like modern dance music than sixties jazz. The original composition was severely dated, but the groove it inspired is timeless.

My single favorite trumpet-playing moment of Miles’ career occurs at around 4:18 into “Shhh/Peaceful.” He’s playing a phrase that winds up and down the chromatic scale. You expect it to land on the tonic D, but instead he plays E flat, the most dissonant possible note in the western tuning system. You think it might be an accident, but then Miles deliberately repeats the E flat and holds it out. What begins as hair-raising dissonance ends up convincing you of its exotic beauty.

The groove segment of side two, “It’s About That Time”, is hardly even a tune at all. It’s comprised of two riffs, a dreamy six-bar chord figure and a funky four-bar bassline. It sounds less like a jazz composition and more like the kind of thing you’d put together with a loop sequencer like Reason or Ableton Live. This is the kind of forward thinking that keeps electric Miles albums sounding so much fresher than anything by his peers.

Miles’ interest in electronic music has made him a beloved figure among younger musicians who aren’t much interested in bebop. Bill Laswell did a pretty cool remix album of In A Silent Way and the electric funk-oriented albums that followed called Panthalassa. There are also some classic hip-hop tracks that sample Miles, like the trumpet scream in OutKast’s song “Ain’t No Thang.”

I wish every jazz musician would get on board with electronic music production techniques the way Miles did. The harmonic and rhythmic training you need to play jazz can enrich your ambient groove playing tremendously. Electronica producers tend to love jazz; I wish the love was more mutual.

If you haven’t had the pleasure, Doctor Who is an extremely long-running, low-budget British science fiction show about a time-traveling alien being who looks like a flamboyant Oxford don. Or actually a series of flamboyant Oxford dons. The original actor playing Doctor Who was elderly and became ill while the show was just getting to be popular. When he couldn’t continue, the BBC ingeniously decided to have the Doctor’s species periodically reincarnate as a routine part of their life cycle. They were thus able to keep the show going through many changes of lead actor. Doctor Who has been on the air for most of the past forty-five years with no signs of stopping anytime soon.

Here’s the original 1963 title sequence, with music composed by Ron Grainer and arranged, produced and recorded by Delia Derbyshire:

Let’s talk for a second about Delia Derbyshire.

She produced the Doctor Who theme music using analog oscillators and tape loops, laboriously, over a period of many weeks. Here she talks about her process.

Her name suggests that she might have been a professor at Hogwarts, but Delia Derbyshire was a genuine hipster ambient techno producer, decades before such a thing existed. She was buddies with Paul McCartney, Yoko Ono, Brian Jones and the guys in Pink Floyd. In addition to the Doctor Who theme, she produced a bunch of other tripped-out electronica. Hear a sample:

Delia Derbyshire – “Planetarium”

The Doctor Who theme I was hearing in the eighties as a third grader was a newer arrangement by Peter Howell:

The Delia Derbyshire version broke a lot of new ground, but the eighties version is the one that really works for me musically. The groove is tighter because the bass was recorded to a click track. The main melody is played on an Arp Odyssey, a more sophisticated version of the synth they used for R2D2′s voice. Peter Howell sings the B section melody wordlessly through a vocoder. Here’s a behind-the-scenes video if you want to really geek all the way out. Dude isn’t the world’s most dynamic camera presence, but he demonstrates all the different retrofuture gear one piece at a time.

In 1988, The KLF had a number one pop hit in the UK with “Doctorin’ The Tardis” which includes a sample of the Peter Howell theme.

What I like about electronic music is how it makes the strange familiar, and the familiar strange. The best science fiction does that too. Nothing could have sounded more futuristic or otherworldly to me as a kid than those synths and that vocoder. Now they’re museum pieces.

Here’s a documentary about the wah:

Cry Baby: The Pedal That Rocks The World from Joey Tosi on Vimeo.

Combined with a guitar, the wah can do more than vowel glides. When you mute the strings and strum through a wah, you get a percussive sound ranging from “chicka chicka” to “chucka chucka.” By filtering the overtones differently, you can make other vocal sounds too. I have a digital effects unit that can make the guitar say the word “yeah” pretty convincingly. These kinds of effects give a guitarist the emotional immediacy of the voice combined with the guitar’s wide range of pitches and richness of harmonic possibility.

The guitar isn’t the only instrument you can use with a wah, and it wasn’t the first. The pedal was invented somewhat by accident when the Thomas Organ Company was developing a tone modifier for amplifiers. The first instrument they tried with it was an amplified saxophone, and the company thought they might market it for wind instruments in big bands, as an electronic version of the Harmon mute. A guitarist who worked for the company named Del Casher heard the possibilities of the new tone modifier, and he was the first person to make a recording of it in 1966.

Frank Zappa was an early adopter, and he introduced it to Jimi Hendrix, who would be the first to break it into mass consciousness with “Voodoo Child (Slight Return).” Jimi also introduced the percussive “chicka chicka” on “Little Miss Lover.” Jimi’s solos on “All Along The Watchtower” is another distinctive early adventure with wah. Plenty of other hippie rockers followed suit. George Harrison has a song called “Wah-Wah” on All Things Must Pass, named both for the pedal and for the Beatles’ whining during their final sessions together. Eric Clapton uses wah with Cream on “Tales of Brave Ulysses” and “White Room”.

Pop culturally, wah is most associated with seventies funk and soul, like on “Theme From Shaft” by Isaac Hayes, with Charles Pitts on guitar. Curtis Mayfield also had a distinctive and much-imitated wah style. From blaxploitation soundtracks it was a short jump to the porn movies that imitated them, which is why funky wah guitar is an effective comedy shorthand for getting busy. But wah doesn’t have to be seductive. Eddie Hazel of Funkadelic used it for a dark, spacey cry on “Maggot Brain.” Click here to listen to some standard wah techniques on electric guitar. The wah pedal sounds especially good on E9, the mother of all funk chords.

Hard rock and metal guitarists have found a vocabulary for wah drawing more on Hendrix and Zappa than on funk. Zappa used it less like a speech effect and more like a simple adjustable filter. He would leave it partially open to filter the high frequencies over the course of an entire song. Distortion exaggerates out the guitar’s upper harmonics and other partials, and the wah makes a great envelope controller. Jimmy Page used it on Led Zeppelin’s “Dazed and Confused,” “Whole Lotta Love,” “No Quarter” and “Custard Pie”. Slash used it with Guns N’ Roses, and Kirk Hammett leans heavily on it with Metallica.

Bassists sometimes use the wah too, especially in the funk and soul world. Michael Henderson played with one on Miles Davis’s album On the Corner. Other wah-loving bassists include Metallica’s Cliff Burton and Black Sabbath’s Geezer Butler.

Electric pianos and harpsichords operate in very much the same way as electric guitars, so it was only a matter of time before keyboard players started investigating guitar effects. Clavinet with wah sounds so much like guitar that it’s hard to tell them apart. Garth Hudson plays some pretty groovy clav with The Band on “Up On Cripple Creek”, but nothing is as funky as Stevie Wonder on “Superstition,” “Higher Ground” and his other seventies classics. Electric piano also sounds great through wah, again because of its guitar-like tone when played through an amp with distortion. Richard Wright uses it on Pink Floyd’s “Money”, and it’s on tons of Miles Davis electric recordings, especially the ones with Keith Jarrett and Chick Corea.

Any instrument that’s amplified can be played through a wah. Miles Davis got a devastating trumpet tone with wah on Live-Evil and his other darker funk records. A few saxophone players have experimented with it too, as the pedal’s original inventors intended. David Sanborn played with one on the David Bowie album Young Americans, and Dana Colley used it with Morphine.

Violin sounds great with wah. The leading practitioners are Jean-Luc Ponty in the Mahavishnu Orchestra and Boyd Tinsley in the Dave Matthews Band. Pink Floyd even tried some wah on an acoustic piano in their song “Echoes”, which also includes wah guitar made to sound like crying birds. I myself have found that wah sounds terrific on mandolin. I’ve also tried it on harmonica, but there it’s redundant since you can do the wah effect so easily with your mouth.

Wah is just one flavor of the envelope filtering you can do with a synthesizer. A lot of the craft of electronic music comes down to creative rhythmic use of the filter. A standard technique is to get a repetitive loop happening and then sloooowwwly open and close the filter over the course of a phrase or section. Since a sequencer or computer can play the actual synthesizer notes, it frees up the musician’s hands for complex multi-parameter filter control using knobs or touchscreens. We’re only at the beginning of our collective exploration of the artificial vowel glide in music.