One of the Grateful Dead’s most endearing qualities is their self-deprecating sense of humor. They are easy to make fun of, too.
Category Archives: Improvisation
A nice Jerry line from the Cornell Scarlet>Fire
My last post was a study of Scarlet>Fire from 5/8/77, and I don’t feel that I completely exhausted the topic. I want to zoom in on a particularly nice line that Jerry plays at the 11:53 mark on the released version: Jerry’s playing is beguiling throughout this whole recording, but there is so much of …
Continue reading “A nice Jerry line from the Cornell Scarlet>Fire”
Scarlet>Fire 5/8/77
Update: see also this deep dive into a particular phrase that Jerry plays on this recording. Did the Grateful Dead play their best show at Cornell University’s Barton Hall on May 8th, 1977? True connoisseurs usually say no, pointing instead to something from the peak years between 1969 and 1974 (or, if they are contrarians, …
Playing in the Band
If you listen to a lot of jazz or R&B, the Grateful Dead sound primitive and sloppy, but if you listen to a lot of classic rock, the Dead sound dazzlingly original. I was listening to classic rock radio recently, and after a bunch of tedious songs by the Eagles and such, “Playing in the …
I built a track out of Grateful Dead jamming
The Dead recorded a bunch of rehearsals and jams while making Blues For Allah. John Hilgarth helpfully compiled and annotated them. A Reddit commenter pointed me to “Descent Into A Spacy Place”, which is farther out harmonically than the Dead usually get. I heard a lot of interesting ideas there, and I wanted to see …
Continue reading “I built a track out of Grateful Dead jamming”
Big River
The Grateful Dead gave their fans a rich education in Americana through their choice of cover songs. My first exposure to Johnny Cash was almost certainly the Dead’s cover of “Big River.” Johnny and the lead guitarist (I think Luther Perkins) are fingering in E, but the recording sounds in F, so I guess they …
Phil Lesh gets funky
In my last post, I transcribed Jerry Garcia’s solo on “Slipknot!” from Blues for Allah. Immediately after that solo comes another part of that tune that I love, a call and response between a repeated riff played by the full band and Phil Lesh’s bass. This eight bar section is a rare instance of the …
The Mind Left Body Jam
You can listen to the Grateful Dead for the songs, or you can listen for the jams. I love the songs as songs, but the Dead do not always do their own material much justice, especially when it’s time to sing a three-part harmony. The jams are less immediately accessible, but it’s what the band …
Inside the Beautiful Jam
The Grateful Dead are most (in)famous for their collective improvisation. Sometimes that improvisation happened within the confines of a song: unstructured arrangements, solos, preset groove sections. Sometimes it happened during semi-composed transitions between the parts of a suite, like Help/Slip/Frank. The most exciting and unpredictable jams happened in transitions between songs, or just out of …
What does Jerry Garcia play on “Eyes of the World” and why does it sound so cool
What makes Jerry Garcia’s guitar style so magical? What makes a person like me slog through so much indifferent-to-terrible Grateful Dead music to hear it? Rather than try to understand the whole corpus at once, I think it makes more sense to zoom in on specific phrases and passages and see how they work. In …
Continue reading “What does Jerry Garcia play on “Eyes of the World” and why does it sound so cool”