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 are tuned up a half step. I have always experienced this as a cheerful and energetic song, because I focus on the groove and the melody and don’t think too hard about the lyrics. But when I played it for my kid, he said that the chorus was the saddest thing he had ever heard. Don’t let that Johnny Cash deadpan fool you, he’s describing a miserable situation.

Continue reading “Big River”

The 32-bar AABA song form

I am approaching my New School songwriting class differently this semester: rather than having students write songs in particular styles, I am having them write using particular forms and structures. For example, for the blues unit, they don’t have to write in a blues style, but they do have to use the twelve-bar blues form. When we cover the Great American Songbook, the students will write 32-bar AABA tunes. But what does that mean?

The first thing to understand about the Great American Songbook is that it’s not a literal book (though there are many books collecting these kinds of songs.) It’s more of a loose canon of early-to-mid-20th-century standard tunes by composers like the Gershwins, Cole Porter, Irving Berlin, Rodgers and Hart, Dorothy Fields, and Duke Ellington. Before I got deep into popular musicology, I tended to think of these standards as “jazz”, but that is not accurate. The songs do sometimes draw on jazz vocabulary, but really, they are pop songs that jazz musicians like to use as launchpads for improvisation. Continue reading “The 32-bar AABA song form”

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 Grateful Dead being funky. Listen at 6:11.

The Dead hardly ever spotlighted a single instrumental voice in an organized way like this; usually everybody just played all the time during tunes. These four bass breaks would even make good hip-hop samples, which is not true of much Dead music.
Continue reading “Phil Lesh gets funky”

Jerry Garcia’s Slipknot! solo

A while back, I learned how to play the Dead’s epic suite of “Help On The Way” into “Slipknot!” into “Franklin’s Tower”. However, I skipped the jam, because I wanted to focus on the composed parts. But since this is apparently the Summer of Jerry for me, I thought it was time to work out his solo on “Slipknot!” too. I decided to do the version from Blues for Allah because it’s short, concise and punchy. I think it’s one of Jerry’s finest solos on record. It starts at 4:18.

There are three sections to the solo, which I call A, B and C. The A section is the first 28 bars of the solo, about a minute and ten seconds long. The B section is the four-bar passage when Jerry lays out and Bobby and Keith play an ascending riff that the Grateful Dead Guide calls “Slipcord” (the idea being that they are pulling the ripcord to signal the end of the jam.) Finally, the C section is Jerry’s last ten bars of solo before they go back into the written part.

Continue reading “Jerry Garcia’s Slipknot! solo”

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 does uniquely well. I especially like “thematic jams”, as the gloriously obsessive Grateful Dead Guide calls them. These are spontaneous quasi-compositions like The Beautiful Jam. Sometimes the themes recur across multiple shows, even across multiple years, and eventually become the basis of new songs. My favorite recurring theme is called the Mind Left Body jam. It’s important enough in the lore that it has a Dead cover band named after it.

Here’s an hour-plus-long MLB jam supercut, with identifiers and timestamps in the description.

If you would rather listen one at a time in chronological order, the invaluable Save Your Face Blog has an exhaustive compilation of neatly edited MLB jams.

Continue reading “The Mind Left Body Jam”

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 the blue.

The ability to create musical ideas in real time can seem like a miracle, both to non-musicians and to classical players. It isn’t; it’s a skill that can be learned and practiced, and there are usually some unspoken shared assumptions holding everything together. The Dead practiced their collective improvising extensively, at least early on, and their large memorized repertoire gave them plenty of shared raw material to draw on.

To illustrate how full-band improvisation works, I’m going to do a close look at one of the most beloved transitional jams, from February 18th, 1971. The Deadheads nickname this the “Beautiful Jam”, and the band officially released it with that title on the So Many Roads box set.

Continue reading “Inside the Beautiful Jam”

Touch of Grey

The Grateful Dead sold a lot of concert tickets and a respectable number of albums, but it took them more than twenty years to have a top ten hit. When “Touch of Grey” broke out, it inspired a debate among the Deadheads: on the one hand, its popularity ruined the experience of going to shows, but on the other hand, it’s an absolute banger, and the video is fun too.

The problem with the single version is that it omits Jerry’s exquisite guitar solo. The album version is the one I grew up on.

Continue reading “Touch of Grey”

The harmonica as a metaphor for pop music theory

This is a reworking of an old post with clearer language and better examples

Last semester was my first time teaching aural skills in NYU’s new popular music theory sequence. This semester will be my first time teaching a full-fledged theory class in the sequence. When I have taught music theory in the past, I have always used a lot of examples from Anglo-American pop, but it’s nice to be in a program that is committed to putting that music front and center. This raises a question, though: what is “popular” music theory? Isn’t music theory just music theory? Why should NYU create a whole alternative theory sequence for pop? The short answer is that Anglo-American popular music operates by very different rules and conventions than Western European tonal music.

It’s a cliche to say that American music is a combination of European harmony and African rhythm. However, a substantial amount of Anglo-American pop harmony is African-descended. The blues has especially strong African retentions. (It’s a problem that theory curricula are so heavily weighted toward harmony and voice leading. We need to include much more rhythm, form and timbre in theory class! But that is a discussion for another post.) You can understand the difference between blues harmony and Western European harmony by looking at the evolution of blues harmonica.

Continue reading “The harmonica as a metaphor for pop music theory”

C-flat and B-sharp

This post is a continuation of my explainer on the difference between F-sharp and G-flat. To sum that one up: in our present-day standard tuning system, F-sharp and G-flat sound the same; the only difference between them is notational. In historical tuning systems, however, they sounded quite different. Tuning is hard!

In this post, I address the deeper mystery of the notes C-flat and B-sharp. Are these real notes?

Continue reading “C-flat and B-sharp”

MusicRadar column on three songs from Brat by Charli XCX

I have now written three MusicRadar columns in a row on current pop smashes by women. This wasn’t planned; it’s just the way the songs of the summer have played out. I didn’t know much about Charli XCX before I wrote this, beyond the fact that she sang some hooks on some radio hits. I’m glad to have had a reason to dig into her music, she is delightful.

This fall I’m teaching theory and aural skills classes in NYU’s new popular music sequence, and I have a feeling these three songs are going to be making appearances.