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 Band” came on. Its odd meter and structural unpredictability made it feel like an explosion of color in a sea of grey. Here’s the version from Skull and Roses, which is a live recording, but with organ by Merl Saunders overdubbed in the studio.

The cliche about the Dead being better live holds true for this song; the (mostly) live Skull and Roses version is much better than the studio recording from Ace. After these two, every successive performance is sung worse than the previous one. That’s the Dead! It’s okay, there are plenty of other things to love about the song.

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I wrote a song to help my students with key signatures

Yesterday I was sitting in on a colleague’s theory class, and when she said that it was time to practice identifying key signatures, everyone groaned. I feel their pain and want to help. I myself learned the key signatures by reading and writing a lot of music in lots of different keys and eventually just absorbing them by osmosis, but that doesn’t work in a one semester class. My idea is to use music itself to teach music theory concepts, so that end, I wrote a song that explains the key signatures. Listen and download here.

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Mississippi Half-Step Uptown Toodeloo

Long before I knew who Duke Ellington was, I adored a Grateful Dead song vaguely named after one of his early hits. I was most attached to the Brent-era version on Without A Net:

This is not the Dead at their absolute best. Jerry sounds like he’s about 95 years old, and some of those drum fills are like sneakers tumbling in a dryer, as critics of the band often put it. But it gets the idea across well enough for my teenage self to be enraptured.

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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 if I could organize them into a piece of music that I would enjoy listening to. During a long bus ride, I brought the jam into Ableton Live and made this:

A Twitter commenter described this as “Greyfolded funkified”, which makes me happy. It’s a pretty good mission statement.

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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.

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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.
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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.

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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.

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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.

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