should i give the grateful dead a chance?

yes it does!

Does it ever not?

i don't know!

i figured as much!

Listening to and enjoying Europe '72 right now, but honing in on what I generally don't like about the Dead. They just don't hold still! Like, they threaten to hit a groove, but then solo over everything. I realize that may be a selling point to some. At least they're more interesting soloists than the schmuck in Phish.

TBH. blown away that anyway would not like the Band. The Band is soul music. The music is great, but it's really all about the vocals.

what was that line upthread about 68-72 Dead refusing to play a bassline lol?

xpost

there are earlyish ('68) Dead shows where China and Rider aren't joined - Dick's Picks #22 features a smokin' morph of Dark Star>China Cat Sunflower>The Eleven, for example

europe 72 is so gd partly because it was the one live set that the Dead ever overdubbed/sweetened with studio vocals etc

so saddened to see scott and others not really digging the band. along w gene clark and gram parsons, richard manuel makes up my 'holy trinity' of heartbreakingly beautiful country rock singer guys (and yeah, the thought of manuel covering 'brokedown palace' or one of hunter/garcia's other ballads is p tantalizing).

been listening to Harpur College 1970 today for the first time ever & it's a good show though I think I'm gonna have to listen several times to really get what's so over the top great about it, compared to 1972 shows, say (though the acoustic set at the start's pretty unique I think? at least circa that era).

BUT: holy shit @ the closing "We Bid You Goodnight", that is some soulful collapse at the end...I love it when the Dead get exhausted b/c they mine it so well, & this is something that can really only come out in the live shows I think.

nah, lots of the 1970 shows started w an acoustic set (some 69 shows, too, I think) - the weird thing abt the official Harpur College release is that its in mono - some of the electric set is v v full-on psychedelic Dead (Dancing in the Streets, Other One)

(and yeah, the thought of manuel covering 'brokedown palace' or one of hunter/garcia's other ballads is p tantalizing).

I thought about starting a "songbook swap" thread to ponder other pairs of artists doing this, but I'm still kind of mesmerized by Dead/Band.

yeah I liked the third disk of the Harpur College show the most, but wasn't blown away by the second disk---doesn't lift off the way 1969 shows often do...but this is just my superficial first time reaction & I'll surely go back to it. the mono thing is pretty interesting (I'm listening to the Dick's Picks version)

Dark lyrics: http://www.dead.net/song/dire-wolf

I'm reading Game of Thrones (thanks for the rec, ILX fantasy nerds!) which features dire wolves so I am pretty much winging this song to myself all the time.

Winding? No. Singing.

dire wolf is definitely one of my top 5 Dead songs

The steel guitar solo on that is so killer

Hold on, did The Band ever use one? Maybe that's my problem, not enough pedal steel!

i can't think of any band w/pedal steel

i think they grew out of being a rock n roll bar band more though

a little note about that Veneta '72 show is that it funded a business which is still going strong today, the Springfield Creamery (run by one of Kesey's kids).

anyone who doesn't dig The Band needs to see the "Festival Express" performance of "I Shall Be Released", it's probably on youtube but I don't like posting those auto-embeds.

"Bird Song" is gorgeous

Dude, next thing you should get is Jerry's s/t solo album, the one with the wheel and the 10 of diamonds and the titty on the cover/
Seriously, check that shit out.

WTF is with this ongoing saga of the kids who were lost by their parents and their fucking hippie ass parents aren't even going to the tent to check on them????

x-post That Garcia album is great. First thing that made me think I might like the Dead. And I do, as long as they're playing Country Rock.

also recommend the ace album cuz its really just a good dead album and not really a weir album. and it sounds great.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E-AhJhiBYxs

i still can't figure out which weir solo thing i don't like the most. kingfish? bobby & the midnights? blah.

Where the Beat Meets the Street is pretty awful.

For Dead lyrics, this is a fun site:

http://artsites.ucsc.edu/GDead/agdl/

oooh boy dark star was super cool but this cover of sing me back home by merle is terrrible and feels like it lasts for 1,000 years

xp

You know - I'm pissed at that guy. Like I've seen that site around since the late 90s or so and I had a lot of respect for it. Like, yeah, guy's really trying to parse these lyrics. So maybe 5 years ago, the guy's like "and my books gonna come out! the Annotated Grateful Dead lyrics book!" And I got the idea into my head that the dude had taken all this crowd-sourced information that he'd been accruing on his website over the years, put it all together, and come out with some academic product. The book turned out to just be stuff from the website, basically verbatim, with pretty illustrations and stuff, but no scholarly insight whatsoever. Like, I thought dude had some behind-the-scenes moves or whatever. It was very disappointing.

ohhhhh man I love love love love ^ 10000000 that cover of "Sing Me Back Home"! Like I think it's the best thing the Dead every did...so slow, yes, but so aching, funereal (for Pigpen?); I can even fuck with Donna on that one. And I love the Hag & did so long before I started listening to the Dead.

kinda wish i had seen this a couple hours ago http://www.fathomevents.com/concerts/event/gratefuldead.aspx

Obviously influenced by this thread, tonight I dreamed the Grateful Dead were fiming a Christmas special: but they had Ashford & Simpson as guest singers (somewhere in my mind there's a reason for this too).

lol valerie simpson is far too good a singer to be let anywhere near the dead, might've thrown them off their stride

Why in this age of youtube can't I find the clip of Jerry dressed as Santa and Mickey Hart dressed as Spock?

"lol valerie simpson is far too good a singer to be let anywhere near the dead, might've thrown them off their stride"

:)
The other day here in the store we received a boxset containing several Ashford & Simpson 12"'s and I think I probably found the shot on the cover somehow spine-chilling.

Scenes like this are the real reason a lot of people *hate* (and not just dislike) the Grateful Dead (though this looks like a Phish show):

http://img3.uploadhouse.com/fileuploads/8260/8260733e941cd8222009f855e46620497651f6e.jpg

lol "my child was born at home." These are the kind of people who have "water births" on their front porch without a doctor present.

lol @ "my child was born at home" bumper sticker

my wife used to go to phish shows w/her friends in college, but when we first started dating she went to a few and basically disavowed the whole thing after these hardcore hippies camping next them basically abandoned their two small children and she and her friend kinda ended up taking care of them just cuz they felt bad. she came home real disgusted by all the hardcore drug use of a lot of the younger kids and the sorta deadend burnouts among the older fans, and also just sort finally hit the point where she couldn't take the body odor anymore

haha mindmeld

"my child was born at home and has yet to be weaned from my teat"

u.m.sd's wife OTM.

i remember hearing from people i knew who went to dead shows in the 80's pre-touch of gray that it was getting REALLY bad and kinda dismal as far as hard drugs and general misery goes. people nodding out all over the place. after touch of grey i think it became more of a thing for normal people to check out dead shows and this was probably a good thing overall. not that it wasn't still a drug pit. (this is all anecdotal, of course. i never went to shows. i would just partake in the drug booty that people would bring back home with them. but i knew more than one person who loved the dead and who were seriously debating at the time whether they wanted to go to shows anymore)if you were going to shows in 84 or 85 you were probably pretty hardcore.

not that they weren't still selling out arenas pre-touch of grey, but it just sounded like some sort of nadir as far as the "scene" went. getting ugly.

The movie TIE-DYED captures the desperate parking lot vibe of the final Dead tour pretty well iirc.

Final tour w/ Jerry, anyway.
I had a bad experience at a Phish show but it was my own fault. The scene always kind of freaked me out.

hell is wrong with those hippies upthread? bah

i mean, other than the fact that they're at a phish gig, if they are. apart from that.

Scenes like this are the real reason a lot of people *hate* (and not just dislike) the Grateful Dead

this is up on some "Hitler was a vegetarian" boring phoned-in shit imo

"You know who else liked guitars? POL POT"

this is up on some "Hitler was a vegetarian" boring phoned-in shit imo

― five gone cats from Boston (underrated aerosmith bootlegs I have owned), Thursday, April 21, 2011 11:38 AM (5 minutes ago) Bookmark

When people talk about how much they hate the dead, the rarel fail to bring up Deadheads in the equation.

I was on Phish tour a lot in the 90s, which was okay to a point because I had my crew and we had a generally positive and relatively healthy way of doing things, although things did get kind of gross sometimes and the larger scene was often troubling.

I ended up on the second to last Dead tour ever bc I had lots of time but little money and needed to get from northern CA to the east coast and some friends were heading out and agreed to take me with them. That was after the Touch of Gray renaissance but there was still a thriving dope-addled gutter punk contingent in the scene. That whole tour ended up being a dismal experience for me for lots of harrowing reasons, but the severe downhill slide started when the guy I was rising with (not part of my regular crew) took on a couple of junkies as riders. They stole most of my stuff (including my sleeping bag - I almost creamed this dippy hippie who tried to pull some "I'm sure whoever stole it needed it more then you did, sister" bs with me) and left me stranded in Atlanta.

Anyway, lots of baggage. Hi!