Does ANYONE on ILX like jam bands? I mean, really?

Allman Brothers, Little Feat, Phish, God Street Wine, Umphrey's McGee, Global Funk, Soulive, Reconstruction, Legion of Mary, Grateful Dead, Mofro, String Cheese Incident is okay (kind of like Phish w/ a "better" singer and less experimental craziness - in other words, more boring), Garaj Mahal.

Phish as "clunky musicians at best" is way off. Listen to "A Live One" sometime. If they ever sound off, it is gennerally due to bad audio/recording. Or, perhaps you just heard one of their 300+ songs that didn't impress you, which was most likely a 3 minute pop song that isn't the reason Phish fans like them, either.

But I had 20 minutes of a Phish documentary going on the TV when I was too lazy to change the channel, and I thought they had some appeal... (At least I could tell that they were precise.) ... Maybe that was because the documentary only played 20 seconds of their songs at a time. So if jam bands would jam for 20 seconds, I might dig it.

The Minutemen to thread!

I'm not real sure what you're getting at ... if it isn't sample-worthy, doesn't that just mean it doesn't have a hook? Are Varese and Stravinsky sampled? (Don't answer that ... I mean, if the answer is yes, then change the composers to someone who hasn't.)

so, whaddya mean?

someone made a whole album comprised of dark star samples.

Geezus, talk about cutting off your nose to spite your face.

Have you heard "Slave to The Traffic Light" and "Harry Hood"?

It's funny, I used to feel the same way. Years later, all I listen to are live shows. I guess I finally "got" the live stuff in a big way. I remember I used to think, "it just sounds worse, why not listen to a nice clean recording?" It only takes a few GREAT shows to understand why the live shows are better in a hard-to-describe way. I would suggest the 10 disc Big Cypress show from New Years 99 or the "Runaway Golfcart Marathon" show in which every song has some reference to the OJ high-speed chase. Then, any of the earlier shows from the late 80s and early 90s. LIVE PHISH #9 from '89 is totally kickass straight through.

someone made a whole album comprised of dark star samples.

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It's a double disc Plunderphonics set called Grayfolded. It's pretty damn great. People who don't like the Dead can suck it.

Count me. Yes, I like jam bands. Some of them. jeez, can't people just treat "jam bands" as any other genre-definable band? The Grateful Dead & Phish were GREAT bands. However, bands like Widespread or SCI do very little for me. ILMers who would say the former and the latter are the same or can't tell the difference really make me question if they've listened to them or are merely parroting hivemind snark.

There are a number of other good bands: The New Deal, Lotus, Sound Tribe Sector 9, the bays, Brothers Past...are they jam bands? i don't know and i don't care. if i enjoy 3 12-15 minute songs/jams in a set or in a show isn't it the same as enjoying 4 or 5 songs out of 15 on an LP?

Also, if people knew enough about The Disco Biscuits to initiate and sustain a "why are they so bad and hated"-type-thread i would show my true colors and play the role of alex_in_nyc in relation to KJ.

I owned Red by God Street Wine for some unknown reason. Terrible!

I never liked the Grateful Dead that much, aside from American Beauty, Workingman's Dead, and Blues For Allah (the only Dead album I own).

I guess I like Phish the most out of that genre. They're pretty good overall. But their godlike status with some acquaintances of mine (who obsess over them about 20x as much as Alex obsesses over Killing Joke) is off-putting.

I always forget about it cause usually everyone is hating on them for being a jam-band and its not a jam-band song at all.

Oh no!

The thing that I appreciate about most jam bands is that they don't stereotype other types of music and rarely judge or -- as this thread does -- berate other music genres. They truly do this shit because they love to hear those notes floating through the air.

Because they figured out how to make money?

Have you ever heard: Wake of The Flood, What A Long Strange Trip 2 CD set, Skull and Roses, One From The Vault, Two From The Vault, Terrapin Station, Shakedown Street, Mars Hotel, Live Without A Net, Dick's Picks? If not, you've missed lots of great stuff and many different styles.
Take advantage of archive.org and download some of the best shows out there for free!

I even happen to like the albums most deadheads don't appreciate too much, like Go To Heaven and Blues For Allah.

Regardless of what you think of their music, Phish are/were some of the best musicians AND the best songwriters out there. Don't let their fans get in the way of your judgment of the band.

That said, I'm glad they broke up. Hopefully the members will do something new and interesting.

The handful of times I've seen Mule live have been some of my most satisfying musical experiences. And, on occasion, the fans have contributed to that. Any crowd on any given night can wrinkle yr opinion of what's onstage, but I've always found the fans at a Mule or Phish or whatever show to simply be more at ease and actually there for the show rather than there to be, you know, seen.

Some people seem to forget we pay to see and hear the bands, not them.

But, yeah, as it was told to me: "Warren Haynes is a for real cat."

Amen to that.

I also did forget to mention that I dled some Disco Biscuits at the suggestion of a couple ILMers and they're great too!

Despite the contrasting opinion expressed above, I really think jam bands are comparable to jazz... and blues. Buddy Guy and Eric Clapton are great jammers.

Sweet fancy moses! my compliments, you open-minded soul. if you ever want recommendations of shows or songs to check out, i will provide that service.

try those two and then maybe 12/31/04 to hear something like what they sound like now. new year's eve shows can sometimes be too gimmicky, especially for someone not familiar with the band, but if you want high-energy, the 2nd set is that in spades. that 1 cd hasn't left my changer in the 4 months since the show.

Oh, I also like Ween a lot of the time, who have some overlap in this scene.

http://www.villagevoice.com/music/0033,tracker_writer.inc,13594,.html

i love jam bands!

j/k

my thesis is that jam bands are for guys in college and the tasteful/"good" ones are for the music majors

I definitely thought of MMW more as a jazz or instrumental/electronic-leaning band than a jam band. A big hip hop nerd I knew thought the same and left a show we were at halfway through because he was horrified by and unable to comprehend or deal with all the rank twirling hippies packing an indoor venue.

xp my phish nerd friends - one used to a high school jazz and orchestra teacher, the other has a doctorate in music and is a tenured oboe professor

What is the definition of 'jam band' is it pachouli soaked hippy fusion with some nods to the Dead?
I'm not that familiar with it but I do love bands that improvise heavily.
Can, Conqueroo, Meat Puppets, Levitation (& Dark Star), Loop, Spacemen 3, Television, Mountain Bus, Santana/Mclaughlin, Lifetime, Gateway, Brian Auger, Pink Floyd Grateful Dead, Mad River, Jefferson Airplane, QMS, man, Arzachel, Soft Machine, Ash Ra Temple, Cymande, Osibisa, Gila, The New Age(Pat Kilroy), Hawkwind, Mighty Baby, Great Society, Hunger, Outlaws, Allman Bros, Yardbirds, Caspar Brotzmann Massaker, Swans, Velvets etc etc. Could go on. Not sure if there's any crossover.

of the bands you name, i'd say the dead, the airplane, qms, and the allmans have "jam band" elements.

the thing about "jam band" music is that, like many genres of music, it's defined culturally more importantly than by what it sounds like. so you have a guy like dave matthews who is a very important jam band figure, even though his music doesn't necessarily have a lot of overlap with, say, dumpstaphunk.

in a historical sense "jam band" music is an outgrowth of dead fan culture- they're just clearly and obviously patient zero here (and as such it's not very fair to lump them in with everything else defined as a "jam band", because they're not very influenced by the dead!)

anyway, the phenomenon really starts in the '80s and becomes more culturally broad in the '90s. they're bands who are inspired by the drugs and the improvisational approach of the dead, but who have more in the way of "chops"- my feeling is that the dead weren't good enough at their instruments to be able to make it as a jam band in this scene. your first wave of these bands would include groups like the spin doctors, blues traveler, etc., and this was the wave that did have some degree of mainstream crossover- i don't think you will ever hear string cheese incident on the radio.

jam bands also tend to de-emphasize vocals and lyrics- there is singing, but, and this is another holdover from the dead, i think, there's not really any sense that you have to sing _well_, either in the technical sense or in the more nebulously defined emotional sense. this is where you start dealing with the infamous jam band sense of humor, which i personally would trace back to phish. phish's sense of humor is pretty much zappa's, except without the hate and misanthropy. while in many ways this is a blessed relief, it also means that the lyrics to their songs are all stupid and have no motherfucking point.

A friend of mine nearly killed the Disco Biscuits' dog with pot brownies once.

The MMW crossover thing was funny. I went to see them play once with a large cadre of Phish fans. During peak points of their improvisations, some of my friends would yell, whistle and hoot, like you do at a rock show when the jams are cookin', and in response the sweater-wearing jazz fans would turn around and shush us.

I've reached a point where I can't even listen to the Dead anymore, outside of American Beauty and Workingman's Dead. Someone posted on the live dead thread last week about some show that was the absolute favorite Dead show, so I dl'd it and tried to give a listen on a car trip. I couldn't switch it off fast enough.

then there's the newer breed of jam/EDM crossover acts. there are all kinds of these that i've never heard of that sell out theaters here (and festivals, of course) on the regular. i wonder what the ratio of hippies to bros to hippiebros is at these shows.

some of the bigger names i can think of that afaik fall into this horrible intersection: Lotus, Beats Antique, Sound Tribe Sector 9, Dillon Francis, Pretty Lights, etc.

XP during my July 4th amurican music marathon, I tried yet again to get into some live Dead, but it just wasn't happening for me ... other than the two Americana albums, I haven't been able to embrace the Dead, in spite of family and friends playing that music around me since childhood

after switching off Europe '72, I put on the recently-released 1971 Allman Brothers set, Live at A&R Studios, and I was good for the rest of the evening

wait, dillon francis the moombahton king? he's a jam band guy now? say it ain't so!

Sound Tribe Sector 9 has been going on about 20 years, so it's not necessarily a newer breed.

Also, don't forget to add Bassnectar to that list.

i'm just going off vague impressions from festival fliers and music listings. i guess he's squarely on the edm producer/dj side, then moving across the continuum you have live band edm shit like 'Big Gigantic', to regular ol' jam bands who bought keyboards and sampler pads

i have a friend who goes to the alex grey chapel of the sacred mirrors events all the time. cyperhippie stuff. lots of acid.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8gHFYSA9nJU

it's all about moon frog, baby...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nIe7czOOfBo

she goes to these too:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X50Kk916Zp0

still going on today if you want to go. Flooting Grooves will be there.

http://www.fractaltribe.org/fractalfest2016/

fun crowd...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=trdL24_PTqM

when i was growing up Max Creek were the Phish before Phish. but they were straight-up Dead worshippers. they still play too. i don't hate them! they even put out some decent records.

people i knew in the 80's would go see Max Creek when they needed a Dead fix and the Dead weren't touring.

the festival they have in town here every year looks like fun.

https://scontent.fbos1-1.fna.fbcdn.net/v/t1.0-9/13335993_10154814210172137_733663556762655819_n.jpg?oh=52666d2ab26d9c2121f7af8934cd2636&oe=57E905FD

i'm sure they wouldn't done great if they weren't apparently forbidden by their terms of parole from ever venturing more than 100 miles away from willimantic. :)

Someone posted on the live dead thread last week about some show that was the absolute favorite Dead show, so I dl'd it and tried to give a listen on a car trip. I couldn't switch it off fast enough.

lol sorry

that "playing in the band" tho

there should be a jam bands/albums poll

is anyone here a crusty enough ilxor to rescue the genre from disrespect???

Jam is so much more accepted now in indie circles it's crazy