should i give the grateful dead a chance?

Just listened to a bunch of those songs. Some I know from other people doing them, like Bertha and Wharf Rat (Midnight Oil is like the least Dead-y band ever). Some of those songs are totally fine but all in the same loping funkless slow-groove-while-guitar-noodles-aimlessly mode that I don't really like. Some of those songs totally sound like Band songs that aren't as good as the Band, but I do like the Wake of the Flood stuff, which I'd never heard. Still very Band-y, but not bad! I have a bad feeling that as much as people may prefer live versions of this stuff they may make the aspects I don't like go on even longer and more prominently - off harmonies, rhythm-free rhythm section, incessant guitar noodles ...

(I concede it's not fair to keep bringing up the Band, because not only were they exceptional, even they couldn't keep it together for more than a couple of albums.)

Anyway, maybe I'll give that mid '70s streak a shot! Rush, I do see what you're getting at when describing the way the guitar kind of turns in on itself. I just wish the playing was more interesting (to me), but also to be fair, if I wanted to hear something on par with (either) Miles Davis Quintet I would just listen to that.

I will say I watched a Dead & Co. set on YouTube for some reason and if you ever doubted Jerry's importance wow you should see what a turgid shitshow it is now

I thought trey did a very good job on the initial few shows. I don’t have a problem with John Mayer as a guitar player but his style is too one dimensional. Multi-dimensional is a good way to describe Jerry’s approach, I guess

(I concede it's not fair to keep bringing up the Band, because not only were they exceptional, even they couldn't keep it together for more than a couple of albums.)

I have a pet theory about how The Band had 'it' up 'til 70, when they got outpaced by band's they influenced, like the Dead, Little Feat, Neil Young, Sir Doug etc.

I don't think they were outpaced, it's just that they changed the DNA of music. Afterter the Band, even Eric Clapton and the Beatles and the superstar like were trying to be like the Band. The acts you note I think came close to the *idea* of the Band, but of course they were a one-off.

I blame Manuel and Danko sinking further into alcoholism and drugs, ceding all control to Robbie

“Cats under the stars” and “Reuben and Cherise” are two lovely Jerry solo things that y’all should check out

I also don't really associate the Band and the Dead that much. feel like the Band is fundamentally an R&B/rock n roll band and the Dead is a folk band

yeah

the band are r&b

oh you said that, lol

“Cats under the stars” and “Reuben and Cherise” are two lovely Jerry solo things that y’all should check out”

Seconded...

"The Weight," "Up On Cripple Creek" and "The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down" are about as definitive as Band songs get, and there's nothing particularly or conventionally R&B or rock about them. I think the key to the Band is that no matter what they were playing they were innately soulful and funky, more a matter of "how" than "what." The vibe and groove of "Cripple Creek" in particular is a good example of a song whose vibe the Dead sometimes echoes, at least to my ears, but imo minus the soul and funkiness, at least not to the degree that the Band delivered it.

i like the grateful dead. i think they're a pretty good band,

Up On Cripple Creek is funky as hell!!

One of the funkiest of all time! but there is nothing particularly r&B or rock about it.

I also don't really associate the Band and the Dead that much. feel like the Band is fundamentally an R&B/rock n roll band and the Dead is a folk band

I blame Manuel and Danko sinking further into alcoholism and drugs, ceding all control to Robbie

Some of those songs are totally fine but all in the same loping funkless slow-groove-while-guitar-noodles-aimlessly mode that I don't really like.

Anyway, maybe I'll give that mid '70s streak a shot! Rush, I do see what you're getting at when describing the way the guitar kind of turns in on itself. I just wish the playing was more interesting (to me), but also to be fair, if I wanted to hear something on par with (either) Miles Davis Quintet I would just listen to that.

― Josh in Chicago

if you want to listen to the dead at all you really have to get into the lope. the dead are the lopiest band ever. also, i've heard the dead trying to be "funky" - "funkless" is absolutely not a pejorative when it comes to the dead imo.

i do think there's some really good stuff on blues for allah, but i'm a proghead. i feel like the prog on there is better than the awkward forays into seven and eleven they tried to do back in the '60s.

the dead of course were never on par with miles, but particularly after miles opened for them in '70 they started to get this "shitty fusion miles" vibe, which to me is worth listening to. they peaked in '72 for me.

tried cleveland '73; didn't last five minutes with "dark star", too much of nothing, but the china->rider clicked with me for whatever reason. i don't know if i'd heard any '73 china->riders before. vox were really nice! jam wasn't as good as the song portion, which is... rare with the dead... but was still good. i'll have to check out 11-11.

lol shitty fusion miles. It's like that bit in the first Wayne's World.

Wayne: Who is playing tonight?
Doorman: The Shitty Beatles
Wayne: Are they any good?
Doorman: No man, they suck!

i think aimless solos are cool, what's the point of having an 'aim' anyway

ask robert fripp, he'll quote some gurdjieff at you

i think aimless solos are cool, what's the point of having an 'aim' anyway

Well, for starters, if you are always soloing then it's no longer a solo.

One thing that surprised me when I first gave a serious listen to the Dead (it was the 8/27/72 “Dark Star” posted on ILM by Scott Seward) was how focused the soloing actually was. There was no marking time or treading water waiting for the next idea to come along; there was absolutely an aim to the soloing, even if that aim seemed to be very far in the distance. Unlike, say, some/most/all live Cream stuff, there were no moments of “shit...um...ok...I guess I’ll just repeat this one Blues Lick until something else occurs to me.”

This Cleveland 73 show must be something, per archive.org

"
A funny thing about this Dark Star is it doesn't really start; the tuning after Big River simply dissolves into a series of spacey jams and soon you realize that this is in fact the plan. About 12 minutes in Phil fires the engines and turns the ship out of orbit, until at 17 minutes we have arrived in the deepest, darkest part of the galaxy, a place inhabited by giant, planet-sized beings made of multi-color translucent goo. We wander here for a while, the engines shut down, the ship's sails filled by the cosmic winds. "

my favorite dead archive.org comment, from the barton hall show:

Yes, it is overrated. It is not *THAT* much better than a handful of other shows. It is, however, the absolute #1 work of art that I consider proof of the divine essence of man

haha the comments are so addictive

A funny thing about this Dark Star is it doesn't really start; the tuning after Big River simply dissolves into a series of spacey jams and soon you realize that this is in fact the plan. About 12 minutes in Phil fires the engines and turns the ship out of orbit, until at 17 minutes we have arrived in the deepest, darkest part of the galaxy, a place inhabited by giant, planet-sized beings made of multi-color translucent goo. We wander here for a while, the engines shut down, the ship's sails filled by the cosmic winds. We can make out a massive, swirling dark cloud. The track cuts through this storm with a nice melody on the bridge but it isn't quite what anyone expected. It's one of those tracks that's always got me wondering about the structure of the song. Maybe it's a very deliberate nod to the dark art that was The Darkness? The second half, though, sounds like anything but a nod. It's more a slow song; a tune that has you listening for subtle shifts from one note to the next. But there's more than subtle shifts here. Phil goes into a very subtle "space opera" mode with a melody that is very reminiscent of some of his best songs.

i've read worse hyperbole about "i feel love"

Now imagine that song exactly as is, but with Jerry Garcia noodling constantly just below the surface.

how could I forget the title track of "Terrapin Station" when we're talking about post-75 Dead, that thing is one of my faves and sounds like Jethro Tull

I'm also pretty partial to Go To Heaven!

“help on the way” is my fave 70s thing by them. So many great chords and voicings, I love the composition, and J’s guitar tone is great.

“unbroken chain” is fun too, find the bit that animal collective sampled

Now imagine that song exactly as is, but with Jerry Garcia noodling constantly just below the surface.

― Josh in Chicago

sounds pretty great tbh

i've heard robert fripp doing "i feel love" with blondie, it's good

OK, finally made it through the entirety of the Cleveland Dark Star. Jesus Christ this is god-awful. Sit through twenty minutes of just plain nothing, I mean pure somnolescent nothingness, and it turns out the "meat" of this is Phil Lesh making fart noises for ten minutes. Now, when Phil is actually playing shit he's my favorite member of the Dead. The guttural distorted noise he spits out on the Farrell Hall 1970 tape is some of my favorite Dead jamming. Part of this I think is that whenever Phil does that shit it is always going to come out on tape as distorted and ugly, so I figure if I'm going to listen to it it might as well be on the most distorted, low-quality audience tape possible to really get the full effect. Also Keith's keyboard tone here is almost as god-awful as Constanten's. I guess I don't get to complain because I like Mike Ratledge and his Lowrey, which sounds like a stylophone with a full keyboard, but again, it's the difference between endearingly shitty and obnoxiously shitty. Anyway this Dark Star is a mess. I suspect the only reason people like it is because it's the longest Dark Star ever, which it isn't.

Up On Cripple Creek sounds like Alan Toussaint. Isn’t he R&B?

Dark Turd

God I love the Cleveland dark star so like whatever man

*raises pitchfork, the original “I need to constantly push my musical opinions as annoyingly as possible” mob justice*

Are there really any *bad* Dark Stars, really, man?

Trivia: I've only ever paid for a Grateful Dead anything once, and that was a copy of "Infrared Roses" at the time ('91?), because it sounded cool. The idea of it, that is. In practice ... not so much.

i've heard robert fripp doing "i feel love" with blondie, it's good

I'd never heard this! It's kind of weird but still pretty cool.

Old man yells at “Dark Star”

One thing that surprised me when I first gave a serious listen to the Dead (it was the 8/27/72 “Dark Star” posted on ILM by Scott Seward) was how focused the soloing actually was. There was no marking time or treading water waiting for the next idea to come along; there was absolutely an aim to the soloing, even if that aim seemed to be very far in the distance. Unlike, say, some/most/all live Cream stuff, there were no moments of “shit...um...ok...I guess I’ll just repeat this one Blues Lick until something else occurs to me.”

― Montgomery Burns' Jazz (Tarfumes The Escape Goat), Saturday, June 8, 2019 2:20 PM (yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

One of the things I've come to appreciate about Jerry's playing is that even the worst parts of it are kind of necessary to/in service of the best parts of it. He's always reaching for something, and sometimes that means sounding awkward or noodly rather than going for the easy layup lick.

Still, I wish he had a little more space in his playing and took a breath more often. I think it's the bluegrass banjo player in him that felt the need to fill every nanosecond with a note.

Also the best guitar moments for me are the interaction between him and Bobby.

One of the things I've come to appreciate about Jerry's playing is that even the worst parts of it are kind of necessary to/in service of the best parts of it. He's always reaching for something, and sometimes that means sounding awkward or noodly rather than going for the easy layup lick.

― longtime caller, first time listener (man alive)

I think that's what makes me so conflicted about him as a guitar player. His playing is so... ruminative. Often he sounds like he's reaching for something, but he never gets there, because there isn't, really, a "there" to get to. You'll have your occasional resolution, but it's only really a secondary resolution; there's some deep tension in his playing that only rarely dissipates completely.

His playing is so... ruminative. Often he sounds like he's reaching for something, but he never gets there, because there isn't, really, a "there" to get to. You'll have your occasional resolution, but it's only really a secondary resolution; there's some deep tension in his playing that only rarely dissipates completely.

fair, but you could also be describing any number of jazz greats

Often he sounds like he's reaching for something, but he never gets there, because there isn't, really, a "there" to get to. You'll have your occasional resolution, but it's only really a secondary resolution; there's some deep tension in his playing that only rarely dissipates completely.

this is beautifully put - for me, that's entirely a positive; I don't want him to get where he's going. I love the never-resolving nature of what he does - it's something I don't think Weir really gets, Weir is very much looking for the peak, the spike, the apex. Jerry at his best sounds like he'd be content to sort of think about what the summit might be like until he dies in the clouds a couple of hundred feet beneath it. but for you, that's often a negative! which I get. Schencker soloing in UFO for example -- always hits the resolve, always finds a deeply satisfying narrative through-line.

In a way Garcia is an impressionist: not a term you'd generally associate with bluegrass dudes. I do think, though, on the acoustic live sets or in his solo stuff, he demonstrates that he's perfectly capable of more trad approaches to soloing. his role in the Dead is different.

The fact that he's not questing for some summit is congenial to me, it's the thing I like most about his playing. The initial appeal of the Dead to me was recognizing that this was a band who exist in the moment, which is what music tends to boil down to for me these days. The negative part of it, for me, is that my use of the term "ruminative" implies the mental health meaning of the term. I don't think that most jazz greats have that approach, though probably some of them do; that compulsion to dig deeper within oneself is a tendency that I know very well and that has been very dangerous to me. I listen to something like Tiger and it sounds to me like he's cutting - in the mental health sense, not the jazz sense.

yeah that's a deep thing with which I'd generally agree ("generally" because I think several of my favorite jazz greats are in the same restless sort of spot) -- what they're doing is deeply personal, and probably connects to deep stuff: solving their own problems, or engaging them, by playing. that appeals to me where I'm presently at: when I was a young man I hated the whole idea of it! but now I think differently.

that's why it took me the longest to come around to the big improv setpieces (playing in the band/dark star), i spent so much time listening to dark star waiting for the point of it all and it took a mental adjustment to learn to just appreciate the journey (maaaaan....).

i think after you really get a feel for garcia's playing, you can sort of map his intentions and it becomes much more evocative and absorbing, you can hear the swirling heart of the universe where others just hear a noodly mess. it's really difficult to force the dead on people, you kinda have to approach on your own terms.

I still really can't get into Dark Star or some of the longer improvs - I feel like they didn't quite have the facility to go as out as they were trying to go in a successful way

the "dark star" on live/dead confirmed me as a deadhead. i like to put it on when i'm writing (i've probably written this exact post upthread)