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

There are bands I like that the jam band kids like (MMW for sure, old Galactic, Charlie Hunter, I dunno, um, Skerik), but I don't consider them jam bands.

I saw QOTSA at a festival in 2001 and they jammed on "You Can't Quit Me Baby" for 15 mins. It was really good.

I saw The Mars Volta at a festival in Jan 2004 they opened with a Jam-ified version of "Roulette Dares". It was fucking shite-ass-gay. I pissed off and saw Aphex/Vibert, who were fab.

someone recently said that lcd sdsys's "yeah (pretentious mix)" sounds like phish, circa fall 97. that is a hilariously accurate description. my first thoughts about that track were actually "boy, this sounds a little like that band lake trout".

anyway, i mostly hate jam bands now. but i fucking love "china cat sunflower" and "st stephen", and i can listen to Billy Breathes without gagging too much.

Jordan otm.

I kind of want to tattoo this on my chest.

the dead stand apart, for better or worse, from all of the other jam bands because of their deep knowledge of/roots in all kinds of Americana - country, blues, bluegrass, folk, and beat lit/poetry

The rest can choke on their own psilocybillic vomit.

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.

----

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 just listened to a Moe. song a friend posted on fb. It wasn't terrible.

i love the dead (in addition to finally getting into a few shows, the americana albums are sorta obv great, and blues for allah is a gorgeous jazz fusion record anchored in songs and so feels to me very related to stuff like court and spark while also being totally different), love floyd and floyd bootlegs if those count. every time I've tried to get into phish, at least live, they seem like the worst possible evolution of fusion. their playing itself sounds so...self-involved, as much as you can ascribe that to a particular interplay. some of their songs are good though, I remember enjoying billy breathes

...not enough to take on the whole of ilm on the topic. :)

lol

lol

none of the newer hippie bands have songs. that's my main problem. maybe songs are beside the point. the dead had many many wonderful songs to choose from. they had an actual songbook! all the best old bands had memorable songs. allman brothers. quicksilver. new riders. little feat. also they could jam better...but they had good to great material to fall back on in if they were too stoned to play straight. i've never heard a great nu-jam band song. they might be giant songs sound like cole porter compared to phish songs.

i think it doesn't help that the bands now are completely unfunny to me. and it seems like humor is definitely a part of their thing. and its definitely zappa humor which is my least favorite kind.

it's a cult thing that i will never enjoy. and i like a lot of cult things. when people come in my store and ask if i have any phish i say no and they have no interest in anything else. they just leave. they don't look at a single record.

ALSO, i know a fanatical phish fan and i've told him that i've listened to album stuff and didn't like it and he'll say NO! you have to hear the live thing and i'll say i've listened to a lot of live stuff online...and he'll say NO! you have to go to a show!! and that right there is the heart of it. if i can't tell how good a band is by listening to any of their zillion albums or live shows online...i mean, that is some extra-musical cult-like activity.

also, yes, the dead could definitely make me cringe when they did "funky", but nothing like any of the newer bands doing "funky". kinda think there should a law against it. that and their takes on "reggae".

i also know that arguing with fans of these bands is pointless. like fighting with limp bizkit fans or something. just not worth it.

well... you have to take it for granted that jam band people will be fanatical about set and setting. i find the best way to listen to any band is to ignore anybody who listens to that band to the exclusion of all other music.

the alleged lack of tunes isn't really a weak side for me, but i listen to, you know, berlin school stuff, which isn't exactly known for its hummable melodies. compared to pink era tangerine dream, most jam bands sound like max fucking martin.

I spent close to four years sharing office space with Relix magazine. Jam band music is the worst music on Earth. If I had to rank major jam bands in order of least to most intolerable it would probably go:

The Allman Brothers Band
Medeski, Martin & Wood
Grateful Dead
Gov't Mule
Widespread Panic
Umphrey's McGee
Phish
The Disco Biscuits (aka The Worst Fucking Band On Earth)

it does make me feel a little jerky to slam the stuff because it really is music for normal white people who feel at home seeing uncool people who look like them onstage and there is something, uh, endearing about that, i guess. i always wanted to see totally cool people who were nothing like me onstage. Ghost were kind of my live ideal in the 90's as far as jam bands go.

It's never made any sense to me that Dave Matthews is gladly accepted into this category. I guess a live show makes the difference, but he seems like a fairly traditional artist/songwriter to me.

i would say that a group like govt mule actually does cross over with older rock fans and fans of older bands. duh, allman brothers fans. but i feel like widespread panic, disco biscuits, string cheese, etc have very little crossover. they are in that hermetically sealed cult world. the wider world has no knowledge of them. something they share with polka fans and probably circa 2016 drum 'n' bass fans. all kinds of people bought grateful dead albums. all kinds of people don't buy phish albums.

also this stuff only really exists here, right? as far as fandom goes? phish never even go to europe, i don't think. maybe its all for the best that phish stay home...

yeah i was just gonna compare jam band music to, like, lawrence welk. i never watched lawrence welk when it was on the air, but i don't have any great objection to it, and there's some polka music i like a lot. i mean i really dig "die knodel" for instance. so while i've never heard the disco biscuits and never have any desire to, i do definitely enjoy listening to, say, ween, or my morning jacket.

polka bands jam so hard. they are insane musicians. great songs too. and choice covers. more fun in general. the local polka radio shows here will play new stuff and it's like a ridiculous level of shredding.

i mean people like to talk shit about myron floren but that dude could shred.

i used to love phish & saw them like 20x but idk i grew out of it, havent listened to them in yrs

oddly they are playing in my area TONIGHT i think, i considered going tbh & id prob still like it but i could never see myself listening to them @ home & obv never as nearly exclusively as i did for awhile, again

When I was editor of Global Rhythm we ran a profile on Jimmy Sturr once. That dude has won 18 Grammys!

I also used to love Phish but only saw them 4 times and the last time was in 1996. I stopped caring a long time ago but will still listen to a few of the studio records every three years or so.

But I'm friends with a guy who has kept up, seen them a couple times in the last few years, and has paid for and invited me over for a live PPV show and the final Dead show with Trey. We've joked that if they happen to come near us, when we're both in town, and at one particular venue, we'd see them. It's taken like seven years but all that has come to fruition and we're seeing them on Friday (or Saturday, our wives going one night, us the other).

Love the Dead and like a few Allman brothers records but don't include them in this category because they were "old". I sort of flirted with other bands but went to see moe live once and halfway though had a magical epiphany about how shitty it was and I just gave up.

let me put it this way: of the music i used to listen to twenty years ago, phish has held up better than dream theater.

Haha!

I saw Medeski Martin Wood a couple times and really enjoyed it. There's even a MMW tune I used to put on mixes for people from time to time (Hey Hee Hi Ho or whatever exactly it's called).

I sort of fell into a circle of people who were into these bands in college after having no prior idea that such bands existed. I was mostly appalled, especially by Phish. I got dragged to a String Cheese Incident show at Wetlands once freshman year and I found them intolerable. Given that I was unaware of jam bands up to that point, I was also unaware of any backlash or hipster sneering against them, so this was a pure, gut feeling I had.

I saw MMW at a city music fest in Birmingham, AL back in the 90s, and went and bought their album afterwards. I've lost track of them over the years, though, and was surprised to find out they migrated into the jam world.

yeah I also didn't originally perceive them as a "jam band" so much as a jazz crossover band, sort of like the Bad Plus today but maybe even more crossed over. Although by the time I saw them live they were definitely in that world.

john scofield

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