There's a quote somewhere (I told the intern to go look it up; dunno where he got to, though) where Jerry says that a song ideally has a moment of pure silence in it. I'm pretty sure he was talking about Stella Blue, but this is a good one to file away next to other nuggets about the musical value of not playing anything. Silence in Dark Star, or "Space" jams in general, isn't exactly a rare thing, so I don't want to make too much of it: but there are two very small ones in this Dark Star that are perfect, like pinholes into infinity, and I would like to acknowledge them. It is the 50th anniversary of this behemoth piece of music, and almost 15 years ago I banged out an appreciation about it that needs no revision to sum up my feelings -- but in the years that followed, I have come to love one additional specific thing about it.
In that original write-up, I mentioned a CD copy of this show that I was fortunate to get sometime between 1999-2001 that tracked the "tuning" and "intro" separate from the main Dark Star. On that copy, Dark Star itself was tracked when Billy slides into his swinging cymbal beat as Jerry trickles in (@3:10 on the current fileset), but the "intro" began at 1:28 -- the moment where, to my ears, the tuning ends and the gentle but wholly intentional playing commences. This magical little black dot of silence is what always bring to mind Tom Constanten's words about Dark Star being a thing that you enter, not a thing that you start playing.
The instrumental texture of Keith's Fender Rhodes and Phil's bass chord at 2 min is about a warm a sound as I've ever heard from the Dead (or, really, most anything this side of Jaco Pastorius' "Portrait of Tracy" or John Martyn's "Solid Air," but I digress)
If anything, I downplayed just how much Keith is playing in this. I wouldn't call it overplaying (although it seems like 300% of what he usually plays), since I do feel that he is completely zoned in and doing exactly what ought to be happening. But Bob seems a bit more reserved in this, and I suspect part of the reason is that Keith was just taking up more space than usual. But go ahead Keith! It sounds perfect. After the scorched earth Phil/Jerry showdown that decimates the second half of this, who's feeling all perky and ready to get back on the road? Keith is.
Then at 29:13, comes the second great silence: the only sound is Jerry just scraping a string very quietly, and there's another tiny pause -- debatably there are one or two more in the quiet passage that follows over the next minute. Everyone is listening so hard and the tension is palpable. And then things get very, very loud indeed.
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