12/6/73 at 50: ideal silences

 

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.

Jerry Week 2015

I grew up outside of New York City [edit: my mother would kill me if she heard me refer to it as New York City.  Sorry, mom!], where Columbia University's WKCR-FM was renowned for its 24-or-more-hour birthday broadcasts of jazz legends -- I have particularly fond youthful memories of July 4th weekend, which meant 48 hours of Louis Armstrong alternated with 12 hours of The Twilight Zone on WPIX Channel 11 -- so something about the idea of marking left-of-center cultural icons with huge marathon celebrations has been hardwired into me.  Given all that, the idea that Jerry Garcia gets a whole 9-day week among the faithful just makes me happy.

I'm getting things started with one of my favorite Scarlet>Fires from 4/13/83 Burlington, VT.

Happy Jerry Week.

like jazz, but boring (Slate on the Dead)

I have a few friends obsessed with Slate magazine's Culture Gabfest podcast, which I've enjoyed on occasion in the past.  One directed me to the latest, which covers the Grateful Dead in one segment.  I'm not much of a podcast guy in general, but I figured it was worth tuning in to see what the educated post-hipster literati had to say about the Dead's legacy and farewell shows.  The GD segment starts @16 minutes in:

http://www.slate.com/articles/podcasts/culturegabfest/2015/07/slate_s_culture_gabfest_on_catastrophe_the_grateful_dead_s_fare_thee_well.html

Turns out, they've got almost nothing.  Ostensibly the topic is the Dead as a "tribal" music (ie, you're in the tribe or not in the tribe, with no one on the fence) and what about the music makes it so appealing/important for the tribe members.  Not a bad premise, I guess (though not one that I fully agree with), but they quickly slide into a very well-plowed rut of Dead criticism: every song is endlessly long, their albums are all worthless, they were well past their prime in the 80's, they were occasionally great and usually bad, their cult of fans were either fratboys or hopeless 60's burnouts.  Slate's in-house Deadhead is brought out to speak on the Dead's behalf and eagerly talks about tapestries of sound, dreamscapes, and psychedelic wallpaper, is apologetic for the bands' faults (my god, he even cracks the joke about what deadheads say when they run out of pot), and continuously refers to their music as noodling.  The hosts talk about shibboleths and rib on the in-house Deadhead for creating a three hour playlist of Dead jams for them to suffer through.  You can imagine the rest.

I'm always intrigued about the responses to the band in 21st century forums of popular culture where the band and/or its following have relatively little (or none) of a foothold.  20-30 years ago, you knew exactly what the response was going to be.  My own unresearched impression is that in the past decade, the contemporary music press has at least come around to the idea that there was a lot more to the Dead than what met the eye in the 80's-90's.  I'm talking about contemporary publications like The Wire, Pitchfork, that kind of thing, not older ones like Rolling Stone or even the New York Times.  I don't want to wander too far into vague generalities about how the Dead are viewed/received by critics of pop culture today, but I was disappointed and honestly a little surprised that a publication like Slate would be so lazily stuck in the past with their treatment of a band that, in Slate's own words, is a great American institution.

I'm going to listen to 7/18/72 right now to get the fuzz out of my ears.  Endless tapestries of sound!

11/28/80 - Florida man ponders new box set

I've got a weird relationship with Florida.  All my life, I've had some family there (almost none of them native), so I'm there a couple of times a year.  This isn't the place to get into it in depth, but I'll say this: it's got a weird vibe.  I like it, because like any truly weird place, it's got its own unique brand of weirdness.  And, like any little pocket of weirdness, it's not surprising that the Dead tended to play better than average shows there.  So, with all the @FloridaMenandWomen in mind, it's always a good time to listen to a Florida Dead show.

More to the point, I was thinking about Florida because of a list that's going around of the 30 shows selected for the Dead's enormous 50th anniversary boxed set (now confirmed at dead.net).  Unusually for picky deadheads, general consensus (and I use the word lightly) in my neck of the woods is that they picked some real winners and some surprisingly cool sleepers.  Inevitably, a couple of choices are going to jump out as being a little too left-field, and one was the 1980's representative: 11/28/80 in Lakeland, FL.  It's smack in the middle of a quick 4-show swing through Florida and Georgia, on the heels of the much more famous (but not as exciting) run of acoustic/electric run of shows, and it's not a show that probably springs to anyone's mind as belonging in the top tier of the year.  11/30/80 was a cult favorite, a punchline in Nick Paumgarten's fine 2012 New Yorker article that was finally (and deservedly) enshrined for posterity as a Dave's Picks release.  11/29/80 seems to be a pretty popular favorite, at least for fans of the early 80's, with an eye-popping setlist and fine playing to match.  But 11/28?  Misguided choice, or a well-kept secret?

Giving it a close listen, I'd have to say neither.  I think it's a very good show, but not a great show, which probably means that I'm not hearing the ephemeral x-factor that's apparently obvious to someone else.  By this point, warts-and-all is the name of the game, but there are still some stumbles and slips in this one that do make this seem like a strange choice: Jerry's solo in Jack Straw starts in the wrong key, there are some pretty big vocal clunkers in Tennessee Jed, that sort of thing.  But there are some pockets of really inspired, raunchy playing, too: a demonic and demented Little Red Rooster (seriously), a powerful Looks Like Rain, some downright nasty jamming at the end of Deal, and the debut of the rare electric Deep Elem Blues (fresh from the acoustic sets from the prior months).   The second set has the same inconsistent highs/lows: a nice Stranger opener has some more stumbles, and the highlight is most definitely the unique To Lay Me Down > Let it Grow > Terrapin, all of which are wonderful but not quiiiite at that next level of magic, to my ears at least.  There's not much happening in drums>space, then the post-drumz is energetic but, for the most part, pretty run of the mill.

There's some really fiery stuff in there, no doubt, but 11/29's second set embodies the magic in much more sustained, consistent way.  It's not all spotless -- the transition into Franklin's from Shakedown (again, one of a kind) is a total clunker, but the whole set glistens and sparkles: Jerry eases back while Brent comes to the fore in a great, airy Shakedown jam, sparks fly everywhere in Estimated, and they really make the most of the usually negligible post-Truckin jam with some seriously hot Other One jamming.  Space has some much heavier, creepier, involved jousting between Jerry, Brent, and the drummers (always a good sign when they stick around), and when the Other One itself finally materializes (complete with the crowd egging Phil into his intro roll), Jerry goes off like fireworks.  He pulls out all the stops with a gorgeous Stella Blue, and despite usual shakiness of Casey Jones, it still feels like something special and out of the ordinary.

Why didn't they pick 11/29 over 11/28?  I have no idea.  What drives official release selections is probably far more mundane than picky heads ever take into consideration: the tapes are missing, the tapes are of poor quality, the tapes have some technical limitation that I'm not hearing, the tapes have a giant cut that can't be patched.  To be honest, there are a handful of 1980 shows that I would've picked over 11/28 -- 1980 hasn't exactly been overlooked, but there are still a number of other shows I would have pulled for.  True, griping about official releases is a guilty pleasure that nevertheless feels like biting the hand that feeds, but a $700 box set touting itself as a representation of the "narrative of the Grateful Dead's live legacy" does add a little more weight to the selections than usual: rather than simply being released on their own merits, these shows now stand as a kind of representative of their year.  

In all fairness, by the way, I love most of the choices they made.  There are some really inspired and non-obvious selections in there, almost outnumbering the picks that are already widely acknowledged classics.  I'm really excited that we're getting major upgrades of 9/24/72, 9/18/74, 10/3/76, and 4/25/77!  Really excited.