Europe 72: the jams, pt 3

Gunther Kieser's deadhead

 

PART 3: GERMANY

4/21 Bremen, Other One #4
 

This was an in-studio performance for TV broadcast (you've probably seen the video with the, um, extreme blue screen effects; see Light Into Ashes for a fine analysis of the video).  Truckin' has a false start and grand collapse before restarting, then a shorter jam (no reprised last verse) and a minute of splashing around before a brief Drums.  Unsurprisingly, given the circumstances, Other One #4 stays pretty close to the surface: they start off playing too fast and Jerry has to step on the brakes about 2 minutes in; first verse comes at 5, then a few minutes of space, and back into the Other One for the second verse, and stop at 15:45.  Still a pretty good time, just nothing much to comment on.  But what's unsual is what happens next: Jerry feedbacks them into another spacey jam that takes shape when Billy lays down a gentle beat at 18:20.  It's a little reminscent of the pretty 3/22/72 post-Caution jam, lovely as a sping breeze.  They cruise for two minutes, Jerry whips up a little ending, and they're done.



4/24 Dusseldorf, Dark Star #4

Actually, starting with Good Lovin #5 makes more sense here, since it's a clear harbinger of the main event. This is by far the most "out" Good Lovin' jam so far, and it sounds like the band's improvisation here is less oriented around accompanying Pigpen's rap, which in turn seems more free-associative than usual (Jesse Jarnow has pointed out that Pig quotes James Carr's "Pouring Water on a Drowning Man" here, which I didn't catch).  The contrast between his vocal and the spacier music is pretty surreal: it hits peak weirdness @7ish minutes as Pig gets ready to see about his woman down the hall, while the band is trilling away at an atonal space jam.  Hey, whetever floats yer boat.  This version is 17 min total, long but not nearly as long as the titanic 4/14 version, but it's a great complement for being much, much stranger.

This Dark Star is (spoiler) one of my all-time favorites and remains a peak intense GD experience.  The feel is immediately quite different from the prior excursions: Phil sounds particularly raw and pushy at the start, and after a minute or so it seems to rub off on everyone else. @3 1/2 min they fall down a little hole and immediately start considering evil.  No looking back at this point: the rest of the pre-verse jams (between 5-11 minutes) feels like a back & forth between Jerry pulling them into the sun and Phil pulling them right back into the darkness -- this multi-mode tug-of-war makes for an extremely engaging pre-verse jam.  One moment that I particularly like is the jam at 8-10 minutes, which surges from a bright, major Dark Star tonality into a faster, driving jam that Phil tries to steer into minor with an early attempt at his King Solomon-ish "jazz theme," which Jerry rejects by pulling everyone back into a peaky Dark Star jam which climaxes and dovetails into him and Bob playing a harmonized DS riff down into the first verse.  Yowza.  And then!  And then afterwards, whooooo shit, after the verse... out come the knives. Everything sounds about 100 feet high, giant waves rising up, big Phil chords underneath Bobby feedback and eagle-high Jerry.  @15ish min Billy swings 'em out of the jurassic period and into a brisk 12/8, but darkness wins out again, and by 18 min it's a Jerry/Phil faceoff as everyone else eggs them on. Jer finally turns on the wahwah and a bloodbath ensures.  The Tiger jam here from 19-21 minutes has to be one of the most brutal meltdowns of their career.  The tsunami finally breaks, they splash around for a couple minutes in the wreckage, and then ta da! Me and My Uncle.  Well.  Afterwards, they blur back into space, bruised but beautiful, and things get even prettier once Keith joins back in after a few minutes. But once again it descends into darkness.  They pull out again into a 12/8 swing and move back towards the Dark Star theme -- this is amazing, people -- morphing into that "country-ish" kinda feel, then Jerry hints at a full return to Dark Star itself, playing the riff a few times but then sidestepping smoothly into Wharf Rat instead.  [sidenote: this Dark Star shares a few things with 12/6/73, including an ending with Jerry teasing the second verse then veering elsewhere] That was almost 44 min of Dark Star, including MAMU.  Sugar Magnolia segues naturally out of Wharf Rat and jams to a close. Bobby says danke shoen and Phil announces they're taking a break and playing some more.

iirc, Rock Scully's book says that Karlheinz Stockhausen was in attendance at this show. Take that with a grain of salt, but if the presence of one of the 20th century's leading avant-garde composers inspired this masterpiece, well, then that's pretty freakin' sweet (and Light Into Ashes has pointed out that Stockhausen had performed in Dusseldorf on 4/16). Other pretty freakin' sweet things are the fact that the band CAN was in the audience for this show (h/t to Jesse Jarnow), and that the venue was a planetarium.

Another small but notable thing that contributes to the weirdness of this particular DS is the mastering of the recording: there's an occasional but very noticeable delay on Jerry's guitar and Keith's piano (which also moves around the stereo field a few times), and also on Jerry's vocal.  It's inconsistent enough that it's really noticeable when it does happen -- check out about 40 secs into the DS track after MAMU where the delay is so extreme that it sounds like there are two Jerrys.  It's not on the older circulating sbd, and so far I haven't noticed this on any of the other E72 recordings.  Why would John Cutler do that?



4/26 Frankfurt, Other One #5

The Truckin' jam is nothing out of the ordinary tonight, but sounds high and wide-open: after the final vocal reprise, they jam a bit more of the Truckin' shuffle, pull apart for some pre-Other One noodling, then stop almost dead before Drums, although Keith tinkles by himself for a bit before Billy takes over. This Other One is a striking contrast with the Dark Star of 4/24: Evil Phil is nowhere to be found tonight.  Indeed, he seems almost chastened after his dance with the devil two nights ago: nearly every time Jerry seems to be pulling off towards darker weirdness, Phil tips them all right back towards something brighter.  The jam before the first verse veers between the Other One and some other mode(s), but mainly Billy is taking it easy, giving this a placid, way high-up, top-of-the-mountain kind of feel: it's not quite 'space' but very gentle and melodic and beautiful.  First verse comes @13:30, then they keep moving forward in this more spacious 'open' Other One feel. At 17 min it starts getting strange, Jerry hits the wahwah, the vibe gets prickly... so Phil pulls the other way and slides them into his 'jazz theme' at 18:20, which everyone picks up even though Jerry clearly has his sights set on some wahwah space fury. This is almost funny! But it sounds fantastic, of course. They ease off at 21 min and then things start getting ominous: slow and intense, no drums at first, but Banshee Jerry and Throwdown Phil start rustling up the feedback curtains. Things slowly build up to the point where Jerry starts revving up for a Tiger jam @26 min, but they no one else really builds up enough of a head of steam to go there with him (btw heads up for a quickie Spanish Jam suggestion from Bob around 27 min). By 30-31 minutes, Jerry is spiraling out arpeggios while everyone else regroups. imho it never quite comes together into anything coherent for this final stretch (Phil suggests Feelin' Groovy @31:25, but nope), though it is plenty cool nevertheless. They get back into the Other One, sing the second verse @35:35, and then they wrap it up and neatly move into Comes a Time.

Phil's 180 shift in attitude here came as a real surprise to me.  Also for your consideration is that the Hundred Year Hall CD (1995) was the first E72 music to be officially released after the original album, and evidently Phil was the one who made the call to release this show.

Good Lovin #6 is a compact 12 min tonight. It's very different from the last one, since Pigpen is leading the charge throughout and the boys seem happy to fall in line. They digress a bit from the usual jam for about 2 minutes at the end, but Pigpen reigns it in.

This show also has the first of three Lovelights of this tour -- but Pigpen doesn't do much with this at all, and the majority of it is instrumental jamming, nothing groundbreaking, just cruising along at a nice speed. Jerry hits a nice climax around 15 min which he threads into GDTRFB, though it takes them a while to recalibrate and finally get into it. Pretty nice, nevertheless.



4/29/72 Hamburg, Dark Star #5

Dark Star has a warm, pleasant feel to the starting jam, with a nice foggy digression around 5 min. @6:40 a Feelin' Groovy jam comes together, but Jerry seems less committed and derails it after a minute by sliding into a minor mode and leaving a small pile-up in his wake. @8:40 they land in spacey jam, which I quite liked this time around: austere, regal vibe to this, and more happening from Keith in particular - weird, but very beautiful. Eventually it gets into a creepier pre-Tiger space and Phil starts uneleasing some bombers at 13 min, but then they surprisingly move it back to Dark Star, a nice moment of group-mind ESP there. First verse @14:50, and then the following jam pulls apart and lava starts rising through the cracks, with things getting progressively heavier (wahwah Jerry, smashing Phil chords, freejazz Billy). But instead of finding a Tiger, they nearly stop dead after 20 min, start building back up, but then @22 min they shift direction again into a jazzier low-key jam, not Phil's "jazz theme" and a little more like a Playin' jam (debatable, but imho). Jerry will not be denied his Tiger jam, though, and pulls out of this after a few minutes, and finally whips things up to a frenzied peak at 28-29 minutes. Yeeowch. It gets there and crashes down, with Phil & Jer still taking jabs at each other, but Bob awkwardly pushes it into Sugar Magnolia. (I didn't hear any Pigpen organ at all in this DS, fwiw).

Caution #4 is a pretty straight-down-the-middle 20 minute stormer, not too dissimilar from the last Caution on 4/17. Pigpen gets on organ right at the beginning and seems to be soloing for a few minutes (hard to tell because of the mix), before spilling the beans about his lady problems.  At 7 min when his prescribed mojo hand begins to take effect, the boys shift gears into a slinky slower jam before kicking it back up a couple gears into Caution proper (nice touch!)  @8:15, Pig sings a bit from Lightnin' Hopkins' "Life I Used to Live" ("gonna change my way of living/join a church again").  Nothing else to report besides @10-13 min they slip into a spacier, pretty jam that could maybe be a doorway back to Dark Star? (dream on, nick) but Phil is intent on staying with Caution. Again, Jerry plays a little slide guitar around 15 1/2 min. @18ish min it hits a big climax, but then keeps going in a mellower vein, seemingly unclear if they're really done, so Phil finally ends it with a big chord at 20:10.

a little bit more on Stockhausen

When I said "Stockhausen was a big influence on pretty much everybody," I was really thinking about the Beatles, and Light Into Ashes reminded me about Miles Davis as well.  Paul McCartney was one of Stockhausen's more famous fans, and his influence on the Beatles (starting with "Tomorrow Never Knows") was even acknowledged on the cover of Sgt. Pepper.  This fine piece by Alex Ross does a nice succinct job of mapping the influence more specifically.

I dug out the two books that I'd seen connecting the Dead with Stockhausen: Alex Ross' excellent The Rest is Noise and Mark Pendergast's The Ambient Century both make passing mention of Stockhausen's lectures at UCLA in 1966-67 that were attended by "members of" the Grateful Dead and the Jefferson Airplane (Ross 474, Pendergast 54).  While I'd bet that Phil Lesh was the Dead's chief representative (he had already been studying this stuff prior to joining the Dead anyway), that still seems like a thread worthy of investigation.  Stockhausen himself also apparently took in some concerts at the Fillmore.

LIA also pointed out that Garcia himself shows no sign of having listened to anything like this, whereas Lesh and Weir have mentioned classical influences in interviews.  At the risk of sounding like even more of a dilettante, I'll suggest that music like Stockhausen's Kontakte may not need a lot of repeat listenings to completely re-wire one's sensibilities, particularly if one is possibly under the influence of a psychotropic substance like LSD.  Unlike, say, John Coltrane, who's impact in live performance was certainly just as visceral and potentially life-changing (cf David Crosby's great story), figuring out exactly what his band was doing probably required you to sit down and listen repeatedly to the record -- which is apparently what various members of the Dead did, Garcia included.  Certainly there is far more to music like Stockhausen's than one will ever appreciate at first listen (not that I know what it is yet), but I don't know that much of the internal workings of something like Kontakte would have really impacted the Dead.  My guess is that, outside of Phil Lesh (who, again, was already well-studied in this kind of music), no one was sitting down with the scores for this stuff and incorporating those techniques into the Dead's own musical approach.  Outside of Anthem of the Sun and Aoxomoxoa, there really wasn't much experimentation with tape loops and electronics, was there?  And by 1968, that influence was probably more directly traceable to the Beatles than to Stockhausen himself.  I'm also putting aside Seastones and Phil & Ned for now; clearly Ned Lagin owed a great deal to Stockhausen.

I would think -- and I'm just guessing here -- that someone like Garcia could have spent a couple of evenings bugging out over a record like Kontakte and then never intentionally listened to it again.  But that could have been enough: it still could have had a profound impact on his still relatively fresh and still-expanding conception of music.  I can see how just a couple of listens could prompt the kind of thinking that led to the Feedback meltdowns of the 60's, the sparse interior jams in the 1969-1970 era Dark Stars, that sort of thing.

edit: I went back through David Malvinni's The Grateful Dead and the Art of Rock Improvisation (2013), and he touches on Stockhausen a bit in one of his chapters on Dark Star, although not really in a way that answers any of my questions.  In short: 

• Tom Constanten actually studied with Stockhausen in 1967, prior to joining the Dead.  That experience rubbed off directly on Anthem of the Sun [although maybe more in theory than in practice; I always had the sense the Anthem sessions were pretty chaotic].
• Lesh was a devout admirer of Stockhausen, modeling his own early (pre-Dead) orchestral writing on Stockhausen's work.  Lesh also "ran the controls" for performances of Stockhausen's tape compositions.
• "'Kontakte' is spatial music with swirling electronic effects, based serially on the placement of speakers in a room for its full effect; it clearly is the sonic godfather of the Dead's concept of 'Space,' a rhymthically free region relying on electronic effects both within sections of pieces like 'Dark Star' and as the middle point of the second set after Drums." (Malvinni 107)
• There's another mention of members of the Dead attending Stockhausen's 1966-67 lectures (at UC Davis, according to this source, not UCLA), but no further details.
• Stockhausen redefined his music as "intuitive" and "beyond improvisation," embracing the belief that humans were on an evolutionary cusp of experiencing universal consciousness, telepathy, etc.  The Dead (and Lesh in particular) embraced similar ideas of group-consciousness (both with each other and with the audience), though that seems more like a parallel aesthetic and less like an influence.
• Stockhausen and his students may have attended the 4/24/72 Dusseldorf show… that's according to Rock Scully's book, though, so a grain of salt for that one.

So still not much in the way of specifics, beyond Kontakte begetting all the weird stuff in Dark Star, Space, etc.  I wonder if there are transcriptions or notes of Stockhausen's lectures?

a little light listening: Stockhausen, Herbie Hancock

A friend came by last night for a little listening session with a handful of German electronic records, including Stockhausen's seminal work Kontakte (the 1968 Candide lp, if it makes a difference).  I think I'd heard it before, probably in a cursory "isn't that interesting" way during some college music survey class, but oh man, my mind was good and thoroughly blown by it last night.  One of my summer projects is to read and listen up on Stockhausen.  I know he's a big deal, but my firsthand exposure to why he's a big deal is pretty scant.  Time to do some homework! 

I also then remembered that Phil Lesh recommended Kontakte, in the same breath as Ives' 4th Symphony and Coltrane's Africa/Brass, when asked for some pieces of music that deadheads should be checking out.  Stockhausen was a big influence on Lesh and the Dead, but just saying that is kind of a truism: Stockhausen was a big influence on pretty much everybody.  The Stockhausen/Dead connection is worth some deeper excavating, but I'm not going down that rabbit hole right now.  Later, maybe.

After my friend left, I was in a electronic state of mind, so I had a nightcap with the atmospherically weird and wonderful "Water Torture" from Herbie Hancock's Crossings, the second album by his groundbreaking band Mwandishi.  Then I also remembered another off-hand link between the Dead and Stockhausen, via Hancock himself.  A few months ago I'd read his new-ish autobiography, Possibilities, and there's this bit when he's talking about the first time he heard Stockhausen:

"When I first heard those sounds [Stockhausen's earlier piece Geseng der Junglinge], I felt drawn to them, though I didn't really investigate how he'd created them, since I wasn't interested in making electronic music myself.  Stockhausen's work was often categorized as classical, but it fell on a continuum of avant-garde music that intrigued me, a continuum that stretched from Stravinsky and Bartok all the way to Jerry Garcia." (Hancock, 104-105)

OK then!  It's not often you see ol' Jer casually mentioned in the same company as Stockhausen, Stravinksy, and Bartok.  It's even more surprising because Hancock mentions throughout his book that he very rarely kept up with what was happening in rock & roll at all (although nowadays he's no stranger to crossover collaborations with all kinds of rock/pop stars).  The connections between Hancock and the Dead are actually pretty thin: I'm sure some of the band were aware of Hancock's music, and the Garcia/Saunders band shared a bill with Hancock at least once, but I think that's about it in terms of actual links.  A couple of other amusing things jumped out at me while reading Hancock's book, though:

• Besides being a serious gadget-head, Hancock was also a taper: he taped a lot of Miles Davis Quintet gigs on his own (and tells a funny story about how Miles would scowl at him as he crawled under the piano to set up his mics as the gig was starting).  Hancock says that his soundman recorded most performances by the astounding Mwandishi band (circa 1970) and that the band would relisten to them obsessively, but all those tapes were stolen out of their van one night in NYC.  I guess that explains why all of the circulating recordings of the group are from 1971 and later. 
• The Mwandishi group lugged around a $10,000 state-of-the-art portable quadrophonic sound system (circa 1971) so as to not be stuck with whatever old PA the club happened to have.  I don't know for sure, but I'm guessing this was still relatively rare for most touring musicians and unheard of for a jazz group in 1971.  Another book on Hancock's Mwandishi period (Bob Gluck's You'll Know When You Get There) also talks about the extremely high quality of Hancock's PA system.  Sound familiar, anyone?
• Carlos Santana was invited to play on the Crossings album, but he couldn't hang with the music.

Stockhausen, the Grateful Dead, Herbie Hancock.  Where was I going with this?  Great minds think alike, I guess.