to the moon, Jerry!

Hi!  I know, I know.

A good excuse to break the silence is to repost this list, which I'm sure my four devoted readers have seen me post elsewhere.  But in honor of everyone's nerd-buzz around the 50th anniversary of the Apollo moon landing, here is a handy list of Moon Landing Dark Stars.

Apollo 11 launched on 7/16/69 and landed on the Moon on 7/20.  The Dead's closest gig was a few days earlier in New Yor (7/12), where they did play Dark Star, although you may find it a stretch to connect the two events.  However...

Apollo 12 landed on 11/19/69.  The GD nearly played Dark Star at their next show, 11/21, but pulled up short, likely because of time constraints.  They played a full-blown monster version at the following show, 12/4/69.

Apollo 13 lifted off on 4/11/70.  Dark Star was played that night, with the GD in the unenviable position of following Miles Davis.  Sadly, there is no tape.

Apollo 14 landed on 2/5/71.  Dark Star, with the classic "Beautiful Jam," was played at the next GD show, 2/18/71.

Apollo 15 landed on 7/30/71.  Dark Star was played at at the next GD show, 7/31/71.

Apollo 16 landed on 4/21/72.  That night, the GD played an abbreviated set for German television, but played one of the true all-timer Dark Stars at the next proper show on 4/24/72.

Apollo 17, the final manned moon mission, landed on 12/11/72.  Dark Star was played that night.  If you missed it, Lemieux posted the only uncut sbd copy of it at the Taper's Section a few months ago:
https://www.dead.net/features/tapers-section/march-11-17-2019

There you go.  That should make a nice little playlist for you.

"Houston, do we have a setlist from last night yet?"

Thelonious Monk centennial

Monk, 1959, by W. Eugene Smith

I'm a few days late (no surprise), but it does seem appropriate that I'm posting on Friday the 13th.

I was a little disappointed that global media wasn't exploding with accolades and tributes for Thelonious Monk's 100th birthday on October 10 (Google's doodle for the day, if that's any indication, was for Fridtjof Nansen), so I'm doing my part in my tiny, barely-functional corner of the internet to salute one of the Giants of 20th century American music.  The influence of jazz on the Dead owes far more to the John Coltrane lineage, which held to a very different set of priorities than Monk's (despite the fact that he spent a few very important months playing in Monk's band), and while I would hope that some or all of the Dead were lovers of Monk's music, I don't know of any direct connections that exist.

My own exposure to Monk came young, courtesy of my father's record collection. His music didn't evoke the same states of heightened emotion inspired by Coltrane, Miles, and Mingus that appealed so much to me as an adolescent, and it took me a while to work out what was so appealing about it.  I am loathe to repeat all of the tired "ugly beauty" cliches about Monk, but there was certainly an element of that.  It wasn't music that I could immediately put my finger on, with its off-kilter rhythms and abrupt melodic about-faces that sounded both slick and archaic at the same time.  It didn't have much in the way of dynamic variety, but I came to really like how it ambled along, seemingly unconcerned with whatever else it could have sounded like.  The "eccentricities" of it -- really, the whole unique architecture of rhythmic, harmonic, and melodic elements -- always informed rather than distracted from every aspect of Monk's music.  Sui generis in the most literal and very best sense of the term.

In that sense, I suppose, maybe the Grateful Dead are kindred spirits.  I have been in a stage of not listening to much Dead or Garcia, but whenever I come back to their music, I'm struck by the ways that it contrasts with anything else I listen to.  The Dead's unique rhythm is, I think, the standout characteristic of their music that goes the least discussed, and it's maybe the most immediate thing that separates them as a band from their contemporaries or followers -- you can imitate Garcia's style, but no one's come close to really imitating the Dead as a unit.  They were a rock band, of course, and so they played with the dynamics and emotional range befitting a rock band, but there was always a kind of clunky element to their rhythm.  I don't mean clunky in a negative way, although I do think it's something that stands out prominently to people who don't like the Dead -- my wife, who prefers the JGB, once commented that the Dead sound like one guitar player and a bunch of drummers, and I've heard the joke more than once that the Mickey and Billy sound like sneakers in a dryer.  Garcia was always the most rhythmically centered of the band -- Phil and Bob, on the other hand, had some real clunk.  I think that the band's change from the rhythmic and sonic density of the "primal Dead" era to the more stripped-down sound of the early 70's made more room for Bob and Phil to develop their own particular kinds of of clunk.  Mickey's return in 1975 served to clunk up the sound even more -- again, something that many deadheads who strongly prefer 1971-74 can't always get down with.  None of this is meant to imply that the Dead didn't groove or swing: they most certainly did, but what reliably makes them recognizably the Dead is that there are always rhythmic hiccups and bumps jutting out at odd angles, that sense of something a little chaotic always churning down in the engine room.

In a direct musical sense, there's nothing particularly Monk-ish about it (and, going back to Coltrane, even Bob's clunk comes partially from McCoy Tyner).  I think it's interesting, however, that both Monk and the Dead were defined in part by their unique approaches to rhythm in their respective musical genres -- both were iconic figures in those genres and both are still, I would argue, relatively misunderstood given how famous their music is.  So many of Monk's songs are deeply embedded in the common repertoire of jazz, but much about his music remains misunderstood and misrepresented.  So too with the Dead, whose music contains dimensions that are misunderstood (or not engaged with?) by so many who claim their influence.   Both carved out paths through the landscape of American music, the kind that makes music better even for those who aren't fans of their music.  So in that sense, Monk and the Dead maybe aren't as far apart as you might think.

Then again, maybe I'm just having fun with this thought exercise.  But that's no reason not to go and listen to some Monk.  If you didn't get to it this week, that's cool: you have all of this centennial year to catch up.

bonus: one of my favorite jazz writers, the pianist Ethan Iverson, posted an unbelievably thorough overview of pretty much all thinks Monk: the recordings, the tunes, the critical writings, major tributes, and more.  Any Monk fan who wants to dig deeper couldn't ask for a better roadmap than this:
https://ethaniverson.com/thelonious-sphere-monk-centennial-primary-and-secondary-documents/

edit: Thanks to lightintoashes for reminding me that Monk did play the Carousel Ballroom in San Francisco on May 3-5, 1968, right in the middle of the short period that the venue was being managed collectively by the Dead and the Jefferson Airplane (I think Ron Rakow was doing the actual managing?).  Columbia Records and Monk’s management were looking to boost Monk’s low sales by courting the white rock market (his then-current album Underground was being heavily marketed accordingly), so Monk was booked to play a hip rock venue in addition to his usual Bay Area club and festival appearances.  Robin D.G. Kelley, author of the definitive Monk bio, has a good piece about this failed crossover bid here.  I wonder why Monk didn’t play the Fillmore for Bill Graham instead — maybe it was too last minute, maybe Monk didn’t want to be an opening act, maybe the Carousel paid better, who knows?  It’s not much of a musical connection, since the Dead were in New York and couldn’t even see Monk play (though lightintoashes points out that Bear did tape the Monk shows), but it’s worth noting.  Maybe someone from the band may fondly remember that their short-lived venture produced this unique Monk gig.

by Rick Shubb, with some info at his website

Love Saves the Day: 2/14/70

Deadheads love dates (remember this one? "you know you're a deadhead when your tapes have nothing written on them besides the date"), and we're never at a loss for anniversaries to use as excuses for celebrating the virtues of a particular show.  Maybe, given how insular this obsession can be, it comes as a surprise when some other musical anniversary overlaps on one of our own canonized dates.  Many rock fans have probably noted that the Dead's legendary 2/14/70 performance at the Fillmore East coincides with the Who's decimation of Leeds University 1000 miles away that same night, but how many deadheads know that the birth of American disco/dance music culture was also happening just across the Bowery, about six blocks away?

a classic by Amalie Rothschild, courtesy dead.net

I'm no big scholar of dance music or "club culture," but my understanding is that most of what we associate with those general terms -- and I mean everything from Saturday Night Fever, to frat bros throwing their hands in the air at spring break beach parties, to underground raves in abandoned warehouses -- has roots in the innovations and ideals of one particular DJ, a record collector and Buddhist acid cosmonaut named David Mancuso, who lived a few blocks west of the Fillmore East.  Right around the time that the Dead were probably plugging in for their late show at 2nd Ave & 6th St, the first guests were arriving at Mancuso's loft on 674 Broadway for a party that had been advertised only by a few hundred invitations with Love Saves the Day printed on them.  These parties would eventually become weekly events eventually known simply as "The Loft" and mark one of the beginnings of dance and club culture as we know it today, and Mancuso is regularly credited by pretty much everyone in that scene as the grandfather of the modern-day "underground" club DJ.  He still hosts the occasional Loft party, too.

Mancuso, c Allan Tannenbaum

There was, of course, plenty of nightlife where recorded music served as a soundtrack to sell drinks and allow people to seek people, to see and be seen.  Mancuso had a different idea: his goal was to create a safe, insulated scene where people could lose their inhibitions in music, immerse themselves in a community of like-minded people, and find a little lysergic transcendence while they did so.  As a devoted follower of Timothy Leary, Mancuso had already been hosting get-togethers with friends that were modeled after Leary's League for Spiritual Discovery events, and had been rebuilding his loft apartment into a space for "mixed-media" acid gatherings.  Initially, he created home-made 5+ hour tapes of music to accompany the arc of an acid trip, and these began evolving into more serious (and larger) dance parties, particularly as his sound system became more sophisticated.  A Buddhist soul-searching hiatus interrupted things for a few years, but when Mancuso returned to New York, he began planning  weekly Saturday night/Sunday morning house parties for a larger audience.  He mailed out invitations, charged two bucks, forbade alcohol and the sale (but not distribution) of drugs, served free organic food, and became default DJ as he created the soundtrack for the night's revelries, following the same psychedelic arc of slow liftoff > peaking > freakout > re-entry.  Or, in the words of Buddhism-via-Leary, “the first Bardo would be very smooth, perfect, calm. The second Bardo would be like a circus. And the third Bardo was about re-entry, so people would go back into the outside world relatively smoothly."  Sound familiar?  Garcia, in 1984, on the structure of a Dead show: "our second half definitely has a shape which...is partially inspired by the psychedelic experience, like as a waveform: [...] the thing of taking chances and going all to pieces, and then coming back and reassembling."

Another striking thing about Mancuso's parties was the sound.  His Klipsch sound system was state of the art and remains famous to this day for its clarity and depth -- apparently, circa 1975, devoted clubbers and fellow DJ's had even started referring to it as "the wall of sound."

disco? Mancuso's invitations always featured this image of Spanky & Our Gang -- seriously

The ballyhoo over disco in the 70's/80's has probably faded from many memories these days, but the word still conjures up a very specific image for most listeners of a certain age.  While being the grandfather of the disco DJ may seem a dubious honor to some, remember that in 1970, "disco" as we think of it barely existed.  Mancuso was playing a mix of R&B, rock, jazz, latin, African, anything with a beat that would keep the dancers moving.  His tastes ranged wide, and Mancuso was famous not only for discovering many records that went on to be classic dance singles, but also for making James Brown and The Beatles sound like a perfect match when played together in the same setting.  His Leary-inspired evening structure typically began with a gentle prelude session taking in everything from Tchaikovsky to Ravi Shankar, Sandy Bull, or Pink Floyd.  Mancuso stated that his intention was never to actually DJ, but to act as a kind of musical host, keep the vibes right, and establish communion with everyone else in the room.  The parties apparently attracted an extremely diverse group of both dancers and cosmonauts, from both gay/straight and male/female crowds and a wide variety of ethnic (predominantly black and hispanic) and socioeconomic backgrounds: Mancuso was committed to making sure cost wouldn't a barrier.  Far from the Studio 54 scenesters that we associate with disco now, Mancuso was seeking out his own subculture of fellow heads and creating a small world for them through music, and the world he created has been arguably as influential -- if not more -- than our band from San Francisco who had the same basic idea.

I'd like to think that a few particularly hip heads left the Fillmore East in the wee hours and tumbled over to Mancuso's loft (grabbing some pizza in Cooper Union on the way), but I kind of doubt it.  Still, it says something that two epochal gatherings of freaks from very different sides of the streets was happening so closely and simultaneously -- at the very least, like Garcia said at the start of that very long evening, "nothing's weirder than coming to New York."

Nearly all this info comes from Tim Lawrence's great book on American dance/club culture, Love Saves the Day -- his page has some specific Mancuso info.  A lot of this information is also repeated here, with a particular emphasis on the link between Mancuso and 60's psychedelia: http://www.gregwilson.co.uk/2013/05/david-mancuso-and-the-art-of-deejaying-without-deejaying/

Here's Mancuso describing the Loft and his intentions in his own words: http://daily.redbullmusicacademy.com/2013/05/new-york-stories-david-mancuso

PS.  And, totally unrelated, but happy birthday to Merl Saunders! (b Feb 14, 1934).

Alan Douglas: a brief encounter

Ellington, Mingus, Alan Douglas: Money Jungle session, 1962

I'm interested, as always, in how context colors your perception of situations and people you're experiencing third-hand, years after the fact.  It's funny how these things start: lately I've been listening hard and frequently to Duke Ellington's classic Money Jungle (which has now been a 20-year endeavor: "don't understand it too fast") and just today I realized that it was produced by Alan Douglas.  Alan Douglas is an interesting guy with a very interesting discography, with some amazingly varied and fantastic albums to his credit -- more on that in a minute.  His connection to the Garciasphere is slight but significant: he produced Garcia's first non-GD side project, the enigmatic Hooteroll? album, originally credited to Howard Wales & Jerry Garcia.  As I made that connection, starting with Douglas rather than Garcia, it struck me as pretty interesting that a maverick jazz producer made a record with Garcia.  But that's probably not how most other folks think about the relationship, if they even think about it at all.  But I think it's worth thinking about.

Actually, most people probably associate Alan Douglas primarily with Jimi Hendrix's posthumous legacy: Douglas is the one who originally had control over Hendrix's unreleased recordings and, controversially, began issuing Hendrix albums in the 1970's that replaced some of the original tracks with overdubs by other musicians.  Douglas also brokered one of the biggest "what if's" in rock & roll, Hendrix's never-realized session with Miles Davis (who apparently demanded $50,000 at the last minute), as well as a planned live recording with Gil Evans (which Hendrix didn't live to see). This all makes sense, given Douglas' jazz pedigree.  He also produced John McLaughlin's remarkable Devotion album with Larry Young and Buddy Miles, made in Hendrix's orbit in early 1970.  Prior to that, Douglas had a decade's worth of top-drawer jazz under his belt.  He recorded a week's worth of Eric Dolphy sessions in 1963 that were boiled down to two great but relatively unheralded LP's, Iron Man and Jitterbug Waltz, and had worked as the head of the jazz division at United Artists, producing a number of significant records: my own personal favorites include Money Jungle, Bill Evans' & Jim Hall's Undercurrent (another all-timer in my book), Art Blakey's 3 Blind Mice (while chopping parsley, naturally), and Mingus' live Jazz Portaits (aka Mingus in Wonderland).   Later, in the mid-70's, he was also responsible for a seminal early documentation of New York's jazz loft scene on the Wildflowers series of records.  Douglas clearly had an ear for cutting edge, important black music: another accolade is that he had the foresight (and the guts) to record what was arguably the first "rap group," the Last Poets in 1969, and another important proto-rap album, Hustler's Convention by Lightnin' Rod.

In 1967, Douglas founded his own eponymous multimedia imprint and released recordings and books by Lenny Bruce, Malcolm X, Timothy Leary, John Sinclair, and Allen Ginsberg, as well an early anthology of writing on gay liberation.  In the days before the infinite discography of the internet, I remember discovering more and more albums with Douglas' name on the back: I didn't really know what his story was, but he seemed to be an indicator of good quality, and I formed a composite picture in my mind of a messily eclectic label with a hodgepodge of artists and styles.  Not everyone saw it that way, though: Bill Laswell, another maverick and wildly eclectic producer from the next generation, said:

"I recognized that [Douglas Records] was a very consciously radical label.  Of course, there was a lot of radical music going on at that time, but Douglas had a wide range of releases that were all linked by the fact that they were pretty extreme or political, things that would wake people up.  It was probably one of the most creative labels from that period." (The Wire)

I realize all of this seems very far removed from Jerry Garcia, but Douglas was clearly a mover in the industry with a maverick spirit and an ear for the underground, so it's not all that surprising that at some point in 1970, he was hanging out in the Bay Area and met Garcia via Ron Rakow.  The story goes that Garcia invited Douglas down the Matrix to catch his gig with Howard Wales, and Douglas checked it out and immediately offered to record them, with the okay of Joe Smith from Warner Bros (who had the Dead under contract).  I find this particularly striking, given the company Douglas was keeping -- Hendrix, Miles, McLaughlin -- and his relatively high ratio of important recordings to forgettable ones.  He must have heard something in Wales & Garcia that put them in that league -- and, judging from the live Side Trips release, I wouldn't disagree!  Hooteroll? doesn't seem to warrant much more than a footnote in Douglas' legacy, which may be understandable given the foggy circumstances around it.  Joe, Corry, and lightintoashes have done admirable work parsing out the knowns and unknowns (links to various blog posts collected here at jgmf), but the full picture is still a little blurry.  Interestingly, jgmf also details another GD connection involving Douglas (again via Joe Smith) installing the recording studio in Mickey Hart's Barn, apparently with plans to record a Hart/Kreutzmann project that ultimately became Hart's Rolling Thunder album, though Douglas isn't mentioned at all on the release.
[edit: or maybe not? once again, lightintoashes is on the case]

Given Garcia's insularity and the Dead's famously thorny resistance to working with outside producers (with the sole exception Keith Olsen in 1977, who was about as far from Alan Douglas as one would think), it's intriguing that one of Garcia's few productive meetings with anyone so far removed from his circle was with Douglas, as brief as it was (and, technically, it was Wales' deal anyway).  Contextually, of course, we tend to situate everything around Garcia and the Dead and view outsiders' involvement through that lens.  In the case of someone like Alan Douglas, I think it's both interesting and informative to treat Garcia as the footnote, rather than the other way around.

from 1973 Jimi Hendrix documentary

Alan Douglas died in 2014.  Some more reading material on his career:

an excellent article/overview from The Wire, 1997:  

http://www.douglasrecords.com/bio.htm 

a fine obituary by the great Richard Williams: 
http://www.theguardian.com/music/2014/jun/18/alan-douglas

a New Yorker piece focusing on his earlier jazz recordings (and source of the above Ellington pic): 
http://www.newyorker.com/culture/richard-brody/postscript-alan-douglas

another thorough career overview, ca 2011: 
http://www.densesignals.com/2011/08/11/alan-douglas-by-john-masouri/

a 1995 interview, mostly re: Hendrix and the Last Poets: 
http://www.me.umn.edu/~kgeisler/ad.html 

see also Douglas' own website (not as complete as you'd think) and his discogs page (which also appears to be missing some things).

RIP Ornette Coleman

Many jazz and music writers will write about Ornette Coleman more knowledgeably and eloquently than I can, so I will just share a few thoughts.  Coleman belonged to the "first name is enough" echelon of jazz giants, so I will refer to him as countless others have: Ornette.

Ornette was a true maverick genius of American music, and I'm fully conscious of the overuse of the word genius.  If a genius is someone who does something genuinely innovative yet wholly obvious and necessary in hindsight, then Ornette fits the bill.  From the start he had a clear vision: make music that sounds sounds beautiful and honest, regardless of whatever convention or pattern you may break in the process.  It's not exactly rocket science, yet at the time the idea was absolutely radical and divisive -- it still is.  Unlike other pioneers of "free jazz" (Cecil Taylor comes to mind), Ornette's music was also wholly inclusive: maybe it wasn't always approachable to those who preferred the conventional way, but Ornette's jazz never felt completely out of reach, never exclusive or closed off to non-believers.  It felt too real.  It wasn't confrontational and it wasn't explicitly reactionary: it was "folk art" in the most sophisticated sense.  Miles Davis was a contemporary who also warrants the "maverick genius" tag, but Miles' thing was always to push relentlessly, unapologetically forward, refusing to look back at what he left in his wake.  Ornette's music grew and changed over the course of his 50+ years, but it never felt like he was trying to leave anything behind.  It defied that narrative of "progress" and "development" that jazz critics love to map onto long careers like his, but it also never felt like he was being nostalgic or locked in the past either.  And it's no exaggeration to say that he completely changed the course of jazz in a way that almost no one else did: he rearranged the priorities, and folks like Miles, Coltrane, and Mingus on down changed what they were doing after Ornette's music hit.  Yet, for all of his maverick and revolutionary spirit, he was no isolationist: his music has always been about communication and community, always an ensemble music where the ensemble always remains just as much in focus as any soloist (I even chose the pic above with this in mind).

I didn't get it at first.  My father had the landmark Shape of Jazz to Come record and I listened to it as a kid and wondered what was going on.  So like much other "challenging" music, it wasn't until I got to see Ornette in person that it suddenly made sense.  This must have been around 1997 or so, and it was a reunion of Ornette with his original bandmates Charlie Haden and Billy Higgins at Lincoln Center in New York -- sadly, all have left us now.  I'm not being hyperbolic: it really was life-changing in a musical sense.  All of a sudden, "free" improvisation made sense.  It just seemed perfectly natural: three cats playing the music as it changes, grows, and moves around before us.  I had never heard anyone outside of the Dead play music in that way before.

The influence of Ornette shouldn't come as a surprise, though it wasn't talked about as often as influences like Coltrane or Charles Ives.   Weir said that the Dead were listening hard to Ornette in the 60's, and Miles Davis himself even reported that Garcia liked Ornette.  But just listen: every Dead jam that took it outside of the normal bounds owes a little something to Ornette's conception of music.

Blair Jackson's got the story of how Garcia hooked up with Ornette for 1988's Virgin Beauty album, with some extensive quotes by Garcia.  Some more pertinent background info is at deaddiscs as well.

And, of course, Ornette actually performed with them, too.  Twice!
https://archive.org/details/gd1993-02-23.116152.NeumannKMF4.daweez.d5scott.flac16
(this one has one track from Ornette's opening set with Garcia sitting in)
https://archive.org/details/gd1993-12-09.sbd.miller.91958.sbeok.flac16

But tonight, I'm breaking out the Atlantic box set, the Golden Circle trios, the amazing Science Fiction album, Dancing In Your Head and Of Human Feelings by the Prime Time band, all the way up to his final "official" album Sound Grammar that coincided with his Pulitzer Prize.  Long live Ornette!