5/8/84: light thickens further in Eugene

In observation of the day, I happily biked home from work for the first this year (it's been a long winter) with 5/8/77 in my headphones, the first time I'd listened to it since, um, last year this time.  I am pleased to report that my commute-by-bike lasts exactly the length of Dancin' in the Streets and Scarlet>Fire.

In the mood for more once I got home, I queued up an older fav that I hadn't heard in even longer: 5/8/84, a show that is emblematic of a shaggy year that has both its fevered supporters and its bemused naysayers.  Much like 1976, there's a lot about 1984 to not like, but hey, if some serious mojo has to come with some serious warts, then so be it.  Garcia's drug abuse and health were the steadily growing elephants in the room, but if you look past the damage he was doing to himself and those around him (and I understand if you can't or won't), there is both a raw ugly beauty and a feverish intensity to the year that I find to be very powerful and exciting indeed.  It's not the effortless grace and execution that the band displayed at their 70's pinnacles; it doesn't even sound like they're necessarily having very much fun -- it's more like a "we've got nothing to lose here" wild-eyed abandon that sometimes fails to hit the mark, but other times hits the bullseye dead-on before shredding through the target.  This show isn't quite an exemplar of this dark mixture at its finest, but it does have one very nice, deep zone right in the middle of it that's about as far from Barton Hall as it gets but delights me all the same.

courtesy deadlists

I remember this whole show being a bit up and down, with Garcia sounding like he was in rough shape.  A week after their east coast spring tour, the band jetted up to Oregon for three shows at the Hult Center's small Silva Concert Hall (capacity 2448) in Eugene, produced by the good ol' Springfield Creamery folks (I swear this is a coincidence! inspiration move me blindly?).  The reunion must have been colored, sadly, by the death of Ken Kesey's 20-year-old son Jed in a car accident 4 1/2 months earlier.  Years later when Kesey eulogized Bill Graham during the Dead's final Halloween show in 1991, he mentioned that Graham had given money for a memorial to his son and that the Dead marked the occasion with Brokedown Palace, which would be this show.

The novelty of the Scarlet>Touch of Grey opener notwithstanding, the first sign of something unusual may be up comes after a stately, relaxed Terrapin that is followed by two minutes of Garcia jamming quietly with the drummers (in reverse of the then common practice of Garcia leaving early as various bandmembers jammed in his wake before Drums proper).  It gives way to a lush marimba-led jam, a standard '84 move where the drummers eschewed the typical percussion bombast for something more warm and considered.  Midway through, electronic effects and delay enter the soundfield, but then things seem to slow to a halt.  Rather than a pause for the guitarists' return, however, various Merry Pranksters emerge to wheel out the Thunder Machine (see also 12/31/78) and then the weirdness really begins.  This kind of Dead music is so far out on the thinnest of musical ice that most heads don't bother with it at all, but it is something to be treasured all the same: the closest point of comparison I can think of would be avant-garde "jazz" of the AACM and Art Ensemble of Chicago, or Japanese experimental bands like the Taj Mahal Travelers.  After a few minutes of this garage sale of odd percussive sounds, Garcia and Weir join the fray and the jungle path thickens and gets denser ("light thickens and the crow makes wing to the rooky wood," perhaps): animals cries, disembodied snatches of speech (Ken Babbs maybe? Kesey himself?), industrial scrapes and crashes, general confusion all around, which then seems to be sucked into a vortex of processed effects to become weirder still.  A little mini Acid Test for some dark times?  After the machine rolls on, Garcia, Weir and, eventually, Lesh, play a solemn, slow march through the haze.  Things take a turn towards the Other One, and they toy with the theme for a while, soaking everything in delicious delay, building intensity steadily and thickening the roux until Phil unleases his roll and Garcia slams into a nasty minor chord.  Some grimy stuff in here!  The ensuing ride feels more akin to the hot and relentless 1970 style Other Ones than the more exploratory 1971-73 era trips.

The rest of the set is a fine listen, but nothing nearly as demented.  It's nothing worth skipping, though.  They follow up with a fine Wharf Rat, then an I Need a Miracle that seems to catch Garcia off-guard, and finally a fine Morning Dew that may be an opaque tribute to Jed Kesey -- it sure as heck ain't in the same ballpark as 1977's vintage, but it's fine for what it is.  Bobby thanks the Pranksters before the encore, a rare twofer of Sugar Magnolia with a jam that's preempted by Brokedown Palace, again in tribute to the younger Kesey.

PS.  If you're so inclined, there's a video of this show, shared by the always reliable voodoonola... but it axes the whole post-Terrapin>drums>space>Other One segment!!  what the heck?

4/9/83: quickie check-in

https://archive.org/details/gd1983-04-09.mtx.seamons.97109.flac16

Just a quick snapshot of a fun second set that got me through some tedious home repairs today.

• the first show of the April east coast tour.  Hampton.  Yes.
• the east coast breakout of Help>Slip>Franklins.  Baboom!  I like how Phil drops a giant bomb @3:17 in the Slipknot jam to avert a possible trainwreck as they stumble into the closing melody.
• the jam after Truckin has very clear Spoonful and Smokestack Lightnin’ teases, then finds its way into an Other One jam, Jerry bails early, and Brent picks up the ball with some weird electric piano sound — nothing far out, but his tone reminds me of Sun Ra for some reason.
• the same kind of thing is happening in the Throwing Stones mid-song jam: 80’s keyboard haters won’t like it, but I think it sounds pretty cool.  Go Brent!  Nice climax here.  Then it ends with a little transition jam: at 7:46, Jerry starts playing a little chromatic thing that sounds like a mini-Mind Left Body jam, though it’s probably just a clever way for him to get into Black Peter.
• a post-drumz Jerry twofer with Black Peter > GDTRFB.  Well played, sir.

 Fun set.  The China>Rider that closed the first set was mighty nice itself.

4/29/77 Help>Slip>Frank

I was playing with Audacity to patch a sbd of one of my favorite ‘unknown’ jams, a forgotten moment from spring 77: the Help>Slip>Franklins from 4/29/77 at the Palladium in NYC.  The show is deservedly overlooked: it’s fine, but nothing to write home about, especially by 1977 standards, and Jerry Moore’s aud tape is still the only circulating recording.  Sbd tape of bits and pieces of the show have trickled out, but really the only must-hear thing is this titanic HSF.  It’s not quite as good as the ones from May or June, but those are the very best of the best.  This one is a major high-steppin’ version and one of my very favorites, and I’m posting it here mostly just as an excuse to gush about how good it is and maybe win some new converts.

An mp3 was posted at the dead.net Tapers Section many moons ago, but the first 3 1/2 min are apparently missing from the vault tape.  So after years of bemoaning this to myself, I finally just patched in the aud for my listening pleasure.  It ain’t perfect: the dead.net mp3 was @192 kbps and sounds a little thin next to the oversaturated aud, but it blends okay.  Just for fun, I also matrixed a few seconds in Franklin's when Jerry sings “God save the child who rings that bell,” and some dude on the aud tape rings a little bell, which has always cracked me up, and I threw in a few seconds of crowd cheering at the end in honor of this monster version.

Enjoy:
http://www41.zippyshare.com/v/LgozpS7e/file.html

new Alexandra Palace '74

There's nothing like a good case of "I need more shows" to jolt me out of my blogging doldrums.  If you haven't seen it already, lightintoashes put out a call for some known-to-exist-but-not-digitally-circulating tapes.  One taper, Simon Phillips, has very kindly uploaded copies of the songs missing from the currently circulating fileset for 9/9/74 and a never-circulated(?) patched version of 9/10/74 (the Dark Star night), neither of which are at LMA or accessible to the masses.  His links expire very soon, but now that they're out there, they shouldn't be hard to find in the future.  I'm happy to pass them along if anyone is reading this too late and missed them.

tbh, the extra 9/9/74 material will satisfy the completionist in you and that's about it, and the 9/10 "matrix" isn't a sbd/aud mix, but a transfer of the sbd with a few aud patches to make the show complete, including the Phil & Ned set.  The true matrix will have to wait, but it's a mouth-watering proposition.  9/11/74, as you may recall, is a pretty tasty show.

EDIT: Goes to show: Charlie Miller has new transfers of all three of these shows now at LMA: 
https://archive.org/details/gd1974-09-09.135655.sbd.new.patched.miller.flac16
https://archive.org/details/gd1974-09-10.135699.sbd.new.patched.miller.flac16
https://archive.org/details/gd1974-09-11.135802.sbd.miller.flac16

The patches are great to have, of course, and this new 9/11 transfer includes all of the Phil & Ned jam in sbd (prior versions had the first 15 min patched in from the aud tape).


Also, if you want another perspective on these shows, there's this:
https://archive.org/post/342038/europe-74-notebook

Here's hoping that aud tape of 2/24/73 makes it out into the world soon, too!

9/11/74 - as natural as breath or speech or thought

I'll be done with my Ornette musings for now, but I did find one more little nugget that segues nicely into something else.  This excellent appreciation by trumpeter Taylor Ho Bynum reminds us that Ornette's greatness was in positing "that the infinite improvisational possibilities of a melody could thrive outside of a predetermined structure, that musical ideas could flow and expand in the moment as naturally as breath or speech or thought."

That struck me more than once last night as I listened to a truly amazing yet strangely under-recognized performance from one of the Dead's most heralded years and felt the need to trumpet its greatness.  I'm talking about the last night of the Dead's London run in Sept 1974, released in small part on Dick's Picks which ignored the towering highlight.  This short European tour seems pretty universally dismissed as a poorer run of shows, with one glowing exception (9/18/74), and in my own unscientific observation it seems like the three London shows are overlooked because of their official release status.

www.postertrip.com

Confession: 1974 is seen by many as a high watermark for the Dead, and I agree in theory, but in practice I find a good deal of 74 to be a little too, well, I dunno, too coked out.  It's still one of their best years and has some of their very best moments, but it also has a fair bit of spiky, edgy jamming that makes my gums throb and my cheekbones ache.  Coupled with the flatter feel of many of those 1974 sbd recordings, I find myself gravitating more towards 1972-73 or 1976 these days (and yes, I'm aware of the irony of writing this on the anniversary of 6/18/74, one of the finest shows of the year).  There's extramusical stuff that colors how I hear this year, too: the amazing but cripplingly extravagant Wall of Sound itself, the band's dissatisfaction with playing larger and more impersonal venues, the increasing intensity/insularity of the behind-the-scenes scene, the growing dependence on cocaine to keep the whole train moving.  It all sounds like one hell of a pressure cooker, and I do think the music reflects that to a significant extent, as brilliant as it often was.

I bring this up because, according to various sources, most of these things came to head on this last night of their London stand.  Someone's book (Rock Scully's?) tells a tantalizing and hopefully not too good to be true tale of the organization's collective coke problem getting so out of hand that one of the roadies finally called for everyone to empty all of their stashes onstage that afternoon and sacrificially light the whole pile ablaze.  Ned Lagin picks up the story and relates how the band huddled up and agreed to reset the levels and engage in a little lysergic purification (he explicitly says so in the interview in Gans' book and hints at it here).

So inevitably that may color your listening to this, too.  It certainly colors mine.  There are a number of shows where folklore has it that the band were all tripping -- we seem to festishize some (8/27/72 and 5/11/78 come to mind) and don't make much of others, for whatever reason (I feel like this is rarely brought up about any of the Oct 74 Winterland shows).  9/11/74 seems to fall into the latter category.  You go down a slippery slope once you start trying to identify indicators of pscyhotropic drugs that are evident in music.  I don't know that the Dead sound different when they're suitably dosed vs. relatively sober (or on something else), but I dunno, there's just a different kind of a vibe.  It may be pure conjecture, but this night feels like it has that vibe all over it.

Granted, another contributing factor may be the recording.  I listened to this fine new matrix blending the meh sbd with an impressive audience recording.  Let's hope these good people are able to put one together for the night before as well!
https://archive.org/details/gd1974-09-11.132458.mtx.GEMS-BCE.flac16

There are folks who don't get much out of 73-74 era first sets, and I get that, but this one seems to me like it shimmers a little more than usual.  The matrix helps to really highlight some of the dyanmics that are usually missing many 1974 sbds, so that's certainly a contributing factor -- Sugaree is an example of a tune from this period that rarely jumps out at me, but the dynamic contrasts that are highlighed by the roomy ambiance here really bring it to life.  Little details kept jumping out at me throughout: Donna's little patch of scatting (as opposed to oooh'ing glossolalia) in the crackling Scarlet jam, Jerry's daredevil little fills under Bob's vocals in Jack Straw, Phil's divebombing runs in Big River... all this stuff gives a very well-played set a little extra sparkle.  Only Bobby McGee seems to wobble and struggle to stay upright.  The closing Playing in the Band seems to deviate slightly but significantly from many other Playin's that characterize the year for me: the first half seems content to revel in its own environment rather than charge forward, but it never feels stagnant or dull to me.  The second half builds a little more purposefully, but without the single-minded, teeth-clenched determination of many Playin' jams of this vintage.  They push and pull at it, never too forcefully, gradually building a delicious kind of tension, which Jerry finally resolves with a little mini-Tiger rush at the end, although here it feels less like a harried, hard-won peak and more like finally letting steam out of a valve.  Phew!  Some ride.

The second set, though, is what puts this in the upper tier of 1974 jams, and, if pressed, I would probably say, of 1971-74 jams in my book.  It could have been included on the Dick's Picks release (the sbd is under 74 minutes), but I guess I can see why it wasn't.  I suspect most heads would prefer to pass on Phil & Ned's sets, and even if you're one of them, don't automatically pass on this one: many of them could be ear-splittingly jagged (like the next one on 9/14/74), but some could be softer, developing more organically and gently, and I would put this one with that bunch.  The first few minutes seem like Ned alone, patiently sending synth waves spiraling and twisting slowly out into the void, almost curiously probing.  It's not all smooth sailing, of course, but it never gets abrasive.  Billy appears, then Jerry, then eventually Bob, and Ned seems to mostly abandon the synthesizers and moves to his Rhodes piano.  This is pure Brain Moss Music, difficult to describe, palpably psychedelic, and deeply, deeply in a groove of its own.  They never played like this after 1976.  Eventually Eyes of the World appears on the horizon, and I love how it takes them seven more minutes to fully their get space together and begin it for real -- you don't often hear them find their way into a new song, cue it up, then back away so completely.  In one of the rare instances that his contributions to a full-band jam is audible, Ned adds some acrobatic keyboard lines as Keith comps behind him, and while this Eyes doesn't quite take flight and soar like others from the year, it doesn't have to.  They're already deep under the sea, so why bother to surface?  Eyes works through its changes brilliantly, finds its way to another nameless jam for another full ten minutes, and winding down with Wharf Rat.  Monstrous, leviathan, beautifully strange music, flowing and expanding in the moment as naturally as breath or speech or thought, up there with some of the best that the Dead created.  And from the looks of it, it was a beautiful old brokedown palace in which to have this experience:

the Alexandra Palace in 1974 (at an international darts championship!)

Phil announces a break to break down Ned's equipment and adds a spacey little comment, "Everybody turn around, look at your neighbor, and smile or something, like naaaah..."  Like whaaa?  It definitely sounds like everyone could use a little break.  The boys return for a perfunctory final mini-set, another half hour or so of reentry music to get everyone back on their feet and back in their minds.  The first few tunes are actually pretty hot and energetic, but by the time they get to Sugar Magnolia, it's clear that they're absolutely spent.  Phil takes the mic again, "Thanks a lot folks.  We couldn't have done it without you."