improvisational music should not be recorded

Summertime.  Uncertain reassertion of degrees of normalcy in pandemic times.  While pondering my treatise on the merits of the JGB circa 1976, I was distracted by my record collection and, for no reason whatsoever, pulled out Miles Davis' Filles de Kilimanjaro to have a gander at it.  I looked at the liner notes on the back and did a doubletake when I saw that Ralph J. Gleason namechecks Dannie (sic) Rifkin, "longtime student of improvisational music" -- or, to you and I, manager and family member of the Grateful Dead.  Besides Danny Rifkin, Gleason quotes Gil Evans, André Gide, Edgard Varèse, and David LaFlamme in his assessment of Miles' latest directions in music.  I am not sure what to make of that.

Rifkin seems to have been slightly overshadowed by other personalities in the Grateful Dead story, but a cursory look at the literature reminded me that in addition to managing the band on and off through the decades, he was the guy who originally managed the house at 710 Haight-Ashbury, instituted the Dead's mail-order ticket service, and spearheaded the creation of the Rex Foundation.  But a manager of the Grateful Dead saying improvisational music should not be recorded but only heard once?  Say it ain't so.

make good money, five dollars day

Um, did you know about this?  I did not.  Among other things I learned: PARCO is a big chain of Japanese department stores.  This is from 1993.

courtesy GDAO

And, if that wasn't weird enough:

Interesting, indeed.  I hope this paid for at least a year of college for one of his kids.

That is all.  Carry on.

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!

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.

white kids > the Dead > the blues

Speaking of the blues, I was rewatching the great documentary Chicago Blues (dir Harley Cokeliss) from 1972 which, besides featuring some amazing performance footage of some Chicago blues heavies, really hits hard on the issue of race.  Very powerful stuff, and still very relevant.  Heads up, though, for the guy discussing the appeal of the blues for white kids, starting around 26:40 in.  No big revelation that a lot of white kids discovered the blues through rock & roll, but the one example he brings up is the Dead covering Junior Wells, of all things (I presume he's talking about "Good Morning Little Schoolgirl," not "Next Time You See Me"). 

To be fair, it's not an inappropriate link to make, though it's still a pretty random choice given the many, many, many other more obvious entry points that most rock fans had into the blues by 1972.  The Dead, at least, were public in their admiration for Wells' music: Garcia is very enthusiastic about Wells' amazing "Ships on the Ocean" on the guest DJ spot that he and Phil did for KMPX in 1967.  For what it's worth, that tune comes from the same album as Wells' version of Schoolgirl, Hoodoo Man Blues.  See the amazing Garcia's Record Collection post at deadessays for more blues influences.  Wells had also opened for the Dead at the Fillmore on Jan 13-14, 1967 in a trademark eye-popping Bill Graham triple bill with the Doors!