Classic Albums Live in Toronto - Grateful Dead!

[thesis]

oh, and by the way, here's the real setlist:

touch of grey

truckin

box of rain

casey jones

china cat sunflower/i know you rider

friend of the devil

ripple

uncle john's band

eyes of the world

shakedown street

sugar magnolia

scarlet begonias/fire on the mountain

dark star

lovelight

[MarcO]

You said I wasting my life

Sitting up in my room

Listening to "Tonight's The Night"

What's it to you?

How long does it take

'Till I can blow this scene?

Maybe I could make a break

Maybe I can make a break.....

Daley's comments changes everything. Go see this, I wish I could now.

[paisley]

from the guy whom when I jokingly yelled out "Dark Star" to his band at the old La Luna didn't miss a beat and launched into a killer 25 minute version (from the style the band was playing that night I was quite shocked)

I'll second that recommendation, if Mike's involved I'll have to say its extremely likely this show will totally rock

[bouche]

Unfortunately, I found out about this one too late.

I'm now having a little email with Dr.Hux about the Wings: Band on the Run in february. That would be foooging unreal.

Hey, so are there any recordings floating around from any of the other performances....say of the Beatles reproductions?

[secondtube]

Mike, i'm not sure if your going to read this or not but, are you in the band?

If so, that makes it even better...still remember ya kickin' out the tunes at the old la luna's.

Actually Doug and I were talking about those old Eggman gigs at La Luna's....Good times.

[Fendermender]

This is where I mention that TMNS are playing the 'Dead at Mavericks in Ottawa on Saturday night, but wait... I'll start a new thread...

[thesis]

i am in the band, playing most of the lead guitar and singing the jerry songs. les cooper from holly mcnarland, andy stochansky, sara craig, uncle violet etc. is playing guitar and singing too, as is dickie kahl from the blushing brides and several other classic albums live shows, including the beatles white album show. chris seldon, who these days plays with ashley macisaac but was also with me in uncle violet, plays bass. nick hildyard, who has played on tons of classic albums shows including sgt. pepper and the led zeppelin shows (singing lead!) is playing keyboards and singing 'lovelight'. we have two drummer/percussionists - joel stouffer from fat cats and andy stochansky and marty morin from goddo, klaatu, and almost every classic albums live show.

it's going to be killer. the first thing we did at rehearsal was spark up and play 'dark star'.

we're also going to do an acoustic set with dueling mandolins for 'ripple'.

[ggrtrhhrtgg]

man, I wish this wasn't next thursday!! I have to teach friday morning... and I have an exam saturday... man, I love the setlist, all the best Mike, will you do this sort of thing again... (I don't care about Q107, just the music, I would be very interested in seeing you cover that) :: ::

[bONES]

it's going to be killer. the first thing we did at rehearsal was spark up and play 'dark star'.

::

I really hope to make it to this.

Thesis, thanks for posting and giving us the real story.

I love the music of The Grateful Dead

If you play as well as these guys, i'll be your biggest fan

[bONES]

Aren't note-for-note cover bands completely contrary to the spirit of rock music?

Yes. Yes, I think they are!

Better scramble CountCowboy and his mule...DSO bashing begin!

just to clear up any misconceptions some*coughcoughahesscough*people may have in regards to DSO

they do not play The Grateful Dead note for note.

what band could recreate a Grateful Dead show and pull it off note for note? NO BAND

[PassedOutGuy]

The Beatles

[TimmyB]

Unfortunately, I found out about this one too late.

I'm now having a little email with Dr.Hux about the Wings: Band on the Run in february. That would be foooging unreal.

Hey, so are there any recordings floating around from any of the other performances....say of the Beatles reproductions?

Hey Mike,

I'll definitely be at the "Band on the Run" show in February. I hope to see you there.

The Beatles rule as does Paul McCartney!

[TimmyB]

just to clear up any misconceptions some*coughcoughahesscough*people may have in regards to DSO

they do not play The Grateful Dead note for note.

what band could recreate a Grateful Dead show and pull it off note for note? NO BAND

Funnily enough neither could the Grateful Dead.

[AdamH]

C'mon cowboy...I think the DSO concept of playing an entire show is cool, and I think they do it well. I just don't like cover bands that much in general, and when people jokingly say they are the best band ever, I jokingly remind them that they're wrong.

[thegreeter]

greetings everyone

it's good to be here

i produce the Classic Albums Live series

and this post is not to promote

but to explain just what it is we do

because there seems to be some real misconceptions about the shows

so

first off

i'm a real music lover

i've made a living as a musician for 25 years

i'm 43 now

when i came up with the idea of Classic Albums Live

i was very sure of what i wanted it to be;

great musicians faithfully recreating the greatest albums lof our time

the records we choose are the mozarts of our time

i wanted the performances to be completely about the music with no imitation or cheesy costumes

i wanted the shows to be recitals

and that's what they are

recitals

performed by amazing musicians who give their heart and soul to the project

most of them have original music carreers outside of what we do

over the past 2 years i've repeatedly employed over 100 musicians

that blows my mind and next to the shows i think it's what i'm most proud of

the musicians who take part in the shows walk away from the experience feeling great

they use the gig to network

lots and lots of original music and partnerships have come out of Classic Albums Live

the bands are usually around 10 piece

so there's lots of people to hook up with

i really encourage that

because our window is somewhat short lived

every month it's a new album

a new set of musicians

so

the dead show

first off the band is absolutely amazing

i was at rehearsal tonight and i couldn't stop smiling

these guys can play

and they love and understand the music

every christmas we do a greatest hits album

last year we did the fantastic bob marley's legend

everyone thought i was crazy picking a reggae album at christmas

but

1200 people showed up and danced

i expect the same at this years show

i choose the dead because i have a long history with them

it's always been happy music to me

and most of the albums we choose are hard to dance to - i want people to not be so cerebral at the christmas shows

well

that's about it

i hope i shed a bit of light on things

and i hope that some of you find your way to the show

and post your results here

until then

i wish you all

peace and prosperity

craig martin

[thesis]

we had a rehearsal last night, working through the electric tunes mostly. i've been trying to get the right guitar/amp configuration for the classic jerry sound - that trebly, clean, bell-like tone. i'll take any suggestions from fellow guitar nerds. anyway.

getting the dead vocal harmony sound is wicked hard. they broke the rules of theory routinely. i blame phil, who usually sang the more whacked out notes.

got the two drummers happening last night. i was standing between them for a while. unbelievable sound.

we're expecting to bring this show to vancouver in february. i'll post deets here....

md

[bouche]

possible tips?

[briguy]

possible tips?

That was very interesting. Thanks for the link.

[thesis]

very cool. i don't know if i can wire it up for thursday, but tell you what, i'll wear a black t shirt.

md

[Booche]

Its a little known fact that Jerry Garcia was tatoo'ed black from his waist to his neck.

[Esau]

Its a little known fact that Jerry Garcia was tatoo'ed black from his waist to his neck.

Hey,I know where that comment comes from,I have the recording (FM) at just happened to have been at that show also. ::

[thegreeter]

Does anyone have a link that explains his foot pedal

set up?

[TimmyB]

I believe I scored passes to this show, so I'll likely be there on Thursday.

[thesis]

Why the Grateful Dead Were the Greatest American Rock Band: A Polemic and Top Ten List

by Mike Daley (from mikedaley.net)

The Grateful Dead may be, in the fullness of time, seen as the greatest American rock band. At this moment, I believe that they are. Shouts of protests immediately leap to mind: “But, but…the three B’s – Beach Boys, Byrds, Buffalo Springfield!” “The Velvets, duh!?”. Indeed, to posit the good ol’ Grateful Dead as the greatest of all American rock bands is a claim likely to elicit hoots of derision from the hipsters, the aficionados, the type of people who argue about who the greatest American rock band was. Many of these same snide hipsters learned irony at the feet of David Letterman. So, to assuage their fears and advance my argument, I present my appreciation in the now venerable form of the Top Ten List. In reverse order. A count-up.

1. The Grateful Dead were not afraid to suck. Bands like the Velvet Underground or the Shaggs sucked sublimely, and largely because some of them had only a rudimentary grasp of how to operate their instruments. The Grateful Dead, on the other hand, did not have to suck. They proved their technical mettle on albums like Blues for Allah and their deft mid-seventies live shows. No, the Dead chose to be the kind of band that sometimes sucked, because when they weren’t sucking they were sometimes amazing, reaching beyond the rock genre, beyond music itself into the pure stream of human communication. They always, almost up to the end, were capable of lifting off the ground in a spectacular way. And that lift, that “Grateful Dead moment”, changed over the years, which brings me to….

2. The Dead were actually several different bands over the course of their career. The band that I hear on Live/Dead is a world away from the one that I started to hear live in 1982, when I was thirteen. That 1982 Dead was a glittering dance – light, angelic. 1970 Dead is menacing, ferocious, go-for-the-throat. As I write this, I realize that my general descriptions of the band’s 1982 and 1970 styles would be the same if I were to describe how I hear Jerry Garcia’s guitar playing in those two periods. The same adjectives. This makes sense because Jerry Garcia was always the prime mover of the Grateful Dead. As regards his guitar playing, wherever it is, so is the Dead. When he skitters, they skitter. When plods they plod. That’s why the Dead went so badly downhill when Garcia’s health started to fail.

3. Jerry Garcia is reason number three. Every great band needs a great guitarist, or at least a unique one. Garcia was a tireless student of the guitar, someone who used his hours of stage time to develop a singular electric guitar voice. Don’t forget that he also played great pedal steel and pretty good banjo, for a guitar player. He internalized the major styles available to a vernacular musician of his generation, and emerged (by 1973 or so) with one of the most recognizable approaches to the electric guitar in the past 70 years or so. These styles included folk, bluegrass, post-bop jazz, Chuck Berry, Chess blues, avant-garde and country.

4. The Dead are quintessentially American. For the sake of my argument, this should factor into the question of who the greatest American band was, n’est pas? The Grateful Dead exemplifies the original ideals of the founding fathers. They represent musical freedom; in fact, among rock intelligentsia, they are the very archetype of improvisation in rock. One of their lyricists, John Perry Barlow, cofounded the Electronic Frontier Foundation, an organization which promotes freedom of expression in digital media, in 1990. They were also, legendarily, a band that built their own business model at a time when rock bands were very much controlled by corporate forces. They turned conventional wisdom about the profitability of touring without hit records on its ear and, in their later years, were one of the biggest concert draws in the world. This type of entrepreneurship is authentically American. Now, the Dead were not racially mixed. Neither is America. Hell, they even wrote a song about being American, without sacrificing their liberal cred.

5. Two drummers. Admit it, two drummers playing together the way Bill Kreutzmann and Mickey Hart did is both exciting to hear and fun to watch. With no apologies, they held on to the 60s drum solo after it became a joke in pop circles (though it has endured in metal). Bill and Mickey are a perfect yin and yang. Apollonian Bill is the stately, conservative stalwart of the drum chair, while Dionysian Mickey flits around the world promoting ethnomusicology and establishing himself as some sort of authority on drumming worldwide. This split, by the way, only became evident when Hart became a steady presence in the band around 1970. Before then, Bill was prone to some flights of fancy himself, and a not inconsiderable darkness.

6. Mr. Pen. A prominent part was played by Ron McKernan, AKA Pig Pen, in the Dead’s brutal youth. Pig, a longtime blues aficionado, was the Dead’s sometimes lead singer and organist. His is the sound of record nerd emboldened by liquor. At the same time that Pig Pen was a relic of the Dead’s early days, who would have had to go even if he hadn’t died from cirrhosis of the liver in 1973, he was an essential element in their early live shows, with badass attitude and charm to burn. He provided the essential blues element of the band, something they largely lost after his death.

7. Phil. How many rock bass players do you know who studied with the avant-garde electronic composer Karlheinz Stockhausen? Phil Lesh, who essentially learned to play bass on stage, established an equal prominence for the bass among the other melodic instruments in the Dead. This egalitarianism, I would argue, is another lost American ideal embodied by the band.

8. Band-sanctioned live taping. The Dead are one of the most documented bands in history, if not the most. Virtually every note they played in public was taped, duplicated and traded among fans, and now lives on the World Wide Web. This enormous oeuvre will serve them well in posterity.

9. Some good songs. There were also some awfully bad ones. Step forward, “Loose Lucy”. But there was also “Ripple”, “Truckin’”, “Uncle John’s Band”, “Stella Blue”, “Let it Grow” and “The Golden Road”. No one else but the writing teams of the Dead, Weir/Barlow but most prominently Hunter/Garcia could have penned those odd little numbers. To their credit, the Dead usually dropped the stinkers from their live set pretty damn quickly. Live, they supplemented their stronger original material with cool covers like “Morning Dew”, “Promised Land”, “El Paso” and “Hard to Handle” (well, it USED to be cool).

10. The “Touch of Grey” video. In the twilight of their career, the Dead showed a goofy, cuddly side.

Cue band flourish and audience applause. The point of all of this? I’m not sure. I guess I’m just exercising the private citizen’s right and duty to rewrite history. As their active career recedes into the past (I am one of those people who is utterly convinced that the Dead simply does not exist without Garcia, just as Led Zeppelin does not exist without John Bonham) the uniqueness of the Dead phenomenon comes into sharper relief. We will not see their likes again. Their relentless excesses – musical, symbolic (the Dead has one of the richest iconographies of any band) and chemical are no longer in fashion and do not seem to be returning anytime soon. They gave more than they had to because their inheritance, from the tapestry of American music, had been so rich. In the end, that is why the Grateful Dead were the greatest American rock band.

[MarcO]

Rock solid case there, Mike.

It's hard to describe how it was the imperfections that - taken in context over the whole of their career - made them perfect but you did bang-up job. Or, never mind a whole career, check out a Garcia solo. He played with such grace and dignity, such thoughtfulness, but a technical pro he was not. You can hear him re-trying mistakes, turning errors into gold, working it all out in front of you. Multiply that by the number of musicians in the band and then again by 2000+ shows and the real deal about the Dead is revealed as their humanity. Real people making real music. Sounds corny but it's rare to find, especially amongst musicians who enjoyed such success at the box office.

I enjoyed how you were able to dilineate your points while sticking to their careers and their music, without mentioning their effect on American culture. That's important too, but that doesn't make them The Greatest American Rock Band of all time, a point to which I agree.

You know else is really good? The Beatles. But they were from Londonpool or someplace obscure.