thesis

hey rev...

the show tonight, at the phoenix concerttheatre at 410 sherbourne, starts at 10. cover is $15 at the door.

we played the water street music hall in rochester last night and converted a room full of skeptical young deadheads into dancing, cheering true believers. you have to hear this band. china cat/rider is worth the price of admission alone.

i may end up doing jerry imitations full time.

md

my first guitar was a yamaha fg-345. i still have it after 23 years but it has a crack in the neck block, so it's got like a built-in whammy bar now if you wiggle the neck.

i play a 1932 gibson kel kroyden now and i just got a ten year old gibson starburst - it's at ring music getting the pickup fixed.

still like the yamaha tho. it's barky.

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.

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

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

interesting that this happened exactly 24 years to the day after another famous musician was shot to death....

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'.

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

sorry for starting a redundant thread...i did a search for this and didn't find it.

anyway.

my name is mike daley, and i'm the music director of the classic albums live grateful dead show on dec 16 at the Phoenix. i read the comments left here and i just want to clear up some misconceptions about this show. though we usually do note-for-note recitals of these albums, in the case of the dead show we're breaking from that. i have been a dead fan since 82, when i saw my first show in rochester. i saw the dead 10 times and played for years in a dead-style band, doing the 'jerry' parts. we decided not to do a specific album for this, because as has been noted, there is no one classic dead album. the dead were largely about the shows. so what we've done is put together a night of what we think is some of their best songs, played by a killer band with all of the riffs, textures, vocal harmonies of the dead, with improvisation in the style of the band. if you've actually heard any of the classic albums live shows then you know that we can't be compared to regular 'tribute' bands. certainly it is different from going to see an original band in your hometown. we are devoted to finding the essence of these albums, the feeling behind them, not just the notes. to drag out an old cliche, it's all about the music. if you love the music of the dead, we are doing our best to reproduce the live experience, with extreme attention to detail that will satisfy the most demanding purist, while providing a hugely entertaining show for anyone. we are not beholded to the q107 demographic or anybody else besides people like us, who love the DEAD.

anyway, that's my rant, from a biased commentator. come see the show and you'll see what i mean.

mike

hmmm....i'm kind of surprised that no one is jumping on this.

Classic Albums Live, which has staged live note-for-note reproductions of Sgt Pepper, Dark Side of the Moon, Led Zeppelin II, and several others is presenting a show at the Phoenix in Toronto called "A Very Dead Christmas" - it's a night of live Dead classics - not "note for note" but expertly played and sung just as the Dead did in their prime, with the original harmonies, riffs, jams, etc. Details at http://www.classicalbumslive.com/main.html