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Least Favourite Dead Song(s)?


Patchoulia

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not to be picky but those are covers...my vote goes to liberty...

Yeah, I know, but when they're played as often as the Dead play these two songs, they have to be considered part of their catalogue.

If you're going to cover a song, do it, and then try another song next time. The sheer repetition of these covers is probably why I hate them so much.

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Most of us werent around when that song was in rotation and since it doesnt appear on a ton of shows I am willing to bet these other *songs* bring out the hate that much more.

Wave To The Wind is the easy winner for me. Holy FUCK that is a terrible song and I completely forgot about it.

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Tons of Steel isn't a bad choice as bad song - like Brent but that ones at the bottom.

Cassidy gets my vote. People like it. I hate it.

If we're doing covers - how about the I fought the law encore? yuck.

Or how about getting hit with Days Between. Not a bad song per say, but if its in that second song out of space spot from the shows that followed the outline then I always feel a little ripped off.

ps. El Paso rocks.

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Cassidy gets my vote. People like it. I hate it.

really? Wow. I've always loved this song. Great versions from the 1980 acoustic shows, electric versions that get jammed out, a second set Cassidy 10/3/94 (my last show :( )

If we're doing covers - how about the I fought the law encore? yuck.

I hear ya. Fuck i hated that song. At one point I had it as an encore for 7 or 8 shows or something. Nasty. At least it was easy getting out to the lot :)

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Someone DOESNT like Days Between? Wow.

Prospero, the Rose, and the Worm:

On "Days Between"

by Steve Silberman

Copyright Steve Silberman. Used by permission. [blair Jackson asked me for a few observations about "Days Between" for his Garcia biography-in-process. There's much more to say about this beautiful song, but I say too much here already. - Steve Silberman]

"Days Between" joined the Grateful Dead oeuvre right at the time-- 1993--when old-time Deadheads were asking themselves if Garcia and Hunter were still capable of creating art that had a primordial, frightening intensity: the beauty at the edge of terror that Rilke described.

As the other songs written roughly in the same period seemed to mine well-worn images and attitudes--almost reveling in their seasoned facility to create One More Time an archetypal mood, like "Lazy River Road" - "Days Between" slipped between your clothes and your skin like a chill wind out of a grave.

It had none of the arrogant retreat to a juvenile mode of pranksterish defiance that "Liberty" had; it turned the Rockwellian nostalgia of "Lazy River Road" inward on itself, almost against itself, in an inquiry into the tenability of idealism and sentimentality in a universe where, as another song has it, "You always hurt the one you love."

The most uncompromisingly adult lyric Hunter ever wrote, the verses present a panorama or mandala of existence in which each thing is in its place, but no place is completely safe. Hunter does his all to resist the tidal pull of sentimentality, seeing, as Blake did, that even the rose at the heart of the world has a devouring worm at its heart--the "black infested trees" on which moonlight shimmers exquisitely.

The world is presented with unrelenting exactitude, a world where both the sighs of young passion in springtime and the lonely horseman, leaving only his torn song in the world as he vanishes (as the singer himself was about to vanish), co-exist, inform one another, together creating a universe of joy and horror side-by-side. Only children would have it any other way, but in the Deadhead milieu where blithe rip-offs could excuse their own shadows with a funky "It's All Good," it was an important statment, at a time when the groupmind knew something was off-kilter, decaying, galloping away from the original joy-spring, but no one could quite put their finger on it.

In their last perfect marriage of form and insight, Garcia gave Hunter's meditation a setting that recollected "Dark Star" in its uncanny, irreducible simplicity. Garcia's little figure opens like a door... and who walks out? Prospero, the aged mage of "The Tempest," who drowned his power-book as Shakespeare himself surrendered the magic-making that had been his art.

Even the tormented tone Garcia was playing with at that time--the slurring headless-horseman's cry that sounded so jarringly out of place in a celebration of precision like "China Cat Sunflower"--was at home in "Days Between," as Weir strummed phantasmal chords behind him that flickered into clarity like moon-faces resolving in water.

"Days Between" was the final battlefield where the Dead dared to face the elementary questions of existence, and refused to flinch. It has the same fated, tragic majesty that bears witness to the life force in all truly great art.

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