The year 1993 tends to get lumped into “the end” of the Grateful Dead. To some extent, of course, this is true: “Leviathan Dead” saw venues averaging a record 22.6 thousand seats, the lineup had reached its final incarnation, and the last of the logistical sound innovations had come about, specifically the removal of amps from the stage and the replacement of onststage wedges with Ear Monitors (the former had been a Healy idea, the latter an innovation by Future Sonics founder Marty Garcia introduced to the band during their 1992 tour with Steve Miller). These late changes were somewhat unpopular with audiences: there was the lukewarm reception to the new keyboardist, the impersonal nature of the venues, and the perceived disconnection between musicians and the audience corollary to each having his own sound-mix instead of reacting to the sound of the audience and stage.
In the same period, the concert-going scene had come to a rather ugly place. Gate-crashing became an increasingly common phenomenon, and hard drugs on the periphery brought an increase in crime along tour stops, prompting an attitude among police and security that was stressful across the board. All these factors could contribute to an unpleasant experience.
But the line has become blurred between these factors, real as they were, and the quality of the music. In the course of exploring the band’s later years, I listened to seven consecutive shows from the summer of 1993: the last five of the June tour and the next two in Oregon in August. Through these dates at least, the apparent association of the final stage as a whole (92-95) with the band’s increasingly erratic musical performances and Garcia’s ultimate decomposition, is unwarranted.
On the musical front, a few things might turn off Deadheads who prefer the raw, bare-bones sounds of the seventies and eighties. First of all, Bob Weir was using a lot of distortion in his playing, something perhaps born of his side-work in the eighties. Secondly, Vince leaned towards a very different sound than either Bruce or Brent. He seemed to favor a somewhat harsh, harpsichord-like sound with lots of overtones that filled out the spectrum. Combined with Healy’s detailed control, it could make for a very slick, saturated sound.
And yet all these factors notwithstanding, the quality of the music in the middle of 1993 was very solid. By the following September (I listened to the Boston Garden run for context), the early signs of decline were more noticeable: Garcia flubbed the odd change, forgot more lyrics, and his time wavered a bit. The band also tended to play without a lot of dynamics, so that the overall energy was rather flat. If one pays close attention, those elements were present under the surface in the summer. Cumberland Blues and China Cat Sunflower in Washington are good examples: they’re relatively easy up-tempo tunes and everybody gets carried away, yielding a frantic energy with little room to maneuver. But this overplaying was still the exception to the rule (and having Bruce at that show added to the clutter).
What is most striking is how crisp Garcia was that summer, and the effect it had on everyone else. He was still using the Irwin guitar (until Shoreline that August) but he had already started leaning towards the very sharp, almost twangy sound that was to characterize the last years. When used right, it was so sharp as to almost singlehandedly keep everything aligned. Women are Smarter from the first night at Deer Creek springs to mind, or Slipknot from the second night in Oregon. Both are worth listening to for just how intentional and directive he could be when he was on point.
Weir’s playing had become very confident. Healy’s imminent firing was brought on by a combination of things not the least of which, according to Phil, was his PA mix of Weir’s performances. There are certainly large fluctuations in Weir’s level within the mix, but he had come into a solid accompanying position with respect to Garcia. His tone was not nearly as harsh as it has become nowadays and he provided a broad tonal layer that underpinned Jerry’s (and Phil’s) more staccato approach. Perhaps it complemented Garcia’s pathological dislike of the spotlight, allowing him to feel less exposed in his solos…
I should note that while Bob’s guitar work was strong, his voice was less so. Throughout those last five June shows, and though he did not sing any less than usual, there were moments when it was very scratchy and strained. It reached a peak on the last night of the tour as he battled his way through Throwing Stones and then followed it up with One More Saturday Night to close the show, which he belted even more than usual. He sounded like he was going to tear out his throat.
He underwent surgery soon after for nodes on his vocal chords, though there might be some confusion as to just when. By August he sounded fine, as he did in Boston a month after that, but McNally writes that the surgery took place after the fall tour. In any case his troubles weren’t over: in April ’94 a medical exam found nodes in his throat.
Vince Welnick had now been the only keyboardist for over a year. Unlike his predecessors, he seldom played piano, or even organ, opting rather for a broad range of synthesizer sounds. His strength lay in coloring the music: his accompaniment to Lazy River Road was particularly pretty, and he threw out any number of nice noodles between tunes. Come solo time, admittedly, his time was not airtight, especially in the fast right-hand figures he liked. All Over Now, on June 22nd, is a case in point: the fills after Jerry’s solo are crisp and well-placed, but the solo that follows, though musically correct, slips around a little. In terms of singing, the only song I heard him take in those 10 shows was Way To Go Home, a solid pre-drums tune with a lot of energy that always went over well. He had been singing Baba O’Riley>Tomorrow Never Knows since May of ’92, got a verse on Maggie’s Farm, and would bring in Samba In The Rain (his only other original) in June ’94.
This seems as good a time as any to address that most unique Dead show quirk: Drumz. Originally little more than a drum solo, it evolved beginning after the hiatus into a nightly fixture fueled by Mickey’s unquenchable thirst for rhythmic toys and the band’s appetite for all manner of effects. This tendency was shamelessly enabled starting around 1987 by Bob Bralove. By the middle of 1993, Drums>Space stretched to almost 30 minutes (33 on August 22nd). Within the somewhat shortened shows of the later 90s, this amounted to at least a third of the second set, which, to be honest, seems excessive. It occurs to me that, had I not been warned, I might have been miffed to discover that 20 percent of the whole show was not music in the strict sense of the word. Even if it was a perfect occasion for a beer/bathroom run, half an hour is a long time. But they wouldn’t have done it if there wasn’t some good reason, some work in progress, so I make a point to listen to the whole thing every time.
I mentioned the drummers’ equipment in my last post, and though I am still incapable of naming more than a few instruments, it seems that Mickey in particular had become very systematic about sampling each of the instruments he owned for use via electronic pads. Explaining that a drum, like everything else, has a certain lifespan in which it sounds good, he says he would take each of them, break them in and then record them so as to be able to play any of them at any time without worrying about the wear and tear of the road or the deterioration of each instrument’s sound.
Sonic scientist Bob Bralove had come aboard during production of In The Dark, having spent eight years with Stevie Wonder and later worked on the Twilight Zone sessions with Merle Saunders. It was at that point that he hooked up with Mickey, and the two immediately bonded over sampling and manipulating electronically “anything that sounded cool and weird.” (Grateful Dead Gear p 228). By the nineties, Bralove was performing nightly, bridging the gap between Drums and Space with a few minutes of very cool atmospheric space sounds that the rest of the band played along with. Though I haven’t seen this stated explicitly anywhere, I suspect he’s also behind the demonic mid-Drumz swish effect, that fast left-right panning of the sound through the PA, always sure to get your brain in a twist.
In addition his contributions as a performer and effects guru, Bralove is credited on Way To Go Home, Picasso Moon and Easy Answers, as well as on six of the twelve tracks that make up Infrared Roses. He was working with Mickey at least through the Other Ones days, and is currently playing with Tom Constanten (as Dose Hermanos), recently recorded a solo piano album, and is working on a record called Psychedelic Keyboard Trio, featuring himself and TC and material recorded by Vince Welnick.
Dennis McNally talks about Space in terms of a unique piece designed to be played exactly once. He also explains that during Drums, Garcia and Weir would hole up in Parish's tent (where the "laughs begin"), and loosely work out a theme for the Space segment to follow. It's not clear how seriously this "theme" was ever followed, since it often sounded similarly haphazard. Surely facemelting given the right conditions, the occasional Space is nevertheless worth an independent listen. Garcia had an ever-growing collection of MIDI effects to sift through looking for something he liked, usually settling on trumpet sounds. Among the new effects available to each, ironically, were drum samples (see June 23rd and 25th). This only makes it even more difficult to figure out what each member was doing, but of course, that's part of the magic.
Long story short, while nightly performances would soon start to decline, the band continued to push the envelope, doing everything they could to keep things from getting stale. A Jerry ballad had made its way into the first set: He’s Gone, High Time etc had previously been typically second-set stuff. The Drumz slot had moved back a step by then, usually preceded by five songs and followed by three. 1993 saw eight new songs including Days Between, Broken Arrow, and Lazy River Road. (Corinna was another addition. While the main form is, in my opinion, one of their most boring – and the substantially reworked version one of RatDog’s most fun - the second half yielded some surprisingly cool jams).
Sting opened for the band a dozen times that year and the Indigo Girls opened twice. Bruce Hornsby, Huey Lewis, Branford Marsalis, Baba Olatunji, Ornette Coleman, Carlos Santana, Edie Brickell and Barney the Dinosaur all made guest appearances. Casey Jones was played for the last time.
Jerry broke up with one girlfriend and then another, then a third before shacking up with Deborah Koons and then divorcing Mountain Girl. Weir toured with Wasserman, played no less than three Clinton inaugural events, and published Baru Bay with his sister Wendy. Jerry, Bob and Vince sang the National Anthem at the Giants’ season opener. Mickey made the inaugural contribution to the Library of Congress’s Endangered Music Project. Bill spent a month sailing off Mexico on Bill Belmont’s 101-foot Argosy Venture. Editor Gary Lambert launched the first Grateful Dead Almanac. Dick released his first Pick.
It was business as usual for the Grateful Dead in 1993. With the benefit of hindsight, it’s easy to see “the end,” but there few clues that summer that the band had barely two years to live.
Up Next: I’m taking a break for a week or so (Phish NYE, 7Walkers NYE, Weir on Jam Cruise, maybe some MMW), then getting right back into the 90s with 8 shows from the Fall of 1994. Maybe more if someone posts some.
Sunday, January 23, 2011
Monday, December 27, 2010
Grateful Dead - Spring 1989
In 1989, the Grateful Dead played to one and a half million seats, with an average venue capacity of over 21 thousand. There had been a huge jump in sales and revenue since the release of In The Dark that would continue for the rest of their career: in ’91, they became the world’s highest-grossing touring act, playing to 1.6 million seats for $34 million; in 1994, they sold almost 2 million tickets, grossing $52 million.
In the late 80s, the band developed a broader role in American culture. In addition to the benefit concerts they had always done, Garcia, Weir and Hart went to the UN in 1988 to bring attention to the destruction of the rainforest, and in ’89 they appeared before the Congressional Human Rights Caucus. In Garcia’s words, they had become “citizens who have a constituency.” Some of their early fans were now in high-ranking political positions, also adding some legitimacy: in March 1993, Mickey introduced the Endangered Music Project to the Library of Congress and they were invited to the White House by Al Gore, and in July ’94, they had lunch at the Senate with Senators Patrick Leahy and Barbara Boxer.
The end of the 1980s also saw a spike in new music. The band had written very little original material since 1979: in the next 8 years, they averaged a paltry two songs a year, including Lesh/Petersen’s one-off Revolutionary Hamstrung Blues. In 1988, they suddenly brought out seven new songs, including Victim, Foolish Heart, and four Brent originals.
I just finished listening to all but three of the shows played during the spring tour of 1989. While spring tours had generally been bookended with Oakland and Irvine shows, the band had been forced to cancel three mid-March shows in Oakland when the local community refused to have them. Consequently, the band hit the road with a six-week break behind them. The ’89 tour was also atypical geographically: instead of sticking to the coast, they spent most of the tour in the Great Lakes region, played Kentucky (which saw the final performance of Louie Louie) and closed out in Minnesota (where MIDI drums made their first appearance).
Perhaps because of the long break beforehand, the band took a while to hit their stride. The first four or five shows showed some of the complacency that had crept into the band’s MO. There were long breaks between songs, flubbed changes, a sense of just going through the motions. Garcia wasn’t particularly tight in his soloing either, and that first week was a bit flat. The Pittsburgh shows, fifth and sixth of the tour, were released as GD Download Series vol. 9 and as I got into that first show, I really wondered why. The answer came post-drums: The Wheel>Dear Mr. Fantasy(>Hey Jude reprise)>Around & Around>GDTRFB>Lovelight, with Baby Blue for the encore. Not only was this the most fun post-drums of the tour, but it also marked the turning point. The shows after this were all completely solid. I’m most partial to the following pair, in Ann Arbor, but the energy did not let up (though I confess I don’t have the last show in Minnesota). Weir has said that he considers the 89-90 period to be their best; by the end of the spring tour, shows were tight, the songs were as shapely and intricate as they would get, and the band alert and attentive.
I paid a bit of attention to Brent throughout the tour for two main reasons. First, it was his last full year with the band. He split from his wife that year, an experience that was very traumatic, according to Phil: always insecure, he became self-destructive, suffering a non-fatal overdose in December 1989, and dying of another in June 1990. Yet at the same time, his contributions to the band had never been greater. As I mentioned, he brought four new songs to the catalogue in 1988, and two more in ’89 brought his total to 12, plus his covers. By way of comparison, Pigpen brought 9 songs to the band, Keith brought 1 and Vince 2.
He had about one song a night, but the crowd went crazy for his performances. His two most frequent originals were Blow Away and I Will Take You Home. The first, about moving on after a failed relationship, never failed to wake everybody up, particularly the long ad-lib jam in the second half, where he would wail about grabbing love in your hand and keeping it way down deep inside. (I have to admit there were moments when I cringed at the sheer awkwardness: “It’s like you want it in your heart,” he howled at the top of his lungs, “you want it in your heart probably!... baby baby baby baby baby baby baby!” Soulful, certainly, but hardly poetic). Anyway, awkward or no – it got better as the tour went on – it never failed to draw roars of approval from the crowds.
I Will Take You Home was his weeper, typically post-drums. The rest of the band would hang back and more or less let him take the whole thing. Just as Barlow’s lyrics for Blow Away are very appropriate for Brent’s rough relationship with his wife, Home’s, I imagine, resonated particularly in the context of Brent’s daughter. The song evokes a father holding his infant girl, a lullaby of protection and reassurance. Brent sold both songs every time, the latter with poignancy enough to fill the slot after Space usually reserved for Garcia.
The last night of the tour saw the introduction of MIDI effects into the Drums segment. The Musical Instrument Digital Interface allowed an instrument to produce the sound of another. It differed from a synthesizer in two important ways: it could be used with any instrument, and it created a new sound as opposed to playing back a pre-recorded sample. Mickey and Billy had been using samples for some time, but they were the last to get on the MIDI bandwagon. It was first introduced on Brent’s rig in the early eighties, and everyone in the band picked it up at some point, though Phil dropped his MIDI setup for a while because of the lag involved in processing the long bass waves. Garcia used MIDI most conspicuously, eventually using various horn emulators in his solos.
For the drummers, MIDI was really just another toy on the massive toy chest that was the Beast. Of the myriad rhythmic noisemakers clamped to and hung from the frame, very few made frequent appearances except the huge toms and the Beam, which generally featured at the climax of the segment (often loud enough to overdrive the microphones). But in between the kit portion and the climax, Mickey and Billy had dozens of other things to experiment with, making Drums consistently interesting. I only wish I knew the names of half of the instruments they were using, or could tell a marimba from a balafon. Drums was one of the only things that improved consistently throughout. After 1981, there was exactly one show without a Drums segment – the Bill Graham memorial concert – and there were constant additions to the toy box. There is really no way to get drums “wrong,” and as the years went on, there was always something new to listen to, from the talking drum solos Bill favored early on or the atmospheric rainforest sounds Mickey brought in during the nineties.
I’m going to forego listing highlights this time around. Like I said, anything after Pittsburgh was pretty solid (i.e. 4/5 onwards). Solos could still hold surprises (and Garcia was sounding great), but by this period most songs were more or less set: there was little improvisation in introductions, thematic suites within jams, fillers, pickups etc. The one thing that might make or break a performance was the vocals: Jerry was prone to flubbing a few lines here and there, Weir could on occasion bring the roof down with his closers.
The period spanning 1989 and 1990 represents to my mind a peak in the consistency and professionalism of the band, which I think is why Weir is partial to it. They had developed a particular way of structuring a set and of performing songs with complicated arrangements, and here was a time when could be relied on to do it well. Most importantly, they could do so with their largest repertoire to date (not including the Dylan/Dead stuff), so that you can listen to a half-dozen shows without losing interest.
Up next. I realize that I tend to accentuate the positive in the music. I want to explore some of the bad days and get into what was so bad about them. I have not done so yet because I don't have enough shows from say 83-4 or 94-5 to make a fair assessment. I have 7 consecutive shows from mid '93, so that'll have to do for a start.
In the late 80s, the band developed a broader role in American culture. In addition to the benefit concerts they had always done, Garcia, Weir and Hart went to the UN in 1988 to bring attention to the destruction of the rainforest, and in ’89 they appeared before the Congressional Human Rights Caucus. In Garcia’s words, they had become “citizens who have a constituency.” Some of their early fans were now in high-ranking political positions, also adding some legitimacy: in March 1993, Mickey introduced the Endangered Music Project to the Library of Congress and they were invited to the White House by Al Gore, and in July ’94, they had lunch at the Senate with Senators Patrick Leahy and Barbara Boxer.
The end of the 1980s also saw a spike in new music. The band had written very little original material since 1979: in the next 8 years, they averaged a paltry two songs a year, including Lesh/Petersen’s one-off Revolutionary Hamstrung Blues. In 1988, they suddenly brought out seven new songs, including Victim, Foolish Heart, and four Brent originals.
I just finished listening to all but three of the shows played during the spring tour of 1989. While spring tours had generally been bookended with Oakland and Irvine shows, the band had been forced to cancel three mid-March shows in Oakland when the local community refused to have them. Consequently, the band hit the road with a six-week break behind them. The ’89 tour was also atypical geographically: instead of sticking to the coast, they spent most of the tour in the Great Lakes region, played Kentucky (which saw the final performance of Louie Louie) and closed out in Minnesota (where MIDI drums made their first appearance).
Perhaps because of the long break beforehand, the band took a while to hit their stride. The first four or five shows showed some of the complacency that had crept into the band’s MO. There were long breaks between songs, flubbed changes, a sense of just going through the motions. Garcia wasn’t particularly tight in his soloing either, and that first week was a bit flat. The Pittsburgh shows, fifth and sixth of the tour, were released as GD Download Series vol. 9 and as I got into that first show, I really wondered why. The answer came post-drums: The Wheel>Dear Mr. Fantasy(>Hey Jude reprise)>Around & Around>GDTRFB>Lovelight, with Baby Blue for the encore. Not only was this the most fun post-drums of the tour, but it also marked the turning point. The shows after this were all completely solid. I’m most partial to the following pair, in Ann Arbor, but the energy did not let up (though I confess I don’t have the last show in Minnesota). Weir has said that he considers the 89-90 period to be their best; by the end of the spring tour, shows were tight, the songs were as shapely and intricate as they would get, and the band alert and attentive.
I paid a bit of attention to Brent throughout the tour for two main reasons. First, it was his last full year with the band. He split from his wife that year, an experience that was very traumatic, according to Phil: always insecure, he became self-destructive, suffering a non-fatal overdose in December 1989, and dying of another in June 1990. Yet at the same time, his contributions to the band had never been greater. As I mentioned, he brought four new songs to the catalogue in 1988, and two more in ’89 brought his total to 12, plus his covers. By way of comparison, Pigpen brought 9 songs to the band, Keith brought 1 and Vince 2.
He had about one song a night, but the crowd went crazy for his performances. His two most frequent originals were Blow Away and I Will Take You Home. The first, about moving on after a failed relationship, never failed to wake everybody up, particularly the long ad-lib jam in the second half, where he would wail about grabbing love in your hand and keeping it way down deep inside. (I have to admit there were moments when I cringed at the sheer awkwardness: “It’s like you want it in your heart,” he howled at the top of his lungs, “you want it in your heart probably!... baby baby baby baby baby baby baby!” Soulful, certainly, but hardly poetic). Anyway, awkward or no – it got better as the tour went on – it never failed to draw roars of approval from the crowds.
I Will Take You Home was his weeper, typically post-drums. The rest of the band would hang back and more or less let him take the whole thing. Just as Barlow’s lyrics for Blow Away are very appropriate for Brent’s rough relationship with his wife, Home’s, I imagine, resonated particularly in the context of Brent’s daughter. The song evokes a father holding his infant girl, a lullaby of protection and reassurance. Brent sold both songs every time, the latter with poignancy enough to fill the slot after Space usually reserved for Garcia.
The last night of the tour saw the introduction of MIDI effects into the Drums segment. The Musical Instrument Digital Interface allowed an instrument to produce the sound of another. It differed from a synthesizer in two important ways: it could be used with any instrument, and it created a new sound as opposed to playing back a pre-recorded sample. Mickey and Billy had been using samples for some time, but they were the last to get on the MIDI bandwagon. It was first introduced on Brent’s rig in the early eighties, and everyone in the band picked it up at some point, though Phil dropped his MIDI setup for a while because of the lag involved in processing the long bass waves. Garcia used MIDI most conspicuously, eventually using various horn emulators in his solos.
For the drummers, MIDI was really just another toy on the massive toy chest that was the Beast. Of the myriad rhythmic noisemakers clamped to and hung from the frame, very few made frequent appearances except the huge toms and the Beam, which generally featured at the climax of the segment (often loud enough to overdrive the microphones). But in between the kit portion and the climax, Mickey and Billy had dozens of other things to experiment with, making Drums consistently interesting. I only wish I knew the names of half of the instruments they were using, or could tell a marimba from a balafon. Drums was one of the only things that improved consistently throughout. After 1981, there was exactly one show without a Drums segment – the Bill Graham memorial concert – and there were constant additions to the toy box. There is really no way to get drums “wrong,” and as the years went on, there was always something new to listen to, from the talking drum solos Bill favored early on or the atmospheric rainforest sounds Mickey brought in during the nineties.
I’m going to forego listing highlights this time around. Like I said, anything after Pittsburgh was pretty solid (i.e. 4/5 onwards). Solos could still hold surprises (and Garcia was sounding great), but by this period most songs were more or less set: there was little improvisation in introductions, thematic suites within jams, fillers, pickups etc. The one thing that might make or break a performance was the vocals: Jerry was prone to flubbing a few lines here and there, Weir could on occasion bring the roof down with his closers.
The period spanning 1989 and 1990 represents to my mind a peak in the consistency and professionalism of the band, which I think is why Weir is partial to it. They had developed a particular way of structuring a set and of performing songs with complicated arrangements, and here was a time when could be relied on to do it well. Most importantly, they could do so with their largest repertoire to date (not including the Dylan/Dead stuff), so that you can listen to a half-dozen shows without losing interest.
Up next. I realize that I tend to accentuate the positive in the music. I want to explore some of the bad days and get into what was so bad about them. I have not done so yet because I don't have enough shows from say 83-4 or 94-5 to make a fair assessment. I have 7 consecutive shows from mid '93, so that'll have to do for a start.
Sunday, December 5, 2010
Furthur, November 2010
Furthur’s latest tour, an eleven-date run between November 8th and 21st, took them through the West-North-Central and North-East regions. The Grateful Dead made a similar run every summer after 1982 (barring ’86), but it was Furthur’s first time in Iowa, Maryland, Minnesota or Missouri. (Iowa is a particularly rare stop: the GD played there 7 times, the last being in ’84. RatDog had been through seven times as well, and Phil exactly once.) The recent tour rounds out all of the major US markets except the South-Central region. I’ll be curious to see if they make it down to Alabama, Kentucky or Texas, all regular - if infrequent - GD stops.
This tour saw them add another few tunes to the repertoire, notably George Harrison’s Any Road. Kadlecik presumably brought that one in: none of the GD have ever performed it, but it’s in JK’s solo catalogue. It came up twice. Aside from that, two sets of lyrics were resurrected from the depths of the Dead catalogue. Spoonful made an appearance in Baltimore on the 17th, sandwiched within Smokestack Lightning. The songs are essentially the same: Weir sang the lyrics but the tune never changed (the same applies Women Are Smarter, Aiko Aiko and Day-O; see 7/6 and 12/31/87). They also resurrected Brent’s Hey Jude reprise at the end of Dear Mr. Fantasy, also in Baltimore. Again, the chord structure doesn’t change: Kadlecik sang the Fantasy lines while the others sang Hey Jude. Finally, the crowd at Madison Square Garden was treated to Furthur’s first performance of Weather Report Prelude>Part 1. The catalogue now stands at an unheard-of 197 tunes (though there is room for debate on the afore-mentioned Spoonful/Hey Jude front, or over how to count the Weather Report or Terrapin sections)
This tour marked a bit of a turning point for the band. First of all, there was an early element of “auto-pilot” reminiscent of Dead tours. The band is getting fully comfortable with each other and the material is well ingrained, which means that they can perform by the book relatively easily. Thus, the first couple shows were tight but conservative. There were also a few songs sprinkled throughout the tour with sloppy intros or iffy changes; a corollary, no doubt, of having such a large repertoire. The second thing was more pronounced arc to the tour compared to the more even quality of the last two outings. There was a high-water mark in Cincinnati, about halfway through, followed by a lull that did not really swing back up until MSG. It wasn’t a deep trough, but noticeable.
Phil’s comments in Chicago reveal something about the band’s more staid philosophy these days. The 11/12 show was, to my ears, surprisingly experimental (just as I had finished telling someone that I thought they were being too conservative…). When Phil came up for his Donor Rap, he thanked the crowd for indulging “interesting asides,” and sorta-kinda apologized for what “some might call … noodling.” In fairness, there were some loose moments in Dark Star and Viola Lee, but it was not so long ago that Phil was talking about how much he loved meltdown moments when anything can happen (Bass Player magazine, May ’09). Perhaps Phil has suddenly changed, but Weir has always run a real tight ship, and maybe Phil is coming around to the idea.
Speaking of Weir: the man has finally (finally!) developed the ability to power through a verse when he doesn’t remember the first line. For years, when he did not have the whole thing in his head, he would just not sing, shaking his head with a grin while the crowd inevitably cheered. Recently it’s been getting almost worrisome. Everybody forgets lyrics, but the solution is to sing whatever lyric comes into your head until you get the rest right. On one hand, the songsmith in Weir seems to demand that he tell the story correctly (In the RD days, he at least once stopped a tune altogether to start the verses over in order); on the other, since he steps to the mic, everybody notices when he doesn’t have it right and it interrupts the song (and gets him bad press in the bargain). Anyhow, this tour marked the first time I’ve noticed him singing whatever line comes up and catching himself after. And I can’t imagine that anyone walked out of the Baltimore show complaining that the third verse of Black-Throated Wind didn’t quite make sense. Overall, July’s Nokia show notwithstanding, Weir’s memory is much more reliable these days. There were as few flubs from Weir as from Kadlecik.
After thirteen years on the bus, Jeff Chimenti is the most consistently original member of the band. He took up piano at age 4 and he studied classical music for about ten years. He switched to jazz in high school and kept at it for another ten, eventually touring with Dave Ellis. That connection brought him to RatDog in 1997, and on to the Other Ones/The Dead starting in ‘02. (He has also played variously with Pete Escovedo, Dave MacNab, Les Claypool, and String Cheese) I’ve previously mentioned his solidity in the context of Unbroken Chain, Big River etc., but as a general rule, perhaps due to his broad background, his contributions are surprisingly fresh. Franklin’s Tower in Reading, Money For Gasoline in Baltimore, and the intro piece to Two Djinn at MSG are good examples. He had ample time to practice the latter piece over the ten-plus years it was in the RatDog catalogue, but he never really settles on a particular feel the way most players will. And he can get a crowd worked up like few others.
Furthur continues to experiment with setlist orders and song pairings. Longtime pair China and Rider are no longer necessarily a pair or even bookends; Viola Lee Blues, which has for over a decade been a sort of mortar-piece that ties most of a set together, was a single tune at MSG on the 21st; Caution and Turn On Your Lovelight appeared in first sets – and not as closers… Songs also continue to get tweaked here and there; Black Peter has a new background vocal arrangement in the jam segment, The Music Never Stopped now ends on a vocal line, Colors Of The Rain seems to change every performance, Dear Prudence has a new chord in the chorus, they’re reworking Hard to Handle… The new transition (>!, where the next tune starts on the 4th beat of the previous one) made a half-dozen appearances; and the Phil-led transitional jams are working better and better… Old dogs, new tricks.
The Reading show and the second MSG show were some of the best, in my opinion. A few other highlights: check out Big Bad Blues and Liberty in Ames, IA, Eyes in St. Louis, Dear Prudence in Chicago and Hard To Handle>Dear Mr. Fantasy in Baltimore. I can’t really link any of the transition jams, since they’re neither tracked nor labeled, but they’re worth keeping an ear out for.
Going forward, Phil and Weir are hosting the annual Unbroken Chain Foundation fundraiser in mid-December; Furthur will play San Francisco for New Year’s; Weir/Wasserman/Lane (also the Rhythm Devils) are scheduled on Jam Cruise 9 in early January; and Furthur just announced three February shows in Colorado.
Up Next: I’m listening to the Spring ’89 GD tour. It’s long, so it might be a few weeks before you get a post.
This tour saw them add another few tunes to the repertoire, notably George Harrison’s Any Road. Kadlecik presumably brought that one in: none of the GD have ever performed it, but it’s in JK’s solo catalogue. It came up twice. Aside from that, two sets of lyrics were resurrected from the depths of the Dead catalogue. Spoonful made an appearance in Baltimore on the 17th, sandwiched within Smokestack Lightning. The songs are essentially the same: Weir sang the lyrics but the tune never changed (the same applies Women Are Smarter, Aiko Aiko and Day-O; see 7/6 and 12/31/87). They also resurrected Brent’s Hey Jude reprise at the end of Dear Mr. Fantasy, also in Baltimore. Again, the chord structure doesn’t change: Kadlecik sang the Fantasy lines while the others sang Hey Jude. Finally, the crowd at Madison Square Garden was treated to Furthur’s first performance of Weather Report Prelude>Part 1. The catalogue now stands at an unheard-of 197 tunes (though there is room for debate on the afore-mentioned Spoonful/Hey Jude front, or over how to count the Weather Report or Terrapin sections)
This tour marked a bit of a turning point for the band. First of all, there was an early element of “auto-pilot” reminiscent of Dead tours. The band is getting fully comfortable with each other and the material is well ingrained, which means that they can perform by the book relatively easily. Thus, the first couple shows were tight but conservative. There were also a few songs sprinkled throughout the tour with sloppy intros or iffy changes; a corollary, no doubt, of having such a large repertoire. The second thing was more pronounced arc to the tour compared to the more even quality of the last two outings. There was a high-water mark in Cincinnati, about halfway through, followed by a lull that did not really swing back up until MSG. It wasn’t a deep trough, but noticeable.
Phil’s comments in Chicago reveal something about the band’s more staid philosophy these days. The 11/12 show was, to my ears, surprisingly experimental (just as I had finished telling someone that I thought they were being too conservative…). When Phil came up for his Donor Rap, he thanked the crowd for indulging “interesting asides,” and sorta-kinda apologized for what “some might call … noodling.” In fairness, there were some loose moments in Dark Star and Viola Lee, but it was not so long ago that Phil was talking about how much he loved meltdown moments when anything can happen (Bass Player magazine, May ’09). Perhaps Phil has suddenly changed, but Weir has always run a real tight ship, and maybe Phil is coming around to the idea.
Speaking of Weir: the man has finally (finally!) developed the ability to power through a verse when he doesn’t remember the first line. For years, when he did not have the whole thing in his head, he would just not sing, shaking his head with a grin while the crowd inevitably cheered. Recently it’s been getting almost worrisome. Everybody forgets lyrics, but the solution is to sing whatever lyric comes into your head until you get the rest right. On one hand, the songsmith in Weir seems to demand that he tell the story correctly (In the RD days, he at least once stopped a tune altogether to start the verses over in order); on the other, since he steps to the mic, everybody notices when he doesn’t have it right and it interrupts the song (and gets him bad press in the bargain). Anyhow, this tour marked the first time I’ve noticed him singing whatever line comes up and catching himself after. And I can’t imagine that anyone walked out of the Baltimore show complaining that the third verse of Black-Throated Wind didn’t quite make sense. Overall, July’s Nokia show notwithstanding, Weir’s memory is much more reliable these days. There were as few flubs from Weir as from Kadlecik.
After thirteen years on the bus, Jeff Chimenti is the most consistently original member of the band. He took up piano at age 4 and he studied classical music for about ten years. He switched to jazz in high school and kept at it for another ten, eventually touring with Dave Ellis. That connection brought him to RatDog in 1997, and on to the Other Ones/The Dead starting in ‘02. (He has also played variously with Pete Escovedo, Dave MacNab, Les Claypool, and String Cheese) I’ve previously mentioned his solidity in the context of Unbroken Chain, Big River etc., but as a general rule, perhaps due to his broad background, his contributions are surprisingly fresh. Franklin’s Tower in Reading, Money For Gasoline in Baltimore, and the intro piece to Two Djinn at MSG are good examples. He had ample time to practice the latter piece over the ten-plus years it was in the RatDog catalogue, but he never really settles on a particular feel the way most players will. And he can get a crowd worked up like few others.
Furthur continues to experiment with setlist orders and song pairings. Longtime pair China and Rider are no longer necessarily a pair or even bookends; Viola Lee Blues, which has for over a decade been a sort of mortar-piece that ties most of a set together, was a single tune at MSG on the 21st; Caution and Turn On Your Lovelight appeared in first sets – and not as closers… Songs also continue to get tweaked here and there; Black Peter has a new background vocal arrangement in the jam segment, The Music Never Stopped now ends on a vocal line, Colors Of The Rain seems to change every performance, Dear Prudence has a new chord in the chorus, they’re reworking Hard to Handle… The new transition (>!, where the next tune starts on the 4th beat of the previous one) made a half-dozen appearances; and the Phil-led transitional jams are working better and better… Old dogs, new tricks.
The Reading show and the second MSG show were some of the best, in my opinion. A few other highlights: check out Big Bad Blues and Liberty in Ames, IA, Eyes in St. Louis, Dear Prudence in Chicago and Hard To Handle>Dear Mr. Fantasy in Baltimore. I can’t really link any of the transition jams, since they’re neither tracked nor labeled, but they’re worth keeping an ear out for.
Going forward, Phil and Weir are hosting the annual Unbroken Chain Foundation fundraiser in mid-December; Furthur will play San Francisco for New Year’s; Weir/Wasserman/Lane (also the Rhythm Devils) are scheduled on Jam Cruise 9 in early January; and Furthur just announced three February shows in Colorado.
Up Next: I’m listening to the Spring ’89 GD tour. It’s long, so it might be a few weeks before you get a post.
Monday, November 1, 2010
Grateful Dead – Fall 1976
Thanks once again to Germain’s systematic uploads to etree, I managed to hear the entirety of the Grateful Dead’s midwest/east coast tour in the fall of 1976 and the two pairs of shows in California a week later. The band’s June “comeback tour” had consisted of 19 shows in the northeast and Illinois. They had played a six-show run at San Francisco’s Orpheum in July; and there had been two huge shows (24 and 30K seats respectively), again in the northeast, in August. After a seven-week break (and a cancelled show in London), the band started up again on September 23rd in Durham, NC, and played nine shows, wrapping up in Detroit, MI, on October 3rd. Two shows in Oakland and two more in Los Angeles would be the last until New Year’s Eve.
The band was recently back from its “hiatus.” Apart from the four shows the band played in and around San Francisco in 1975, they had also spent weeks in Weir’s new studio jamming and working up new material, released two GD albums and several more solo efforts, and got the Grateful Dead Movie under way. As McNally tells it, the break in touring was forced on the band by the sheer un-sustainability of the operation as it was in 1974. Not only was the Wall of Sound a financial sinkhole, but rampant drug use was becoming a real hindrance to both music and interpersonal relations and the laissez-faire business model had resulted in a bloated crew and inefficient management. As Danny Rifkin succinctly put it in a post-tour meeting in August ’74: “I’m not having fun any more.” The announcement within the organization was phrased in such a way as to encourage people to find work elsewhere, but notwithstanding Bill Graham’s “the last one” gimmick at the October 20th, 1974, show, not everyone expected the break to be permanent.
(Between October ’74 and June ’76, Phil met, married and divorced a woman named Lila; Rock Scully was arrested over a drug deal and would do some jail time (bunking with HR Halderman); Robbie Taylor – to this day Phil’s stage manager – came aboard, working at Weir’s studio; Garcia separated from Mountain Girl and moved in with Deborah Koons; Weir split from girlfriend Frankie, whom he’d been with since mid-‘69; Billy married his third wife, Shelly; Lenny Hart died of natural causes; and Mickey slowly rejoined the band even though he would not appear on Blues For Allah.)
By mid- ’76 the organization had been stripped down a bit and various changes made to booking and equipment use, but things weren’t perfect by any means. The biggest persisting problem was the band’s record company. Grateful Dead Record and the Round Records subsidiary were proving more trouble than they were worth. Despite creative and quality control, the band ran up against counterfeiters and had an insufficient distribution network that led to a partnership with United Artists. The whole self-production effort finally fell apart in July when Ron Rakow, on board since the Carousel days, author of the So What Papers and head of GD records, got wind of his impending termination and made off with $225,000 in distribution advance money from UA. On top of that, Rakow had invested in a dead-end Hell’s Angels film and borrowed money to keep the company afloat. Financially, the band was not in good shape.
They would sign and remain with Arista in September 1976, definitively abandoning GD Records (and UA).
That same month, longtime friend Rex Jackson died. He had originally come down from Hermiston, OR, through a Kesey connection, with Sonny Heard and Ram Rod in 1968 and joined up with the band as a roadie. After a stint on the Rolling Stones tour of November ‘69 he returned to the GD and worked his way up to manager (‘75-6). He fathered a daughter, Cassidy (as in Cassidy), by Eileen Law, and a son, Cole, by Betty Cantor. Ironically having incited a 1974 “drug bonfire” in Europe in response to the rampant cocaine use, Rex’s newfound free time coupled with his rock-band drug connections got the better of him and he drove off the side of the road one night on his way home.
Such were the conditions under which the Grateful Dead took to the road in late September 1976.
The band’s sound had changed significantly during the break. Perhaps most significant was the return of Mickey and new swing tempos. There was a very intentional and deliberate feel to the music in this period that I like very much: it left room for everyone to have a say and contributed, I think, to the adventurous nature of some of the tunes (more on that later).
Phil was playing a fretless bass this tour, as he would again on the spring ’77 tour. While the most evident manifestation was in the introduction to Scarlet Begonias, it also contributed a wider range in open-ended passages. He dropped that bass a little while later – I think because the fretlessness was unnecessary to his style – but was in rare form throughout the tour. Here’s a jaw-dropping little lick that will give you an idea what he was capable of (at 0:25). nor was he averse to throwing some chords around if things were getting dull.
But the most distinctive element of the sound in this period might be Jerry’s Travis Bean guitar. Recognizable by a T-shaped cutout in the headstock, it was the first of his guitars with an effects loop. He would hold on to it until he got a refurbished Wolf back from Doug Irwin in fall 1977. It had an unprecedentedly bright, clean midrange that was ideally suited to the fast runs of Samson or Big River, and defines to my ears the best days of Scarlet Begonias. It could get a bit screechy in the high end though.
A word about Keith and Donna: they were far from a new addition to the band, but I haven’t really paid attention to their contributions pre-hiatus. Keith was never particularly high in the mix, but I think part of it was on purpose. He was a very colorful player but also very self-effacing. During the first few nights of the tour, he had a few real pretty absent-minded noodles between songs that showed off his abilities, but there were rather few instances where he took off in his solos, preferring instead to play safer, chord-based lines. Nonetheless, he was still alert and tight – it would be another year at least before he started to fall flat in his contributions. It's apparent, meanwhile, that Donna had a very beautiful melodic range but could not cope with the louder stuff. She sang beautifully on most ballads, particularly High Time and Looks Like Rain. Songs like Dancin’ or Playin’ In The Band demanded more power than she could comfortably put forth, and she was often both straining and low in the mix.
The fall tour was atypical in that it took longer than most tours to get rolling but didn’t taper off. I noted in my last post that the band wasn’t always tight: a certain disorganization persisted for about half the tour, with confusion in the arrangements and the odd blown change. I also noticed that there were 1-to-2-minute breaks between tunes, suggesting either technical issues or uncertainty about how to structure the sets. It is difficult to pinpoint when these breaks got shorter because many of the circulating recordings have had them removed. By the time they wrapped up in LA, however, things were moving smoothly. Over those three weeks, the band’s facility with the material improved steadily and there was none of the usual end-of-tour fatigue: perhaps the relative shortness of the tour and the several days of rest between the last two pairs helped sustain the energy.
The long pressure-free jam sessions at Weir’s had yielded a lot of new material. The Music Never Stopped, for example, grew out of repeated workouts on a Weir progression called Hollywood Cantata. Aside from Music were Help-Slip-Frank, Samson and five other new songs. They also rearranged Dancin’, St. Stephen, Minglewood and All Over Now, which had been absent since ‘71. This material would provide the backbone of late-1976 setlists, with many songs – especially Dancin’ – making near-nightly appearances.
While the relative novelty of the material meant the occasional pitfalls, it also meant that the band had an experimental approach to a large proportion of the material they were playing. Music is a good example. The thematic succession that makes up the second half of the tune had two parts: a bridge and a jam on the main theme. At one point (9/30), there was a miscue in the change that led to a sort of awkward jam before everyone came back to the same page. As the tour went on, that awkward moment was repeated intentionally, cued by Phil, and made for a third theme. By the last show, it was gone again. Another moment materialized out of haphazard noodles, becoming what was labeled Orange Tango Jam on Dick’s Picks 20. That being a favorite jam of mine I waited for it as I was listening through the tour and I noticed that the odd lick or effect reminiscent of that jam were peppered throughout, both before and after the night of the jam itself.
A different sort of improvisation stemmed from the new Drums interlude. Drums were a new addition to the sets: usually confined to a few minutes and involving little more than the regular drum kits, they were not always a nightly fixture. Nevertheless, they were regular enough to occasion experimentation with respect to the set: they floated around, generally in set II, and served variously as interludes within a song or as transitions. On September 24th, they split up Slipknot and increased the tempo significantly. As the band came back in, there was a nice little jam on the faster Slipknot theme before they worked the tempo back down into Slipknot>Franklin’s.
To a certain extent, improvisation of this sort was common currency, if not a trademark, of the band’s music throughout its career. This period was nevertheless exceptionally experimental in that department.
Finally I’d like to say a word about venues. We modern-day Heads are spoiled by the circulation of so many soundboards, but it’s a double-edged sword: while it makes for great listening, it also means we often don’t get a sense of the actual rooms the band was playing in. It struck me during one of the longer audience patches that many of these places were big concrete cubes with few acoustic qualities and little intimacy. The Wall of Sound and other financial constraints had engendered the need to book ever-bigger halls. Without including Watkins Glen, the average venue in 1973 held 13,500 seats, up from 5,900 in ‘71. Even with the European tour, 1974’s average was 10,500. In ’76 they were able to go back to smaller venues in the spring, but the fall tour still took them through gyms, event centers and arenas.
All this points to the fact that this band was still struggling. They were making completely unique music for a very dedicated fan-base and that put them on a solid foundation, but they were constantly chasing their bank balance. In 1976, after ten years on the road, there was nothing to indicate that this would ever be anything more than a hand-to-mouth exercise in survival for all those involved. They were famous in their own circle but had not gained any kind of cultural notoriety in the wider world. Nobody was writing books about them (except Hank Harrison, the Warlocks’ “manager,” who published a semi-fictional account of their early days in 1973), and none of them had a retirement fund.
Here are a few highlights from the tour: St. Stephen, 9/25 (interesting stuff in the jam); Looks Like Rain, 9/27 (Keith and Donna both sound lovely); Minglewood, (for Jerry’s solo), and Johnny B. Goode from 9/28; Around and Around, 10/03 (with the double-time ending of that period); Music 10/03 (with that middle bit), Scarlet and Lazy Lightning>Supplication 10/09; and Dancin’>Wharf Rat>Dancin’ from 10/10. As a general rule, shows got better as they went along, and I would say that the tour as a whole is most interesting for its experimental aspects. It yielded two Dick’s Picks: 20 (9/25, 28) and 33 (10/09, 10). Personally, I‘m most partial to DP 20 and the Detroit show on October 3rd.
There you have it. Happy listening!
Up Next: I'm listening four Rhythm Devils shows from the most recent tour; I'll have a word about that up shortly.
The band was recently back from its “hiatus.” Apart from the four shows the band played in and around San Francisco in 1975, they had also spent weeks in Weir’s new studio jamming and working up new material, released two GD albums and several more solo efforts, and got the Grateful Dead Movie under way. As McNally tells it, the break in touring was forced on the band by the sheer un-sustainability of the operation as it was in 1974. Not only was the Wall of Sound a financial sinkhole, but rampant drug use was becoming a real hindrance to both music and interpersonal relations and the laissez-faire business model had resulted in a bloated crew and inefficient management. As Danny Rifkin succinctly put it in a post-tour meeting in August ’74: “I’m not having fun any more.” The announcement within the organization was phrased in such a way as to encourage people to find work elsewhere, but notwithstanding Bill Graham’s “the last one” gimmick at the October 20th, 1974, show, not everyone expected the break to be permanent.
(Between October ’74 and June ’76, Phil met, married and divorced a woman named Lila; Rock Scully was arrested over a drug deal and would do some jail time (bunking with HR Halderman); Robbie Taylor – to this day Phil’s stage manager – came aboard, working at Weir’s studio; Garcia separated from Mountain Girl and moved in with Deborah Koons; Weir split from girlfriend Frankie, whom he’d been with since mid-‘69; Billy married his third wife, Shelly; Lenny Hart died of natural causes; and Mickey slowly rejoined the band even though he would not appear on Blues For Allah.)
By mid- ’76 the organization had been stripped down a bit and various changes made to booking and equipment use, but things weren’t perfect by any means. The biggest persisting problem was the band’s record company. Grateful Dead Record and the Round Records subsidiary were proving more trouble than they were worth. Despite creative and quality control, the band ran up against counterfeiters and had an insufficient distribution network that led to a partnership with United Artists. The whole self-production effort finally fell apart in July when Ron Rakow, on board since the Carousel days, author of the So What Papers and head of GD records, got wind of his impending termination and made off with $225,000 in distribution advance money from UA. On top of that, Rakow had invested in a dead-end Hell’s Angels film and borrowed money to keep the company afloat. Financially, the band was not in good shape.
They would sign and remain with Arista in September 1976, definitively abandoning GD Records (and UA).
That same month, longtime friend Rex Jackson died. He had originally come down from Hermiston, OR, through a Kesey connection, with Sonny Heard and Ram Rod in 1968 and joined up with the band as a roadie. After a stint on the Rolling Stones tour of November ‘69 he returned to the GD and worked his way up to manager (‘75-6). He fathered a daughter, Cassidy (as in Cassidy), by Eileen Law, and a son, Cole, by Betty Cantor. Ironically having incited a 1974 “drug bonfire” in Europe in response to the rampant cocaine use, Rex’s newfound free time coupled with his rock-band drug connections got the better of him and he drove off the side of the road one night on his way home.
Such were the conditions under which the Grateful Dead took to the road in late September 1976.
The band’s sound had changed significantly during the break. Perhaps most significant was the return of Mickey and new swing tempos. There was a very intentional and deliberate feel to the music in this period that I like very much: it left room for everyone to have a say and contributed, I think, to the adventurous nature of some of the tunes (more on that later).
Phil was playing a fretless bass this tour, as he would again on the spring ’77 tour. While the most evident manifestation was in the introduction to Scarlet Begonias, it also contributed a wider range in open-ended passages. He dropped that bass a little while later – I think because the fretlessness was unnecessary to his style – but was in rare form throughout the tour. Here’s a jaw-dropping little lick that will give you an idea what he was capable of (at 0:25). nor was he averse to throwing some chords around if things were getting dull.
But the most distinctive element of the sound in this period might be Jerry’s Travis Bean guitar. Recognizable by a T-shaped cutout in the headstock, it was the first of his guitars with an effects loop. He would hold on to it until he got a refurbished Wolf back from Doug Irwin in fall 1977. It had an unprecedentedly bright, clean midrange that was ideally suited to the fast runs of Samson or Big River, and defines to my ears the best days of Scarlet Begonias. It could get a bit screechy in the high end though.
A word about Keith and Donna: they were far from a new addition to the band, but I haven’t really paid attention to their contributions pre-hiatus. Keith was never particularly high in the mix, but I think part of it was on purpose. He was a very colorful player but also very self-effacing. During the first few nights of the tour, he had a few real pretty absent-minded noodles between songs that showed off his abilities, but there were rather few instances where he took off in his solos, preferring instead to play safer, chord-based lines. Nonetheless, he was still alert and tight – it would be another year at least before he started to fall flat in his contributions. It's apparent, meanwhile, that Donna had a very beautiful melodic range but could not cope with the louder stuff. She sang beautifully on most ballads, particularly High Time and Looks Like Rain. Songs like Dancin’ or Playin’ In The Band demanded more power than she could comfortably put forth, and she was often both straining and low in the mix.
The fall tour was atypical in that it took longer than most tours to get rolling but didn’t taper off. I noted in my last post that the band wasn’t always tight: a certain disorganization persisted for about half the tour, with confusion in the arrangements and the odd blown change. I also noticed that there were 1-to-2-minute breaks between tunes, suggesting either technical issues or uncertainty about how to structure the sets. It is difficult to pinpoint when these breaks got shorter because many of the circulating recordings have had them removed. By the time they wrapped up in LA, however, things were moving smoothly. Over those three weeks, the band’s facility with the material improved steadily and there was none of the usual end-of-tour fatigue: perhaps the relative shortness of the tour and the several days of rest between the last two pairs helped sustain the energy.
The long pressure-free jam sessions at Weir’s had yielded a lot of new material. The Music Never Stopped, for example, grew out of repeated workouts on a Weir progression called Hollywood Cantata. Aside from Music were Help-Slip-Frank, Samson and five other new songs. They also rearranged Dancin’, St. Stephen, Minglewood and All Over Now, which had been absent since ‘71. This material would provide the backbone of late-1976 setlists, with many songs – especially Dancin’ – making near-nightly appearances.
While the relative novelty of the material meant the occasional pitfalls, it also meant that the band had an experimental approach to a large proportion of the material they were playing. Music is a good example. The thematic succession that makes up the second half of the tune had two parts: a bridge and a jam on the main theme. At one point (9/30), there was a miscue in the change that led to a sort of awkward jam before everyone came back to the same page. As the tour went on, that awkward moment was repeated intentionally, cued by Phil, and made for a third theme. By the last show, it was gone again. Another moment materialized out of haphazard noodles, becoming what was labeled Orange Tango Jam on Dick’s Picks 20. That being a favorite jam of mine I waited for it as I was listening through the tour and I noticed that the odd lick or effect reminiscent of that jam were peppered throughout, both before and after the night of the jam itself.
A different sort of improvisation stemmed from the new Drums interlude. Drums were a new addition to the sets: usually confined to a few minutes and involving little more than the regular drum kits, they were not always a nightly fixture. Nevertheless, they were regular enough to occasion experimentation with respect to the set: they floated around, generally in set II, and served variously as interludes within a song or as transitions. On September 24th, they split up Slipknot and increased the tempo significantly. As the band came back in, there was a nice little jam on the faster Slipknot theme before they worked the tempo back down into Slipknot>Franklin’s.
To a certain extent, improvisation of this sort was common currency, if not a trademark, of the band’s music throughout its career. This period was nevertheless exceptionally experimental in that department.
Finally I’d like to say a word about venues. We modern-day Heads are spoiled by the circulation of so many soundboards, but it’s a double-edged sword: while it makes for great listening, it also means we often don’t get a sense of the actual rooms the band was playing in. It struck me during one of the longer audience patches that many of these places were big concrete cubes with few acoustic qualities and little intimacy. The Wall of Sound and other financial constraints had engendered the need to book ever-bigger halls. Without including Watkins Glen, the average venue in 1973 held 13,500 seats, up from 5,900 in ‘71. Even with the European tour, 1974’s average was 10,500. In ’76 they were able to go back to smaller venues in the spring, but the fall tour still took them through gyms, event centers and arenas.
All this points to the fact that this band was still struggling. They were making completely unique music for a very dedicated fan-base and that put them on a solid foundation, but they were constantly chasing their bank balance. In 1976, after ten years on the road, there was nothing to indicate that this would ever be anything more than a hand-to-mouth exercise in survival for all those involved. They were famous in their own circle but had not gained any kind of cultural notoriety in the wider world. Nobody was writing books about them (except Hank Harrison, the Warlocks’ “manager,” who published a semi-fictional account of their early days in 1973), and none of them had a retirement fund.
Here are a few highlights from the tour: St. Stephen, 9/25 (interesting stuff in the jam); Looks Like Rain, 9/27 (Keith and Donna both sound lovely); Minglewood, (for Jerry’s solo), and Johnny B. Goode from 9/28; Around and Around, 10/03 (with the double-time ending of that period); Music 10/03 (with that middle bit), Scarlet and Lazy Lightning>Supplication 10/09; and Dancin’>Wharf Rat>Dancin’ from 10/10. As a general rule, shows got better as they went along, and I would say that the tour as a whole is most interesting for its experimental aspects. It yielded two Dick’s Picks: 20 (9/25, 28) and 33 (10/09, 10). Personally, I‘m most partial to DP 20 and the Detroit show on October 3rd.
There you have it. Happy listening!
Up Next: I'm listening four Rhythm Devils shows from the most recent tour; I'll have a word about that up shortly.
Friday, October 15, 2010
Furthur - Fall 2010
Furthur played a nine-date west coast tour in September. They had had a six-week break beforehand (barring a one-off in Golden Gate Park), and are scheduled for another before hitting the Midwest and East Coast in November. They also just announced two shows to wrap up the year in San Francisco, putting this year’s show total at a healthy 82.
September’s outing saw the premiere of three new songs, bringing their songbook to a total of 193 tunes. Two of those songs have their origins in previously written material and feature lyrics by Phil’s son Brian Lesh (with some indirect input from Robert Hunter). The full story appeared in a Jambands.com article, but the broad strokes are as follows. Having heard an outtake from David Crosby’s If Only I Could Remember My Name, Brian built on the only lyric (“Gonna let the mountain be my home”) and wrote a song for his own band. His mother Jill thereafter dug up an old set of Hunter lyrics originally intended to complete Crosby’s, upon which Brian and Phil retooled the song to incorporate all the elements. This yielded Furthur’s The Mountain Song, premiered in Oregon on the 17th and played two more times thereafter. I personally like it very much; it has a great thematic suite, like Unbroken Chain, and a lot of energy.
Brian’s second contribution to the songbook comes from Olla Belle Reed’s High On A Mountain, which has a long tradition of interpretations. Phil having reworked the tune himself, it fell to Brian to write the three new verses that complete Furthur’s version, performed in Redmond and at Red Rocks.
Finally, we were treated to one performance of Weir’s Big Bad Blues. This tune was posted, in its embryonic stages, on Weir’s facebook page a while back and sounded pretty simple and generic, with only two verses and a chorus. The performed song was much more interesting; a long, funky blues with three new verses and a nice long jam sandwiched between a very cool new bridge.
There is more funk in the band’s sound these days. There has been an undercurrent at least as far back as the Crusader Rabbit Stealth Band in 2000, but it was seldom developed into actual songs (barring Shakedown and Viola Lee) until now. I noted the Schoolgirl from last tour and now Big Bad Blues. In addition, JC funked up Stagger Lee and Come Together, and On the Road Again got a full treatment.
Another new trick appeared, this time in the transitions. They can segue seamlessly from one tune to the next (>), they can transition with a jam (>jam>), they can end one tune and start the next immediately (.>), and now they’ve come up with a new way which I’m tempted to dub “>!” because it’s inherently surprising. It involves starting the next tune on the ending chord of the previous one: the tune doesn’t resolve, and the 4th beat becomes the 1st of the new bar. They did it at least twice this tour and I hope they do more of it: it keeps everybody on their toes.
Of Furthur’s revamped material, King Solomon’s Marbles deserves some mention. I noted – uncharitably – that Kadlecik had had a little trouble with the form when they first started playing it. It was originally written and recorded during the hiatus, at a time when I think they felt the desire to experiment with some complex arrangements. Consequently, it is a rather dense progression that takes some serious attention and work to get just right. They finally nailed it from start to finish in Santa Barbara on the 20th. The second performance of the tour, on the closing night at Red Rocks, saw them start to really make an original go of it, with Chimenti in particular finding some very original things to say in his solo section. I’m glad to see a substantially new interpretation start to make some headway. The same can be said of the end of Terrapin: while the first two sections have been evolving all along, those seldom-performed sections have moved past the recital phase (for lack of a better term) and into the performance phase.
Now if JK can just get his head all the way around The Eleven…!
A few disjointed notes: Kadlecik tweaked the lyrics to Deep Elem (“Have your 20 dollars ready,” “bandits in Debellum”); the Other One has a “coming around” closing tag; Phil found a new introductory line to Colors of the Rain; the tricky vocal arrangement to Born Cross-Eyed has been settled, and China Cat and Rider seem to have been separated, performed at a week’s interval, though with the transition jam still serving as outro and into respectively.
Donor Rap: the tour opened with two show in Oregon, which Phil dedicated to Macalan (sp?) in the first real departure from his usual Donor Rap. Macalan was an Oregonian who recently donated his organs, and Phil mentioned him at both shows. It has been eleven and a half years since he’s been doing the Donor Rap and recently he’s been acknowledging that most of the audience has heard it before, and that many of them are already organ donors. There are only so many ways to say that playing at all is bittersweet moment, and that we should all emulate Cody’s courage, nobility and generosity of spirit; this was the first time that he has tried to make it immediately relevant. Parenthetically, Phil has been much more genial in his donor raps this tour than he was over the summer: a word about the rain and the cold in the first few nights, a nod to the renovations at the venue in Vegas, and he repeated how he absolutely loves playing at Red Rocks.
In closing, I’d like to say something that will likely be extremely unpopular: in some ways, Furthur is a better band than the Grateful Dead. Now let me explain before you throw me to the wolves. The Grateful Dead, for all their magic, cultural importance and personal significance to the tens of thousands of people who have grown up with them (myself included), are also plagued, in my opinion, with a certain hagiography. The deification of the band in Deadhead culture tends to obscure their humanity, and precludes a certain type of criticism. Of course we all agree that Garcia was a mess at certain periods, and that the last few years were a painful experience for all involved, but there is always the implicit agreement that there will never be anything that can touch the Grateful Dead. Any and all post-GD incarnations fall into the “used-to-be” column. But let’s look at it the other way: should we write off the ongoing work of the people who created the Grateful Dead to begin with? That would amount to a dismissal of (in this case) Weir and Phil’s contributions. There will never be another Jerry Garcia, just like there will never be another Shakespeare or another Pélé, but there will be other musicians and playwrights and soccer stars who build and expand on their work.
Over thirty years, there was a constant refinement and improvement of the way the Dead played. For all the fun of ’76 (which I’m currently listening to), they were not always tight, nor did the arrangements have the subtlety and texture that they would have later. These aspects continue to evolve. Furthur’s music is driven by forty-five years of development and experience. It is a more professional organization than the GDP ever was: it’s not clogged up with the complications of being the sole support of the extended GD family, it’s less claustrophobic, and in the sense that there is new blood in the band, the music is less inbred. I think the long period of frustration and ill-feelings in the late nineties attests to just how untenable that model had been.
This band is very tight and they work at it, they’re motivated, and they’re disciplined. They have, as a group, demonstrated a willingness to incorporate and develop individual interpretations of the Dead’s material. They’re sober, at least by comparison if not objectively. Phil and Bob have spent fifteen years finding a way to productively renew their body of work. I find the emotional range of the music to be broader, and the thematic progressions to be subtler and more intentional. Which is perfectly logical. Personal preference, naturally, is a different matter.
Jerry Garcia is dead: his body of work is finished and we’ll always have it, but his was a part of a larger musical organism that is still alive and no less interesting.
There. I said it.
Up next: I’m already halfway through the Dead’s 1976 fall tour. I should have a post up in two weeks. Cheers.
September’s outing saw the premiere of three new songs, bringing their songbook to a total of 193 tunes. Two of those songs have their origins in previously written material and feature lyrics by Phil’s son Brian Lesh (with some indirect input from Robert Hunter). The full story appeared in a Jambands.com article, but the broad strokes are as follows. Having heard an outtake from David Crosby’s If Only I Could Remember My Name, Brian built on the only lyric (“Gonna let the mountain be my home”) and wrote a song for his own band. His mother Jill thereafter dug up an old set of Hunter lyrics originally intended to complete Crosby’s, upon which Brian and Phil retooled the song to incorporate all the elements. This yielded Furthur’s The Mountain Song, premiered in Oregon on the 17th and played two more times thereafter. I personally like it very much; it has a great thematic suite, like Unbroken Chain, and a lot of energy.
Brian’s second contribution to the songbook comes from Olla Belle Reed’s High On A Mountain, which has a long tradition of interpretations. Phil having reworked the tune himself, it fell to Brian to write the three new verses that complete Furthur’s version, performed in Redmond and at Red Rocks.
Finally, we were treated to one performance of Weir’s Big Bad Blues. This tune was posted, in its embryonic stages, on Weir’s facebook page a while back and sounded pretty simple and generic, with only two verses and a chorus. The performed song was much more interesting; a long, funky blues with three new verses and a nice long jam sandwiched between a very cool new bridge.
There is more funk in the band’s sound these days. There has been an undercurrent at least as far back as the Crusader Rabbit Stealth Band in 2000, but it was seldom developed into actual songs (barring Shakedown and Viola Lee) until now. I noted the Schoolgirl from last tour and now Big Bad Blues. In addition, JC funked up Stagger Lee and Come Together, and On the Road Again got a full treatment.
Another new trick appeared, this time in the transitions. They can segue seamlessly from one tune to the next (>), they can transition with a jam (>jam>), they can end one tune and start the next immediately (.>), and now they’ve come up with a new way which I’m tempted to dub “>!” because it’s inherently surprising. It involves starting the next tune on the ending chord of the previous one: the tune doesn’t resolve, and the 4th beat becomes the 1st of the new bar. They did it at least twice this tour and I hope they do more of it: it keeps everybody on their toes.
Of Furthur’s revamped material, King Solomon’s Marbles deserves some mention. I noted – uncharitably – that Kadlecik had had a little trouble with the form when they first started playing it. It was originally written and recorded during the hiatus, at a time when I think they felt the desire to experiment with some complex arrangements. Consequently, it is a rather dense progression that takes some serious attention and work to get just right. They finally nailed it from start to finish in Santa Barbara on the 20th. The second performance of the tour, on the closing night at Red Rocks, saw them start to really make an original go of it, with Chimenti in particular finding some very original things to say in his solo section. I’m glad to see a substantially new interpretation start to make some headway. The same can be said of the end of Terrapin: while the first two sections have been evolving all along, those seldom-performed sections have moved past the recital phase (for lack of a better term) and into the performance phase.
Now if JK can just get his head all the way around The Eleven…!
A few disjointed notes: Kadlecik tweaked the lyrics to Deep Elem (“Have your 20 dollars ready,” “bandits in Debellum”); the Other One has a “coming around” closing tag; Phil found a new introductory line to Colors of the Rain; the tricky vocal arrangement to Born Cross-Eyed has been settled, and China Cat and Rider seem to have been separated, performed at a week’s interval, though with the transition jam still serving as outro and into respectively.
Donor Rap: the tour opened with two show in Oregon, which Phil dedicated to Macalan (sp?) in the first real departure from his usual Donor Rap. Macalan was an Oregonian who recently donated his organs, and Phil mentioned him at both shows. It has been eleven and a half years since he’s been doing the Donor Rap and recently he’s been acknowledging that most of the audience has heard it before, and that many of them are already organ donors. There are only so many ways to say that playing at all is bittersweet moment, and that we should all emulate Cody’s courage, nobility and generosity of spirit; this was the first time that he has tried to make it immediately relevant. Parenthetically, Phil has been much more genial in his donor raps this tour than he was over the summer: a word about the rain and the cold in the first few nights, a nod to the renovations at the venue in Vegas, and he repeated how he absolutely loves playing at Red Rocks.
In closing, I’d like to say something that will likely be extremely unpopular: in some ways, Furthur is a better band than the Grateful Dead. Now let me explain before you throw me to the wolves. The Grateful Dead, for all their magic, cultural importance and personal significance to the tens of thousands of people who have grown up with them (myself included), are also plagued, in my opinion, with a certain hagiography. The deification of the band in Deadhead culture tends to obscure their humanity, and precludes a certain type of criticism. Of course we all agree that Garcia was a mess at certain periods, and that the last few years were a painful experience for all involved, but there is always the implicit agreement that there will never be anything that can touch the Grateful Dead. Any and all post-GD incarnations fall into the “used-to-be” column. But let’s look at it the other way: should we write off the ongoing work of the people who created the Grateful Dead to begin with? That would amount to a dismissal of (in this case) Weir and Phil’s contributions. There will never be another Jerry Garcia, just like there will never be another Shakespeare or another Pélé, but there will be other musicians and playwrights and soccer stars who build and expand on their work.
Over thirty years, there was a constant refinement and improvement of the way the Dead played. For all the fun of ’76 (which I’m currently listening to), they were not always tight, nor did the arrangements have the subtlety and texture that they would have later. These aspects continue to evolve. Furthur’s music is driven by forty-five years of development and experience. It is a more professional organization than the GDP ever was: it’s not clogged up with the complications of being the sole support of the extended GD family, it’s less claustrophobic, and in the sense that there is new blood in the band, the music is less inbred. I think the long period of frustration and ill-feelings in the late nineties attests to just how untenable that model had been.
This band is very tight and they work at it, they’re motivated, and they’re disciplined. They have, as a group, demonstrated a willingness to incorporate and develop individual interpretations of the Dead’s material. They’re sober, at least by comparison if not objectively. Phil and Bob have spent fifteen years finding a way to productively renew their body of work. I find the emotional range of the music to be broader, and the thematic progressions to be subtler and more intentional. Which is perfectly logical. Personal preference, naturally, is a different matter.
Jerry Garcia is dead: his body of work is finished and we’ll always have it, but his was a part of a larger musical organism that is still alive and no less interesting.
There. I said it.
Up next: I’m already halfway through the Dead’s 1976 fall tour. I should have a post up in two weeks. Cheers.
Sunday, September 26, 2010
Grateful Dead - Europe, October 1981
The Grateful Dead went to Europe seven times in their thirty-year history and cancelled at least two other expeditions. In 1981, they went twice. The first trip, consisting of five shows in March, was a favor to Pete Townsend: the Who were breaking up and Townsend had called to ask if the band could possibly cover some dates in London. They stayed an extra few days to share a bill – and a European telecast – with the Who in Germany. In September, the Dead flew back across the pond for the first extended tour since the acclaimed 1972 visit, playing thirteen shows in seven countries between September 30th and October 19th.
The planned venues averaged 3-5,000 seats (with the notable exception of Copenhagen’s Forum Theater at about 13,000), significantly smaller that the stateside average of about 12K though not out of line with venues in Cleveland, Pittsburgh or DeMoines.
Soundboards (including at least three Millers) circulate of all but two of the shows. They all recently appeared on Workingman’s Tracker as part of the ongoing 1981 project, along with video of the shows at the Melkweg in Amsterdam (the Garcia-Weir acoustic show and the two GD performances).
After three shows in the American northeast, the band flew out and played their first European gig in Edinburg. The mood was grumpy. Technical issues caused delays and gripes from the various band-members and left space for the audience to holler at the band. Of course, the audience was Scottish, and the band can be heard talking, both among themselves and to the audience: “I can’t understand a fuckin’ word.” The show was decent.
Things changed when they hit London, however. October 4th saw a much more relaxed Weir bantering before the show, notably polling the audience as to whether they felt that Springtime for Hitler was in good taste (The Producers had been on TV the previous night). Over the four nights they played at the Rainbow Theater they built up a head of steam that would carry them through most of the rest of the tour. While most of the shows were, for my money, real good, I would point to London 10.6, Copenhagen 10.8 and Bremen 10.10 as the highlights.
I noted with a smile how Weir handled the different countries. When they went over to Germany, he made a point to e-nun-ci-ate clear-ly, and instead of his falsetto “Thank you”, it was “Danke;” Amsterdam might as well have been the US (the aud tapes reveal that a lot of the audience were in fact Americans); in Paris, he managed “intermission s’il vous plait” and a mangled “Bonne nuit et bons rêves.”
There were a total of 92 songs in the repertoire for the tour, including a Blues for Allah jam and four Spanish Jams (the latter having made a big comeback that year). The most frequent tunes were Althea and Minglewood, but aside from that, Garcia had a much broader repertoire than Weir did. Of the other most frequent tunes, most were Weir’s: Rooster, Sugar Mags, Sailor>Saint, Looks Like Rain etc. Garcia, on the other hand, had a numerous ballads like High Time or Row Jimmy that he could break out at will. This pattern holds true for the year as a whole: of the 15 most frequent songs, 13 were Weir’s. Brent only had two songs in the repertoire: Good Time Blues and Far from Me, the latter of which he only played once, in Amsterdam.
Brent, however, was a force to be reckoned with musically. He was in great form throughout the tour. He was always on point, Good Times was always a winner and there are a few moments that bear mentioning as well: his solos on FOTD on 10.4 and Scarlet 10.8, a fun little oom-pa-pa riff at the beginning of El Paso in Bremen, 10.10, and a solid lead on the only impromptu jam of the tour in Ruesselheim on the 13th.
The Drumz section now stretched out to nearly twenty minutes, with the drum solos taking up about 60 percent of that time. Almost every day, after a few minutes on the kits, Bill broke out the talking drum and Mickey his tar; they would give each other a few minutes more or less alone before closing out with the rack-toms. They were quite attached to those drums, it appears: on the Amsterdam jaunt, the only elements of the band’s gear that made it were Phil’s bass and those two drums.
Amsterdam's unscheduled Oops Concerts get a lot of attention as one of the band’s more spontaneous adventures. On a day off in Germany a week before, Garcia and Weir had gone over to Amsterdam to meet some friends of Rock Scully’s, including Basketball Diaries author Jim Carroll, William Burroughs, and a poet laureate named Vinkenoop with a tennis-champion wife and the world’s largest library of psychedelia. That night, Weir and Jerry had followed Jim Carroll’s rock/poetry set at the Melkweg with a 35-minute acoustic duet. The next day, back in Germany, the band heard that their two gigs in the south of France had been rained out, and they faced the choice of either staying in Germany doing nothing or blowing all their money in Paris before their next gig. Garcia, Weir and Scully convinced the rest of the band and the crew to go to Amsterdam instead. The crew accepted - grudgingly - on the condition that they not have to take the equipment.
So on what Scully describes as the band’s last real adventure, the Dead played two gigs on mostly borrowed equipment in a small, sweltering 1,500-capacity club tucked away on the south side of Amsterdam. The shows were a lot of fun if only because the band seemed free of the pressures of a regular tour date and could fool around somewhat with the setlist. On the first night, Brent pulled out the only Far From Me of the year, and they played the first ever Spoonful. The second night saw them open with a rare acoustic set, and the electric set boasted the first Gloria since 1968, followed by the first Lovelight since 1972, and the band’s only performance of Hully Gully.
The following day, the band was in Paris, and two days later they closed out the tour in Barcelona, the only time they ever played in Spain.
Now, the general quality of the shows notwithstanding, some Garcia issues were coming to a head. Thanks to Scully’s otherwise flawed book, we know that his heroin habit was getting to be a problem socially. Scully relates an incident that occurred upon arrival in Scotland. Upon meeting an emissary (i.e. a courier) from local contacts at the airport, a sweaty Garcia insisted upon immediately retreating to the bathroom to get high, despite objections to the effect that customs officers were twenty feet away and their hotel ten minutes from the airport.
The way in which it affected the music is less well documented. The first thing I noticed was a general laziness in moving the show along. Setlists read Jerry.>Bob, pause, Jerry.>Bob, and so on. Weir was always ready to go with the next song. The band was used to it too; one night Mickey had to fix something between tunes and you can hear him yelling to wait a second while the closing hit of Bird Song was still ringing. The only exception to this rule was Mexicali, which Jerry starts. The grainy videos from the Melkweg show that he would walk off the stage for a sec, maybe to fiddle with his rig, maybe for a puff of a cigarette.
Weir (“Mr. Clean” at that time, according to Scully) had an active stage presence. While Garcia was less than charismatic, looking generally shaggy, nobody else seemed particularly alert either, and Bob was already the one leading, calling changes, and keeping the timing and arrangements together when it was needed. There was really only one thing Garcia could be counted on to do, and that was to call the last hit of a tune. He could be capricious as well, setting off on a jam of his own accord (the first time they went along, the second time they left the stage and it segued into drums), and he was resistant to spontaneous musical suggestions put forth by the others.
Finally, I noticed that he was starting to have trouble in the faster parts of tunes. In something that would characterize his later playing as well, he would occasionally miss notes. While he was thinking and moving in time, there would be occasions, especially in faster riffs like Cumberland or Samson, when it sounded like he was missing the string. I should stress that for the vast majority of the shows, his playing was still sharp and that the shows don’t betray a serious issue. But there was a shadow of things to come in the next few years.
Overall, his condition and attitude were getting to be too much for his band-mates. On the last night of the tour, in Barcelona, they presented Jerry with a letter, penned by Phil but signed by everyone, expressing their dissatisfaction with his behavior and musicianship. It started: “Dear Sir and Brother. You have been accused of certain high crimes and misdemeanors against the art of music. To wit: playing in your own band; never playing with any dynamics; never listening to what anyone else plays…” Considering the legendary avoidance of confrontation that characterized the organization’s inter-personal relations, I take this to be a significant step, expressing a lot more than passing frustration.
While I confess I have not listened systematically to a significant portion of 1980-82, I think this European tour is a positive representation of the musical state of the band in that period. The extended jamming on, say, Scarlet>Fire, still yielded interesting moments, especially thanks to Brent, and the more complex Weir tunes like Sailor>Saint were tight and well executed. There were fun moments, like the time Garcia segued into Around and Around so fast that Weir had to jump to the mic, after which Weir screwed around with the introduction to Good Lovin’ to keep him on his toes. Not Fade Away tended to have a nice long jam-in, Truckin’ had those new whistle blasts at the intro riff, Weir was dropping F-bombs in Looks Like Rain and Saint, and the Altheas of this period are some of my favorite. Finally, though musical issues are lurking in the wings, it’s still easy enough to ignore them, and most of the tour is definitely worth a listen.
Up next: Furthur’s on tour, so I’m listening to that. I’m a little disappointed that only three of the shows have appeared (those West Coast tapers tend to be slower than the Joe Beacons of the world), so I guess I’ll be dropping some money on Nugs.net…
The planned venues averaged 3-5,000 seats (with the notable exception of Copenhagen’s Forum Theater at about 13,000), significantly smaller that the stateside average of about 12K though not out of line with venues in Cleveland, Pittsburgh or DeMoines.
Soundboards (including at least three Millers) circulate of all but two of the shows. They all recently appeared on Workingman’s Tracker as part of the ongoing 1981 project, along with video of the shows at the Melkweg in Amsterdam (the Garcia-Weir acoustic show and the two GD performances).
After three shows in the American northeast, the band flew out and played their first European gig in Edinburg. The mood was grumpy. Technical issues caused delays and gripes from the various band-members and left space for the audience to holler at the band. Of course, the audience was Scottish, and the band can be heard talking, both among themselves and to the audience: “I can’t understand a fuckin’ word.” The show was decent.
Things changed when they hit London, however. October 4th saw a much more relaxed Weir bantering before the show, notably polling the audience as to whether they felt that Springtime for Hitler was in good taste (The Producers had been on TV the previous night). Over the four nights they played at the Rainbow Theater they built up a head of steam that would carry them through most of the rest of the tour. While most of the shows were, for my money, real good, I would point to London 10.6, Copenhagen 10.8 and Bremen 10.10 as the highlights.
I noted with a smile how Weir handled the different countries. When they went over to Germany, he made a point to e-nun-ci-ate clear-ly, and instead of his falsetto “Thank you”, it was “Danke;” Amsterdam might as well have been the US (the aud tapes reveal that a lot of the audience were in fact Americans); in Paris, he managed “intermission s’il vous plait” and a mangled “Bonne nuit et bons rêves.”
There were a total of 92 songs in the repertoire for the tour, including a Blues for Allah jam and four Spanish Jams (the latter having made a big comeback that year). The most frequent tunes were Althea and Minglewood, but aside from that, Garcia had a much broader repertoire than Weir did. Of the other most frequent tunes, most were Weir’s: Rooster, Sugar Mags, Sailor>Saint, Looks Like Rain etc. Garcia, on the other hand, had a numerous ballads like High Time or Row Jimmy that he could break out at will. This pattern holds true for the year as a whole: of the 15 most frequent songs, 13 were Weir’s. Brent only had two songs in the repertoire: Good Time Blues and Far from Me, the latter of which he only played once, in Amsterdam.
Brent, however, was a force to be reckoned with musically. He was in great form throughout the tour. He was always on point, Good Times was always a winner and there are a few moments that bear mentioning as well: his solos on FOTD on 10.4 and Scarlet 10.8, a fun little oom-pa-pa riff at the beginning of El Paso in Bremen, 10.10, and a solid lead on the only impromptu jam of the tour in Ruesselheim on the 13th.
The Drumz section now stretched out to nearly twenty minutes, with the drum solos taking up about 60 percent of that time. Almost every day, after a few minutes on the kits, Bill broke out the talking drum and Mickey his tar; they would give each other a few minutes more or less alone before closing out with the rack-toms. They were quite attached to those drums, it appears: on the Amsterdam jaunt, the only elements of the band’s gear that made it were Phil’s bass and those two drums.
Amsterdam's unscheduled Oops Concerts get a lot of attention as one of the band’s more spontaneous adventures. On a day off in Germany a week before, Garcia and Weir had gone over to Amsterdam to meet some friends of Rock Scully’s, including Basketball Diaries author Jim Carroll, William Burroughs, and a poet laureate named Vinkenoop with a tennis-champion wife and the world’s largest library of psychedelia. That night, Weir and Jerry had followed Jim Carroll’s rock/poetry set at the Melkweg with a 35-minute acoustic duet. The next day, back in Germany, the band heard that their two gigs in the south of France had been rained out, and they faced the choice of either staying in Germany doing nothing or blowing all their money in Paris before their next gig. Garcia, Weir and Scully convinced the rest of the band and the crew to go to Amsterdam instead. The crew accepted - grudgingly - on the condition that they not have to take the equipment.
So on what Scully describes as the band’s last real adventure, the Dead played two gigs on mostly borrowed equipment in a small, sweltering 1,500-capacity club tucked away on the south side of Amsterdam. The shows were a lot of fun if only because the band seemed free of the pressures of a regular tour date and could fool around somewhat with the setlist. On the first night, Brent pulled out the only Far From Me of the year, and they played the first ever Spoonful. The second night saw them open with a rare acoustic set, and the electric set boasted the first Gloria since 1968, followed by the first Lovelight since 1972, and the band’s only performance of Hully Gully.
The following day, the band was in Paris, and two days later they closed out the tour in Barcelona, the only time they ever played in Spain.
Now, the general quality of the shows notwithstanding, some Garcia issues were coming to a head. Thanks to Scully’s otherwise flawed book, we know that his heroin habit was getting to be a problem socially. Scully relates an incident that occurred upon arrival in Scotland. Upon meeting an emissary (i.e. a courier) from local contacts at the airport, a sweaty Garcia insisted upon immediately retreating to the bathroom to get high, despite objections to the effect that customs officers were twenty feet away and their hotel ten minutes from the airport.
The way in which it affected the music is less well documented. The first thing I noticed was a general laziness in moving the show along. Setlists read Jerry.>Bob, pause, Jerry.>Bob, and so on. Weir was always ready to go with the next song. The band was used to it too; one night Mickey had to fix something between tunes and you can hear him yelling to wait a second while the closing hit of Bird Song was still ringing. The only exception to this rule was Mexicali, which Jerry starts. The grainy videos from the Melkweg show that he would walk off the stage for a sec, maybe to fiddle with his rig, maybe for a puff of a cigarette.
Weir (“Mr. Clean” at that time, according to Scully) had an active stage presence. While Garcia was less than charismatic, looking generally shaggy, nobody else seemed particularly alert either, and Bob was already the one leading, calling changes, and keeping the timing and arrangements together when it was needed. There was really only one thing Garcia could be counted on to do, and that was to call the last hit of a tune. He could be capricious as well, setting off on a jam of his own accord (the first time they went along, the second time they left the stage and it segued into drums), and he was resistant to spontaneous musical suggestions put forth by the others.
Finally, I noticed that he was starting to have trouble in the faster parts of tunes. In something that would characterize his later playing as well, he would occasionally miss notes. While he was thinking and moving in time, there would be occasions, especially in faster riffs like Cumberland or Samson, when it sounded like he was missing the string. I should stress that for the vast majority of the shows, his playing was still sharp and that the shows don’t betray a serious issue. But there was a shadow of things to come in the next few years.
Overall, his condition and attitude were getting to be too much for his band-mates. On the last night of the tour, in Barcelona, they presented Jerry with a letter, penned by Phil but signed by everyone, expressing their dissatisfaction with his behavior and musicianship. It started: “Dear Sir and Brother. You have been accused of certain high crimes and misdemeanors against the art of music. To wit: playing in your own band; never playing with any dynamics; never listening to what anyone else plays…” Considering the legendary avoidance of confrontation that characterized the organization’s inter-personal relations, I take this to be a significant step, expressing a lot more than passing frustration.
While I confess I have not listened systematically to a significant portion of 1980-82, I think this European tour is a positive representation of the musical state of the band in that period. The extended jamming on, say, Scarlet>Fire, still yielded interesting moments, especially thanks to Brent, and the more complex Weir tunes like Sailor>Saint were tight and well executed. There were fun moments, like the time Garcia segued into Around and Around so fast that Weir had to jump to the mic, after which Weir screwed around with the introduction to Good Lovin’ to keep him on his toes. Not Fade Away tended to have a nice long jam-in, Truckin’ had those new whistle blasts at the intro riff, Weir was dropping F-bombs in Looks Like Rain and Saint, and the Altheas of this period are some of my favorite. Finally, though musical issues are lurking in the wings, it’s still easy enough to ignore them, and most of the tour is definitely worth a listen.
Up next: Furthur’s on tour, so I’m listening to that. I’m a little disappointed that only three of the shows have appeared (those West Coast tapers tend to be slower than the Joe Beacons of the world), so I guess I’ll be dropping some money on Nugs.net…
Saturday, August 21, 2010
Rhythm Devils - July 2010
Mickey Hart and Bill Kreutzmann have re-formed the Rhythm Devils. Starting on July 16th, the band played eleven shows in the Mountain region and on the West Coast, closing out the tour at the Gathering of the Vibes on the 31st. Venues were varied, from a drive-in theater in Idaho to the venerable Orpheum Theater in Flagstaff, with capacities from 700 to 6,000 (not including the Vibes), in the same circuit as Michael Franti, J.J. Grey or Yonder Mountain. They started a North East leg on August 21st; they will play Chicago’s House of Blues, the Sherman Theater and the Hampton Beach Casino Ballroom, venues frequented by RatDog and Furthur (the northeast has always been Deadhead territory).
The lineup has changed considerably since the Rhythm Devils’ last incarnation a few years ago, which had included Mike Gordon, Jen Durkin and Steve Kimock. The new personnel has jam-scene favorite Keller Williams on guitar and lead vocals, advantageous because he knows the words to a broad section of the Grateful Dead’s catalogue. The other guitar slot has been filled by 22-year-old Brit Davy Knowles, a founding member of Back Door Slam, who has shared bills with The Who, Government Mule and George Thorogood. The bass slot is held by Government Mule member Andy Hess (whose credits also include Tina Turner, David Byrne, the Black Crowes and John Scofield), and who filled in for Kreutzmann’s Seven Walkers band in June. Rounding out the lineup is talking drum master Sikiru Adepoju, a musical cohort of Mickey Hart’s since the mid eighties who recorded with Stevie Wonder and Santana and has played with Babatunde Olatunji for 17 years.
This tour’s rotation counted 45 songs, with a dozen originals forming the backbone of the setlists; the vast majority of the other songs are from the Grateful Dead catalogue. Aside from that, Davy Knowles contributed Sultans of Swing (the first song he ever learned on guitar, he says), they played David Crosby’s Almost Cut My Hair, Hey Bo Diddley (6 performances), and Neil Young’s Cortez The Killer. Unfortunately, very few shows trickled down through the usual channels: I only managed to get a hold of the Tucson show on the 28th and the Vibes show from the 31st.
The addition of Keller Williams gave the band the freedom to pick liberally from the GD catalogue, so that a lot of those tunes were only performed once or twice. This is nice for the band, and makes for a fair amount of diversity in the shows, but by the same token they did not have time to really work up the Dead stuff: there is nothing new or special about that material. On the other hand, their original material is pretty good. Without the thick sonic atmosphere boasted by previous incarnations, these Rhythm Devils have worked up some new arrangements for Fountains of Wood and Fire on the Mountain (mainly coming from Mickey, it sounds like), and the jam section of Strange World was great both times I heard it.
Overall, this is a young band in the sense that they have yet to really jell around a particular sound. For the moment, the Dead material sounds like it’s being played by a cover band, albeit a perfectly competent one. Davy Knowles has garnered a fair amount of praise for his talents, and knows his way around rock and blues. Andy Hess has all the experience you could ask for but comes off a bit stiff in some of the longer jam segments. Keller Williams plays great and sings well, though he doesn’t have the power and authority of Jen Durkin. It took me a little while to get used to it.
The 17 shows of the current tour, which runs though September 11th (Mickey’s 67th birthday) should give them time to work out an angle, and there are two more shows scheduled for early January 2011. I’m curious to see what happens to this band. There has already been a lineup change, with The Mother Hips’ Tim Bluhm replacing Keller, which begs the question as to what kind of commitment they’re asking of the individual members, and what kind of time-frame they have in mind for the life of the band. I’d venture that it’s not a long-term project, since it never has been in the past, and I don’t expect that they will work too hard at a seriously original sound; I think the drummers have too many other projects on the burner to commit to the Rhythm Devils.
Up Next: at the moment, I'm working through a dozen or so Miles Davis shows. I'm not very knowledgeable on that subject, so I won't post on it, but I think the next thing you'll see here is a review of the Grateful Dead's September-October 1981 European tour.
The lineup has changed considerably since the Rhythm Devils’ last incarnation a few years ago, which had included Mike Gordon, Jen Durkin and Steve Kimock. The new personnel has jam-scene favorite Keller Williams on guitar and lead vocals, advantageous because he knows the words to a broad section of the Grateful Dead’s catalogue. The other guitar slot has been filled by 22-year-old Brit Davy Knowles, a founding member of Back Door Slam, who has shared bills with The Who, Government Mule and George Thorogood. The bass slot is held by Government Mule member Andy Hess (whose credits also include Tina Turner, David Byrne, the Black Crowes and John Scofield), and who filled in for Kreutzmann’s Seven Walkers band in June. Rounding out the lineup is talking drum master Sikiru Adepoju, a musical cohort of Mickey Hart’s since the mid eighties who recorded with Stevie Wonder and Santana and has played with Babatunde Olatunji for 17 years.
This tour’s rotation counted 45 songs, with a dozen originals forming the backbone of the setlists; the vast majority of the other songs are from the Grateful Dead catalogue. Aside from that, Davy Knowles contributed Sultans of Swing (the first song he ever learned on guitar, he says), they played David Crosby’s Almost Cut My Hair, Hey Bo Diddley (6 performances), and Neil Young’s Cortez The Killer. Unfortunately, very few shows trickled down through the usual channels: I only managed to get a hold of the Tucson show on the 28th and the Vibes show from the 31st.
The addition of Keller Williams gave the band the freedom to pick liberally from the GD catalogue, so that a lot of those tunes were only performed once or twice. This is nice for the band, and makes for a fair amount of diversity in the shows, but by the same token they did not have time to really work up the Dead stuff: there is nothing new or special about that material. On the other hand, their original material is pretty good. Without the thick sonic atmosphere boasted by previous incarnations, these Rhythm Devils have worked up some new arrangements for Fountains of Wood and Fire on the Mountain (mainly coming from Mickey, it sounds like), and the jam section of Strange World was great both times I heard it.
Overall, this is a young band in the sense that they have yet to really jell around a particular sound. For the moment, the Dead material sounds like it’s being played by a cover band, albeit a perfectly competent one. Davy Knowles has garnered a fair amount of praise for his talents, and knows his way around rock and blues. Andy Hess has all the experience you could ask for but comes off a bit stiff in some of the longer jam segments. Keller Williams plays great and sings well, though he doesn’t have the power and authority of Jen Durkin. It took me a little while to get used to it.
The 17 shows of the current tour, which runs though September 11th (Mickey’s 67th birthday) should give them time to work out an angle, and there are two more shows scheduled for early January 2011. I’m curious to see what happens to this band. There has already been a lineup change, with The Mother Hips’ Tim Bluhm replacing Keller, which begs the question as to what kind of commitment they’re asking of the individual members, and what kind of time-frame they have in mind for the life of the band. I’d venture that it’s not a long-term project, since it never has been in the past, and I don’t expect that they will work too hard at a seriously original sound; I think the drummers have too many other projects on the burner to commit to the Rhythm Devils.
Up Next: at the moment, I'm working through a dozen or so Miles Davis shows. I'm not very knowledgeable on that subject, so I won't post on it, but I think the next thing you'll see here is a review of the Grateful Dead's September-October 1981 European tour.
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