RUSH vs. YES vs. THE GRATEFUL DEAD

http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-F5lO2fFr6T4/T4Y_vgGW87I/AAAAAAAABGA/EddleYRWFhc/s1600/janis%2Bpigpen.jpg

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I'm genuinely interested in what this thing that you've located is. because, sure, some of the country rock is pleasant. and some of the dead's jams are pleasant too. but man, so much of their stuff is so bland to me. their albums are so spotty. their live sets are so spotty. I seriously can't hear what makes people become so obsessed with this band and I am really trying to hear it, man!

well I mean - it's a groove, a vibe, a bunch of not-very-useful terms describe it. a feeling, a zone. which I think is why deadheads often say "well if you heard the 'dark star' from Cleveland Free Trade '72* you'd understand" - you catch a song you dig when they're in this zone where competing sloppinesses just lock into a thing that expresses not just country-rock cool-vibes (else why aren't the Burritos giant, or the New Riders? the New Riders play a lot better, the Burritos too) but this distinct character that's really complex and human and real. But also p. cosmic. The anchor imo is Garcia's tone, which imo is fantastic though I know there's also players/tone freaks on this thread who don't care for it at all. But if you do get a moment - in "Help on the Way/Slipknot/Franklin's Tower," maybe, that I think was the first tune where the groove really locked in for me - it's like a door into why people go nuts. Which you don't have to do it's perfectly ok not to dig the Dead, one weird thing about people hating on them is really nobody gives a shit if you don't like the Dead - it's not like Creedence stans who're certain you're wrong if you don't love 'em

*this is actually the best dark star afaik

Thing is, I love the Band, and always felt like the Band totally got what the Dead could only get a little at a time.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oP0KMZ__eh4

isn't it more like the other way round -- that the band are getting a lot of their shared Matter of America out via highly composed studio stuff, whereas the dead get at it by spending twenty minutes on one chord before they go back to they 'he had to diiiiiiiiiiie' bit

i think the dead's 'vibe' / 'what they are about' is hard to nail down because it's the intersection of two v different things, viz.

i. garcia/lesh/weir extended improvisational interplay -- lesh and weir never exactly just comping -- which is the manifestation of something that didn't exist much or at all in rock before the dead and certain peers of theirs. and which they were able to do on a whole range of stuff which (to me, at least, etc) makes them more interesting than jefferson airplane or quicksilver messenger service (n.b. quicksilver messenger service were way better on a bo diddley beat tho)

ii. the queer place of their songbook (by which i don't mean the songs they wrote qua songs, which were sometimes v awful) as summation of 'where popular music, narrowly considered, is at, at the end of the 60s' and too 'where popular music, more broadly considered, ended up in order to get us here'

those are good thoughts thomp

also interesting to me the way they could sometimes write really, really good songs that any songwriter would hear and say "yeah - that's the stuff" (ridiculous hit-to-miss ratio on Workingman's Dead and American Beauty for these) and then turn around and write "Here Comes Sunshine" (quiet you Wake of the Flood defenders that song is garbage) - it's weird. everybody has hits and misses but the distance between their best numbers and their worst ones is incredibly vast

What are your objections to Here Comes Sunshine again?

Another data point providing me a frame of reference is the Byrds, a band with similarly traditional roots but whose improvisation to my ears is far more sophisticated, exciting and rich than anything I've heard from the Dead.

I do find several Dead songs absolutely lovely, and wish they had more than an album or so's worth of them, spread over 30 years.

are the dead ever, like, contemporary? how do they relate to their contemporaries?

i always get the impression of them (maybe because of their fans and the tape/concert culture) that they're sort of absorbed into the universe they've made for themselves. i know that can't be quite right, because of e.g. 'touch of grey', but it seems like once they got this deal set up, it just kind of runs on noodly autopilot for 40 years like a big cloud.

whereas rush give you a pretty strong sense of their being part of the changing world, up through the 80s (and probably after but they get kind of out-of-touch after that with age, maybe?), and yes fit into their time in relation to their peers in a lot of interesting ways and then have that 80s comeback / personnel shift / sound shift.

They changed a lot over the years. Sometimes they engaged with contemporary music, sometimes they didn't. In the early 70s, they obviously did the cocaine cowboy thing that the Stones and the Burritos had been into a year or two before. They messed around with disco and funk in the late 70s. The 80s they dealt in a lot of pop country and yacht rock. A lot of the stuff they were just following their own paths, or more obscure paths, songwriting-wise.

What are your objections to Here Comes Sunshine again?

it's just a terrible song

But there are better means of judging a song than by how good it is, maaaaaaaan.

that's actually true - I have live versions where they play that song really well and I can hear that they're together - plenty of songs I don't care for can be good live, this is true w/pretty much any band. that song seems p irredeemable though

I think the Band is a pretty good touchpoint for the Dead circa 72 but I don't see why it's an either/or thing

can't find enough places to post this tune; if you have any taste for country rock at all, this is a supreme jam. they go Merle one further in bringing to light the darkness at the heart of the song, & the Dead were so good at that, at playing amoral rock; all those outlaw songs from the early 70s are expressing something that their playing did from the start

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8YegGdZIPDM

they go Merle one further

Oh come on.

totally serious, Merle is #5 for me as an artist, & part of that is writing songs that leaves spaces to be brought forward more than you can do in one 2 minute take

god, i will just never get the dead. cuz i have a taste for country rock (and for country and folk, etc), but that "sing me back home" is just fucking horrible. like, i can hear the song in it, and the musicianship is accomplished, but the nasal vocals, dirge pacing and slack interplay are punishing. it's long, slow torture. do like the guitar solo, but not enough to put up with the rest.

rush fans: an eternally self-selecting group of people who will never grow not to be butthurt about the fact that other people are not rush fans

― thomp, Saturday, August 4, 2012 6:38 AM (4 hours ago)

with DJP on this one. it doesn't bother me that rush lost. i figured they'd lose, but was happy to find enthusiastic fans itt. and i'm not even mad that the dead won. i'm just baffled.

Okay, well I've been spinning it a lot since last time you attacked it out of the blue and this song is such classic dead it isn't even funny. It hits all these perfect dead markers. It's got the historical references:

*badass flood from Robert Hunter's childhood#
*but also '49! San Francisco! Gold!
*plus hard to disassociate the dead from orange sunshine and the flood of psychedelics of the late 60s that they were at least somewhere in the wake or backwash of circa 74, looking back on the 60s from what must have seemed like a gulf of time

Plus this song just opens up so well. Look! Here's an amazing jam:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8gz_OTXy430

#

"(Remembering the great Vanport, Washington
flood of 1949, living in other people's homes, a family abandoned by
father; second grade)".

I used to not like it, because I thought there was too much similarities between the chorus and Beatles's Sun King, but eh, fuck it.

By the way, there are some crazy deals on Dick's Picks albums from Amazon MP3 right now. Like, $3.99-$7.99 for some of these albums?

dick's picks vol. 26 is great & so is vol. 8, harpur college (one of the legendary if-you-have-no-other-dead-shows ones) though harpur I think circulates in various forms

God I tried that "Here Comes Sunshine" again and when I hit the chorus I just go "lol that is terrible, I hear that you were out of ideas for a chorus but you could have just put the song aside until you came up with one instead of...that"

I can get putting those CCR tunes at a different plateau, as they just connected with people in the US in a bigger way and ar ubiquitous in ways that rare few Dead tunes ever got. That said, I think Bill Graham really nailed the Dead with his oft referenced quote "They're not the best at what they do, they're the only ones that do what they do." The Dead were a weird unique amalgamation of a band: bluegrass banjo player/folk singer, teenage jug band guitarist, college modern composition trained musician learning bass on the job, juicehead r&b/blues enthusiast, marching band drummer and rock and roll drummer.

Some of those 60s bands sounded the way they did as rock wasn't so codified out yet and many of the musicians while some were fans of the 50s rock, that really wasn't the music that often got them into playing.

Yes was a bit younger than the Dead, but they got some of that in their sound too, as Bruford was really a jazz drummer who went where the paycheck was, Wakeman was a classical music school dropout, Steve Howe was a totally odd amalgam of Cliff Gallop/Wes Montgomery playing rock and roll.

Bruford was really a jazz drummer who went where the paycheck was

Which perhaps explains why Yes is one of the least swinging-est bands ever. Of these three, only the Dead swing, in its one inimitable, sloppy, loping way.

I take it back, Rush swings plenty, when it needs to, when it suits the composition.

Why would being a jazz drummer explain the accusation that they were one of the least swinging-est bands ever?

I'm not sure how much "swing" is relevant to rock and roll aside from like '50s R&B anyway.

Ha, well, it generally is relevant to jazz!

xpost I just mentioned it as someone who has heard Buford's jazz stuff.

Rush definitely once they had an arrangement down, they tend to pretty much try to re-create it live. A rare few might open up in an arranged way live for their show or be edited down - but they don't improv. AT one point, even Peart thought his playing had gotten too uptight at one point and worked on reinventing his playing by working with jazz drummer Freddie Gruber.

Yes was kind of the same way which is why Bill Bruford bailed out at their popular height to go to King Crimson. That Yes Union/history video that Atlantic did back in the 90s is hilarous in that Bruford and Wakeman kind of both infer - yeah this whole 'Union' Yes band thing is pretty much crap, we could have done something good but we are just following through in a very scripted way.

that's a v. strange criticism of early yes.

re: lack of swing

I was a pretty big fan of Union when it came out, especially the tracks that featured the classic line up. Feel like I need to get reacquainted with it to see if it still holds up.

Not a criticism of Yes, just of Buford, who someone posted came from a "jazz" background. Because as I noted, lack of swing is I think a legit jazz criticism.

Bruford.

dick's picks vol. 26 is great & so is vol. 8, harpur college (one of the legendary if-you-have-no-other-dead-shows ones) though harpur I think circulates in various forms

harpur college is my sentimental favorite because it eventually became the humanities college of suny-binghamton, where i went to undergrad.

i'm surprised the dead rated as highly as they did, but i'm happy for yes (my pick, warts and all) for only being behind by four votes.

This is all just so wrong...

re the dead and west coast psych in general: i think i fundamentally dislike music that sounds as though it were played on a lawn, in the swelterning mid-afternoon of a really hot day. a lot of dead stuff sounds as though it were recorded during a bbq, when everybody was feeling all turgid from the food, booze, weed and heat, and the instruments had become these molten, floppy dali blobs suitable only for slow oozing. it's a quality hear in a lot of trancey, jammy psychedelic rock, but also in reggae and mariachi music. i don't like it. it makes me tired and irritable. if it's that fucking hot, just put your shit away for a while. pick up later, in the evening, when it's nice.

I love you contenderizer. Have you ever tripped dicks?

ccr vs allman brothers vs dead (pigpen years)
― thomp, Saturday, August 4, 2012 9:40 AM (9 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I honestly can't remember if I voted in this or not (if I did, it would have been for the Grateful Dead). The thing is--and I don't mean this as a criticism of whoever started it--putting the Grateful Dead with these other two bands just doesn't make sense to me. CCR/Allmans/Grateful Dead, yes; plug in the Band or Gram Parsons-era Byrds or any number of other bands, yes. But this is apple, orange, orange.

TS: apples vs. oranges vs. oranges.

imo ccr is a psychedelic country response to hawkwind and foundation stone for zz top

but anyway what am i missing about the dead? what if i don't want to drift off like windchimes, or a girl wearing a patchwork dress over jeans in a dusty field?

and more importantly - yes is still good in the 80s

lol Nate between your love of Agalloch and your hatred of the Dead I'm ready to totally write SUCKS next to band names on your notebook when you're not looking in class & then blame it on the other dude next to you when you call me out

― steven fucking tyler (underrated aerosmith bootlegs I have owned), Friday, August 3, 2012 6:32 PM (Yesterday)

I would say that I "support" Agalloch more than I love them. And the Dead--I just try to pretend that they don't exist. It's not any sort of hatred.

As for YES, this thread caused me to purchase a Relayer LP for $3 today and I'm loving the hell out of it.

And if you write "Voivod sucks" on my notebook, I will run you over in the parking lot.

did anybody vote for "grayfolded" btw?

nice you should check out relayer

http://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/8838-relayer/

I was reading this thread over and thinking about it and something occurred to me: the grateful dead are awesome