should i give the grateful dead a chance?

i skipped this year but i went to citi night 2 in 2018 and i'd say there was a bunch of stuff that was pleasant but kinda plodding and a genuinely great 20 minutes of communal joy during st stephen -> the eleven. experiencing that moment in a stadium was pretty powerful. i don't dare to listen back though.

the best piece of dead journalism ever imo is jeff weiss's magnum opus on fare thee well : https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/6wqgz4/the-grateful-dead-chicago-fare-thee-well-2015

sorry, i'm being a bitch, i just hate the Dead

― blue light or electric light (the table is the table), Thursday, June 27, 2019 5:22 PM (yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

don't flatter yourself that we care either way

I still have mixed feelings about not having gone just bc it could be "the last chance."

i love the dead but let's be real "the last chance" was a few decades ago and yes this is a boomer con. you are not missing much. i went last summer and had fun laying on a blanket on the grass getting high w/ friends but it was too expensive just for that, it's really just another outdoor concert, and the music was more or less equivalent to a dead cover band. "something larger than yourself" at a dead & co show in 2019 is mostly the screen that you are watching them on and the sea of drunk fans who are mostly in pretty rough shape.

thx, ur a good dude for putting my regrets to rest

I used to think all live Grateful Dead was all just a single, interminable song. Now that's exactly what I love about it.

this 'cream puff war' is outstanding

https://archive.org/details/gd66-12-01.sbd.ladner.8575.sbeok.shnf/gd66-12-01d1t10.shn

often when i'm listening to the dead i get to a particularly terribly played song with awful vocals and i wonder 'why am i listening to this shit?'. this isn't one of those times

oh yeah that is a great one, kind of interesting because it's more of a straightforward "psychedelic jam" than one would usually expect from jerry

Yeah Jerry going off there. So energized, into this era for sure (early Dead kind the only road I go down for the most part these days cause I am lazy).

Man do I love "Viola Lee Blues." Something about that song really gets me.

same

I know it's probably an obvious/consensus pick, but I love this version so much
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3vC6ZfzIBEg

going out on top for sure

dp22 and rio nido '67 are also fine versions

a couple months ago i did try to find live versions of every song on that first lp because while people have come around to it for a long time it was deprecated despite containing some of their all-time classic material

had to give up on that 'cause (1) i couldn't sit through pig doing "good morning little school girl" (2) there are better live versions of, say, "morning dew" than there are of "the golden road" (label didn't hear a single...)

Yeah that version is really really great. I love when they would dig in that hard. I mean sounds practically like the Dead C for a bit there. Rules.

lol waht

After the breakup of the Soviet Union, Lithuania could not afford to send its basketball team to the 1992 Olympics.

The Grateful Dead offered to sponsor the team provided they played in tie-dyed uniforms. The team wore them on the podium when they took home the bronze medal. pic.twitter.com/gswqYbrGgE

— Bocaj (@pisschalice) February 3, 2020

you see those shirts on ebay sometimes for $$$ they are extremely sick

i would 100% wear one of those

Gave this beer a chance, and it’s great:

https://www.dogfish.com/brewery/beer/american-beauty-hazy-ripple-ipa

How many chances do the grateful dead deserve, really

for work reasons i am currently giving aoxomoxoa its first even chance, things aren't going well tbh

How many chances do the grateful dead deserve, really

As many as it takes, maaaaaaaan.

xpost

Which mix?

i sort of like the long droney gregorian chant kind of thing ("what's become of the baby"): it's not that good but at least it isn't so fucking PERKY, most of the rest of it just drives me mental

the mix that's on spotify (2013)

Is jelly roll driving you stone mad?

aoxomoxoa is really good imo let me break it down by track

St Stephen -- top 3 dead jam, Garcia's deep folk knowledge under proper west coast psych lens. better live of course, '69 st stephens are utter fire but still psych dead at their best 10/10
Dupree's Diamond Blues -- i often find the Dead in storytelling mode kind of nihilistic and unpleasant and this is why -- what is the narrator's opinion of the proceedings here? amused, kinda? something sleazy about it, like the closer I get the sleazier it feels, which is a weird way for a genteel folk blues song to behave, and very compelling as you keep looking at it again, like a slasher movie 9/10
Rosemary -- so delicate and odd, JG's vibe isn't usually in the English folk realm but it's clear he knows that stuff, too -- the instrumental intervals are like nothing else in the catalogue, should be longer though. 8/10
Doin' That Rag -- JG is really not the man to be singing this weird, extremely historically centered (San Francisco after the tourists have started moving in & everybody's feeling aggro about it & about things generally) tune though he settles into it about halfway in. If you told me "this song uses every major chord in the scale at least once" I would believe you. the coda is tedious, 7/10
Mountains of the Moon -- more of JG getting the straight-no-chaser folk out of his system but of course they're hippies so they gotta roto the vocals. This & Rosemary represent a single impulse not shared with the rest of the album really. v hypnotic jam though 10/10
China Cat Sunflower - lol it's only 3:40 here, that's not even like an appetizer bite of CCS. plays more like straight SF psych, that intro is so convincingly off-the-cuff. knowing the heights this one reaches live it's hard to be objective about the tame studio version but as a template it does the necessary, 9/10
What's Become of the Baby? - so this would be the Truly Weird GD right but I feel like their hearts aren't truly in it, it's a gesture & maybe an assertion of Seriousness. An unconvincing assertion, there were lots of people doing this better in '69. still, they commit to it for eight minutes, 5/10
Cosmic Charlie - what, are you fucking kidding, this is an all-time jam no doubt, with more of that weirdo "why do I get a sleazy vibe off you?" "philosophy" -- blues as shared hallucination, the tension between JG's folk-music-instructor past & the band's we-are-always-higher-than-God life is in perfect balance here. winds up the album with another "more going on musically that it feels like if you're just nodding your head" song just like the album opened. reportedly a commentary on their local scene, how would I know, these phrases feel so hermetic that you just sort of have to listen like you would to a poem about a painting you've never actually seen. 10/10

couldn't make it past 30 seconds of St. Stephen's awful group vocals and clumsy attempts at syncopation, sorry

bud you know I got love for you but when a grown person who knows music says they "couldn't make it past thirty seconds" of anything I know they didn't do any actual listening

I listened for 30 seconds until someone let out a whoop/yell and then I was like "nope, I'm done"

haha fair. what you gotta do is hear how electric that yell is on 5/23/69, you see the [is ushered offstage by an enormous cane]

lol

ftr i started in on live/dead afterwards and was enjoying it somewhat more until i had to do something else -- the one person i know irl who loves GD (rather implausibly given the rest of his taste, aside from he's old) swears by the live jams

but there's a tone to the over-chirpy deployment of the "deep folk knowledge" on aoxomoxoa that just rubs me up the wrong way. smugness? maybe that's not the word tho, maybe i'll have to listen more to pin it down…

unconvinced i will ever come to love the singing

i sort of like the long droney gregorian chant kind of thing ("what's become of the baby"): it's not that good but at least it isn't so fucking PERKY, most of the rest of it just drives me mental

You've got me started now. I just listened to this and it's garbage. And that "St Stephen" song sounds like any ramshackle bottom-of-the-bill band ca. 1969/70.

yes i don't think i'd much like the baby song if i just heard it on its own out of the context of what was around it, but in context it seemed like a nice rest mood-wise

also as i was skipping around finding what came before and after i noticed that xgau disliked only it in his original review and that made me like it a bit more also

I don't think the Grateful Dead are for the likes of us, i.e. Britishes.

that yell is, of course, awesome

it's awfulness is only exceeded by the drums and guitars going out of sync immediately afterwards

Didn't the drummer study with Stockhausen or something? How come he can't play a piss easy song like that?

xp That's when the magic happens! How do you like Royal Trux so much, but not that moment(!?)

that is actually kind of a good question...?

I think all the Trux stuff I really like (ie, from Cats and Dogs on) has a pretty shit-tight rhythm section, for one thing. And Hagerty as a guitar player just goes places that are so unpredictable, always keeps me guessing without devolving into tuneless wankery, and I appreciate that a lot. Whenever I listen to the Dead I get the sense that they're trying to do a certain thing (a folk pop song, a blues jam, a "jazz odyssey", vocal harmonies, etc.) and, unfortunately, failing. I don't get that sense from the Trux, they aren't trying to nail any particular trope, they're turning them inside out.

fwiw the one thing that I heard on St. Stephen that I thought sounded pretty good was Jerry's guitar tone.

His guitar playing is the only thing about the Grateful Dead I like.

a fair take tbh

but there's a tone to the over-chirpy deployment of the "deep folk knowledge" on aoxomoxoa that just rubs me up the wrong way. smugness? maybe that's not the word tho, maybe i'll have to listen more to pin it down…

also yes its condescension. the west coast hippie vibe was incredibly condescending

That's funny, I don't hear that presentation of "deep folk knowledge" or stuffiness, reverence, whatever... if anything, it's playful and irreverent(!)

the GD were pretty sarcastic and condescending too. some of bobby's banter on late 60s shows are downright mean. would harsh a trip man

Well, sure... "Everybody take two giant steps back, so the folks in front of the stage don't end up two-dimensional."

I don't think that comes through in the music, though

is drumming a thing you'd learn from stockhausen? he was more or less totally allergic to the notion of a good beat

the GD were pretty sarcastic and condescending too. some of bobby's banter on late 60s shows are downright mean. would harsh a trip man

so much of their banter is just smarmy. my favorite is at the end of a luminous "he was a friend of mine" here:

https://archive.org/details/gd1969-04-23.sbd.miller.88501.sbeok.flac16/gd69-04-23d1t02.flac

GD: plays first song
fan: Morning Dew!
GD: No. Fuck you. You gotta stick around to hear Morning Dew

is drumming a thing you'd learn from stockhausen? he was more or less totally allergic to the notion of a good beat

― mark s

idk can seemed to do pretty good on the drumming front

anyway i am definitely on whatever team holds that anthem of the sun and aoxamoxoa or however the fuck you spell that crap is horse puckey and that they're putting in "psychedelic" weird crap to cover up the fact that they had no fucking idea how to write or record a proper "psychedelic" song at this point (it's an open question as to whether they ever figured that out), and that whatever else you can say about the "roots" music from '70 on at least the goddamn songwriting is basically solid

there are better psychsploitation albums than "anthem of the sun"

i like "what's become of the baby" but only because nobody else does, i like henry flynt and the insurrections too and they're objectively terrible