should i give the grateful dead a chance?

And anyway:

an enduring love of jam bands

Jam bands=drugs=Hells Angels.

truly it is a mystery

I never knew about this, but maybe you did?

In the 1980s and 1990s, there was a major expansion of the club into Canada. The Quebec Biker war was a violent turf war that began in 1994 and continued until late 2002 in Montreal. The war began as the Hells Angels in Quebec began to make a push to establish a monopoly on street-level drug sales in the province. A number of drug dealers and crime families resisted and established groups such as the "Alliance to fight the Angels". The war resulted in the bombings of many establishments and murders on both sides. It has claimed more than 150 lives and led to the incarceration of over 100 bikers.
― Josh in Chicago, Thursday, February 20, 2020 11:00 AM (five minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

canadian organized crime is very weird. multi-ethnic gangs called like "united nations" and shit allying with, or against the hells angels, to control meth sales or whatever. sketchy as hell

Man would it suck to be in a band and have the Hells Angels into you.

Always worth posting this:

https://www.beatlesbible.com/wp/media/681204_george-harrison-hells-angels-memo-apple-580x386.jpg

The story goes that the UK had sort of a fake HA club, and that George et al. were not prepared for the real deal, and had to hustle to get them out of there.

And speaking of the HA and Canada:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ccyu44rsaZo

"straighten out" Czechoslovakia?

the Thompson book is essential imo

The story goes that the UK had sort of a fake HA club, and that George et al. were not prepared for the real deal, and had to hustle to get them out of there.

There's some footage of the UK HA in the 1969 The Stones in the Park movie. Literally just pimply teens in leather jackets and Nazi medals, for the most part.

You make them sound like the Bromley Contingent!

I think there was a bit more to British HA than pimply teens tbf - in fact they're still around and occasionally causing mayhem, though only with each other.

more discussion re the "fake uk hells angels" from upthread: should i give the grateful dead a chance?

(i still basically think the apple incident is overstated, greatly amped up in retrospect to make a funnier story)

we were all pimply teens once! plus the UKHA must have had a start-point when it wasn't very daunting, however hard they later became

Do the UKHA turn up at Cropready? I know it's a big magnet for bikers in general (my sister used to live in Cropready). If so - another Fairport/Dead connec!

xpost Yeah, I had a hunch I posted about it already.

I dunno, I get the impression the Hell's Angels as they are today are nowhere near the bad hombres that they were back then.

really?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hells_Angels_MC_criminal_allegations_and_incidents#United_States

I mean in terms of national menace. I have no doubt that almost every Hell's Angel member is bad news, but their prominence has declined, or at least has been fully absorbed into other bad organizations.

it's a good question, though. Bike gangs used to be go to boogeyman in pop culture, but not so much anymore.

we've had a lot of go-to boogeymen - communists, islamic terrorists, teenage hoodlums, biker gangs, black people, brown people, techbros, hippies

I'm Irish and I like the Dead.

the branch in my city was just a meth trafficking ring fwiw

Here in Berlin the Hells Angels and their rivals the Bandidos are involved in organised crime and kill each other now and again

I never got why people (OK, often Brits) apparently compared (or I guess compare?) Television to the Grateful Dead. While I concede they both have guitars, beyond that I don't hear it.

And the guitar sound isn't really the same. The Feelies, on the other hand, on songs like "Slipping (Into Something)" and "Find a Way," have guitars that are totally Grateful Dead-like--Grateful Dead guitars + Lou Reed vocals.

Heh, if anything I think the Feelies sound even less like the Dead!

yeah I don't hear that at all, the propulsion and krautrock rhythms are so central to the Feelies for one thing

is there an era when propulsion is an actual GD thing?

“Touch of Grey” maybe.

"Alabama Getaway", "Shakedown Street", a lot of the post '77 stuff imo

I think "The Eleven" is reliably propulsive, whenever it appears...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c_WpX9s2_rQ

another case of a shit rhythm section not being able to maintain a tempo or a beat, with some pretty good guitar playing being the only standout factor.

it does almost have that Beefheart thing of different band members playing different rhythms against and on top of each other, but none of them seem capable of actually keeping their individual parts together, nor is it as knotty and clangorous

So I listened to "Dark Star" from "Live/Dead" and it started off like Agitation Free or one of those 3rd division Krautrock jam bands I don't like very much. The (tiny) song bit itself was naff then back to the jam. I like Jerry Garcia's playing, but maybe not for 23 minutes straight? I did expect something a bit more transcendental but I suppose it's OK, I prefer when Amon Duul II do it though.

Maybe Garcia is more like Richard Lloyd than Tom Verlaine?

another case of a shit rhythm section not being able to maintain a tempo or a beat

but it's groovy in a very Dead-specific way... I guess either you hear it, or you don't.

lol they even named the song after the time signature, just in case.

Man, imagine if Robert Quine was in the Dead ... Or, like, Sonny Sharrock.

I guess the Dead are not a band I would try very hard to "make a case for," or try to convince anyone to keep trying if they don't connect with it (though, again, that's what happened with me... eventually, it clicked).

Don't know if it's been mentioned upthread, but this is the key document re UK Hell's Angels: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ng8Ll7x08Vk&feature=youtu.be

It's pretty terrifying stuff

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ng8Ll7x08Vk&feature=youtu.be

xxp "Just in case"? Lol. I mean, musicians do that kind of thing, I wouldn't read too much into it.

"Lady if you have to ask you'll never know!!"

Argh, apols. It's a BBC documentary from 1973. Sorry for fucking up the board.

xpost The Dead and Dave Brubeck, maybe. But Genesis? They called the song "Turn It On Again," dammit, not "Thirteen."

“There’s never enough money to cover marijuana, LSD, Grass and acid”

Tell me about it.

are those some things that wd help me love the dead better

That documentary is awesome.

So I listened to "Dark Star" from "Live/Dead"...

lol I did this today too. I try again every few years to see if I get it, and I don't. Really my favorite part is the very beginning, the noodling just before they play the actual composed head of the song. And the song itself is okay, but by the time they're trying to take it "out" at about nine minutes or so I just give up. I don't think I've ever made it through a "Dark Star."

Wow--we either hear the Grateful Dead or the Feelies very differently. For what it's worth, I'm talking about those two specific songs; on Crazy Rhythms, for instance, no, I don't hear the Grateful Dead.

lol they even named the song after the time signature, just in case.

I would guess that the title was more of a way for the band to remember it (not that it helped)

Now, that's just rude.

Brit Hells Angels bring Family's Music From a Doll's House lp and watch Doctor Who on their hell-raising bank holiday weekend.

the dead have another song in seven. guess what it's called.

ts: "the eleven" by the grateful dead vs. "eleven" by primus

i mean, they proved that they could be as lumpen and imprecise as any group of british art school dropouts, so job done?

i've listened to way more dead than i can rationally justify, and i still don't fuck with "live/dead". idk, maybe it is that great, but it just completely fails to click with me. yeah it's a decent guitar solo and all but i really would rather listen to cipollina. jerry gets compared a lot to django but while django built an amazing technique to compensate for his missing finger, jerry just seems to have accepted it as a limit and worked within that limit, and for me to find him listenable i have to do the same.

so digging the dead for me is a process of understanding and accepting their very obvious limitations. none of them can sing. they can't play in unison. they're completely inconsistent, frequently within the course of a single song. there are a lot of songs of theirs that are never fucking good any time they play them, and they are guaranteed to play at least one of them in any given concert of theirs.

when they're on, though, they do things no musicians have done before and no musicians will ever do again. and since jerry's been dead for a quarter century or so, i have the luxury of being able to cherry-pick the "good bits". that helps a lot.

"when they're on, though, they do things no musicians have done before and no musicians will ever do again."

Kate, could you —or after you do so, anyone who wants to— please elucidate as to what this could be? People say this kind of thing all the time about this band, yet it is seldom that anyone can specify…

Yeah, this is the crux of it for me:

none of them can sing. they can't play in unison. they're completely inconsistent, frequently within the course of a single song...when they're on, though, they do things no musicians have done before and no musicians will ever do again.

I guess when people say "highly improvisational rock band" what I want is something much more like Can circa 1971-74, or Träd, Gräs och Stenar, than any version of the Grateful Dead. There were a few isolated moments on the 3CD Fillmore West 1969 set and the "Bear's Choice" album from 1970 that almost clicked for me, but eventually I just couldn't get past the hapless fumbling stuff to get to the "good" stuff. And ultimately the vocals are just an insurmountable obstacle.