should i give the grateful dead a chance?

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.

I didn't get the Dead really, beyond liking a few songs, until Garcia's playing just clicked for me one time. It was like I finally heard what people love about him, the flowing conversational tone and sparkling runs. They'll never be a band I listen to a lot, I go through a Dead phase maybe once a year. But it finally made sense to me musically.

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…

― veronica moser

i can try! it's definitely a challenge to convey.

My personal starting point is that I like terrible music. There are a lot of ways people come up with euphemisms for different sorts of awfulness but there is a lot of music that I like while acknowledging that it is, on some level, completely awful. "White Light/White Heat", for instance, that is an absolutely terrible sounding record, or if that doesn't go far enough for you, we can talk, I don't know, Metal Machine Music, or "Flames of Ice" by Les Rallizes Denudes. These are records I like. I also like a lot of the later work of Brian Wilson, who after 1967 wrote a great deal of songs that are, really, just terrible songs. I'm talking about songs like "Games Two Can Play" from "Adult/Child", an extremely belated riff on Joe South's "Games People Play" where he in the middle of the song out of nowhere exclaims "I'm fat as a cow, how'd I ever get this waaaay?"

I don't like these songs _because_ they are terrible. I feel like it's a common misconception people get, that just because I listen to and enjoy terrible music that I have no standards. I like this music because its brilliance and awfulness is inseparable, because as I get older I find that my greatest strengths and my greatest weaknesses are two sides of the same coin. Because nobody but Brian Wilson could ever possibly write a song like "Games Two Can Play".

Well, the Grateful Dead's music is probably more explicable and comprehensible than "Games Two Can Play" is, if only because of that fucking bridge. But it is, for me, definitely a matter of absence rather than presence, it's lacking in what I had thought and assumed were essential elements in making music listenable.

I'm just putting on right now a random track of theirs... them doing "Not Fade Away" at Boston Music Hall on 1971-12-01. And it is just so frankly bizarre. The audience just starts screaming and going wild and right out of the gate it's clear to me that this is an absolutely, unquestionably, terrible version of "Not Fade Away". I listen to other versions of it I have sitting around and this is... this is kind of a hard song to fuck up? It's got this incredibly basic and rock-solid beat, this propulsive energy to it, and if you fuck it up you're usually left with a snoozefest or something lethargic but here, there's this just implicit fuck-you in the way they're playing it. It's not necessarily the vocals - I mean there are honestly a lot of bands that have kind of ragged harmony vocals, that's a rock thing - but the musicianship is just as "ragged", which is to say there's no groove, there's no pocket, they're the exact opposite of "locked in". The term "professionally incompetent" comes to mind, but not in the sense that they're shit at their jobs, but in the sense that being this shitty _is_ their job, a job they take very seriously and are very, very good at.

lol, "with friends like these ..."

that’s a great post and it actually makes me feel challenged to make music you would like

But not to listen to the Grateful Dead tbh.

So they’re making Outsider Art?

i like kate's reasoning a lot -- withdrawal of conventional values as a self-conscious tactic (and value), well, i have not laboured lo! these five decades in the free improv mines without working out that this is exactly the kind of perverse crabwise approach i too have tbh

obviously metal machine music is simply good not bad and why would you even try to claim otherwise, pshaw at that line

i like kate's reasoning a lot -- withdrawal of conventional values as a self-conscious tactic (and value), well, i have not laboured lo! these five decades in the free improv mines without working out that this is exactly the kind of perverse crabwise approach i too have tbh

obviously metal machine music is simply good not bad and why would you even try to claim otherwise, pshaw at that line

withdrawal of conventional values as a self-conscious tactic

This is Crazy Horse too I guess, when they were backing Neil anyway. The difference (to me) is that their lumpen rhythms still had some forward propulsion, unlike the Dead who just sound incompetent to me, and not in a good way. At least Rallizes took that murky swilling feel to its logical conclusion, and were never going to play bluegrass either. I have the same problem with the Dead I have with Pink Floyd - the rhythmic end is so plodding it makes me feel exhausted just to listen to it.

i think that's another good point about forward propulsion! most people when they play are, you know, going somewhere, you get the sense that they have a destination in mind, and that's what frustrated me so much about the grateful dead - the phrase "aimless jamming" came to mind a lot. and it's something i just had to learn to accept, that their aimlessness is an essential part of their appeal. for me, the dead at their best don't do crescendos, don't do build and release, every moment exists for its own sake. maybe they just had no short-term memory, i don't know, but it's something i appreciate about them. everything is fucked, there's no consolation in the past or the future, the only joy possible is to live in the now. and that's on some level a bleak, nihilistic way to live, but it's also liberating. it fits with my personal philosophy as i live it, of being the best me i can be in any given moment, of not being afraid to make mistakes, and of asking nothing more of myself.

what they actually learned from stockhausen: moment form

So they’re making Outsider Art?

― Something Super Stupid Cupid (James Redd and the Blecchs)

that's a phrase i consciously avoided using because of the implications it has. i feel like chusid means well by it but there's some difficult implications raised by it - "outside" of what? in industry terms, brian wilson is pretty much the opposite of an outsider, but a lot of his work has the singular vision often ascribed to "outsider art".

what they actually learned from stockhausen: moment form

― mark s

good cite, though cynical me wants to say that nobody actually learned shit from stockhausen, they just name-dropped him for a decade or so there

https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/31hzS-4JvHL._SX371_BO1,204,203,200_.jpg

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HeE6QysNp24

posting this in lieu of a long post in my head. also there's a destination in the sunshine daydream "playing in the band," that destination is hell

back in the day the title track of terrapin station drew me in deeper than workingman's dead and american beauty. the existence of this cover version, despite the generous range of the day of the dead tribute project, still surprises me

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qPdoWp-PHFU

the reason i love the dead is that they are constantly falling apart but remain together, it's like this spaghetti-like web that turns out to have all of these knots in it that you couldn't see. it's exhilarating to listen to. at about seven minutes in that "help on the way" you enter that web

they might not be the best players in the world but for me they are one of the best examples of an ensemble of musicians as a collective, roaming, unconscious mind

hell. hmmm.

hell isn't about the destination, it's about the journey.

i'm not trying to be glib there. it's something i've been through, several times, it's in fact something i'm going through right now, and going through a certain level of mental/emotional shit i have at times found myself completely lost, miserable, and with no way out. i've tried following other people's directions and gotten, as far as i can tell, absolutely nowhere, and i don't have any better ideas, and there's nothing left for me to keep doing the same shit i've always been doing and hope that what i'm doing will somehow miraculously start working.

i think you're generally right about the dead having no destination in their jams and that that is the point! and yeah hearing "playing in the band" gradually bend into something evil and gnarled is a really sick journey

i have played the sunshine daydream "playing in the band" for people hoping to convert them and it's never worked, which is very weird for me, someone who can't help but feeling at around nine minutes into it that i've been sucked off the earth into space and am being chewed up in the teeth of a monster formed out of the darkness and stars

the reason i love the dead is that they are constantly falling apart but remain together, it's like this spaghetti-like web that turns out to have all of these knots in it that you couldn't see.

― american bradass (BradNelson)

i get what you're saying, i have that feeling about a lot of things, and i'm not sure i trust that feeling. the way my brain works, and this seems to be a common human experience, is that my brain tends to create patterns and meaning where none exist. like, if there's a collective mind here it's not _just_ the dead, it's the canon-building process, it's headyversion saying "hey check out the 1970-11-05 DS, sure it's an AUD but they were really on and locked in that night", that's why i'm happy to see you writing about this insted of saying "listen to this version of this song", which is a thing that gets mocked so roundly by people who aren't deadheads, whatever is there - and ok, you've convinced me, there is in fact something there - is elusive, there's no single way in and if the common entry points don't work, which they didn't for me, i kept trying different ways over a period of decades and it did eventually click. one of my ongoing efforts w/r/t music is social, if somebody loves a song or a performance i want to be able to hear what other people hear in the music they love. i kept trying to listen to the dead because people still love them.

and i guess w/r/t the dead i'm now officially on the other side, where i'm trying to explain why i listen to dead bootlegs so fucking much after decades of vocally despising them.

ftr the 1977-05-09 help/knot/tower is yeah very good, and that's coming from somone who is generally left cold by '77

i'm going to have to listen to the sunshine daydream "playin" again, i haven't had that experience with it before but now that you've mentioned your experience i might!

this developing description -- that they're the AMM if not the scratch orchestra lol of stuff i personally don't much care for (=bluegrass) -- is actually p clarifying, in re the gap between my current response and a love for them i fee i now very much get (and respect) even if i'm unlikely to share it any time soon

However, my love for them very definitively stops at whatever point in the 1970s the lame funkiness and envelope filter guitars start to kick in.

i just started listening to some random dead tracks because of this thread and i think this is actually the point where i start to like them - bits on 'blues for allah' sound like the meat puppets trying to play steely dan songs

I'm just putting on right now a random track of theirs... them doing "Not Fade Away" at Boston Music Hall on 1971-12-01. And it is just so frankly bizarre. The audience just starts screaming and going wild and right out of the gate it's clear to me that this is an absolutely, unquestionably, terrible version of "Not Fade Away".

That's interesting because its almost like a political rally, that's where there is a break between the Dead and say, Rallizes or Dead C or whatever you'd care to compare it with who are basically playing to very tiny numbers of people - just howling feedback and shards of song in empty spaces (with free improv its even 'worse' , i.e. there is no song lol, the spaces are tinier still). The music is creating this social space that seems more sacred, somehow. Doesn't end when the show ends

The way some of you are (intriguingly!) positioning the band's faults as attributes makes we wonder what you think of Neil Young. Crazy Horse can be sloppy, and they can certainly be aimless. Plus, they embrace primitivism and lack of polish. But it's often if not always in the context of *great songs*, which is key, imo. I guess one way to look at it is that they are starting at the destination - great song - and going forward from there. Another quality comparison could be, say, Miles Davis "Live at the Plugged Nickel." The compositions are all tried and true, it's where the players take it from there that makes it such a fascinating document. (Though I admit it's not fair to offer those particular players up as comparisons to any rock band.)

Anyway, the Dead ... the way the band is often described (jamming, hit or miss, searching, etc.) is the way people often describe the writing process itself. That is, the Dead (live?) is like listening to all the permutations a band's music goes through *before* most bands even press record. I suppose my frustration with the Dead, whenever I give them a shot, is that they often seem either uninterested in reaching or unable to reach that destination, which is why even fans (afaict) discount huge hunks of their catalog or live documentation. They had a good night, they had a bad night, etc. Did Miles or Coltrane ever have a "bad" night? I dunno!

But it's often if not always in the context of *great songs*, which is key, imo.

let me clarify my own position here: the dead wrote great songs

bits on 'blues for allah' sound like the meat puppets trying to play steely dan songs

more where that came from on wake of the flood

^ thank u!

Did Miles or Coltrane ever have a "bad" night? I dunno!

Not "bad" in the shambling, "doesn't anyone here actually know how this song goes?" way of the Dead, but yeah, there are bootlegs of the 1973-75 Miles band - the group that made Agharta, Pangaea and Dark Magus - where they're just kind of going through the motions, with no real sense of inspiration or desire to make the audience's heads explode. It feels like a group just running through their repertoire.

I can believe it. Tbf, that was after three decades of music (and bands) that changed the course of jazz and right before he vanished for several years.

i have played the sunshine daydream "playing in the band" for people hoping to convert them and it's never worked, which is very weird for me, someone who can't help but feeling at around nine minutes into it that i've been sucked off the earth into space and am being chewed up in the teeth of a monster formed out of the darkness and stars

I've come to realize that it's pretty much impossible to show someone the Light, even via something that might seem objectively fantastic to the convert like the 8/27/72 Bird Song; it's something that has to happen organically. Personally I got semi into the Dead in high school in the early 00s via Live/Dead, which I loved (Dark Star in particular, because it's essentially a deep exploration of the mixolydian mode, which resonates with my brain chemistry like high-grade heroin). But apart from a song or two, I couldn't get into the Americana stuff that followed at all despite my Deadhead friend's best efforts, so I gave up on exploring further.

Fast-forward to 2016 or so and I randomly decided to listen to the studio version of Terrapin Station, and it resonated super hard. From there I listened to the studio albums in order to familiarize myself with the canon and found myself loving tons of the songs. Once I set off to explore the live stuff, it was OVER. For months I hardly listened to anything but Grateful Dead. I don't think anyone could have verbally or otherwise persuaded me to get to that point tho, and I've stopped trying with others :(

man, you guys need to settle down

no way

Settle down easy ;)

bits on 'blues for allah' sound like the meat puppets trying to play steely dan songs

more where that came from on wake of the flood

These are those newly remastered GDR albums I was taking about! (plus Mars Hotel)

I don’t care for the Americana stuff either — at least not American Beauty and Workingman’s Dead. (I do like the Europe ‘72 songs which could be descended that way, however.) Anyway, yeah, the Dead did have great songs, that’s not even a question.

*described that way

I don't deny it! It's just that imo that's not what they're best known for.

I know they're diametrical opposites, but I see some similarities between the Dead and Frank Zappa. They both undeniably changed the course of music, and you can hear their direct and indirect influence all over rock music. But they don't really attract/reward casual fans. You really have to be on their wavelength.

(And both, needless to say, deserve a chance. I think a newbie would come to a conclusion one way or the other relatively fast.)

And an unconscionable amount of laudatory tosh is spoken about both.

I can’t stand Zappa! And I’ve given him several big chances 🤨

lol ben w4tson once told me that i was his target-to-convert reader for his zappa book -- i was his editor at the time, at the wire -- and of course he did sterling work pulling together a bunch of potential ideas from all over everywhere, political, cultural, anything (it's a rich and interesting book! ppl shd read it!), that might encourage me to warm to the ghastly old goat. and anytime i do read a bit of it it makes me think "ok that was intriguing, i'll give him another try!" -- and i listen to half a song (less if he starts singing) and think OH MY GOD FUCK THIS HORRIBLE GARBAGE!!

i have played the sunshine daydream "playing in the band" for people hoping to convert them and it's never worked, which is very weird for me, someone who can't help but feeling at around nine minutes into it that i've been sucked off the earth into space and am being chewed up in the teeth of a monster formed out of the darkness and stars