should i give the grateful dead a chance?

Is Dead & Co worth seeing? I have the opportunity to get my friend's really good seats at face value ($150 each) but I'm always sort of skeptical of still-touring-old-dudes iterations of bands. And also John Mayer, but otoh the guy can certainly play and I guess that would be something to see.

― longtime caller, first time listener (man alive)

Obvious point maybe, but.. Lots of their gigs are available in full on their YouTube channel. Worth a look

It does seem like the Dead are having a moment of sorts. Sometimes I think it's because there's just a lack of similar phenomena in music today -- there's nothing as big as them that's as loose as them, everything is much more professionalized and scripted. Other than other jam bands I guess, and I haven't really come around on other jam bands at this point. Death before Phish.

They feel like a real escape from the worst aspects of our era.

I can't properly articulate it but I wonder if the fact that the Dead aren't a touring band (side projects notwithstanding) is a factor. There's less of a "stigma" of associating with dreadlocked hacky sack players, and a latter day fan can just download shows off archive.org rather than mingling in a parking lot scene. Maybe the Dead seem more "respectable" as a historical act rather than a going concern, where the focus is back on the band itself rather than the carnival trappings?

tbh that had turned into *quite* a carnival in later years. You couldn't have paid me enough to be around that scene in the 80s and 90s.

Is Dead & Co worth seeing? I have the opportunity to get my friend's really good seats at face value ($150 each) but I'm always sort of skeptical of still-touring-old-dudes iterations of bands. And also John Mayer, but otoh the guy can certainly play and I guess that would be something to see.

― longtime caller, first time listener (man alive), Thursday, June 6, 2019 3:15 PM (one hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

honestly i'd go see your best local dead cover band and call it a night. dead & co were fun but like i felt like i was mostly watching a dead cover band for 4x the price

the dead are having a moment right now and i think it is largely bc of the amazon prime documentary. lots of folks i know who weren't actually that into them, then watched the documentary and now talk about wanting to take lsd and listen to the dead the whole trip

As for me, I had just fallen hard for a clutch of records like David Crosby's If I could Only Remember My Name and Graham Nash's Songs for Beginners, and noticed the Dead were all over them. I remember listening to Workingman's Dead to dip the toe in, but something about the voices on the first track didn't click with me, and "High Time" killed it off. I gave it another go, though, and the harmonies and guitar solos on the Europe '72 "I Know You Rider" blew me away, along with "Brown Eyed Women" and "Jack Straw". I'd always scoffed at rootsy Americana stuff, so this was a real road to Damascus moment: I suddenly wanted to hear a dozen records just like this.

I dunno how much I count as a Deadhead, though. My appreciation is pretty solidly a specific span of years--I've no curiosity about post-70s, and despite being obsessed with the Sixties, a fair amount of their output in that era is hit or miss for me. I just can't get into the half hour '69 jams where it's a lot of "deeedle-lee-deee" soloing; too busy for me. Though the 1970-06-24 show is the perfect transitional balance for me: that version of "Easy Wind" is one of my favorite things they've done.

i wonder if the internet flattening or erasing all context and meaning has anything to do with it. like not only was i able to avoid the lot scene due to my age i was able to approach the music more on its own terms

the dead are having a moment right now and i think it is largely bc of the amazon prime documentary

these are very, very lame times

"yeah man, I get it now! roll away the dew!" I rolled away the dew.

― longtime caller, first time listener (man alive), Thursday, June 6, 2019 1:01 PM (three hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

lol this is so amazing

i wonder if the internet flattening or erasing all context and meaning has anything to do with it. like not only was i able to avoid the lot scene due to my age i was able to approach the music more on its own terms

― global tetrahedron

i don't think of that as the internet, i think of that as _time_

the internet is just the way we're currently scribbling on top of the past

it's definitely true that dead fans in my youth were drug burn-outs listening to terrible music who i wanted nothing to do with.

the dead are having a moment right now and i think it is largely bc of the amazon prime documentary

these are very, very lame times

― Paul Ponzi, Thursday, June 6, 2019 5:19 PM (sixteen minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

i thought the doc was excellent fwiw

the doc was pretty solid as those things go. and i think the dead moment was well underway before it came out!

I got into the Dead when a buddy said dang you like The Band, you should check out Europe 72, it’s just like that, and he was right

documentary was terrible--a long, tedious episode of Behind The Music--but I was more referring to the lameness of Netflix being the catalyst for anyone getting into anything

It’s Amazon Prime, get your OTT services straight

god those lames, getting into a band by watching a movie. paul ponzi was there man, lemme tell you. an original head

I got into Ja Rule via the Fyre Fest doc

My first knowledge of the Dead was in junior high in 1985 or 86 when a friend pointed out a poster in a shop after school and he told me about them and I was scared because of the skulls and they were called "The Grateful Dead," man.

A couple years later I saw Touch of Grey on MTV and loved the video.

In high school and early college I heard the couple of songs they played on classic rock radio like "Truckin'" and "Uncle John's Band" and always loved the latter.

Later in college and just after I had a friend who was deep into the Dead and by osmosis I was exposed to more and more. I got Workingman's Dead, American Beauty, and Live/Dead. For years that was good enough to me. It wasn't until I downloaded my first live show (Barton Hall 77) from archive.org about 10 years ago that I started getting in deep. I still prefer 69-72 and don't go past 77 (except for Reckoning).

My only live exposure to Dead-adjacent bands was in 2000, prior to totally getting on the bus, when I saw Dylan open up (LOL) for the Phil Lesh Band at Merriweather Post Paviilion with my then girlfriend (now wife). The parking lot scene was pretty seedy and I wasn't that into it (I also was a little uptight). We had to drive a couple of hours home, so we left early in Phil Lesh's set. As we left the venue, there were all these decrepit Deadheads without tickets hanging out right outside the gate asking for my ticket stub. At the time I kept all the stubs to my shows, so I just sort of politely refused, said "sorry" and kept walking. The look of disdain on the face of the Deadheads for my not enabling their getting into the show has stuck with me for nearly twenty years.

Dylan open up (LOL) for the Phil Lesh Band at Merriweather Post Paviilion

Unless you meant they were already inside the venue with lawn seats and wanted to be stubbed down to the pavillion.

I actually went to Merriweather Post a few weeks ago for a fairy fest with my daughter. It's weird how much the area had changed. I grew up in Columbia, spending a lot of time at the lake and the mall. Now they've torn down huge chunks of Symphony Woods and put up office buildings.

I don't remember Merriweather letting people back in with ticket stubs at the time though. So maybe the dejected heads just wanted to collect the tickets themselves?

Unless you meant they were already inside the venue with lawn seats and wanted to be stubbed down to the pavillion.

Definitely outside the venue, but like immediately outside like you had to run the gauntlet of them leaving. On the way to the parking lot I must have been asked six or seven times, "stubs, can I have your stubs, man." It was like panhandlers outside the Taj Majal or something. Never seen anything like it any other show.

xps -- something was definitely brewing before the movie came out. A bunch of friends of mine who previously I never would have thought liked the dead suddenly threw a party where they formed bands to play dead covers a couple years ago. IDK if that was before or after Day of the Dead came out. Obviously some of that group of people had just been quiet deadheads all along while others sort of hopped on the train.

Myself, I was at the first Tub Thumpers show. I read Robert Hunter's high school poetry. I saw Jerry crying in the sandbox at age 3.

I also think the anti-jam influence of punk on indie has finally sort of died out. Also we are old.

I also think the anti-jam influence of punk on indie has finally sort of died out.

I feel like the waning stridency of that punk/90s indie militancy applies to a number of similar "rehabilitations", such as Steely Dan and yacht rock. (Pitchfork in 2000: "Amazingly, Steely Dan's name has been popping up as a hip musical crush. Remember, this glossy bop-pop was the indifferent aristocracy to punk rock's stone-throwing in the late 70's. People fought and died so our generation could listen to something better.")

“Remember...” ✊✊

Hey, lookit what came out today: https://www.amazon.com/Aoxomoxoa-50th-Anniversary-Grateful-Dead/dp/B07KZKCZDL/

Includes both 1969 & 1971 mixes, plus live tracks from a few Jan. 1969 shows.

Guess it is in the air: After a long, strange trip ... all your indie faves are jam bands now

Twenty years ago, this would have been unthinkable. Indie rock (let’s say: everything that descends from the Velvet Underground) and jam band music (let’s say: everything that descends from the Grateful Dead) have traditionally felt incompatible, if not adversarial. Indie people are skeptical and fickle. Jam band people are undiscriminating and loyal. Indie is principled. Jam is chill. Indie scorns. Jam accepts. Yes, plenty of indie guitar heroes spent their respective ’90s stretching grooves out toward enlightenment — Sonic Youth, Dinosaur Jr., Yo La Tengo, Fugazi — but the difference between an indie band and a jam band still used to feel like night and day, oil and water, Lollapalooza and H.O.R.D.E.

control f not found "Built to Spill"

Twenty years ago, this would have been unthinkable. Indie rock (let’s say: everything that descends from the Velvet Underground) and jam band music (let’s say: everything that descends from the Grateful Dead) have traditionally felt incompatible, if not adversarial.

An interesting counter-article might deconstruct this opposition (haha, sorry) -- starting w/the similarities btw. the Dead and VU (who did a lot of jamming themselves!), and tracing strands of the Dead aesthetic through post-VU "indie rock" history. Maybe also vice-versa, although I don't know enough about the jam band scene to know how much VU shows up there (apart from Phish covering Loaded).

I've always thought of early Dead & VU as sort of thinly related projects on opposite coasts; taking v different approaches to "experimental rock" but also with some shared ideas. (Both groups even had roots in earlier bands called "The Warlocks"!)

Both groups also had members involved w/heroin

yeah, Lou sang about it, Jerry allowed it to kill him

also, which indie rock band will be the first to embrace Phish (and bridges beyond ie Panic, Govt Mule, et al)?

Television (the band) is sort of an obvious '70s touchpoint for a VU/Dead synthesis

(to continue my earlier ramblings)

Both VU and the Dead had bassists with direct links to the avant garde.

VU could be super jammy, check the Max’s Kansas City record

I basically got into the Dead through their songs. I was exposed to "Truckin", "Casey Jones" and "Friend of the Devil" via classic rock radio and friends who were into it during my freshman year of college. They weren't Deadheads or anything. For them (and me) the Dead just slotted in alongside bands like Steve Miller Band, the Doobie Brothers, the Doors, etc who had some songs that everyone knew and liked. I didn't meet any Deadheads until I transferred to a different school in Northern California. My roommate had a box of Dead show tapes. To be honest, I kind of dreaded when he put them on. I was getting into free jazz at the time, and to me live Dead sounded like a watered-down, drug-addled version of that. Later I discovered that the Dead had made a couple of near perfect albums. I still don't have time for their live recordings.

After I started getting into the Dead, I turned back to a tape that a friend made me, with Wake of the Flood on one side and Mars Hotel on the other — I ended up listening to that a lot in the car. I feel like those middle-period albums are sort of a secret / underappreciated gateway.

(Or maybe not so underappreciated — considering that Mars Hotel features college-dorm favorite “Scarlet Begonias”; and Blues for Allah has the above-mentioned gateway jam “Franklin’s Tower.”)

I've always thought of early Dead & VU as sort of thinly related projects on opposite coasts; taking v different approaches to "experimental rock" but also with some shared ideas. (Both groups even had roots in earlier bands called "The Warlocks"!)

― Theodor Adorno, perhaps the greatest philosopher alive today (morrisp)

the one time they shared the bill the dead were so pissed off that they said "fuck it" and put on a tape of "what's become of the baby"

and this was '69, by which time the vu were in total hippie mode

Interesting, didn’t know about that... Here’s more I found:

http://www.richieunterberger.com/vucon.html

10. The Kinetic Playground, Chicago, April 25-27, 1969: [...] According to Doug Yule's recollection in the fall/winter 1994 edition of the fanzine The Velvet Underground, "That show the Dead opened for us, we opened for them the next night so that no one could say they were the openers. As you know, the Grateful Dead play very long sets and they were supposed to only play for an hour. We were up in the dressing room and they're playing for an hour and a half and, hour and 45 minutes. So the next day when we were opening for them, Lou says, 'Huh, watch this.' And we proceeded to play a very long set. We did 'Sister Ray' for like an hour and then a whole other show." But for all the differences between the Velvets and the Dead, they do share one thing in common: sheer volume. "There was a guy standing over by the sound mixing board, and somebody said, 'that's [Grateful Dead soundman] Owsley,'" remembers Milwaukee radio DJ Bob Reitman. "I walked over to him and said, 'Are you Owsley?' He turned to me to answer, and the whole sound system just—and it probably was him—it's like somebody turned the whole thing up so loud that we couldn't hear each other. We just looked at each other and shrugged."

i think phil is full of shit in the doc, he says 'there was another band called the warlocks, which was the velvet underground!' when it's clear that was just a band name a lot of people had and it wasn't clear they knew of each other until later on

I wonder if there were many fans of both groups. Out of curiosity, I checked the "G" section of the index in the Lester Bangs book, and found this passage:

Meanwhile, rumblings were beginning to be heard almost simultaneously on both coasts: Ken Kesey embarked the acid tests with the Grateful Dead in Frisco, and Andy Warhol left New York to tour the nation with his Exploding Plastic Inevitable shock show [...] and the Velvet Underground. Both groups on both coasts claimed to be utilizing the possibilities of feedback and distortion, and both claimed to be the avatars of the psychedelic multimedia trend. Who got the jump on who between Kesey and Warhol is insignificant, but it seems likely that the Velvet Underground were definitely eclipsing the Dead from the start when it came to a new experimental music. The Velvets, for all the seeming crudity of their music, were interested in the possibilities of noise right from the start, and had John Cale’s extensive conservatory training to help shape their experiments, while the Dead seemed more like a group of ex-folkies just dabbling in distortion (as their albums eventually bore out).

Not exactly a rigorous examination of the similarities btw. the two groups (though Lester obv. wasn't very interested in the Dead's music).

I mean, it's not a particularly great passage in terms of discussing the Velvets' music, either. (It's from Creem, 1970)

what i want to know is if anybody who posts here has a grateful dead-related tattoo

i grew up near marin county so i always hated the dead, thought they were awful burnout hippie dad trash. then i got obsessed with "box of rain" right after a relationship dissolved, then i slowly came around to the rest of american beauty, then workingmans, swore i'd never get into the live stuff, then i watched long strange trip one afternoon, heard death don't have no mercy into st. stephen in the opening credits and that was it for me.

now i listen to them basically daily, i would never have predicted this but they were really there for me when it mattered and it all seems like such a miracle that it happened at all, and that the vast majority of it was preserved and is instantly accessible. we might be on the last embers of the thing that was the grateful dead, but in a lot of ways there's never been a better time than now to be a deadhead.

i think about this jerry quote a lot:

I think The Grateful Dead kind of represents the spirit of being able to go out and have an adventure in America at large. You know what I mean? You can go out and follow the Grateful Dead around. And you have your war stories. Something like hopping railroads. Something like that. Or being on the road like Cassidy and Kerouac.But you can’t do those types of things anymore. But you can be a Deadhead. You can get in your van and go with the other Deadheads across the States and meet it on your own terms. Sort of a niche for it, in a way.

One of the mysteries is how Jerry could be so wise and thoughtful in interviews, and yet so self-destructive in his own life.

Not exactly a rigorous examination of the similarities btw. the two groups (though Lester obv. wasn't very interested in the Dead's music).

― Theodor Adorno, perhaps the greatest philosopher alive today (morrisp)

i think of bangs as one of the people who posited the vu and the dead as polar opposites! wasn't one of bangs' first pieces comparing and contrasting "anthem of the sun" (which he hated) and "white light/white heat" (which i believe he thought was an okay record)?