should i give the grateful dead a chance?

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)?

Jerry is such a piece of shit in Gimme Shelter I can't ever trust that guy

also in the doc the way he's continually letting fucked up shit happen and copping out like there are no leaders maaaaan

I haven't personally noticed any real uptick in Dead interest. Seems the last time I picked up on it was when dudes like Lee Renaldo and Stephen Malkmus outed themselves as Deadheads.

I've tried, but I really can't get into them myself. There's jamming, there's vamping, there's improvisation, there's tight and there's loose and shambling, but in the end I guess I kind of think of them like SNL: even at its best it wasn't as good as its reputation, and year by year it's the pre-recorded, better thought out stuff that makes a bigger impact than the hit or miss skits they rush to air. Maybe every few years I'll put on "American Beauty" because I like the songs, but other than that ...

I recently read Joel Selvin's Altamont book. I really had no idea the Dead were so integral to that disaster.

The Bangs line about Cale's extensive training seems a little weird considering that Lesh and Constanten studied with Berio.

they were as responsible as the Stones for the Angels being there, but worse because the Stones were somewhat naive where the Dead knew exactly who the Angels were and still encouraged them to use them for security

From the book at least the blame shifts from the Dead crew to the Stones when the Stones' inept people (who were more or less tasked with getting the band the most money possible to refill its coffers) wrested control from the Dead crew and fucked up the original plans, forcing them to scramble for an alternative. And then Jagger insisted on so much control/money over the filming that they were left with no real choices agreeable to his demands. The Hells Angels made a bad situation that much (much much) worse, and yeah, the Angels were all the Dead's fault.

haven't read that book, in Booth's True Adventures of the Rolling Stones the Stones come off as naive, foppish school boys who's outlaw pretentions are punctured by Real American Violence provided by the Angels...but def according to that the Dead heavily insisted that the Angels were "cool" and that to have actual security wouldn't be sufficiently countercultural. which that I believe as the Stones obv never really connected or cared about any of that except on the surface

I'm sure everyone involved on both sides were incredibly stupid so there's probably blame enough to go around

also in the doc the way he's continually letting fucked up shit happen and copping out like there are no leaders maaaaan

xpost No, you're right. In England I guess there were these sort of fake Hells Angels, and the Stones themselves were totally out of touch with America. They hadn't toured the States in 3 years, weren't that familiar with the west coast scene, and maybe misjudged the ugly impact of acid (which was apparently hard to come by in the UK). So the Dead, who were originally the point people, did suggest the Angels for security, and the Stones were definitely naive about their innate nihilism and danger. But rather than leave it to the Dead & Co. to organize the event - even as outlaws they had relationships with the SF authorities - the Stones and particularly Jagger were simultaneously aloof and actively irresponsible about the whole thing, undercutting efforts to organize the event by making last minute changes and demands that literally left them with nowhere else to go and no time to get there.

The book's take, fwiw, posits that the event killed the original spirit of the Dead and forced them to change paths.

yes i was just looking up if the UK hells angels had done security for any UK shows or festivals in say 1967-68. they *definitely8 did security for worthing phun city under the er watchful eye of self-declared white panther mick farren, in 1970 (i.e. post-altamont and post-altamont fallout) -- which was famously chaotic but i don't think anyone got hurt.

are uk hells angels fake? possibly but i would be careful who i said this to…

ans = yes! the uk hells angels did security for the stones in the park show in london's hyde park in july 1969, five months before altamont

"they were very sweet kids. they looked very daunting with the black leather, the skull and crossbones, swastikas and all that, and they were just daunting enough to make sure nobody did anything – but they came on their vespas from willesden and kilburn and croydon" (film-maker jo durden-smith, quoted in days in the life: voices from the english underground 1961-71, ed.jonathon green)

Yeah I thought every track was

haha, wtf was that

I meant to quote Josh:

There's jamming, there's vamping, there's improvisation, there's tight and there's loose and shambling, but in the end I guess I kind of think of them like SNL: even at its best it wasn't as good as its reputation, and year by year it's the pre-recorded, better thought out stuff that makes a bigger impact than the hit or miss skits they rush to air.

...and offer the pov that what you’re possibly missing/underplaying, Josh, is that they have a lot of really, really, good songs. Better than most bands. And not just on American Beauty (which is actually not a fave of mine), but throughout their catalog... And to me, that’s a key to getting into the live stuff; hearing these great songs performed in different, engaging ways.

....and then they cover "Good Lovin'"