should i give the grateful dead a chance?

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.

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.