should i give the grateful dead a chance?

Everyone in that Billy & the Kids lineup seems pretty talented.

This came out today:

https://store.bluenote.com/products/dave-mcmurray-grateful-deadication

Looks cool!!

I agree that the bluegrass background seems to really help him get the jerry feel right (with his own spin on it of course). A lot of guys do the jam band thing with a kind of exaggerated whiteboy funk swing, whereas there's something a little more understated about bluegrass phrasing, more flat and fluid (if those adjectives make any sense together).

xpost - digging it so far!

i guess he's played with weir?

i think a lot of the tendencies i hate about modern jam bands have their origins in the allmans over the dead

I thought I had heard everything but I just came across the single version of dark star on the long strange trip compilation. So good. Sitar and is that banjo at the very end?

Jerry's Before The Dead is a very good folk-to-bluegrass 4-disc set (Amazon's got the CDs for $35.16, MP3 $31.96, ltd. ed. vinyl $299.49). He seems like a low-key folkie at first, but quickly takes off. I posted about it over on Jerry Garcia Solo/JGB/Grisman/etc. - S/D Sure would like to hear his pre-Dead performances w Grisman.

I thought I had heard everything but I just came across the single version of dark star on the long strange trip compilation. So good. Sitar and is that banjo at the very end?

I think Paul Williams listed that as one of his 100 Greatest Rock Singles of All-Time.

I'm still not a huge Dead fan, but what helped me kind of like them was the Amazon documentary, which I was able to see at a limited screening in NYC. The director was there and he was definitely a very knowledgeable Deadhead, addressing every esoteric question every fan had. (The biggest and not-so-esoteric one was "Where's Mountain Girl?" and he said they REALLY tried, but she said she was saving everything for a book or film of her own that she was already doing and refused to participate.) I don't doubt there's lots of holes in it - it's tough to cram a whole band's long history into four hours - but it was surprisingly engaging from start-to-finish and the music came off really well. I now have Live/Dead, the two classic country-rock LP's, the famous Ithaca bootleg from 1977 and the Dick's Picks volumes Greg Kot recommended (I think in the 2004 edition of the Rolling Stone Album Guide) and enjoy them quite a bit.

Good stash. Also in the country-folk vein, Reckoning is a soulful acoustic set-down set (2 CDs for price of one, as Ah recall).

I had reckoning as a young lad and was always annoyed with the production. Something about acoustic guitars in a live setting, they never sound good …

“Searchlight casting for faults in the clouds of delusion” 😊

Something about acoustic guitars in a live setting, they never sound good …

The acoustic guitars on some late '60s/early '70s Dead shows sound ok, probably because they're externally miked rather than having a pickup. Once acoustics got fancy internal pickups in the late '70s/early '80, they were much easier to manage from an EQ/feedback standpoint when going through a PA, but almost always sounded tinny.

On the Europe 72 version of “jack straw” at the beginning, Bobbys vocal is on the right, and there’s a high harmony on the left. Who is this? I thought Phil’s voice was deeper and jerry’s vocals doesn’t come til later. Maybe a Bobby overdub In the studio?

Should I give Brent Mydland a chance?

“tons of steel” is a jam.

https://i.imgur.com/Wat1Xxf.png

L-R: Aykroyd, Ramis, Murray

Photo is actually a still of when they encounter the old lady ghost in the nypl stacks

xxxxxxpost birdistheword, also check out Weir's accurately-titled Ace--as Deadhead Xgau opined way back then:
Ace [Warner Bros., 1972]
Weir can be preachy and screechy, but Robert Hunter's homiletics ("Playing in the Band") make up for John Barlow's post-hippie know-nothingisms ("Walk in the Sunshine"), and "One More Saturday Night" isn't any less a rockabilly epiphany because it strains Bobby's vocal chords--that just adds a note of authenticity. With Barlow redeeming himself on the elegiac pre-hippie fable "Cassidy" and Keith Godchaux sounding like a cross between Chick Corea and Little Richard, this is the third in a series that began with Workingman's Dead and American Beauty. A-

Ace is a wonderful, wonderful album.

Won't let me paste anything, but it's from 1990, so may be just as well---press release for Dave's Picks Vol. 40, w links to Listening Party etc.:
http://view.email.dead.net/?qs=6ceb8ca8d65dd0c108e4a444be120b4ed9eef6a4717bb0a7736434639088d68c0f11bde2d65fe50dc711383bec9f2a326316c7f0d7536017d3d7cb675128e047e7cee5b73a713fc726e930426d0b9ca8

How’s the Phil Lesh and Friends show these days? Have the chance for great seats from a friend but not cheap.

I think it really depends which lineup you get, he's been bouncing around between different backing bands on different week/ends for this run. This weekend it's mostly the Dawes guys backing him up, which I'm not exactly excited about tbh. But I guess MC Taylor from Hiss Golden Messenger is playing with him Friday and Saturday nights, which could be cool.

Yeah I was considering the Saturday show, it's for my birthday (after other plans got canceled) but still not sure I want to drop $220/seat on it.

Concerts are so fucking expensive now aren't they. I spent like $125/pop for Bela Fleck tickets at carnegie hall, but prime seats.

My own take on this issue.... https://vassifer.blogs.com/alexinnyc/2020/01/exhuming-the-buried-or-how-i-learned-to-lighten-up-appreciate-the-grateful-dead.html

xpost - yeah, my Dead & Co. tickets ended up being not much less than $200 by the time all the $46(!!!) worth of fees got added in.

I just can't do it. I can't drop that kind of cash on a concert I'm not even sure I'd be that into. I could justify maybe $50. Even for something I'm sure I want to see $220 is a lot.

I'm trying to think of the most I've paid for tickets, or who I would do that for. (There's probably a thread for this.) I don't see a lot of big name shows. I think I paid $60 for Bryan Ferry. Sparks are coming next year and I haven't pulled the trigger yet, but I think balcony tix for that are about the same. $220 for the guy who wasn't really even a vocalist in the Dead plus some ringers is outrageous imo.

It was for arguably the "best" seats, but I'd be paying $135 even for GA floor tickets.

I also generally speaking don't go to big production/big name shows. I don't see a lot of shows period, but when I do I usually like smaller venues and non-major artists better as an experience.

Oh, ZZ Top was the last show I saw pre-Covid. Nosebleed seats, but $40.

$220 for the guy who wasn't really even a vocalist in the Dead plus some ringers is outrageous imo.

Yeah, I didn't even pay this much for three actual Dead guys and ringers when I saw them, though not appreciably lower by most standards. I could justify it this time after not having spent a penny on shows between March 2020 and September of 2021 though.

imagine paying $200 to hear John Mayer noodle on his guitar at a 'dead' show

imagine swinging into a thread to inaccurately describe something to feel like a cool guy on the internet.

Tried with the Dead again this morning while doing laundry; listened to about a third of the Fillmore West 1969 3CD set before giving up and switching to the Allman Brothers' At Fillmore East, which it turned out was what I wanted all along.

Depending on which third that was, I get it. The first disc is meh, the magic really shines on the second two discs, imo. But I'm not sure it'd still be in your wheelhouse.

Allman Bros at Fillmore East is going to scratch a very different itch than Dead at Fillmore West, so that makes sense. I also come back a lot to the fact that the Dead were about the entire atmosphere at and around the shows, and I'll just never experience that (whether or not I would have liked it, which I'm not sure).

That's a good point, the atmosphere is a huge contributor to it (I know, cue the 100 jokes about stinky hippies). But it really does make a difference.

xxxp You shoulda at least skipped to St. Stephen->The 11

I was halfway through "St. Stephen" when I bailed out. I've owned the set (and had downloads of the expanded set with all the concerts in full) for years. It's really the only Dead thing I can even get close to liking. Every couple of years I get the urge to listen to it, but it fades quickly.

Finally getting around to Wake of the Flood after 30 years. I always lumped it in with the other limp mid 70s albums but I guess it’s the first of those and was made not soon after Europe 72 so..yeah it’s ok, better than I thought. I love Half Step and Eyes. No use for the 1-2 punch heroin hangovers of Jimmy and Stella. Haven’t made it past the first minute of Weather but was dismayed when Bobby started singing…

That’s a great album; that one and the two after it are my favorites of theirs.

Gotta defend Row Jimmy, imo one of the greatest Garcia/Hunter songs. Enigmatic, world-weary, and stoic in the most beautiful way. And rhythmically tricky in the verses. Full of evocative imagery, e.g. "grass shack nailed to a pinewood floor." There are lots of great live versions, but I treasure the studio version because Keith gets to play both Rhodes and Clavinet via the miraculous technology of overdubbing

Stella is beautiful, too

Listened to American Beauty today zzzzzzzzz

I like the studio Eyes of the World a lot. Some days I enjoy Stella and Jimmy. Here Comes Sunshine is one of my favorite live tunes and the studio one is pretty good.

American Beauty I kind of waver on, some days it feels right. I love Box of Rain and Friend of the Devil and Ripple. Til the Morning Comes feels kind of dated and icky. Other songs are mostly solid.

I’ve never liked American Beauty or Workingman’s too much, guess that’s unusual, I have tried to get into them but it’s just not my type of material or performances.