Grateful Dead live, Dick's Picks etc - S&D

i stan late '69 dark star. for as much as people think of 1970 dark stars as happening in, well, 1970, a _lot_ of the things that make the 1970-02-13 dark star exceptional are elements that were developed throughout late 69 - space, soulful strut, feelin' groovy, all come out of the period between late august and december of '69.

my fave mind you are still the aud dark stars from '70...

my pick for most slept-on '69 dark star: 1969-07-07 piedmont park

A Closer Look At Lyceum '72: The Complete Recordings

Suspicions confirmed. That was what Phil Lesh thought when he stood outside of Stonehenge. It was April 1972, right after the Dead had played their first two concerts of the historic Europe ’72 tour, and Lesh, Jerry Garcia, and Alan Trist were taking in the sight of that storied landscape and monumental mystery. Scholars still debate its purpose, but for Lesh, the awe-inspiring arrangement of mammoth stones was proof that the kind of archaic wisdom that inspired the Dead was rooted in something deep, powerful, and very real, however mysterious and ineffable. Years later, Lesh recalled the experience as truly life-changing, one he still considered transformative. Salisbury Plain was impressive, an ancient landscape where the legendary Avalon was reputed to house King Arthur’s final resting place, but Stonehenge was myth made real, a site where “the whole concept of places of power” came to life, he told band historian Dennis McNally, with “so much consciousness poured into it that it still vibrates.” The lesson was personal, too: looking at those massive stones “clarified my whole idea of trying to put our music into a place, how it would change,” he explained. “How it could be different.”
It was a lesson that the rest of the tour reinforced, with every stop adding new insights, offering new ways to affirm Lesh’s epiphany. By the time they returned to London at the end of the tour, they were indeed changed, different—and they were eager to show that. The four concerts they played at the Lyceum gave proof of that transformation, something the band recognized when they chose a majority of the tracks for the album documenting the tour from those shows.
Fans could hear the full context of that for the first time with the 2011 release of the groundbreaking boxed set documenting the entire tour, but vinyl offers an analog warmth and presence that speaks to the sumptuous Old World elegance of the Lyceum, and that conveys all of the nuances and dynamics of the music they performed and the ambience that informed those four final nights of the band’s first sustained foreign tour. This set lets us hear that, in a format that harks back to that time, letting us revisit what those shows meant, at the end of a historic tour and a remarkable point in the band’s history. - Nicholas G. Meriwether

"Have a good time. And don't take anything too seriously, least of all music!" - Jerry, Book of The Dead
"Sam's done an incredible job co-ordinating this whole thing. All the musicians really have to do is play. We don't have to worry about technicalities, we just go where we're pointed and hope we're pointed right. We're told there's a bus at two, be on it. People can get that together by now. It's a matter of necessity. If you miss it - too bad. If you're on the bus, you're on the bus." - Pigpen, Book of The Dead

Happy birthday to Jerry Garcia, AND to the greatest "Dark Star" this band ever played:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5QsoDMEXFXM

Well that depends. Just how far in do you wanta go?

🌹After a yearslong development process, we're ecstatic to be able to share a project we've been keeping under wraps: AFTER ALL IS SAID AND DONE, a gorgeous dedication to the art, history, and vast community of Grateful Dead tapers.
Folks, it was well worth the wait. pic.twitter.com/CpcCH7hYxt

— Anthology (@Anthology_Recs) August 9, 2022

this actually interests me as a historian because what gets lost, i think, from a lot of taping history is what tapes people could _hear_ and when they could _hear_ them. people weren't trading '77 betty boards in '78. like there's a canon of dead tapes, a canon that started out as a tape trader canon and was later revised and reified by the official live releases, and i want to know the history of that canon, how it developed. it fascinates me that all of the early dead boots were '71 boots, that early dead fans were apparently _really_ into '71 shit. i mean i'm not into '71 shit mostly, haha.

rushomancy otm. I’ve always been curious about when Dead tape trading really became semi-established. Like you said, I don’t think the whole Betty Boards thing (and Cornell in particular) was a thing at the time, and maybe didn’t become one until the mid-‘80s.

my understanding of the betty boards... i think there's something about it that jesse jarnow has talked about, at least, and my understanding is that there were three batches, and the batch that contained cornell got into circulation around '77? there's a long and convoluted story that iirc basically comes back to the dead family not taking care of their own (not terribly surprising there).

'77, god, i mean '87, the cornell show got into circulation around '87, is my fallible memory.

yeah, that book could be good---I read about one taper, who taught himself and built or hacked his own equipment, with posted results being a circa-'69 Dead show outdoors, in the Bronx: quality very good-to-excellent, I thought. Seems like the band came to some kind of understanding with him, about taping East Coast performances whenever feasible---but when Pig was gone, so was he, forever! I've known several heads like that, but they didn't have his abilities. Hopefully he went on to other bands, beyond the purview of Dead chronicles.

(I don't know why some people have always blamed the Dead for his drinking himself past being able to perform, and then to death---according to Rolling Stone's obit, he was hitting the bottle pretty hard when he was 13. But maybe they didn't try to help him, or try as hard as they could.)

Sorry to sidetrack, carry on please.

(I don't know why some people have always blamed the Dead for his drinking himself past being able to perform, and then to death---according to Rolling Stone's obit, he was hitting the bottle pretty hard when he was 13. But maybe they didn't try to help him, or try as hard as they could.)

― dow

i'm deeply personally interested in the praxis of radical communities of the 1960s and their failures - i do see them as forerunners of a lot of the communities i'm involved in today. so when i talk about the failure of the dead family, it's not coming from a place of dismissal, but an appreciation for what they did, and a desire to take what was good from them and improve on what was bad.

my main feeling is that radical outsider communities such as the dead family have a _duty of care_ to one another. normative institutions hate us, despise us, do not care for us as people _within_ societal norms are cared for, and even though we are not _adequately resourced_ when it comes to caring for each other, even though we can and will fail, this does not mean that we do not have a duty of care - to ourselves above all, most of all, but part of self-care, for me, is caring for community, is being there for others in the hope, not the expectation, that they will be there for us.

my outsider observation is that the dead family failed to _strive towards_ caring for each other. they were, at the same time, inappropriately libertarian when it came to things like pig's drinking, and inappropriately coercive when it came to things like dosing people without their consent. they created toxic situations and refused to take accountability for the results of those toxic situations. big fucking example: altamont. jerry wasn't _to blame_ for what happened, but you know, as much as i hate to lapse into corporate speak a root cause analysis of what happened would have really fucking helped instead of what happened, which was everybody running away and living out fucking outer space fantasies where all the white people get to fly off on wooden spaceships loaded to the gills with cocaine, and everybody else? fuck 'em. the only way crosby was different from the other fucking boomer cishet dudes was that he spoke out loud the things the others put into practice while pretending they weren't. fuccccck, their great idea for a concert was to have an outlaw biker gang riddled with white supremacists be security for a free concert in a Black neighborhood because you can't fucking trust cops, maaaaaaan, so let's get the fucking proud boys to do security instead, and then everybody acts fucking shocked when they murder a Black man on camera. bullshit!

a root cause analysis of what happened would have really fucking helped instead of what happened, which was everybody running away and living out fucking outer space fantasies where all the white people get to fly off on wooden spaceships loaded to the gills with cocaine, and everybody else? fuck 'em.

And this led to the whole, "Oh man, let me get my head together out in the country, man" phenomenon (that was, from a musical standpoint, inspired by Music From Big Pink, but the Band shouldn't be blamed for the shitty, self-centered lifestyle choices that sometimes accompanied that back-to-the-land movement). So the Dead moved out to the country essentially to run away from the damage they were at least partly responsible for causing, but couched it in blameless "wow, man, things are getting heavy out there...we just need to remove ourselves from the situation and groove for a while." It's all laid out (with a complete lack of self-awareness) in Jefferson Airplane's "The Farm" (on which Jerry plays, appropriately enough).

Just here to say '71 dead shit is awesome. The 2/18/71 show on the 50th anniversary Workingman's Dead is really interesting:

Ooops, meant to say:

First "Bertha" - First "Greatest" - First "Loser" - First "Playin" - First "Wharf Rat" - Mickey's last show until 10-20-74 - E.S.P. show - also: NRPS - this run was recorded for "Skull Fuck"; none of it was used.

You can hear all these songs that became staples in 71-74 being tentatively worked on - all the later possibilities are there but hadn't yet occurred.

Maybe a better way to say it is they hadn't figured everything out yet so you can sort of hear other possible roads they could have taken.

Also 71 is really interesting to me because it's the last year of the OG Dead - by 1972 things have changed and they lost some of the early roughness (gaining a lot obv). You still have the faint remnants of pre-1969 acid test Dead, the folky stuff from the 1970 studio albums is still fresh, and you have the beginnings of a lot of live staples from 72-74.

It's all laid out (with a complete lack of self-awareness) in Jefferson Airplane's "The Farm"

??
Disagree

Maybe I'm being a bit harsh, but "The Farm" always struck me as the perfect expression of the hippies who had the means and privilege to live out the stoner fantasy of, "What if, like, we could just not have to deal with the hassles and responsibilities of the world, man, and just lay back and groove out in the country?" That said, I actually like the song (and that album) a lot, having only discovered it relatively recently.

I mean yeah, the song's "about" that, but I don't think it lacks self-awareness -- I think of it as a gentle (good-natured?) nose-tweak of that particular slice of the counterculture.

(fwiw, I think the same is also true of, say, the song that pairs "up against the wall, motherfuckers!" with "we are very proud of ourselves...". I think the Airplane were steeped in straight-faced irony)

Speaking of 60s etc. communities in San Francisco, Jay Babcock has created a Wordpress about the Diggers, with lots of research, incl. interviews he conducted---here's a deep 'n' wide one with a couple about life before, during, after Diggers (they are not happy to report that Emmett Grogan, one of the relatively best-known Diggers, called them up, looking for volunteers to work security at Altamont, but they already had dibs on a big work party for a house raising, so that was one reason Grogan or somebody got the Angels to do it)
https://diggersdocs.home.blog/2022/03/05/we-had-a-far-more-profound-effect/

(also: Christopher Hill's The World Turned Upside Down is a great read on the original (17th century) Diggers (and Levellers and Ranters and etc.)― papal hotwife (milo z))

And here's the article about Pigpen I mentioned, which doesn't say he was drinking at 13, specifically, but his buddy from way back does remember them hitting it pretty hard from then on, in Pig's case---also shows some attitudes, and mention of "the orphan of the Haight"---quite a time lens, possibly triggering for some, re alcohol abuse:
https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-news/pigpen-mckernan-dead-at-27-46215/

I wonder if the tape of his songs mentioned in that article has surfaced, is posted somewhere---?

I mean yeah, the song's "about" that, but I don't think it lacks self-awareness -- I think of it as a gentle (good-natured?) nose-tweak of that particular slice of the counterculture.

― Disarm u with a SMiLE (morrisp), Wednesday, August 10, 2022 1:03 PM (twenty-four minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

(fwiw, I think the same is also true of, say, the song that pairs "up against the wall, motherfuckers!" with "we are very proud of ourselves...". I think the Airplane were steeped in straight-faced irony)

― Disarm u with a SMiLE (morrisp), Wednesday, August 10, 2022 1:07 PM (twenty-one minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

Yeah, I can almost see that (the irony, that is). I rarely associate '60s SF bands with irony, straight-faced or otherwise, and Ian MacDonald's assertion that '60s US bands lacked irony entirely is often stuck in the back of my head. I don't think he's completely correct, but I think there's more examples that prove his point than refute it.

And "we are forces of chaos and anarchy, everything they say we are we are, and we are very proud of ourselves" feels less like slight tweaking of their contemporaries/audience, and more like "this is what the establishment is saying about us, so fuck 'em, we'll embrace those labels, true or not."

Here's a thing about Pigpen as songwriter:
https://faroutmagazine.co.uk/the-only-self-penned-pigpen-track-on-a-grateful-dead-album/ (title is misleading, since it mentions several things, incl. on the expanded Europe '72

xp Hmm, yeah... good read on that line.

Btw (completely tangential) - the lyrics of "The Farm" were written by this dude Gary Blackman, who I don't know much about... he was some kind of "associate" of the band (part of their management team?) who has a few songwriting credits here and there on their stuff.

(I don't know who gets credit for the farm-animal SFX, lol)

The Farm was released on the pre-altamont Volunteers album though. The post-altamont spaceship fantasy cocaine album that Kate hints at was paul kantner's Blows Against the Empire in 1970. And the Dead had already moved away from Haight Ashbury by 1968 so the SF hippie "back to the land" movement wasn't really a reaction to Altamont, it continued to grow after Altamont for sure, but it i think it started more as a reaction to the overcrowding & commercialization of hippies in the Haight.

Btw (completely tangential) - the lyrics of "The Farm" were written by this dude Gary Blackman, who I don't know much about... he was some kind of "associate" of the band (part of their management team?) who has a few songwriting credits here and there on their stuff.

― Disarm u with a SMiLE (morrisp), Wednesday, August 10, 2022 1:36 PM (ten minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

Oh weird, didn't know that about "The Farm" lyrics!

And looking up the lyrics to "We Can Be Together," I see they were written by Kantner. Maybe this is an unfair comparison, but since he also wrote the following, I don't believe he had an ironic bone in his body:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WxnsmRl8x14

Well he wrote a memoir titled Paul Kantner's Nicaragua Diary: How I Spent My Summer Vacation, Or, I Was a Commie Dupe for the Sandinistas... that's kinda ironic!

Ha! Good point

I also have to believe for myself that whoever wrote the lyrics to "Come Up the Years" (Balin or Kantner) was being at least a little ironic, or I'd feel guilty loving the song so much.

Worth mentioning that Blows Against the Empire contains a follow up to "We Can Be Together" called "Let's Go Together" also by Kantner and also devoid of irony:

Pre-Altamont Kantner wants to fight America:
We are all outlaws in the eyes of America
In order to survive we steal cheat lie forge fred hide and deal
We are obscene lawless hideous dangerous dirty violent and young
But we should be together
Come on all you people standing around
Our life's too fine to let it die
We can be together
All your private property is target for your enemy
And your enemy
Is we
Da da da da da da da da da
Da da da da da da da da da
We are forces of chaos and anarchy
Everything they say we are we are
And we are very
Proud of ourselves

Post-Altamont Kantner wants to escape Amerika:
Shall I go off and away to bright Andromeda?
Shall I sail my wooden ships to the sea?
Or stay in a cage of those in Amerika??
Or shall I be on the knee?
Wave goodbye to Amerika
Say hello to the garden
So I see - I see the way you feel
And I know that your life is real
Pioneer searcher refugee
I follow you and you follow me
Let's go together
Let's go together
Let's go together right now

Yeah, by hijacking a fuckin starship!

(that KBC Band "America" song is such a jam, btw... never heard it before)

well, he did hijack the word "Starship" for the name for the band going forward from there so it's not as ironic as it sounds.

the thing you have to understand about kantner's airplane lyrics is that he unrepentently stole half of them. "we can be together", a lot of that stuff _isn't_ him but is cribbed from the pamphlets of the radical group Up Against The Wall Motherfucker (associates of Valerie Solanas) - they called themselves a "street gang with analysis". UAW/MF are specifically a group that has a huge influence on the way i look at how to live in the world, which means that i'm very specifically interested in their failures as an organization. i linked this before but here's a piece i wrote a couple weeks ago where i talk a little bit about UAW/MF and call Bob Dylan a sellout for going electric:

https://www.alanauch.org/wtob/2022/07/26/being-there/

since i know people don't often click on links in message thread posts, i will call out specifically that "we are very proud of ourselves" is an _important_ statement to me. it has a certain resonance and meaning for me, resonance and meaning that the radical hippies of the '60s by and large didn't understand the _significance_ of, i'd argue.

Some trivia to tie this discussion back to the thread topic: both “We Can Be Together” and “Volunteers” are reportedly based on an old banjo lick that David Crosby played for Kantner, which is also the foundation of the Dead’s “St. Stephen.”

Just finished Long Strange Trip, which I really enjoyed. It made me finally break the 1980 barrier - I listened to Go to Nassau for the first time in its entirety and it's mostly awesome. I was surprised how good the vocals are and how energized they sound. My main complaint about post-74 Dead is how the energy/pace flags, but this was fine.

One of my all time favorite Dead moments is the Uncle John's Band, Live at Winterland, 1970, on Complete Live Rarities Collection. It apparently was the show closer and when the instruments come back in after the a cappella last chorus it's so ecstatic and the crowd responds and goes nuts and I want to live in that 45 seconds.

Oh yeah, that's an incredible version. I think Phil's voice sounds great in the harmonies, like he can barely contain his enthusiasm.

Also happy Veneta Day! 50 years!!

I listened to Veneta this afternoon! One of my favorite Dead memories was listening to that Dark Star while walking around the Desert Botanical Gardens in Phoenix on a really hot day, matching the vibe of that show.

#onthisday pic.twitter.com/hVe4Fqvgek

— Record Crates United (@RecordCratesUTD) August 27, 2022

xp listening to that right now!

At least it wasn't "Naked Pole Guy For The Future"

Speaking of the Grateful Dead yogurt concert, my old Vermont band had a song inspired by a certain special segment of Sunshine Daydream. It was called "Boob Montage for the Future"

— Emily Hilliard (@hey_emhilly) August 30, 2022

To wit,

"I painted my boobs with a sun and a flower/ I'm peaking just before Franklin's Tower"

— Emily Hilliard (@hey_emhilly) August 30, 2022

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iR4_D6P6Hrc

posting this just so we can appreciate weir dressed like an amusement park employee and lesh's glorious dolphin shirt/sweatpants combo

One of my favorite Lesh outfits outside of the Heineken years.

I hate that they dressed like shlubs. If you look at the Europe '72 photos and footage, they made an effort to dress up a tiny bit onstage (except for Weir)...but man, by the '80s, it was like, "Thanks for coming, guys, we really need our lawn mowed...oh wait, you're the band?"