The Grateful Dead Thread Band • Page 4

Honestly I find all of 76 and pre-spring 77 extremely fascinating. Everyone knows that Spring '77 is the magnum opus, the single best tour they ever did, a whole month of May of just flawless show after flawless show, but what's interesting to me is how they adapted their sound to that. 73-74 are jazzed out, and the four 75 shows are the same way but with some more psychedelica infused, but I'm still trying to figure out how they moved from that into the much more rock, almost arena-rock sound of 77. I mean, what is actually different in their playing. Idk.

 

RIP Merle Haggard

 

No! Damn. RIP. What a musician

 

Been listening to Joe Russo's Almost Dead lately. I actually just found out about the band. I like their sound. I've always been a fan of Benevento and Russo so no surprise there.

 

Heard only good things about JRAD but haven't seen. They came by a few months ago but I couldn't go. I'll have to keep looking.

 

Watch the Grateful Dead Take 'Tennessee Jed' Through Massachusetts | Rolling Stone

 

Hah. That's my dad's last show. He stopped going because in the parking lot after that show people were lighting off fireworks and firecrackers throwing around beer cans and shit and he was like "nah"

 

Damn that 2/26/77 was the first Terrapin ever. You can tell, too, very different from what it would become. Only 10 minutes long is crazy - there's about 5 total choruses of jamming on that whole thing. They'd do 25 minute versions of that by the end of the year. There's a few missteps here and there with some forgotten lyrics (it's an epic poem, it happens), some missed cues (it's an orchestrated epic in 3 movements, it happens), but it's really interesting to hear it without extensive improv. They didn't even try to play the third movement - they only played it once or twice total, without lyrics - which makes sense because on the studio version it's very orchestrated. But I guess they knew not to bother from the beginning.

Keith is on a Moog for a lot of this show, which is very unique and you can tell he's not totally comfortable with it. At times,he falls into a lot of what he fall into in the late 70s leading up to his being kicked out and death, where he's mostly playing block chords on the downbeats with relatively few flourishes. It's not as distracting here as it was then, but you can tell he's not feeling it completely. That said, he does some fucking awesome shit with it on Estimated, also the first. That nearly ruins a lot of the late 78-79 shows for me. Takes me way out. Apparently, the reason he was forced to use this Moog for this show was that Jerry experimenting with a new Mutron filter, which, due to technical difficulties, had to be patched through an actual Moog synth for it to work. Kinda crazy.

 

Not a huge Deadhead, but a few of my random opinions:

Bob Weir is cool as hell and his first "solo" album is awesome.

"Truckin" is one of my favorite songs of all time.

I think "Blow Away" is such a great song. Not sure where it ranks with serious fans, but I absolutely love it and the live versions.

How does everyone think Mayer is doing with them? From what I've heard and read, he seems to be pretty accepted, but I'd defer to more experienced fan's opinions.

I really don't consider myself a fan of jam bands per se, but I love just throwing on a shuffle of Dead live tracks and wasting like 3 hours of my work day.

 

The '77 Cornell show has always been one of my favorites.

 

Hell yeah ok Im gonna respond in order because that sounds like fun:

Yeah agreed. It's also the side project/solo album with the most material that got played regularly, every track bar "Walk in the Sunshine" was an absolute staple.

Same.

"Blow Away" isn't one of my favorites, but neither is that era and album. It's a great song though for sure but I almost never hear it because I rarely am listening to 89+ material. That, "Victim or the Crime," and "Standing on the Moon" were the last great songs the band wrote, imo.

There was a lot of backlash when Mayer was announced because Deadheads can be really stupid about pop music but a lot if not most of those people have at least come to accept him, and a lot love him. For me, he's absolutely the best Jerry replacement yet. It helps a lot that he came from somewhere other than a Dead cover band, or a different jam band, I think, because those guys have been studying Jerry all their lives. Makes them sound like cheap copies a lot of the time. Meanwhile Mayer discovered the Dead in like 2012, well after he was already one of the best guitar players in the world, so there's a lot more individuality in his playing. That said, there's just the right amount of Jerry as well - he clearly studied hard and his talent makes it unsurprising that it paid off. You can hear him doing some very Jerry-esque things like the little improvised riffs in between couplets during verses and the way solos often starting out with the main theme slightly varied and then get more and more varied but keep the essence of the theme. Not that Jerry invented either of those things but they were definitely staples of his playing. He also stays within Jerry's theoretical space, with the Mixolydian and Lydian modes making up a lot of what he's doing along with some blues work of course. I think the outside influence is important as well because when you think about it, none of the Dead came from a background of listening to Jam Bands or the Dead (obviously). Their influences were about as varied as you can get, so I think it was extremely important to get someone outside of that scene completely. It seems to be working out well - Bobby has a ton of chemistry with Mayer and I actually saw him smile on stage (!!!!!) at one point during this last tour. And he sure sounds great to me. My biggest concern with Mayer at the beginning was how he would handle a 30 minute Dark Star or something but he seems to be able to play with space pretty well. It's definitely still a weak point imo but it's promising.

The '77 Cornell show is as great as the legends say for sure. Hyped like it is for a reason. I know everyone loves the Scarlet>Fire, but another one worth mentioning from that show is the Morning Dew, something about that song gets me every time and that added with the "on"-ness of that whole elevates it to an incredible level.

 

Just found out about this, gonna give it a listen today. Need to hear more Garcia/Grisman stuff in general, there's a whole album of outtakes from those sessions of just jazz standards which obviously I need to hear

The Pizza Tapes - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
So What (Jerry Garcia and David Grisman album) - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

 

John Mayer Says He'll 'Never Close the Door on Dead & Company, Ever'

Weir, meanwhile, spoke about a cosmic, out-of-body vision he had at the end of last year's tour, and then a subsequent dream, that indicated Dead & Company could even outlive some of its primary members.

"We were playing...and suddenly I was viewing this from about 20 feet behind my head, and I looked over at John from that point of view and it was 20 years later and John was almost fully gray. I looked over at Oteil and his hair was white. I looked over to my left and Jeff's hair was all gray." And when he looked to where he, Hart and Kreutzmann would be, "it was new guys, younger guys holding forth, doing a great job...playing with fire and aplomb....It changed my whole view of what it is that we're up to. I find myself wondering, 'Well, what are they gonna be saying about this new approach or this honoring of this tradition? What are they gonna be saying about that in 200 or 300 years at the Berklee School of music?' That's the kind of stuff that goes through my head now because this legacy here, there's a chance now that they'll be talking about us in years to come. So I find it incumbent on myself to think in those terms."

 

You know infinitely more about the Dead than I do, but check some of this recent JRAD at BK Bowl out. I'm partial to the Hard To Handle -> Franklin's Tower. Smokin'. Tommy Hamilton is awesome. I mean so are Russo and Benevento...it's just a sick group of musicians. Really excited for their late night sets at Lockn' this August.

 

@Wharf Rat My bad dude, wrong link up there. Here's all 3 nights.

 

Will do. I find it hard to make time to listen to shows of cover bands because...well...there's still so much of the Dead I haven't heard. But I will definitely give it a go and go see them if I can

 

Bob pushing 70 and still as trippy as ever. Awesome

 

Yeah really fucking cool. He hasn't done acid in like 50 years too. But I do really like the idea of Mayer and Oteil or whoever continuing an "official" GD band in the vein of Furthur and D&C after the living members are gone. Like Sun Ra Arkestra. Ra's been dead for a minute but they do that legacy justice and more at times. Really cool idea

 

Your Mayer take is refreshing, so that's awesome to hear. I think his blues background brings a little something extra that, the others maybe not lacked talent wise, but wouldn't incorporate due to their Jerry fascination.

The Bob Weir vision is interesting, and something I've thought about a lot recently. In 300 years are bands today going to be regarded like classical composers are today? Will we have dedicated groups playing select catalogs like modern day symphonies do? I don't think dedicated cover bands (the ones that dress like the bands used to) are necessarily the answer to that. But I could see my great grandchildren checking out groups playing a suite of Beatles/Stones/Dead/etc songs.

 

The dictionary where Jerry Garcia got the phrase ‘Grateful Dead’

GRATEFUL DEAD: The motif of a cycle of folk tales which begin with the hero coming upon a group of people ill-treating or refusing to bury the corpse of a man who had died without paying his debts. He gives his last penny, either to pay the man’s debts or to give him a decent burial. Within a few hours he meets with a travelling companion who aids him in some impossible task, gets him a fortune or saves his life. The story ends with the companion disclosing himself as the man whose corpse the hero had befriended.(Funk & Wagnall’s Dictionary).

 

Happy 4/20

 

Hell yeah baby stay grateful everyone

 

Dick's Picks 35 is highly recommended. Some really interesting rarities. For example, Brown Eyed Women in a much faster tempo:

A pig original called "Empty Pages:"

And a '71 Weather Report tease in TOO: (at :36 and :41)

 

So, Dick's Picks 30 is a recording of a show booked by the Hell's Angels (who loved the Dead btw, did a bunch of security there, really interesting history there). Anyway it's 3/25/72. 11 song set with the dead backing Bo fucking Diddley and then a 13 song GD set. But on the Dick's Picks, Dick only put 5 of the 11 songs with Bo on it like a fucking dork. For real? Super rare insane show with one-time guest and you don't include half of it? Ridiculous. I was bummed too because there are 4 versions of it on the archive, and I checked the first 3 and they're all horrible quality.

But then the 4th...with like 1,000 views...is in fucking perfect HQ. This must be like, a leaked version of the Dick masters or something, because all the others are straight AUD tapes but this is a PRISTINE SBD. Apparently it's a Charlie Miller mix, who does a lot of incredible remixing and mastering and compositing of bootleg tapes, but I have no clue how he got his hands on this SBD if not from Dick himself. Anyway it's fucking incredible. Highly recommended.

Grateful Dead Live at Academy of Music on 1972-03-25 : Free Streaming : Internet Archive