Grateful Dead General Thread

[Druggist 303]

The Road Trips Summer 71 is really good too and the bonus disc has a Hard to Handle that rivals the badass one from the Fillmore East run.

[alincoln 2,385]

That is the 8.6.71 version.  No other version comes close imo.  The Bertrando AUD is the best version of that show.

[Druggist 303]

That is the one. I’ll have to check that out because the SBD is phenomenal.  The Bertha, Mr. Charlie, Cumberland, & Brokedown that proceed it are all some of my favorite versions too.  There are almost no keys on it  and the other four are so locked in you don’t miss them at all.  Unique sound for them.

[alincoln 2,385]

http://www.deadlistening.com/2008/07/1971-august-6-hollywood-palladium.html

https://archive.org/details/gd71-08-06.aud.bertrando.yerys.129.sbeok.shnf

It's the AUD to end all AUDs.  I am definitely an SBD snob but I prefer the AUD for this show and it's not really close imo.

 

Edited January 9, 2019 by alincoln

[alincoln 2,385]

One of my favorite GD legends is that Garcia dropped to his knees during the peak of his HTH solo.

[Hate 20,164]

I just want to say that I LOVE this fucking band. Any era, any time. They just make sense to me. Maybe that makes me weird, but I don’t fucking care. Love y’all !

[Hate 20,164]

So the Dallas Cowboys thread turned me on to the gem.

 

 

 

I had no idea they had done a video for this. I think Bob is kind of enjoying it.

 

On a side note, I had a few Amazon dollars to spend so I bought the “Believe It If You Need It” disc from the 73-74 Pacific Northwest Shows. It should be here tomorrow. Can’t wait.

[Hate 20,164]

So I got my CD’s tonight and I’ve been listening for a while now. I really love the Eyes of the World and the China Cat. I haven’t made it all the way through yet, but I think I still prefer the 88-90 and the 77-78 eras. They just seemed so much better as musicians and I think the difference is Bobby. He evolved into the greatest #2 of all time over those years. It’s really amazing to listen to how fucking good he got. Jerry was always great as was Phil. Some songs sound better with a grand piano played by Keith and some sound better with the organ played by Brent, while others sound better with Pigpen. I think the biggest difference in the eras is Bobby. He really started killing it 77 and beyond. By the time he got to my favorite era, he was a goddamn god on the “rhythm” guitar. Maybe I’m just drunk though.

[Hate 20,164]

I’m listening to Reckoning tonight and drinking whiskey. I’m not letting this thread fall off of the first page. Where the hell are all of my fellow Deadheads??

[Hate 20,164]

Natural born easy on the road again!

[Hate 20,164]

Well, I guess I'll keep this thread going all by myself.  Ain't skeered.  

 

[Hate 20,164]

I've been listening to the entire Dick's Picks 18 this afternoon at work, and have to say it is out fucking standing!

[Hate 20,164]

Across the Rio Grande-o, across the lazy river!

[Hate 20,164]

Nothings shaking on Shakedown Street, used to be the heart of town.

 

 

 

Where in the fuck are my Surly Deadheads???

 

[alincoln 2,385]

Received my Dave's 29 (2.26.77).  What a way to kickoff 1977 and this year's Dave's Picks series.  Just a classic 77 show with the debut of Terrapin taking the show into the stratosphere from the kick.  

[Druggist 303]

Got mine yesterday.  For the first time in forever, I won’t mind the drive to work.  Excited to have another ‘77 Dancin too.  The whole show looks great.

[Hate 20,164]

I've been on a Morning Dew kick for the last few days.  I re-watched the Long Strange Trip movie and loved the story about the guy who was supposed to be in the truck recording but had to leave to fix a microphone.  He said that he was on his way back to the truck, but they broke into Morning Dew and he just had to stop and listen.  Great story and a great song.  

[Hate 20,164]

Well if you go down to Deep Elem, put your money in your shoes
Women in Deep Elem got them Deep Elem blues

Oh sweet mama, your daddy's got them Deep Elem blues
Oh sweet mama, your daddy's got them Deep Elem blues

[Hate 20,164]

PSA...The Jerry Garcia Symphonic Celebration featuring Warren Haynes is on Axstv right now. A pretty damn good Black Peter is on at the moment!

 

On a side note, I had to pick up my son from school today and I was listening to Europe 72 “He’s Gone”. He lived that song, but asked if we could listen to “Shakedown Street” next...a proud Dad moment!

 

[Hate 20,164]

I’m currently jamming the 11/15/71 show from Austin. Damn fine show!

[Hate 20,164]

I dare anyone to listen to the 7/4/89 Morning Dew and tell me that isn’t an all time great!

[Hate 20,164]

Here is an out fucking standing Crazy Fingers from 6/14/76.

 

[Hate 20,164]

I’m jamming the 9/3/77 show tonight. An amazing Eyes and a fantastic Mississippi Half Step! Great Music Never Stopped!!! Did you hear what I just heard? Great show!

 

[Druggist 303]

On 2/13/2019 at 10:11 PM, Hate said:

Here is an out fucking standing Crazy Fingers from 6/14/76.

 

Love this one.  The 6/9/76 one is another favorite.

[Hate 20,164]

Whoa awhoa I’m the pride of Cucamonga!

[Hate 20,164]

I’m listening to 7/8/78 Red Rocks tonight. I have an aunt and uncle who got married that night. I was 9 and had a great time, but I think I’d rather have been at this show. Great show!!

[Guest Lobo]

Apprently Robert Weir is playing some Songs at austin’s theater department next month. Should be a hoot. 

[Mojo Hand 4,580]

NY times today:

 

Opinion

The Brilliant Uncertainty of the Grateful Dead’s ‘Dark Star’

Fifty years ago, the band recorded the most entrancing version of its most hypnotic composition.

By Jennifer Finney Boylan

Contributing Opinion Writer

Feb. 27, 2019

It was a slow winter day, and I had just left the Anthology Film Archives in New York after a screening of “Andy Warhol’s Frankenstein.” It had seemed like a long afternoon, what with the beheadings and the orgies and whatnot. Curiously, Baron von Frankenstein insisted on calling his creature’s nose its “nasum.” Also, he observed that “in order to know death, you have to” — let’s paraphrase here — “know life in the gallbladder.”

I stood there on Second Avenue, more than a little discombobulated.

And then, from an open window, I heard Jerry Garcia singing, like the voice of an old friend. “Dry your eyes on the wind,” he sang.

Garcia’s mother took him to see “Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein” when he was 6 years old, he once said in an interview. “My father had just died the previous year. That was my first sense that there are things in this world that are really weird, and there are people who are concerned with them. I think that sounds like fun.”

It was fun. And it was 50 years ago today — Feb. 27, 1969 — that Garcia and the Grateful Dead stood onstage at the Fillmore West and recorded the live version of “Dark Star,” a song that is still about as fun, and as weird, as American rock ’n’ roll can be.

Lou Reed, the heart of Andy Warhol’s house band, the Velvet Underground, didn’t have much patience for the Dead. “All those people are the most untalented bores that ever lived,” he said of the San Francisco scene. “It’s a joke.”

But the Velvets and the Dead had a lot in common, and by this I mean more than the fact that they were both originally called The Warlocks. Both liked to stretch tunes out into long improvisations; both had band members (John Cale and Phil Lesh, respectively) with roots in avant-garde music. Cale described the Velvets’ music this way: “It was an attempt to control the unconscious with the hypnotic.” Who else does that sound like?

[For a track list of Jennifer Finney Boylan’s favorite performances of the Grateful Dead’s “Dark Star,” scroll to the bottom.]

“Dark Star,” the Dead’s most hypnotic tune, began with the band rehearsing at the Rio Nido in Sonoma County in the summer of 1967. Listening to the music from the next room, the poet Robert Hunter wrote down its first verse: “Dark star crashes, pouring its light into ashes. Reason tatters, the forces tear loose from the axis. Searchlight casting for faults in the clouds of delusion.”

And then, the Prufrockian chorus: “Shall we go? You and I while we can, through the transitive nightfall of diamonds.”

After the lyric, in most performances, the song turns catty-wompus. There is ambient warping and woofing. There is electronic weeping. Sometimes this part of the tune gives way to something else — jazz riffs, dance music, cowboy songs, the ballad “St. Stephen.” You never know what you’ll get.

It’s that uncertainty that I’ve always loved best in the composition, its sense of infinite possibility. Of the nearly 250 times the band played the song live, no two versions are the same. But it’s more than the tune that keeps changing. Usually, the thing that has changed between each listening is me.

I heard it as a young hippie thing sitting in a friend’s bedroom in Merion, Pa. I heard it the night my daughter was born, in Maine. I listened to it this summer as my wife and I, celebrating 30 years of marriage, hiked the Cinque Terre in Italy.

There are versions of it in which the audience is clapping along, like it’s a dance tune. There are versions of it that sound a lot like a half-hour of musique concrete, or as my mother described it, “like someone left the vacuum cleaner on.”

Some nights the band did only the first verse, and things devolved from there. This happened during the very last performance of the song, in fact — on March 30, 1994, in Atlanta.

Now and again I imagine a world in which Jerry Garcia is alive once more, and the band comes together, to finish what they started that night, and we are all young again.

But Jerry Garcia is gone, of course, as is Andy Warhol, as is Lou Reed, and the world in which they created art has been largely eclipsed by commerce. At the gift shop of the Warhol show at the Whitney right now you can buy a set of Warhol-themed skateboards for $1,750.

But we still have “Dark Star,” in all its beautiful, terrifying weirdness. Bob Dylan once described folk music this way: “It’s the only music where it isn’t simple. It’s weird, full of legend, myth, Bible and ghosts, chaos, watermelons, clocks, everything. “

If you haven’t listened to the tune for a long time — or if you’ve never heard it — the 50th anniversary today is a good excuse. There are a lot of strange things to uncover in “Dark Star”; ghosts and chaos and watermelons and clocks may be the least of them.

As Warhol’s Frankenstein observed, there are a lot of ways to know life. Music is one of them. Turn and face the strange. It’s fun.

Twelve Classic Performances of “Dark Star” by the Grateful Dead

Before checking out these 12 performances, it’s worth reading Robert Hunter’s lyrics here; this version includes the final coda, never performed live. He composed the first verse lying on his bed, listening to the band in a rehearsal space nearby.

“I don’t have any idea what the ‘transitive nightfall of diamonds’ means,” he wrote. “It sounded good at the time. It brings up something you can see.” The chorus echoes T.S. Eliot’s “Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.”

Several weeks later, Garcia requested a second verse. As he wrote it in Golden Gate Park, a stranger passed by. “In case anything ever comes of it,” Hunter told him, “this is called ‘Dark Star.’”

I asked David Lemieux, the band’s official archivist, how he would describe the significance of the song within the band’s catalog. “It’s a song with endless possibilities,” he said, “and in true Dead fashion, they explored every possibility the ‘Dark Star’ musical landscape allowed. Although there are consensus ‘best versions,’ every single performance is worth exploring.”

Here are 12 classic performances, starting with the best known version, performed 50 years ago today. The next three versions were selected by Mr. Lemieux, the rest by me.

1. Fillmore West, San Francisco, Feb. 27, 1969. From the 1969 “Live Dead” album. On the original vinyl, “Dark Star” jammed into “St. Stephen,” and “The Eleven” and “Turn On Your Lovelight.” The live version of the song that began this sequence, “Mountains of the Moon,” was not released until the full four-night run of the Fillmore shows was made available in 2005. Running time: 23:17.

2. Fillmore East, New York City, Feb. 13, 1970. Mr. Lemieux: “This was the first version of ‘Dark Star’ I heard after ‘Live/Dead,’ the highlight of the first box of cassettes I received in 1984. Its melodic upbeat coda is in stark contrast to the primal, psychedelic, orchestrated chaos of 2/27/69 and shows where the Dead were heading. In the age of the Grateful Dead’s foray into Americana, ‘Dark Star’ from 2/13/70 demonstrated that they were still able to pull off improvised, psychedelic/melodic bliss.” Running time: 29:42.

3. Veneta, Ore., Aug. 27, 1972. “On a hot, sunny day near Eugene, Ore., playing in a field to their tribe, the Dead played a ‘Dark Star’ that is about as dynamic as they ever got with this song in this era,” Mr. Lemieux said. “From the smoothness of the opening section of the song to the meltdown, drum-and-bass duet, and its rising-from-the-ashes triumphant return to light, this ‘Dark Star’ is one of the most deep and joyous journeys the Dead ever took.” Running time: 31:40.

4. The Spectrum, Philadelphia, Penn., Sept. 21, 1972. “Similar in structure to 4/8/72, this ‘Dark Star’ has it all, from the psychedelic depths of its earlier incarnations to the jazz-inflected introspective moments, to an ending that is all bouncing and smiles,” Mr. Lemieux said. “It’s versions like this that make me think the band must have even surprised themselves. This is not composed music, but rather improvisation that is as structured as though they’d played this closing a hundred times.” Running time: 37:08.

5. The Family Dog at the Great Highway, San Francisco, Calif., Nov. 2, 1969. Nine months after the “Live Dead” version, the song has become quieter and more reflective. Organist Tom Constanten, known as T.C., is particularly inventive this night; note how he takes the song in a curious direction at about 6:45. Running time: 30:16

6. Fillmore East, New York City, Sept. 19, 1970. This recording begins mournfully. It was the day after the death of Jimi Hendrix. Mid-song, however, things change. Running time: 25:23.

7. Capitol Theatre, Port Chester, N.Y., Feb. 18, 1971. The Dead played a number of legendary shows at this venue; this one jams into the song “Wharf Rat” before evolving again into something later simply described as the “Beautiful Jam.” Running time: 21:42.

8. Wembley Empire Pool, London, April 8, 1972. The band’s spring 1972 tour of Europe was a triumph. This version of the song features the delicate piano of the keyboardist Keith Godchaux. Running time 32:09.

9. Miami Arena, Miami, Oct. 26, 1989. Brent Mydland joined the band as keyboardist in 1979 and gave the Dead a jolt of new energy. This “Dark Star” captures that version of the band, and of the song. Running time: 26:40.

10. Oakland-Alameda County Coliseum, Oakland, Calif., Oct. 31, 1991. The band performed on Halloween, in the wake of the death of their friend, the concert promoter Bill Graham. On that occasion, they were joined onstage by the author Ken Kesey, who was himself in mourning over the loss of his son. Midway into the tune, Kesey reads the e e cummings poem “Buffalo Bill’s Defunct.” Running time: 11:06.

11. The Omni, Atlanta, March 30, 1994. The last performance. Garcia sings only the first of the two verses, leaving the song forever unfinished. The weariness in his voice is heartbreaking. Garcia would die of a heart attack 17 months later, on Aug. 9, 1995. Running time: 10:29.

12. No compendium of “Dark Star”s is complete without a version of the original “single” of the song, from 1968. Garcia considered this short version a flop. It’s historically interesting for the banjo riff at the very end, along with the only recording of the lyricist Robert Hunter’s voice on a Grateful Dead record, performing what he called a “word salad” in the final seconds. Running time: 2:44.

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/27/opinion/grateful-dead-dark-star-anniversary.html

 

Edited February 27, 2019 by Mojo Hand

[Guest Lobo]

So the article is literally as long as the song?   Got it. 

 

too long; didn’t trip 

Edited February 27, 2019 by Lobo

[Hate 20,164]

I can’t remember if I said it here or on TOS, but Cosmic Charlie is a great fucking song!!

[Scooter Monzingo 821]

I was always partial to Franklins Tower. And it seemed as if once Bob started performing it on his own it got even better. Perhaps it was because his part had changed and he infused more emotions or even soul then speed. Younger guys seem to always want to play fast. You get older and you develop those subtle techniques that often go unnoticed to those who don’t play. So though you slowed it down, it feels as if you added more texture. If that makes sense.

But, I’m not a Dead Head, only someone who digs what they did. But that tune epitomizes the Dead sound to me. It can go 5 minutes, or 20. On the nights they were feeling it, it could be a hell of an experience.

[Druggist 303]

[Sleepygrad 1,029]

Jerry’s looking for his briefcase

[Hate 20,164]

It’s whiskey and The Dead tonight!

[Hate 20,164]

The 73-74 Pacific Northwest is in heavy rotation for me tonight. Love the Eyes, Sugaree, and NFA>GDTRFB!!

[Hate 20,164]

Where all of my Deadheads??? Rosie red and electric blue, I bought you a paddle for your paper canoe!

[Hate 20,164]

Here's a great Help on the Way>Slipknot>Franklin's Tower>The Music Never Stopped from 6/19/76!

 

Edited March 11, 2019 by Hate

[Druggist 303]

I'll have to check that out.  Right now I am watching the second set of the previous night (6/18/76) which was recorded when I was a few hours old.  

[Hate 20,164]

I've been on a huge Music Never Stopped kick the last few days.  This is one of those songs that I have to hear late 70's era Dead play.  When Donna is in tune for that song it's just a great jam!  Here is one from 4/24/78 that is terrific. 

 

[Hate 20,164]

Now I'm watching Winterland 12/30/77.  Great Looks Like Rain which is one of my all time favorites.

 

[Hate 20,164]

I'm jamming this one tonight.  I've been on a 70's kick for a while now ever since I got the 73 PNW show CD's. 

 

 

[Hate 20,164]

Twenty five years ago tonight I was in Chicago watching the Grateful Dead at Rosemont Horizon!  It was the second night in a row that we had gone to and it was just fantastic.  It had a really great set list.  I know it was 94 Dead and everybody hates it, but I don't care.  It was a great show and will always be one of my favorite memories.  Here is the show if anyone is interested.

https://archive.org/details/gd94-03-17.sbd.ladner.8023.sbeok.shnf

[Hate 20,164]

Does it drive anyone else crazy when Jerry screws up the words?  I'm listening to a pretty damn good He's Gone from PNW 73 (it would be my favorite He's Gone if not for the screw up) and Jerry messes up the second verse.  Other than that, the song is pretty much perfect.

 

Edit:  And I don't mean like it ruins the song or anything like that.  It messes me up when I'm trying to sing along is all I mean. 

Edited March 20, 2019 by Hate

[Hate 20,164]

But they make up for it with a pretty perfect Eyes of the World!!!!!!

[Hate 20,164]

It is a spectacular night here in SE Texas...might as well have some whiskey and listen to some Grateful Dead!

[Hate 20,164]

Days like this are made for being outside and listening to this song!

 

[Hate 20,164]

PSA....AXS TV is doing a Grateful Dead special tomorrow beginning at noon.  From what I can remember seeing, it has the Big Interview with Bob Weir, Warren Hayes playing Dead songs with a symphony (I posted about it earlier in this thread), a documentary about a Rock and Roll train through Canada (GD, Janis Joplin, The Band, etc.....great show and worth watching (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Festival_Express)), and some special show about Jerry Garcia. 

 

 

Edited March 22, 2019 by Hate

[Hate 20,164]

Here's a great one...Estimated>Shakedown Street>Fire on the Mountain>Sugar Magnolia from 11/24/78. This  might be my favorite Shakedown!

 

Edited March 23, 2019 by Hate

[WhatTheBuck 28,842]

On February 27, 2019 at 3:11 PM, Lobo said:

So the article is literally as long as the song?   Got it. 

too long; didn’t trip 

That makes no sense. It's almost like saying, "too hungry; didn't eat."

You do realize that the psychedelic experience (aka "tripping") and the length of songs by psychedelic bands are directly connected, right?

Have you passed the acid test?

[Guest Lobo]

Yes, I have a cousin who has a friend that once did acid at a Dead show, so I'm pretty sure I know how the whole concert/hallucinagen thing works dude.