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- [00:00]
A
Announcing Dogfish Head Grateful Dead Juicy Pale Ale Collaborating for over a decade now, Dogfish Head and Grateful Dead have crafted a light bodied pale ale brewed with sustainable kerns of grains, granola and heaps of good karma for a refreshing brew that's music to your taste buds. Check out dogfish.com for more details and to find some Grateful Dead Juicy Pale Ale in your neck of the woods. Dogfish Headcraft Brewery is located in Milton, Delaware. Please drink responsibly the Good Old Grateful Dead Cast the official Podcast of the Grateful Dead I'm Rich Mahan with Jesse Jarno exploring the music and legacy of the Grateful Dead for the committed and the curious. Ladies and gentlemen, fellow Deadheads, welcome to season 12 of the Good Old Grateful Dead Cast. I'm your co host Rich Mahan. Thank you very much for tuning in. In this episode of the Good Old Grateful Dead Cast, we leave the land of Help on the way en route to Franklin's Tower by way of an absolute freight train of a song. Yes, friends, today we're getting into Slipknot announcing the Grateful Dead Blues for all, a 50th anniversary deluxe edition. Arriving September 12, this 3 CD set features the newly remastered album with unreleased soundcheck and concert recordings. Check this out. The set features almost two hours of unreleased recordings. Among the highlights are rehearsals from the band's August 12, 1975 sound check at San Francisco's Great American Music hall, including the album tracks Sage and Spirit, Help on the Way, Slipknot and Franklin's Tower. This collection continues with performances from the June 21, 1976 show at the Tower Theater in Pennsylvania, spotlighting Five Blues for All the songs alongside favorites like Eyes of the World. Rounding out the set are selections from Bill Graham's Snack Students Need, Athletics, Culture and Kicks benefit at Kezar Stadium on March 23, 1975. There are also vinyl variants of the original album available including a picture disc and a Midnight Fire red vinyl edition and a 180 gram black vinyl edition. Very cool looking Blues for all of 50th anniversary merch is also now available and all of these are available now attheenddead.net and over@rhino.com you can also pre order the Dolby Atmos mixes of Blues for Allah on Blu ray disc. They were mixed by Stephen Wilson and are ready to blow your mind. All of these fine releases will be out on September 12th via dead.net and rhino.com head on over to dead.net deadcast and check out all of our past episodes and including the complete seasons 1 through 11. You can link from there to your favorite podcasting platforms so you can listen how you like to listen. Please help the good old Grateful Dead cast by subscribing, sharing us with your friends on social media, hitting that like button and if the spirit moves you, leave us a review. Thank you very much. Do you have any great stories about any of the songs on Blues for Allah? Were you lucky enough to catch the band at one of their San Francisco shows in 1975? Then we need to hear from you. Head over to stories.dead.net and record yourself telling us all about it. You just may hear yourself on a future episode of the Dead Cast, and for those of you who read, we have transcripts for many of your favorite Deadcast episodes available for your perusal. Head over to dead.netdeadcast index and check them out. Slipknot the Grateful Dead are known for venturing into uncharted musical territory with great regularity, and the instrumental piece known as Slipknot is no exception. This piece of music that ties together Help on the Way into Franklin's Tower on Blues, Ferala is perhaps the band's most intricate composition from their 30 year repertoire. It's a musically dense and incredibly satisfying journey that takes us from point A to point B. Unlike any other offering from the band. We're gonna dive into it and really get under the hood today. Here's master mechanic Jesse Giorno.
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B
The second piece on Blues for Ala Slipknot heralded something new on a Grateful Dead album, an instrument fit between Help on the Way and Franklin's Tower on side A of Blues for Allah. Slipknot flashed back to some of the Dead's dense late 60s music before they'd entered their so called Bakersfield era of Working Man's Dead and American Beauty. Slipknot was one of three instrumentals on the album, alongside King Solomon's Marbles and Sage and Spirit, one, each driven by the band's three primary writers, Jerry Garcia, Phil Lesh and Bobby Weir, respectively. But Slipknot was the only one to survive past 1975 in any significant way. Grateful that archivist and legacy manager David Lemieux.
- [05:28]
C
It's some of the most complicated music the Dead played helped Slip for sure.
- [05:32]
B
Two in its entirety.
- [05:34]
A
It's a complicated record.
- [05:54]
C
So it's a.
- [05:54]
B
Good thing they rehearsed and it's a better thing they recorded it for all of us who love listening to this stuff. That was an early version of slipknot from March 1975. It's a song development that we're going to trace today. Like many of the songs on Blues for Allah, Slipknot can be used to tell the story of the album as a whole.
- [06:40]
D
I prefer playing live to playing in the studio, for sure. Just as an experience, it's definitely richer, you know, because it's continuous. I mean, you play a note and you can see where it goes. You can see what the response is, what the reaction is. When you have a group of musicians in a studio, it's not unlike having a room full of plumbers. I mean, what we might be interested in as musicians and what we're doing might not relate to anybody else.
- [07:08]
B
In today's episode, we're going to get down into the plumbing, so to speak. Focusing in on the band's ongoing musical workshop at Bob Weir's ACEs studio in the first half of 1975, especially focusing on what was happening in the month of March. But before we do, let's zoom out pretty far. Not that the Grateful Dead were ever fully mainstream, even when they had a top 10 hit in the 80s. But I think there's an argument to be made that Blues for Allah, more than the studio albums that followed, felt truly contemporary with other popular music that was being made in parallel by the Dead's peers in both surface texture and in deeper ways. An argument we're going to move into sideways. The Dead remained as ambitious as ever in 1975, but as they recorded what became Blues for Allah, they were pursuing what can be described as purposeful ambiguity, both musically and career wise. Last episode, we discussed the document in the Dead archives that mapped out a production plan for GD103, the third album on Grateful Dead records, where not a single item proved correct as described, and that might have even included the Grateful Dead part of it. Electronic composer and keyboardist Ned Lagin joined the band on Rhodes during their workshop sessions throughout the spring of 75.
- [08:55]
C
There are two business entities, several, but two important business entities. One was Grateful Dead Records, Ron rakow, Steve Brown, etc. And one was Grateful Dead, which was the Parkers and others that'd be their.
- [09:10]
B
Trusty financial managers, Dave and Bonnie Parker, installed after Lenny Hart's abrupt departure a half decade previous.
- [09:17]
C
That schedule was probably created by both entities in some kind of agreement to solve financial problems and nothing more. Nothing more real than that. That's pretty real, but it certainly wasn't driven by artistic or creative impulses.
- [09:37]
B
Even Ron Rackow of Grateful Dead and Round Records is the first to admit that any document with a schedule was like the Grateful Dead. Having a set list on stage, merest, the vaguest outline of what might actually occur.
- [09:49]
C
When you try to do that in the Grateful Dead, it's not a plan, it's a prayer. It doesn't matter. The dates don't matter. All the functions that go into making an album have to be done, and they have to be done in some order, in some fashion. And all that you want to do is get everybody to agree that this even has a right to breathe and exist. And it doesn't matter if the dates are right or not. That's not what's important about it. The important thing is it's an is this that it's going to get done. You had to be a psychological genius to deal with the Grateful Dead in that capacity. They didn't like to do anything in any schedule whatsoever.
- [10:26]
B
The situation on the ground and in the high rarified air of Aces was a little more fluid. Ned Lagin it was clear that for.
- [10:34]
C
Several months at this point in time, the Grateful Dead were disbanded. The goal had been, when they were retiring was to not be in the entertainment business, to be in the music art, personal business.
- [10:46]
B
One way to think about this, I think, is that for the first part of 1975, there both was and wasn't a band called the Grateful Dead. Bands were and are changing entities, and the Grateful Dead had never maintained an absolutely stable lineup for very long. In their first 10 years as a band, only one lineup had survived without change for three years, from Keith Godshaw's arrival in fall 1971 through their 1974 pause. Groups changed all the time. All the big bands were doing it in the mid-70s. In fact, two of the year's biggest selling albums were by the Grateful Dead's close contemporaries, who'd made a point of reinventing themselves in the UK. 1975's biggest album was being made an almost exact parallel to Blues for Allah, by the British band the Dead were most often compared to the Pink Floyd.
- [11:35]
C
How I wish, how I wish you were here we're just too lost Swimming in a fishbowl Year after year running over the same old ground have we found the same old fish Wish you were here.
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B
The year's biggest selling album in the United States was made much more quickly by a band the Dead were briefly tight with in 1970. By 1975, Fleetwood Mac had reconfigured, taking on Lindsey Buckingham and Stevie Nicks and releasing their self titled album that summer.
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C
Why in life you've never seen a.
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A
Woman taken by the wind Wouldn't Say if she promised you ever, will you ever win?
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B
And there was a model of band ambiguity much closer to home, for that matter. In 1970, the configuration known to some as the Planet Earth Rock and Roll Orchestra contributed to the album Blows against the Empire, helmed by Paul Kantner of the Jefferson Airplane and released under the Jefferson Starship flag. A reconfigured band debuted under that name in 1974 and didn't even have to change record labels when they released Dragonfly. While the Dead were making Blues for Allah at aces in early 1975, Jefferson's starship were in the familiar confines of Wally Heider's at Turk and Hyde in San Francisco, making the smash album Red Octopus, released in May. We'll continue discussing ways that the Dead did or didn't align with other contemporary music, but one other popular local group was continuing to molt throughout the mid-1970s until there was only one original member left. I bring up Santana less because of their membership, though, but because, as Mr. Completely calls out, even more than the fusion groups like Return to Forever and weather report. Santana's 1972 album Caravanserai sounds like a precursor to Blues for allah. But the Schrodinger's dead of 1975 weren't in any rush to be or not to be the Dead in any definitive way, and they certainly didn't have a specific sound or strategy in mind except to remain a fluid situation for as long as they could.
- [14:33]
C
Ned Lagin I wasn't looking to be in the Grateful Dead except as it remained an open entity with Crosby and.
- [14:43]
B
Grace and other people showing up in 1975 at ACES. Even as they roughed out the new songs, it wasn't uncommon for visitors to stop by and join the proceedings. The Open Plan Model Dead Steve Brown yes, Lou Chaos.
- [14:57]
C
Okay, and let's let David Crosby come.
- [15:02]
A
Hang out here, and he's got his.
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C
Dope dealer there with him and stuff.
- [15:05]
B
So we're smoking most of my tapes.
- [15:07]
A
And stuff like that have a horrendous amount of coughing involved in them.
- [15:11]
C
With the times that David's in the studio.
- [15:15]
B
He wasn't the only local musician to drop by.
- [15:18]
A
Cipollina would come around there, and then.
- [15:21]
C
Van Morrison also came by and hung out there.
- [15:24]
B
While Fairfax resident Van Morrison did visit, he didn't play, though John Cipollina of Quicksilver Messenger Service shows up a few times on the tapes. But perhaps most assertive was David Crosby, who quickly taught the Dead a few of his songs in progress. First rain of that was homeward through the haze from the March 17, 1975 tape known as Ned's Birthday Jam, falling on Ned Lagin's 27th birthday. We'll get back to that tape. Not that any other band had someone quite like Ned lagin, though Brian Eno's role in Roxy Music in 1972 and 1973 comes closest. But Ned was another way the Dead remained contemporary, a jazz piano player who was then readying Seastones, his electronic debut for Round Records, one of many projects in the Dead's orbit that fed in abstract and tangible ways into their work on Blues for Allah. The Dead spent a lot of time at Aces in spring of 1975, but all of the music was developed between much other activity. According to Steve Brown's papers, the Dead sessions at Aces commenced on Valentine's Day 1975, with seven sessions in the last two weeks of February alongside for Jerry Garcia. During those same two weeks, two gigs with Aunt Monk, two with Legion of Mary and five with the Good Old Boys, while Weir had nine shows with Kingfish. Here's Kingfish doing Dolly Parton's My Blue Tears in Sacramento that month.
- [17:47]
C
Waste not you won't all the coldness in here what trouble midnight go elsewhere Go light through the skies and I'll shed my blood you.
- [18:13]
B
In March 1975, where we're mostly hanging out in today's episode, there were 15 more dead sessions, plus out of town trips for Legion of Mary and Kingfisher, alongside one Jerry Garcia and Friends performance at Kezar Stadium that became a short Grateful Dead set, at least in the most accepted reading of it. So for much of March, the Grateful Dead gathered at Aces in Mill Valley, where the roadies patrolled the end of the driveway and Ron Rakow had a recurring task throughout the sessions.
- [19:04]
C
What I remember about Aces Studio is that every single day that they played there, every day that they played there, and it was not true so much during the Ace album, but it was true when the Grateful Dead made an album, there was I had to go every afternoon and have a conference with a guy named Decker. He lives right next door to Bobby. And he kept saying to me, how is this going to work? You got a studio right next to my house. It's about 10ft from my baby's window. How is this going to work? Don't worry, we're going to soundproof and soundproof and soundproof until we get it soundproofed. And every day that was part of my day was to blow smoke up Decker's ass for him not to call the authorities. And close us down.
- [19:50]
B
We'll keep an eye on Rakow's smoke blowing skills as we progress. I should make clear that some of the dating on these Blues for a LA tapes is a bit provisional. Based on the conversation, here's Garcia, Weir, Lesh and Kreutzman at the end of the rehearsal from March 5, which we can date based on these 19 seconds of conversation paired with a little bit of other context.
- [20:11]
C
Well.
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D
Or same time tomorrow?
- [20:14]
C
Sure, yeah.
- [20:17]
D
When y' all leaving for?
- [20:19]
C
I'm going day after tomorrow. So we're off Friday till Monday. Then there is no session Friday. No session Friday. No session Friday. So what. What day is today? Wednesday.
- [20:30]
B
Did it again. Weir.
- [20:32]
C
Is this a. What day is this?
- [20:34]
B
Here's Jerry Garcia speaking to Peter Simon in late March 1975 about what was unfolding at Aces just exactly as Slipknot was in development.
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D
Part of what creating new forms has to do with it has to do with creating a situation in which miracles can happen, in which amazing coincidences can happen, that all of a sudden you're in an unusual space.
- [20:58]
B
If Garcia wasn't thinking about Slipknot with Peter Simon, he could have been, or any number of other pieces that were then in development for Blues for ala.
- [21:06]
D
That's the challenging part about coming up with structures that are loose, tight, you.
- [21:11]
C
Know what I mean?
- [21:12]
D
We have an element of looseness to them, which means they can expand in any direction or go anywhere from anywhere or come from anywhere, but they also have enough form so that we can lock into something. So it really has to do with the element of what's knowable and known and what isn't known and what isn't knowable and what can be invented on the spot. There's a delicate balance in there.
- [21:51]
B
The Dead had created suites of songs on their albums before, a musical idea with several roots. It drew from the classical tradition, surely, and might be used as ammo if anybody wants to argue that the Dead were a half secret prog rock band, as we sometimes do on this podcast. But to me, the most important thing the Dead song suites did was to identify the individual songs as parts of a bigger whole, as big as the larger tapestry of music and art, part of the expanded universe of the Dead songbook, or even just as intentional parts of the album or performance at hand. On Anthem of the sun, they linked together. That's it for the Other One and New Potato Caboose with some delightful musique.
- [22:31]
C
Concrete.
- [22:59]
B
On American Beauty. Ripple and Broke down palace were connected. During our episode about Broke Down Palace, Mike Hamed postulated that perhaps broke down. Palace's introduction in the key of G was written specifically to come out of Ripple, acting as a bridge before shifting to F for the verse and the rest of the song. Both live dead in 1969 and Europe 72 framed songs as extended suites as well. Blues For Allah began with something that, in a sense, channeled that three pieces of music with three different sets of songwriting credits drawn together into one suite. On the album, and at most, but not all live shows where it was performed, Slipknot fell between Help on the Way, which we discussed last time, and Franklin's Tower, which we'll discuss next episode. There's been some appropriate ambiguity about this over the years, and I'll cop to getting this wrong even in the recent past, but going by the track timings included on the original Blues For Allah, this is the moment that Slipknot officially begins with the reprise of those two big F minor chords that also introduce Help on the Way. And Slipknot has an exclamation point as part of its title, which I'll do my best to pronounce, but might occasionally, if you'll excuse me, slip. I refuse to make the obvious Wayne's World joke here. It can perhaps be argued that Slipknot was one of the wildflower seeds that suggested the methodology of Blues for Allah. If you listen very closely, bits of the composition turned up as early as 1972. Here's a microscopic flash of the transition riff from September 9, 1972, at the Hollywood Pallad. Lots of jams from 1973 have Jerry Garcia slowly moving towards the language that would become Slipknot. But then at the first show of 1974, February 22nd at Winterland that was from the plane and the band jam now on Dave's picks 42's bonus disc. I don't think that's the specific origin point so much that by early 1974, Jerry Garcia had a pretty good hold on the riff. Or maybe the riff had a hold on him. Here's the other one from the next night. Dead bass traditionally lists June 20, 1974, as the first version of Slipknot, and sometimes it's even put on its own track. But on this and a few other versions from the year, it sounds to me like Garcia playing the riff and the rest of the band improvising around him, trying to figure out what to do, and constantly getting a little bit closer.
- [26:40]
C
Sam.
- [27:06]
B
At the band's final show before taking their break from the road, it even turns up in the bridge Between Eyes of the World and Stella Blue. Garcia touches on it briefly during the first full circulating tape we have of the Blues for Allah songwriting sessions at Bob Weir's Aces Studio as well. But the first extended version is from March 5th, and we'll let it soundtrack a few more clips of Jerry Garcia speaking with Peter Simon, which I think describes something about the origins of Slipknot in terms of how and why it developed from a seed into a fixed piece of music.
- [28:04]
D
The only thing I can relate to, I can really, really relate to in terms of the roots of my own playing has to do with a sound that I would wish I would hear.
- [28:12]
C
Huh?
- [28:13]
D
You know, something that I wanted to hear, or maybe a little snatch, a moment of a guitar player, you know, on some record, or, you know, just a little a moment. And there's something about it that says that is a door to something. I can't really explain it. It's emotional, and it goes back to my earliest years. It really is. It's that deep and just is me really selecting out of the universe stuff that's part of that sound. It's the thing which I sometimes I hear it very clearly, sometimes I don't hear it at all. But it's. But it's produced my whole development. I like to be able to at least rely on my own resources, if that's what it comes down to. But I prefer to be ready to be able to play what, you know, whatever's there at the moment. And it's not really. I can't say that there's a certain sense when I am transformed, you know, and then all of a sudden, you know, God is speaking through my strings.
- [30:10]
C
It isn't really like that, Sam.
- [30:41]
B
On different levels, I'd argue that Slipknot was a piece of music that channeled these ideas and helped plant the seed for both the suite it formed with help on the way in Franklin's Tower, and maybe even Blues for Allah as a whole, embodying the new language they were trying to create.
- [30:55]
D
It's more like if you're real lucky, you know, and practice a lot and play a lot and try to feel right, and you're lucky, and everybody wants for it to happen, then there's the possibility that things, special things will happen. And when those things happen, everybody gets off on it, not just me.
- [31:14]
B
The goal for Blues For Allah was to both create a musical place for those special things to happen and then build songs around them that generated further special things. Ned Lagin it was marvelous to have.
- [31:27]
C
Three or four Months of just doing that. They finally just got to just not be playing live to people, but just dedicated to composing and interacting in a supportive environment.
- [31:41]
B
The Seastones album was nearing completion and plans were afoot for a follow up. During the last phase of the touring Dead, Ned had played additional keyboards at more shows than not, and now had.
- [31:52]
C
His own corner at the studio in the Weir setup. The only instrument that I had there permanently all the time was my electric piano. And it was set up there not just for C Stones, obviously. It was set up for me to contribute every day to Summer. All of the jamming and grooving that was going on, that was the early development and the mid development of Blues for Alla, or what became Blues For Alla. And there was only one drum setup. It was in a separate building that you went upstairs because it was sort of Mill Valley. So it's a little bit hilly, maybe, is the right way to describe it. And a relatively long driveway was not a big room. So there was an acoustic piano, which I played. But it was for Keith, of course. And Keith's electric piano was jammed up in a corner and there was a little space left next to me for Crosby. And Phil and Jerry were. And Bobby were more center in front of Kreutzman.
- [32:53]
B
Like the Dead themselves in that era, Ned's presence on the tapes is both there and not there.
- [32:58]
C
I'm on all the playing, whether I made it onto the cassettes or the two tracks that you see the mixes, that's a whole other thing. Subject to composers, subject to engineers, subject to politics and subject to the availability of tracks.
- [33:16]
B
It's time to dig into Steve Brown's work tapes, a bit like band practices since time immemorial work discussions derailed into goofiness. Here's Phil Lesh updating his bandmates on the new power control for his Osiris quad bass, designed by George Mundy. A perfectly logical topic for band practice.
- [33:34]
C
George has the best idea yet.
- [33:36]
D
We just put everything in the box and when we have the vc, I.
- [33:39]
C
Have to have audio out in the.
- [33:40]
D
Voltage control, back and forth going Pymon actually in the instrument.
- [33:46]
B
We'll mention here that George Mundy recently departed at the age of 79. We've posted a link to an obituary@dead.net deadcast after Lesh's update, Bob Weir had a helpful suggestion either though you could.
- [33:59]
C
Have little buttons put on the inside of your teeth that you can get with your tongue while you're playing. Now that's a trip I'd love to Try that.
- [34:07]
B
Which leads to Jerry Garcia dropping this amazing but totally true bit of lore.
- [34:12]
D
Somebody famous.
- [34:14]
C
Lucille Ball. It was either Lucille Ball or Dinah Shore or something like that. And I think it was Lucille Ball picked up spy broadcasts over T during the Second World War. Yeah. Really?
- [34:28]
D
And they uncovered this.
- [34:29]
C
Ours or theirs? Theirs. Theirs. Really? Yeah. What a story. Yeah, it is. Yeah. The freak frequency.
- [34:55]
B
The conversation moves into an appreciation of Lucille Ball's work and Samuel Goldwyn's pictures, which we'll abbreviate. Garcia, don't derail us. Mostly, the tapes demonstrate a pretty focused band running through the untitled bits of music in development. Ned.
- [35:12]
C
During the time that I was playing there, the first five or six months, the tunes were known as A to E distorto, E, A C again, sequence of chords and grooves one and two and other.
- [35:53]
B
That was the piece known as Groove Number two from late February. We'll get to some of these other provisionally titled pieces as we move through these episodes. I mention this because while we're going to be talking about Slipknot like it's a finished piece of music with a name, at the time they were making it, it was just a musical idea they were passing around, trying a number of different approaches that only bore some resemblance to what it became. Some of the slipknot takes from March 5 sound a bit like Renaissance music to me, especially when they put it into a noon time signature. You can hear Garcia and Weir trying to work out how to fit the guitar parts together.
- [36:46]
C
The whole thing would want to have other words.
- [36:53]
B
Garcia's description here of overlapping circles hints a little bit towards the image of the Slipknot itself to release from that other stuff.
- [37:02]
C
The thing you were just playing as a seven.
- [37:05]
D
I used the same chord, but.
- [37:09]
C
It.
- [37:09]
D
Fits in the same way that any circular figure will eventually fit any other figure.
- [37:14]
C
Right.
- [37:16]
B
The next week, on March 12, they experimented with what might be called a disco version. We only have a slightly blown out tape, apparently a compilation Steve Brown made for Garcia of some bits he wanted to review. It starts like this. It's a groove clearly designed to build to the riff, a function eventually served by help on the way. Obviously, they don't quite have it down yet. There was lots of experimenting going on, both in the piece of music that would become Slipknot and quite intentionally in their music as a whole. Slipknot, like many of the pieces on Blues for Allah, featured a unifying feature. Perhaps a little bit like Rembrandt adding a little bit of brown into every color. He mixed the Dead Love Diminished chords.
- [38:57]
C
It was later than I thought.
- [39:03]
D
When I first believed you.
- [39:06]
B
Some sets of chords change, like the Western ear expects them to. Others don't. To get deeper into the tonally ambiguous waters, please welcome back Chadwick Jenkins, associate professor at the City College of New York.
- [39:19]
E
The fully diminished seventh chord is a symmetrical chord, which is one of the reasons why I think it's not used in rock very often. The point of symmetricality in music is that it points somewhere and you get a sense of how things resolve.
- [39:32]
B
But symmetrical chords, like the ones the Dead were using as building blocks are more tonally ambiguous and provide a sense of openness.
- [39:39]
E
With a fully diminished seventh chord, it still points because you have that dissonance. So that dissonance wants to resolve. But a fully diminished seventh chord doesn't define where it's going as clearly as other chords. And it kind of has that old. It's that Brill Building sound where they're throwing back to sort of old Tympan.
- [39:57]
B
Alley ish kind of thing. Thanks for the handy example, Neil Sedaka.
- [40:16]
E
The fully diminished seventh chord doesn't define where you are. It just says, basically, I need to go somewhere. That's what makes it so flexible. And you're seeing a lot of that in this album, I think, is more emphasis on ambiguity, both with respect to chordal identity and therefore key identity and modal identity that you see especially in Blues for Allah, but also even in the time signatures.
- [40:39]
C
Ned legion the diminished seven chords. I taught them to Garcia in 1970, 71, when I would hang out and we would play jazz and I gave him my harmony books from Berkeley School of Music when I had learned all this stuff about passing chords and substitution chords. And I also, and Phil, knew this really well since the Baroque, since Bach, but then Mozart and later Mozart and Beethoven and even Mahler used these chords for mystery and for suspense and for darkness. So it doesn't surprise me. And Crosby would look at me on the piano, and Garcia used to look at me at my piano keys and see what these chords were that I played. But they made transitions between or modulations between two sets of dominant and tonic harmonies. And it had emotional color to it.
- [41:37]
B
Diminished chords weren't wholly unknown in the Dead's music before, but Ned's visits to the west coast are exactly when diminished chords started showing up in Garcia's compositions with more regularity. It's what gives Tennessee Jed's Chorus its particular nostalgic sound.
- [41:53]
D
You know, you.
- [42:00]
C
Primarily, at the time that I was playing, diminished chords were not in Rock and roll, except for some highly melodic, emotional music. But they were all over jazz. And that's how I learned it in 1960s. It has a lot to do with ambiguity and darkness and mystery in the early uses of it by Bach and by Mozart and. And I understood it also from Gershwin, used it in some of his great tunes.
- [42:30]
B
There was a lot of ambiguity in the making of Blues for Allah, from the inner tonality of the music to the identity of the Grateful Dead as a whole. Just how rare were diminished chords?
- [42:40]
E
David Temperley and Trevor leclerc. And they did what's called a corpus study. If you want to get percentages, you gotta get a pretty good sizable study to get a sense of what those percentages would be.
- [42:52]
D
Right.
- [42:52]
E
So what they do is they opt for The Rolling Stones 500 most important rock songs. So, of course it's going to be selective in that sense. But I think that it's probably a fair enough sample that we get a sense of what's what. And according to them, fully diminished seventh chords really don't show up in rock music very often at all.
- [43:13]
B
We've posted a link@dead.net deadcast so not.
- [43:16]
E
Even just fully diminished cords, but this would include diminished triads, half diminished sevenths, and fully diminished sevenths. According to them, that constitutes 0.7% of the corpus that they were looking at, which is incredibly small.
- [43:29]
B
Over the course of their career, the Dead used diminished chords roughly 20 times more than that.
- [43:35]
E
If you take a conservative estimate, they use some kind of diminished chord in roughly 14% of what they do, as opposed to 0.7 in the standard repertoire. If you take just the years that we're Talking about from 70, 71. 70, 71. Where you see it in Tennessee Jet and things like that. 72. And then they sort of stop using it after this album. It's in later songs, but not very often.
- [43:58]
C
Right.
- [43:58]
E
So if we focus just on the period that we're talking about, roughly from 70 to 75, then it's like 30, 34, 35%.
- [44:07]
C
Right. That's a.
- [44:08]
E
A lot for a chord that's fairly rare. And we should talk a little bit more about Slipknot.
- [44:21]
C
Yeah.
- [44:22]
E
Probably you've got the dominant substitute, which is the most typical outside of the Dead, not their most typical. They do use it on this album, though.
- [44:29]
C
It's.
- [44:29]
E
It's the main thing in Slipknot. One of the things that's cool about that riff is that. That it can easily go either back to itself, back to 1, or it can go to the. The minor 5. So when. When you're in Slipknot, it's A minor and E minor, but when you're in Help, it's F minor and C minor. And so it's. It's just that slipperiness of that little riff. It's a great connector riff. As a listener, it clearly comes from that riff. And Help on the Way.
- [45:10]
B
We spoke about this a bit during our last episode, postulating that because the Slipknot riff almost certainly predated Help on the Way by a full year, that perhaps Help on the Way was reverse engineered as a way to set up the Slipknot riff itself.
- [45:23]
E
It's that little riff that then they elaborate it and it becomes longer. It's differently accentuated at that point you have this shift. Like you keep. It's not exactly a steady meter because they slip in an extra beat here and there. But it's more or less 4. 4. And what shifts is the accentuation. And that's what makes it feel so alive.
- [46:01]
C
Foreign.
- [46:13]
E
To me. Makes it feel a little more interesting than you might have in other bands that are doing similar things like. Yes and so on.
- [46:21]
C
Where.
- [46:21]
E
Where, yes, we'll do it in a much more pattern, less that.
- [46:25]
B
That.
- [46:26]
E
Less of a loose feel. It's less about time and more about harmony. With them and with the Dead, it's always this compromise between harmony and time or how time can affect harmony.
- [46:37]
B
Also from the City College of New York, Deputy Dean of Arts and Humanities.
- [46:41]
C
Sean o', Donnell, the Minish arpeggios that help them modulate from like F minor, where they were, to up a whole step to G minor and then eventually to the A minor where they take the solo and stuff. It's all arpeggio based. This sort of arpeggio based riff comes right out of the main tune. Like, if I was studying a work of art, I would be like, oh, this is the main idea. It's presented here in the. You know, in the first couple of seconds. And then they developed it. But. But the timeline doesn't say that sometime.
- [47:32]
B
In art it's the big idea that comes first.
- [47:35]
C
They land somewhere in Slipknon, sit for a bit. Like when Jerry takes his Aldi Miola solo.
- [48:05]
B
And for contrast, an Al Dimiola solo from Return to Forever's Shadow of Low. I don't think the Dead were intentionally channeling prog or fusion acts like. Yes, or Return to Forever so much that their own creative path sent them on an adjacent trajectory. Between the early March sessions working on Slipknot and The time the band locked it into form for the album, there was lots of other music making.
- [48:48]
C
Sam.
- [49:15]
B
That'S from the tape known as Ned's birthday jam from March 17, 1975, the sole surviving documentation of the quintet featuring Ned Lagin, Jerry Garcia, Phil Lesh, Billy Kreutzman and David Crosby. This odd metered piece composed by Ned is formally titled no Name, and we'll be listening to bits and pieces throughout this segment, sitting perfectly next to the themes the Dead were workshopping for their own album.
- [49:41]
C
Sam One reason for Crosby being there was to hang out because it was in Mill Valley near his home with the Grateful Dead people. But the other reason was because of Seastones. The record company owed me time for Seastones and we were working on stuff for Seastones too.
- [50:25]
B
In addition to generating material for a follow up Seastones album, there were live shows planned for the albums released later in the spring.
- [50:33]
C
When we had a Seastones rehearsal there scheduled after Grateful Dead or Blues For Allah or whatever you want to call them, early on, those were recorded or not recorded and nobody kept notes about them. Bob had a dentist appointment that day, and because Bob had a dentist appointment and it was going to be a C Stone session anyway later with Crosby, Keith didn't show up either. When I started jamming with Crosby in 1970, he said, could you sound a little less Jazzy? And by 74 and 75 he really liked my playing and learned from it. Merle was also commented to me about or questioned me as to whether I had some effect on Garcia because he was playing with Merle as a jazz player or playing jazz tunes had changed and evolved over time as well. I had some responsibility. How much, it's really hard to say. I did go through, as I said, those summers with all the notes and playing it on the piano, and Garcia absorbed through osmosis a lot. People tend to think of seastones as 1974 live on stage, when it was a lot more than that. Historically, compositionally, the music of Seastones was.
- [52:12]
B
Organic matter that grew from musical seeds.
- [52:15]
C
Moment forms are seeds, and you can have tonal seeds as well as atonal seeds. You can have motivic seeds that are rhythms or are quotes of other historical or media music. I take exception to the fact that people think that Seastones is purely and completely atonal, which it's not.
- [52:35]
B
The incomplete circulating tapes of Ned's Birthday Jam reveal that for sure. With a lineup of Legion, Garcia, Lesh, Kreutzman and Crosby, at times it's possible to imagine that David and the Dorks finally discovered their new piano player.
- [52:49]
C
It.
- [53:20]
B
But in the same way as the planet Earth Rock and Roll Orchestra, David and the Dorks, Jerry and the Jerks, Mickey and the Heartbeats and Bobby Ace and his Cards from the bottom. It was less an exercise in ambiguity and more an exercise in actual musical.
- [53:40]
C
Sam and there are several multimeter prototype pieces that are ned pieces for Seastones 2, or what was called Megacat Laugh at the time. And some of those I I created them. They were all mine, but I created them to have the kind of rhythmic interplay that was going on in parallel or had or began in parallel with Phil and with Kreuzman. And I was writing and playing for for who would be playing performing Seastones.
- [54:41]
B
This is one of my favorite moments of the tape.
- [54:44]
D
Hi friend.
- [54:45]
C
Welcome again to guys.
- [54:49]
D
We like to do a little murder.
- [55:01]
B
From there there's some scattered plane that coalesces into it's not the Grateful Dead and it's not even an alternative universe, just one that only manifested briefly in hours in 1975 in Mill Valley. But then the then the real world came to challenge the Grateful Dead's happy ambiguity. And the reason was a budget crisis. And for once a budget crisis, not even of the Dead's own making. From late 1973 through early 1975, the entire country was in a long economic slump, the longest since the Depression, with unemployment peaking at around 9%. The long tale of the oil embargoes that also wreaked havoc on the Dead's plans to operate their own record company. In early 1975, the city of San Francisco announced severe budget cuts to several youth related after school programs. The promoter, Bill Graham, was outraged, didn't take much, and in February announced the SNAC benefit Students Need Athletics, Culture and Kicks. The initial lineup included San Francisco legends like Willie Mays, the Reverend Cecil Williams, Jefferson Starship, Santana, Tower of Power, Graham Central Station, and a group announced as Jerry Garcia and friends, plus talent to be named later. Here's Garcia speaking to K101 on the day of the benefit.
- [57:18]
D
One of the reasons I agreed to do it was just because I'm from here and I went to school in San Francisco. Not that I could say that I greatly benefited from the sports program or anything like that, but I'm sort of more interested in other kinds of extracurricular things that the money would also have to do with the music stuff and that sort of thing.
- [57:38]
B
The Grateful Dead were retired from the road, but Garcia had lobbied his bandmates. All of these snippets are from the March 4th rehearsal. The same week they were working out the 78 version of Slipknot.
- [57:49]
C
It's okay.
- [57:50]
D
There's no pressure to deliver some dynamite show. There's other people who are their big headliners and stuff.
- [57:57]
B
As with the Beatles rooftop concert, the drummer was the holdout. Here's Phil Lesh grilling Billy.
- [58:03]
C
Well, hey, Kreutzman, I hear you don't want to play keys, Art. I'll tell you about that, Phil. It really is, you know, I just might like to be up in the country that weekend.
- [58:10]
B
But the drummer was convinced, perhaps by this bit of Garcia logic.
- [58:14]
D
Might be a bummer, but it would.
- [58:15]
C
Only last dollar you absolute word. If I could be guaranteed that all bumpers would only last an hour, I would go into them a lot. Right.
- [58:32]
B
The idea was to take a couple of what they were calling Feelings and expand them for the set. But there was some discussion of a set list between Lesh Garcia and Kreutzman, with the drummer making a pretty radical and inspired sounding suggestion.
- [58:44]
C
You want to do a couple tunes, if I recall? Maybe one or something, you know. But I like to take the rhythm of the song like Sugar Rie man playing like that and start breaking it up. That feeling, man, it's really good. You play all kinds of times in that feeling. Oh, that's a possibility. We can go out down there and just bring it all outside of you.
- [59:08]
B
The far out version of Sugary didn't quite happen. But they continued to pursue ambiguity musically, once again posing the question of what even was the Grateful Dead.
- [59:18]
D
So we've got a nine piece band, basically. Three guitars, three keyboards, two drums and bass.
- [59:23]
B
The expanded Nandet needed all the room they could find at Aces. Featuring David Crosby on 12 string electric and the triple keyboard lineup of Keith Godschow and Ned Lagin on dual rhodes and Merle Saunders on B3.
- [59:36]
C
Where are we gonna put the B3? We gotta get the B3. Where is it? Is that a keys place? We put it where it is monitored? No, could conceivably over there is the only place. That's where the couch is or where Jerry is. Move Jerry over where the couch is.
- [60:03]
B
If it was the deads B3 and it was at the God shows for the making of their album, it's possible. Merle Saunders was playing Pigpen's old Hammond at the snack benefit and on drums alongside Billy Kreutzman. And not entirely to Kreutzman's pleasure at first was Mickey Hart. Hart had been furloughed from the band in 1971, a little less than a year after his father had run off with the Dead's money in 1972, Lenny Hart had finally gone to jail, and Robert Hunter and Jerry Garcia finished a song that was originally about him.
- [60:35]
C
Like a steam locomotive rolling down the track. He's gone, he's gone Nothing's gonna bring him back he's gone.
- [60:54]
B
In February 1975, almost exactly five years after bilking the Dead, Lenny Hart died, giving at least some form of closure to the story. It was a topic of news at one of the early March rehearsal sessions.
- [61:07]
C
Lenny's dead. Did you know that? Yeah. Which Lenny? Lenny who? Hart. Dan. Yeah, Lenny Hart. Dan died about a month ago. Yeah. Really? Yes.
- [61:22]
B
Mickey Hart, meanwhile, had put out his solo debut, rolling thunder, in 1972, and had a few other tabled albums of his own in the vault in his studio in Nevada in October 1974. Crew member Rex Jackson had invited him to the band's final retirement show at Winterland without telling the band in advance. And Mickey Hart returned for one final set of music, or so they thought. Since then, the Rolling Thunder studio had become the site for a handful of Dead adjacent recording sessions, including two albums produced by Garcia, Robert Hunter's Tiger Rose and the Good Old Boy's Pistol Packing Mama, the Snack. Rehearsals were Hart's first invited time playing with his bandmates since early 1971. The band picked out a few of the unnamed themes and progress that they'd been developing. Slipknot wasn't ready for primetime yet, nor even the late morning slot. The Dead agreed to play Ned Legion.
- [62:55]
C
My remembrance of it is that at the rehearsal, the official one rehearsal, Garcia as conductor, led us through the tracks as he wanted to play them, and there was no other discussion of it whatsoever. I'm sure that maybe 50, 50. Jerry knew in advance of what he was going to do on the rehearsal day or whether he just started playing and it naturally evolved.
- [63:54]
D
We've got a thing worked out that's more or less specially for this. You know, we've done something that we haven't done before. We won't play any our old material or, you know, any of that. We're approaching this freshly, and that's part of the reason we stopped performing was an effort to pursue completely new ideas and sort of of shake loose the past in terms of musical stuff, you know, it'll be interesting. I can't wait to see how it turns out.
- [64:19]
B
The music they plotted out drew from the themes they'd been exploring for the past Month and change, as Ned reminds us.
- [64:25]
C
And there were no words, no titles, no album title, no concept.
- [64:30]
B
And here's how Garcia described it. The day of the performance, it'll be.
- [64:33]
D
More an instrumental piece and it has a little bit of vocal stuff in it. And then maybe we'll do some song if you. If the time allows. But it's a piece just designed to cover the amount of time that we're allotted on the program. It'll be a good flash for us all.
- [64:47]
B
At the Snack Benefit, the Dead would perform a 32 minute piece of music which we now label with certain track names so that on paper it looks like a set list which reads Blues for Ala into King Solomon's Marbles into Drums back into King Solomon's Marbles and Blues for Allah. Rolling Stone reported the name of the new piece as Space Age, which wasn't a name the musicians used in Ned's memory, but it's a way to hear the piece with fresh ears. We've been listening to a tape that circulates labeled the First Day, which is the rehearsal for the Snack Benefit, probably from a day or two after Ned's birthday jam on March 17th. The mix is impeccable, which I suppose is a Dan Healy joint, and it's possible to pick out all nine musicians. It was an extremely rare incursion by Merle Saunders directly into the Dead's world, culminating in one of only three known stage appearances.
- [66:40]
C
He talked to me about the material because he was. I don't know if Garcia had given him a cassette, but he was really. He was very unfamiliar with the material. He didn't know what it was or anything, except maybe Garcia had clued him in. But Murrow was a very talented and intuitive musician, so he could pick up on anything or add to or stay clear of conflicting situations, of lack of knowledge or experience. I have only the highest respect and praise for Murrow.
- [67:39]
B
The event was officially referred to is Snack Sunday and to remind you that students need athletics, culture and kicks. Located at the southeastern corner of Golden Gate park, where the panhandle leads out into the Haight Ashbury Kezar Stadium was site of Bill Graham's big outdoor soiree with the dead in May 1973, which we talked about in our Here Comes Sunshine season, Snack Sunday marked a rare return by the Dead to the neighborhood where they made their name. It was a massively exciting day for San Francisco music fans. We've heard from Joan Miller a few times. She attended the whole Winterland run in October as a high school freshman and she checked in with this scene report.
- [68:17]
F
In 1975, I was a freshman at an alternative high school in San Francisco called Urban, and we'd been going to concerts quite a lot on and off that year. And it was announced that Snack was going to happen, which was going to be a concert by Bill Graham for the San Francisco 3 School District because their art and music programs were failing. I was thrilled because the ticket price was only $5 and it was something I could definitely afford. I remember taking the bus out there, getting to Kezar, which was where the 49ers used to play.
- [68:52]
B
A prelude to the benefit, though the day before, on March 22nd, the San Francisco examiner reported that not only had the school board somehow located an extra $2.1 million in their budget, making the benefit kind of irrelevant, but that they had discovered it several weeks previous and were too embarrassed to mention it. The show went on anyway.
- [69:13]
D
The blundering fools in City hall have put us all through a lot of changes for no good reason. But the way I understand it is the budget is skimpy regardless, even if they have discovered an extra couple of million dollars that is probably not won't stretch very far knowing that mismanagement is rife.
- [69:30]
B
And on the poster, the band we're talking about is listed as Jerry Garcia and Friends. A newspaper ad, though hand lettered by Graham's in house artist Randy Tutin, was a little more explicit about the friends.
- [69:42]
C
There I was with Marlon Brando. Mickey Hart was also on there, but there was the Grateful or Jerry Garcia and Friends, or the Grateful Dead, I don't remember which. But then they had my name misspelled as L A, G E, N. They.
- [69:53]
B
Were listed as the Grateful Dead in the newspaper ad alongside Bob Dylan, Neil Young, Joan Baez, the Doobie Brothers, Marlon Brando, Willie Mays, Francis Ford Coppola, and a cast of dozens. It's possible somebody had a talking to with Bill Graham's people, but by show day they'd kind of stopped pretending, even if they still weren't quite officially the Grateful Dead. Here's Garcia speaking backstage just before the Dead went on.
- [70:18]
D
It's the Grateful Dead, really, In an expanded version of the Grateful Dead. It's the Grateful Dead, sort of like the old Grateful Dead. Two drummers, Mickey and Bill, are playing and Bobby Weir and me and Phil and Keith. So that's the nucleus, Grateful Dead. And then Merle Saunders is playing and Ned Lagin, who's the guy that Phil's been working with a lot. So three keyboards and David Crosby is sitting in two on rhythm guitars.
- [70:43]
B
And by the time Jerry Garcia hit the stage, moments after this interview was conducted, even that plan changed somewhat.
- [70:50]
C
Crosby was supposed to play the Snack concert as a guest performer because we were all just jamming together. But then he had his kid or his wife went into labor and I don't know if his kid was actually born that day or whatever, but he couldn't, he couldn't make it.
- [71:06]
B
Happy 50th to Donovan Crosby.
- [71:08]
C
Me and my girlfriend rode with Phil and his girlfriend in Phil's BMW to that gig and had special parking and everything.
- [71:16]
B
The day got started extra early with the gates opening at 6am and Eddie Palmieri hitting the stage at 9:01am followed by former Family Stone bassist Larry Graham's Graham Central Station. Welcome back from Tales from the Golden Road and probably a show somewhere near you. Gary Lambert.
- [71:33]
G
And then Snack Sunday was an insane day in many ways. It was just this huge stadium show. I think it was like 50 to 60,000. I can't remember how many keys are held, but it was packed and the variety of music was pretty amazing. I have a funny memory of one of the first bands to go on was Larry Graham in Graham Central Station. And a band that was clearly not accustomed to playing at 10:30 in the morning. You know, Larry Graham has shades on and he comes out and the first thing he says is it's good to.
- [72:04]
B
Be here this evening.
- [72:06]
G
Like just standard stage patter.
- [72:12]
C
So happy to be here this evening.
- [72:20]
B
It wasn't yet noon, but the party was in full swing. And some folks might think it's. It's kind of Easy singing at 10:30.
- [72:27]
C
In the morning, you see.
- [72:30]
B
But I tell you what, we gonna.
- [72:32]
C
Let you find out right now for yourself. You see, we want you to warm up your vocal cords with ground Central.
- [72:37]
B
Station and say this.
- [72:45]
A
All you got to say is this little baby.
- [72:56]
B
Joan Miller with some excellent 1975 concert going tips.
- [73:00]
F
I hadn't really been to a lot of outdoor concerts. I'd made the mistake of the Beach Boys and the Dead in wearing some big platform wedgies. And I was falling off my shoes all day long, finally having to take them off. So I knew the drill for an outdoor concert now was just some gauss string pants and some clogs. Bring a blanket and a big down jacket. That was kind of the standard uniform between all my girlfriends and I. Our down jacket seemed to be the place where we could stash the drugs easily in and out of coming home to our parents. Of course, we took a bunch of Mr. Natural.
- [73:39]
B
After that, Bill Graham brought out a few ex members of the 49ers who'd played at Kezar in the pre Candlestick days. Our friend Jay Curley was there. He'd moved to the Bay Area just in time for the retirement shows in October.
- [73:51]
C
Kezar was really fun. I mean, of course there was a million different bands that played there. Everybody from Marlon Brando to all these sports people, oh my goodness. Kezar was just amazing. And we knew the Dead were going to play there. So we were all ready for a rock and roll good time.
- [74:13]
G
Gary Lambert Keezar was announced as Jerry Garcia and Friends. People said maybe that's Jerry and Merle in some configuration. There's always rumors about whether it's going to be the Dead or not, but we didn't know until they hit the stage. And Bill Graham did those individual introductions.
- [74:30]
C
On vocals and guitar, Mr. Jerry Garc. On guitar and vocals, Mr.
- [74:41]
B
Bomb Wea.
- [74:46]
C
La Battery. On the drums, Mr. Bill Kreutzman. On the keyboards, Mr. Keith Gotshaw. On bass and vocals, Mr. Philip Lesh. I'm about to be un. On the drummers, Mr. Mickey Hart. On the keyboards, Mr. Merle Saunders. Ladies and gentlemen, the Grateful Dead and their friends. At that gig, Bill Graham had to profusely ask for forgiveness from me because he inter. He introduced the band and forgot to introduce me.
- [75:25]
B
Bill Graham had never liked the name Grateful Dead, but this was one day he was happy to have it. Ignoring their chosen identity as Jerry Garcia and Friends. One result of staying ambiguous was that it gave them headroom to blow minds.
- [75:38]
G
Bill was making the intros. I said, oh, there's Merle, there's Keith, oh, there's Ned Legion. These surprises just unfolded it. It really remains one of my all time favorite Live Dead experiences because it just felt, it felt like so, so brave and so wonderfully anarchic.
- [75:55]
B
There would be no sing alongs. The whole show was broadcast on K101 and became an instant tape trading staple. Please do dig into the March 23rd performance. Now on the blues for Olive 50th release. It's wonderful. Grateful Light archivist David Lemieux. I just can't imagine, you know, these.
- [76:42]
A
Hungry, desperate Deadheads seeing them.
- [76:45]
B
You know, when you got Neil Young.
- [76:46]
A
And Bob Dylan and so many, you know, just an incredible concert and the Grateful Darien Friends.
- [76:51]
B
But the Dead come out. You're like, oh my God, we're going.
- [76:54]
A
To get China Rider and Scarlet Bo. We're going to get maybe Dark Star.
- [76:59]
B
Well, it wasn't too far From Dark Star.
- [77:31]
C
I mean, they come out and start with Blues for All. Holy mackerel.
- [77:35]
B
Gary Lambert.
- [77:36]
G
It was a big deal, but it was also under the radar because we were not told it was the Grateful Dead. I think they meant to keep it that way. I think Bill meant to keep it that way as a surprise. So it was just a jaw dropper in every conceivable way.
- [77:51]
C
I love that about the Grateful Dead.
- [77:53]
A
That that was the first taste of Live Dead for the fans in five.
- [77:58]
B
Months with no indication that they were.
- [78:01]
A
Ever going to play again.
- [78:02]
B
There was a variety of reactions in the crowd.
- [78:04]
G
Oh, I think from ecstasy to absolute confoundment. There were people who I'm sure were saying, what the hell are these guys doing? Because they're playing music totally instrumental, except.
- [78:15]
C
For the do, do do, do do.
- [78:17]
G
Do instead of Under Eternity at the end of Blues for Allah. And it was music that got really gnarly in the middle and really abstract and then had these little bits of song form like Stronger Than Dirt. It was free jazz in a stadium.
- [78:53]
B
We'll get deeper into the mechanics of these particular and often mislabeled pieces of music in episodes later this season. A week or so after the Snack benefit, Jerry Garcia expressed a faith in the Dead's audience to Peter Simon.
- [79:07]
D
I think the audience is ready for whatever, you know, rather than kind of insist upon hearing Casey Jones or. There's always people that are into that kind of stuff, and that's neat, you know, I'm glad that they are on certain levels. Some levels I'm not.
- [79:29]
C
Sam.
- [79:55]
B
The Dead set at Snack went by quickly, but broadcast by K101, the tape gave Dead freaks something to smoke. While it couldn't have happened anywhere besides in front of an audience, the performance is one that's made it into many more years as a recording where it makes a lot more sense in the context of the rest of the Dead's year. And on the new 50th anniversary, blues for Allah reissue.
- [80:21]
C
It.
- [80:47]
B
They finished it off with a single song, one that didn't require rehearsal. Bill Graham was happy. He'd allotted 30 minutes for the Dead, and they'd only gone over by 10. Gary Lambert.
- [81:16]
G
The Dead set, to me, was one of the most audacious things they ever did. They're playing this stadium show, it's the Return of the Grateful Dead, unannounced. And you think, okay, they're just going to knock us out with, you know, there'll be. There'll be a China writer, there'll be another one they'll be, you know, they'll really announce that they're back. And instead they played the most unformed, weirdest, however many minutes of music that was, and then come back with the Johnny B. Goode encore, which I thought was hilarious in its own way because they had just absolutely confounded this crowd and captivated those of us who were ready to be captivated by it.
- [81:58]
C
Ned Legion the performance went by very quickly and it was okay. It's really hard to judge when there's a lot of acts and there's a lot of quick setup and tear down. As you probably know well, Grateful Dead experience, in whatever form, is something that takes time to fully blossom. So it's hard to say either for the audience live rather than the audience that's listened to it recorded since then. It's hard to say how much it was appreciated besides the fact that it was just the Grateful Dead being there.
- [82:37]
B
It was a pretty action packed day with all kinds of big sounds by the local bands.
- [82:41]
C
Jay Curley went with some friends of mine and we were all just blown away by the whole scene. And it was beautiful weather too. But I also enjoyed the starship that day. That was a good, good God. Now take the sky. Who will give to you? We will. Volunteers of America. Volunteers of America. Volunteers of America. Volunteers of America.
- [83:28]
F
Joan Miller Truthfully, the Dead were the least memorable band of that day. Tower of Power really knocked my socks off with what is hip. And the Thorn section was just fantastic.
- [83:55]
C
What is it?
- [83:59]
B
But it was one of those days where the hole was perhaps even greater than the sum of its non insignificant parts.
- [84:04]
F
I remember that day so vividly because it was one day in San Francisco. Keys are so close to the hate that it was a lot of freaks, but also a lot of like friends of my mother's. A lot of politicians and people roaming around. It wasn't just a young person's concert. It was really had all the cross section of all of San Francisco. I have kept that ticket stub with me for God knows why for these 50 years. Because it was such a memorable day. And I just remember me and my girlfriends talked about it a lot after the concert. It was one of those days in San Francisco where everybody comes together, politicians, freaks and kids. And we all sat at Kezar under this great music. Only in San Francisco is all I can say.
- [85:01]
B
And in fact Marlon Brando was there.
- [85:04]
C
I was really interested and even more so my girlfriend was interested in actually seeing Marlon Brando, who was there. Bob Dylan was there. We didn't care Lots of other famous people were. Were there. We didn't really care. We were, you know, already we had been exposed for almost five years to famous people being backstage. But Marlon Brando were something special. From on the Waterfront and A Streetcar Named Desire and a whole bunch of film and other reasons. Hey, Stella. Hey, Stella. And part of it was the film reason of seeing if in real life he looked the way he looked in movies. Older. I mean, older, but older and wider, but good. Yes. I said. My girlfriend was very much impressed.
- [85:54]
B
Steve Brown.
- [85:55]
C
I was standing backstage, I looked over and there's this guy with a little jacket on and stuff.
- [86:01]
B
It's Dylan.
- [86:02]
A
And then I look to my left and it's Brando. They're on either side of me. I'm sandwiched between these two people looking up at the stage from the back, you know. And it was one of these moments. Who's got a camera?
- [86:19]
C
I need this.
- [86:20]
B
Jay Curley.
- [86:21]
C
And of course, the Kicker with Neil Young and Bob Dylan and people from the band that. What? Amazing. Just plain amazing.
- [86:31]
B
From a rock history pov, the one time collaboration is pretty special, even if the tape is a bit flawed for reasons I've never understood. For the Snack performance, Knocking on heaven's door became Knocking on a dragon's door.
- [87:08]
C
Knock, knock, Knocking on the dragon.
- [87:13]
B
The day was a pretty roaring success, whether the money was needed or not. As Al Dale reported on Channel 5 Eyewitness News, the mayor met with rock impresario Bill Graham, who organized the affair. The concert took in about $300,000. $200,000 or so will go to the school system. But Bill Graham said that if everybody who worked on the concert had gotten paid, all the performers, if it had not been a freebie, it would have cost about $1.3 million. The dead said at Snap was fun, but it didn't convince them to unretire. When Jerry Garcia spoke with Peter Simon a week or so later, he was more ambiguous than ever about the Dead's future.
- [87:49]
D
I can see getting back on the stage eventually. Format is part of what we're trying to determine and one of. Well, one possible fantasy that we've thought of thinking about ourselves as a more or less permanent musical association is the idea of eventually building a place that would be like a permanent performance place that's designed around us and designed around our specific ideas.
- [88:16]
B
That might be the best way I've heard to describe the ambiguous Dead. Not Dead. They were in a band, but a more or less permanent musical association. For now, they were committed to their.
- [88:28]
D
Process and this is, this is the start of that. I could see this, this kind of developmental thing lasting for a long time, going on for a long time, and we would continue to work on things this way. And it'll be interesting. It's the first time we've ever done things that purely rise from the studio. Rather than trying out, rather than learning a tune and then developing it a little in a live or an onstage situation and then recording it. That's normally what we do.
- [88:56]
B
The band took Monday off and we're back in aces on Tuesday, March 25. According to Steve Brown's notes, the band continued to work through Slipknot by the first days of April. Just before departing for an east coast tour with Legion of Mary, Jerry Garcia completed the music for Help on the Way, which in turn locked Slipknot into the form we know it in now, when the Dead connected it to Help on the Way. As musicologist Melvin Backstrom points out, the suite showcased the Dead moving between different kinds of harmonically and rhythmically intricate spaces, a true musical centerpiece, especially once Robert Hunter's lyrics were added to Help on the Way. It shows up on tapes throughout June, too, with their next ambiguous gig on the Horizon, another Jerry Garcia and Friends show, this one at Winterland, a benefit for the family of the late artist Bob Freed. Along with the instrumental version of Help on the Way, Slipknot made its debut on June 17, 1975 at Winterland.
- [90:57]
C
Sam.
- [91:23]
B
The Blues for Allah version of Slipknot was recorded on July 3rd in a single take alongside the basic instrumental track For Help on the Way. The tracking sheet is labeled Reel 191, an indication that they'd been running multi track tapes throughout the spring, too, presumably now in the Aces vault, or perhaps even taped over. The tape is labeled Slip Jig, which we discussed last episode. The phrase Slipknot jig appears in an unused verse at the bottom of a later Help on the Way lyric draft. And it's possible that this piece of Robert Hunter writing is what gave name to the song. Or it could be that the band had come to name it that on their own. Hard to say. Archivist David Lemieux the one on the.
- [92:04]
A
Album is, to me, kind of the definitive.
- [92:07]
B
It's what they wanted that song to be. The full band would get a songwriting credit on Slipknot, but it very much developed out of Jerry Garcia's central guitar part. We discussed the track assignments last time, but it's the only piece on the album where Phil Lesh was playing his quad bass as we talked about in our tribute episodes earlier this year, Phil Lesh almost never doubled anybody else's parts here, playing against Garcia's phrase, Weir's rhythm part is made atmospheric by a Leslie rotating cabinet playing what Sean o' Donnell calls the second violin part. Keith Godchau plays Rhodes on the basic track with a piano overdub later, an extension of the multi keyboard sound the band played with at the snack benefit. First the Rhodes and the piano, playing mostly hanging chords during the structured part of Slipknot and then coming in during the jam. Slipknot has two tasty overdubs, one more subliminal than the other tagged on the end of the pair of backing vocal tracks. They're both noted on the tracking sheet in Jerry Garcia's handwriting, and either or both might be Mickey Hart, though both are only a matter of seconds. The first is a brief flourish of orchestral bells. The other is labeled just bells, and I think they're basically what we call sleigh bells, right up to the transition to Franklin's Tower. Here's that segment of the song with the orchestral bells and maybe the sleigh bells further behind. The Dead put care into all the music they worked up for Blues for Allah. But Slipknot was the centerpiece of the first side central suite, practicing it twice during the newly released Soundcheck rehearsal for their epoch making album release party at the Great American Music hall in August. David Lemieux when they come back to it and they start building it back.
- [95:50]
A
Into the Slipknot jam after going way out there, it's very, it's orchestrated and.
- [95:56]
B
You can hear that developing on this.
- [95:57]
A
On the Soundcheck versions. And then I think it meets its.
- [96:01]
B
Peak the next day in the live version, which is amazing. That was the version from the Great American Music Hall, August 13, 1975. And of all the ambitious and sometimes ambiguous pieces of instrumental music that the dead explored in 1975, including King Solomon's Marbles, Sage and Spirit and the Sand Castles and Glass Camel's Jam in Blues for Allah, as well as other themes named and unnamed. Only Slipknot would survive in the Grateful Dead's repertoire. Maybe getting a little less ambiguous. That was the June 21, 1976 version from the Tower Theater in Philadelphia. Now on the new blues for Olive 50th, it's from a classic combo. Help on the Way, Slipknot, Franklin's Tower. As sequenced on the album in the fall of 1976, slipknot loosened as the middle section spaced further out, truly creating a musical version of A slipknot loose in the middle, tight at the sides. This is from the October 9, 1976 show in Oakland. Now Dix picks 33.
- [98:01]
C
Sam.
- [98:32]
B
And a few times in the fall of 1976, the band used Slipknot as a jumping off point to build even wider song suites. At this show, they went from Help on the Way into Slipknot, into a drum break, into Samson and Delilah, and out into a purposeful Slipknot reprise before playing Franklin's Tower.
- [98:53]
C
Sam.
- [99:21]
B
By spring 1977, though, the suite had contracted back to just the three parts of help Slip Frank, as many heads abbreviated it. And in some very minute ways, Slipknot began to change, too. In 2021, at the Grateful Dead Scholars Caucus, musicologist Melvin Backstrom, now adjunct professor of music history at Lakehead University, outlined some very subtle changes the band introduced to the song in 1977, only they doubled the amount of times they ran through the phrases that landed the song into the jam and brought it back out again. This whole section goes for twice and sometimes three times as long in 77. Here it is from Buffalo 77. But by fall 1977, help on the way and slipknot disappeared from the band set lists until the early 1980s, returning in 1983.
- [100:57]
D
Paradise Wave on a crest of a wavering.
- [101:06]
B
This is from Melvin Backstrom's presentation in 2021. Thanks, Mel.
- [101:10]
D
When it was revived in 1983, it had changed, however, in some significant ways.
- [101:16]
B
Basically, it jammed less. A few 83 versions did get a bit gnarly, with some great long note Garcia playing and conversational Lesh in Midland. Like the in and out of the GARDEN Take from October 12th that we've.
- [101:27]
C
Been listening to Sam.
- [101:59]
B
And some of the details changed. We'll focus in on one of them. And again, it's almost microscopic. Here's how the transition into Franklin's Tower sounded in the 1970s iteration from one from the vault in 1983, they added an extra bar that evens out the phrase.
- [103:06]
C
There's an extra bar here. In the 83 version, instead of just going directly to G sharp diminished seventh, it repeats the F sharp diminished seventh.
- [103:15]
D
Before doing that, before getting to these.
- [103:18]
C
To the da da da da da. All these rapid chord changes.
- [103:22]
B
The group had switched keyboardists since they last played the song, with Brent Midland replacing Keith Gau.
- [103:27]
C
They hadn't played it since the godchaus were in the band, perhaps in teaching.
- [103:31]
D
It to him, Garcia decided to make these changes.
- [103:34]
C
Since the revised version is definitely easier to play and remember, it may well have been a conscious attempt to simplify a complicated piece of music, to make bringing it back into the repertoire an easier process.
- [103:46]
B
Some excellent listening@dead.net deadcast we've posted a link to Melvin Backstrom's thesis, the Grateful Dead in Their Popular Music and the Avant Garde in the San Francisco Bay Area, 1965-1975, as well as his paper about help on the way Slipknot and Franklin's Tower titled Spring From Night into the metaphors of dark and light in the music of the Grateful Dead. But even in slightly altered form, Slipknot was still a transcendent piece of music. Here it is, from the Hampton Warlock's return in 1989, now with Midi.
- [104:54]
C
Sam.
- [105:21]
B
As a piece of music, Slipknot was much more than a powerful reminder of the Dead's journey through ambiguous waters in 1975. It captured and expressed the Dead's rhythmic and harmonic experiments into tangible written form that came through loud and clear whenever they called the tune. It still functioned mostly as it had been composed, reanimating the cigarette and weed smoke trapped in the carpeting of Ace's Mill Valley Studio.
- [105:46]
C
Sam Sa SA Sam SA.
- [109:34]
A
Thank you very much for tuning in to the good old Grateful Dead cast. Friends we'd like to thank our guests in this episode David Lemieux, Ned Lagin, Ron Rakow, Steve Brown, Gary Lambert, Joan Miller, Jay Curley, Chadwick Jenkins, Sean o' Donnell and Melvin Backstrom. Extra special thanks to friend of the Dead cast David Ganz for his ongoing contributions of audio from his interview archive. Executive producer for the good old Grateful Dead cast Mark Pincus, produced for Rhino Entertainment by Rich Mahan Promotions and Jesse Jarno. Special thanks to David Lemieux, Brian Dodd and Doran Tyson. All Rights reserve.