Jesse Jarno (4:57)

Here's a Grateful Dead trivia question that's not actually that trivial. What was the last album of original Grateful Dead music? True, the Dead put out Built to last in 1989, but the answer to the question and the subject and springboard for today's episode is Infrared roses, released in 1991, 30 years ago this fall and now streaming for the first time. Here's some of the title track.

Bob Bralove (5:54)

The.

Jesse Jarno (5:54)

Grateful Dead, of course, kept writing songs after Built to Last, but they also kept developing in other ways, and Infrared Roses was a progress report from their improvisational group mind created at the cutting edge of technology, just the way Live Dead was more than 20 years earlier. The music on Infrared Roses emerged from the part of Dead shows labeled Drums in Space, the point about halfway through the second set when they left the songs behind. A punchline to some, but a nightly cosmic portal to many others. It was where some of their most inspired music occurred Grateful Dead archivist and legacy manager David Lemieux.

Tyler Roy Hart (6:30)

That's the moment when the Grateful Dead, with their big label of being an improv band, truly got to improvise. And every night was different in drums and space, dramatically. Whereas if they did China Rider three times on that tour, they're not identical. The energy would be different on a performance level. It's an orchestrated piece of music, as is everything they do.

Jesse Jarno (6:49)

You know, war fratted everything. This is Jerry Garcia talking to Howard Rheingold in 1990.

Bob Bralove (6:54)

We want to maintain some area that's absolutely unstructured, you know, absolutely totally unstructured.

Jesse Jarno (7:01)

But it's also pretty hard to hold space for genuine chaos.

Bob Bralove (7:04)

It finds structure, it finds expression. You know, if we're lucky, if not it, then, well, again, this is one of those things that's totally subjective kind of experience. There are times when we feel like we're really clicking into something here, but it's definitely. You have to be alert in a certain way. You have to be ready. And also, you have to discard notions that are fondly held by a lot of you. You know, about sequences of notes and about scales and about musical systems as a whole. If you think of music as a language, the space part of it is where you throw out all the syntax.

Jesse Jarno (7:50)

In the late 1980s, the dead, the whole Dead, embraced MIDI technology. Musical Instrument Digital Interface. It allowed the musicians to make their instruments sound like anything they wanted. A guitar could sound like a flute, a choir, a translucent light fish, a bowling ball in a petting zoo, a pan dimensional five cornered ice gong, or anything else. It pointed towards new dimensions in Grateful Dead, Infrared Roses was the result. Our friend Steve Silverman is a fan.

Steve Silberman (8:20)

It still sounds like music from the future to me. And so Infrared Roses was kind of the last group of music that really looked toward the future of not just Grateful Dead music, but music itself.

Jesse Jarno (8:33)

Dave Harrington of the band Darkside is a Dead freak who uses MIDI extensively in his own music.

Dave Harrington (8:38)

I really dig it. Not as a curiosity, but as, like a musical document. Just the fact that they were, like, going to the edge of what was possible with the technology they had, to me is like, you know, that's enough. That's worth the price of admission. Like, the spirit of the thing of being, like, this is the new pieces of gear. What can we do with this? This is interesting. See how it inspires us? That's part of, like. That's a cipher for the whole endeavor, really. Right.

Jesse Jarno (9:06)

Infrared Roses wasn't just a dalliance, but the most official Invisible representation of an entire period lasting more than a half decade through Jerry Garcia's death in 1995. Drums in space provided a pressure free platform that resulted in many of the band's most creative moments over their last half decade. Through their very last shows, that truly Open Territory was a portal back to the formlessness of the psychedelic experience and the acid tests. In our Dead Freaks Unite episode, we discussed surveys conducted by sociologist Rebecca Adams, in which respondents frequently reported moments of realization occurring during the deepest part of the Dead. Second sets a point to consider here as well. The music on Infrared Roses comes from a fairly contested part of Dead shows well into the weirding.

Tyler Roy Hart (9:54)

I'm a huge fan of drums and space. I always was, and to me, and as I've got older, I wish I appreciated it more. At the Dead shows I saw live in concert back in the day, because sometimes I was taping. So I'd be concentrating, usually drums and spaces where you'd flip your tape so.

Rich Mahan (10:13)

You'Re concentrating on that.

Tyler Roy Hart (10:15)

Or maybe it's when you kind of sit down and just kind of take a breather and look at the crowd.

Steve Silberman (10:19)

Something that I think is important is when I started listening to feedback on Live Dead and stuff. One of the things that was so compelling about it is that most of the time when you listen to music, it's not that hard to figure out what emotions they're going for. You know, if is it a ballad, is it, you know, a love song, is it a excited party song? Feedback and then space, and then the MIDI spaces evoked emotions for which there was no name. You couldn't attach it to any known emotion because it wasn't falling within the standard lexicon of musical language. It was outside of it. And thus it was outside of the coded emotions that is in almost every music that anyone listens to.

Jesse Jarno (11:14)

But for people who felt the Dead psychedelic pull, these moments were the reason to go see the Grateful Dead. And in some senses, Infrared Roses is an album length collection of those moments.

Steve Silberman (11:24)

Psychedelic shamanistic initiation is part of indigenous cultures all over the world in different forms. And I feel like Deadheads kind of stumbled on that at the same time that the band kind of stumbled on that. If they deconstructed their music, which started with feedback in the late 60s, if they deconstructed their music somewhere in the middle or towards the end of the show, that it would be amazingly appropriate for an audience that was turned on to psychedelics. I don't use hyperbolic phrases like ego, death or anything, but something happens. You're no longer imprisoned in the cage of your personality as much. And there's a moment of kind of open space when you feel like you can become anything and where you can see anything. And I feel like drums in space was that. And because it started with drums and because Mickey was so tapped into the history of percussion in various indigenous cultures. To me it was like going back to the very beginning of music. It was like going back to the Big Bang. Every show of music where you would start with these very quote unquote primitive sounds. And then you would get into. Eventually, once they started using midi, you would get into kind of the orchestra of the imagination.

Jesse Jarno (13:12)

That was a space segment from February 21, 1995 in Salt Lake City, released on the 30 trips around the Sunbox set. Today we're going to hear the story of how the Grateful that dreamt an orchestra of the imagination from the musician who helped them turn it into sound. Please welcome to the good old Grateful Deadcast, Bob Bralove.

Bob Bralove (13:30)

I was getting a master's degree in composition at San Francisco State. And I needed to work. I had done some word processing and stuff and then got a job working in computers. I ended up with a company called Osborne Computers. Who made the first transportable computer, which, because it fit under your airplane seat, no batteries, you know, you had to plug it in. It was. It had this huge case and the front of the case just sort of flopped down and the keyboard was in it. And I had a friend who happened to have been a Deadhead, really awesome guy. And he was in customer support. I was doing international stuff, translating software and stuff like that into different languages. He had this big Cadillac with these two huge speakers in the back seat. And we used to drive around and he'd play dead music for me, you know. And one day he came up and he said, I just got a call from Stevie Wonder's chief engineer. And I had always said. I had always said. Because I got the sense right away from using the machines. I said to him, if anybody calls about music, let me know. Because I sense the power of these machines. This will get me back into music.

Jesse Jarno (14:49)

Originally hired to help Wonder create a voice controlled phone book, he soon moved on to creating voice controls for Wonder synthesizers.

Bob Bralove (14:56)

In the process of doing that, I had to learn the synthesizers, right? And I was coming in as a computer guy, not as a musician. So I would work the synthesizers when he wasn't there. So I'd come in late at night to record or something and he'd hear me. He'd come In I would have headphones in and speakers up, something. And he'd hear me operating them and he'd say, well, why don't you stay for the session, Bob? I think I could use you. So then spent all night there. Crash and then come back and learn the synthesizers. And then he kept asking me, and then one day he said, we're going to Europe this summer. Do you want to come? I said, sure. I joined the tour and then it was eight years of nonstop touring and studio work and television shows. And it was wonderful. My parents said, girl, don't leave home. But.

Jesse Jarno (16:14)

That was Stevie Wonder's go home from 1985's in Circle Square, for which Bob received a programming credit. It was around that time, too, that Bob came into the Grateful Deads world through another keyboard player, Merle Saunders.

Bob Bralove (16:27)

I was doing a Grammy show and Murl was very involved with Narus, the Grammy organization. And I was doing this big synth thing with Thomas Dolby. Howard Jones, Stevie Wonder and Herbie Hancock all had number one hits that year with heavy synth stuff. You know, Merle comes up to me afterwards and looks at me and looks at the stage and says, you know how to operate those things. I said, yeah, I do that for Steve. And he goes. He goes, you ever want to do television music? And he invited me to work with him on the Twilight Zone, which was the CBS remake of the Twilight zone in the 80s. Merle had the contract and he was bringing in the Grateful Dead as part of that. The first thing I started doing with the band was recording them in a room. And I remember we had this really strange isolated room, isolation room in Front Street. Just a tiny room. I mean, tiny for the size of the warehouse, but totally padded, totally isolated. I don't know if you're aware, but Front street was not a sound isolation kind of environment. Was just a big warehouse that they set up structures depending on what was going on. And so the control room was not isolated. So this was the room. And I had Bobby in there, and I had this list of ideas that he should play. And I would record them and the idea to use them in the show even when they were away or if they didn't feel like coming in. They were things like, all right, play first view of the coffin. Or you realize he's still alive. And Bobby would go, you know, first view of the coffin. And Bobby do his, you know, quintessential. And, you know, you just place that in the right place. And it was magical. Mickey got very involved in sound design. We would record on tracks and send them to la. And Mickey and Merle were having territorial issues over the soundtrack. And I was working with both of them and they would fight over my time. It was really kind of funny because I was the only one going to both sessions. And so it was a wonderful introduction to Mickey because those kinds of sonic worlds that he lived in, totally Twilight Zone. For me, there's that aspect of 1950s, 1960s and through the 70s of that sort of classical avant garde that was very idiosyncratic to instruments. So you would. It was kind of a tradition to use an instrument in the only way that instrument spoke, you know, in the John Cage way. George Crumb, all those guys were pushing the envelopes of these things. And so, you know, here was Mickey, you know, using water phones and Tibetan prayer bells and pitch bending them. So I just dove right in. We saw eye to eye right away on that stuff, and we made a good connection.

Jesse Jarno (20:34)

A few years later, when the Dead were getting to work on in the Dark, they remembered Brelove.

Bob Bralove (20:39)

I was brought in to sort of orchestrate Brent or Mickey. Most of in the Dark is more. The guitars are all more traditional guitar stuff. But Mickey and Brent were pushing some envelopes. I was bringing in new piano sounds for Brent. I will give up I will get by I will get back I will survive.

Jesse Jarno (21:17)

Did pretty well.

Bob Bralove (21:18)

They invited me to go on the Dylan tour. And at the end of the Dylan tour, I went to the office and there was a band meeting. And I went into the. The band meeting and I said, well, this is the end of my contract. I'd love to stay and work with you guys, but if you want to end this, that's fine. And they all went around the room and said, well, I want to use you I want to use you I want to use you and the last guy said was Billy. And he said, well, I'm going to use you too, so hang out as long as you're having a good time. And that was the only job description I ever had.

Jesse Jarno (21:55)

So in 1987, Bob Ralove started outfitting the Grateful Dead for the 21st century and beyond.

Bob Bralove (22:01)

First was to update Brent. That was the priority. But of course, Mickey always wanted something new and fresh. I had to set Billy up, who is in many ways less technological than Mickey in his thinking. But his playing is so soulful that it doesn't matter what you give him, he's going to make some magic out of it. And so he was just in. It was just quite amazing. Everybody was just game.

Jesse Jarno (23:03)

That was the drum segment from July 3, 1988, at the Oxford Plains Speedway in Maine, released on the 30 trips around the sun box set. Steve Silberman was a fan.

Steve Silberman (23:13)

Right away, for me, the Thrill of Minnie began when Mickey started using loops in the drum section and using sort of more melodic elements in a. In a strictly percussion based performance. And so I felt like I was hearing music from the future. Once Mickey started using loops. And it's not like he invented it. Tio Massaro, when he was producing In a Silent Way. I mean, In a Silent Way is loops and samples basically based on jams in the studio. And it's one of the top five records ever made. So it wasn't that. The idea of loops and samples was new. But Mickey brought it into a live performance contest that broadened the palette of what was available to the band, particularly in drums.

Bob Bralove (24:00)

It was a constant learning thing. In the early days, before I fully understood the way Mickey wanted to hear things, he would. Sometimes he said, no, you need to do something. And he'd go up and tune the reverb on a drum sample. Because he could have those huge long reverbs hit a drum and you sort of washes over the audience. And that's a uniquely Mickey vision. Anybody who does that now heard it from Mickey first.

Jesse Jarno (24:30)

Suddenly, the drummers could play notes. Here's Billy Kreutzman talking to David Ganz on the Grateful that hour in 1991.

Bob Bralove (24:36)

It's still drummers trying to be musicians. Time it is. It's really true. I'm not lying. That's a fact. We're percussionists somewhere out there involved in some sounds. And neither Mickey or I have learned the 12 scales perfectly. We don't know how to be free in all the scales. So when you put all this stuff in front of us, it's still, God forbid me for saying this, but it's still the monkeys on the keyboards going at it.

Jesse Jarno (25:00)

I don't care.

Bob Bralove (25:01)

I mean, that's what we do. And it works out cool some nights.

Bob Bralove (25:04)

I remember there was one day we were at a sound check. And Mickey, he could get relentless about needy. He could need something. And he was going for some sort of perfection. And it was like, it's sound check. You know, you could have come up with this yesterday or something. I could have worked on it. But it was, you know, it was worth doing, always worth doing. But Brent saw me over there and he called me over and he said, I got something you need right away. I went over to Brent and he said, oh, Mickey, Just looked like he was giving you a hard time, so I gave you a break. It was like having many bosses, but at the same time they were used to having a ban so they could surrender things. That's somebody else's part. This is somebody else's role. I realized pretty quickly that there's a unified vision of the band, but everybody's role in that is very individual. Everybody had their own world, their own sense of control over their instruments. They weren't putting a part in there. They were finding an instrument to be expressive with. Jerry was waiting for something, I think. I think he was waiting for me to get through everybody else so I'd get my Grateful Dead chops together. And also the technology, a Roland gr. Something that tracked. You had had MIDI pickup. So it tracked fairly well. And when we put that on, I remember Steve Paris said to me, oh, well, maybe he'll use it here, but he's not going to use that on the show. He'll never use that in the show. Just don't worry about it. He's not going to. He's not going to use MIDI in a show. So I thought, okay, well, he still wants it, so I'm going to keep, keep working at it. Of course, you know, within two months he has it in the show.

Jesse Jarno (27:02)

By early 1989, Bob Weir, Phil Lesh and Jerry Garcia all had MIDI pickups attached to their guitars. At first, Garcia's MIDI rig was confined to a black Stratocaster he'd switched to during the space segments. By the summer, it was attached to Wolf, the custom Doug Irwin guitar he'd played between 1973 and 1979 and which.

Bob Bralove (27:23)

Soon returned to active duty, especially with Jerry. The issue became for me, how do I make this synthesizer respond to Jerry's fingers so that Jerry feels like it's him, not that he is playing what a horn player would play, but what Jerry feels like playing. And one of, of course, the most important things became the translation of the pitch bend for his vibrato. Right? You can always tell Jerry's playing one of the synths by the vibrato. He'll have that. It's like a vibrato on a trumpet or something or on the flute. It's not. It sounds like his hands. And when that sort of fell into place and he became happy with it, then he started using it a lot.

Jesse Jarno (28:20)

By the fall of 1989, Wolf was Garcia's full time guitar again. And things were about to get surreal.

Steve Silberman (28:26)

I have a kind of a singular attachment to 89 and 90 for me, basically, the height of the MIDI era coincided with the last great Himalayan peak of Grateful Dead music. I'm not saying that there weren't good shows in the 90s. There were. I'm not saying that after Brent died, everything went bad, although it kind of did.

Bob Bralove (28:50)

Sorry.

Steve Silberman (28:51)

But what I'm saying is that 89, 90, those shows were as good as they had ever been, I think. And of course, I still remember the night coming back to my house to 12 voicemails or something about the breakout of Dark Star at Hampton. That was a big moment.

Bob Bralove (29:17)

Sam.

Jesse Jarno (29:43)

With a name on the marquee Reading, formerly the Warlocks. The October 8 and 9, 1989 shows at Hampton Coliseum in Virginia probably would have been legendary even if the Dead hadn't brought back Dark Star. Addicts of my life and the full help on the way, Slipknot Franklin's Tower Suite. But even beyond that, it opened a tour that heralded a new era for the Dead and some legendary shows. Here with us is Tyler Roy Hart. You may know from such Twitter accounts as Mr. Completely. He was on tour in the late 80s and did all of the shows in fall 89. Watching the emergence of the new Dead.

Tyler Roy Hart (30:18)

I think I remember hearing about it even during like summer 87, during drum segments, like, with weird samples. And someone had explained that it was MIDI triggers and it was a computer thing. And as a computer guy, I was already a computer kid at that time. I looked it up and was interested in it, and I was impressed by it because of the computing power that it would take to do it. Because at the time, running just lossless audio in real time was something that would be considered difficult. Like, there were people I knew who worked at the very early virtual reality lab at UNC Chapel Hill, and they were moving very low bit rate video around in real time of about equivalent bandwidth. And it was a hard problem. And so this was another case of the Grateful Dead technical crew taking something that was, like, difficult in an academic setting and doing it live on the road. Rock and roll. It seemed to be a little inspiring. I immediately associate it with, like, this is why we got Dark Star. Jerry's into this. This is inspiring to him. He got this toy and he wanted to play Darkstar with it. And now here we are.

Steve Silberman (31:33)

And to me, them bringing back Darkstar, them turning into a cosmic orchestra of the imagination with MIDI and them just being really tight. Like, there was something about the whole organism of the Grateful Dead in the best shows of 89 and 90. It's just cooking There was already a.

Tyler Roy Hart (31:54)

Sense of like, okay, this is creative, like, it's a source of new sound. But I don't think most people were just thought of it as anything other than another stomp box gizmo or the thing that Jerry uses that other guitar for, the black guitar. For a little while during space, I heard fall 89 as this progression of kind of a weird tension and release of them trying to push against the limits of habit and find really new ways to use the new tools, and.

Steve Silberman (32:30)

Then finding that Jerry was such an exquisite craftsman. Everybody outside the Grateful Dead community is like, oh, they were so sloppy. Even they admitted that they sucked half the time or whatever. Hello. Jerry Garcia had such exquisite control of his tone, or even microtones, that when he was using MIDI to play, like a wind instrument, he would play lines that were appropriate for a wind instrument player. So he wasn't just blasting his usual guitar lines through a different voicing. He was actually adapting his playing approach to the sound that he was making. I'm sure that he probably felt like just like a personal thing he was doing for his own art, but I really appreciated that that fall, Garcia told.

Jesse Jarno (33:24)

Blair Jackson, if you produce a sound that's convincingly like, say, a French horn, you start to think French horn ideas, they just tumble into your head. I don't have the discipline to sit down and learn how to play French horn, but if I can make sounds like a French horn, I'll find them. Horn sounds are the ones that are the most playable for me right now. I go on how much my touch can be transferred to the MIDI realm. What's interesting is that if I play harder on the horn things, I can actually overblow it, just like you can with a horn. So what I'm looking for is some of the expression you get from a horn, except on guitar. I look for things that are most interactive and that I can affect by my touch. But I'm still on the ground floor of this. The MIDI began to emerge in other places. This is Let it grow from October 16th at the Meadowlands. Now Nightfall of Diamonds. You can hear Garcia in traditional shred mode, like almost any version since the late 70s, before switching into MIDI and immediately altering his phrasing and attack.

Tyler Roy Hart (34:53)

Miami was where that broke all the way open.

Jesse Jarno (34:56)

The fall tour that began with the stealth shows at Hampton made a pass through the Northeast before bouncing back south and ending two and a half weeks later in Miami on October 26th.

Tyler Roy Hart (35:06)

It's the last night of tour, and I was with a friend who hadn't done the whole thing, and I had done the whole thing, and there don't only been two dark stars. So there was sort of this feeling of, come on, you got to get one more, one more in. So maybe tonight's the 9th. So we did. That was my last time I ever washed out the bottom of a tour vial. And my friend and I did that, and it was really something. And by the time set break happened, we were floored.

Jesse Jarno (35:39)

And a few songs into the second set, they got it.

Tyler Roy Hart (35:42)

And then it starts with the soft piano intro, and you could feel it coming through Brent. And it was like, okay, here we go. And it's a very beautiful start. And then it eases in and, like, the opening, you know, opening part plays in the room, you know, everyone's happy, obviously, you know, and some of that is just because for me is this is like, all I'm equipped to handle at the moment is Dark Star is like, you can just relax into it. I don't have to. This isn't just like, let it wash over you.

Bob Bralove (36:28)

Sam.

Steve Silberman (36:56)

I used to talk to Dick Lavala about that Miami Dark Star, and we agreed that it would have been a Dick's pick if Jerry's throat hadn't been so shot. Like, I have often felt like Grateful Dead history would have been changed if someone had had a Sucret for Jerry in Miami.

Jesse Jarno (37:12)

The October 26, 1989 show for Miami arena was eventually included on the 30 trips around the sun box set. The first jam has a little bit of MIDI and colors rolling in from the edges. Lovely, no? But then comes the second jam.

Tyler Roy Hart (37:57)

Then right after the second verse, it goes straight into the deep end, like, there's no screwing around. It's like the middle jam in some old school Dark Stars where as soon as they finish singing the first verse, it's like, okay, no beat, no anything. Let's just go and.

Doug Kaplan (38:16)

And see what happens.

Bob Bralove (38:49)

The sounds are coming from the same places in the mix in the stereo image that their sounds are coming from. So if something's coming from Brent, it's over on that. The Brent side of the image. And if it's coming from Jerry, it's over where he's at. And so try to keep that in mind so that the images open up the key to who's playing what.

Jesse Jarno (39:13)

In other words, if you get confused, imagine the music playing in 1989. From left to right, Phil Lesh, Billy Kreutzman, Bobby Weir, Mickey Hart, Jerry Garcia, Brent Midland Bob was nice enough to annotate some of the Sounds heard in the Darkstar jam.

Bob Bralove (39:41)

Okay, they've clearly dropped the changes at this point. Bobby's got some piano sounds behind his guitar. Everybody else is using their standard instruments. Jerry's added some electronics to his. It's sort of a fat, distorted sound. Brent's using that kind of choir sound with pitch bends.

Tyler Roy Hart (40:30)

One of the things that I had never really seen from the Grateful Dead is fangs out, like claws, like, we're coming for your brain. And they did that that night, and that was new and different. And it was a little bit of careful what you asked for, because as I get it, as I can talk about it, was not an easy thing to get through actually in the moment.

Bob Bralove (41:10)

Jerry's got a trumpet sound on his guitar now. Jerry's just moved to a bunch of percussion sounds. Bobby's still in that little funky groove.

Steve Silberman (42:03)

There's a word, and I think it's like Norse mythology, a phrase, and I think North Mythology, Ultima Thule, which means like the far point of the known universe kind of, you know, to me, that Miami89 Darkstar is the Grateful Dead's Ultima Thule. Like, you know, people say, like, oh, well, the Grateful Dead, you know, they screwed around with jazz and, you know, music on crit and stuff. But listen to Ornette Coleman sometime. I'm telling you, man, that 89 dark star, it's like there is no Ornette Coleman performance I've ever heard that's as out there as that. It is really out there. Even by the standards of very knowledgeable out there music experts.

Tyler Roy Hart (43:21)

My memory of the latter half of the Dark Star is actually from out of my body. It's from floating above the floor. I don't remember, like, leaving my body. It didn't feel like an out of body experience experience. But my. My mental image of it is I'm kind of looking down at the stage from above and. And that the music was somehow had embodied myself and. And that. That's a beautiful thing. It's not the first time that had happened, but it was kind of a dangerous night to do that. I don't remember hearing it as music. It was just that experience of, like, falling into the singularity and being stripped apart. It's the absolute kitchen sink. It's every sound. Everyone's got something to add. It feels like total chaos, but it has a structure to it that builds to a peak. And then at one point, like, Brent throws piano chords in there that just because it's a natural musical instrument sound is almost jarring. Just to hear something that like is normal human music for a minute.

Bob Bralove (45:11)

Mickey on the doom sound, Jerry on the high and metallic percussion. Bobby howling in the wind beautifully.

Tyler Roy Hart (45:34)

But it was incredibly liberating and felt very old school. It felt very like 60s or like wall of sound meltdown. Kind of where they're really trying to fuck with the audience in a serious way of like people who are on the edge holding on, like just stomping on their fingers and kicking them off. And it's all for the best because you know, you want to break through, you want to be in that space. Some of that's obviously just my experience because there is no show that is more of a in room bias than this one for me.

Bob Bralove (46:27)

That's Jerry on a synth, the little bells, Phil on that helicoptery sound.

Tyler Roy Hart (46:48)

One of the funny things about this show is that my friend and I had this incredibly intense psychedelic experience of being overwhelmed musically and dragged through it. But at the time and in the years immediately after, even online, even on the early Internet, the show didn't get a lot of attention.

Jesse Jarno (47:08)

By 1989 there was already a quite active Grateful Dead newsgroup REC Music GDead. But there wasn't a single review posted of this tour closing show in Miami.

Tyler Roy Hart (47:18)

And then of course, as you know, you read from the archive comments and you talk to other people who were there. It turns out it was a very common experience, that it was a very heavily dosed room and that a lot of people had really intense trips that night.

Jesse Jarno (47:34)

I wasn't the same for days after this night, reads one comment. It was more than just good Sid and good Dead. This show is terrifying. I can remember all my friends asking me if I was alright for hours after the show. Truth was, I wasn't. Over 20 years later and it might as well have been yesterday, the spirits the band conjured up this night defy definition. Formless reflections indeed. Here's another. We watched many a pastel colored yuppie suck down frozen drinks, oblivious to the seriousness of the first set. By the time drums was hitting us, these poor folks were literally crawling up the aisles covered in their own sick, trying to get out of the cauldron. And one more. I was dosed out of my mind. But to hear this second set was a grateful treat at the tail end of a killer fall tour. This was the icing on the cake, so to speak. This second set was a monster. The Dark Star was really dark and scary. All I know is I wound up in Key west the next day, still tripping my balls off and swimming with dolphins. Ah, those were the days.

Tyler Roy Hart (49:12)

So the reason I think, you know, in retrospect, that Miami is important is that it was the moment for me again, outside of just the constraints of space itself. It's when MIDI went from being a new effect used in existing ways to being new music.

Jesse Jarno (49:31)

There were new worlds to explore. Bob Braylov's role continued to expand.

Bob Bralove (49:35)

I was feeling that all of the end of the beam solos were exactly the same. They would just have this long drone. It seemed to be going emotionally to the same place. So I started creating these pads. Playing these pads that could give Mickey another emotional place to go that he could then play. There'd be some sort of drone going on and he could play the rhythms against it and still feel like he was initiating the transition to the space. And he loved it. So he kept encouraging me to do that. He would walk off the stage and let me keep playing a little bit, and I was quickly getting out of the way. The space guys would. The front line guys would come out. I was ducking out. I didn't want to step on their toes. I could barely see them from where I was playing behind the drums, so I didn't want to mess that up. Nobody was here to see me. They were here to see them. I knew it. There's no question about it. And so I kept pulling back fairly quickly. And then one day I had this thing going on. I'm facing the audience behind the drums. Jerry's tent is to my left. Bass is to my right. Phil's coming out from Jerry's tent where they've just discussed the second set. And he's passing by me and I'm doing this all on headphones, not to add more sound to the stage than it's already there. And he. Phil pulls my headphone out and he screams in my ear. Keep playing. Drops my headphone out and goes out to get his face on. Sam.

Jesse Jarno (51:59)

That was Bob Ralove putting the and in drums in space. September 10, 1991, on the 30 trips around the sun box set that fall, the band released Infrared Roses, Bob Ralove's album, Long Edit of Drums in Space segments.

Bob Bralove (52:13)

I went around to all the band members and said, would it be all right if I did an album? If I looked at doing an album? Drums in Space. And I went to them individually and they all said yes. Once I got their approval, Dick Lotvala kept giving me tapes of the Drums in Space stuff isolated. So it'd just be Drums in Space. Now there were a Couple of decisions then I had to make. And the first one was I wasn't going to use anything that I wasn't there for. I wasn't going to research opinions about what was what I needed to use for this record. I needed to have experienced it, to feel it. The other thing was to use as much of John Cutler's multi tracks because he'd been multi tracking a lot of shows for a while. But that didn't do everything for me, so I had to vary from that. And then part of the pitch, when I asked if I could do that, it was like, I'll mess with it a little bit.

Jesse Jarno (53:15)

The album is structured in four movements, the first of which begins with a track called Crowd Sculpture. Slip on your headphones and time travel back to Shakedown Street.

Bob Bralove (53:54)

It's outside the Spectrum, the Garden, Henry J. Kaiser. I think about three More and. Oh, and also the parking lot of Club Front. I took tapes of shows, put them in a ghetto blaster, and walked by with a recorder as though it was moving past the thing. And I'd do several samples of that. And then whenever I felt like it was time for somebody to walk past the sound of a show, I'd lay that in. There's a very strong story for that crowd sculpture. You know, from wandering in to offering tickets to getting a ticket to the. To the crowd.

Bob Bralove (55:04)

There's.

Jesse Jarno (55:30)

And then, give or take a little bit of a warbling nitrous tank interlude, you're inside the show.

Bob Bralove (55:44)

Instead of just twos drums in space, I wanted to have three movements per section, and that first movement would explore something different each time. The first trio is crowd parallel acoustic drums and electric instruments. No MIDI in the first one because I wanted to establish where this was coming from.

Jesse Jarno (56:09)

Infrared Roses wasn't merely Live Dead, it was truly a Grateful Dead album, the music sculpted and presented carefully. And though Bob Braylove was at the helm, it was a full family project. The album and its tracks were named by the Dead's writer in residence, Robert Hunter.

Bob Bralove (56:26)

Somebody suggested that I do that, and I gave him the tape over the weekend. Came back at the end of the weekend with that fucking list. They're visual, too. They're incredibly visual.

Steve Silberman (56:39)

And Hunter's titles are just so wonderful, you know, Magnesium Nightlight. It's like, who knows what that means? But you know exactly what he means.

Bob Bralove (56:53)

Sam.

Jesse Jarno (57:20)

Concluding the first trio of tracks is Little Nemo in Nightland, referencing Windsor McKay's surrealist cartoon.

Bob Bralove (58:00)

When I started listening to all the material, I felt like I was seeing a trend of certain themes begin to come out in a certain tour, may come out at the end of the tour, but the next tour, they're exploring those themes a little bit. The first statement of Clear first statement of a musical idea that is explored over the time of a tour. That first statement may have been. Has a certain energy the first time it's explored the second time it may not be so good. But the response, the second statement in that same vibe might be there. So I started piecing together this kind of fantasy version of that tune that was being developed. This is what I would think of them doing at the end. I had to play the record for everybody individually and get their okay to release it. Jerry used to like to listen in his car. And so we got in his car, he turned on the gorgeous stereo in his car and blasted the record. And at the. At the end of Little Nemo and Nightland, I said, just to be clear, Jerry, this comes from a lot of different shows, right? This performance. And he turned to me and said, I know that we can't play that good. It. There's the falling apart of the Uncle John's band that I wanted. That sense of the tune falling apart into drums.

Jesse Jarno (60:35)

That's Riverside Rhapsody beginning the second movement of Pieces, beginning the third as Silver Apples of the Moon, a reference to both W.B. yeats and likely Morton Sabotnik's pivotal piece of electronic music of the same name.

Bob Bralove (60:48)

Silver Apples of the Moon, which was, you know, Bruce and Vince, is somewhat created. Bruce's track is pretty much as he played it in London, I think, and Vince's track, and he played it in the middle of a dark star. And Vince's track comes from various dark stars that he played and pieced together to work with Bruce. Sam.

Jesse Jarno (61:46)

Dave Harrington of Darkside digs in for Red Roses.

Dave Harrington (61:49)

Every now and then I'll hear a patch and I'm like, well, there's the Cassio trumpet. And I'm like, okay, that places it for me. But the thing that blew me away on my first listen was how ahistorical it sounded. One of my favorite tracks is the one that's just Billy and Mickey. That's like, got a ton of beam on it. And it's like, that could be from any film score that has come out in the last 20 years. The level of atmosphere in some of that is pretty mind blowing. And the kind of thing that, like, you simply can't get to with just playing conventional instruments. Whatever is the instinct that they're chasing has become push them over a Ledge to a place where they're working in a lot of these songs in a way that is not just wacky sounds. This totally otherworldly palette is kind of like a. And it's like a long way around, but it's kind of a different way of understanding, like, whatever those internal musical dynamics are, whatever's happening on that deep listening level.

Bob Bralove (63:23)

And then Sparrow Hawk Row is all from Healy tapes. There's a little cry out that he sampled from the audience and then processed back into the show. And I liked it so much, I captured it and laid it back in a couple of times so that it became thematic.

Steve Silberman (64:16)

The track that gives me that tingling feeling on the back of my neck every single time I hear it is Sparrowhawk Row, which Bob, you know, Braylove credits on the album to Dan Healy's mixes during Drums in Space. There's something about the shimmering quality of that track that basically triggers a psychedelic flashback for me. Like, it gives me that.

Bob Bralove (65:11)

That.

Steve Silberman (65:11)

You know how when you're coming.

Bob Bralove (65:12)

Well, I don't know if you know.

Steve Silberman (65:14)

You know how when you're coming on to lsd, when you're coming on to lsd, there's that moment when you say to yourself, wow, this is kind of intense. I guess I'm okay. You sort of have to, like, ground yourself because you're shooting up through the roof. Spare Terrorhawk Rogue gives me that awe. Awe in the ancient sense, you know, it's not just like, oh, this feels really good. It's like, this is kind of scary. But it's interesting.

Tyler Roy Hart (66:11)

To me.

Dave Harrington (66:11)

It's like, not to be underestimated and, like, not to be taken lightly. That they're doing this, like, infrared roses. They're doing it in stadiums and coliseums. Incredible. They commit to this as part of their, like, experiential beginnings. And then it stays. And not only does it stay, but it changes and it develops over time. And they find new ways constantly to investigate this particular zone of the music. The desire for searching and improvisation that long into any career, into any level of success. I mean, it. Look, it's inspiring.

Jesse Jarno (66:52)

The music wasn't the only place they were pushing themselves. The COVID art was by Jerry Garcia, the only cover art Garcia contributed to a Dead album. In a way, it's iconic Dead art for the 90s.

Bob Bralove (67:03)

I remember being at his house and discussing it and saying, gotta come up with something. And I think he sort of just filled the empty space in the conversation by showing me stuff. It was an image that was floating in nothingness. There was no background or anything. So I grabbed that image and then Jerry coached me through creating the checkerboard floor and creating the background and floating the emblem in the back in the ghosted steal your face in the clouds. He was happy with the way it ended up. Mickey turned to Billy at one point and pointed at the album coverage. Look, Billy, it's us.

Jesse Jarno (67:50)

In recent years, Garcia had reconnected to his roots as a visual artist and in parallel to his explorations with Mitte, had hopped fully into the digital art world. The tech critic Howard Rheingold conducted a really fascinating conversation with Garcia backstage at a Dead show in the summer of 1990. Thanks so much to Howard for letting us use this recording and naturally to David Ganz for digitizing it. In recent years, Garcia had been getting deep into computers. His main digital axe in the early 90s was a Mac IIci.

Bob Bralove (68:22)

No, I'm not a keyboard person. The mouse is better, but I use it mostly for graphics.

Jesse Jarno (68:27)

The conversation takes on a new dimension, or several when one of Jerry's friends arrives.

Bob Bralove (68:32)

Do you guys know each other? People call me Bear. My name is Altay.

Jesse Jarno (68:36)

Stanley. Oh, hey, what's up, Bear? Jerry talks about doing graphics with a mouse and Bear expresses some skepticism.

Bob Bralove (68:43)

It's like drawing with a cake of soap. That's right. That's a good metaphor for it. But they're ever increasing. There's a new digitizing pad that works with a pencil like a stylus. And it also has the thing of that the harder you press, the wider the line is. You can get a dynamic line, which you never used to be able to put that. It's hard for me to reflect, relate to drawing on something that comes out in little jiggy jaggies. Well, that has to do also with the resolution of what you're looking at. So there's lots of things that have sort of anti biasing now. So when you make a line, if the line goes is a little out of true. You know how it splits up? Well, it just doubles the line. It kind of fuzzes it. So you get a curved line, doesn't have little sawtooths around it and so forth. It's much smoother. Yeah, the graphics stuff is way better than it was even last year.

Jesse Jarno (69:35)

It's a delightful futurological conversation all around. We've posted a link to the transcript@dead.net deadcast just like with music, Jerry was a serious gearhead when it came to graphics. In another interview reproduced in the Collected Artworks book, he described his setup. I use the fractal design Painter program a lot, but I also have two or three others. I Fractal Design Sketcher and Electronics Art Studio 32. Each has a few effects the others don't. So I can import and can mix and match. I have a lot of extra memory, a million color graphics card and so forth and so on. It allows me to play around pretty freely. The conversation with Howard Rheingold took place in 1990, almost three years before the launch of the first web browser. With the future of the Internet very much open to questions, cyberspace was the hot new buzzword. And most people thought it would take the form of some hybrid of modems and virtual reality. That same year, Garcia had even gotten an early VR demo at Autodesk, long before the technology was ever available publicly.

Bob Bralove (70:38)

One of the things that's attractive about cyberspace is that it doesn't seem. I mean, that it doesn't. It can be construed as no threat if you see it through the video game keyhole, you know, in the amusement keyhole, the entertainment keyhole. It's no threat if you see it through the LSD keyhole or the consciousness expanding keyhole. Bong. You know, it's like electronic drugs.

Jesse Jarno (71:02)

They don't get everything quite right. But that's also not the point.

Steve Silberman (71:05)

Can you see grateful dead concert 10 years from now taking place in cyberspace?

Bob Bralove (71:09)

Absolutely. Are you kidding? Sure, Absolutely. I think it's an ideal place for it. Because again, I mean, part of the whole Grateful Dead thing is that there is no dogma, you know, there isn't anything about how the universe works. And people are free to hear it as they want. You know, they're free to experience it as they want and we don't push it around. It's an open ended experience. And I think cyberspace is ideal for that. Because if anything, it requires more participation. Yes. On the part of the observer. So that the uniqueness of their particular experience remains that way. You know what I mean? Not only the event itself. With the Grateful Dead, each show is unique, but further within that, each person's experience of each show is unique.

Jesse Jarno (71:55)

Nobody in the conversation draws out the point that I feel is right there about the Dead's far out and deeply imagistic MIDI explorations being the musical equivalent of virtual reality. But with Garcia's cover art for Infrared Roses providing a visual representation that looks a whole lot like a virtual reality landscape, it was clearly part of the same early 1990s discourse just as they were in the era of Alembic and the Wall of Sound. The Dead Surfed the newest tech.

Bob Bralove (72:21)

There was one tour when I got this story that was an interactive story. Everybody had computers at that point and it was an interactive story. You loaded it on cd. It was called Victory Garden. And the way the preface talked about it is that you should see this as a museum. This is a thing for a while. It was a very brief thing, but it was really interesting. And you should look at it as a museum and go and wander around the rooms and check out what's in that room. So I gave it to all the band members and we were all reading the same book. But you could pick a word and it would take you down a path and pick another word and take it down another path. And so you were scripting the story out of all these options. And so we would talk about it and we'd find ourselves. We were all in different times in history. We were all in different countries. We had all different characters. Some would share characters like, oh, yeah, I followed that person until this. It was a fascinating thing.

Jesse Jarno (73:28)

Hypertext fiction. Far out. Victory Garden by Stuart Malthrop. We've posted a link to some info@dead.net deadcast the last few years of the Grateful Dead were pretty rough by most accounts, but the musical place where Bob Braylove resided remained a font of creativity and inspiration. It was a six year musical period with plenty of evolution inside it. And it continued to evolve all the way through 1995 with Candace, the lights.

Bob Bralove (73:55)

Were amazing in terms of feeling like they were part of the music. Yeah, she could anticipate and things. And at the end, I was sending her MIDI feeds from each of the band members. And you could tell in some of the last couple of years of the lights during space. There were sections of the lights that were dedicated to each performer. And as they played, each note would move a. They're called chases in lighting, which is like a sequence of lights. So each note would be another step in the sequence. So their instruments themselves were driving the lights. And it becomes this at these moments, which I was, of course, completely enthralled with because my stuff was going out there. This very organic interaction of sections of lights that are being driven by each instrument. It's like a light wall of sound. Each person is driving their own set of lights. It felt like, oh, I've spent all this time separating everybody in their own worlds. And now this is the first time going from. Everybody was going down this one MIDI cable to the lights and then separated out again. And so it started making me feel like, oh, the next Step here is not to have to run around the stage, but have everybody come into a central place that both they can control and I can control. I think that was the next step.

Jesse Jarno (75:33)

The music itself had reached a pristine level.

Bob Bralove (75:35)

I had a 32 input board just for electronic drums. I ended up sending it out with a stereo mix of everything and submixes, two submixes. I sent out four channels. Of course I was enjoying the stereo ness of it. I was using that. So there were stereo rich options for Dan. But how it moved was either he was leaving it moved as it is, or he was playing with it. He had that amazing box that John Cutler made and it was. It did panning and you had control over the depth and on a pedal and the speed on a pedal and it was just magical. It would do anything you put through. It sounded fucking great. And Dan's agreements was you send anything you want down those lines and I'll do anything I want with it.

Jesse Jarno (76:30)

The recordings made by Dan Healy and then from spring 1994 on by John Cutler have an almost studio like quality in 2021 that could be an experimental artist from anywhere in the world, found in the far reaches of Bandcamp or Soundcloud. But in 1995, it was the Grateful Dead in an 18,000 capacity arena in Salt Lake City. February 21st to be precise. Now, in the 30 trips box on the Working Man's Dead and American Beauty, seasons of the Dead cast, we charted some of the ways Jerry Garcia and Robert Hunter channeled traditional American music. A link in the chain for songwriters to come. But the music the Grateful Dead made in the 1990s has been influential and anticipatory in a different way. Joining us is Doug Kaplan, co founder of The Chicago label Hosu Mountain, 1/3 of the trio Good Will Smith and a huge fan of the Dead's MIDI years.

Doug Kaplan (77:53)

A lot of people that were Deadheads may be familiar with jazz and some may be familiar with free jazz, but this was like free music being played at a stadium level. It's like really, I think the most experimental music to be played in a stadium ever Night, Night by Night. And like it incorporates so many of these traditions that are so on Grateful Dead, it's electroacoustic improvisation, free music devoid of jazz. There's ambient drone, minimalism, maximalism, influences. There's this sort of, I'll use the word fourth World because that's what it sounds like to me. But there's a very sort of John Hassell imaginary international music vibe. And they're all at odds with each other. Oh, and the other thing is like sort of like horror soundtracks, I think, come into this in a big way. Like the. The February 21st. The space starts in like a totally creepy, very John Carpenter, like Slinky Zone. It's so different than like the country rock that they really were playing in the recording. Sometimes, sometimes you'll hear like crazy stereo panning because they're trying to make this like 360 experience into a stereo experience. Especially on the soundboard, you'll hear it. That's something that must have been so massive. That just doesn't translate at all into my experience as someone that was seven when Jerry died and never got to see it in real life. That like there was crazy multi channel, just like swooping, happening around the arena. Also harkens back to this like early experimental, like quadraphonic music, but doing it up at the stadium level to like the maximum degree.

Jesse Jarno (80:30)

That was Doug's band, Good Will smith, their track 5 Meo FBI from things our Body Used To Have. They're part of a generation of musicians who take a different kind of influence from the dead. Beyond guitar jams or songwriting. They often release their music on cassette. The art on their recent sleeping village 4252019 tape is inspired by the art on Dead cassettes. A first generation audience recording. Shout out to taper Joel Burke.

Doug Kaplan (80:56)

So like my sort of Grateful Dead history is that like a lot of young Jewish boys, I got into them through summer camp camp counselors playing like Ripple and Friend of the Devil at campfires. As a teenager I got really into like the 70s stuff. Went to college, I got into the noise radio station. I completely rejected being a hippie for a long time. When I really got back into them in the 2010s again, I dove straight into 80s 90s. Because I was just like, I already know all this 70s stuff. In that time between fandoms had gotten super into electronic music, which I didn't listen to in high school. Was really just seeing the similarities between Kraut rock and Mickey Hart and seeing how, oh, they're doing a Tangerine Dream segment in the middle of the show. And that was kind of what when I got super into it is once I kind of combined the Dead fandom with my sort of like indie label Time in this period I was very active with the band Good Will Smith, which is myself, Max and our friend Natalie. I'm not gonna say we were using midi cause we were all just using more like analog gear. But it was very. At least from My estimation very drum space inspired, like long form, 40 minute sort of structured compositions with lots of open space all droning in D. Lots of textural elements. We had just like some small hand percussion instruments to kind of have the drums vibe. And it was very much in line with the drum space segment.

Jesse Jarno (82:29)

In some ways. Bill Kreutzman wasn't too far off when he compared the drummers to monkeys banging on keyboards. But it wasn't always the monkey's fault. The technology has evolved enormously since the early 90s. These days, musicians like Dave Harrington and Nico Jar of Darkside have midis orchestra the imagination at their fingertips with control down to the thickness of the virtual strings. The technology is just another tool in the electronic musician's palette, but still an incredibly powerful one.

Dave Harrington (82:57)

The main feature of Niko's touring rig was this gigantic custom made MIDI controller that allowed him to have that tactile thing and allowed in what was what allowed us to jam and to not be a plug and play kind of electronic band. Nothing against that, but like not something that the two of us were interested in doing. I mean being able to use midi, he could control. He could control the tempo, the pitch, the timbre, the color, the sequence, the drum arrangement, the bass line, the keyboards, the, the effects, the dynamics. Like all he had all of that at his fingertips in a very hands on way that allowed him. That was like part of the language that we developed was really a result of that where we could get to a point where like we were doing the thing, we were listening and reacting and making choices together in real time. Because he had made that his instrument.

Bob Bralove (84:05)

It.

Jesse Jarno (84:31)

That was the only shrine I've seen from the Dark side album Psychic Live, July 17, 2014. They also have an excellent new album called Spiral.

Dave Harrington (84:40)

I do have guitar player friends who are big devotees of the Roland guitar synthesizer. I have something that's very rudimentary, that is that I actually do do exactly what you described. That just converts pitch information to midi. I just actually started using that in the last couple of years. But I'll plug my guitar right into it and then I'll plug it into my Moog or a profit synthesizer and then use the guitar as a controller in that way as well.

Jesse Jarno (85:11)

Out in the vast electronic weirdo underground, the sounds charted by Bob Ralove, Mickey Hart and company in the late 80s and early 90s are now a world of music unto themselves. We've posted links to Music from Darkside, Hasu Mountain and a number of other jumping off places for modern midi music@dead.net deadcast Bob Ralove has continued making music too, continuing the mission he began in the late 80s with the dead. He's gearing up to release a new album with Dos Hermanos, his duo with 1969ish dead keyboardist Tom Constantin. The future keeps beckoning. This is Smoke Rings of my mind.

Bob Bralove (85:47)

From 2014's Batik Sam.

Jesse Jarno (86:18)

In 2009, Bob recorded an album with the great guitarist Henry Kaiser, who he spoke with during our playing in the band Episodes Building on the and Transitions from the Drums in Space segments, perhaps his most literal continuation of the mission. This is spectral refractions from 2009's ultraviolet licorice, the grateful Eds midi year are unlike anything else in the history of rock music. At an age when most bands were settling into greatest hit sets, the Dead were deconstructing themselves yet again. Infrared Roses stands as one of the more beautifully weird albums of the 1990s. The album closes with source music from the March 29, 1990 show at NASA Coliseum with Branford Marsalis edited a little.

Bob Bralove (87:29)

And if you listen very carefully, Branford moves a little too quickly from soprano to baritone.

Jesse Jarno (87:37)

It's called Apollo at the Ritz.

Rich Mahan (88:12)

I'm with David Lemieux and he said that he wished he would have appreciated drum space a little bit more back in the day. As I've gotten older, drum space definitely resonates differently with me and I've really been enjoying oteal joining Mickey and Billy during drums on the recent Dead and company tours. Mickey hit a low note on the beam in St. Louis this last tour that really resonated literally and figuratively with the crowd. Great stuff and do make sure to check out Infrared Roses, now available for the first time ever streaming online thanks to the multitude of guests and contributors who helped make the good old Grateful Dead cast possible. We absolutely could not do it without your help. We will be back next year with a bushel full of new episodes that we are pretty damn sure you're going to love. Don't forget to go to dead.net where you can record yourself telling a tour story or anything Grateful Dead related.

Jesse Jarno (89:09)

Really?

Rich Mahan (89:10)

Did you travel over to Europe to catch any of the shows in 1972? Well, we definitely want to hear from you. Tell your friends we need your stories. Happy Holidays, Happy New Year. Take care out there and we'll see you next time. Executive producers for the good old Grateful Dead cast Mark Pincus and Doran Tyson produced for Rhino Entertainment by Rich Mahan Productions and Jesse Jarno. Special thanks to David Lemieux. All rights reserved.