Loading summary
Transcript189 lines
- [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. Hello friends. Welcome to the Good Old Grateful Dead cast. This episode is Part two of Playing Dead, our exploration into the world of the Grateful Dead's music as heard and played by musicians around the world. Again, we have a cavalcade of guests on today's episode to help lend their perspectives. We'll hear from Jerry Garcia, Jeff Mattson, Peter Shapiro, Oteal Burbridge, Gary Lambert, Dave Harrington, Steve Bernstein, Jake Robbenbach, Shuhei Iwasa, David Ganz, Rebecca Adams, Joe Russo, Holly Bowling, Bob Weir, Stephen Malkmus, Ira Kaplan, and David Lemieux. As always, you can get new episodes of the good old Grateful Deadcast right here every other week. Visit us at our website dead.netdeadcast and check out the extra materials we have for you to explore for this episode. Also@dead.net deadcast are all of our past episodes, including the complete seasons one and two, as well as the five part Skull and Roses series we just wrapped up. You can link from there to any and all the podcasting platforms out there so you can listen where you like to listen. Please give us a hand by subscribing, Hit that like button and if you're up to it, leave us a review. Thanks very much. Have you listened to the second disc of the new Skull and Roses 50th Anniversary Edition? It's out now and there's more than an hour of unreleased music from the Dead's final Fillmore West show on July 2, 1971. Pigpen is well represented on the second disc with a rollicking good lovin and a great big boss man. Check it out@dead.net well, it's no surprise that a 17 person guest list means this episode is a monster not only in length, but there's just so much great music here that this episode easily became our longest episode to date. The music of the Grateful Dead is far reaching in its appeal. And a multitude of musicians have embraced it and made it their own. Get ready for a mind bending variety of interpretations from around the globe. Ladies and gentlemen, here's your translator, Jesse Jarno. I was feeling so bad, I asked my family doctor about what I heard. I said, Doctor, doctor, Mr. Andy Doctor.
- [03:18]
B
Can you tell me, doctor, what's hailing me, doctor?
- [03:23]
A
He said, hey, hey, hey, hey.
- [03:30]
B
One of the Grateful Dead's enduring legacies is their vast, incredible songbook. With ear catching melodies, layered wisdom bearing lyrics, and a deep sense of history. An equally powerful legacy is the musical freedom the Dead declared for themselves. As questing as jazz and open as experimental composition. And sometimes obsessively tight, sometimes as casual as friends jamming in the basement. But perhaps the reason why there's an entire Grateful Dead musical Universe More than 25 years after the last Grateful Dead show is because the lines between those ideas blurred almost completely. Here's how Jerry Garcia described it to master British improviser Derek Bailey in the early 90s on the BBC show on the Edge.
- [04:11]
A
I don't know. I don't believe that I could play.
- [04:13]
B
Without improvising on some level.
- [04:16]
A
That is to say that I don't plan ahead.
- [04:18]
B
I could never bring myself to actually learn something note for note and play.
- [04:22]
A
It that way more than once. It's maybe deeply rooted anti authoritarianism, you know, I don't know what it is, but it's something in my personality just.
- [04:31]
B
Won'T allow me to do it. Garcia once compared the Dead song the Eleven to a musical cop. The Grateful Dead hated authority, even if it was a song of their own making. If somebody else wanted to play their music, they were welcome to mutate it beyond belief or not. That's cool too. But the Dead themselves virtually created a mandate for constant reinvention. The band that I'm in, remember, I mean, everybody has the same disease that.
- [04:54]
A
I have, which is the inability to.
- [04:57]
B
Do something exactly the same way twice.
- [04:58]
A
Sometimes it drives you nuts, you know, I mean, if you're wor. If you're trying to.
- [05:02]
B
If you're composing something and you feel that there's a delicate little interaction that.
- [05:06]
A
You want to hear, and you always want to hear it, forget it. You know, it doesn't happen in the Grateful Dead, but other stuff does, which is much, much more wonderful. But you have to be prepared to.
- [05:18]
B
Relinquish a certain amount of your ego involvement. In the last part of our two part Playing Dead special, we talked about the history of how Grateful Dead music became an underground school for young musicians, both the first generation of Dead cover bands as well as artists who left the Dead well behind. But in 1991, dead covers went mainstream with the tribute album Dedicated, featuring a truly impressive array of artists. The great East LA rock band Los Lobos did Bertha I had a hard.
- [06:05]
A
Run.
- [06:09]
B
Running from your window British songwriting legend Elvis Costello did Ship of Fools.
- [06:15]
A
Though I could not caution all I still might want a few don't lend your hand There is no flag the top no Ship of Fools Ship of.
- [06:35]
B
Fools on a cruel sea and transgressive LA weirdos Jane's Addiction, Mashed Up Ripple and the other one.
- [06:53]
A
If my words did too with the glow of sunshine and my tunes were played on the.
- [07:05]
B
Heart I'm strong Could you hear my.
- [07:08]
A
Voice come through the music?
- [07:14]
B
The album's pitch was to make a tribute to the Dead without jam bands, and it worked. Shining a light on the band's catalog of songwriting, Robert Hunter told producer Ralph Saul that it was like getting a dozen roses every day for the rest of his life. Dedicated was an enormous hit. Not only did it make the top 30, but it helped launch a new boom of tribute albums as well as the career of producer Ralph Saul. I really loved Ray Padgett's recent book I'm youm Fan, part of Bloomsbury's 3313 series, which gets into Dedicated and the history of tribute albums. Dead songs turned up increasingly in the songs of non jam acts. In the years before Jerry Garcia died, none other than Bob Dylan made a number of Garcia Hunter tunes a regular part of his sets. This was released on the great compilation Stolen Songs of the Grateful Dead, produced by David Ganz.
- [08:03]
A
Got a weapon Chino babe Got a weapon Cherokee there's one says he got no child.
- [08:30]
B
None of this, of course, was going to stop the jammers from jamming. And ironically, by performing Dead songs over and over. It was perhaps the COVID acts and interpretive jammers who were also responsible for transforming the Dead into a kind of folk music all its own, a spectrum between traditional and radical. And there was maybe no single place where that spectrum extended and fractalized more than the Wetlands Preserve opened in 1988 at 161 Hudson street in New York City, just outside the exit to the Holland Tunnel Wetlands was the launch pad and home base for many local and touring acts playing a truly eclectic variety of original material, both of the jamming persuasion and not. But it was also perhaps the first venue where the owner had an opinion about whether the Dead cover band playing tonight was going to close the first Set with Deal or Not. That was the Zen tricksters at Wetlands, April 30, 1998. Featuring lead guitarist Jeff Mattson, now also a member of Darkstar Orchestra, segueing from New Potato Caboose into I know you, Rider.
- [09:59]
A
I think we're the band that played Wetlands the most of any other band, because we played the whole history of it, and every month, several times a month, but it really, in a way that I don't think ever was before or after, a center for Deadheads to come in New York City. And of course, between New York City and Long island and New Jersey, there were thousands, hundreds of thousands of them, you know, so that place was great.
- [10:32]
B
We talked a lot about the history of the Zen Tricksters and the rise of Dead cover bands. In our last episode with Wetlands, they finally had a real home. Here's one more quote from Jerry Garcia from BBC's on the Edge. If you say, what we're doing here.
- [10:46]
A
Is we're inventing this as we go along, and you are involved in this experience, and it's never going to be this way again. This is it for this particular version of it.
- [10:55]
B
There's value to that, and I think our audience is.
- [10:58]
A
Is a proof of that. These are people who come back to every performance.
- [11:00]
B
If we do 10 days somewhere, a.
- [11:02]
A
Lot of them will be back every night.
- [11:05]
B
They know that it's going to be different every night. The longevity of the Grateful Dead's music has to do with their enduring songwriting and musical freedom, but maybe just as much by the listening community they still engender. Hungry for more music by the Dead, but also just for more music in general. Dead cast listeners may know Peter Shapiro as the proprietor of the Locken Festival, the Capitol Theater, Brooklyn bowl, and the magician behind the 2015 fare thee well shows. He was also the owner of wetlands from 1997 until its closure in 2001. More than anybody else, he understands the coalition of active music fans that make up Grateful Dead land.
- [11:42]
A
The Grateful Dead are the great American band. The music within the Grateful Dead is, you know, a little bit of folk, you know, a little bit of psychedelic, a little bit of bluegrass, a little bit of straight up rock, you know, a little bit of, you know, Southern rock. It's a mix of everything, sometimes a little electronics kind of stuff. And so that sucks in, I think, a group of people who have, like, maybe they're part of one religion, but there's different subsets.
- [12:14]
B
Larry Block opened Wetlands in early 1988 as a nightclub for activists with no intention of Having live music besides maybe a folk singer or two. But it turned out that live music paid the rent. But as Larry envisioned it, the bar was also to be a home for a coalition of community organizers and environmental activist groups. Earth first received mail there during the AIDS crisis. It would become home to one of New York's first underground medical marijuana exchanges. One of the groups that hung around, especially on dead nights, was a subgroup of the Rainbow Family. As Jeff Mattson remembers.
- [12:46]
A
They used to meet, I think, earlier in the night downstairs in that lounge downstairs. This guy was his name Verne, de facto leader of them. And he came up and he was beating on something while we were playing. And he. He nodded to Barako and Barack and, like, nodded back to him when he was just saying hello and what he was doing without knowing it was giving him the de facto okay for the Rainbow family to come up on stage and play percussion with us. Like six people, none of whom were probably real percussionists, but people who like to beat on things better than people, you know, it was a misunderstanding, but we want to embarrass them, so we really just go with the flow. So they got up there and we played something, and there's like six guys standing. Maybe women too, I don't remember, but standing behind me, banging away, you know, in pretty much random fashion. The next one comes up on the set, and I think it was a ballad, and I might have been introducing it or it was on the set list or something like that. One of them said, oh, no, let's do something more up tempo, you know. And I was like, all right, that's it.
- [14:11]
B
In the mid-90s, Wetlands owner Larry Block moved to Vermont to help raise his son. And Peter Shapiro came into the picture.
- [14:18]
A
Jerry died. And I just knew that that scene, all these people who are in their young people, twenties looking for something, we're not going to just go away, you know, you. You want to explore musically. You want to, you know, maybe puff, throw a Frisbee. You know, every campus in Boulder to Portland, Oregon, to Portland, Maine to Gainesville, Florida to Lawrence, Kansas. You know, not. Not just the hippie dims, but all the big universities have a chunk of kids coming through who would have gone on dead tour, who now are not going to just not go to see music. They're going to want something similar. The beginning of the jam world kind of comes. It was already there with Fish Traveler and some things, but then it really breaks through with string Cheese, you know, with the bluegrass scene, the more jazz kids in the modesky scene. You know, the southern rockers ones with the. More Mule and the Crows and then, you know, Jamtronica with the Biscuits and Sound Tribe and more the Prague side with Umphries. The more Americana with Mo. I saw that I was in it. I was like, that's. That's not going away. That's going to grow. And that's why I went to Larry Block at Wetlands. And I was young, but I was like, I just coming out of Dead World and I'm like, I believe that Wetlands going to play a key part of keeping that spirit that the dead. That is based on the music of the dead, in the words of Robert Hunter and John Barlow and Jerry, you know, and Bobby, but can live on and will live on through this younger, this next scene. And I want to help see that happen. That was the conversation. It's almost heavy now when I talk about it, just because it kind of did happen. He believed in me and he enabled me to. He said. He gave me the club. When I said that, he basically was like, I want to see this. He said, you can pay me on monthly payments. And I was young and I just knew there was nothing else like this place.
- [16:23]
B
Wetlands took its music seriously. Kind of an underground megachurch.
- [16:27]
A
We would do punk during the day Saturday or hardcore. Hardcore, you know. But Saturday night, to a Dead band. Sunday afternoon, do a SCA show. 800 people would do an $800 bar. You know, everyone's drinking water 16. But you do it because it's good, because it's religion. And then Sunday night we had the Roots residency where Black Lily, all female black women singing with the Roots. So we would do some. Four shows in a weekend. Early, late, both Saturday and Sunday. You would see there's. So that's one shirt. The church is the same. It was Wetland. It was one building, one structure. Everyone came through. You would see these four different groups, you know, the ska kids, the hardcore kids, the Deadheads on Saturday, and then the hip hop kids and the Hipsters for the Roots all coming seeking the same thing. They just looked a little different. Their dress, the. The sounds of the music they went to pray to. The pastor was a little different. There's four different pastors. Each music is its own thing, sub religion, subset. But. But the church, the venue, that's what was cool about Wellington. It was one church or congregation, you know, and temple. And. And so I saw that first because I would be at all four. And so I really did see that, how powerful it can be. And the venue is an important part of it.
- [18:00]
B
Oteal Burbridge is the bassist in Denning Co. But played in the Allman Brothers Band for many years and came up in the Atlanta based Aquarium Rescue Unit led by Colonel Bruce Hampton, once the frontman of the infamous Hampton Grease Band, the South's flagship freak jammers in the late 60s. We'll be speaking with Oteal a bunch today. The Aquarium Rescue Unit played Wetlands many times. Here's Time is free from November 20, 1993 recorded by Tabor hero Scott Bernstein.
- [18:44]
A
And I don't know, and I don't know why we.
- [18:59]
B
They don't sound like the Grateful that at all. And yet they would become an improbable conduit into Deadland. We are so overjoyed to have with us Ottilie Burbridge.
- [19:07]
A
The only people that ever came to see us were Deadheads and like all the freaks, like, you know, artists, performance artists, witches, like the whole Wiccan community was really supportive. I got to know a bunch of it and I considered dear friends, but you know, they'd have their crystals and swords and stuff, you know, so just. It was totally crazy. But I often think about that how like Deadheads were the first ones to get us. I was supposed to be like some instrumental jazz rock fusion guy that had to live in Europe because you can't make any money playing there in the US and it was like, you know, I met Colonel Bruce and I didn't resist it and you know, let your life proceed by its own design. And I'm like, well, this is cool. I expect to be at Gillette Stadium singing Comes the Time. But hey, whatever, you know, like, it's just like what happened, you know, don't give Only love can be that Only love can be.
- [20:38]
B
That was Ottilie Burberge singing Comes a Time with Dead and company at Citi Field on June 24, 2017. Comes a time is also the name of the great podcast Oteal co hosts, featuring long, fascinating conversations around the world of the Dead, psychedelics, politics and more. The Grateful Dead's music was a huge and inclusive tent.
- [20:57]
A
If it was gonna be a genre of music, it would just be American, because it's got all these American music's in it. I mean, it's not one genre. It's like literally every genre.
- [21:11]
B
It was the mid-90s that the language of the Grateful Dead and the language of jazz spilled over into one another. Fourth Wave, fifth World, sixth Stream, whatever your current jazz operating system. Our friend Gary Lambert was there to witness and participate in the exchange.
- [21:26]
A
That was a fantastically Creative time in New York. When I started coming back to New York a lot after living in the.
- [21:33]
B
Bay Area for some time, the scenes I gravitated to. I gravitated more avidly toward the Knitting Factory, which was also quite new.
- [21:41]
A
It opened in 87, I believe.
- [21:43]
B
And then there was Wetlands, of course.
- [21:46]
A
Wetlands wasn't just all hippie all the time. They had some hardcore punk and they had reggae night and they had all kind. It was pretty eclectic in the booking.
- [21:54]
B
Policy, although it obviously became jam band central.
- [21:57]
A
And then you could go to the Knitting Factory and, you know, with a seated audience listening very intently and, you know, pensively scratching their soul patches, you know, and listening to Modesky, Martin and Wood or, you know, some early Steven Bernstein iteration of Sex Mob or one of those bands.
- [22:16]
B
Gary played at both clubs as part of the Henry Kaiser Band. We talked a bunch about that unit's brand of Dead reinvention last time with both Henry and David. And they fit right in at both venues. Henry recently posted a video of the band's set at Wetlands in October 1990. And we posted a link@dead.net deadcast on the page for the last episode. Modeling a set like the 1975 dead going in and out of Blues for Allah definitely falls into the category as something the Dead weren't doing in the 90s. I kept thinking, if these two scenes.
- [23:16]
A
Could converge and you will have a scene where people are playing music of the depth of what's happening at the Knitting Factory, but you can dance to it. And I thought that Moduski, Martin and.
- [23:28]
B
Wood were kind of instrumental in splitting.
- [23:30]
A
That atom, you know, making that fusion happen.
- [23:33]
B
It was in the fall of 1995 that Modesky, Martin and Wood collided with Fish for several nights, the players joining one another on stage. By a few years later, it was like the divisions hadn't existed at all. To Dave Harrington, now of the band Darkside, who grew up in New York, it was all one and the same.
- [23:51]
A
The scenes had merged, at least locally in New York. I could feel it. And, like, I felt like I was able to go see so much music and see the same characters. And the boundaries between, like, the downtown jazz world and the jam world were pretty porous. You know, there were, like, characters like, you know, Modeski or Scofield, who really kind of travel between the two. But then all of the supporting players, you'd. They'd pop up. You know, they pop up where you least expected them. And so I think, like, a lot of my. And I was, like, studying jazz. I grew up as a jazz bass player and I became a guitar player later. I mean, I always played guitar mostly like playing along to Vanessa, Martin Wood and Grateful Dead records and not like with people. So that was definitely like, you know, that is one way that Jerry was just in my way of thinking about guitar.
- [24:47]
B
One of the people responsible for connecting the worlds was the great trumpet player Stephen Bernstein, one time member of John Lurie's Lounge Lizards and leader of the band Sex Mob and the Millennial Territory Orchestra. He'd go on to work closely with Levon Helm and create string arrangements for Warren Haynes orchestral tours because he's Gary Lambert. Gary met Stephen Bernstein and saxophonist Peter afflebaum in the mid-70s when the two were teenagers playing in the world renowned Berklee High School Jazz Band.
- [25:14]
A
These did not sound like 15 year old kids trying to master jazz. This music was coming from some strange experiential place, like they, you know, they were drawing on a past life or something like that.
- [25:27]
B
And Steven Bernstein at 15 was exactly.
- [25:31]
A
The same person he is today in terms of sharp, witty, irreverent Stephen Bernstein could easily have a side career as a standup comic because just his interjections between songs at a show are utterly hilarious. But also this depth of musical knowledge, frame of reference, context that he profoundly.
- [25:55]
B
Understands the whole history of the trumpet.
- [25:58]
A
And the whole history of the big band and the whole history of New Orleans music and all that. And he brings it all to bear in his music. And then he can also do, you know, a Prince song like Darling Nicky and make it sound like it's being played in a Kansas City gin Mill in 1931. He's just, he has this amazing.
- [26:21]
B
Amazing.
- [26:21]
A
Gift for like fusing completely disparate sensibilities and making them exhilarating and hilarious. Did a fantastic Sly and the Family Stone tribute project. And then we'll do the music of Nino Rota from Fellini films and then we'll cover Grateful Dead tunes and do it with incredible love and knowledge and.
- [26:45]
B
A singular approach to it.
- [26:47]
A
I must have seen the Millennial Territory Orchestra and Sex Mob more times at Tonic than just about any other band. And like that was Midnight and those. I mean, I'm sure I was at like every one of those midnight MTO shows they used to do on Friday on the weekends. I mean, it was just, just one of my favorite bands of all time. Anyway, Bernstein. It's a long Bernstein sidebar, but on Solid Sender they cover Ripple. What more do you need to know? Bernstein is out there like, you know, playing the freest of free jazz. And then covering Ripple, that, to me, is like the full New York dose of, like, anything's possible.
- [27:57]
B
Stephen Bernstein grew up in Berkeley, but worlds apart from the Grateful Dead.
- [28:01]
A
All I knew there was a band called the Grateful Dead. And a lot of my friends said, oh, we're gonna. We. We're going to see great. The Dead. Grateful Dead this weekend. So I. All I knew is it's a band that played around, so I just assumed a local band. Then on the way to high school was the. The club called Keystone Berkeley. Now you pass Keystone Berkeley, there's a big sign that said, Monday night, Jerry Garcia Band. Now, I don't know who's in the Grateful Dead, so I don't know that Jerry who Jerry Garcia is. But I do know that I was in a place called Leo's Music once, and some guy pointed to, like, a hippie dude in a poncho and said, that's Jerry Garcia. I'm like, oh, that's the guy who plays Monday night. And just looking at him, I said, well, he's got to be like some kind of. He was in the guitar section, you know. I said, he's got to be some, like, Mexican blues guitar player, local guy. You, Jerry Garcia, who plays Monday night. You know, the way that. So in my head, that's who Jerry Garcia is. Every time I pass the sign, I'm like, oh, yeah, that's a Mexican guitar. Blues guitar player. Now, there was also this music that you heard all the time coming on Telegraph Avenue. Like, the hippies sold their. Their kind of wares. They sold, like, pottery and earrings and leather belts and stuff like that. That was a big thing in Berkeley. And everyone had a little, like, kind of early boom boxes. And there was always this music that came from there and also came from. There were a lot of communes where I grew up. It was this kind of music that you heard and was kind of like this kind of country rock. And of course, there were a lot of bands that played like that. Where I'm getting at. It was this music that I always heard, and I just assumed it was a kind of music that hippies listen to. And it seemed to be a bit like country music and a bit like rock music and bit out of tune and kind of like kind of guitari. You know, I never paid much attention to it. Now. Now getting to where it all comes together. 1979, September of 79, I moved to New York to go to Columbia University. Now, Columbia University was full of all these kids that had Gone to these east coast private schools, you know, whatever they are, like, show in Andover and all this stuff. And so I'm hanging out in some guy's dorm room who went to one of those schools, and, you know, we're just hanging, and he's like, yeah, I was. I was. I went to the Egypt to see the Dead. And I'm like, you went to Egypt to see the. The Dead? The Grateful Dead? I'm like, yeah. I'm like, wow. Like, I still didn't know quite that they were. That. That, like, people really knew. I mean, obviously they were a band. I'm like, really? And they said, yeah, it was crazy, man. Like, I'm like, wow, this is really some information I never had before. And then he goes, yeah. And Jerry was looking right at me when he was playing. I'm like, who's Jerry? And they say, jerry Garcia. And I said. I said, the Mexican blues guitar player who plays on Monday nights was in Egypt looking at you. And then, you know, you're hanging out and they start to play this music. And I realize, oh, shit. All this music I've heard my whole life is the Grateful Dip.
- [31:01]
B
To Steven Bernstein's jazz trained head, the Dead sounded like a subgenre all their own. By the mid-80s, he'd found his way to the Dead's music.
- [31:10]
A
Coming up with jazz, like, what the Grateful Dead comes from is coming from folk music, right? And I didn't really understand how that language worked. So even though, in a sense, it's very simple and basic, it was also very. Because I don't play guitar, right? It was very foreign to me. And I was trying to figure out, well, what. What is this? Like, what. I mean, I know what it is, but, like, how is this made? Like, what are the notes and. And. And what are the building blocks of this music? And I started to get fascinated with it, and that is kind of the story of the beginning of my fascination with the Grateful Dead, especially because you hear from a lot of jazz musicians that don't. And I didn't understand it at first. Like, if your language is the language of. Of African American blues and. And rhythm, the Dead just sounds like wrong notes. It does, because it's not. It's coming from the bluegrass tradition. It's coming from different scales. And so you hear that scale, maybe over a blues, and you go like, well, that sounds like wrong. Yeah. A lot of jazz people did not know what to make of the Grateful Dead. They really did because the languages are so different that it. It is very Foreign music. And. And the way the drummers play is foreign. The way Phil plays is foreign. Like everything about it is foreign. And even the way they pitch, they. You know, I mean, it was interesting because a lot of people talk about, oh, they sing on tune and they do. They sing exactly how they should be singing. You know, when you see who they are and where they come from, you realize, no, that's exactly what this is supposed to sound like.
- [32:51]
B
One musician who understood the connections between musical worlds was Harmelodic jazz titan Ornette Coleman. At the invitation of Gary Lambert. Amazing. Ornette Coleman saw the Dead at Madison Square Garden in 1987 and soon invited Jerry Garcia to contribute to what became his 1988 album, Virgin Beauty, including the opening song, Three Wishes.
- [33:14]
A
Sam. When that came out, that was a huge deal. That's that one on Colombia with, like the African cover. No, that was. I. I listened to that. In fact, maybe I should listen to that today because I don't think I've heard it in 20 and 30 years. But we used to listen that song over and over. When that song came out, that was like you just. And that was a record that was. I didn't have a CD of that. I had a record that, you know, I listened to that a lot.
- [34:07]
B
As literally as it's possible to do in music, the Grateful Dead drew lines between worlds, demonstrating a musical language for others to do the same. It was perhaps articulated best by none other than Bob Dylan. When Jerry Garcia died in 1995, Dylan There are a lot of spaces and advances between the Carter Family, Buddy Holly and, say, Ornette Coleman. A lot of universes, but he filled them all without being a member of any school. Instead, Garcia's ease of navigation became a school of playing unto itself. The Garcia school of guitar playing includes an incredible range of influences, filtered through an almost instantly identifiable, hyper articulated lead style that echoes Garcia's years studying banjo. For that matter, since it's a metaphoric school, the Garcia school also grants players the permission to drop out and light the whole place on fire. Jake Robinbach is a lead guitarist in High Time, our local Dead band here in Brooklyn, as well as a member of the Echo Friendly. During the pandemic, he began offering zoom guitar lessons, exploring the fundamentals of Dead and Garcia style playing.
- [35:11]
A
I did basically like six units, and each unit would cover a player that I thought either influenced Jerry or, like, influenced the style of music that Jerry was into and then the elements of that within his playing. So like, I did a whole thing on Bakersfield Country. And we talked about James Burton and the way he played on the Merle Haggard records. And also the way that him and Roy Nichols, who is Merle Haggard's touring guitar player, played together. He just had a huge bag. I mean, he's the least repetitive improviser of any rock and roll player. And I think, like, that's the thing I was trying to impart. And he had ways of doing it where, like, it was a little bit repetitive, but maybe he would alter the phrasing a little bit or play that part backwards instead of forwards in that particular moment. But he never. He really. You know, if you listen to something like Eyes of the World From, I don't know, 74 or 89, it doesn't really matter. But if you listen to those long solos on I's, there are certain things that are gonna pop up here and there on the same tour. But to me, that's more like he's working out ideas, not necessarily repeating himself. And then within those solos, he never repeats a phrase. I can't do that. And I would never say I could. But it's something I aspire to. And I think it helps. You know, I think the ethos is really important. I really do. I think just because I think his ethos was so good, you know, don't repeat yourself. Make it as open as possible so you can get as far out. I mean, these are great for anybody, you know? So it's like, even if I'm, like, doing Jerry, like, the way Jerry set it up for all of us is like, to do you. It's so cool.
- [37:24]
B
That was high time doing Eyes of the World from Chip's picks, volume two, which we've linked to@dead.net deadcast.
- [37:30]
A
I do think there's a logic to Jerry's playing. It's like pattern, which would be like taking a scale and instead of playing it in exactly the right order, playing a pattern out of the major scale. So a classic one that he would use in and a million other songs instead of going do re mi fa. So he'd be like, right. And that would be, like, one way he would play through the scale and then he'd do that backwards. Then the next thing he might do is do, like, a chromat, a weird chromatic climb where things get a little dissonant and then come back to a chord shape to bring it back in. And he would basically combine those three things. They would all be happening at once and kind of move through them. And I. You know, I don't think you could necessarily say that he does that on everything every time. But I think that's a classic Jerry approach, would be to be like, I've got my chord shapes, I've got my chromatic notes, and I've got my scale pattern, and I'm gonna blend those three things together, and that's gonna help me express what I'm doing. I have no idea if he thought about it that specifically when he was on stage, but I do know that he practiced way more than anybody I've ever met in my life. So he had to think about it at some point.
- [38:40]
B
Like Stephen Bernstein, Ottil Burbridge began his musical upbringing pretty far from the Grateful Dead.
- [38:45]
A
My parents are New Yorkers from the Bronx, so I grew up hearing mostly black music, although we heard a lot of classical and Indian classical. But my orientation is jazz, R and B, gospel, blues, all those things, and then every thing else. So, you know, if I. If I wasn't hearing those things, like from the vein that I was used to, I kind of let it go. I wouldn't say it's bad. I just wasn't it. It didn't stay on my radar, you know. But when I met Colonel Bruce, he helped me understand what I was missing in folk music, you know, and it's just people's story. Not that that's not in jazz, blues and gospel, but, you know, from a black perspective. I could always relate to that immediately, you know. But like Bob Dylan, I was like, oh, my God, how can you stand the sound of his voice? You know what I mean? Being an instrumentalist, I didn't care about the lyrics at that point. I was like, that's almost unlistenable to me now. I love his voice because it's so. Because that's his story, you know what I mean? I didn't understand the folk part of it, which, you know, so. And even if it was a jazz, like, gospel singers, like, the singers have a lot of chops, you know, they could sing like, you know, the person on the. At the corner church could sing circles around, you know, so many people, you know, so. But then when I. When Colonel Bruce turned me on to, like, Delta blues, bluegrass, folk music, that whole thing, then I started to see it. And then that's when I heard. That's when I understood the Allman Brothers. It's like. It's just that electrified. Grateful Dead is that electrified, but it's. They are coming out of those same traditions that I just listed, you know, but it's electric and also on mushrooms you know, or lsd. And I was like, gah, I get it. In fact, what was so beautiful about him is he's such an animated person. Watching him listen to it is what showed me what was so cool about it. Howlin Wolf would sing something, Bruce would go like this. Like, electricity shot into him. And I was like, yeah, that's. I feel it too. Wow, that's like, amazing that a human could even produce that amount of energy and electricity and force and spirit and exorcism and, you know, like this. I just was like, oh, my God. And then I heard it in the old bluegrass stuff, man, you. You listen to Dr. Ralph Stanley, you hear him saying, oh, death or any of that. It's just like all of a sudden ghosts are rising up. I'm like, whoa, this is crazy. And now I could hear a direct line from that to the Grateful Dead, a direct line from that to the Allman Brothers Band. You know, as well as all the stuff that I grew up with, it's that it was that missing piece. And I honestly believe if it were not for Colonel Bruce, I wouldn't have been able or should have even got either gig with the Allman Brothers or the Dead.
- [42:03]
B
As you may imagine, he's got some keen insight into the Dead's rhythm section.
- [42:08]
A
I started playing drums at 5 and picked up bass probably around 14 years old. And I studied drums. I mean, I studied. I played in a classical setting. I studied all the rudiments, I played traditional grip, all that stuff. And I studied jazz on drums. So that really helped a lot. And it's helped me get a lot of gigs, just period. Because I know how to lock up with a drummer. Like, because I am a drummer, I'm playing drums on bass. I'm just using the harmony to spell out the harmony. But everything almost, I would say 90% of it is rhythmic ideas first. And I just use the harmony to spell it out, so. And then I get to play drums with them too, so it's easier for me to learn. The playing with a two drummer thing is just different. And there's no way to describe it. And it's different, whichever two drummers it is. I've actually done it three times because Tedesi Trucks Band had two drummers, also JJ and Falcon, but I just kind of listened to them as one big drummer. The fun part is when they get off from each other, because now you're like, oh, it's like surfing on two surfboards and hoping they stay together. And when one doesn't, you're like, ah. You try to pull it back or just stay on. The drumming always disturbed. I will just say it's. The drumming really would disturb jazz musicians. Dance band drumming is very specific. Like, you listen to Count Basie and Jimmy Lunsford and these things, and it's this very type, you know, and it does, like. Because they're not hitting at the same time. They're hitting, like, kind of like. It's way more of an individual thing than a. What this idea of, like, this. This dance machine, you know, and that's what get. That's why people do a kelp dance. That's why the dance is like this. You know what I'm saying? The dance is. Is like a wide dance because it's. It's a very wide beat. One guy's on one side and one guy's on another side. And the bass, which usually goes boom, boom, boom. It's going. It's a much looser grid. It's, you know, I'm saying it's the grid of. It's the psychedelic grid. It's not like, you know. I'm saying it's not the Afro Cuban grid. Phil had no rules, so he would do all these bass substitutions. So if it's like. If some. For people that don't know music harmony, if you're playing C major and it's like, happy, right? But if I play A, then it makes it A minor. So now I can turn it dark, even though everybody's still playing the same thing. And I can just make Dracula, you know, or whatever, just create some other tension, you know. And Phil, there was no rules. He was allowed to do whatever he wanted. So he gave me permission to do a lot of things where I might get a frown in other bands, like, you know, don't do that. Don't bring Dracula out.
- [45:10]
B
When Steven Bernstein was in Levon Helm's band, he had lots of opportunities to observe Phil Lesh at close range.
- [45:16]
A
And I'd sit there and watch Phil's set, and he would do that thing, which I. I call it. I call it the scale to nowhere. Starts, like, going up the base and. And then he ends up on something, and you don't even know what it is, but it has kind of like. But once he's on that note, man, whatever the band was doing before, they can't do it anymore because now it's really somewhere else. And it took a while to get there because he just kind of goes up the bass. And I realized, yeah, he's the guy. Well, While like, in most bands, like, the bass holds the band together, he's the guy that breaks the band apart. Like, everyone could be, like, chugging along. If Phil says, it's time to go out there, man, and he starts doing that rise to nowhere, I. You just can't keep chugging away because now he's gonna be on some note that, like, has nothing to do with what you're doing, and you better just go to outer space. And it's almost like he's calling the shots. Like, once he's done that, we're out in the zone. Now, there's been many things, and I've thanked him personally. I call him Easter Eggs. I'm like, you left me all these little Easter eggs. Because when you dig into something and then you're like, oh, shit, look what he did there. And I'm like, you slick bastards. Thanks, Phil. Because then it gives you other ideas.
- [46:29]
B
And underlying the songs was the band's incredibly rich songwriting. Just like Jerry Garcia had a particular logic in his guitar solos, he also had a particular penchant for structural left turns.
- [46:39]
A
But Ship of Fools is just one most gorgeous set of chord changes ever. Every once in a while you get a tune and you go to like, there'd be some chord change. And I think to myself, man, you'd have to eaten a lot of acid to think that chord change is. Is. Is what's going to happen now. Like, I understand that's what happens now. But to even have a mind that would say, why don't we try this chord? After that chord, you'd have to, like, really think of infinite possibilities. Because most people will be like, well, that doesn't work. It was some song that's like, go along swimmingly, Everything seems fine. And you get this one thing and you're like, how do I go from here to here? I can't. You're trying to figure out, like, how you get from one note, like, at the end of this section to the next section. And I eventually figured it out, maybe even Black Peter, the first time I went through that.
- [47:25]
B
Musicologist Sean o' Donnell talked extensively about the strange changes of Black Peter during our working man's dead season. Stephen Bernstein and the Millennial Territory Orchestra have recorded Black Peter as part of Bernstein's ambitious Community Music series. This is from Volume 4, to be released in September 2022 by the Righteous Label Royal Potato Family. Other volumes will be out sooner. Check them out.
- [47:50]
A
Take a look at poor Peter now he's lying. Oh, let's go, let's Go, let's run and see.
- [48:11]
B
Oh, run and see.
- [48:16]
A
When I got the gig with Dunn Co. I really dug in and I found these ballads. That's when it really opened up for me because my parents are really into jazz. And so tunes like Stella Blue and a bunch of their ballads, just the construction of the chord changes and the melodies, it's like jazz tunes to me. And I was like, oh, man. In fact, with China Doll and Stella Blue, like, I could actually hear like Mingus taking an acoustic bass solo over it. I can hear it easily in my mind, you know. And I thought, wow, how did I miss this all these years? My God. But it's because no one ever said to me, like, learn these eight songs. Like, I could just pick eight ballads. And if they said, learn these eight ballads by the Grateful Dead and then come tell me what you think.
- [49:11]
B
It was a musical language that spread across the world. The Dead's music began to spread internationally by the early 70s, as we heard about in the last episode with the Calcutta band Maha Maya. In the 80s there were bands in England, including the Cosmic charlies. And the 90s saw the establishment of the Warlocks of Tokyo. We spoke with Shuhei Iwasa, the keyboardist and the Warlocks of Tokyo. He wasn't in the band when they were formed by lead guitarist Ken Sasaki, but he filled us in on some of their history playing Dead music.
- [49:44]
A
Warlocks was formed in 1992 when I was 10 years old. @ first, Warlocks is not that band, just a session band with music friends. So they founding a place to music playing. There was no place to pray at that time. Japanese famous Dead Heads. Yuko. Yeah, Yuko was maybe she went to 80s dead show many times and she came back to Japan. She started a live house named Yukotopia in Tokyo.
- [50:33]
B
Yukotopia became the center of the Japanese Dead scene. The scene got an unlikely ally a few years later when Steve Silberman and David Schenck's crucial book Skeleton A Dictionary for Deadheads received a Japanese translation. By the time Shuhei was a teenager, the Dead's music was constantly around.
- [50:51]
A
When I was high school, in my hometown, there is a clothes shop named Jack Straw and there are so many tie dyes and hemp cross and Oregon Maid. So what is this culture? I don't know. Well, what is hippie? What is behind of there? So I found Fish and Grateful Dead. But at that time I'm too young to understand the Dead music. When I was young, I like Fish. I can understand their music deeply. So started to join Warlocks. So playing their music I can understand their sound clearly. Their music is very freely kind of freedom. They can go wherever she want to go and have so very deep cows time to heaven, to space and back to Rabe. So much kindness. They took me everywhere.
- [52:12]
B
As with virtually everybody else we spoke with for these episodes, Shuhei learned from the Dead. He was already a jazz bassist before taking up keyboards, and he had studied ensemble improvisation. But the Dead's approach clearly crossed the language barrier.
- [52:26]
A
I love Kyo. He is my hero in A Grateful Death. I like Kiss God's show. He is my best pianist keyboardist in Death. Yeah, very sensitive and I like piano sound. So he is my teacher. Not technical skills that teach me music attitude and spirit and what is music and how to make music ensembles. So listening member song. It's like a conversation. So its rhythmic other and the sound became one and makes big groups. So all the members ride on the big waves. It will be a beautiful sound.
- [53:32]
B
For the Dead. It was an incredible and idiosyncratic musical code to live by individually and collectively and annihilate if they so felt like it. But it especially began to take new shapes after Jerry Garcia died in 1995. Musician, journalist and radio host David Ganz has been an observant and participant in Dead adjacent music making since the late 70s.
- [53:54]
A
I remember in 1981 when Blair Jackson and I interviewed Jerry Garcia, I remember having a conversation that included my saying, this music will outlive the men who made it. And Jerry agreeing in a fairly humble way, but recognizing that it was that deep and that important to enough people. And we have seen that. It's truer than I ever could have even imagined it being in those days. And I think Jerry would also be kind of astonished at how big it's become now.
- [54:29]
B
In the years after Jerry Garcia's death and the official dissolution of the grateful Dead in 1995, the Dead's music has gone fully through the mirror, creating a broad spectrum from ultra literal recreation to total anarchistic reinvention. Close to one end of that spectrum is the Dark Star Orchestra, founded in 1997 and perhaps the most popular interpreter of Dead's music outside the band themselves. Known for recreating complete Dead set lists, they used the band's old shows as frameworks for new jams, staying true to the band's gear setups for each particular era. Jeff Matson started his career in the Volunteers, eventually morphing into the Zen Tricksters, the Long Island Dead loving band we spoke about in the previous episode. Along with keyboardist Rob Barocco, Jeff Matson joined the Darkstar Orchestra. In the late aughts, Jeff broke down some of his strategies for us.
- [55:18]
A
If we're doing a show like we're recreating a show, say it's a 69 show, but it doesn't matter. I listen to the show the day that we play it. I don't listen to every note because, you know, a lot of times they're four or five hours. I don't have that much time. But I will listen to all the significant things. Anything that really sticks out as unusual, I will address in the show, which doesn't mean, again, not playing it note for note. But. And Darkstar would be a good example in that, you know, we see that as one of the purest expressions. You know, you really want to be playing directly from the heart. There. There's certain little themes that pop up, so I play those themes, but only if it makes sense where you are in the music would I address that. If it's, you know, I'm not just like, oh, right, here goes that part. I'm forcing it on you. Because it's just not the spirit of the music. I've listened to all those different years, and they're kind of ingrained in my head, and I know what it's supposed to sound like. When it comes to soloing, I'm just playing. I'm just playing. And so there is definitely. I mean, I don't know what I'm gonna play next. You were always walking this fine line, you know, this gray area of being imitative but also expressing yourself musically. So, I mean, I'm just. I'm trying to create a flow. I'm not. Again, I don't want to be thinking. I don't want to be editing. If you're thinking about recreating some lick or something like that, you're not in the moment.
- [57:14]
B
You're different. Years do require different strategies. Brown Eyed Women, which debuted in 1971 and stayed in the band's repertoire ever after, is one example.
- [57:22]
A
In the first couple of years, two or three years of that song, he was playing almost a set melody. You know, he would go off it a little bit, and it was one pass, a solo. It was just like a statement of the melody. And then, of course, you jump to the late 70s, and he's starting to take more and more passes at it and extrapolate on it. And I think that that was largely because I think he was more confident he could play more interesting stuff that addressed the chords, I mean, I can't get in his head. I don't know. But that's what feels right to me.
- [58:02]
B
And though Dark Star Orchestra might be called a tribute band, they're still a band, and each of its members has their own musical personality, existing at some oblique angle to their counterparts in the original bed. The band's rhythm guitarist is legendary taper Rob Eaton.
- [58:17]
A
Eaton's great, particularly at that. Earlier, I think he's less a fan of, like, Bob's 80s sound, but he'll still play those things. But he loves that. 69 through, say, 77. 78. And he knows all that. On the other end of the spectrum, you have Baracko, who doesn't really play like any of the keyboard players. You know, he's kind of constitutionally unable.
- [58:50]
B
Fancy that, an anti authoritarian playing Grateful Dead music as a band. Though, the Darkstar Orchestra have clearly figured out a way to surf the bigger vibrations. Sociologist Rebecca Adams has been seeing Dead music since the early 70s and formally studying Deadhead since the late 80s. After Jerry Garcia died, she continued to see Dead cover bands. Jeff Matson, Rob Barocco, and the Zen Tricksters even crashed at her house on tour. But it took her slightly longer to take the community seriously from a scholarly perspective, at least until she saw Darkstar Orchestra.
- [59:23]
A
One specific memory I have is that as I was leaving that night, I was standing in line at a porta potty, and this young woman in front of me was saying, oh, that was an amazing show. I really have to get the tape. And I can't remember what show they covered, but I said to her, oh, I have the tape. I can send it to you. And she said, did you just tape the show? And I said, no, no, I mean, I have a tape of the Dead playing the show. And she said, no, no, I want Dark Star Orchestra playing the show. And I just thought it made no sense to me. And I remember thinking, wow, that's really weird. Why would you want, you know, a copy of a Dead cover band playing the show when you could have the real thing? So I do believe that was the first time I became aware that the COVID band thing was a thing in its own right. When I finally started going to more Dark Star Orchestra shows, I was extremely surprised to find out that there was a Dark Star Orchestra community where people knew each other and always went to Dark Star Orchestra shows, you know, just as religiously as Dead fans would have gone on Dead tour. And, you know, that they knew each other and, you know, and that they had their own Little neighborhoods within the show that weren't replicas of what happened at Dead shows. I myself became very involved with a group of Dark side Star Orchestra fans called Dance Nation. They used to bring Rug or no Rug Nation, I think it was called Rug Nation. They would bring rugs into the Dark Star shows and put them out so they could dance in their bare feet. And as you know, I dance a lot. And so I got recruited. You know, they had no idea I was Rebecca Adams, sociologist. I was Rebecca Adams who danced or. They probably didn't even know my name at the time. But I became aware of the fact that there was in group knowledge among Dark Star fans that wasn't shared by all Deadheads. It was a separate community, a separate sub community.
- [61:51]
B
She was fascinated by the older Deadheads who'd started seeing Darkstar Orchestra when they can no longer see the Dead. And she was fascinated by the younger following who'd never seen the original band at all. An important moment came at one of Dark Star Orchestra's summer jubilees in Ohio.
- [62:06]
A
There was a time when I forget what year it was, but DSO was playing. And I think it was a tornado hit the stage or there was bad weather and they had to shut everything down. The older Deadheads all had things like tents and blankets and food and, you know, ways of taking care of themselves. And the younger Deadheads had other things and things. There was like a big intergenerational bonding experience that I madly took notes on, watching the old people helping the young people and the young people helping the old people. And up until that time, I honestly thought, okay, there are these young Deadheads and there are these old Deadheads. And they were kind of like totally separate in the audience. And after that, I noticed this really age integrated thing going on at DSO shows. And I think that particular event was a turning point.
- [63:14]
B
David Ganz has been mixing his own original music with Dead tunes and other covers since the 70s. We talked to him last episode, too. He likes the Dark Star Orchestra just fine. But for him, it's just one of many ways to interpret Dead music.
- [63:27]
A
I mean, Dark Star Orchestra is tremendously successful.
- [63:31]
B
Plays large rooms.
- [63:32]
A
They play Red Rocks, for God's sake. Playing set lists from Grateful Dead history in a magnificently accurate way. It's not what I would want to do. And I say this. I'm friends with those guys. Many of them are some of my favorite musicians. And I always say this about. They got to learn the lame songs, too. I only play the ones that. That tell that work for me, that somehow Tell my story. I play the ones that are musically valid for me as a musician, and there's lots that I don't know. I can't play Estimated Profit because I never sat down to learn it. I'd rather play my version of Warfrat in a different key and a different tempo. I'd rather play my version of New Speedway Boogie, which is in the key of D and has a descending line that makes me people think I'm about to play Dear Prudence. Instead. I want to tell the story in my own voice and I would rather be on stage with people that do that. That's why I'm touring with this Hawaiian guy where we play two acoustic guitars and play Dark Star for half an hour in our own way, and then play Days between, you know.
- [65:07]
B
That was from One Afternoon long Ago by Fragile Thunder David, with Stephen Inglis on slack guitar and Ella Lauren on Celtic harp and Robin Sylvester of Ratdog on bass. As a touring musician and radio host, juggling both of those roles for decades, David's got a crow's eye view of Deadland.
- [65:25]
A
J Rad is a great example of guys that are like super high energy musicians who weren't Deadheads to begin with, who have adopted this book and are pleasing crowds from coast to coast playing these songs in a super high energy sort of, you know, shreddy guitar fashion. There's Wake the Dead based here in Northern California, who do Celtic style. Grateful Dead with Grateful with Celtic instrumentation. They have harp, well, their harp is just retired, but they got, you know, that little Irish drum and there's a penny whistle and mandolins and, you know, and then there's. There. There's a string band out of Dayton, Ohio called the Great Northern String Band. They don't sound much like the Dead. They play Grateful Dead songs like their own seven piece string band arrangements, right? I would rather hear that. I'd rather hear people kicking these songs around in another style and, and finding new ways to interpret them. But I just appreciate the fact that so many people love these songs and that on any given night there's a good chance you could go downtown, wherever you are, and find a Dead band playing these songs.
- [66:34]
B
Joe Russo's Almost Dead, often abbreviated as J Rad, is pretty far at the other end of the spectrum from Dark Star Orchestra, led by drummer Joe Russo, who played with Phil Lesh and Bob Weirin. Further, J Rad could almost be considered a wetlands band too, though they played their first show a dozen years after wetlands 2001 closing. But Joe Russo's first escapades with nearly all of his bandmates came in jams on the Wetlands stage. Here's a typically atypical J Rad move from their January 24, 2015 show at Brooklyn Bowl. Start with Waylon Jennings, Only Daddy that'll Walk the Line, a song done by the New Riders of the Purple Sage. And then they somehow end up in this jam that morphs seamlessly into Bertha. Gary Lambert loves J Rad.
- [68:16]
A
J Rad is, for me, the Grateful Dead cover band that matters. You know, they are, they are. They are the ones who get the music the way I want it to.
- [68:26]
B
Be got in that they're the first band.
- [68:29]
A
And I have immense respect for anyone who covers that music with sincerity and passion and skill. But J Rad to me, is the first band that has approached this music.
- [68:43]
B
With the acknowledgement that since the Grateful.
- [68:45]
A
Dead first made it, punk happened and funk happened and fusion happened, and all these other genres feed into what they do. And so they make the music their own simply by bringing to bear all of the influences they've absorbed since the Grateful Dead.
- [69:05]
B
And they weren't obsessed with the Grateful.
- [69:08]
A
Dead when they started J Rad. It was just kind of a one off. It was a lark. It was a one time thing they were going to do for a party. Five friends who liked to play together. Joe already had a foot in the Grateful Dead world because he had been in further. But the rest of the guys, you know, had some awareness and affection for the music, but none of them ever planned to be in a Grateful Dead cover band. But the first gig, the first gig was so much fun and so incredibly well received. And the way they approached it was so beautifully transgressive that, you know, it just, it made sense for them to see, how far can we push this? You know, how far can we take.
- [69:49]
B
You know, our non standard version of this music?
- [69:52]
A
You know, two, two lead guitarists, neither of whom sounds like Jerry or Bob, you know, that's a real paradigm shift in the music right there. And Joe's approach to the drums. Sometimes he sounds like both drummers at once, but they've always straddled that downtown sensibility, New York sensibility, and the wetland sensibility, and then later, you know, the tonic sensibility and the new Blue sensibility, You know, all those guys are regulars at all these experimental musical laboratories in different configurations. And then they come together and, you know, just absolutely slay the hippies.
- [70:31]
B
Please welcome to the Dead cast, Sir Joe Russo.
- [70:34]
A
There was a divide, you know, like when I was younger, when I was in high school, it was like, you know, either you liked hard rock or you liked the Grateful Dead. Pick a fucking side, you know, And I was, I'm gonna, you know, put this black T shirt on as I have. And I was like, you know, fuck the Grateful Dead. You know, it wasn't my thing. And I feel like there was kind of a built in bullshit, you know, societal thing that I subscribed to, as, you know, I'm 13, I'll give myself a pass, but I feel like that has dissolved and it's lovely.
- [71:07]
B
Joe also came up in the jazz world, playing with the great band Fat Mama in Colorado before heading east. He was a musician who was almost literally at home at both the Knitting Factory and Wetlands. Virtually a drummer in residence during the last year or so of Wetlands, after which his new duo with keyboardist Marco Benevento began life with a long knitting fashion stay. Through a winding series of events, Joe and Marco wound up touring with Fish's Trey Anastasio and Mike Gordon, joined by Phil Lesh for a Bonnaroo Super Jam.
- [71:37]
A
Yeah, Bonnaroo at the Super Jam. That was the first time I'd played a Grateful Dead song since quitting my high school band for playing too many Grateful Dead songs. And we played like, I think Casey Jones and Going down the Road Feeling Bad. And I just met Phil and I remember asking him, I was like, hey, man, so how do these, like, end? And he's just like, oh. I was like, no, fucking seriously. I don't know. I don't know how this kind of goes, you know, I had an idea and we just went through it. So, yeah, you pan to 2009, I get this call. It kind of just sounded like maybe it was like some benefit gigs or just a little handful of something out west. And I was like, hell yeah, man. I'll go check this out.
- [72:15]
B
Despite at first having only listened to studio recordings, Joe passed the audition. It was a gig that would last on and off for five years. He'd taken on other artists repertoires before, but it was nothing like learning Dead songs. And once further began a local residency in Marin County, Joe developed a method.
- [72:32]
A
Every morning I woke up with just 10 names of songs in my email to be played that night. And being that I had already just had my ass handed to me by, you know, not having the right version, I started doing a thing where I would get the studio version. A version from the 70s, a version from the 80s, and then the most recent Dead version of the Dead. And usually I kind of found like, A cross section there. I would. I would. And a lot of these I literally never heard in my life. Like, just. No idea. 100 brand new grateful Dead songs. So I would. I would google the lyrics, find the lyrics, put them in a file, and then I would just kind of accentuate if I were to. If I was supposed to like, drop out or like, you know, if some fill had to happen, I would kind of like shorthand it out. And that's what I did for the first year and a half of Further. I had my laptop next to me and it was these like, shorthand things all based on the lyrics, which is something that I realize is like the best way to learn a song, by the way. It's like if you don't know the words, you don't know the song. And that was a huge lesson while learning that stuff. And I developed this shorthand. So it's like I can like learn something really fast now if I have ever asked to in that way. But yeah. So by the end of that 10 days, it was another hundred songs that we performed and I was fucking exhausted mentally, and I never wanted to hear another shuffle again. And I remember I didn't listen to music with guitars for like six months after that because it was. It was such an intense and obviously worthwhile study. But it was. It was so overwhelming mentally because it really. It's like when you don't know the material and then you're expected to perform that stuff. And again, this is now 160 songs available to play within that first thing, it just. It blew my mind. I like short circuited and I was just like, I don't want to hear a real drum set. I don't want to hear guitars. I don't want to hear anyone take a fucking solo, you know, For Joe.
- [74:31]
B
The Grateful Dead and music with guitar solos at all are one part of the incredibly vast musical universe. All of which informs a band that was intended for one night and one night only. January 26, 2013. The Freaks Ball at Brooklyn Bowl. A yearly party thrown by a core group of New York music fans with deep Wetlands roots.
- [74:51]
A
We're filling in for a band for one show at Brooklyn bowl with this thing begrudgingly. And I kind of. Just for that one, I just put a songbook together that was playable by people who maybe didn't know the music that well. Like, I did. So I had that kind of foresight of being like, oh, I remember this being difficult. And then just like, I was like, what show would I want to hear and then kind of just, we just went loose on it, you know, it was just going to be a party. So it was like, I just, I think I let out all of the energy I always wished I could have. And further, it's an aggressive band, is an aggressive band of musicians. You know, if you think about anybody in jrad, everybody's kind of playing with teeth on no matter what gig they're playing with, you know. So I think for that first gig I just wanted to explore what was possible with that kind of like not give a fuck energy to this incredible songbook that, you know, again I was so lucky to be involved with in such a small way with Bob and Phil. And it was a one time thing. So it was like just blow the load, man. Let's just like fucking, you know, let's have fun and just crush the shit off these songs in whatever way we want to.
- [76:01]
B
It's. That was from the first J Rad show, January 26, 2013.
- [76:36]
A
We made a conscious decision that if we were gonna do this, we should, you know, throw a little bit of energy behind it. And then it just kind of kept taking on a life of its own and we kind of had to keep putting more energy into it. We would certainly, we would put the time to learn the song like properly for sure. Didn't want to go out there and half ass it again, like as it became more of a thing and that idea that people were coming for a certain experience, you know, we didn't take that and don't take that lightly at all. Like I want people to come to that if we're gonna be out there playing this songbook, you know, it's already dicey, you know, so if we're gonna do it, let's fucking do it really well and really deliver something that we feel good about, you know. And yeah, we certainly took and take that seriously when it has to be taken seriously, like the learning and then that. But again, it's been years since we've had to enter that space. We'll add things to the book now, here and there, but it's so easy. A song here and there is pretty easy. And I think we've tackled a lot of the big stuff at this point. And then now at this point it's in our DNA and it's just second nature. And now when we walk on stage, it just feels like a playground. There's just like whatever. Like we can go out in front of 10,000 people and start from a whisper, not discussing anything and just figuring it out, you know, and, and that's a testament to the songbook. It's a huge testament to the fan base, the people out front who are willing for that. And then the history that we all have together and the trust that we have through so many bands together that aren't this, you know, it all just kind of comes together in that perfect storm of like confidence and chaos.
- [78:17]
B
JRAD would be a formidable band even if they were to never play another Grateful Dead cover and focused only on original music, be it songs from the Benevento Russo duo, Scott Metzger's Wolf or Tom Hamilton's American Babies. But playing gradful Dead music has also given them a kind of cosmic arts grant to head off and follow other paths and an audience who might come along with them. This August, Joe Russo's Almost Dead headline and host a three night weekend at the Locken Farm featuring lots of Dead tunes, a set of J Rad playing quote, other shit, plus a reunion by the great New England band the Slip and late night jams with John Modesky and Billy Martin.
- [78:56]
A
What a blessing it was, was that it's enabled those guys to be continue just to have a career just as being musicians, you know, not have to get normal gigs for jobs, you know, and, and, and then explore and other stuff. And Scott's got his own stuff and Marco's got his own stuff and Dave's got his own. Well he's also we in choke and now take the momentum he has as an individual popularity and do other things.
- [79:22]
B
With that for musicians and venue owners alike. Cover bands also pay the bills.
- [79:27]
A
Personally, as the venue owner, I know how much I love people love by the way it's on set. I think at Wetlands when we needed to pay the rent, we would book the Dave Matthews Band cover band outside.
- [79:41]
B
Of a few expansive songbooks like those of Duke Ellington or Bob Dylan. And it's hard to think of individual bodies of music that are heard so regularly at so many scales and in so many variations.
- [79:51]
A
For us, they are our standards. It's just amazing to me that. And it's just something, you know, they, because they play there's so many, I guess versions that each version is a little bit different that that lends itself to it working where you can just listen to these standards time after time after time after time after time. And it never fades because you know, traditional standards were recorded at, you know, three and a half minutes, four minutes long. You know, traditionals are shorter to me, you know, but these songs, they're the, that's why? Actually, Rich, they're the new standards, right? And that they are expansive, you know, and each type of recording is different. So it's a standard that leads itself, lends itself to interpretation, right? It's a standard that's open to interpretation and. And improvisation and expand. You hear it, take it and go. That's why these other younger, new, different musicians, bands are like, for the point about Trey, like, yeah, it's great to write new composition and new songs, but it's also good to play standards, you know, especially standards that let you help add your own voice to it. We need both, right? We need to feel that thing that we love so much again. And look, I do think it's cool to see how people interpret it their own way, do their own new version. And I think both can coexist. There's so many different versions of. So it's kind of like going to the church with different music, you know. You know, the Dead song, the song is like, is the. Is the. You know, the religion? In a way. But, yes, there's different sects of it, and you can pick which sect, and then young musicians can reinterpret it and write their own, you know, theology, you know, wow, we're getting into religion pretty good here.
- [81:35]
B
J Rad are the biggest of a new generation of artists playing Dead music, invested in channeling their own energies through the Dead songbook. Another is Holly Bowling, a pianist who has transcribed the Dead's jams and arranged them for piano. This is from her recent album, Seeking all that's Still Unsung Out.
- [81:52]
A
Now, if you're transcribing something, you're usually taking like a. In most cases a single instrument, and you're writing down or learning either way, but mostly writing down every note that they played and then learning to play. And it's an amazing tool for diving into someone's style and just improving your chops as a musician. But if you're arranging something, you have to start making decisions. It's not just taking what you're hearing and writing it down on paper. It's deciding what to do with it.
- [82:48]
B
Another person who's recently transcribed some Dead is none other than Ned Lagin, who played keyboards with the Dead from time to time between 1970 and 1975. Ned recently transcribed Jerry Garcia's solo from the May 6, 1970 Dancing in the Streets from MIT. We've posted a link@Dead.net Deadcast for me.
- [83:08]
A
It'S a process of taking all the information that I'm hearing, and in some cases, Trying to be really accurate with it, and then in other cases, deciding not to be as accurate with it. Because sometimes accuracy is actually the death of the whole thing. And if you're trying to get not at what the notes are, but what the notes were actually saying, sometimes you have to get away from the meticulous accuracy and just start to look underneath, like, what's going to make this feel the way the original thing felt? Like, what did that thing make me feel like if I want to capture that emotion? What do I have to do on my instrument to still carry that story? The first time that I ever arranged any Grateful Dead music for the piano was I did a version of the Freedom Hall Eyes of the World. And I did it for the project that jam bass was doing before the Fare Thee well shows, where a bunch of different musicians did their own spin on a different Dead song, counting down to the shows, which was kind of a crazy one to dive into. I did it as a jam transcription, which the idea was to approach it more like a. Like a classical interpretation where I'm not improvising in it. I'm taking this thing that was a much, you know, bigger sound and rearranging it for one instrument. The Louisville Freedom Hall I's. I did a bunch of Phil's bass lines on that thing because he's really the melody for some of the sections of the jam. I did him and put him in my left hand. And I even experimented with. Maybe I should try to play it with my right hand because it's so melodic and it's so all over the place on the piano. And I ended up keeping it in my left to keep the challenge. And I swear, man, learning that guy's bass lines on my left hand while holding down Bob's rhythm guitar on the right is like, what built my hand independence. I find the arranging process for the Garcia tunes versus the weird tunes to be very opposite processes. For me, a lot of the Garcia tunes are musically simpler, but that can be really difficult to pull off convincingly and nail it. And a lot of them have these. You know, a lot of them are about the melody, too, the vocal melody. And I'm. I'm playing a version of them where I'm stripping that away. And so if you're gonna, you know, play a song that has five verses and musically they're essentially the same, and you're taking the story away from it, you better do something so that you're not just repeating yourself, you know? And for me, I still am singing every single word in my head as I go. I still want to capture that vocal inflection and everything behind it as I'm playing the melody line on my instrument. And I still want to capture the shape and the arc of the song, even if I'm gonna pull the words away. So it ends up being an additive process for me where, you know, if there's four chords in the song, I'm gonna. I'm gonna play around a lot with, like, adding a repeating pattern. Maybe that wasn't in the original, but is there to just kind of, like, add something different to the second verse and start to shape it differently. And then, like, maybe I'll invert it and bring it back in the left hand later and I'll move the vocal melody around more in different ranges of the instrument just to. To try to capture the emotional arc of what he was doing as a singer, even though no one's singing, you know, Whereas with a lot of the Bobby tunes, you have these crazy changes and, like, weird rhythmic stuff. And I totally. I geek out on all that stuff. Love it. But it ends up being something where I'm like, I cannot possibly play all this stuff. So that then turns into a subtractive process where the best way for me to get at what's being said by the tune is to take different things away from each part as it. As the song moves on, you know, so that I'm bringing different things into focus as it moves through the piece of music. There's a lot more. A lot more Bob tunes on this record. They're complicated. I love it. I think one thing that was really, well, first of all, sage and spirit. I just absolutely love that song. You know, these. These little, like, hidden gems that are. These beautiful instrumental preludes, right, that have a, like, almost chorale feel with the way the voice leading works and just all these intertwining lines. And I don't know, you know, as an. As an, you know, ex classical world person, that stuff definitely does it for my brain.
- [88:17]
B
Against this backdrop of both wild reinvention and. And reverent channelings, the members of the Dead themselves have worked to carry the music forward, both together and separately, often working with younger musicians. Phil Lesh and Bob Weir, respectively, have brought many through their own schools of the dead.
- [88:32]
A
Phil Lesh, you know, playing at the Capitol, and he loves playing with new people he's helping. He loves bringing the music right. He doesn't want to play in the same band each time.
- [88:42]
B
Bob Weir, too, has gotten the opportunity to play with dozens, if not hundreds, of younger musicians.
- [88:48]
A
Well, it's more interesting to me to see what their take is on it and then for me to try to embody that a bit and then play with them. And I've played with a lot of folks over the last few years who did that, who came up through those ranks, and everybody has a different purchase on it. It's really wonderful fun for me to dive into that view or that view of what it is that we've been up to. And it's really informative to me. I get a good, solid hit of, you know, when we were drawing inspiration for the songwriting that we were doing or the kinds of musical deliveries that we were trying to work up. If we were drawing from the blues, if we were drawing from country or jazz or whatever, what of that. That we managed to get across to them, that run their bills, and then they. They took further. That's always been interesting for me to see.
- [89:50]
B
A lot of the advice he has is practical.
- [89:52]
A
Just do what you love. Come on. And advice. Yeah, don't play loud. Save your ears. Because if you want to get good at this, you're going to want to play for a long time. And if you. If you hurt your ears, that's not going to happen. And also, if you play too loud, you. It's hard for you to hear the other guys and play off of them. So if there's any advice I have to spread around, it's tone it down. You got a big PA system that's going to make it plentifully loud for the folks out front. If you turn it down on stage, then you can hear the room that you're playing. You can hear the. Because that's really your instrument. That big PA that you're playing through, that's your instrument, not what's happening back behind you. And so if you. If you can hear the room, then you're hearing what the. The audience is hearing, and you're one with them. I tell people that when. When I'm playing with them and. But these days, most of the bands that. If I'm gonna be sort of a, you know, hired gun at a festival or something like that, which happens a fair bit, most of the bands that I play with don't play loud anymore. You know, I've been discovering that these days, the bands that make it out of the club circuit are the ones who don't play bar band loud.
- [91:14]
B
In Dead and Company, Oteal Burbridge has received plenty of wisdom, but not a lot of rules.
- [91:18]
A
It's hard to talk about rules. The rules are more about intention, you know, outside of the tempo thing. And Bob always wanting things to be slower. You know, I heard who was it that told me. And it kind of reminded me, because he had said it before, that one of his problems with the tempo getting too fast is that it made things louder. And that does happen. You know, it's like things get louder if they get faster. I would always go back to the album version. And I was, like, checking different eras, different decades as they changed them. And then Kamenti was like, go to further. That's where it stopped. That's what, you know, that's. They were doing the versions like when Jerry died. That's how it. And then you go from there, like, we may change it from that, but that's the template you should learn, like, whatever Further did that last time, their last. Whatever their shows were. Bob really helped me with that early on. I was like, man, I cannot play like Phil. It's just too elusive. He said, just play it black. Just do be what you are. And I was like, oh. And it just was like, all of a sudden, my problem was solved. It's just, like, approach it how you would normally approach it. And I was like. And there's so much, like, all the shuffles, the blues, the funk, the jazzy, the swing stuff, you know, bluegrass stuff or country. I play like that. But I may even, like, mix jazz in with that, you know, like, it's. It's. It just freed me. So I think all the ways that's what this music is supposed to be like. Any music that becomes its own institution, that's what Jerry would have wanted. I know that's what Phil wants. I know that's what Bob wants. I know that's what Nicky and Billy want. We want you, man.
- [93:14]
B
And that means you and you and you. Also you. The band Oteel plays in Dead & Co. Was formed in 2015, which turned out to be a landmark year in Dead history. In the same way that the Grateful Dead's only top 10 hit, 1987's Touch of Grey, yielded a massive new wave of deadheads. The 50th anniversary fare thee well shows in California and Chicago in the summer of 2015 launched another new generation in post dad history. They were promoted by former Wetlands owner Peter Shapiro.
- [93:44]
A
Supposed to be the end, but the core guys haven't done anything together, and it lifted it back to that scale. And I think the fans love the scale. You know who else likes it? The band members. Those guys had fun. So that's why then after Fare Thee well, they have the chance, you know, Mickey, Billy and Bobby to go with John and go do amphitheaters so you can go do Shoreline again and Jones, you know. And that's why it's like, fuck, you know. Yeah. And the best part is young people get to go. People get to bring their kids. People sometimes tell me like, yo, dude, thank you for, you know, I get to bring my 19 year old to their first show at Folsom Field or wherever the venue is. And that's the key. Those kids seeing that they will then go to a Goose show later, you know, or Spafford show or Billy String, you know. And there is a hall, we talk jam bands. In the 1.0 version, I mean, the dead are 1.0, you know, and then the 2.0 is traveler and Fish, I think in widespread. And then 3.0 is like mo and string cheese and mmw, you know. And then there's like a three, four, whether it's three biscuits soundtrack, you know. But now there's a real four with like destroy, Billy Strings and Goose and Spout. It's just cool that it keeps going. And I'm not sure as many people bring their kid to any other thing as a Dead, you know, it's back to like, you want to introduce your child to the religion.
- [95:13]
B
By the early part of the 21st century, there were dead scenes everywhere, including a growing one in Israel. If you know of other far flung Grateful Dead scenes, we'd love to hear about them in the comments@dead.net deadcast Joe Russo discovered the Japanese Dead world for himself.
- [95:29]
A
So I was on tour with Spongel, which is not the Grateful Dead, you know, this insane electronic zoo. We were playing in Tokyo for I think a couple nights and we had one more night there and we were off. And I was just like, man, I'm in Japan. I want to go have a musical experience, you know. And I put something up on Facebook being like, does anyone know any musicians in Japan? I want to just go like improvise, like anywhere. I just want to go play music with someone in my mind thinking more of like a jazz context, you know, like find like whatever weird nightclub has like an open jam, like, you know, like some fucking monster, you know, Japanese players. And I think I got a message from one of the guys in the Warlocks with this lovely message being like, you know, we would love to host you, you know, kind of a little bit of a broken English thing. But it was like this really lovely invite, you know. And I was like, fucking yeah, man, absolutely. You know, and. And they were. They were so kind. And I ended up going just by myself. I got. Got on the train and it was about 25 minutes away. I had no idea where I was going. I do not speak Japanese. And we were definitely leaving the place where some people spoke more English, like. And I end up in this cool little like, city with these like weird buildings, you know, stacked upon each other in a way that I hadn't really seen before. And it was like, really, really exciting. And I round the bend and there's these, you know, hippie guys loading their gear, you know, standard issue. And you know, I. And also, like, there was like the Jerry guy. And I was like, holy shit, he fucking looks like Jerry. He looks just like Garcia. It's like Japanese Garcia. And it was just so amazing. And like I said, you know, the language barrier was pretty solid. There were a couple people that spoke English and, you know, kind of guided me through what was happening. We got on an elevator and went up and it was this tiny, tiny little club. And by club I mean it was like a room with kind of like almost like a homemade bar. And there was like a chair, it's like a folding chair or just like some sort of like outdoor chair. And they kind of like led me to it. And I sat in front of the stage and then everybody was kind of behind me watching the band. Like, I was sitting watching the band and then the crowd was behind me and we watched and they had me up and I played like three or four songs. We did Cassidy, Sai, Be Good, maybe Bird Song, something. And my mind was just being fucking blown. Yeah, it's very exciting. Wonderful night. Unexpected. Wow. Joe Ruso, he's super professional. Yeah. Oh my God. I'm sitting here outside of Tokyo. These amazing people who are so in love with this Grateful Dead culture. Everybody's wearing tie dyes and, you know, having this incredible time. And this band is singing these songs like they were doing Japanese versions of the lyrics. Like the whole thing was so far out and amazing. And then after the show, like there was almost like a reception line. And I just kind of stood meeting everyone in the crowd and people were talking. You know, some people had further shirts where they had come from Japan to some California shows and all this stuff. And it was just like the most amazing, like life affirming experience of music and the Grateful Dead and the whole thing. It really just like warmed my heart being in that position of, you know, seeing this like, nugget of Such incredible American culture in this place, and they were just all so deeply invested in it. And, yeah, it was just like one of those moments, like, for my life, I'll never forget. It was so wonderful, and they're all just so kind and loving.
- [100:01]
B
In recent years, the Japanese Dead scene has expanded to the point of having its own festival, Oshino Dead, held in the lush greenery at the base of Mount Fuji. There are some extended documentaries on YouTube, and it looks like an amazing place. We've posted links@dead.net Deadcast Oshino Festival.
- [100:20]
A
Yes, it's a Japanese number one biggest dead festival. Maybe 1,000 or 2,000 people. Yeah. In Japan and Mount Fuji places. Mount Fuji.
- [100:37]
B
The Warlocks of Tokyo play, of course. But just like in the United States, the notion of musical freedom has absolutely, unquestionably, transmitted in the fullest and most unpredictable way possible. I definitely am personally not prepared to unpack the Japanese hip hop version of Shakedown street today. But that was last week.
- [101:23]
A
Call.
- [101:50]
B
And then things got really weird. In the years before Fare Thee well, the Dead had crossed over into the indie rock world, like the jazz universe. The lines had always been porous with some Dead freaks on the inside, but by the early 2000s, the walls were down completely. I wrote about it extensively in the last chapter of my book, Heads. It resulted in a number of new turns to Dead music, new ways for the music to perpetuate it itself.
- [102:15]
A
It's like a genre, and people want to play in that genre that keeps growing the number of musicians who want to play in it. And there was a time when it wasn't cool meeting, like, the guys from the national before I knew any of them were into the Dead, you know, Like, I met them when. When Further played at Radio City, you know, And I met, like, the Devendorfs after. I was like, oh, my God, so cool. The guys from the national, you know, and they're like, this is so cool Grateful Dead stuff. I was like, really? You know, and you just start realizing it's like everybody fucking kind of loves the Dead, you know, and has some sort of history with it or becomes involved with it. And I don't know. I feel like that switch is just waiting for everybody, and it takes longer for others than some. It took me a while and. But it's. It's, you know, just. That's why it's the Grateful Den. That's why that songbook is the songbook. It's like. It's infectious somehow, you know?
- [103:10]
B
2016, the 25th anniversary of the original Dedicated tribute album saw the release of Day of the Dead, a sprawling 59 track collection that reinvented the Dead yet again. Organized by Aaron and Bryce Desner of the National Like Dedicated, it de emphasized jam bands. There are a lot of surprises. One of my favorites is Mina Tindall and friends doing Rosemary from Oxamoxoa. I had no idea such a beautiful melody was buried in there.
- [103:52]
A
Since no one may stand.
- [104:07]
B
Another surprise was Stephen Malmus and the Jix getting deeply inside China Cat Sunflower into I know you Rider. Capturing the spirit of Europe 72 without losing their own fuzzed energy. Hunter's lyrics go well with Malkmus own quizzical delivery.
- [104:26]
A
Crying Leonardo's work out of a silk trombone. I rang a silent bell beneath the shower uprose in the Eagles winds Palace.
- [104:39]
B
Of the Queen shining. And they invented their own way to bring the jam to a peak sa as the primary songwriter in Pavement, Stephen Malkmus literate and casual lyrics helped invent a new kind of songwriting voice in the 90s. The Grateful Dead world is extraordinarily inclusive, which is one of its wonders. But Stephen Malchus wasn't sure at first if he wanted to be included.
- [105:35]
A
I went to school in Virginia and then that was where I noticed 84 to 88, that it was becoming a thing again. At our college radio station where I hung out a lot, they had a Grateful Dead show that was pretty deep with really good sharing of tapes and live shows. And specifically they had a rock marathon benefit show which was 48 hours of the Dead. And that's basically how they made all the money for the station. You know, we had a Butthole Surfers one and there was punk and everything. But the Dead one specifically was like, hang out on Sunday, throw your Frisbees. Everybody from the whole school listened to it, where before it was just a small thing. And combine that with COVID bands and you know, a lot of Grateful Dead jam band influence groups playing in the fraternities and gigs. And then also like Robert Hunter would play. You know, I just started noticing how this supported so many musicians was really interesting to me. And still now I'm still not completely getting the band, you know, except for kind of some of the earlier psychedelic music. But then I guess in the late 80s was when I started to listen to it more seriously and realize the uniqueness of the genesis of the band. Not only, you know, just their playing and their songs, but the whole scope of it and just listen to the music without bias against hippies or against. I mean it's unfortunate, you know, but, you know, when you see that some of the really bougie frat guys like the band or something, you know, you're just like, what? What is? You know, there's a little bit of us against them. And my music tastes like hipster biases and stuff like that. I don't know. And so, yeah, then I listen close, listen to old tapes and actually listen to the albums and you realize the lyrics are pretty awesome. And I mean, I'm traditional in that, like, Jerry rules and, you know, maybe, you know, I know there might be other takes or something, you know, or. And yeah, I just love his voice and I love his guitar playing.
- [108:06]
B
We talked a bunch with Stephen Malkmus over the course of our season on American Beauty before taking up China Rider with the gx. He did participate in one other Dead related performance in which he and David Berman, the late genius songwriter of the Silver Jews and Purple Mountains, jammed on top of Gray folded John Oswald's 1993 megamix of Darkstar.
- [108:26]
A
It was an idea to do a promotional concert for American Water, I believe. David was not wanting to sing or really be a frontman. So I don't know. He just got this idea. He had got that CD and it was like multiple solos and multiple concerts, like, grafted on top of each other. It's like, yeah, we'll just play at this bar. We'll just bring our guitars. And it probably doesn't necessarily matter what we play. More of a concept, probably influenced a bit by. We were working at the Whitney Art Museum and there was lots of conceptual things, conceptual art. So really, as long as you had sort of a concept or just, you know, an idea, it didn't matter what you did, you know, sometimes we felt that way about the art or, you know, but that was really useful to me anyway in my own musical career to just, you know, have a way to. Artists, I think, you know, they're used to having studio visits and having to defend their work or, you know, like, what? You know, why are you doing that? You know. And then if you can come up with something good to defend yourself, then you can get away with just about anything. So, yeah, so we played at pianos and it was cool. There was maybe 10. We didn't really tell anyone. There was probably 10 people there.
- [110:02]
B
Treating the Dead's music as a found object is certainly another completely singular way to use it as a starting point. If you've got a tape of the show, come find us. Ira Kaplan of Yola Tango, who we heard from last episode didn't need any help getting into the Dead and saw them several times in the early 70s. IRA's on day of the Dead too, Doing Warfrat with a very Yola tango like combination of noisy guitar and quiet singing.
- [110:36]
A
Spent doing time for some motherfucker's crime. The other half found me stumbling.
- [110:55]
B
But in 2019, Ira went one step further, sitting in with Jake Robinbach in High Time on guitar. A band in New York that specializes in savage Young dead, mostly 1966ish to 1974ish, with an emphasis on the band's raw energy.
- [111:11]
A
I got brought in to do like a song or two, and then they said, oh, how about this one? How about this one? And a couple of times they did ask, like, oh, do you want to do, like, the solo or the lead or something like that? And maybe they were saying that just to be polite, because I was like, no, no, of course not. Like, I can't do that. So it was fun, and I hope it was for them too, because I do think my presence ended up making it into something different than when they usually do those songs. He came to soundcheck and he just said, you know, you guys are really familiar with this stuff in a way that I'm not, so why don't you just do what you do and I'll, you know, weave around it? Which, like, for a guy that is just, like, just. He's such a hero to me in so many ways. I just love his whole approach. He was like, I'm gonna find a way to just add my personal thing to this thing you guys are doing. And so it was a lot of ambient sound. And then eventually he started to kind of weave around melody.
- [112:43]
B
That's from Chip's Picks, Volume 2. You can find a link@dead.net though y' all at Tango have covered Dead songs sparingly in the past, the Dead's influence can be seen more in their adventurous approach to live performance, mixing a deep catalog with improvisations and a songbook of covers, connecting them to a vast musical family tree and extended community and a range of regular collaborators that includes legendary comedians to free jazz and rock titans. Come to New York the next time the band does their eight nights of Hanukkah shows. It doesn't matter which night, you'll find me there.
- [113:14]
A
Given the amount of increasingly free improvisation Yolotengo's been doing, it would not surprise me if the little detour with High Time played a positive role in that. Just kind of like how much fun it is.
- [113:34]
B
Yola Tango's first 2020 collection we have Amnesia sometimes captures the band jamming in their practice space. This Is Georgia considers the two blue ones Thursday the Dead scene has expanded and expanded where now it just feels like a connective tissue between worlds. Out west is Grateful Shred maybe the first Dead band I'd go listen to explicitly for their vocals.
- [114:30]
A
Some come to make it just one more day whichever way your pleasure tends. If you plant ice you're gonna harvest wind Roll away do.
- [114:52]
B
But I think I like Mapachi even more. The duo of Grateful Shreds, Clay Finch and Sam Blasucci. This is Songs to a Seagull from their self titled album. We've got links to this and lots of other music@dead.net deadcast.
- [115:15]
A
In that black dude is glide falling in the San Francisco sky.
- [115:36]
B
There's Dead music to be found everywhere. It's certainly a way for musicians to find audiences and a portal for people to hang that bit of Grateful Shred doing. Franklin's Tower came from the 2021 iteration of the long running Dead Covers project from dead.net a body of music that I hope gets processed someday by an ethnomusicologist. The excellent site deaddisc.com has attempted to keep track of officially released Dead covers. But like the Dead, a lot of Dead covers live outside the bounds of official releases. You can find Dead collaborations in the corners of TikTok, Strangers Stopping Strangers just to make some memes, adapting the Dead for a different kind of musical vocabulary. Here are TikTokers, Elena sucks 2Z's FishTalk, Dead in the Desert LV and Anthony8300 with Mississippi half step.
- [116:42]
A
Half step Mississippi uptown too. Lou hello Baby I'm Gone, Goodbye.
- [116:53]
B
And you might find Dead covers right in your own neighborhood as Grateful that archivist and legacy manager David Lemieux revealed when we were talking to him and he held up a CD called Owens Picks made by a teenage neighborhood buddy.
- [117:05]
A
Operating can you help me if you please give me the right area code and the number that I need my rider left upon a midnight fly Singing like a summer dream. It's nothing like the Grateful Dead playing it. But it is clearly this is a Grateful Dead record. It's just played by different guy. The music is unmistakably. It's timeless. It really is. You know this, this, this thing he made me. It's got Bertha, it's got Black Peter from where it's got a lot of 50 year old songs on here and he could play this for his friends, and he could tell them that he wrote them today. He's been coming by every two weeks. I give him a file box of my old cassettes, and he comes by and he got a couple of cassette decks and he borrows a box of about 80 or 100 cassettes. And he doesn't record them all, but he sorts through them, chooses the one he wants, and makes copies of them. He got a Walkman, A cassette Walkman. I find that with the Dead covers project that we do with Rhino every year, where people send in themselves. And it can be a full band performance in front of people, or it can be somebody with an acoustic guitar in their bedroom. And these songs come off as timeless, as though each of those people writing them could have written them right there. And yet, it's unmistakably our band.
- [118:30]
B
We really are everywhere. The next Dead cover you hear could be coming from inside the house. We'll sign off with another one of Owen's picks. Unlike the King's Road, the knockoff band we heard about last episode, Owen did learn the cool ending to Uncle John's Band. Right on, Owen.
- [119:15]
A
It's fascinating that the Grateful Dead songbook is so open to interpretation, allowing it to be played by musicians from such a wide variety of genres. Grateful Dead songs filtered through another musician's perspective might just offer a little insight in the strangest of places, if you look at it right. Take care, friends. We'll see you next episode. Executive producers for the good old Grateful Dead cast, Mark Pincus and Doran Tyson. Produced for Rhino Entertainment by Rich Mahan Productions and jet. Special thanks to David Lemieux. All rights reserved.