Back in the twentieth century, there was no easy way to find out what a song was about unless its lyrics were self-explanatory. Grateful Dead lyrics are rarely self-explanatory. I always enjoyed “He’s Gone”, but had the feeling that it was a bunch of inside references that I wasn’t privy to. I turn out to have been right.
We Were Pretending
This is a break from my usual topics to let you know that my friend Hannah Gersen recently published her second novel. I am about a third of the way in, and I can already tell you that you should read it. The story concerns the US military’s surprising interest in new age medicine. The narrator (like the author) shares my climate despair.
Hannah has a straightforward and undemonstrative prose style that gets at big emotional and political themes without melodrama. If I wrote novels, this is how I would want to write them. Also, Hannah has a suggested reading list to go along with the book. I have read a few of the titles on it, and that makes me want to read the rest of them.
Black Peter
The other night at Rosh Hashonah dinner, my stepbrother was playing my guitar and found his way into “Black Peter.” This was not because he had ever sat down and learned it, but because it’s embedded so deeply in his unconscious that he could teach it to himself in real time. This is yet another Dead tune that I loved as a kid without knowing why, and then didn’t think about for several decades. But now that it’s back in the front of my mind, I figured I would work it through.
Like all the best Jerry tunes, this is neither complicated nor difficult to play, but it is unpredictable and intriguing.
Anyway, here’s Wonderwall
When MusicRadar assigned me to write about Oasis, I was not overjoyed. I figured I would start with the Wonderwall meme and go from there.
Once you move past the joke, though, it becomes an interesting question: why did this seemingly unremarkable song become such a standard for amateur guitarists?
MusicRadar column on “Lilac Wine” by Jeff Buckley
My latest MusicRadar assignment was to pick something from Jeff Buckley’s Grace to write about. I chose the weird old showtune.
The column was mainly an excuse to meditate on the difference between classical timekeeping (expressive, rubato) and pop/rock timekeeping (metronomic and steady). I also got into Buckley’s complex gender presentation.
The Grateful Dead as improv comedy
One of the Grateful Dead’s most endearing qualities is their self-deprecating sense of humor.
They are easy to make fun of, too.
A nice Jerry line from the Cornell Scarlet>Fire
My last post was a study of Scarlet>Fire from 5/8/77, and I don’t feel that I completely exhausted the topic. I want to zoom in on a particularly nice line that Jerry plays at the 11:53 mark on the released version:
Jerry’s playing is beguiling throughout this whole recording, but there is so much of it, so I tend to hear it as a pleasant texture rather than as a series of specific ideas. As I studied sections of Cornell Scarlet>Fire, I picked out the line at 11:53 as a good candidate for transcription because it’s a self-contained passage of manageable length (sixteen bars), with a beginning, a middle and an end. Continue reading “A nice Jerry line from the Cornell Scarlet>Fire”
Scarlet>Fire 5/8/77
Did the Grateful Dead play their best show at Cornell University’s Barton Hall on May 8th, 1977? True connoisseurs usually say no, pointing instead to something from the peak years between 1969 and 1974 (or, if they are contrarians, something from the Brent era). The argument is that Cornell only got so hyped up because a high-quality Betty Board circulated widely among tapers before everything went onto the Internet Archive. For a long time, Cornell was the only bootleg I had, with cassette labels handwritten by my friend Ellie. But the Heads don’t just love Cornell because it’s familiar. I have listened to a lot of other shows now, and I stand by the second set opener as an all-timer. It’s a pair of songs, “Scarlet Begonias” and “Fire on the Mountain”, which Deadheads know as a single entity, Scarlet>Fire.
This Scarlet>Fire clocks in at a little under 25 minutes. It may sound long, but it’s not even close to being the longest one; that would be the 34-minute version from 11-1-79. Some people like the more ruminative and exploratory performances, but I prefer Cornell for its tighter focus (by Dead standards).
Playing in the Band
If you listen to a lot of jazz or R&B, the Grateful Dead sound primitive and sloppy, but if you listen to a lot of classic rock, the Dead sound dazzlingly original. I was listening to classic rock radio recently, and after a bunch of tedious songs by the Eagles and such, “Playing in the Band” came on. Its odd meter and structural unpredictability made it feel like an explosion of color in a sea of grey. Here’s the version from Skull and Roses, which is a live recording, but with organ by Merl Saunders overdubbed in the studio.
The cliche about the Dead being better live holds true for this song; the (mostly) live Skull and Roses version is much better than the studio recording from Ace. After these two, every successive performance is sung worse than the previous one. That’s the Dead! It’s okay, there are plenty of other things to love about the song.
I wrote a song to help my students with key signatures
Yesterday I was sitting in on a colleague’s theory class, and when she said that it was time to practice identifying key signatures, everyone groaned. I feel their pain and want to help. I myself learned the key signatures by reading and writing a lot of music in lots of different keys and eventually just absorbing them by osmosis, but that doesn’t work in a one semester class. My idea is to use music itself to teach music theory concepts, so that end, I wrote a song that explains the key signatures. Listen and download here.
Here’s a chart if you want to sing along. And here’s an explainer on how key signatures work.
Continue reading “I wrote a song to help my students with key signatures”