My emotions about the Grateful Dead have gone from intense obsession as a teenager, to embarrassment about my former intense obsession in my 20s, to nostalgic re-embracing of my fandom in my 30s. In my 40s, I’ve come to feel about the Dead the way I feel about my extended family: we’ve had our ups and downs, but they’ve always been there, they’ll always be there, we’re inseparably entangled.
Now that I’m teaching music theory, I’m finding a new angle for Dead appreciation: as a source of pedagogical examples. Here’s a pair of Dead tunes, an original called “China Cat Sunflower” and an arrangement of a folk song, “I Know You Rider.” The Dead performed them together, seamlessly joined by a modal jam, so they’re known as a single unit, “China>Rider.” Here’s my favorite version.
I was listening to this recording recently, and I noticed that during the transitional jam, there’s a peculiar moment at about 3:34 where I sense the key center changing, even though there’s no change in chord or mode. The band is playing a drawn-out groove on D7. At first, it feels like the V7 chord in G major, but after a certain span of time, I start hearing it as the I chord in D Mixolydian instead. It’s like a musical Necker cube.
In Western tonal theory, you establish key centers using cadences. The Dead use a cadence going into the second verse of “China Cat Sunflower.” The first guitar solo section ends with a IV-V-I cadence, C to D7 to G, which establishes firmly that G is “home base”. This cadence is an exception. Most of “China>Rider” is modal, not functional, and the Dead use other techniques to establish the key/mode. Their main technique is metrical placement and emphasis.
For example, “China Cat” begins with a repeated riff on G7. This repetition tells you that you’re supposed to be hearing G7 as the I7 chord in G Mixolydian, not V7 in C major. (The lack of resolution to C helps too.) There are a few places in “China Cat” where the information you get from a cadence conflicts with the metrical emphasis and repetition. In the second guitar solo, there’s the same C to D7 cadence you heard in the first solo. However, it unexpectedly resolves to E, not G, and the Dead sit on that E chord long enough to make sure you hear it as a new home base. At the end of this section, there’s an A to B7 cadence that would seem to reinforce the key of E major, but this resolves back to G. Yet again, the metrical emphasis and repetition overrides the expectation set by the cadence.
Harmonically speaking, the most interesting aspect of “China>Rider” is how the band creates ambiguity by repeating a chord long enough to overwhelm your short-term memory. In each of the solos in “China Cat,” there’s a V7 chord that sustains long enough that it weakens your sense of it being the V7 chord and makes it start feeling like I7 in Mixolydian. But it’s really the last solo that reaffirms that D7 is the key center once and for all, because the chord never resolves. It would be an interesting empirical study to see how long it takes different listeners to feel that Necker-cube-like transition from V7 in G major to I7 in D Mixolydian.
I enjoy experimenting with Paulstretch, using it on music that’s familiar to me. The psychological impact of harmony is amazingly different at long time scales. So much music theory is dependent on the limits of your short term memory. Meanwhile, in ambient music, each event is usually so long that you forget what happened before it, and have trouble anticipating what’s going to come next. When I listen to Paulstretched songs, every chord feels like the tonic after it hangs in the air long enough. This seems like a principle that could be generalized.
I had a hard time in my formal music theory classes in school because they taught the conventions of Western European aristocratic music of the 18th and 19th centuries as if they were universal laws of nature. But even within a Western culture like the United States, those conventions don’t always apply. The Grateful Dead based their harmony on modal folk musics and the blues, where cadences happen rarely and are structurally not all that important. To understand the Dead, you need a larger model, one that takes groove harmony into account.
In a groove, you establish the key center through repetition or metrical emphasis. This fact has implications for music theory generally. You can’t know what key a piece of music is in just from looking at the chord symbols or the voice leading. You have to consider the effects of musical time. If you see G and D7 on the page, maybe the D7 is the V chord in the key of G, but it’s also possible that G is the IV chord in the key of D Mixolydian. In the case of the China>Rider jam, it can be both! European classical theory is a fine way to understand European classical music, but it can’t be the only tool in your analytical toolbox.