Remixing the Grateful Dead

There is no corpus of music I know better than the albums and concert recordings of the Grateful Dead. Some people memorize the works of Shakespeare; I, for better or for worse, spent my youth memorizing the works of Jerry. This puts me in a great position to sample and remix them. However, while I’ve learned approximately all of the Dead’s songs on the guitar, until recently I hadn’t done much with their recordings. As it turns out, the Dead are hard to sample. Their music is full of cool ideas, but they didn’t often realize those ideas cleanly in sound. This did not stop John Oswald from making his breathtakingly ambitious Greyfolded album, and it didn’t stop me. But it is a challenge.

When I was analyzing “Help on the Way->Slipknot!->Franklin’s Tower,” I started by warping out the recording in Ableton Live. In other words, I aligned the track to the bars-and-beats grid, which makes it easier to loop and annotate sections of it. Once you’ve got a track all warped out, then remixing it becomes effortless. So I did, and it was so much fun that I felt inspired to do a bunch more Dead songs. My self-imposed rules: use drum machines and breakbeats, but otherwise only use samples of the Dead and their side projects. Here are the results:

There are three main challenges to sampling the Dead:

• Audio quality: The Dead tried some creative production ideas early on, but most of their studio work is recorded and mixed indifferently. In the live shows,  where they really bring the heat, the recording fidelity ranges widely.
• Sloppiness in execution: The Dead’s musical reach frequently exceeded their grasp. Technical stumbles aren’t necessarily a dealbreaker for sampling, because you can always find a bar or two or four that are in the pocket, and you can quantize whatever rhythms need tightening up. But still, it’s work. The Dead’s ragged vocals are even tougher, because you have to find those rare places where the raggedness is charming rather than annoying.
• Musical clutter: This has turned out to be the hardest part of sampling the Dead. Every member of the band plays pretty much all the time, and what they’re playing is not necessarily supportive of what everyone else is playing. The various keyboard players are the main problem: Jerry, Bobby and Phil already fill up most of the musical space, but Keith, Brent et al are hammering away continually anyway. Phil is a problem too; he never plays normal basslines, instead preferring to do continual low-register noodly lead guitar. Sometimes this is interesting, but his constant fight against your expectations gets to be exhausting. And after the mid-1980s, Jerry is mentally checked out half the time.

All this clutter and disorder is symptomatic of the fact that everyone in the band recognized Jerry as its leader except for Jerry himself. His refusal to give direction made the Dead a true musical democracy. Sometimes this resulted in a bubbly Dixieland-jazz-like interplay, but more often, it makes you wish Jerry would have told everyone else to focus in and leave some empty space. Here’s a remarkable (and depressing) quote from a Rolling Stone interview he gave shortly before he died:

I’ve never been able to sustain an idea and get it down. It’s hard for me to do it with music, too, as far as that goes. I feel like I’m swimming upstream — my own preferences are for improvisation, for making it up as I go along. The idea of picking, of eliminating possibilities by deciding, that’s difficult for me.

I’m assuming this trait is related to Jerry’s having lost his dad at a young age? I have this problem too, though not to the same extreme.

It’s instructive to contrast the Dead with James Brown, the most sampling-friendly musician in history. JB ruled his bands with an iron fist, keeping the arrangements clear and the performances tight. He orchestrates lots of sharp texture changes where the drums or bass or guitar or vocals play in isolation. As a result, just about any two-bar segment of any JB recording makes a good sample. With the Dead, you have to be significantly choosier, and that takes more effort.

By doing the remixes, I feel like I’m doing the work Jerry was unwilling or unable to do of eliminating possibilities, rejecting all the mediocre ideas and directing focus on the best ones. It’s certainly easier to make brutal judgments of ideas when they aren’t your own. “Sorry guys, out of this twenty-minute jam, I’m only really feeling these two bars, and only after I EQ out the bass and beef up the kick and snare with a 909.” Sampling has also richly informed my guitar playing. I identified my favorite Jerry riff as a sample first, and only sat down to transcribe it much later. Dead music is a good place to practice this kind of selective choosiness because even their greatest fans will tell you that their music is uneven. It’s hard to sample Bach or Coltrane because they are so consistent–everything is solid and well-considered, so you don’t know which ideas you should select and which you should reject. With the Dead, we might not all agree which of their ideas to reject, but we can all agree that they aren’t all keepers, and that is emboldening for a would-be remixer.