The Dead recorded a bunch of rehearsals and jams while making Blues For Allah. John Hilgarth helpfully compiled and annotated them. A Reddit commenter pointed me to “Descent Into A Spacy Place”, which is farther out harmonically than the Dead usually get. I heard a lot of interesting ideas there, and I wanted to see if I could organize them into a piece of music that I would enjoy listening to. During a long bus ride, I brought the jam into Ableton Live and made this:
A Twitter commenter described this as “Greyfolded funkified”, which makes me happy. It’s a pretty good mission statement.
I listened through the jam and marked all the spots that I thought had remix potential. Then I put a drum machine beat down and quantized the good parts to the groove. The timestamps refer to John Hilgarth’s edit.
- 0:17 Eb Phrygian riff – I found the tempo of this riff (about 110 BPM) and used it for everything else.
- 0:52 Dissonant and funky – the chord is kind of a Bb7(#11). I created more rhythmic clarity by deleting the audio between Jerry’s strums.
- 1:41 Cheerful jig – an astonishing spontaneous melodic idea on Jerry’s part. The leaping Bb major arpeggio in the middle is like a chocolate chip in a cookie. It’s cool that the phrase ends on E-flat rather than the expected B-flat, too. It took some heavy manipulation of the warp markers to get this lined up with the beat but it was worth it.
- 1:54 More dissonant and funky – this chord might be an Eb7sus4, played in a nice tresillo rhythm.
- 2:03 Eb(add9) shimmer – lovely offbeat accents.
- 3:01 Jerry wanders – some nice ideas in here but it would have required some heroic editing to pull together coherent loops, so I didn’t end up using any of this.
- 3:25 Whole tone riff – some clearly loopable sections but it didn’t match the vibe of everything else I had, so I didn’t use it.
- 4:39 Nice angular line built from stacks of fourths. Jerry was playing “Freedom Jazz Dance” with The Legion of Mary around this time, and I’ll bet that it was in the back of his mind. The Cheerful Jig begins with a few notes from “Freedom Jazz Dance” too, now that I think about it.
Once I had my loops edited together, I put on a filter sweep, compression and delay. Then I layered in more beats: the intro to the studio version of “The Music Never Stops”, the intro to “Not Fade Away” from Skull and Roses, and the drum break from some “Uncle John’s Band” or another. I did some more editing of the loops to tighten up the structure, and by the time the bus ride was over, I had my track.
The original jam is a frustrating listen. I keep hearing Jerry throw out cool grooves, and nobody else locks in with them, either because they aren’t picking up the thread quickly enough or just out of contrariness. Keith does pick up Jerry’s ideas and echo them back quickly, but doesn’t necessarily complement them. Bobby and Phil seem to be obstinately refusing to dial in with him. In fairness, Jerry is quick to abandon ideas and move on to the next one. Would this all be more satisfying if Jerry was the clearly acknowledged leader and everyone else felt their role to be following him? Maybe. On the other hand, the Dead were way more interesting than Jerry’s side projects of this era, even if they were also more raggedy. Maybe Jerry needed this bunch of ornery misanthropes to push him.
Would the Dead approve of this remix, or any of my other ones? I would like to think so. They did commission Greyfolded from John Oswald. On the other hand, their age cohort is not broadly enthusiastic about sampling and other digital audio production methods. My Deadhead stepbrother, who is ten years older than me, asked of one of my tracks, “Were any recordings harmed in this process?” It is true that I am imposing my will on these things in a not-necessarily-respectful way, but I like to think I’m serving the overall spirit of the music, even if I am doing violence to the specific recordings. The Dead are great at efflorescing out new ideas, but not so good at pruning them into a satisfying shape. Ableton Live is a great tool for order by quantizing, looping, and deleting.
When I do this kind of editing, I can feel my dad nature being activated. I haven’t taken any psychedelics, but I certainly do have plenty of friends who have used them, and my observation is that when people are tripping they basically become toddlers. They act like their brains are not fully myelinated, so on the one hand, all these new connections between brain regions are constantly forming, and on the other hand, they have have ability to sort out or make sense of those connections in meaningful ways. In Grateful Dead jams, I hear childlike wonder in discovery, but also childlike inability to follow an idea through or be attentive to other people. I enjoy free improvisation as a participant very much, but as a listener (and creator of recordings), I feel the need to be more of a grownup.
My general feeling about Dead recordings is that they work better as templates for amateur participation than as completed works. Listening to them isn’t like listening to, say, Michael Jackson, where every musical and sonic detail has been worked over with great care. A Michael Jackson song is like a painting in an art museum: selected from many alternatives, hung in a clean white space without distractions, lit from the right angle, optimized for clarity in every possible way. The Dead’s best musical ideas are more like paintings in a thrift store. You have to sift through a lot of junk to find them, they aren’t presented in any special way, and they usually show signs of neglect. But it’s worth digging, because maybe you find something special and unusual, and you don’t necessarily feel too bad about cutting it up and using it for your own piece of art.