The Grateful Dead are most (in)famous for their collective improvisation. Sometimes that improvisation happened within the confines of a song: unstructured arrangements, solos, preset groove sections. Sometimes it happened during semi-composed transitions between the parts of a suite, like Help/Slip/Frank. The most exciting and unpredictable jams happened in transitions between songs, or just out of the blue.
The ability to create musical ideas in real time can seem like a miracle, both to non-musicians and to classical players. It isn’t; it’s a skill that can be learned and practiced, and there are usually some unspoken shared assumptions holding everything together. The Dead practiced their collective improvising extensively, at least early on, and their large memorized repertoire gave them plenty of shared raw material to draw on.
To illustrate how full-band improvisation works, I’m going to do a close look at one of the most beloved transitional jams, from February 18th, 1971. The Deadheads nickname this the “Beautiful Jam”, and the band officially released it with that title on the So Many Roads box set.
This show is from a period when the band had no keyboard player, because Pigpen was too ill to play, and Keith Godchaux hadn’t yet joined. Ned Lagin was sitting in on this show, but he didn’t play all the time, and when he did, he was mixed quietly. However, he does play an important unintentional role in the Beautiful Jam: he had a clavichord onstage with its mic cranked way up, and when it picked up Jerry’s guitar amp, it produced some epic feedback.
You can listen to the whole show on the Internet Archive if you want the full musical context, but if not, here it is in a nutshell. Late in the first set, the band plays “Dark Star“. Jerry sings the first verse, and then the unusually short jam section leads into the first-ever performance of “Wharf Rat.” The Beautiful Jam is the connector between the end of “Wharf Rat” and the second verse of “Dark Star.”
Right before the released version begins, the band has transitioned from the languid 80 BPM swing of “Wharf Rat” into a doubletime 160 BPM country-rock feel. It’s similar to the doubletime shift during the groove between “China Cat Sunflower” and “I Know You Rider.” Both the “Wharf Rat” groove and “Dark Star” are in A Mixolydian, so no harmonic transition is necessary.
Here’s my annotated listening guide to the jam. The timestamps refer to the released version.
- 0:00 Bobby plays an A to Asus4 to A riff. Jerry and Phil improvise around it.
- 0:08 Bobby plays a Bm chord. Jerry is playing D at that moment, and it fits beautifully. Billy immediately reacts by playing delicately on his cymbals only.
- 0:14 Bobby returns to A/Asus4/A. Jerry and Phil improvise around him in A Mixolydian. Ned Lagin plays organ arpeggios quietly behind them. Billy resumes playing kick and snare in an unpredictable syncopated pattern.
- 0:20 Bobby plays Bm again, and now the pattern is established: two bars of Bm, two bars of A. The band will follow this pattern for the next two minutes. Normally the ii chord in A major would imply B Dorian mode, but because this is A Mixolydian, the ii chord implies B natural minor, with its darker and more wistful G-natural.
- 0:25 Jerry plays some lovely triplet pulloffs.
- 1:28 After pausing for two bars, Jerry re-enters by ripping an A7 chord topped by a G. Then he moves down to F-sharp to anticipate the Bm by two beats.
- 2:03 There’s a howl of feedback from the clavichord mic, and Jerry stops playing to let it ring.
- 2:14 The Bm to A groove ends, and a new Asus4 to A groove begins.
- 2:38 Another feedback howl.
- 2:42 There’s a momentary tape dropout.
- 3:04 Jerry plays a loud and accented F-natural, maybe unintentionally.
- 3:09 Bobby is paying attention! He echoes Jerry’s F-natural by playing a bar of Dm. The beat gets turned around in here, as Bobby implicitly plays a bar of 6/4.
- 3:12 The beat gets turned around again as everybody plays an implicit bar of 3/4. Bobby settles into his new progression, a bar and a half of A and half a bar of Dm. Jerry and Phil soon lock in with it with repeated figures of their own. This will carry on for the next half a minute or so.
- 3:40 Jerry plays a lovely melody, which reminds me of a line he plays in between “Not Fade Away” and “Goin’ Down The Road Feeling Bad” from Skull & Roses.
- 3:47 Jerry plays a G-sharp, a break with the prevailing A Mixolydian feel.
- 3:55 The Dm chord has dropped away, but Bobby calls back to it with a nice E to F-natural trill.
- 3:59 Phil calls back to the Bm part.
- 4:02 Jerry plays fast triplets.
- 4:09 Jerry plays a loud and prominent B-flat as a chromatic connector between A and B.
- 4:17 Jerry cuts off the bar a beat early and asserts the slower “Dark Star” tempo. The tempo drifts for a few seconds while everyone else reorients around him.
- 4:22 Jerry plays the Em7 “Dark Star” pickup.
- 4:24 The “Dark Star” groove begins in earnest and the recording fades out.
This is not completely chaotic free improvisation. The Dead did do that at times, but less often than their reputation would suggest. Instead, there are some unstated rules: the tempo is steady, the key/modality is static, and if anyone plays chord changes, then they repeat predictably (at least for a while.) The band is ostensibly leaderless, but you can feel Jerry steering most of the time. As the years went by and he became more bored, depressed and heroin-addicted, he stopped steering, and you can tell.
The Beautiful Jam is a novel set of ideas in its specifics, but it also sounds a lot like the band’s written material. This kind of improvisation is less about pulling ideas completely of out nowhere, and more about assembling fragments of existing tunes. Bobby can throw a Bm chord into an A Mixolydian jam because this is the kind of thing that everyone has played many times before. The jam sounds coherent because it’s a nonverbal songwriting session, rather than everyone just doing whatever they feel like in the moment.
Another thing to notice is how much Bobby holds all of this together. He is the unsung hero of the Dead (as a guitarist, anyway; I am less enthralled by his goofy singing). Bobby’s chords and riffs plays the role that the bass player normally would, because Phil is busy improvising elaborate non-repetitive countermelodies. While Bobby doesn’t have Jerry’s effortless melodic flow, he does have what Phil calls “innate whimsical originality”. But that originality was not immediately apparent.
Bobby came into the Dead as a novice musician, and for the first few years, he was nowhere near the same level as everyone else. This caused some tension. Phil, Billy and Mickey had some prior musical expertise, and Jerry was an obsessive practicer. The four of them wanted to play psychedelic prog/jazz fusion, and they felt that Bobby and Pigpen were holding them back. Pigpen wasn’t interested in this direction at all; he just wanted to sing blues and R&B. Bobby was solidly on board (his early tune “Born Cross-Eyed” is peak psychedelic-era Dead) but he didn’t have the chops. In 1968, the band went so far as to fire Bobby and Pig.
Bobby didn’t give up. He describes hitting the woodshed hard for a few months, and continuing to show up for rehearsals and gigs until everyone just accepted that he wasn’t going anywhere. It clearly hurt his feelings, though; you can see why he and Phil aren’t working together anymore. Pigpen must have been heartbroken too; it may not have been the main reason he drank himself to death at age 27, but it couldn’t have helped.
Is it healthy for me to know this much about any band? I have the pretext of being an academic, and having students who are interested in Dead lore. But I was deep into the lore long before I had a job that called for it. Being a Deadhead is excellent preparation for popular musicology, actually. You can’t just put on a Spotify station; you have to do all this research, wade through all these archival recordings, learn all of this backstory. In some ways, being a Deadhead is like being a Trekkie, just with more dancing. But being a Deadhead also creates rich opportunities for music education.