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.

The Day of the Dead compilation includes a cover of PITB by Tunde Adebimpe and Lee Ranaldo. It’s fine. Their version lacks the country flavor, but it’s tight and well sung, and the textural jam section works very well.

PITB originates with a ten-beat groove that Mickey Hart came up with. During a jam in Mickey’s barn, David Crosby created a guitar riff in D Mixolydian mode to go with it. The band nicknamed this groove the Main Ten, and sometimes played it during shows. The Grateful Dead guide gives examples. This is a good one:

There’s another good Main Ten from 6/7/70, leading from the end of “Cryptical Envelopment” into the first-ever performance of “Sugar Magnolia”. The first set of this show is an interesting one too; it’s an acoustic set with (I think) David Nelson on mandolin.

Bob Weir developed the Main Ten into PITB in 1971. After a year of playing it as written, the band inserted a jam section into the second Main Ten break before the second bridge. You can hear an embryonic version of it on Ace. The jam rapidly expanded in length, and it became the platform for some of the Dead’s wildest improvisational adventures. Sometimes these adventures happened entirely within the boundaries of the song itself. The fourteen minute version from 9/21/73 is a good case in point. The twenty-one minute version from 9/10/72 is even better. The longest self-contained version, from 5/21/74, lasts for forty-six and a half minutes. Maybe you read that sentence with horror, but if open-ended improvisation is your jam, then 5/21/74 will very literally be your jam.

The more usual situation was for the band to get to the second Main Ten break and then leave the song behind entirely  Sometimes they would insert another single song into the gap. On 8/6/74, in the midst of an unusually funky PITB, they found their way into “Scarlet Begonias“. This required that they get from D Mixolydian in 10/4 time to B major in 4/4 time and back. The transition into “Scarlet Begonias” is clumsy, Jerry just jumps from one key to the other, but the return to PITB is delicately elegant, and the crowd goes wild when the transition is complete.

Sometimes the PITB jam leads into a whole sequence of other tunes. There’s an especially cool recursive sandwich from 11/10/73: PITB goes into “Uncle John’s Band”, which goes into “Morning Dew“. This then goes back into “Uncle John’s Band”, which then goes into the PITB reprise. This time, the keys are more closely harmonically related, but the time signatures aren’t; the band has to get from 10/4 to 4/4 to 7/4 to 4/4 to 10/4. This all happens spontaneously and without prior discussion! The crowd goes bananas for the PITB reprise, and rightly so.

I’m going to discuss the meaning of the jam in more depth below, but first let’s talk about the song itself. I think it’s Bob Weir’s finest achievement as a writer aside from “Jack Straw“. I’ll use the Skull and Roses version for analysis. Here’s my transcription. The song is in 10/4 time throughout (that’s how Bobby counts it in onstage), but that’s a difficult time signature to notate and analyze, so I’ll be discussing each bar of ten as if it’s groups of smaller beat values.

Intro

I notated this as an amalgam of Jerry’s and Bobby’s parts. I hear it as three bars of 2/4 and a bar of 4/4. The chords are D, C and G, but Jerry plays D and A on top of the C chord, implying C6/9. No one is playing the thirds of the chords, giving the riff an open and spacious feeling. The overall mood is serene and pastoral.

Verse

The tempo picks up a little and the feel becomes straightahead country rock (except for the odd meter.) The grouping changes to two bars of 4/4 and a bar of 2/4. It sits on the D chord for nine beats, and only goes to the A chord for the tenth, a charmingly weird harmonic rhythm. Even though the melody uses standard country phrasing, the odd meter makes it sound fresh.

Chorus

The harmony and rhythmic grouping are the same as the verse. The three-part harmony is rough at best, but on Skull and Roses it doesn’t bother me as much as usual. The choruses will become an endurance test in later live versions, unfortunately. Bobby can be an okay singer when he’s relaxed, but when he gets all hyped up, he goes wildly sharp.

Break

A nicely harmonized version of David Crosby’s Main Ten riff. The chords are simple, alternating D and C, but the rhythmic grouping is appealingly asymmetrical. I hear it as two bars of 3/4 and a bar of 4/4.

Bridge

After the last A chord in the chorus, they unexpectedly stay there for a shift to the key of A major. Going to the dominant key is typically more of a classical thing than a rock thing. It sounds like a fanfare or a sunburst. There are five 10/4 bars that are grouped like the verse and chorus, 4+4+2, but with a more unpredictable harmonic rhythm. I hear the last bar of 10/4 as being a bar of 4/4 and two bars of 6/8. The 6/8 part underlies a strange four-chord sequence: Bm, G, Bm/D, Gm. Is this ii, bVII, ii, bvii in A major? Or is it vi, IV, vi, iv in D major? That would make more sense, but it’s a very strange way to modulate back to the home key. My stepbrother Kenny calls these “the secret chords.” They are counterintuitive and hard to remember, and the band played them correctly at most half of the time.

How about the lyrics? They are vaguely biblical, like many Hunter lyrics. They seem like he mostly wrote them to fit the distinctive rhythm of the song and was more concerned about a joyful mood than any specific meaning. If there’s a message here, it’s that the singer is too busy playing music with his buddies to care about much of anything else. It’s an anti-political statement that fits the bands’ overall anti-political public persona. Offstage, they were good supporters of causes ranging from the Black Panthers to rainforest conservation, but little of that featured in their music. If you like your songs to be about something specific, Hunter lyrics can get on your nerves, but in this instance, you could interpret this song to be about the experience of the song itself.

So, those are the components of the song. Now, how about the jam? Why does the band stretch out so far on this song, and why is it so exciting when it happens? On Deadessays, Michael Getz, Darren Mason and Jeff Tiedrich give the Deadhead perspective.

PITB lives for adventure. It’s a mini Dead show, really. The song evolved (was consciously designed?) to roar fearlessly down the [10/4] road into new terrain, into the Great Unknown…. Just that feeling after the initial verses are sung of “here we go!” when the jam begins can be enough to lift our spirits and put a gleam in our eyes — *regardless* of the outcome to follow. This glorious moment is so exciting precisely because everything is possible and anything might happen. This feeling is most intense during the moment in a pre-’79 PITB where the Main Ten theme stops and the space starts, i.e. “the point at which the music falls off the table.” Up until this point, the song progresses as lyric, lyric, lyric, chorus, chorus, main ten, main ten, main ten, and then BLAM. It’s like a free fall, like being pushed out of an airplane. Instant weightlessness!

PITB is similar in a microscopic fashion to what many people report is their favorite moment at a Grateful Dead show: the moment the lights go down to start the show. This feeling is similar to opening a new book — perhaps one with an edge, like exploring a science fiction world. The feeling of entering Tolkien’s Middle Earth, Simmons’ Hyperion, or Herbert’s Dune, is very much like riding out the PITB wave.

This describes my listening experience accurately. I was a big fantasy geek in my early teenage years before getting into music, so it’s no shock that I would be drawn into music structured like a fantasy novel.

How did the Dead ever arrive at this idea of using rock, country, blues or R&B tunes as the basis of long jams to begin with? Other rock bands sometimes stretched out on these kinds of forms, but not to the extent that the Dead did. In his book Listening for the Secret: The Grateful Dead and the Politics of Improvisation, Ulf Olsson calls their usual improvisational approach “The Framework”: play most of the song, and then towards the end, do a long jam before capping it off with the last chorus or whatever.

The Framework was the Grateful Dead’s first original solution to the problem of how to integrate substantial amounts of group improvisation into their music.
This was indeed an elegant solution, and one that suits the band’s chosen identity as a rock dance band. The placement of the improvisational material at the end of their shows ensured that the band was warmed up by the time the jamming began and also satisfied the audience’s desire to hear the song— lyrics, chorus, and hooks—before getting down to just dancing.

The placement also brings up associations with fade-outs, a popular way at that time to end singles. The purpose of the fade-out is to symbolically dissolve temporality, making it seem as if the song can overleap its finite boundaries and enter eternity. Properly executed and properly heard, a fade- out can give the impression that the song never ends, but merely moves away from the listener until it is inaudible. The Framework evokes a world in which the listener can keep following the fade-out as it recedes, bringing its tantalizing promise of eternal musical pleasures into reality.

However, the point of a fade-out is that it fades away. Eventually, no matter how attentively one listens, the song ends, or, better, vanishes. This is not the case in the Framework. There, instead of fading to nothing, the song makes a return. Following a climax, a point of maximum separation from the original tune, the band falls back into the defining groove of the song and sings one last chorus.

This can have a profound effect on the listener. First of all, it gives a sense of finality. There is a definite ending. Second—and, to my mind, more significantly—it serves to encapsulate the improvisation within the song as a whole. No matter how strange or distinct the jamming may have been, the final return to the main groove suggests that we never really left the song. All that transpired during the jamming section, all the changes and potential that it contained, are thus symbolically present within the song itself. The Framework’s placement of the jamming section, and its return to the song’s theme, takes that feeling one step further, showing that a song can be elastic enough to contain anything that the band, working together, could conceive of. There are strong parallels here to the experience of taking LSD, an experience that most of the members of the Grateful Dead knew well: one moves away from one’s normal experience of life through the gradual and organic emergence of adventures or ruminations, and then, in the end, one returns to one’s baseline state.

The cliche is that the jams are only fun if you are on drugs, but I am living proof that this is untrue; I have never tried LSD and have never wanted to, but I love the jams.

Most Dead jams are dance-oriented modal grooves, but not always. Sometimes tonality and meter break down, and the band moves into atonal and arrhythmic free improvisation, or they abandon pitched sound altogether in favor of textures and soundscapes. Olsson calls this mode of jamming “sounds”:

[S]ounds sections generally arose out of preceding songs, rather than beginning sets; they were places that the listener was taken to. Just as the improvisation in the Framework arose out of the main riff of the song, so here the movement is from normality to strangeness, the impression being that of a sudden change of perspective, so that what was normal is now revealed to be strange. But the perception of the strange is presented as being liberatory rather than basic; in other words, it follows, rather than precedes, the perception of normality, revealing what lies behind that facade.

In this approach, paradigmatically audible in the songs “Uncle John’s Band” and “Playing in the Band,” there is a distinctive and repeated phrase found within the song that identifies the location and initial characteristics of the improvisation. These phrases stand in marked contrast to the feel of the rest of the songs in which they are found: to borrow an expression used in an interview with Garcia in a different context, they could be described as “signposts to new space.” In “Uncle John’s Band,” for instance, the phrase over which jamming takes place is in Dm, while the rest of the song is in G; it is 7/4, while the rest of the song is in 4/4; and it possesses a very tight and distinctive rhythmic structure, while the rest of the song tends more toward a loose, open rhythmic feel.

In naming this approach, the image of a trap door appealed to me because it brings to mind the ideas of revelation and exploration of unsuspected potential; a trap door is a way to get out of the obvious levels of the structure one is in and to explore previously hidden areas. After these explorations, of course, one returns to the original structure, just as the wardrobe in C. S. Lewis’s The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe is the means by which the children both enter and leave Narnia.

It’s no coincidence that Olsson uses a metaphor from another fantasy novel here.

Robert Trudeau has an essay on PITB in Reading the Grateful Dead: a Critical Survey. He describes the song as “metacantrical”, a song about songs. PITB takes metacantricality a step further; it’s a song about the experience of playing PITB (or listening to it, or dancing to it.)

Most concerts, at least in the last decade of the band’s career, reflected the structure of “Playing in the Band”: shows opened with a first set of varied songs, generally a series of complete songs. But we departed from that realm of “normalcy” in the second set, where usually we heard more exploration, more improvisation, greater risks, and so forth. Shows ended with a triumphant and energetic return to the world of structured music, brought there after a “Jerry ballad” by an anthemic and rousing conclusion. After an encore that usually returned us to the realm of more or less traditional form, the show ended and we carried on. As I show below, that “typical” concert scenario conforms to the structural characteristics of “Playing in the Band.”

[W]e can see the event of the Grateful Dead concert itself in a similar light: we leave our normal lives for a while, joining thousands of similarly inclined pilgrims; enter a different realm that is difficult to describe to nonparticipants; and then eventually come back from the adventure altered— presumably for the better. The essence of this process is not seen especially clearly in the lyrics of “Playing in the Band,” however, but rather in its performance: the process of leaving “normalcy” and exploring alternatives, usually with a return to the sphere of “normalcy”—the better, we hope, for the adventure.

PITB, like Dead shows more broadly, is an opportunity for “episodic adventures.”

By episodic adventures, I mean events each of us would locate outside our “normal” day-to-day existence. These could be as ethereal as a daydream while at work or as concrete as emigrating to another country. They could mean buying a new house or car, or going on a pilgrimage, or taking an acid trip. The concept is inherently polysemous: It can mean almost anything we want it to mean.

Episodic adventures can be very profitable. They can make life very interesting. But they carry risk, and hence can go wrong. Bilbo Baggins is famously cited, in the first chapter of Tolkien’s The Hobbit, as outlining this conundrum before the adventures begin: After describing the pleasures of Bilbo’s home—“it was a hobbit-hole, and that means comfort” (11)—the narrator asks the reader to ponder whether a risky adventure would be worth leaving this comfort and security. But Bilbo is going on some adventures, and the narrator suggests that the reader reserve judgment: “You will see whether he gained anything in the end.”

Trudeau is interested in the fact that the PITB jam section evolved quickly from nonexistent to brief to long to epic.

Instead of less than one minute—as on Ace—starting in 1971 or 1972 this segment extended for several minutes, allowing time for more reflection and improvisation. The liminal space increased, providing listeners with an arena for more effective episodic adventures during the show as well as a better symbolic basis for appreciating the role of such adventures and risks in their own lives. This is what allowed the song to become structurally metacantrical of an entire Grateful Dead concert.

Listeners can find an interesting illustration of this variation in the second set of the 29 December 1977 performance, released on Dick’s Picks Vol. 10. This version of “Playing” inserts “China Cat Sunflower” and “I Know You Rider”—two songs that also feature an improvisational space between them—and then adds “China Doll,” a short return to the “Playing in the Band” central motif jam, a “Drums” segment, “Not Fade Away,” and only then returns to conclude “Playing” to end the second set.

That’s a fifty-eight minute episodic adventure. Pretty good! Listen to the crowd when the Main Ten riff coalesces out of the jam after “Not Fade Away”, they know what they’re experiencing.

As a middle aged listener, I am done with lengthy psychedelic adventures, but it’s still nice to know that such things are possible. The Dead can be frustrating to listen to, but they are good fuel for a developing musical imagination. Whether or not you think PITB is ever executed well, it’s a richly generative model for what musical composition and performance could be. There are lots of directions to take the ideas in PITB: country music in odd meters, songs with built in trap doors, songs wrapped around other songs, performances where the performers have no more idea than the audience what is about to happen. Other, lesser jam bands started using these ideas decades ago, but I feel like they barely scratch the surface. What could you do with this ideas in metal or hip-hop or ambient? I would love to find out.