Did the Grateful Dead play their best show at Cornell University’s Barton Hall on May 8th, 1977? True connoisseurs usually say no, pointing instead to something from the peak years between 1969 and 1974 (or, if they are contrarians, something from the Brent era). The argument is that Cornell only got so hyped up because a high-quality Betty Board circulated widely among tapers before everything went onto the Internet Archive. For a long time, Cornell was the only bootleg I had, with cassette labels handwritten by my friend Ellie. But the Heads don’t just love Cornell because it’s familiar. I have listened to a lot of other shows now, and I stand by the second set opener as an all-timer. It’s a pair of songs, “Scarlet Begonias” and “Fire on the Mountain”, which Deadheads know as a single entity, Scarlet>Fire.
This Scarlet>Fire clocks in at a little under 25 minutes. It may sound long, but it’s not even close to being the longest one; that would be the 34-minute version from 11-1-79. Some people like the more ruminative and exploratory performances, but I prefer Cornell for its tighter focus (by Dead standards).
Scarlet>Fire is remarkably uneventful from a musical structure perspective. The band spends about 19 of the 25 minutes of the Cornell version’s running time playing an unbroken loop of the chords B and A. If you aren’t predisposed to liking the Dead, this might sound mind-numbing. I could defend it by saying that it’s music for dancing, not music for sitting and listening. But I also think it’s more interesting for sitting and listening than my description makes it seem.
Before we get into the details of the Cornell performance, let’s do some background on the two constituent songs. “Scarlet Begonias” came first. Jerry and Robert Hunter wrote it in 1974, and the band recorded it soon afterwards. The studio version is peppy, though I find it doesn’t really stay with me the way that the Cornell version does.
The lyrics are ubiquitous on Dead t-shirts, bumper stickers and other merch. I always thought they were lightweight: Robert Hunter meets an attractive hippie chick in London, they flirt, maybe they have a relationship but maybe not, and then there’s… an acid trip? I guess? However, Songfacts informs me that Hunter wrote the song about his early courtship of his wife Maureen, which is sweet. I’m sorry for misjudging your song, Robert Hunter.
Some Gen X-ers first came to “Scarlet Begonias” via Sublime’s cover, which is backed by the Funky Drummer break. Much as I love that beat (and the rap verse about drug dealing), Sublime’s version is otherwise not to my taste.
“Fire on the Mountain” has a more complicated back story. Like “Playing in the Band“, it began as a rhythmic figure created by Mickey Hart. In his book A Box of Rain, Robert Hunter says that he wrote the lyrics at Mickey’s ranch “in heated inspiration as the surrounding hills blazed and the fire approached the recording studio where we were working.” The title phrase also appears in a British nursery rhyme, an Appalachian fiddle tune, a Tanzanian children’s game, and many other folkloric and literary contexts. I don’t know which of these was Hunter’s source.
The first recorded version is a pleasant but aimless instrumental called “Happiness is Drumming” from one of Mickey’s solo albums. Mickey has also performed a rap version of the song live over the years. The Dead recorded a version for Terrapin Station, but didn’t end up using it. Eventually, they recorded the tune in its final form for Shakedown Street.
It’s remarkable that this can be so boring, and that the Cornell version is much more exciting at five times its length. Why? It might simply be that the album version isn’t long enough. We will get into it below.
“Fire on the Mountain” is one of Jerry’s most persistent earworms, but I had always dismissed the lyrics as vague druggy nonsense. Then I read this essay by SG Bradbury arguing that the song is Hunter warning Jerry that heroin addiction is going to ruin his life.
By 1977, Jerry’s heroin addiction surely struck Robert Hunter and others as the rolling flames of a fearful fire, threatening to rage over and consume the mountain for those who loved and depended on Jerry. Years later, indeed, Hunter was quoted as saying, “All I can say is it more or less ruined everything, having Jerry be a junkie.”
In its finished form, I’m convinced the song is now addressed to Jerry: He’s the long-distance runner who’s trying to spread joy and laughter by staying in motion, playing his music day in and day out in an unrelenting concert schedule, while his addiction is killing him at his core. And heroin obviously had become the dragon threatening Jerry and the band: in street slang, smoking “Persian” — inhaling the fumes of heroin heated on tin foil — was known as “chasing the dragon.” These new meanings had to be top of mind for Hunter and Hart in 77.
Jerry’s heroin addiction had spread out like a wildfire to other factions of the extended Dead tribe and was consuming many lives beyond his own. And Jerry could not keep the family enterprise sustained or get it back on track by giving more to his performances — the more he would throw himself into the grind, the more it would consume him, and at some point soon, he would inevitably cross the line into self-destruction, where he would lose all remaining ability to “fake” it, any last hope or delusion of keeping up the charade.
I am completely convinced by this theory. Unfortunately, if that was the song’s message, it didn’t get through to its intended recipient. This is heavy thematic material for such a fun and bouncy groove. Of course, “cheerful music with depressing lyrics” is a defining quality of the best Dead songs, both the originals and the covers, and it’s one of the things that sets them apart from lesser jambands.
So that’s where these songs come from. Now let’s look at the particulars of Cornell. Here’s my transcription of key sections. I talk through the whole thing below. Time stamps are relative to the first downbeat. For timing on the officially released version, add 1:57.
0:00 Scarlet intro
The tune launches straight into its loose-limbed syncopated groove in B Mixolydian mode. Phil’s bass slides sound exuberant. Jerry and Bobby toss B and E chords back and forth at will. What is the tempo? I hear it as about 80 BPM, with a sixteenth note pulse. You could make a case for 160 with an eighth note pulse, but then the snares are on beat three rather than two and four. It’s definitely easier to count and notate it in cut time, but I’m going for accuracy over simplicity.
The Dead do not keep amazing time in general. “Scarlet Begonias” has plenty of ebb and flow in its tempo. However, for the whole 20 minutes of the transitional jam and “Fire on the Mountain”, they keep the tempo between 80 and 85, and most of that variation is during the verses and choruses. The groove actually grooves! The Dead may not be on the level of Fela Kuti or Herbie Hancock, but this performance is a more than respectable one.
0:23 Scarlet verse one
Jerry belts out the lyrics with gusto. This is a song by, for and about young people, and Jerry sounds youthful here. Hearing him croak out these lyrics with his cigarette-ravaged voice later on is not such a good time. I do like his ragged croak on blues, folk and country songs, just not on this tune.
“Scarlet Begonias” is one of Jerry’s best-constructed melodies. There are two phrases of four bars each, and each phrase is a repeated two-bar cell. The first phrase (“As I was walking round Grosvenor square”) is all beginning-accented: the accented syllable (“I”) on the hyperdownbeat is at the beginning of the phrase. The second phrase (“From the other direction, she was calling my eye”) is end-accented, meaning that the accented syllable on the hyperdownbeat (“eye”) is at the end of the phrase. There needs to be a break after the second phrase, because otherwise it would overlap with the beginning of the next verse. The break has another benefit, too: it makes the verse ten bars long instead of eight bars long, so the form isn’t too symmetrical.
The chords are the classic rock standard I, bVII and IV, but their placement in musical time is quirky and unpredictable. Which of these chords is the tonic? It’s hard to tell.
| E B | B A | E B | B A | | A E B | A E | A E B | A E | | B7 | B7 |
In the first phrase, E is in the metrically strong position. In the second phrase, A is in the metrically strong position. You don’t hear a clearly accented B until the break at the end. It’s hip!
1:53 Scarlet bridge
The harmonic rhythm remains quirky, and each phrase also has a bar of 3/4 in it. The F# chords are the only break from B Mixolydian into B major until about 20 minutes later–we will get to that.
| F# |(3) B A | E | E | | F# |(3) B A | E | F# | A | B | B |
The instrumental tags on the end of each phrase add more asymmetry: after the first phrase, the break is two bars long, and after the second phrase, it’s five bars long. Cool!
2:55 Jerry solo
This is a long solo, four times through the ten-bar verse/break form. However, it’s restrained compared to what’s coming. If you want to learn to play it yourself, Weeping Willow has got you covered.
4:53 Final verse
This is the kind of wide-eyed hippie imagery that is my least favorite Hunter mode. It is, as the kids say, cringe. But maybe I’m too cynical, most of the Heads love it. See, again, all the t-shirts and bumper stickers.
5:16 Scarlet outtro
After a one-bar break, there’s a catchy Latin-sounding outtro riff. However, Jerry plays it hesitantly, and keeps dropping in and out. Keith plays an arpeggiated figure on B and A, each chord lasting for two beats. Donna’s wordless ahhhs create a mystical atmosphere. Her singing is a controversial topic among the Heads, but she sounds good here.
6:50 Jerry solo
This begins with a lovely exploratory line. Jerry quickly breaks into scribbly triplets that go in and out of the key. The dynamics pull back a little. I always like it when the band isn’t hammering away at full intensity.
7:40 Keith stops playing the Scarlet outtro changes
Instead, he plays a syncopated riff on the note B. It sounds like something he picked up from playing Latin tunes in his pre-Dead career as a jazz pianist.
7:55 Fire changes begin
The Fire groove also repeats B and A chords, but each chord lasts for an entire bar, as opposed to the two-beat harmonic rhythm of the Scarlet outtro. The two-bar B and A loop will run uninterrupted for the next sixteen minutes. Keith pedals B on top. Mickey moves between the cowbell and the roto toms, and it sounds great. I wish he just played percussion all the time and left the kit to Billy.
9:07 Jerry sounds ethereal
He is using some kind of echo effect. I don’t know what it is, though; if anyone can tell me, please do. The groove very gradually transforms from straight-sixteenth Latin-flavored rock to swinging-sixteenth reggae.
9:56 Just a gorgeous Jerry line
He doesn’t noodle all the time, sometimes he spins out a structured and orderly melody like this one. It’s a combination of arpeggios and chromatic runs. If you want to play more like Jerry, practice your arpeggios, then learn to connect the chord tones chromatically.
10:40 Jerry settles into the Fire groove
The whole band just sits in this groove for a minute and a half. The syncopation is cool, lots of accents on weak eighth and sixteenth-note subdivisions. The second phrase has a dotted eighth note’s worth of silence in it, too. Empty space is all too rarely a feature of Dead grooves.
12:55 Fire intro riff
The “wuh wuh wuh” sound on Jerry’s guitar comes from a Mu-tron III envelope filter, my favorite of all his guitar effects. It’s like an automatic wah pedal where the filter cutoff is controlled by the amplitude envelope, so the harder Jerry picks, the more of a “wuh” sound it makes. It’s so expressive and speech-like.
13:47 Fire verse one
At last! This melody is simple, but it has plenty of craft to it. The phrases all start on beat two. Jerry sings a lot of D-sharps on top of the A chords, giving them a magical Lydian quality. The Dead don’t use much Lydian mode, so when they do, it’s memorable – see also “Lady With A Fan” and the jam section in “Cassidy.”
14:22 Fire chorus one
After the verses so carefully avoided the downbeats, the chorus hammers on them. Again, this is a simple idea, but it is not an unsophisticated one. It’s interesting to me how Jerry’s earlier writing has all this baroque complexity (e.g. “St Stephen“) and then as he matures, he focuses in and strips the ideas down without losing any of the witty imagination… until he mostly stops trying in the 80s.
14:45 Jerry solo
This solo is three minutes long. A normal rock band could get through an entire song in that amount of time. Jerry plays through the Mutron for eight bars and then switches to octave harmonizer, which acts as a kind of audio highlighter. Then he pairs them together for maximum flavor.
17:40 Fire verse three
Jerry skips verse two and gropes around for the lyrics he does sing. In fairness, I don’t know how he could ever have kept track of any of the words in the midst of all the improvising. Jerry makes long solo sound easy, but they require substantial mental effort.
18:15 Triple chorus
That’s twelve times through the phrase “fire, fire on the mountain”; you quickly lose track of where you are in the form, which might be the point of repeating it so many times.
19:26 Yet another even longer Jerry solo
The song would seem to be over now, but no, there’s still almost five full minutes of groove to go. Jerry starts switching between B Mixo and straight B major. After so much A-natural, those few A-sharps jump out at you.
20:36 Fire outtro riff
This is my favorite musical moment in the whole epic. The riff uses A-sharp prominently, which clashes hard with the prevailing B Mixolydian mood. Jerry plays the riff eight times, with evident pleasure.
21:23 Jerry solo continues
At the end, he’s just mandolin strumming the chords, a favored technique for hyping the crowd at the end of a long solo.
24:18 Scarlet outtro reprise
They don’t do this extremely tightly, but who could blame them?
24:42 Ending
I love that after this whole vast expanse of time, they end cleanly on a button, it’s droll.
So there you have it, the best Scarlet>Fire, in my humble opinion. If you want to chase down other noteworthy versions, Dead Essays has feelings about them.
Maybe this ranks highly among Dead performances, but in all objectivity, is it actually, like, good? I mean, if you are not already in the cult? In his book about the Cornell show, Peter Conners quotes a review in the Ithaca Times the next day: “The Dead kept to their solidly patterned style with the ever prominent guitar of Jerry Garcia carrying songs on for 20 minutes. Garcia’s mastery of the guitar, while amazing, approached monotony by the latter half of the concert.” Are they right?
The musicologist Anne Danielsen distinguishes between songs vs grooves. By her definition, “Scarlet Begonias” would be a song, a series of discrete musical events with a linear structure to them. “Fire on the Mountain”, on the other hand, is a groove. It’s an open-ended two-bar loop, and any higher-level structure (verses, choruses, solos, riffs) is purely incidental. “Scarlet Begonias” has a groove underpinning its song elements too, but it’s in the background. In “Fire on the Mountain”, the groove is both background and foreground.
Danielsen thinks that white people don’t know how to listen to grooves. In her (excellent) book about funk, she says:
[T]he focus on goal-directedness and developmental forms within white Western musical traditions also expresses its dominant listening strategy. Not only can the music be said to be of a teleological kind, but even the listening to it is in a certain way teleological: one expects that something will happen, certainly regarding the aspects most often involved in shaping such large-scale time spans, namely melody, harmony, and musical form. When a funk tune like “The Payback” encounters such a listening habitus, the incongruity between the mode of production and the mode of reception may hinder the engagement in the groove, because there is simply nothing else to the tune (p. 191).
In other words, if you listen to a groove expecting large-scale structure, then you miss out on all the rich structure present within the repeating cells.
The idea that grooves are less “intellectual” or substantive than songs has a long and racist history, and it’s an idea that persists right on up through to the present. The concept of the “guilty pleasure” in music is based on the anxiety that white people feel when we dare to enjoy a groove. But the musical value system here is backwards. Grooves are much harder to play well than songs are. If you have a good song, the interest of its structure can easily conceal weak musicianship. In a groove, there is nowhere to hide. Anne Danielsen again:
[T]he relation between the pure form of a groove, with its repetitive structure and cuts and breaks, and funk’s main musical “challenge,” namely the subtle perfection of the basic two-bar pattern, is not accidental. However, this also means that, as a musical form, the pure groove hides no weaknesses. When all attention is on the groove and almost nothing else is happening, even small mistakes become distinct. The pattern has to be kept steady and relaxed all the way through, and this requires quite extraordinary musical skills (p. 190).
I enjoy the Dead’s more complex writing and less-structured improvisation, but there is a special place they get to when they focus in on a groove. This is why people love Cornell, it’s that balance between ease and focus that a groove requires, the relaxed intensity that dissolves the ego and takes performers and listeners alike outside of mundane experience. The length of the Scarlet>Fire groove is essential to its impact. Ted Gioia argues that dance tunes should last at least ten minutes, because that is the minimum amount of time to build up a good trance state. In an era of fractured attention, there is an inherent benefit to focusing in on any extended piece of music. The fact that the Scarlet>Fire groove is also interesting and thought-provoking is just icing on the cake.
Great ending thoughts on groove! These Dead posts have been awesome. Thank you!