You can listen to the Grateful Dead for the songs, or you can listen for the jams. I love the songs as songs, but the Dead do not always do their own material much justice, especially when it’s time to sing a three-part harmony. The jams are less immediately accessible, but it’s what the band does uniquely well. I especially like “thematic jams”, as the gloriously obsessive Grateful Dead Guide calls them. These are spontaneous quasi-compositions like The Beautiful Jam. Sometimes the themes recur across multiple shows, even across multiple years, and eventually become the basis of new songs. My favorite recurring theme is called the Mind Left Body jam. It’s important enough in the lore that it has a Dead cover band named after it.
Here’s an hour-plus-long MLB jam supercut, with identifiers and timestamps in the description.
If you would rather listen one at a time in chronological order, the invaluable Save Your Face Blog has an exhaustive compilation of neatly edited MLB jams.
If MLB is a thematic jam, what exactly is the “theme”? Is it a melody, a chord progression, or just a general vibe? Really, it’s a combination of all three: a group of related chord progressions organized around the same descending chromatic line cliche, deployed to produce a particular country/blues vibe. Here are all the chord progression variants that appear in the YouTube supercut. (I transpose everything in this post into D for ease of comparison.)
- ||: D7 | G7 | Gm7 | D7 :||
- ||: D7 | G7 | Gm7 | D7 :|| x4, alternating with sixteen bars of A7
- ||: D7 G7 | Gm7 D7 :|| x4, alternating with eight bars of A7
- ||: D7 | D°7 | G7 | Gm7 :|| x4, alternating with sixteen bars of A7
- ||: D7 | D°7 | Gm7 | D7 :|| x4, alternating with sixteen bars of A7
- ||: D7 D°7 | Gm7 D7 :||
The shared concept here is the descending chromatic voice leading:
- C in the opening D7 chord
- B in the G7 or D°7 chord
- B-flat in the Gm7 chord
- A in the concluding D7 chord
The Deadheads named the jam after a song called “Your Mind Has Left Your Body” by former members of Jefferson Airplane. It features Jerry on pedal steel.
The problem is that “Your Mind Has Left Your Body” does not use the same chord progression as any of the MLB variants on the jam. The song’s main loop is:
- ||: D | D7 | G | Gm :||
This uses the same descending voice leading as MLB, but the placement of chords in musical time matters in music like this. “Your Mind Has Left Your Body” has two bars of D up front, whereas all the MLB variants have only one, usually with another concluding D at the end.
Some Deadheads think that MLB originates in the “Slide Jam” recorded by Jerry and David Crosby.
This is indeed the same progression as one of the MLB variants:
- ||: D7 | D°7 | Gm7 | D7 :||
Another proposed source is Marvin Gaye and Tammi Terrell’s recording of “You’re All I Need To Get By”.
The Dead loved Motown and probably knew this tune well. The changes are not quite the same as MLB, though the voice leading and metrical placement are similar.
- ||: D7/C | E7/B | Gm7/Bb | D7/A :||
The final candidate for an origin is “Dear Prudence” by the Beatles, which Jerry performed in his solo bands for decades.
But “Dear Prudence” uses the same progression as “Your Mind Has Left Your Body”, so, it isn’t the same as any variant of MLB:
- ||: D | D7 | G | Gm :||
The problem with these possible origin stories is that they are almost certainly all wrong. The MLB variants are all standard blues tropes that you can hear in every American vernacular style. All of the songs listed here are drawing from the same shared memepool. Let’s give the final word to Phil Lesh. He thought that the idea of MLB originating in “Your Mind Has Left Your Body” was so silly that he sarcastically titled it “Mud Love Buddy Jam” on the Dozin’ at the Knick release. Unfortunately, the name stuck, so MLB it is.
Many Dead tunes originate in thematic jams, and the story goes that Bobby got the bridge to “The Music Never Stopped” from MLB. Maybe so; someone would have to ask him.
My favorite MLB comes at the end of the epic “Dark Star” from 9/21/72. The official Dick’s Picks release is below. The Save Your Face edit begins at 29:38.
The baseline feel is country-rock at about 100 BPM in D major and/or D Mixolydian. The eighth notes are straight, and the sixteenths are swung. Here’s an annotated listening guide. All timing refers to the Save Your Face edit, so if you are following along with the Dick’s Picks release, add 29:38 to everything.
- 0:00 Jerry plays a D that rings for eight seconds as the band swirls around beneath.
- 0:10 Bobby plays a funky riff that alternates C and B (the notes, not the chords).
- 0:26 Bobby plays B-flat under the D chord, perhaps foreshadowing the MLB chords coming later.
- 1:01 Jerry begins chicken pickin’ and the drifting feel that has prevailed so far begins to self-organize into country.
- 1:32 Jerry interrupts the general D Mixolydian vibe with a brief Dmaj7. He will only play one other prominent C-sharp in the entire rest of the jam.
- 1:36 Jerry and Phil can’t quite decide where the downbeat is.
- 1:59 Bobby’s funky riff re-enters.
- 2:12 Keith enters (or at least becomes audible.)
- 2:20 Jerry and Phil somehow get half a beat ahead of Billy, creating an implicit bar of 9/8.
- 2:25 Billy re-asserts 4/4 with a clear downbeat followed by the Bo Diddley beat.
- 2:37 Jerry plays a strong chord on beat four which everyone else hears as a downbeat, creating an implicit bar of 3/4. It isn’t very disruptive to the groove, though.
- 2:58 Jerry once again gets half a beat ahead of everyone else.
- 3:01 Jerry gestures toward the MLB theme by playing a bluesy descending chromatic line in quarter notes, but it’s messy. He starts on the wrong note, going from B down to A-flat.
- 3:06 Jerry finds the right notes for MLB and descends in quarter notes from C to A.
- 3:08 Billy manages to catch up with Jerry and re-sync the beat.
- 3:10 A lot happens at once. Jerry now plays an ascending chromatic riff, F-sharp up to A. He also falls a half a beat behind everyone else. This results in an implicit bar of 7/8, and then a bar of 5/4.
- 3:15 Billy gets oriented with Jerry again. Jerry resumes the descending chromatic line.
- 3:18 Jerry plays an extremely hip riff that both ascends and descends chromatically at the same time. The implied chords are D7/C, G/B, Bb7, D7/A. He probably learned the riff from a ragtime tune, maybe one by Elizabeth Cotten. He plays this pattern four times.
- 3:20 Billy jumps out with a more assertive ride cymbal pattern.
- 3:28 Jerry stops the ragtime pattern and chicken picks some country riffs on open, sunny D major.
- 3:37 This is where the MLB jam begins in earnest, as the band settles into a loop of | D7 | G7 | Gm7 | D7 |. I will be referring to this as the main loop. One version or another of the loop will run for the next two and a half minutes, one chord per bar. Now everyone is happily in the pocket.
- 4:07 Jerry switches to a different version of the loop: | D7 | D°7 | Gm7 | D7 |. He plays this three times.
- 4:36 The main loop resumes, but just once.
- 4:46 Jerry varies the loop again: | D7 | C | G7 Gm7 | D7 |.
- 4:56 The main loop resumes. Phil emphasizes the descending chromatic line in the bass: | D7 | G7/B | Gm7/Bb | D7/A |.
- 5:15 Jerry plays yet another new chord progression: | D7 | Dmaj7 | C G/B | D |. Phil is still playing the main loop, though, so there’s an exciting clash when Jerry’s B rings over his B-flat.
- 5:25 Jerry strums out one pass through | D7 | D°7 | Gm7 | D7 |. This is the energetic peak of the jam.
- 5:35 The main loop resumes, and will continue through the end of the jam.
- 5:55 Bobby arpeggiates the loop crisply while Jerry plays a lovely crying line way up the neck. The tempo slows and everyone starts to decrescendo.
- 6:45 The jam begins gently winding down. Jerry plays some delicate fast triplets.
- 7:13 Phil ends the MLB by alternating Eb and D power chords. The tempo slows from around 95 BPM to around 75 BPM.
- 7:26 The edit ends with a conclusive D7 that is also the first chord of “Morning Dew.”
I love this jam so much that I put it in a remix.
Is the MLB jam a “composition”? A motif? I learned how to play it while writing this, but what was I learning how to play? The descending chromatic line isn’t a specific melody, but it isn’t just a chord sequence either. It’s more of a framework for improvisation, the nucleus of a deep-fried country jam. It isn’t like the head or chord changes of a jazz tune, because the form is simpler and more open-ended. It reminds me more of the thematic improvisation you hear on In A Silent Way by Miles Davis. The Bitches Brew band opened for the Dead at the Fillmore West, and the Dead were suitably awed. Miles and Jerry even hit it off personally. That makes me feel good.
Beyond my enjoyment of MLB in particular, I’m interested in the larger phenomenon of the Dead as improvisors. I have had a few opportunities to play in bands that did this kind of open-ended jamming, and at its best, it’s the most magical experience you can imagine. Time becomes meaningless in a good jam; it’s both endless and instantaneous. You walk away from it feeling elated. Of course, jamming can also be a miserable experience if the people involved aren’t listening to each other, or just can’t play very well.
One of my missions as a music educator is to get university music majors to do more improvising. This in part because I want them to appreciate jazz and funk and other improvisational styles, but it’s also because jamming is a practical skill. I read some of Bill Kreutzmann’s autobiography, and was amused to learn that the Dead got into open-ended jams not only because of psychedelics and the spirit of adventure, but also because early in their career, they played long dance gigs and didn’t know many songs yet. I myself have never tried psychedelics, but I have been in a band that got booked to play for four hours when we knew at most an hour’s worth of material. Jamming can be a transcendent spiritual experience, but it is also useful as a way to let people keep dancing after you’ve exhausted your repertoire.