One of the Grateful Dead’s most endearing qualities is their self-deprecating sense of humor. They are easy to make fun of, too.
Author Archives: Ethan
A nice Jerry line from the Cornell Scarlet>Fire
My last post was a study of Scarlet>Fire from 5/8/77, and I don’t feel that I completely exhausted the topic. I want to zoom in on a particularly nice line that Jerry plays at the 11:53 mark on the released version: Jerry’s playing is beguiling throughout this whole recording, but there is so much of …
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Scarlet>Fire 5/8/77
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 …
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 …
I wrote a song to help my students with key signatures
Yesterday I was sitting in on a colleague’s theory class, and when she said that it was time to practice identifying key signatures, everyone groaned. I feel their pain and want to help. I myself learned the key signatures by reading and writing a lot of music in lots of different keys and eventually just …
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Mississippi Half-Step Uptown Toodeloo
Long before I knew who Duke Ellington was, I adored a Grateful Dead song vaguely named after one of his early hits. I was most attached to the Brent-era version on Without A Net: This is not the Dead at their absolute best. Jerry sounds like he’s about 95 years old, and some of those …
I built a track out of Grateful Dead jamming
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 …
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Big River
The Grateful Dead gave their fans a rich education in Americana through their choice of cover songs. My first exposure to Johnny Cash was almost certainly the Dead’s cover of “Big River.” Johnny and the lead guitarist (I think Luther Perkins) are fingering in E, but the recording sounds in F, so I guess they …
The 32-bar AABA song form
I am approaching my New School songwriting class differently this semester: rather than having students write songs in particular styles, I am having them write using particular forms and structures. For example, for the blues unit, they don’t have to write in a blues style, but they do have to use the twelve-bar blues form. …
Phil Lesh gets funky
In my last post, I transcribed Jerry Garcia’s solo on “Slipknot!” from Blues for Allah. Immediately after that solo comes another part of that tune that I love, a call and response between a repeated riff played by the full band and Phil Lesh’s bass. This eight bar section is a rare instance of the …