One of the Grateful Dead’s most endearing qualities is their self-deprecating sense of humor.
They are easy to make fun of, too.
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 it, so I tend to hear it as a pleasant texture rather than as a series of specific ideas. As I studied sections of Cornell Scarlet>Fire, I picked out the line at 11:53 as a good candidate for transcription because it’s a self-contained passage of manageable length (sixteen bars), with a beginning, a middle and an end. Continue reading “A nice Jerry line from the Cornell Scarlet>Fire”
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 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).
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.
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 absorbing them by osmosis, but that doesn’t work in a one semester class. My idea is to use music itself to teach music theory concepts, so that end, I wrote a song that explains the key signatures. Listen and download here.
Here’s a chart if you want to sing along. And here’s an explainer on how key signatures work.
Continue reading “I wrote a song to help my students with key signatures”
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 drum fills are like sneakers tumbling in a dryer, as critics of the band often put it. But it gets the idea across well enough for my teenage self to be enraptured.
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 if I could organize them into a piece of music that I would enjoy listening to. During a long bus ride, I brought the jam into Ableton Live and made this:
A Twitter commenter described this as “Greyfolded funkified”, which makes me happy. It’s a pretty good mission statement.
Continue reading “I built a track out of Grateful Dead jamming”
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 are tuned up a half step. I have always experienced this as a cheerful and energetic song, because I focus on the groove and the melody and don’t think too hard about the lyrics. But when I played it for my kid, he said that the chorus was the saddest thing he had ever heard. Don’t let that Johnny Cash deadpan fool you, he’s describing a miserable situation.
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. When we cover the Great American Songbook, the students will write 32-bar AABA tunes. But what does that mean?
The first thing to understand about the Great American Songbook is that it’s not a literal book (though there are many books collecting these kinds of songs.) It’s more of a loose canon of early-to-mid-20th-century standard tunes by composers like the Gershwins, Cole Porter, Irving Berlin, Rodgers and Hart, Dorothy Fields, and Duke Ellington. Before I got deep into popular musicology, I tended to think of these standards as “jazz”, but that is not accurate. The songs do sometimes draw on jazz vocabulary, but really, they are pop songs that jazz musicians like to use as launchpads for improvisation. Continue reading “The 32-bar AABA song 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 Grateful Dead being funky. Listen at 6:11.
The Dead hardly ever spotlighted a single instrumental voice in an organized way like this; usually everybody just played all the time during tunes. These four bass breaks would even make good hip-hop samples, which is not true of much Dead music.
Continue reading “Phil Lesh gets funky”