The most common entry point for Grateful Dead listeners is the acoustic folkie material, especially “Uncle John’s Band”. That makes sense; the song is fun, memorable, and relatively accessible. It seems like it would make a good campfire singalong. But then you get in there to try to learn it, and the song turns out …
Tag Archives: Grateful Dead
Identifying chromatic embellishments
Embellishing tones are non-chord tones that are still within the key or mode. Chromatic embellishments are notes from outside the key or mode. They are easy to spot because they sound characteristically “weird”, or, at least, more colorful than the other notes around them. Thus the “chromatic” part – the word comes from chroma, the …
Cumberland Blues
Phil Lesh’s passing hit me harder than I expected, probably because I’ve been so immersed in the Dead lately anyway. I persuaded MusicRadar to let me write a column about my favorite Phil basslines, one of which is “Cumberland Blues.” Phil co-wrote the tune, and I assume he was responsible for its moments of intense …
Dark Star part two
RIP Phil Lesh, who passed on while I was writing this. In the first part of this post, I analyzed the Live/Dead recording of “Dark Star” and compared it to several other versions. In this part, I survey the academic literature about the tune, of which there is a surprisingly large amount. First, let’s consider …
Dark Star part one
Just after I posted this, I learned that Phil Lesh died. RIP Phil. See also the academic literature review in part two. Space: the final frontier. “Dark Star” is the ultimate Grateful Dead jam vehicle, and the purest experience of the band, at least as far as the true believers are concerned. The song also …
He’s Gone
Back in the twentieth century, there was no easy way to find out what a song was about unless its lyrics were self-explanatory. Grateful Dead lyrics are rarely self-explanatory. I always enjoyed “He’s Gone”, but had the feeling that it was a bunch of inside references that I wasn’t privy to. I turn out to …
Black Peter
The other night at Rosh Hashonah dinner, my stepbrother was playing my guitar and found his way into “Black Peter.” This was not because he had ever sat down and learned it, but because it’s embedded so deeply in his unconscious that he could teach it to himself in real time. This is yet another …
The Grateful Dead as improv comedy
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 …
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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 …