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 …
Tag Archives: Grateful Dead
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 …
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 …
Jerry Garcia’s Slipknot! solo
A while back, I learned how to play the Dead’s epic suite of “Help On The Way” into “Slipknot!” into “Franklin’s Tower”. However, I skipped the jam, because I wanted to focus on the composed parts. But since this is apparently the Summer of Jerry for me, I thought it was time to work out …
The Mind Left Body Jam
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 …
Inside the Beautiful Jam
The Grateful Dead are most (in)famous for their collective improvisation. Sometimes that improvisation happened within the confines of a song: unstructured arrangements, solos, preset groove sections. Sometimes it happened during semi-composed transitions between the parts of a suite, like Help/Slip/Frank. The most exciting and unpredictable jams happened in transitions between songs, or just out of …