Uncle John’s Band

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 …

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 …