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From: mfs@mhuxr.UUCP (SIMON)
Newsgroups: net.music
Subject: Their Music: Grateful or Dead?
Message-ID: <284@mhuxr.UUCP>
Date: Tue, 2-Apr-85 09:30:53 EST
Article-I.D.: mhuxr.284
Posted: Tue Apr  2 09:30:53 1985
Date-Received: Wed, 3-Apr-85 01:19:16 EST
Organization: AT&T Bell Laboratories, Murray Hill
Lines: 47

[is there room on this net for a Grateful Dead perspective somewhere between
Deadhead adulation and Rich Rosen skepticism? Fools walk where angels fear
to tread]

First of all, I agree with the multiple Dead postings that a Grateful Dead
concert is a special and magical experience, with or without chemical additives
(that is a choice best left to the individual concertgoer and certainly not to
be advocated on a public net.) It does not have anything to do with the
band's music however, which is what I propose to look at here.

The band members are all superior musicians, and the Dead's continued
vitality is a tribute to their skill. The examples are legion: the smooth
transition from "St Stephen"'s 8/8 to "The Eleven"'s 11/4 on LIVE DEAD;
the delicate interaction between the two guitars and the congas on RECKONING's
"Cassidy"; the red-hot 12 bar blues solo of "Little Red Rooster" on DEAD SET;
and many others. Note however that except for the first example, these
moments tend to occur on well defined songs with a beginning, middle and end,
*not* on those endless jams the Dead are famous for. And in the first example,
we are talking about the only more-or-less well defined "songs" on that album.

But those jams! In a word, SLOPPY!!! There is nothing wrong with collective
improvisation, but too often they just mark time while waiting for someone
to have a decent idea that the jam can coalesce around. It is admirable of
a rock band to be willing to stretch the arrangement and do some on the spot
creation, but there must be some framework for the improvisation to soar
from. Too often you have the two drummers not in time with each other,
and Garcia soloing on a different key from Lesh... They are good enough
musicians that they can recover fairly quickly, but then whomever they
coalesce around has usually gone on to something else, hence continued
chaos. They would be well advised (and seem to do so these days) to decide
beforehand on the harmonic and rhythmic base for excursions on a given tune.

The other problem with the Dead is their, uh, singing. Tomcats in heat is
more like it. That is far less serious a problem in rock, a medium
famous for insisting that musicality is not a necessary condition for success.

Finally, the Dead have been together some 20 years, and their current style
(blues and boogie with a dash of country) solidified around 1970. They have
thus been playing the same things, and sounding the same for 15 years.
There is merit to finding a suitable style and perfecting it, but as discussed
above, they have stayed with their sloppy, imperfect, lengthy jams.
It has now gotten to the point of ossification.

Marcel Simon

P.S. Somewhat intelligent debate is welcome, but flames will be directed to
/dev/null