Grateful Dead Unconcert: Set One

The Dead absorption comes in waves, comes when I'm in certain moods.  Seasonal, perhaps.  Something I do every couple of months.  I'm probably(?) about done with my latest wave, and figured I would wrap it up by making a mix.  I make lots of mixes.  It's how I make sense of the world, contextualizing things.  So that's what I'm doing here, contextualizing my history with the Dead, which goes back... as far as 2012, apparently, longer than I thought.  I hit the hard stuff sometime before 2016 - the 1970-05-08 Dark Star is from before the Great Timestamp Reset of 2016-03-03.  Of the 223 tracks in my live Dead playlist, though, only 33 of them are before the reset.

So this isn't a mix, then, of a decade in the touring life of the Grateful Dead - it's an excavation of a decade's worth of change in my life.

Here's how I did this.  There's eight sets, each about an hour long, not really any repeated songs once you allow for room for interpretation.  The intent is not to recreate an idealized "Dead concert", which isn't a place I ever really would have been, but to break down a growing mass of tracks into comprehensible chunks, each with their own sense of flow to them, within a larger whole.

Mountains of the Moon -> China Cat Sunflower (1969-04-26, added 2019-06-09): Starting with a pretty rarely played acoustic-ish (the keys are electric) track.  This combo is from a set in Chicago where they shared the bill with the Velvet Underground.  I'd love to hear the Velvets' set.  Apparently the Velvets got them pretty uptight, because the Dead's set concluded in their playing a long "feedback" section incorporating a tape playback of their unpopular experimental song "What's Become of the Baby?"  This is sort of the opposite of that.  Here we're opening with a couple of the best songs off Aoxomoxoa, which was generally a fussy and overlabored shambles of a recording.  Here, actually, I'm gonna quote from a memo the Dead's record company sent to their manager... this is possibly, I believe, taken from the recording of their previous album, but the difficulties didn't ease up any when it came time to record their _next_ album.

"Lack of preparation, direction and cooperation from the very beginning have made this album the most unreasonable project with which we have ever involved ourselves. Your group has many problems, it would appear, and Hassinger has no futher interest or desire to work with them under conditions similar to this last fiasco. It's apparent that no one in your organization has enough influence over Phil Lesh to evoke anything resembling normal behavior. You are now branded an undesirable group in almost every recording studio in Los Angeles."

All I can say to that is, if things are bad enough that you are singling out _Phil Lesh_ as being unruly, things must have been pretty profoundly fucked up in that studio.

Live, things were different.  Their biggest problems here were curfew and, on this particular night, the especially big, loud, and hairy group they were sharing the bill with.  Enough opportunity, at least, to play a nice gentle renfaire ballad straight.

For those of you who are familiar with the Dead's live staples, yes, the inclusion of "China Cat Sunflower" in this unfamiliar context means that there will be no China Cat -> Rider later on.  This isn't meant a comprehensive overview, only a way of hearing.  Probably the biggest downside of this early "China Cat" is the presence of the guiro, which is an instrument I absolutely fucking despise and is for some reason common in their '69 sets.

Clementine (1969-04-26, added 2018-04-20): First things first: The date added is JUST A COINCIDENCE.  I don't smoke pot.  I know this isn't a particularly credible statement given the context, but to be perfectly frank I live in Portland, Oregon, where there's no particular stigma around smoking marijuana.  I have no reason whatsoever to claim I don't smoke marijuana when I do.

The song itself... this was a song written for possible inclusion on "Anthem of the Sun" but didn't make it there, probably because they couldn't quite get it right.  Here's where a certain strange habit of the Dead rears its head - their tendency to do a good, solid version of a particular song, and then apparently say "OK, nailed that," and never play it again.  Obviously this doesn't happen with all songs, but there will be a couple more tracks here that are last performances of songs that didn't become long-term staples.

I do still think Clementine is more interesting than great, a bit overwritten and tentatively played, a band eager to prove their Serious Musicianship... but there's enough here to make it worth keeping around for me, enough here to throw it in the mix in this oddball early set.  I feel they'd have done better versions still if they'd kept it around.

Cream Puff War (1966-12-01, added 2019-06-01): Our first of many instances of anachronism.  Here we have a "primal dead" song, one which I became familiar with through Oneida's redoubtable cover version, and one which was gone from the set very very early, '67 at the latest, not to reappear.  Jerry was acutely embarrassed about these early efforts at songwriting, but then he was embarrassed about a lot of the stuff he did.  Doesn't necessarily mean it's bad.  This one I like because it's one of the only Dead recordings that fits in the mold I expect from SF psych bands - it's full of the sort of rave-up acid guitar Garcia tended to avoid for most of his career in favor of the sort of oblique, ruminative approach that drove me bonkers for years.  I kept waiting for him to shred and instead he would unleash these endless torrents of agitated three-note figures.  Well, here: He shreds.

Cosmic Charlie (1969-03-01, added 2020-03-21): OK, break over, back to '69 Dead.  This is another Dead song that vexed me.  You use the word "cosmic" in a song title and I'm expecting some Ash Ra Tempel shit.  Nope.  It's a blues song.  For this performance, though, I can get behind it - Garcia spends much of the song riffing on the intro to Pee Wee Crayton's "Do Unto Others", though at least the immediate impetus is probably more likely to be the single version of the Beatles' "Revolution", which uses the same intro riff.  In any event, we've gone from rave-up to rave-up.

St. Stephen -> The Eleven (1970-04-24, added 2020-03-21): Nominally we're still on our Aoxomoxoa trip at the beginning, but heads will know this sequence better from its presence as side B of "Live/Dead".  (So even though we have dipped our toe into 1970, this material is still completely and totally "'69 Dead".)  "St. Stephen" is honestly a longtime favorite of Deadheads, but it's not one I'm much taken with.  Its stop-start nature just makes it sound like a bad Mothers of Invention song to me.  The main riff has grown on me at least.

Here, in the first perverse choice, just as we start heading into the truly popular material the sound quality dips precipitiously.  Yes, this is our first foray into the world of audience tapes, and not really a particularly good audience tape either.  On top of that, they did in fact play the entire first LP of "Live/Dead" here, and the Side A track, "Dark Star", is an exceptionally good performance.  I've left it off, though, because honestly?  Really good Dark Star performances are kind of a dime a dozen, and I didn't want the spectre hanging over this whole set.  In the end, I'm just going to spoil this here, I throw in a pretty decent but fairly brief Dark Star just to get it represented.

What we don't have a lot of is versions of St. Stephen -> The Eleven I can get behind, and this is one of them.  In fact (so soon?), this is the last time they would play The Eleven.  Guess they got it right.  We can't tell for sure, because the tape goes into a brief drum break (I have left these in for breathing room where they are short, and this one is, just over a minute; you need not worry that you will find yourself in an interminable stretch of drums) and then into a jam which abruptly cuts.  End of set!  That's how we do things around Chez Kate.  Get used to it.  I mean, see you after the break.  Don't forget to tip your waitstaff.