The Dead

If I'm going to write about music I should probably write about what I've been actually listening to.  This weekend that's been the Grateful Dead.  I have spent hours trying to explain, to justify - primarily to myself, but also to my friends, many of  whom, in their younger years, hated the Dead as loudly and openly as I did - why this change.  Of all the changes in my life - and there have been many - this, more than all of them, defies my explanation, my rational understanding.  I'm afraid, really, afraid of becoming a terrible person, and the way to become a terrible person is to have no standards at all, no core beliefs.  Hating the Dead was as close to a musical core belief as I had.

Reminder to self: Whether one is a "good" or "bad" person has no correlation whatsoever with what records one listens to.  That five-point scale tracks "openness to experience", and I'm pretty high on that scale, but there is no betrayal of any meaningful principles implied by listening to the Dead.

So what's left is my trying to explain why it is I listen to them and exploring some of the deeper corners of their music.  Rather than write about why I like them from scratch I believe I will append, at the end of this post, a couple message board posts I wrote a couple weeks ago talking about what I hear in the Dead.  My thinking constantly changes and what I wrote a couple years ago doesn't necessarily represent what I feel today, but a couple weeks ago?  Close enough.

What has struck me this weekend... this weekend I've been, as is my wont, delving into the duskier corners of the Dead's music.  The past few decades - since '95 at least - have involved the collective building of a shared canon, one that is often explicitly at odds with attempts to make the music commercially available.  The cornerstones of this canon, as of 2020, seem to be the show from 1977-05-08 and 1972-08-27, both of which only saw commercial release relatively recently.

Which meant that a lot of my exploration thus far has actually involved reaching out to commercially released shows, the old Dick's Picks, many of which were criticized on their release because all the heads had their own favorite shows and were miffed when shows that weren't those shows got released.  I run into them by chance, browsing headyversion for the most-loved version of this song or that.

And half the time I wind up disappointed.  I can appreciate a lot of the acclaimed stuff, even love some of it, but coming to them late I've got a well-developed taste for grungy bootlegs.  You don't get that with Dick's Picks.  The closest you will find is, say, an early '68 tape from a grungy bowling alley somewhere in the Pacific Northwest, which is a little rough around the edges but still sounds disappointingly clean and well-mannered compared to, say, early '70s tapes of Earth and Fire or Arthur Brown's Kingdom Come, which is the sort of stuff that's my typical bread and butter.

Turns out you need say only two words to get into territory most Deadheads still won't touch: "audience tape".  Fair enough.  For most people, you have all these hours of top-notch playing in pristine sound quality - why go furthur?  Unless, like me, you're interested in the way the sound is mediated by the technology.  That's the heart of the bootlegs for me - the shows, even the soundboards, can often have radically different mixes, with different members of the band present, absent, inaudible.  What would Hendrix's Woodstock set be like if you could hear the conga players?  What's the difference between the Velvets' "Legendary Guitar Amp Tape" and the other tape of the show made by someone who _wasn't_ sitting in front of Lou's guitar amp - and which one would you rather listen to?

Fortunately the people who go for this thing tend to be pretty vocal.  Also fortunately there are people who will listen to fucking _anything_ the Dead did as long as it's called "Dark Star".  This was how I found my way to the 1970-05-08 tape.  This tape!  This is the bootleg sound I crave.  With the Velvets, at least, one of the weird things about them was that the worse the sound quality is, the better they sound.  Certain of the Grateful Dead's recordings share that tendency.  If people prefer "Dark Star" not sound like Les Rallizes Denudes, I can understand that, but me, I am not among those people.

Here's my earlier writing from a couple weeks ago on Why I Like The Dead:

My personal starting point is that I like terrible music.  There are a lot of ways people come up with euphemisms for different sorts of awfulness but there is a lot of music that I like while acknowledging that it is, on some level, completely awful.  "White Light/White Heat", for instance, that is an absolutely terrible sounding record, or if that doesn't go far enough for you, we can talk, I don't know, Metal Machine Music, or "Flames of Ice" by Les Rallizes Denudes.  These are records I like.  I also like a lot of the later work of Brian Wilson, who after 1967 wrote a great deal of songs that are, really, just terrible songs.  I'm talking about songs like "Games Two Can Play" from "Adult/Child", an extremely belated riff on Joe South's "Games People Play" where he in the middle of the song out of nowhere exclaims "I'm fat as a cow, how'd I ever get this waaaay?"

I don't like these songs _because_ they are terrible.  I feel like it's a common misconception people get, that just because I listen to and enjoy terrible music that I have no standards.  I like this music because its brilliance and awfulness is inseparable, because as I get older I find that my greatest strengths and my greatest weaknesses are two sides of the same coin.  Because nobody but Brian Wilson could ever possibly write a song like "Games Two Can Play".

Well, the Grateful Dead's music is probably more explicable and comprehensible than "Games Two Can Play" is, if only because of that fucking bridge.  But it is, for me, definitely a matter of absence rather than presence, it's lacking in what I had thought and assumed were essential elements in making music listenable.

I'm just putting on right now a random track of theirs... them doing "Not Fade Away" at Boston Music Hall on 1971-12-01.  And it is just so frankly bizarre.  The audience just starts screaming and going wild and right out of the gate it's clear to me that this is an absolutely, unquestionably, terrible version of "Not Fade Away".  I listen to other versions of it I have sitting around and this is... this is kind of a hard song to fuck up?  It's got this incredibly basic and rock-solid beat, this propulsive energy to it, and if you fuck it up you're usually left with a snoozefest or something lethargic but here, there's this just implicit fuck-you in the way they're playing it.  It's not necessarily the vocals - I mean there are honestly a lot of bands that have kind of ragged harmony vocals, that's a rock thing - but the musicianship is just as "ragged", which is to say there's no groove, there's no pocket, they're the exact opposite of "locked in".  The term "professionally incompetent" comes to mind, but not in the sense that they're shit at their jobs, but in the sense that being this shitty _is_ their job, a job they take very seriously and are very, very good at.

[re: lack of forward propulsion in their music]

i think that's another good point about forward propulsion!  most people when they play are, you know, going somewhere, you get the sense that they have a destination in mind, and that's what frustrated me so much about the grateful dead - the phrase "aimless jamming" came to mind a lot.  and it's something i just had to learn to accept, that their aimlessness is an essential part of their appeal.  for me, the dead at their best don't do crescendos, don't do build and release, every moment exists for its own sake.  maybe they just had no short-term memory, i don't know, but it's something i appreciate about them.  everything is fucked, there's no consolation in the past or the future, the only joy possible is to live in the now.  and that's on some level a bleak, nihilistic way to live, but it's also liberating.  it fits with my personal philosophy as i live it, of being the best me i can be in any given moment, of not being afraid to make mistakes, and of asking nothing more of myself.