Dear Dead Diary:
So I’ve taken a little break from posting. It doesn’t mean I haven’t listened to the Grateful Dead non-stop since my last post.
I just needed some time to consolidate my thinking.
I’m sure I’ll drop my standards soon, but it will be fun someday to look back and see my earlier, obviously wrongheaded views in print.
So here goes.
First, this band played way too many shows of much too long a duration for way too many years.
Second, this band and its fans enthusiastically killed the golden goose.
Third, the golden goose had his own issues that led him to prefer working himself to death (by playing music) rather than doing something else.
Fourth, something happened to Jerry’s voice somewhere between 1978 and 1981, I haven’t worked through that era yet, but his vocals pre- and post- that event, whatever it was, are completely obvious within 5 seconds of listening.
Fifth, starting in the eighties, the crowd sounds more like a typical rock crowd, in terms of the intensity of the cheering, you can hear the hero worship and stridency (it happened across many bands, if not all of them). It’s pretty stunningly obvious after having listened to a couple of months of 70s shows exclusively.
I could go on, Dear Diary, but there’s the gist of it.
My basis for being a curmudgeon is all right there. But at least no one can say I only like the era I recall from my youth, or of the shows I attended, or the music that accompanied my young romances, because there was no Grateful Dead for me in any of those years. Well, almost none.
I have probably listened to only 20 songs where Brent sings, thus far. I recall that the Eighties were keyboard-centric, and hated them contemporaneously as well as ever since.
It is not a good sign that I don’t like Mr. Mydland’s singing at all. Very Eighties, over-singing without a good voice drives me nuts. And the Dead’s originals from that era are too keyboard-driven for me.
So I’m worrying here a bit, although it would be a relief not to have so much to wade through in such detail.
I think the path here is to stay focused on the Seventies for now, with brief forays into the late 60s and the Pigpen era for some relief.
I’m listening to Hey Pocky Way, whatever that is, from So Many Roads, if that helps explain anything . . .
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July 1, 2009 at 13:41
Mark in Chicago
I’ve said it before, but it bears repeating: I completely agree with you about the decline in the Dead, with two caveats: the late 80′s and early 90′s were better (though still not anywhere near what the band did in the 60′s through the mid-70′s); and, more importantly, late 80′s and early 90′s JGB is magnificent. So too is Jerry’s work with David Grisman in that same period. If you avoid JGB and Garcia/Grisman because of your rightful despair over the decline of the Dead, you will be missing out on some of the best music Jerry made.
June 30, 2009 at 17:04
HalSF
First off, thanks for your blog — your Dead explorations are coinciding with my own enthusiastic re-immersion after many, many years off the bus. What a great band, and how much joy there is to discover! Your voice and fresh responses — unhampered by weary overexposure and self-censorship, lacking that overdetermined devotion to Deadcult pieties — are refreshing and useful.
I was born in San Francisco, grew up in Redwood City, and went to college at Berkeley in the 1970s, so the Dead were local heroes with a huge, planetary gravitational pull for me. I was lucky enough to attend a bunch of Bay Area shows between 1972 and 1978, and I got to hear plenty of JG Band and Kingfish shows and FM broadcasts along the way.
In 1980 I moved to NYC and for all intents and purposes left the Grateful Dead behind. Somewhere, for me, amid the trip to Egypt, the burning out and ejection of the Godchaux’s, the arrival of Brent, the hideous Blues Brothers alliance, and the insidious infiltration (unknown to me then) of heroin, the Dead lost its sparkle for me. No great new songs. Too many half-sludgy, plodding post-’77 shows. Too much repetition. And yep, the decline of Jerry’s other great instrument, his singing voice, as it thickended and clotted and lost it’s range and tone.
Just about the only stuff from the last 15 years of the Grateful Dead that I truly love are the beautiful version of “Days Between” and the heartbreaking 7/9/95 “So Many Roads” that both appear at the end of the So Many Roads box — and they’re possible the saddest, most funereal pieces of music I know. The final flights of those wild geese in the west, golden but dying.
I’m still coming to terms with all the younger fans who encountered the Dead in the 80′s and 90′s and fell in love with that long, bright comet tail, and I don’t begrudge them a bit of their enthusiasm and high times. But every time I ask those latter-day fans to play me a show that holds a candle to something from February 1969, or April 1971, or April-May 1972, or November 1973, or May and October 1977, I listen and have to shake my head.
Anyway, keep trusting your instincts and insights, keep listening, and keep writing! I’m loving it.
July 1, 2009 at 05:54
Me
HalSf, thanks for taking the time to comment and for your kind words.
I think in the end this blog will say more about me (a pretty uninteresting subject for most people) than about the Grateful Dead, but I am fascinated at how we define our lives and our selves through our relationship to these kinds of standard touchstones.
It’s interesting how you see the Dead as losing their way in the late 70s/early 80s, a pretty barren time culturally if I say so myself (I am college ’83 and high school ’79, so I have a vested interest in those times being cool, but they really weren’t).
The path for a rock band through and past those times was a minefield for most.
Once rock became self-referential and self-conscious it was never really the same. In many ways, the Dead blazed the path of “new authenticity” with their frequent, interminable Not Fade Away jams ( a favorite whipping boy of mine) and the like. Nothing glamorous there. But it blazed a path away from corporate rock to a degree.
What fascinates me is that the whole Dead thing is insular — everything is compared within the world of Dead shows, all captured. No one ever says Garcia played a better solo than Clapton could on this song or that.
As a newb, I still put on other music and think “wow, how direct, punchy and enjoyable that was.” Other guitarists were improvising great solos every night too — just not in such an overt and earnest way.
So many roads to go down, and I’m just getting started.
I see myself moving into my adolescence as a Dead fan — questioning and critiquing to feel my way forward. Thanks for the encouragement.