Enthusiasts, I have recommended this indelible offering from 1973 before; it’s just that marvelous. 9/26/73 from the War Memorial Auditorium in Buffalo, NY, is a delight of a show. Less of a delight: Harvey Weinstein was the concert’s promoter.
(War Memorial Auditorium is a wonderfully generic name for an arena. Did the designers call it that as a placeholder, but neglect to circle back around and punch it up? And by the time they remembered, the stone had been chiseled? Unless there’s a Revolutionary War hero from Buffalo named Instance Starchroot War and the building’s in his honor. If that’s the case, then I apologize to General War’s descendants.)
It is a horn show, Enthusiasts. If I may be permitted some wanton capitalizing–
You may not.
–it is a Horn Show, baby.
Ugh. The horn shows are failed experiments and curiosities, at best.
You lie.
AT BEST.
The Horn Shows were splendid, the Horn Shows were great; the Horn Shows befriended my weary prostate.
Ew.
There were eight Horn Shows, all during a ten-date tour in September of 1973, and they are fantastic. The Dead had invited folks up to toodle on the trumpets or twiddle their flutes before, but this was different. This was a trumpet and sax–the typical Rock and Roll configuration, give or take a trombone–and their part in the arrangements was to be counter-punchy, and blippative, and overly dramatic. Just like all the other bands’ horn sections. Just like, say Huey Lewis’ News.
Except the Grateful Dead are bush league, and therefore did not rehearse, or even write up charts in the first place. By the Buffalo show–the last of the run–trumpeter Joe Ellis and saxophonist Martin Fierro–have resigned themselves to BAPBAP stabs during choruses, and they’d solo during Eyes, and nothing worked at all ever not for one note; the musicians all seem angry with one another. It is glorious. I’m sure there’s at least several “jam bands with horn section” acts touring the festivals this summer. I am not saying that the feat cannot be performed. I am saying that the Grateful Dead and the Keep On Truckin’ Horns could not accomplish the feat of mixing the Dead’s music with the traditional Rock and Roll horn section.
But they tried. Not their hardest, as that would imply rehearsal, but they tried a little bit.
Want to read more about the Horn Shows? Visit your local library, and eat the librarian. Eat all of the librarians. Surrender quietly. Society will place you in a facility. It may be prison. It will more likely be the booby hatch. Behave while incarcerated. Earn privileges, such as internet access. When you are permitted to once again visit the information superhighway, then click here to read Lost Live Dead’s far, far better telling of the Tale of the Horn Shows than mine. You’re welcome, and remember: Reading Is Fundamentalist!
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