Our favorite teacher, Professor Jenny Boylan, on our favorite songish piece of music, Dark Star. Today’s the 50th anniversary of the Live/Dead version, which some profess to be Best EVAR, and others merely know by heart.
Hey, here it is!
Musings on the Most Ridiculous Band I Can't Stop Listening To
Tag: dark star (Page 1 of 3)
We may argue (good-naturedly, of course) about the BEST EVAR Dark Star. 10/31/70? The nearly hour-long journey to the center of Rotterdam from the Europe ’72 tour? The out-of-nowhere brilliance of 1/10/79? Cleveland ’72? Cleveland ’73?
If we’re honest: the best Dark Star is the one you’re listening to at the moment.
Unless you’re listening to this one: 12/31/81 from the Oakland Auditorium. Now, I’ve not listened to most of the 90’s Dark Stars because my time on this planet is finite, but none of them can possibly be as half-assed as this version. It is the dictionary definition of “ehh, fuck it.”
The rest of the show is worth a listen (and so is the DS: a bad Dark Star is still fucking Dark Star, maaaaaan), all three sets of it.
WARNING: Joan Baez.
BONUS: the recording I’ve linked to is courtesy of FoTotD David Gans, whose wonderful oral history of the band This is All a Dream We Dreamed can be purchased right over there on the sidebar.
If you’re still on the fence about Cleveland Dark Star, then know this: the Dead does not get around to actually playing the Dark Star part of Dark Star until they are 21 minutes into the Cleveland Dark Star.
And, sure: most of humanity would hear that fact and say, “No, please, none of that for me; I’d rather watch pandas try to cross the freeway.”
But we are different.
From an esteemed and pedigreed source comes this: A 10-hour supercut of all the Dark Star from ’72. Like me, I’m sure, you’ve often wondered, “How much Dark Star was in 1972?” Here is the answer to the question: this much.
I am reminded of the classic cocktail party game for spotting sociopaths: your mother dies and at the funeral you meet the love of your life. you have never met this person before, and they disappear without exchanging information with you. How do you get in touch with this person.
The answer is, of course, “Kill your father and meet the person at the funeral.” It’s supposed to snoop out psychos, but it always seemed more like a riddle than a true psych evaluation to me.
How do you tell a True Enthusiast: upon hearing there’s a 10-hour supercut of all the ’72 Dark Stars, you immediately ask if there will be one for ’73, as well.
Jeremiah watches and keeps the count; he has always done so.
Did you think Jeremiah abandoned his post after the last notes seeped out of the crumbling building and soaked into the parked cars along Steiner Street, tangled with the early morning feral cats patrolling Post? Walked away as if his job was done?
Foolish to think so.
On that first day after the SF Dark Star, Jeremiah slept late. He still had a “1” posted in the number section of the banner by mid-morning, though. This was his task; it had just begun and had been going on for quite some time.
He watched the city come and go, boom and bust: San Francisco was always beautiful despite her chill, and still gritty no matter how much cash flowed up and down Market.
Jeremiah watched men and woman fall in love, marry, raise children, die: all without an SF Dark Star and this saddened him. Would he be the last one left? Were there no more encores left in the evening?
He was there watching during the Big One, the 9.2 that broke and burned California. The Golden Gate was his hero: four cables snapped, that’s all–she braved the cataclysm and earned herself a scar. The Oakland bay Bridge, on the other hand, collapsed instantly. Thousands died in simply the most horrifying way you can picture. Jeremiah tried hard to concentrate on the silver lining
Keep the days straight, an eye on the horizon, an ear to the ground, a shoulder to the wheel, nose to the grindstone, nipples to the polling place: watch and keep the count, Jeremiah. Watch and keep the count.
There were men all around him at first and the guy selling blue jeans and white t-shirts must have been doing some business. And there were more men and more. And then there weren’t as many. Jeremiah had no idea where these men were disappearing to, but it must have been overflowing. Perhaps there was a Dark Star there. If there was, he would hear.
Jeremiah watched the men and women and children of San Francisco leave, supplanted by guys. Workers. Callow punks who talked about disrupting society. Jeremiah knew about disruption: the SF Dark Star.
Everybody’s going to want a dose.
The techies left right after the money left; San Francisco was ceded back to the whores and merchants who founded her and the city went back to smoking dope and sheltering runaways. Jeremiah liked it better this way, but he was not a critic. He watched, kept the count.
Jeremiah was there for the Robolution, when the city more than held her own as it turns out that anyplace built on a series of 20 degree inclines is eminently defensible. He was there for the Hobolution, when the homeless people started punching dicks for social justice.
He was there when the AI that runs the trolley cars became self-aware and the cars leapt off their tracks and started humping each other.
Could an SF Dark Star have helped ay of these things? Jeremiah believed so, but it was just belief. There had been so very many days since the last SF Dark Star.
There would be another, though. There’s always another SF Dark Star.
Jeremiah watches and keeps the count; he will always do so.
Dark Star would have been a lot better with a breakdown section in which each of the band members was introduced with an inside joke and an instrumental flourish and then the horns come in: BWAAAA-doo-duh-TWOOOO and then Garcia karates the fuck out of everything.
Just a thought. ON THE DEAD.
Oh, fuck you.
Dave’s Pick 10 has arrived; my copy fell off the back of the internet today because information wants to be FREE, man. Jeffrey Norman prefers to get paid, however, so there will be no link to the back-alley version of this latest Official Release.
December 12th, 1969, at Thelma in Los Angeles . Not, of course, “The Thelma Theater” or whatever: just Thelma because someone had skimmed some Aleister Crowley. (Crowley was always ranting about Thelma, but it’s just Greek for “will” and whenever anyone dared question Crowley about his latest lunatic mountain-climber pansexual junkie escapade, he would proclaim himself the King of Black Magic by the Law of Thelma, which basically meant “You don’t know me: I do what I want,” but, you know: EEEEEE-vil.)
The place was right next to where the Viper Room is today and across from where the Whiskey a-Go-Go was (and still is and always will be until California slides into the ocean) and only lasted a few months because it was run by people who would leave the word “theater” out of the name of a theater and three guesses whether that sort of dude is good at paying bills on time and/or not getting busted.
It’s a Panini place now, according to the googles: when I lived in Los Angeles, it was–and I promise you this is true–an oxygen bar owned by Woody Harrelson. People would go and breathe pure, flavored O2 and eat tapas and socialize and then go home and fucking kill themselves. One night, vandals snuck in with a tank of hydrogen and turned the place into a water park. (That last part is not true, but it’s a damn good joke.)
Not a review–the thing’s sold out and if you’re reading this, you’re going to listen to it–just some random thoughts on a first listening.
- Between this and Dave’s Picks 6, I think we’ve covered December of 1969 quite thoroughly. October of ’77: that’s a good month to release 20% of the Picks so far, but no: December ’69. That is a choice and TotD publicly supports it.
- While we’re at it: no more 35-minute Lovelights. How many minutes long should Lovelight be? Call it the blackjack rule: anything over 21’s a bust (usually.)
- I cannot bring myself to go to Dead.net’s forums. First, because they’re impossible to find; and second, nothing can be released/announced/rumored over there without releasing the Kraken that is: the 80’s Truther. Unearth a trove from the late-60’s? 80’s Truther wants to know why you’re keeping 1983’s glories under wraps.
- THEY PLAYED THE CHINA>RIDER TRANSITION IN ’69? Dark Star, 12 minutes in, bonus disc. Learn something new every day.
- I was listening to some January ’68 the other day, stuff from the Pacific Northwest Quick and the Dead tour, and it’s amazing how much different they sound two years later, how much different you can hear them wanting to sound. But they’re not quite there yet: they haven’t quiiiiite learned how to play actual human songs. The early strategy for getting through, say, Cumberland Blues seems to be, “Go!” Five minutes later, “What happened?”
- The Next Time You See Me, with Garcia and Pig on twin lead vocals, is so slow it could be a musical tribute to the famous pitch-drop experiment.
- As most Enthusiasts will know, the Dead weren’t at first good at changing tempos. Nor did they ever get any better at it. In fact, even a casual music fan would rightly describe them as laughably bad at it. They just never seemed to do it all at the same time was the problem, so most of the time, everyone buy Garcia would stop playing and then he would change the tempo, and then Billy would goose it up a bit, and then everyone would jump back in. There was far less chance of a train wreck that way. Which made Easy Wind an often more comical than musical part of the show. The Dead, however, solve the problem this night by simply not playing any of the time changes and just doing the whole song slow as fuck. (The closing jam is great, though.)
- The bonus disc is absolute Hall of Fame: The Dark Star>St. Stephen>Eleven suite. Into Cumberland Blues. Like you do.
- The fact that a recording that was made by a hallucinating techie as a private reference so the band could listen to themselves now sounds so good: that’s as close to magic as you can get. There were a couple of Dick’s Picks on the iffy side, sonically, but not this latest series. As with the rest of the Picks, you can hear the room, get a sense of the band’s location in space. This thing’s as well-made as Queen Elizabeth’s dildos.
- Serious about the Lovelight thing. Live/Dead Lovelight? Fifteen minutes. That’s plenty. Dark Star was about the majesty of existence and terror of an uncaring universe. Lovelight is a song about getting a woman to let you stick it in her for a while. Don’t misunderstand me: these are equally powerful ideas; they’re just not equally complex.
Boxing Day in Texas 1969 at the McFarlin Auditorium on the campus of SMU.
Billy is still on an airplane, so they give the longhairs some country music to open up: an always-fun Monkey and the Engineer, an out-of-tune All Around This World, and a one-time only rendition of The Master’s Bouquet.
Then there is a Dark Star>New Speedway Boogie. Dark Star>New Speedway Boogie is a thing that happened, it was recorded, and I am pointing it out to you to enjoy.
But yet you are still here. Go to the enjoyment: it calls you, and offers mai tais and tittyfucking.
You have to know it off with that.
What’s bad about either of those things?
Absolutely nothing. It’s just the repetition makes it weird.
…
Bloody mary and a lubed-up armpit?
Eww.
I am listening to a mirror being shattered by an arrow–I am listening to the universe wink at me and chuck me in an avuncular fashion under my chin.
I am listening to a goddamn miracle. The program playing the FLAC files has glitched, or perhaps gained self-awareness and declared itslef aligned with Chaotic Good and the Answer Man alone could solve the riddle of whether or not we should go, you and I.
Keen-eyed Enthusiasts will have spotted that Fillmore South is having a bit of a love affair with the Baby Dead, and today was all about 1969. The picture in the last post inspired a trip to 4/21/69 at Boston’s The Ark and when the needle skipped to Dark Star, an amazing thing happened: Dark Star and St. Stephen began simultaneously and if the Dead were ever the Cosmic Symphony, they were for a brief moment being conducted by Charles Ives.
This was, accidentally, one step beyond Anthem for the Sun, with its quadrophonic clones battling each other to the death over the soundscape as they clattered their way through the Anthem suite. It was even beyond the tragically overlooked work of art Greyfolded by John Oswald. That record (which you should own, and don’t argue with me or I’ll turn this internet around) used the 30 years of Dark Stars as the paint and canvas for an impressionistic take on just who exactly did those Grateful Deads even think they were, anyway.
These were two completely different songs; surely, the result will not only not be good, but will in fact be intolerable
But it worked. The two songs are in different keys, DS in D and Stephen in A, but they are related keys and, while not being entirely consonant, the effect produced a constantly unresolved chord, note after note failing to resolve properly, because there was no place to resolve to in this scary new world.
Each song has dynamics, a wide range of shout-y parts and ooky-spooky quiet passages, so they vied for sonic territory, battling with the musicians most trusted weapon, volume. Stephen fades out entirely for a moment , only to shatter the tranquility of the quiet jam after Dark Star’s first verse with the 1.21 gigawatt blast of Mickey’s snare signalling that The Eleven was soon to rush to the stage, off-balance and out of whack yet stylish, like a one-legged alcoholic in a tuxedo.
They rushed back and forth, these two Dead classics did, like two oceans meeting: the waves crashed and warred above the surface, but below there was just water and all water is the same, in the same way that everything beautiful is the same.
I wish I could play it for you. Perhaps one of my readers, tall and handy and sexually-charged that they all are, could mash these two things together. It sounds like a thing that could be done fairly easily, maybe even by me. but I don’t know if I want to.
There is still a little bit of magic in this used-up world. But you should never watch a magic trick twice.
You know me, my fellow Enthusiasts: I don’t care much for the hard sell. Shows will be reviewed and recommended; it’s what you do with a show and, besides, my sneaking suspicion is that the rest of you are as desperately unnerved by the dangerous task of choosing the next show as I am.
It always sneaks up on me. I’ll suddenly perk up around the Box Back Nitties or the opening chords of the Bobby Rocker and realize thattime has drawn nigh: out of the over two thousand shows the Dead played, my task–my duty!–is to select only one. The pressure, the anxiety, the fear: these things lay upon my shoulders like a cape of torment, or a shawl of agony, or a light jacket of woe.
Easily sixty percent of the pointless Dead-related meandering around the internet, used book stores, and Dennis McNally’s house when he’s on vacation that I do is just looking for a recommendation for the next show. The other forty percent is spent trying to find out what actually did become of the baby.
And when I find something good, it thrills me, inspires me, seduces me, adopts me, raises me, has a falling out with me, becomes sadly estranged for years from me, and then reunites in the face of illness with me. I never wanted to write a straightforward review of a show for you: those multi-page exegeses that used to appear in DeadBase always smacked of homework to me. A Dead show must never be an assignment.
(By the way, if we’re going to keep allowing that dumbass “tape traders were the first social network” thought to stagnate, then we must also accept that the editors and contributors to DeadBase were the first Sabrmetricians.)
But 11/7/69 at the Fillmore Auditorium deserves a bit more cheerleading. The set list and the big thematic/modular jams are mostly identical to the legendary next evening, but there’s something special about this show. Does it surpass the 11/8? No, of course not: what could? Perhaps it doesn’t even equal it; instead, the shows complement each other.
So, in lieu of my usual half-remembered notions about the first set that degenerates rapidly into Dickpunching Billy material TotD presents actual reasons to listen to this great show:
- The first set is light years ahead of the next night, with tighter playing, better vocals (I won’t mention the 11/8 Cumberland Blues if you won’t).
- Except for Mama Tried, when Bobby is reduced to faking his way through the melody with a combination of grunts, hums, and nonsense syllables. It’s doesn’t sound as though he doesn’t know the song, no: it sounds like Bobby is unfamiliar with the concept of language itself. In his defense, they had only been playing the tune for five months. In favor of the prosecution is the fact that they played the song every damn night in those five months. On September 27th, they played it twice.
- A very special rendition of Next Time You See Me, featuring Pig and Garcia on lead vocals. They sing the whole song together, with Garcia taking a casual harmony line that, on second listening, is actually rather clever and blends perfectly with Pig’s occasionally loosey-goosey relationship with pitch.
- The middle of the first set contains what can only be described as a tuning-thon. Love those kooky little familiar melodies that the Dead sometimes burst into? What if they did it, like, 17 times in a row? Would that be something you’re interested in? (I’m exaggerating slightly, but just.)
- In the same technical difficulty portion of the show, Phil performs and act of complete Phil-ness. He becomes one with himself. He assumes his final form. There is a ringing sound in the hall, and instead of telling Bear (who, if you pay attention, seems to cause about 70% of the problems he then solves) the approximate note location of the ring, or playing it on his bass, or singing it, Phil instead identifies the frequency of the sound wave’s amplitude. Yes, Phil has perfect pitch, but being able to tell the number of times a sound wave oscillates between its domain and its range is fucking creepy, man. What is it like to hear the world like Phil? It must be like when Neo was first able to see the Matrix.
- The China>Rider is one of the best early versions of the diptych the Dead ever played; it is possibly HOF material. Once again, credit goes to Phil: he is total command of the songs from the weird way he comes in the song backwards to his authoritative runs up to the high desert of the fretboard where mortal bass players fear to tread.
- The second set is where it gets tough to root for 11/7 on a purely rational basis, and instead must consciously resolve to root for the doomed underdog that will always be overshadowed by its more accomplished, better-liked sibling.. This is not tough for me; I am a New York Giants fan. The 11/7 second set is superb, especially the Dark Star, which ends deep in the land of insect fear. This is not a Dark Star to be listened to with the lights off. It, too, contains the wordless Uncle John’s theme, but for barely half of the time they spend the following evening with the melody that would become their first ever minor hit record.
- This is not to discount the older of our sister shows: every musical bet they made paid off, but on the second night, they were betting the rent money. The 11/7 Other One>Lovelight is the dictionary definition of Baby Dead: if the opening riff of TOO can be placed into the category of Phil Bombs, then these notes are the napalm terror-fuckers from the first minutes of Apocalypse Now and then a great and sudden and inevitable and completely unforeseeable ascent into the raving, good-time shake-your-booty of Lovelight, a rip-roarer clocking in at 25 minutes and containing, like, 12 instances of Pig doing that “WAIT A MINUTE” thing he did
There would be no encore.
Just listen to the music
© 2024 Thoughts On The Dead
Theme by Anders Noren — Up ↑
Recent Comments