All about the Grateful Dead... and then some

Well I have to admit that I know nothing about The Dead. I’ve been saving myself in case it’s all too much. But I love the Allman Brothers in all of their wonderful glory. The highlight for me was finding the glorious Derek and The Dominoes Layla boxed set with the Allmans jams on it. I get a lump in my throat every time I play it.

So what’s a good place for a young lad such as mesself to start with The Grateful Dead without my losing interest. I need a quick fire fix of hippyesque extended jamming with some knock out guitar fireworks to get me started. Anybody? (AXE Victim)

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Friday Night Cage Match/Fondue Party/Evolving Conversation/Dancing About Architecture Vol.15

Posted on 27 Jun 2008 at 06:18 pm Under: Desert Island, Entertainment, Guitar, Hunh?, Icon?, Music, Pop Culture, Ramble

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Hippyesque extended jamming doesn’t come in quick fixes, axe. It comes in huge chunks. The cheap way to proceed is The GD Archive on Archive.org.

I’m told that, for live Dead stuff, the album to get is Europe ‘72. Also, Live Dead. My complete Dead collection is American Beauty, Reckoning and Hundred Year Hall. I used to have Workingman’s Dead and might get it again.

I like the American Beauty Dead a lot more than the deep improvisational Dead, but that’s me. (Sans Direction)

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Axe, I am being too aggressive this week… trying the impossible, which is to get the last word on these guys… I apologize to you.

I would say this in a psychological preamble — the Dead — I suggest one think of a group of children who have just learned how to dress themselves. They are only a group of scruffy young rascals, barely past playing mumbly peg… Then they have to learn how to go on stage even when they don’t want to. Their politics springs from rugged individualism.

Then they have to learn about girls and female needs to caboodle. But debts grow and your drummer’s dad runs off with all the money. Then become unready, unskilled fathers, the children they create are part of the back stage rabble, which I think might be the first ever Day Care for single parents fighting custody cases. So you must bear down, and work harder, make more tours.

As tension increases, some wealthy roadie on sabbatical shows you that to get the families and Band all moving to the next poorly rigged sound stage somewhere in Louisiana, that here is a cocktail of pharmaceuticals that one can use to be mellow. And here is another package that makes you a better than average lover… and here is the best cocktail to delay your stage fright, or reluctance.

For us hippie dippy types in attendance, we learned to rely on a new phenom — the contact high; it is a guarantee of going to Dead concerts.

Then when the band feels the rewards of a job well done, and look a little contented, disaster comes in threes. “Show me a contented man and I will show you a catastrophe in the making,” some one once said.

–As band member, your small cult following turns into millions who each feels entitled to a piece of you.

–Many of those are soldiers who are actually living your name, who end up memorialized as the Dead.

–Others who opted to not go to Vietnam begin copying the folklore of your work, adapt your ethics to their own path, and killing each other, and themselves over rhymes that you have made.

Pandemic of remorseful homeless Dead Heads walk around San Francisco humming your songs; by 1977 the whole thing has imploded. And China is still red, as is Vietnam, and Russia still thinks it can make more refrigerators than the USA. Gerald Ford falls down regularly as acting President, because Nixon is not a Crook.

If you are a fan who somehow wheedles through the drug misuse and standard packages of STD’s, and you have a rich old man, you finally get your accounting degree. You become a partner, and owner, and have a couple of above-average kids, with a spouse twelve years younger than you. You are a good husband because lord knows you sowed your wild oats long before settling down.

Funny thing is there is no plan in existence for any of this to have happened as it did. Every plan that was presented during ‘64 to ‘77 has failed. Presidents, Civil Rights Leaders, Ministers murdered, others disgraced, and the rest running for their lives after being elected… grief trickling all the way down to the lowest denominator the young Dead offspring growing up in the wake of this disaster of an era.

So the music is of course rich and fantastic. The songs written are real, and complex as well as efficient. Only the strongest survived, and well that’s my story for you Axe. It wasn’t a bloodless civil war, by any stretch. (Pat Darnell and Friends)