I thought 9/8 was better than the previous night. As a matter of fact, I thought the garcia Saunders show on 9/6 was better than the dead 9/7 show.
Ace was re-mastered, I have a version that lights up my HDCD indicator on my Oppo. Ace (Bob Weir) | Grateful Dead
Apologies to whoever it was, but someone on here mentioned the Dave's Vol. 3/21 October '71 Dark Star>SOTOTW>Dark Star the other day. I gave disc 3 of Dave's Vol. 3 a listen to commence my revision for Dave's 26 (if it ever shows up - I'm in the "oh well, I guess it's lost in the post" phase at the moment). I happily accept that I am going easy on the Star because of it being Keith's first and all that, but I really enjoyed it. Each of them are throwing the kitchen sink at it and it gets a bit overwhelming at times but it's great fun hearing Keith trying to run away with things really early on. Jerry goes with him a bit but grabs a hold of things and returns the theme. Throughout it (and the whole disc) Keith keeps going hard - rather than feeling his way, he is bashing through walls. Now, if I heard this Star one one of the Europe shows from six months, I'd probably think it was a mess but in this context, with Keith turned up really loud and everything sounding fresh, even if the group mind is fairly cluttered on this occasion, it's well worth a listen. Funny, because my memory of the last time I listened to it was that it was really bland and boring. Far from it. There aren't enough lulls in it, if anything. Quite remarkable that by just over a week later, things had coalesced sufficiently for them to produce that stunning Halloween Dark Star. Give disc 2 a fair crack. Assuming you have access to them, don't forget the Viola Lee and Schoolgirl from the same show that are contained on Road trips 2.2.
Any Dead.net Memorial Day sale this year? 2-3 years ago my friend scored the all music edition of Europe 72 for 20% off, I’m pretty sure.
Phish really has very little to do with the Grateful Dead...except the spirit of improvisation. But they really started out far more like a tightly composed prog rock unit...IMHO.
I loved all those 90s and early 2000s jambands - Karmic, Ominous Seapods, Uncle Sammy, Percy Hill etc - but in hindsight, I agree with the quote comparing (then) modern jam bands to the Dead from David Gans in the book that comes with Get Shown The Light (specifically the section on ‘Loser’) - “They’ll make you laugh, they’ll make you dance, but they’ll never make you cry.” Edited to add - of course, if you never liked that stuff in the first place, those bands probably didn’t make you laugh or dance either...
DP volume 29 has long been a favorite and I'm mainly speaking of the Atlanta show. Then I finally started paying attention to the Lakeland show, and could not believe the energy the band had. I would compare it to the energy level on DP33 during Day on the Green a year earlier. Which makes the overall of v-29 pretty special. The long Sugaree in hot'lanta is my favorite of all, but if I keep listening to Daves P 18, that spot may change. Jer's play on the Daves, the tone, is some of the best sounding and cleanest guitar tone I've heard him wield.
I think the similarities between '88-'90 GD group improvisation and Phish's group improvisation are absolutely staggering, especially '89. The former clearly helped give birth to the latter. This is a good part of the reason I appreciate the GD I saw live much more now than in the almost 20 years after I saw it. I put it all together for myself during Grateful Dead night at the movies when they showed the Alpine 7/18/89 show. And it makes sense timing-wise because '88 or '89 is when Trey began paying less attention to the GD to concentrate more on his own music. The torch was starting to be passed at that point.
A question about the studio version of Friend of the Devil: I've always assumed that it's Jerry who plays the opening, descending scalar line and it's Bobby who plays the more complicated complimentary line. So, am I right or wrong? While my position may seem counter-intuitive, consider China Cat, where Jerry plays the simple G motif and it's Bobby playing the more complicated part in the upper register (although someone here once informed me that Jerry came up with both parts but obviously couldn't play both at once). IMO, FotD is a good, rare example of the GoGD never being able to come anywhere close to surpassing the studio version live (Unbroken Chain would be another).
As far as I recall, when Jerry sings a song he usually plays the more basic chord changes and often Bobby comes up with, or is fed, a "part." Something like Iko Iko or Brown Eyed Women is not really an exception since Jerry more plays solos over the intro, rather than a fixed part; I would expect in these situations if someone is hewing closely to a strumming thing and someone has an adorning part, that would be Jerry and Bobby respectively. So, I don't think it's counterintuitive. (Scarlet Begonias is the first thing to come to mind besides China Cat. He's Gone. Probably Standing on the Moon, although I can't think of what Bobby plays to that. Franklin's Tower to some extent.) But I'd want to hear it and see if it sounds like Bobby, or like something he's capable of. In the studio, it's possible Jerry did both.
I think you are correct, though the version I'm listening to right now has the mandolin on the left speaker along with 'guitar 1' so it becomes obscured once the mando comes in. However during the bridge, guitar 2 pulls some fills that sound distinctly like Weir's idiom to me.
Seems very likely then. I swear I remember, from one of the books I think, Bobby once saying Jerry "couldn't play rhythm guitar to save his life" or something like that. This is odd, since Jerry is often playing more of a rhythm part than Bobby is. And in Kreutzmann's book, he says the rhythm section was he and Jerry--surely an exaggeration. It is true sometimes, I think, but not all the time. Maybe it was just a jab at Phil and Bobby. In any case, I remember this from the 80s, so it would be from a book or interview that has been out for a long time. Does anyone else recall a quote like that?
Rock Scully said the same thing as Bill in his book, that's part of why they brought in Mickey. I don't remember the Weir quote though. I don't think Garcia's rhythm playing is nearly as distinctive as Weir's (duh,) but he comps time and plays chords well enough. Easy Wind is a good one to hear Garcia playing rhythm, as well as the jam out of China Cat c. 1970-74. You can get a sense of his approach with more challenging material in some of the Garcia/Saunders shows too, where he backs up Merle or the saxophone. You're right above though, during songs he sings he tends to play chords or boxy runs while Weir plays more intricate stuff. Someone who is listening to FOTD on a better system can probably confirm (or refute) this, but it sounds like Garcia is playing bluegrass style picking runs on that tune, not just strumming chords, while Weir plays his repeated figure. @Archtop I can't find the source right now, but Weir said sometime that China Cat was the one example he could come up with of a song where Garcia taught him his part.
That all depends on what you mean by "HDCD". There are a couple of other forum topic threads devoted to this, but most listeners use the term "HDCD" to mean a disc that sounds better decoded by an HDCD decoder than not decoded. OTOH, the Grateful Dead studio CD's (like many other CD's also labelled "HDCD") sound exactly the same "decoded" or not.
Perhaps more amazing is that more Phish fans are not into the Grateful Dead. But perhaps neither idea is surprising; musically the groups are quite different.
I think one needs to be really familiar with both to hear the musical similarities as they lay in the execution and not so much the sounds--a passing familiarity with one or both of the bands will not reveal it. There are immediately obvious similarities of course, two sets, "hippy band" and Trey's playing suggests Jerry's here and there, in moments and some phrases. But he takes just as much, if not more, from C. Santana. Listening to 3/28/81 Rockpalast so I can finally pay close attention to the NFA through OMSNight with P. Townshend, assuming it merits it. I'm loving DB 50, maybe because I've never had one before.
