Ode To Missoula By Tommy Banjo Oooohhhh Missoula Montana with your fruited plains and big skies... How you once hosted a show of magnificent proportions on a Spring Day in May of 1974! Who knew what was to come with its Bertha opening?.. Even the Scarlet Begonias>Must Have Been The Roses gave not a hint of the 2nd set awaiting you... NO, it was not til the driving, driving Playin in the Band that you had even a glimpse of the Monster 2nd set that graced your fields of grain.. How the Weather Report Suite must have harkened back to Rain Dances of the previous century visited upon by paleface and Indian alike... And let us not forget the Dark Star>China Doll that has made me miss exit after exit over the yr, especially when we found the missing 12 plus minutes. Nay, even with the respite of a Promised land that gave respect to the promised heart land that Montana is, you stood ably by while the band revved right back up to 15 minutes of NFA>GDTRFB ecstacy, only to touch down after One More Saturday Night. Yes, Missoula, you were there, and when it was done, even a massive expanse as yours' was left a little shaken, not stirred by the experience. If you got it, listen to it.
I think Bear was largely correct in his analysis. In neuroscience, it's generally thought that the hallucinations make opaque earlier, "primal" stages of visual processing that are normally transparent in standard visual output. At these earlier stages chaotic visual data is self-organized into a coherent picture of the world in order to reduce entropy in the brain. While on hallucinogens, the earlier stages of visual processing become apparent: "If a subject in a laboratory experiment and under the influence of a hallucinogenic psychoactive substance (say, LSD or 2-CB) observes abstract geometrical patterns on the wall, breathing, and slowly evolving into deeper and ever deeper forms of ineffable beauty, then she will frequently be aware of the representational character of her visual experience in that sub-region of her phenomenal space. Typically, the subject will immediately have doubts about the veridicality of her experiential state, cognitively “bracket” it and take back the “existence assumption,” something which effortlessly goes along with visual experience in standard situations. My claim is that what this subject becomes aware of are earlier processing stages in her visual system. Visual pseudo-hallucinations – the breathing patterns on the wall – are such earlier processing stages. Today, we have the first mathematical models describing the self-organizing dynamics characterizing such unstable states of the visual cortex (e.g., Bressloff, Cowan, Golubitsky, Thomas, and Wiener 2001). These models offer precise predictions about the phenomenological form constants characterizing such simple, context-invariant and opaque sensory states, and they permit certain conclusions about the functional architecture of the visual system. They also give us a first idea of the type of self-organizational dynamics, the actual earlier processing stages, which enable the non-propositional, sub-symbolic form of metarepresentation, which then leads the subject to the experience of opaquely hallucinating." Metzinger, "Phenomenal Transparency and Cognitive Self-Reference"
Maybe I should read that paragraph when I'm trippin', 'cause I didn't understand much of it when I'm not. Was that written by a lawyer, or a physicist, or something?
Basically, I think, the idea is that one is not hallucinating at all but seeing reality before the brain does its cleansing of what is being seen, with its inherent shortcutting of perceptions and tidying up to make it digestible to one's psyche.
It is?! Those are two of their big, huge Jerry ballads. The first thing that really hooked me on the Dead was Jerry ballads, and aside from amazing improvised passages they are the greatest thing about the band. I am surprised and a little troubled to hear there is a perceived lack of appreciation for these among the Deadnoscenti...
Exactly, the organ really makes the studio version, and I like to hear it with Brent. That little organ swell after a lyric really lights the whole thing up.
Ozzie is interesting, that's for sure. I am glad his tenure was brief but I can sort of dig his wild sounds once in a while. They often don't really fit the overall aesthetic, though--Sugaree doesn't lend itself to a prog treatment...
The implication though is that hallucinations are an artifact of sensory processing, not a part of reality that is then filtered out, if by "reality" we mean the objects of sense perception...
Thanks. You'd make a good editor! I didn't feel like putting in the effort to try to decipher it. Makes me wonder though, since so much of this seems visual, what would an LSD experience be like for a lifelong blind person?
JGB 10/31/92 Nice return to form after the cancelled late-summer and fall tour/shows. Ain't No Bread in The Breadbox, mid second set, is a bit slower than usual, and at first it seemed to drag a bit. But once it gets going - holy smokes Batman! Peak jam of the evening for sure. Jerry kicks it up not just a notch, but several notches! Of course the obligatory Werewolves encore was well received. In this case, "Oooh-ooh, werewolves of Oakland!" I got see/hear Jerry sing Werewolves of London at Halloween shows 4 times! JGB 10/31/89 - Concord Pavilion GD 10/31/90 - London! GD 10/31/91 - Oakland JGB 10/31/92 - Oakland
Yes, and if you can't find the matrix that Jeffrey Norman created for the official release, look for the audience tape that Dr. Bob Wagner made (which was used for the audience portion of the matrix). The second set sounds better because he found an ideal position in the balcony for that set, but the first set still is quite listenable as well.
That JGB tape from 10/31/92 (first show back after the cancelled August shows if I recall correctly) made the rounds and quickly became a favorite of mine. I wasn't there for any of those but did see Jerry do Werewolves at Brendan Byrne on 10/31/93, the first show of that late Fall '93 JGB tour, all of which was good to excellent.
Stella got a lot of grief here one day, and I felt isolated and alone. Months of therapy has me living life again, along with the occasional warewolf95 review.
For me. the profound aspect of that has to do with the effect on time perception. I think that subjective time is often assessed by awareness of changes in the surrounding environment- the classic example being clock-watching. Psychedelics introduce that "Zeno's arrow" thing into the cognitive frame of reference...you can look at the hands of a ticking stopwatch in some uh frames of mind, and the watched watch can appear stock-still and silent for who knows how long- while everything around swirls and melts, or flutters at the edges like an early filmstrip. &c., &c. "A watched kettle never boils"- that's another fun one. And when it finally does, the once-stable liquid starts to vaporize, and you lift it off the stove and pour it from the kettle into the cup, and even the metal looks like it's liquid, and steam of the boiling water is, like, sublimating everything around it from solid into vapor, and the cup you're pouring the water into is none too solid either, the ceramic practically looks and feels like wax, and you can't figure out how it's managing to hold up as a container, or why the kettle didn't boil away along with the water... mass = energy divided by the speed of light squared. that's apropos of something.
I saw Garcia on his 50th birthday at Irvine. It was a great show (what I was able to see of it) from my experience. (Security was an absolute disaster that day, with hundreds of people stuck at the gates waiting to get in after the show had already begun. I was pissed.)
I thought most deadheads really liked Stella. Most that I’ve known at least. I know Black Peter isn’t everyone’s cup of tea although count me in on the pro-run-and-see side.
Black Peter was a great tune if you didn't want to miss the drums and space and really needed to hit the head for half a song.
Good piece on various women involved with the Dead over the years, like Betty Cantor, etc. 'Do You Want To Talk To The Man-In-Charge, Or The Woman Who Knows What's Going On?'
Ugh. Yeah those knuckle-dragging security goons at Irvine Meadows were _always_ the worst. Hard to believe it was California, really. Jerry's 50th was a fun one (I felt real lucky to be walking in right at the beginning of "Cats") - but I think I dug the show the next day more down in Chula Vista. Maybe it was the juxtaposition against the militaristic vibe of Irvine, but seeing JGB in the afternoon on a big mellow grass field as families played on beach towels in the sun just seemed...better? I seem to recall thinking the Lay Down Sally was really something at the time but that could've been related to the initials of the same...in slightly different order. ;-)
