121. 1971-11-15 youtube Austin, TX 20:40 (Dark Star 12:55>El Paso>Dark Star 7:49) Main theme at 6:44. First verse at 7:05. Goes into El Paso and then Casey Jones. The music begins with a confident languor that is quite affecting. Keith is a bit louder this time out, which is good. There is a glorious peak beginning at 1:33; nothing too strenuous, everything flows nice and easy. Coming off the other side, they almost go into Sputnik at 2:17, but it winds up being a little eddy in the current and the music sweeps along. Perhaps in part due to the mix, this rendition presents the Dead at their polyphonic best, with four instrumentalists intently spinning out lines, and it all winds up fitting together perfectly. At 3:56 Garcia starts a morse code pattern, and the music heads into a minor-sounding passage for a few moments until a frenetic jam begins to develop. It sounds like they are gathering steam for a modular jam here, but instead they keep going until they decide to start the theme at 6:44. This seems to be a unanimous decision, although Garcia kicks it off. They head to the verse rather quickly from here. They seem inclined to weird out a little after the verse, and we get something like a space jam this time, although it is one that features a lot of frenetic activity and quickly solidifies into another active jam. At 9:40 Weir starts playing El Paso, but we don’t get there yet, and the jam keeps taking off. At about 11:00 we get into a holding pattern, and then the jam gets even more frenetic, ebbing and flowing until everyone but Kreutzmann, Garcia and Lesh drop out for a bit. At 12:51 Weir again asserts El Paso, and this time the band follows suit. El Paso briefly comes to a full stop, and then we are back in Dark Star or something like it, as a kind of atonal space jam begins. At first this is largely a duet between Garcia and Godchaux with Kreutzmann tapping the cymbals, and then everyone gets in on the act and things get even freakier. This becomes a full-blown meltdown until at 21:15 Garcia starts some Caution-like strumming and brings it back to earth, although Keith provides some dissonance here. The jamming here is ferocious and exhilarating. It starts slowing down and getting weird again at 24:00, and things begin to sound transitional, but they stretch it out a bit before Garcia suddenly starts Casey Jones. This rendition is utterly magnificent, and in fact this is certainly one of the best Dark Stars to date. If anyone wanted to know what Grateful Dead music is about, this would be as good an example as any.
It's certainly the most '72-esque of the Dark Stars to date. There's a departure from convention becoming evident but a certain loose tightness has yet to coalesce. 12/5/71 is on deck (technically, it's a DS jam because there are no verses, but I reject that notion; it's a fully-laden Dark Star in it's own right) and it lays the next and final paver into 1972 and the magnificent 3/23/72 Star that opens the doorshatters everything into microscopic fragments. Bring it on!
#121 11/15/71 Austin: 20:44 (DS 12:55 > El Paso > DS Jam 7:49) – Road Trips Vol.3 No.2 Lotta Phil, he’s switched his tone to a much more lead-bass tone lately on the giant bass, so he’s strong in these mixes lately. He’s going for a lot of little fast riffs in between statements of the Dark Star theme area, as is Jerry. They are all working as a unit on this intro jam this evening, much more than it has been in the earlier part of the year. It’s like multiple lines braiding the rope of the music, in real time as it moves forward. Love that stuff! Jerry drops into a Sputnik after a couple minutes in, with Keith arpeggiating along, then they take it up again, JG is really reaching for some beautiful lead playing. It falls off the mode at 3:30 for a bit and then falls back in and JG goes for some of those pinch harmonics, and Keith leads it out in arpeggios. Drums mostly drop out for a bit and it enters a space area, but the players are maintaining some pulse so it pulses back to life. Phil is mostly playing higher notes so when he plays a descending bass line, it sounds like it will come back to Dark Star, but he goes back to the higher notes again, Bob on some odd chords, they continue playing propulsively but outside, then it breaks up and JG starts the theme and verse 1 at 7 minutes. Really stated rhythms on line 2 with Phil climbing on the beats, back to a groove for line 3, only wandering at the ends of the phrase. A funny drop to the “Diamonds” and a strong bass note. Into bell tolling on the bass, with volume knob playing, and noises taking over. JG skirting all over with fast quiet lines as Phil and Bobby play with feedback and noise. Drums start kicking it in and they build it up with a strong rhythm and fast lead playing going on and on, the endless melody. Jerry takes it down at 11 to a lower register, the rhythm section is still chugging away, but it’s dying off slowly, heading somewhere else, JG is playing with double stop lines, and some sputnik-y arpeggios. At 12 minutes he takes off in a fast lead that goes all over the place harmonically, and keeps switching key centers even as he’s playing some country licks in there. Sounds like Phil gets frustrated trying to keep it and hits some low notes, and then they start a waltz time and what happens, they start El Paso! What a weird window into the past, emerging from Dark Star into a Marty Robbins cowboy song. (I’ve got a lot to say about El Paso, and this all off topic perhaps, but I’ve been listening to this and the sister song “Feleena from El Paso” for a long time and trying to mentally reconstruct the reality that this ballad takes place in, and I’ve come to a conclusion that the entire song hinges on cognitive dissonance: The Cowboy’s tale is based on misconception of the reality of the situation, ie, probably Feleena doesn’t care about him at all, probably it’s only a day or less when he “hasn’t seen a young maiden” for so long, probably the people he sees returning to town don’t know or care who he is at all and when he, in his paranoia, starts shouting and shooting his way back into town, they are taken aback and start to shoot back, duh. He’s probably dead way before the song ends, that rifle shot is a cap to that, and it’s doubtful that Feleena comes to his dying side let alone even knows who he is. He’s basically schizophrenic.) Anyway, it goes off into atonal lines as soon as the song portion ends and the band starts a new space section with atonal notes in melodic lines, and noises and sounds from Phil and Bob. JG starts chromatic descending lines over this, building up the monster movie soundtrack, breaking it down into tremolos. (What is this sort of space called by the ‘heads?”) Continuing lines and statements with no tonal center, volume swells and tremolos, string scrubbing, then suddenly a chugging rhythm emerges at 3:40 into this part, A minor to D. (“The Carlos Santana Secret Mystical Chord Progression!”) It goes on with this jam for a while, Jerry playing with some licks that mimic the intro riff occasionally. It eventually peters out to a quieter place, Phil still playing some odd little sounds. It never comes back to Dark Star proper, instead, Jerry starts the intro riff to Casey Jones. Nice playing, especially in the first part, braiding lines together as they move forward in time.
#121 1971-11-15 A nice mellow but active vibe as it gets going. Everyone is clear in the mix and the interweaving is lovely. At 1:05 Jerry plays some spiraling notes and then stretches it out before rising to a short peak starting around 1:30. They bring it up and then keep winding along in symphonic fashion. The complimentary textures from Bob and Keith work well and Phil is quite active. Billy's subtle drumming blends in just right too. There's a touch of Sputnik as noted and then they ease up and continue to wander forth. Jerry goes higher and sharper again starting at 2:44 with Phil playing off him and Keith in tow. By 3:25 they are rising up as if gathering into a cyclone but then ease off creating a space for some lovely piano. From there they hover for a bit as if deciding where they want to go next. Things get a little spacey and starting at 4:30 slightly The Other One-ish. They bounce around and build up some momentum and launch into a jam of sorts with the framework shifting as they go along. They pull back again and Bobby seems to suggest a new direction around 6:30 but they opt to shift back into the theme and then on to the first verse. After the verse they briefly reset and hover a bit with an inclination to let things dissolve. Strong notes from Phil and pretty piano with a touch of feedback. There are some freaky didgeridoo-esque sounds I believe via string scraping and then Jerry and Keith pick up the pace considerably with Bob eventually joining in. By 9:45 Bob is actively playing El Paso but Jerry isn't letting up and Keith sticks with Jerry and the musical collage morphs back into the jam. They keep it rolling and start to rise up around 10:40 but instead of ascending to a peak they pull back and go into a lower repeating pattern. This too gets some momentum going and then they start to bring it down, creating a space for Phil to spring forth with some strong activity. They gather and swirl for a bit and Jerry and Phil play off each other in edgy, descending fashion. Then at 12:50 Bob decides to take another crack at El Paso and the others slowly shift away from the preceding jam to join him. Cosmic cowboys. El Paso ends and out of the enthusiastic applause Jerry starts a subtle, spacey winding line with Keith and Bob joining in. And we find ourselves drifting out into the void. Did El Paso happen or was it just a dream? Things get nice and freaky and they take their time with it, slowly increasing the intensity and then allowing it to ebb and flow as Jerry gets into the creepy tremolos that JSegel pointed out. Some powerful jabbing notes from Phil; the frenzy begins to ratchet up again and then suddenly at 21:15 Jerry starts a new line and Phil jumps in and they're off on a jam. My own imagination might be adding this element but it sort of has a psychedelic Old West feel to it; even Keith's piano sounds a little saloon-ish. Eventually they slow up a bit and then move into more of a funky bluesy feel. They're cooking along and taking the audience for a ride. By 23:45 things seem to be winding down but they're in no hurry to finish. They glide along and then get into some repeating notes around 24:20 that serve as a come down. From there they drift a bit longer ending up in a delicate, quiet space from which they opt to bust into Casey Jones. It's a wonderful collaborative version and recordings like this are such a gift because they allow us to get a greater sense of the full story.
I realize that we are all trying to analyze these Stars one at a time and sequentially, but it bears mentioning that we are just about to enter into what I consider to be the most intergalactic leap the band ever made. They played DS on 11/15/71 and next on 12/5/71. They didn't play it again until 3/23/72 and they played it only that once during the seven show run at NYAoM in late March '72. That's only three times in nearly five months before what they did on 4/8/72; something we are about to discuss shortly down the road (along with the ~every other show rotation that was clearly part of the plan for the E'72 tour and a departure from the recent past).
As a dedicated thread lurker I am massively here for this, and for the thread’s entrance into the Keith Godchaux era.
1971-11-15. The last first-set Dark Star for 20 years? OK then! Starts beautifully; the band's fired up and ready to dive in. Drums from the start; Keith seems pretty laid-back at the opening, leaving lots of space. They toy around the theme at first, and things get a little sputniky at 2:20, then quiet & spacey at 3:50. After four minutes it sounds like they're starting to leave Dark Star territory altogether into pure Dead jammin', maybe some new theme. Fabulous stuff, suggesting any number of directions. But by the time we've forgotten what song we're in, at 6:45 Jerry suddenly yanks the theme chain and pulls us back to Dark Star, and sings the verse straightaway. A straight drop into space after the verse, just like old times! But it's a short one: Phil plunges into feedback and wants to get some far-out drones, but the other players are all a-flutter and kicking up a fast jam instead. There's a country tinge coming on; Bob takes the hint to start El Paso at 9:40, but the others ignore that suggestion for now and push him aside. And off they fly into a joyful jam; when the momentum falters at 10:55, Jerry starts a nice fingerpicking pattern and the music bubbles happily for a minute. But things are starting to get scattered: they break down to just Jerry, Bill & Phil zipping around erratically, with Bob & Keith having trouble jumping in. Bob uses the moment to start El Paso again; Phil says OK, and Jerry finally gives in to the waltz in exaggerated fashion. El Paso's spirited and ends with a full stop. Jerry trickles out and Bob & Keith join him for some spacey twinkling. Once Phil & Bill find their way in, things soon get wild with a quick meltdown....another proto-Tiger! Phil's feelin' rambunctious and gets freaky on the bass while the others provide the sounds of tension & terror. Jerry turns pretty now and then, only to be pulled back into the frenzy. But at 3:30 he breaks free, chopping out some rhythmic chords, and the others chase him into a fast-driving jam. They're almost in Good Lovin' territory now, hot slashing rock & roll. Around 6:00 things calm down, and they wind it up with an exaggerated "the end!" finale at 6:40, but then....nobody quite knows what to transition to. Everybody's kind of drifting off in their own direction, playing their own random bits, and the jam just quietly fades out on an interesting Bob pattern. Presumably they're calling the next song to each other off-mic, since Casey Jones pops right out without any apparent count-in. This sounds like it was a fun one for them to play! If I were to quibble a bit, it's not all that cohesive after the verse as they flit here & there, and there's some tug-of-wars happening when they can't agree on a direction. Both before El Paso & before Casey Jones, they'll cohere for a few minutes into a great jam, then sort of split up and wander aimlessly til someone makes the call for a song. So I'd say, great in parts, maybe not one of the best as a whole. I'd agree with JSegel that the opening jam's the nicest part with the band the most "together," though the fast jams later on are also great before they dissolve into looseness. This also marks, I think, the longest freaky meltdown we've heard yet in '71. The "Insect Fear" space emerges!
122. 1971-12-05 131532 20:17 (DS 8:01>MAMU>DS 12:16). Goes into Me & My Uncle and Sittin’ on Top of the World. The sound starts out a little boomy on this Charlie Miller transfer, but it seems to get a bit better almost immediately. Either they’re taking it slightly faster than they have been, or I’ve gotten used to the slower tempo—mine is not a scientific approach, I recognize. Garcia and Lesh are very prominent, with Jerry playing beautiful runs with pinch harmonics and little flurries. We can hear Keith, but he’s a little reticent. The intro starts to get a little weirder at around 2:35, and soon Lesh is playing a morse code pattern of the type they’ve been fooling with lately. This leads to a burst of vigorous jamming, but it doesn’t last long, as they seem to be a little restless here. Eventually, at 3:55, a kind of bouncy thing emerges and gathers force. There’s a nice peak beginning at about 4:20 leading the jam into a sort of behind the beat swing. At 5:10 this is all coming together, and the band is going like gangbusters. 5:35 sees Feelin’ Groovy hints come and then go, and everything falls apart a little and by 6:37 is heading into weirdness. A small meltdown follows and builds in intensity, then recedes, until at 8:00 the band sort of magically drops into a nice version of Me & My Uncle. The last chord of MAMU drops almost immediately into a jam that is recognizably some form of Dark Star. After about 25 seconds the band backs way off into a drumless contemplative space. Garcia plays some rolls, and Godchaux asserts himself a little more here. Jerry’s line starting at 2. 1:49 is particularly beautiful. This leads him into some volume knob stuff, and Phil echoes him with some plaintive notes while Weir and Godchaux provide more active counterpoint. At 3:20 the music becomes more insistent and we seem to be heading for a meltdown. It proves to be an intense one, and has many of the characteristics of what is usually called a Tiger jam, although Garcia does not hammer the wah pedal. It recedes and then comes roaring back, and by 5:10 Weir is furiously scritching, then Garcia starts some tremolo stuff, but the band has backed way off. They proceed to weird out for a while. By around 7:00 this seems to be heading into a more structured jam, although they seem reluctant to regularize it too much at first. Keith starts playing a riff that holds it together, while Garcia and Lesh pipe along with one-note patterns as it migrates into a rock thing. But then by 8:30 it is all coming to an end again, and the band descends into a kind of oasis of weirdness again. At 8:54 Garcia starts another morse code line, but he quickly abandons it in favor of some noodling. At 9:22 Garcia starts a Sputnik line while Lesh begins the main theme. Garcia wins out this time, and a sort of Sputnik-like part comes here. By 10:45 there is a beautiful little jam underway, and this picks up cohesion briefly, and then falls apart again, with Lesh again trying to assert the theme to bring them back together. Jerry briefly considers joining him, but instead he starts Sitting on Top of the World, and we’re out. Although there is no main theme and no verses, this clearly seems to be a Dark Star. As I said earlier, however, I am unscientific; it may help to have clear criteria to distinguish a Dark Star from a Dark Star jam. There is a lot to enjoy here, but one thing that sets the Dead apart as improvisors is how they pull it all together for cohesive and tonal jams, and these are in short supply here, at least if we’re talking about jams of any length. There is a lot of great music in these 20 minutes, though.
For this FM broadcast the engineer mixed a lot of room sound in at the beginnings of songs (I guess to show the audience's enthusiasm) but then turned it down.
Interesting strange version. They seem excited to hit all of the different territories they can access from the Dark Star base, but have trouble agreeing on what to do within Dark Star. A bit similar to 11/7/71 in that regard, but this is a more energetic performance. I mentioned recently on the other thread that I couldn't remember Lesh guiding the band back to Dark Star, but he does so towards the end here, or tries to, before Garcia finally decides he isn't having it and makes a decisive mood towards Top of the World (which ends up being a sloppy version as Weir and Lesh can't remember the weird key changes from the band's arrangement of that song).
Reading the Deadessays writeup reminds me that Bill is more involved in this version than the last few (where if I recall correctly he keeps time nicely but doesn't do a lot else). He's on drums throughout, no maracas (not sure there will be any more versions starting with maracas). Pigpen is also back with the band and it sounds like he *might* play the organ for a few seconds in this Dark Star sequence, although maybe only in the country/blues songs.
#122 1971-12-05 The crowd is psyched! As noted the recording gets better by the 20 second mark and they're off. There's a nice winding, bouncy vibe initially and they're moving with decent pace. Jerry reaches high with some bending notes and then they start to slow it up a little. There's more of a drifting feel but the current has pull so they're still moving along. Things get oozier around 2:30 but instead of heading into the void they hop on a quick-paced repeating thing starting at 2:50. They get a nice collective groove going but by 3:30 they're already switching it up with a revving ebb. They move out again and starting at 3:45 there's the bouncy line from Phil that bzfgt pointed out. The others play off it, gently at first but they quickly get some momentum going. Jerry goes lower for a spell with driving energy. I haven't mentioned Bob yet but his textures are adding to the fabric nicely along with Keith. Billy is pretty active throughout and he sounds really good. They ease up again and then after 5:00 they ratchet it back up. Bob is more prominent now with Jerry reaching high. Feelin' Groovy is considered but passed by and then around 5:40 they let the groove subside and swirl around a bit. At 6:02 Phil starts another bass line with some nice compliments from Bob. The collective feel becomes gentler and pretty but Jerry seems to have something stronger in mind and he takes it in a spacier direction. Everyone follows and things get freakier and more intense and the fabric is tearing but they stop short of a full meltdown and start gliding out into what soon becomes Me & My Uncle. The collective sound prior to the start of the vocals sounds great because they're still riding the preceding wave. As MAMU ends there's some guitar shimmering and they slip right back into a Dark Star groove. It's got some momentum but after 20 seconds they opt to pull up and drift into space. It's got a gentle, pretty feel with a lot of openness as the players slowly blend things in. There's some volume knob action and things start to get weirder with Phil coming in more strongly. They dance around it for a spell and then at 3:20 Jerry starts a fast repeating line with Keith in tow. They spiral downwards and then unleash a meltdown. It eases up at 4:35 but they aren't done with it yet; Billy steps forward and the weirdness builds and swirls and the monster is there again, reaching forth. After 5:30 they pivot again into more industrial, feedback-y freakiness and things stay mellower but with a creepy vibe. It picks up again around 6:08 with Bob adding some scraping sounds and Jerry continuing with the quick, high strumming. They stay in this zone for a spell and then after 7:00 start revving it up and reaching higher. They build towards a peak but at 7:18 opt to move towards a groove instead. It has a bit of MAMU feel initially but the jam is relatively mellow with nothing being strongly asserted. Around 7:55 they pivot led by Phil and move into a new groove. It doesn't last long though; by 8:30 they give up on it and drift back into the ooze. Billy asserts himself while the others weird out in low-key fashion. At 9:20 Jerry gently starts up Sputnik; a few seconds later Phil turns to the theme and the two co-occur in subtle fashion. Jerry asserts his line more strongly and Phil eases up but he still plays off the theme less distinctly; it pokes out again briefly at 10:00. Jerry continues with the gentle, Sputnik-ish line and adds an ascending feel that Phil plays off of. Billy comes in more prominently and a nice, gentle jam starts to take shape. It begins to ramp up but then they quickly let it go. Phil starts playing around the theme again at 11:18 and after a spacier line from Jerry everyone starts to fall in. They work around the theme for just a bit before Jerry starts to push it into Sitting On The World instead. There's a brief spell where both are still happening which sounds cool but by 15 seconds into the SOTOTW track they've fully committed. It's a really good and well-loved sequence that I always enjoy listening to. I will say though that in listening to it the context of this exercise it does feel like they dance around a variety of things without fully committing to many of them, at least with regards to the jams. But as discussed that may just be part of the transitional process as they were figuring out where they wanted to take Dark Star next.
#122 12/5/71 Felt Forum, NYC: 20:17 (DS 8:01 > Uncle > DS 12:16) (instrumental) A rolling jam that just continues on for a few minutes before taking a breather, then Phil comes in with a different riff idea, and they move into a new area, Bill is really rocking out. When it comes back to a potential Dark Star theme area at 5 minutes it’s still got forward momentum. Great playing from all the musicians. Sort of moves toward a descending bass chord progression bit for a sec, then away again. Bill starts a side stick groove, but they don’t stick with it, and it devolves into bass chords and rolling drums. As it moves into atonalism, they crest a wave and then come back down to start Me and My Uncle, another ballad in the middle, it takes a bit to settle into it with Jerry still playing lead until Bob starts singing. It’s a fast and strong version of the song. From the last hit of the song it starts wandering off toward Dark Star territory and quiets down into a spacey section. At a minute into this section there are hints of the Star theme, but it maintains no tonal center and all lines wander out of the mode, and again at 2 minutes in, it’s like atonal variations of bits of the theme. This is the new style of space section, it’s got more “notes” and less “sounds” and the notes are not tied to any center. Keith is doing some very outside piano bits, they build it into a tense trilling area, Jerry spikes some non-tonal lead playing and string stretching as the band builds up tension. Some string scrubbing with picks or other implements, bass feedback, it maintains a tense level for quite a while. Jerry sticks on some high notes, with noisy accompaniment. Nice jam! Some shouts from the audience. A little dip in volume and back up with everybody making noise. They are really holding a level of tension here. Jerry starts some lead lines at 7:30 into this part, Keith is playing triplets against any pulse established by that, Phil and Bill pick up the pulse, the band drops in and starts a fast jam for a minute, then it dies off with some more non-tonal melodies accompanying it. At 9:30, Phil comes in with the Dark Star theme and Jerry does some slow Sputnik, neither coalesces, but it does place the jam in the Dark Star world and it slows down the tempo. At 11 minutes into this section, it feints a jam, but it falls apart as Bob continues scrubbing strings, then Phil comes back to the Dark Star riff and they move forward. Toward… not Dark Star, but where they might have actually gone to a verse (that never happens) Jerry is playing the intro to Sittin’ on Top of the World as a collage right over the Dark Star theme area, and sure enough, they play that instead. Wow, man. Trippy! It never got to a Dark Star verse, but definitely had elements of the song in the jam themes and the riff poking its head through. A couple side trips to space while landing back on earth and hopping off again a couple times. The set continues with regular old songs, ya know. Space, as such, is now a multi-headed free-for-all combining polytonal or atonal melodic and harmonic components with noise/sound-qua-sound components. Free jazz-y. It’s a very rootless area (well, space) with hints at normalcy (short runs of tonal figures) presented in collage, like superimposed realities.
1971-12-05. Another long tuning break before Dark Star, while the crowd waits impatiently... It starts with some bouncy drummy New York energy, Bill adding a lot to the groove. No need to warm up, they get straight into a nice jam right away. At the start Keith seems to be undermixed yet again, so he's present but doesn't stand out at first. (It could be he's playing more of a background role than he was in October, but I haven't directly compared. Here he kind of blends into Bob's rhythm playing rather than vying with Jerry.) The jam wanders here and there on paths of beauty without really settling down...a little Dark Star hint around 5:00, Phil teasing Feelin' Groovy at 5:20....Keith's getting louder and more assertive. In a way this opening jam is like extended foreplay that keeps backing off before it hits a peak. I like Phil's chords at 6:00 but they don't develop into anything; instead the band sort of dissolves into spaciness. By 7:00 they're getting frantic and scratchy, dissonant insanity beckons....but they don't get full noisy, it's more of a meltdown tease. By 7:50 a solid melodic center is found, and it sounds like a pretty jam is starting. But wait, what's this....all of a sudden it's Me & My Uncle. Must be '71! Bill swings right back into the Dark Star beat once Me & My Uncle finishes. At first they're back to the swingin' jam they started with, but by :25 Bill drops out and the others sink into a quietly tranquil passage. A peaceful meditation ensues, guided by Phil with a firm hand. But the intensity rises after Jerry starts volume-twirling, Phil turns doomy, and Keith steps up with off-kilter tinklings. Around 3:15 they spiral into another early Tiger (missing only the wah screeches), back off, and plunge into it again, climaxing with some scrubs by 4:30. (Keith plays a big part in this, happily banging away with nutty chords.) But they don't have the weirdness out of their system and they keep going with scratchy dissonance, Bob scrubbing and Phil rumbling, threatening another round of the Tiger. The tense freakiness continues for some time, getting more subdued then ratcheting up again. Things are quite demented by 7:00 when Keith starts repeating a line and doesn't let go of it for 50 seconds. The storm-clouds clear and the band turns back to regular playing, although they seem to have trouble settling on anything until Keith finally quits. Once he does, a nice snappy little jam starts -- and almost as soon dies, the band hitting a full stop at 8:30. Then there's a spell of ominous spaciness with tumbling drums & bass chords. After 9:20 Phil starts the Dark Star line, a soothing tune after all the gloom, but Jerry's fixated on a sparkly arpeggio instead and the music dissolves again. The band seems uncertain about where to take this (Bob dropping out altogether), and a mildly jazzy jam heats up by 11:00 but then quickly falls apart again. After 11:15 Phil keeps trying to start Dark Star and pull the scattered band back together; Bill & Keith join him while Bob sputters. Jerry finally goes along with them with some Dark Star-type runs, Bob starts strumming again, and it sounds like the theme is finally (after 20 minutes) going to lead to a verse... But no! Jerry starts Sittin' on Top of the World instead, repeating the opening hook while the others are playing Dark Star, a very odd-sounding combination, but after 15 seconds they figure out what he's doing and join him. So much for Dark Star! A strange version. (Although strangeness is a virtue in the Dark Star realm!) It's certainly more than a Dark Star Jam, but Dark Star itself is only implied through most of it. They're so carried away with the Spacy Meltdown / Country Ditty contrast they've been milking through late '71, they kind of skip over the actual song. This is very much in the same vein as 11-7 & 11-15-71 (minus the verse). It starts out really promising and then sort of....scatters and dribbles away. The opening part is the nicest, and the extended dissonant space is a neat indication of where they're heading in '72, but they never quite pull together in a cohesive jam. Bill has a strong role in this Dark Star, as does Phil, although Phil's plans are often frustrated when his suggestions fall on deaf ears. (Actually Jerry doesn't seem to dominate as much as usual in this one either, it's a group-mind effort.) And once again, Keith is really eager to push the band into atonal outside madness, which is developing a life of its own. It's been mentioned that Dark Star still wasn't been played all that often in fall '71 (only 7 versions out of 29 shows, compared to 16 Other Ones). Lately it sounds like the Dead are kind of struggling with Dark Star; either they're not able to sustain a unified mood for long, or they keep striking out in all different directions and lose the thread. The little mini-jams that comprise Dark Star can be quite fleeting as the band hurries on. As a result fall '71 sounds like a very "transitional" period for Dark Star as Keith settles in, but it's also an exciting time for the band as they discover all kinds of new possibilities and they're impatient to play them all at once. So we get both the lack of full commitment and the "collage" effect that have been mentioned.
123. 1971-12-15 149966 Ann Arbor 20:16 Main theme at :04 and 9:34. First verse at 10:02. Goes into Deal. The last Dark Star of 1971 kicks right off with the main theme. Garcia has a lovely tone with some bends and a beautiful little A-D-C lick at :28 that I muchly dig. He develops it as a kind of motive, weaving similar figures into his opening spiel. At around 2 minutes in, things settle down and it seems like some kind of weirdness is being considered. A softly melodic but not too together interlude ensues, with Godchaux making his present felt a bit more. At this point, he seems to have become an important presence, but he’s not as boldly assertive as he was when he first joined. Nevertheless, he often seems to push things in interesting directions. After about a minute of casting about the band starts to congeal, with a kind of rolling section that remains on the far side of normalcy. This again settles down into what seems like it might be the beginning of a space jam at around 4:00. As happens often lately, the band keeps their distance from one another, perhaps waiting for something to happen. At 4:59 Garcia starts a little morse code line, and Keith winds around it, and then Lesh follows suit, but it’s not until Weir gets more involved that this shapes up into something that is more meltdown than jam. Once again, this is something that would develop into a Tiger were it 6 months later. At around 7:00 Garcia’s lines turn into something that suggests rock and roll, and by 7:30 we seem to be getting more cohesion…if this doesn’t come together, it would be an obvious place for the main theme. But instead they persist and things draw together until by about 8:45 a little peak is reached and sustained until almost, 9:34 at which point Garcia finally states the theme and they fall into line. This brings us to the verse, sung off-key at what feels like a languid tempo. I’m not sure that there is a standard way to follow the verse at this point. Here they go to a basic Dark Star jam that seems to be happening at a significantly slower pace than the intro jam. By 12:15 this seems to be turning into space, which would have been the usual routine in 1970. At 12:45 Garcia starts making noises with a slide, and then things get rather quiet, which is also reminiscent of 1970, although they don’t get quite as quiet as they often did the previous year. Instead a lugubrious brooding starts to build; at 14:24, however, Garcia pronounces in a pure tone that he is again thinking of Dark Star. Weir rolls around a bit, but then he subsides, and the future remains in doubt; at 14:45 he advances a chord pattern that suggests Let it Grow, but this goes in a slower, vaguely Latin direction as the others latch on. A really cohesive and satisfying jam is what we get out of this. Godchaux’s understated contributions are sublime; as is typical, he subtly undermines the harmonic balance, until at 17:05 he gets a little more forceful and pushes them in an entirely new direction. Garcia briefly takes it toward something like Me & My Uncle, and then it settles down a bit, and then it sort of recedes into uncertainty. At 18:48 Garcia starts one of the morse code bits that sometimes serve to gather the troops (and sometimes don’t). A dark and bubbling coherence builds, and this threatens to become something remarkable, but as it drives toward a peak they suddenly back off again and Jerry starts Deal. I wouldn’t call this one of the best Dark Stars of the year, but it is a fun 20 minutes that has some good moments. It doesn’t seem unusual at this point that the band seems hesitant to commit to any of their ideas; this seems to be a feature of a lot of these Dark Stars from the back half of 1971. The second half jam is really wonderful when they commit to it, although its span is relatively brief.
It almost seems as if they were collecting ideas for the right time to unleash them in more complete form. Does anyone know when the E'72 tour was set up and "a known future event"? There would only be one more performance of DS prior to the E'72 tour (on 3/23/72) and one could argue that there's more "closure" to the improv in that version than there is in late '71. So, they trotted out one more version, took it to a logical conclusion and decided, "See? We can do this they way it needs to be done." Then again, I have a tough time believing that it was that well thought out.
I doubt it was that thought-out at all. If they were thinking, "let's work out the material we're going to record in Europe for the album," this seems to have extended to songs only. They played nine shows in 1972 before the Europe tour, and Dark Star got played just once....the lowest Dark Star ratio since August '71. Baffling. I don't know if that means they were a little timid of Dark Star at that point (as in "we're not doing it right" or "we're not feelin' it"), or if they were confident that they'd be able to pull it together in Europe despite almost no performances in the previous four months. Either way, probably not safe to think Dead decision-making ever came to "a logical conclusion!"
Well, I agree with most of that, especially anything regarding being overly thought out or logical, but I don't agree that they felt that they weren't feeling Dark Star. How it evolved in late '71 and that one version they played on 3/23/72 (which is one of my favorites, by the way, although some folks poo poo it) shows that they were gearing it up and that they only did it once at the NYAoM suggests, at the very least, that once they did know E'72 was happening, they were ready to roll with it and didn't want to drain any more ammo stateside. And roll with it they most certainly did. Perhaps it was simple happenstance that the E'72 tour arrived when it did. I also don't think that their recording of the tour had anything to do with their perception of Dark Star. As far as they were concerned, Dark Star had already been released on a successful album. The E'72 recording project was an animal that had nothing to do with Dark Star. Dark Star was a side project to present them as something that couldn't be readily defined. A rock improv band that sounded like no one else. But again, I don't think that this was a scripted thought.
Seems true. (Dick said that when he brought up a new Europe '72 release with Phil in the 90's, Phil's first response was, "we already released that.") However, they apparently recognized 4/8/72 was special, as they (or just Jerry?) mixed it during the tour for the Glastonbury Fayre record. But we'll talk about that more a few weeks from now.
It blows my mind that someone as perceptive as Phil would ever say such a thing. To suggest that the 4/8/72 or 4/24/72 Dark Stars, or pick another one from that tour if you're @ianuaditis ; (I think it's 5/23, but it might be 5/25), hadn't evolved by light years relative to the 2/27/69 version on Live/Dead (which is really good but hardly definitive, except possibly for that brief era) almost suggests that Phil had no idea that their music had progressed so very much from '69-'72. It's almost as if he weren't even there. However, I have a strong suspicion that he was.
I kinda got my points scrambled in my previous post. Of course they had released an album called Europe '72, but it was hardly representative of the most substantive content of that tour. Dark Star/TOO and the newly-minted Playin' jams being among the most important content. I guess Phil underestimated the market, which is still mind-blowing to me.
But, to Phil's credit, once he listened back to some tapes he realized the error of his ways and put out Hundred Year Hall.
