( 3:37 PM )
Monday, March 8. Afternoon. Music Currently Playing: Saul Williams, Amethyst Rockstar
Aha! Finally my impulse to write explained! Per T.C. Boyle, all writers write because they secretly wish they had their own rockband. More here at NPR.
In other news...
My mentor teacher right now, who is an old Dead Head, has exposed me to several of his favorite artists, further expanding my palette of amazing music:
-Hot Tuna
-String Cheese Incident
-Ozric Tentacles
...And lastly a host of Grateful Dead live recordings that I am amazed to discover far exceed any commercial recording that the band ever did. I suppose this is just musical naivete on my part, since when people talk about the Dead they always seem to prefer the brilliance of their live shows... and for me, I think up until recently, I had sort of written off the Dead as an audio sub-culture I just couldn't relate to. This may have been a mistake.
I have discovered that those "in the know" about the Dead, are "in the know" because of a set openly shared live recordings of various Dead shows that they all exchange with each other. I still don't really know enough about the Dead to know their philosophy behind this (since it is legal and acceptable); but speaking to other Deadheads confirms that it's completely normal for fans to have their collection of Dead music dominated by bootlegged concert recordings rather than commercial recordings.
In terms of the live recordings themselves... some are better than others. In many cases this has as much to do with the quality of the recording as it does the band. I listened to one show recorded as recently as 1994 to discover Jerry Garcia's voice sounding strained and slightly flat. On the otherhand, there are some recordings where every note is right on and there is this exhuberance projected through the country-sounding interplay of guitars.
What characterizes all of the recordings I have heard is the band's ability to just... play. It's almost as if, due to the improvisational nature of their shows, the band is rediscovering each song every time it's played. The consequence is that no two live recordings ever have the same song. Ok sure, you may hear "Box of Rain" on two separate live recordings that span fifteen years between them. But it is not the intervening years that differentiates the sound of the song... it's the unique exploration that both live performances took of the same core melody. I think that the Dead may have accidentally discovered something most bands never find... the ability to continually reinvent themselves and their music through the improvisational exploration of old musical ideas. I think this is what great Jazz does, or at least tried to do before it killed itself with free jazz and fusion... And in that sense perhaps it's a pity that more Coltrane and Monk and Bird live recordings are not available. (Or perhaps not--the genius of good jazz is that it is so improvisational that you really do have to have "been there" to know what it was you experienced...)
Anyhow, I am not entirely sure if I have converted yet to full Grateful Dead fandom; perhaps this is because I am too attached to things like regular bathing and shaving... really what it is for me is the bluegrass elements in so much of the Dead's music. They still feel very foreign to me - bluegrass is just a genre, a sound, a flavor that I have so little exposure to... (Drop me a line if you can recommend something to educate me!)
Ultimately though, I have to admit there is a powerful appeal for me in a band whose best music is music *freely shared between fans.* Suggests to me that it was only ever about the music for these guys, another powerful lesson that too many of today's musicians have clearly missed.
And anyhow, some of the guitar work is beyond compare...
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