Jerry Garcia at a Los Lobos concert, 1987

When I saw Los Lobos in the summer of 1987 at the Warfield Theater in San Francisco, Jerry Garcia was in the audience. After the opening act, I had a little chat with him about the lyrics of “Lady With A Fan”: I wanted to know if it was “his job is to shed light and not to master” or “share light.” He said, in his inimitable voice, “Some people hear shed; some hear share. Hunter wrote shed, but whatever you hear is okay by me; I’m just the singer, you know.”

During the Los Lobos set, a roadie came out and gave David Hidalgo a cherry-red Telecaster, and David strapped it on to play “Come On Let’s Go,” which he dedicated to Jerry.

A week or so later, I met a guy who had been backstage at the show, and he told me about that guitar: Jerry had come backstage with a guitar case before the show, looking for Hidalgo. When he found him, he gave him the guitar: a mint-condition vintage Telecaster. Hence the dedication!

Join the Army

I used to have a T-shirt with this slogan on it, though it didn't have a hand grenade. Instead, it had a picture of Uncle Sam.

Which makes it seem like as good a time as any to jam out to "U. S. Blues":

Sing, Words

Here is the first poem in Mark Granier's Fade Street (Salt, 2010):

SING, WORDS

That you may survive

those star-grazed years after I've 

gone back to where I'm going: air

of a song, dead air, my dark star 

set in the glimmerless hush, 

cool enough to touch.

Sing, that something remain

of these epic, mundane

conversations hoofing it down my back

clicketty clack—

that you may hit or miss

with a flourish, a backdraught, a hiss

like intaken breath. Life itches to get out 

of its mildewed coats,

glint with the motes turning

in a slanted beam—O sing

the slow schoolboy's daydream

counting them in.

*

The Swiss critic Peter von Matt has argued that poems want two things: to be beautiful and to be immortal. There's a long history of poems that stake their immortality precisely on their beauty. Here, the poem's speaker directly appeals to the poem's words to "sing"—to be beautiful—as a way to make it possible for them to "survive"—to be immortal. 

If the poem's own immortality is not an issue, this poem's opening rhyme juxtaposes the words' immortality with the speaker's own death in such a way that the speaker can live on in the rhyme itself: "I've" may be followed "gone" in the phrase "when I've / gone," but it is also contained in "survive". By admitting his future death into the poem in this way, the speaker allows his own self, his "dark star," to continue to shine even in the "glimmerless hush" of a cooling universe. This is a world of grand drama on a cosmic scale.

But a few lines later, the poem's second strong rhyme approaches the issue of survival from a different direction: "Sing, that something remain / Of these epic, mundane / conversations …" "Remain" picks up on the desire marked by "survive" in the poem's first line, but now it is not the speaker's self that may survive through the poem's singing. Instead, it is the speaker's down-to-earth, everyday experience of "mundane / conversations". This is an everyday world on the scale of human dialogue.

Yet before they are called "mundane" (and even before they are named as "conversations"), these everyday experiences are also called "epic". And of course the opening appeal to "sing" in a poem comes from the great epics about "great" issues like war and the founding of nations (or the grand cosmic drama of this poem's first appeal that its words "sing"). The contrast between "epic" and "mundane" both contests the idea of "greatness" as a necessary feature of the "epic" and elevates the "mundane"—in this case, everyday conversation—into something worthy of the immortality represented by great epic poetry.

The epic poem bases its appeal to immortality on the beauty of its presentation of "great" themes. This small poem also appeals to immortality through beauty, but after appealing to the grand drama of the universe through its opening images of stars, it calls for the mundane to be seen as beautiful as well.

The poem does not close with that image, though; it moves on to acknowledge the desire to escape the mundane: "Life itches to get out / of its mildewed coats". Yet this escape does not aim for the stars; this "itch" can be realized in "the slow schoolboy's dream" as he tries to "count the motes turning / in a slanted beam." This schoolboy, slow as he is, does not aspire to the greatness of the epic hero; his escape from the mundane world of "mildewed coats" is much simpler than the grand journey of an Odysseus—and this schoolboy's private dream can also be sung. And insofar as it is sung, it, too, aims for the epic, for survival, for immortality, and for beauty.

In the end, "Sing, Words" does not privilege one of these ways to escape the limitations of life over the others. They are all modes in which the words of a poem may "sing" beyond the life of the poet and beyond the lives represented in a poem. Grand cosmic drama, everyday discussions, childhood dreams—these are the matters that poems address, "hit or miss". And all of them can miss, but all of them can, sometimes, hit, when the words listen to the poet's exhortation and begin to sing.

*

I could leave it at that, but I can't help but mention how I love this line in particular:

of a song, dead air, my dark star 

Any fan of the Grateful Dead will love that play of "dead air" and "dark star."

Friend of the Devil

My band Human Shields made a video last night of "Friend of the Devil" in memory of Jerry Garcia, who died on August 9, 1995. In our practice room, with the bookshelves in the background.

Furthur and The Grateful Dead

Furthur is the current band of the Grateful Dead's Bob Weir and Phil Lesh, with John Kadlecik on lead guitar, Jeff Chimenti on keyboards, Joe Russo on drums, and Jeff Pehrson and Sunshine Garcia Becker on backing vocals. The band has played over 100 shows since their first gig in September 2009, and though I have not had a chance to hear them live (since I live in Switzerland and they have not been in Europe yet, and I always miss them by days when I'm in the U.S.), I have listened to recordings of all their shows, thanks to the Live Music Archive and Furthur's own live downloads. Gradually, despite my being a veteran Deadhead (83 shows from 1982-1995), I have come to the conclusion (with a couple of caveats) that Furthur is a better band than the Grateful Dead.

The primary reason is Jeff Chimenti on keyboards. Chimenti's background is primarily in jazz, and he has played with Bob Weir's band Ratdog since the late 1990s, as well as being on keyboards with the various incarnations of The Dead (as the surviving members of the Grateful Dead—Weir, Lesh, Mickey Hart, and Bill Kreutzmann—called themselves in 1003-4 and 2008-9). Simply put, Chimenti is a much better player than any of the Grateful Dead's keyboard players. None of them (Pigpen, Tom Constanten, Keith Godchaux, Brent Mydland, Vince Welnick, or even Bruce Hornsby, whose tenure on piano with the GD was brief but wonderful) ever had the chops to provide a serious second lead instrument alongside Jerry Garcia's leads—and that is exactly what Chimenti adds to the mix. While Garcia always rightly insisted that his lead playing was just part of what the band was doing, the sound of Furthur benefits hugely from Chimenti's leads, both as a compliment to Kadlicek's lead guitar and in how his keyboard solos (whether on piano or organ) take the band's jams in ever new directions.

Drummer Joe Russo is also a better drummer than Mickey Hart and Bill Kreutzmann ever were. I always liked the lightness of Hart and Kreutzmann's playing together, the way they kept the band afloat by never overemphasizing the beat but always playing colors and textures around it. When they started playing the beat more heavily in the late 80s, it detracted from the band's feel to my ears (although this might have been a matter of mixing the snare drum higher, in good 80s style, à la Phil Collins). Russo plays the beat with emphasis and drive, while also keeping the rhythm floating. Both Chimenti and Russo's potent contributions to Furthur can be heard in exemplary fashion in the first set of the July 22 show at the Gathering of the Vibes festival in Bridgeport, Connecticut, especially on "Sugaree," "Deal," and "Big River." (That just happens to be the show I listened to this morning.)

Furthur's quality also derives from the vocal arrangements. The backup singers and the band's obvious serious rehearsal of the vocals give Furthur something the Grateful Dead never had: consistent high-quality harmonies. I love the old recordings of "Uncle John's Band," say, as much as any Deadhead, but Furthur just nails the vocals all the time, while with the Grateful Dead, the vocals were always hit and miss at best. While listening to the Bridgeport "Sugaree" and "Deal," it struck me that, in this respect, Furthur is more like the Jerry Garcia Band in the 80s and 90s, with his excellent background singers. (I even hope that Lesh and Weir will give their backup singers a chance to step forward and sing lead ...)

So Furthur is a better band than the Grateful Dead—but of course, they owe everything to the Grateful Dead. Weir and Lesh are still playing their Grateful Dead repertoire, most of which (despite excellent contributions from Weir and Lesh) was written by Garcia. They should, of course: it's a great catalogue! There are a couple of Furthur originals, and one or two get played per show, but it would be a waste if Weir and Lesh played together without playing their back catalogue together, and as with the Grateful Dead, they play almost the whole catalogue, with no repeats from one show to the next.

Now it's time to discuss the elephant in the room: Jerry Garcia. Overall, Furthur is a better group of musicians than the Grateful Dead, but Furthur doesn't have a Garcia, who was simply one of the best musicians in rock history (and even beyond rock, as his work with David Grisman shows). Yet Garcia was not always at his best, and John Kadlecik is much more consistent than Garcia was in the last few years of his life. Like Chimenti, Kadlecik also has great jazz chops. Early in my listening to Furthur, I kept hearing traces of John Abercrombie in Kadlecik's playing, which turned out to be a matter of the wrong John: Kadlecik's primary early influence (even before he began listening to the Grateful Dead and Garcia)was John McLaughlin. As the lead player in the Dead cover band The Dark Star Orchestra for over a decade, Kadlecik knows how to "be" Garcia; interestingly, Furthur gives him a chance to play Garcia's music while being himself.

So the two caveats on my claim are that Furthur doesn't have Garcia, and that Furthur plays Grateful Dead music and is thus implicitly "derivative." But my argument is finally that Furthur does take the Grateful Dead's music "further," primarily but not only because of the unique contributions of Chimenti and Russo to the band's sound.

A while back, I read a comment on a Furthur show at the Live Music Archive that pointed out that in 20 years, when Furthur is long gone, Deadheads will be listening to the Grateful Dead and not to Furthur. Because of Garcia, that's probably true, even for this Furthur fan, but my response is also that the Grateful Dead's run ended in 1995, and Furthur is happening now. I hope I get a chance to hear them live before they stop happening.

Stevie Ray Vaughan in 1983

It was a Sunday evening, and I had already gone to Grateful Dead shows at Frost Amphitheater at Stanford on the Saturday and Sunday afternoons, and I was exhausted and wired, but I went to see Stevie Ray Vaughan at the Keystone Palo Alto anyway. I was right at the stage, to the left of SRV's mic in the middle of the stage, and quite close to his wah-wah pedal. After he played two of his fast instrumentals, he stepped over to that pedal and started doing this crazy stuff with it, and I could not really see him, but I watched his left-handed shadow playing on the back wall. Here's what he did (from a different 1983 performance):



And the moral of Stevie's story is: don't ride helicopters during storms.

Music as skin

There are passages in Göran Sonnevi's Mozart's Third Brain (translated by Rika Lesser) that are just exactly perfect, such as this one:

Music covers us with skin, touches with skin
We are painfully described there, even in great delight

The feeling of being surrounded by music, and touched by music, as something physical, even erotic (skin on skin), and the way that overwhelming music can be painful and delightful at the same time. At my last Grateful Dead show (March 18, 1995), which was also my wife Andrea's only Dead show, she turned to me during the space jam and said, "It's really scary." But that's just why I loved it!

Management Secrets of the Grateful Dead?

... is the title of this article by Joshua Green in the Atlantic Monthly. I figured this stuff out 20 years ago! :-)

Hardscrabble

Okay, I admit it: I'm a sucker for any collection of poems that mentions my favorite band, as in Kevin McFadden's poem "Die Satan!", from his collection Hardscrabble:

(The Stones alone show him sympathy,
the Grateful Dead call him friend.)

But McFadden's collection is worth reading even for those who aren't Deadheads. The only reason to avoid it would be if you hate puns and anagrams, because the book is full of them, and is also full of reflections on punning and anagramming.

Here's a taste from "Famed Cities," one of the three longer pieces in the book:

My friends I teased about the leave in Cleveland;
they teased back Brunswick's run. Home not,
as the saying goes, a place to hang your hat—
home where the hat, by name, by chance, hangs you.

McFadden's attention to the letters that make up his words might seem to get out of hand at times, but he relates his interest in letters to his own biography, as in this passage from the long prose section, "It's Tarmac," that is the second of the longer pieces here, in which he talks about his mother's name: "Her maiden name (Bretmersky) was a clerical error on a baptismal certificate (Pretmersky)."

His attention to letters and anagrams even colors his brief comments on poetics, in this later passage from "It's Tarmac":

Contemporary American poetry is fond of dichotomies. I'm feeling a little punchy, so I'll hazard my own one-two: those interested in who and those interested in how. Cults of who and schools of how.

The third of the long pieces here is called "Time"; section XV ("Another, Cleveland": yes, McFadden is from the Cleveland area) begins with a line that recalls a theme I appreciated in Jonathan Lethem's Fortress of Solitude ("The key to mostly anything is pretending your first time isn't"), and then it ends with a bit of philosophy and a bit of deflation:

What are we, but what we mistake ourselves for?
The brashest fact of my childhood—was I five?—
learning there were other Kevins. Might have said seven
for the rhyme, but you'd probably think I was slow
("Second grade, the lad hadn't grasped that?") and
good thing, too, since you're counting, I wasn't named
Nate, the temptation would be too (don't say it)
powerful. Do you even believe a syllable of this?
This life is a living remembered over a shoulder:
breadcrumb trail remapped into meaning years after
from crowshit cairns which pigs mistake for truffles.
Three days in your life that no art will recapture:
the day you were born, the day death sank in deep,
and the day you divined you weren't so damn special.

Thus, even when he's playing with anagrams and puns (pursuing the "how" of poetry), McFadden never turns fully away from a biographical approach centered on epiphanies (or the lack thereof), the "cult of who."

One feature of the book that I have left out until now is its focus on the theme of America, from anagram poems built around lines about America from Langston Hughes and Allen Ginsberg to a poem about the Statue of Liberty that outlines his mother's peculiar use of idiomatic phrases like "brand spanking new" to a poem about being "At Rushmore" that also deflates its subject in the conclusion, though here the deflation is also an opening up of the monumental subject at hand:

... Near the base, rubble remains—
a talus of blasted stones, dropped names—
the part of the image we may come closest to.

A Grateful Dead Analysis

Deadheads will enjoy this statistical analysis of the relationship between the Grateful Dead's performance of songs and the fans' listening habits. (Thanks to Ron Silliman for the link.)

One thing I noted in my comment on Silliman's blog is that the most-played songs are all Weir tunes, but the most popular tunes are largely Garcia tunes. This might not be statistically significant, though, since Garcia simply had more tunes in the repertoire, so he did not have to repeat songs as often as Weir did.

Phil Lesh on the Grateful Dead

"All we did was steal what jazz musicians did and apply it to rock 'n' roll. If we didn't do it, someone else would have," he says.

That's Phil Lesh from this interview about the Dead's forthcoming tour. His comment reminded me of the reaction of Deadheads when Branford Marsalis first sat in with them on March 29, 1990.

The Deadheads were blown away by Branford's brilliance, and by the fact that he seemed to play along so well, even though he openly stated that he had never heard the Dead's music before.

And all I could say was, "Duh!" Of course Branford fit in with the Dead; any jazz musician would have, because the Dead applied jazz methods to rock and roll, which is admittedly harmonically and rhythmically simpler than jazz, and thus a piece of cake for jazzers!

Top 5 songs of 2008

Once I factor out the Grateful Dead tunes, here are my top five tracks from my last.fm charts for 2008:

Greg Brown, Canned Goods
World Saxophone Quartet, Hattie Wall
Miles Davis, Bitches Brew
Greg Brown, If I Had Known
Greg Brown, Cold and Dark and Wet

The next highest one that is not by one of those guys/bands is Dylan's "Stuck Inside of Mobile with the Memphis Blues Again," followed by Chris Smither's "Leave the Light On."

An old Deadhead who loves jazz and folk, that's me. :-)

Seven years ago today

It was a Friday. I was driving back from shopping in Lörrach, the Wiese river to my right. I was listening to a Grateful Dead tape, one I had not listened to in a long time, from my first pair of shows (so either October 9 or 10, 1982). At that time, "Touch of Grey" was new not only to me but to all Deadheads, as the band had debuted the song only shortly before. When the chorus started, with Jerry singing "I will survive," I became so sad about his passing (then only six years previously) that I had to pull over, because I was crying.

On Monday morning, I read in the Basler Zeitung that W. G. Sebald had died in a car accident on that same Friday afternoon. I later found out that the accident was at around 4:30 p.m. or so—that is, about 5:30 in the Basel area. Pretty much the same time when I pulled over to cry.

To me, this is another example of the kind of "touching but meaningless" coincidence that Sebald referred to in Austerlitz. Others may want to interpret it more mystically.

Inside Straight

On Tuesday morning, William Kristol wrote in the Times about McCain's chances: "It’s an inside straight. But I’ve seen gamblers draw them."

The metaphor was not quite right, though. Drawing an inside straight means you've got AKJ10 and you cut the Q, say. But McCain was only holding the Ace and the Ten, and he would have to draw the Jack, the Queen, and the King.

I can't help quoting the Dead here:

Everybody's bragging and drinking that wine
I can tell the Queen of Diamonds by the way she shines
Come to daddy on an inside straight
Well I got no chance of losing this time

And that song is called ... "Loser."

Ratdog does Morning Dew

Bob Weir said in an interview I read a while back that he did not really want to do "Morning Dew" with Ratdog, because it was too much Jerry Garcia's song, or something like that. Well, now they've done it, and it brought tears to this old Deadhead's eyes. And probably to Bob's, as well!

Spring

... yesterday, the sky was blue, the wind was slightly chilly, and I drove my son Miles to his drum lesson, opened up the sun roof, and cranked up the Grateful Dead. "Look for a while at the China cat sunflower ..." That's spring ...

last.fm

I've added two last.fm widgets to the right-hand side of my blog. With them, you can check out what music I am listening to. It's mostly the Grateful Dead, with healthy doses of jazz to keep me on my toes, and bits of selected other things.

Isn't this all incredibly strange?

Wind; bonobos; Las Vegas

In his article "Swingers," in the July 30 issue of the New Yorker, Ian Parker describes someone he met while researching the article: "I spoke to a tall man in his forties who went by the single name Wind, and who had driven from his home in North Carolina to sing at the event."

I like to think I met that guy once, back in 1984. I was in Las Vegas for a Dead show (April 6, for those keeping track, a show full of set-list oddities), and after the show, I went out to the car of the folks I was supposed to be driving to Irvine with. Nobody there. I was wearing a T-shirt, and the night was cool.

At the next car was a guy who was also waiting for the one with the keys. He saw that I was shivering, so he gave me a blanket to drape over my shoulders. We fell to chatting, and I asked him his name. "Wind," he said, "like what's making you cold." "No," I answered, "Wind is keeping me warm."

*

That, by the way, was the only Dead show I ever flew to. And before the show, I won a few dollars on slot machines, so except for the plane ticket and the concert tickets, the whole trip cost me nothing.

There's also the story of the drive to Irvine, and then the drive home with some other folks, but I'll save those for some other day.

Halloween 1971

It's always fun on Halloween to listen to an old Halloween show by the Grateful Dead. I am particularly fond of October 31, 1984, at the Berkeley Community Theatre (the fourth of a wonderful six-show set, including the spectacular November 2 show), but this evening I have chosen Halloween 1971, part of which was released as Dick's Picks, Volume 2, with its rivetingly beautiful "Dark Star" (with no second verse) surprisingly seguing (out of a passage of steadily increasing dissonance) into "Sugar Magnolia" instead of "Saint Stephen" (which then comes after "Sugar Magnolia").

Addendum: And then there's the stunning segue out of the first part of "Not Fade Away" into "Going Down the Road Feeling Bad"—again, a jamming climax that suddenly and smoothly shifts gears into another song, as Garcia shifts from rapid flourishes to pretty melody lines in a matter of seconds.

Stella Blue

I have never doubted that Jerry Garcia wrote some absolutely gorgeous ballads (with Robert Hunter's words, of course), but if you have ever doubted Garcia's songwriting, then check out Willie Nelson's version of Garcia-Hunter's "Stella Blue" on Willie's CD "Songbird" (the title cut of which is a version of the Fleetwood Mac song). The extra twist of the CD is that Willie uses Ryan Adams and the Cardinals as a backing band.