Rediscovering The Dead

May 7, 2010 Rant

I’m sure like me, many of you have been burnt out a band for one reason or another. For me that band was the Grateful Dead. During my teens and early twenties everyone I hung out with were Deadheads. Subsequently all we ever listened to was the Dead or some band closely related to them. Like many a youth I was hooked.

I listened non-stop, collected a treasure trove of live shows, and immersed myself into the music. The Dead opened so many doors for me musically, not just in what they played. So often I’d hear a song and find out that it was a cover and begin looking into where it came from. While my tastes have always been very eclectic, there were many times that a specific song or artist they covered was something I was not already familiar with.

Over time I begin to tire of constantly hearing the same ol’ stuff wherever I went and more and more I found myself not wanting to listen to them at all if I was alone or the one in control of what was playing. With the passing years I always considered the Dead one of my favorite bands, but rarely did I listen to them. I listened to a lot of their various side projects when I felt the urge and when they came on shuffle I  often go ahead and skip to the next track.

Within the last week I have begun the daunting task of compiling all of my live shows on my computer from cd. When I started I thought, what the hell, I’ll start with the largest quantity which happened to be the 700 or so Dead shows I have gathered. As I was making my way through the decades of material I started to listen to random things.

The more I listened the more I remembered why I like them in the first place… they were really fucking good. Here was a band with some serious live chops, that included a great lead guitar player, bass player, two killer drummers, and a plethora of keyboard players. Along with fine musicianship was the fact that at any given time one of three very good vocalists (four if you count Phil Lesh’s Ben Steinlike monotonous drawl) would take the mic and a show or album could take on a whole different feeling.

To top it all off, the songs are great. Obviously like any artist there are gonna be some bad albums (Go to Heaven, anyone? ) and some songs or performances that aren’t going to be your cup of tea (90% percent of anything that Donna Jean could be found screaching on) but with a catalog that spans thirty years and countless available live shows it’s easy to pick through the rare downers and find the gems.

I’ve really been listening to these live shows a lot. I now immediately skip all versions of Space or Drums (because let’s face it those were for times when mind altering substances weren’t limited to only sleep deprivation), I’m not really one for most instrumental music in the first place. I do however still marvel at their ability to seemingly slide into any genre whether it be rock, country, bluegrassy, blues and do it well.

Some of the stuff I am really getting sucked back into right now are any of the Pigpen era shows because he has always been my favorite member of the Dead and I’m a fiend for some dirty blues. I  am also really digging the shows from 1970 and 1980 that included the acoustic sets which were just laced with Jerry and Bobby singing country and traditional folk covers as well as songs that fit that bill from their own songbook. Finally I am loving the shows where Brent Mydland came into his own and began singing more, think 1982.

Also worth noting, I have been obsessed with downloading Phil and Friends shows now. I  never really was a fan of Phil singing but I love Warren Haynes who was the singer/guitar with Phil for like three years.Also as I believe I’ve mentioned before, I am obsessed with Jackie Greene who for the last two or three years has been handling a lot of the vocals for Phil as well as playing guitar and keyboards. Interestingly enough, Greene was not a Dead fan prior to being asked by Lesh to join him and was discovering these great songs as he was learning to play them.

At the end of the day I guess the lesson for me is that some of the things we write off or forget about really are worth remembering and experiencing again. I am having a great time dancing in my mind to all these songs and once again I  know why it is that it takes me ten scrolls to get through The Grateful Dead section of Itunes.

Tags: bob weir, bootlegs, brent mydland, grateful dead, Jackie Greene, jerry garcia, phil lesh, pigpen, warren haynes