Daily Listen by Brian Brock

The Grateful Dead – Live / Dead

The thing about the music of the Grateful Dead in 1969 is that they were still improvising essentially by repeating a short phrase with variations. They had some good songs, like “St. Stephen”, which is musically fantastic and lyrically psychedelic to the max if not particularly meaningful. Most of the tunes were essentially just excuses for the aforementioned primitive jamming. “Dark Star” allowed instrumental wheedling and deelding on a chord, and “Turn On Your Lovelight” offers Ron McKernan the chance to hop up and down like he’s James Brown for a half an hour. It’s fine. Hippies would certainly use the most violent power they have, ostracism, to thwart my disdain, and I wouldn’t blame them. “Death Don’t Have No Mercy” is phenomenally performed. The feedback jam is enjoyable, and you have to appreciate the Dead inflicting such noise on parents of hippies and on “hippies” everywhere.

Good improvisation develops harmonically, structurally, melodically, in the same fashion as any good piece of music. Simply repeating a short phrase while one player improvises melodically is essentially performing a composition, and a poor one at that, even if the phrase has not been previously determined.

The problem is really not that the music is limited compared to the Dead’s later output, but that it’s limitations mean that any attempt to understand what is truly happening has to be primarily concerned with the social context of San Fransisco in the late Sixties, which has already been written about by Tom Wolfe and Hunter Thompson. It would be wiser to think about other such culturally driven music works, like early bluegrass, or punk rock, which aren’t nearly as played out.

A number of Grateful Dead albums succeed specifically on musical grounds, like Workingman’s Dead, Wake of the Flood, Terrapin Station, and American Beauty. The last is the album people will point to as the Dead’s classic studio album, but I find songs such as “Operator” and “Til the Morning Comes” drag down “Ripple” and “Box of Rain” a little too much.

As a result, I’m not convinced one can investigate any single classic Grateful Dead album on purely musical grounds.

Cat Power - Moon Pix

I’m going to try to “get serious” about writing.  We’ll see how that goes.

At the moment, I’m trying to convince myself, followed by Continuum International Publishing Group, followed by 5,000 or so lucky customers, that I can write a book about a great album.  Strictly speaking, according to the call for proposals, the album does not have to be great.

The albums I’m considering are:

• Cat Power - Moon Pix
• Bjork - Vespertine
• The Evens - The Evens
• Smog - Knock Knock
• OP8 - Slush
• Robert Wyatt - Rock Bottom
• Shania Twain - Come On Over
• The Cure - The Head on the Door
• Tom Ze, who doesn’t have a “that’s the one” album
• The Grateful Dead - Live / Dead
• They Might Be Giants - Lincoln

What else?  There are probably a hundred more.  I feel vaguely competent to approach these albums, unlike, for example, The Talking Heads’ Remain In Light.  None of the bands have yet been covered in the 33 1/3 series, and none are in the list of 50 bands which have been proposed already.  All of these are universal - these are not sounds that precisely fit some crack in my psyche, like the chewed up gum of the Moldy Peaches or Glenn Branca’s hundred year flood.

That last point is important, because the book really does have to induce 5,000 people to drop the price of 10 mp3s for it.  I imagine that about 70% of the choice to purchase rests on the album in question - except in cases like Colin Meloy’s memoirish account of The Replacements’ Let it Be.  The big sellers seem to be books about an album adored by either a small, information-starved audience (eg Neutral Milk Hotel’s fans), or a massive audience, some of which prefers the format of these books to the 30 other books about a given artist (Bob Dylan).

Cat Power’s Moon Pix is a good choice.  It’s a set of eleven pure knockout songs.  The story of Chan Marshall moving to Prosperity, South Carolina and waking up out of nightmares and into half a dozen songs is a classic, even if it’s fairly well known at this point.  The audience is large, and still growing, but information is scarce - only one book about the band turns up on Amazon.com.

Moon Pix is the “that’s the one” Cat Power album.  I don’t necessarily have to say it’s the best, although it is, just that it represents her major turning point of departure. (I think there might be a Robert Wyatt song in that sentence.)  Before it, Cat Power was an OK indie rock band, not the great singer and watched artist that she has been since.

I remember being just hammered by this album when I put it on in my blue Geo Prizm, sitting in a parking lot on the Pacific Coast Highway.  It combines real lyrics, gooey underwater instrument playing, and Chan Marshall singing like she is overcome by the “Black Sleep of Kali Ma”.  What?

On the other hand, the harmonic structures and recording methods are not particularly inspiring on this one.  There are great sounds and great performances, but writers generally approach sounds and singing by pouring syrup over them and brushing off the flies.  “Chan Marshall’s evocative warbling creates a distinct unease in her transfixed auditors, while her greasy guitar-slinging curdles their milkshakes in a manner that can only be termed heavenly.”  My favorite music book is The Beatles as Musicians, by Walter Everett, who is interested in the Beatles as musicians, not just as story-fodder.  Everett approaches the album as a work with an inherent meaning, for which the history and personalities only offer us context.

Feel free to suggest other albums I should write about.