Seriously cool, empty post-genre half-improvised music you might hear in a bowling alley where the pins are sheep jumping over a fence.
People from Tortoise, Calexico, the Chicago Underground Duo, and the first recorded incarnation of Cat Power make the sort of music you would expect, except expect less whee and more aahmm. And those are some pretty aahmmy groups to start with.
In the end, I suspect that this music doesn’t really matter, unless it matters to you. It’s just too cool. It’s the ultimate rejection of the Led Zeppelin kind of grab-you-by-the-nostrils rock music. Punk was like a military coup which overthrows a corrupt government and then tyranizes. Tortoise and the rest of this ilk are like a Swedish utopian society that just moves along happily. You never would recognize it as important, but conceptually it’s very fit.
Recorded at two of my favorite studios, Tucson’s Wavelab and Soma in Chicago.
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.
