12/24/2022 0 Comments Grateful dead grateful dead![]() ![]() Before anyone can feel it, they’re already home free and well into “The Eleven” as they only brake lightly for Bob Weir’s out of tune vocals singing more oblique lyrics. The collision never occurs, but it’s running over everything: a stop sign, a cop, upsets a grocery-carrying grandmother, straddles half the sidewalk but it never, ever slows for any twist or turn. The lyrics are cryptic as hell, yet evoke a “Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam”-type life and death cycle, as hints of the strictest gnosis blossom and start to fragment into mythic imagery and suggestion in a waking dream that soon gets even more raucous and complex for, oh about eight minutes, and it’s about as precariously balanced as an overloaded chicken truck you see in old-tymey movies about to collide at a train crossing. Stephen” which gently awakens side 2 a place where things start to get far more raucous and complex. ![]() The side ends into a fade, catching the first chords of “St. You can listen to this track a thousand times and still hear something previously unrevealed. The drums cease completely at one point, but it’s not noticeable in the least as the group extends a track originally cut as a single A-side into an album side’s worth of consciousness mapping penetrations. The kicking of Bill Kreutzmann’s bass drums (remarkably picked up by the expert ambient miking of Bob and Betty Matthews) and hand held percussion devices are shaken, stirred and struck as snatches of keyboards, bass extrapolations and skinny Bob Weir rhythm guitar are all constantly manifesting into what the song already is - a deep and wordless joy that reawakens shades of existence that go passing by in a mindscape where nothing is preordained and flow is all. The lyrics enter sung sweetly and strongly by Jerry Garcia, his yearning inflections casting through the nether reaches of emotional shadow-land as he reigns and regroups the piece time and time again, but it’s by no means his exploration alone. It’s an interplanetary, interplaying synaptic ZAP one that doesn’t meander so much as ebb and flow within the locked multi-tiered levels of consciousness of the players - who all improvise responsibly as an ensemble giving each other tremendous tracts of open space to demarcate their individual rhythms while absorbing the always becoming-ness of where they were, and where they were going. ![]() “Dark Star” takes up side one in its entirety with a slow fade-in into its quiet paces. ![]() The first three-quarters of the album was a single, massive, run-on jam of four songs’ duration, interrupted only by fade outs and fade ins as dictated by the strictures of album length while knocking all further continuity on its head with the irritating DJ programmatic device of pairing side 1 with side 4 and side 2 with 3 although once reissued on CD, the heavy flow of “Live/Dead” was reinstated and enabled to run on unfettered. And on a good night such as this, their vibing skills were honed to such a point it enabled them to subsume themselves into ‘group brain’ telepathy: producing music that would roll on powered only by the highest, reflective and ever-striving improvisation they ever got down on record. And at this point, the band’s live performances began to mutate into sinewy effortlessness incarnate. This double live album capped off The Dead’s initial phase of their career, characterised by their electric acid jugband blues as it curled at the corners into freaky experimentation. Unfortunately, The Grateful Dead were never this raw and avant-garde ever again. ![]()
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