Never became a Deadhead, but there's the odd moment on the records, and then there's "Dark Star"
There's also the electro-acoustic side project Seastones, the creation of Ned Lagin, but Lesh's contribution and encouragement clearly crucial.
Below is
a/ bit on the Grateful Dead from an essay on psychedelia for a Liverpool exhibition
b/ a bit on Grateful Dead and Deadhead culture from Retromania
c/ my interview with John Oswald about his Grayfolded project based on 100s of different live versions of "Dark Star" - a project instigated by Phil Lesh.
Ethan Hein does close analysis of "Dark Star" and recommends some great versions (helpfully collated here by me as a playlist)
Here's a different playlist of other "Dark Star" renditions I made on Tidal
I rather like this ridiculously non-singular studio version they put out as a single
Second part of Ethan Hein's analysis of "Dark Star", less musicological this time and more about concept + context, surveying academic literature on the song
Earlier Hein post titled "Phil Lesh gets funky"
Call me soft in the head but I've always rather liked this other single - an actual hit, Top 10 Billboard!
Grateful Dead and the SF Sound
Unlike the British psychedelic groups, the SF bands had gone straight from folk to acid-rock without any intervening period playing rock’n’roll or R&B. As a consequence, the feelgood groove that the UK groups retained through all the studio malarkey was absent. Yet despite its lack of grounding in R&B, the SF acid-rock bands uniformly emphasized the importance of dancing. It’s no coincidence that the scene was born in former ballrooms like the Fillmore and the Avalon. This was a particular form of dance--unpaired and asexual, a sacred frenzy of undulant gestures. This freeform dance matched The Grateful Dead’s “search for the form that follows chaos,” as guitarist Jerry Garcia characterized it.
Capturing the fugitive “magic” of their live jamming in the studio would prove an abiding problem for the Grateful Dead. Shortly before making their first album, Garcia warned, “We’re not a recording band. We’re a dance band.” After a disappointing debut, the Dead veered to the opposite extreme and embraced the sound-sculpting potential of the studio. Painstakingly stitching together live tapes with studio experimentation, 1968’s Anthem of the Sun drew heavily on the avant-classical training of bassist Phil Lesh and pianist Tom Constanten, both of whom had studied under Luciano Berio at Mills College in Oakland, California. “We were making a collage,” recalled Garcia. “It had to do with an approach that’s more like electronic music or concrete music, where you are actually assembling bits and pieces towards an enhanced non-realistic representation.” Compared with the phonographic feats of the Beatles or Hendrix, though, Anthem is a pretty mild experience, with an “organic” quality that mostly feels like a plausible real-time musical event (unlike the Beatles’ “A Day In The Life.” say). The Dead quickly reverted to their original go-with-the-flow improvisational model, as documented on an endless series of live albums. Jefferson Airplane, likewise, made a couple of gestures at musique concrete--the freak-out track “A Small Package of Value Will Come To You, Shortly,” the electronic foray “Curinga”--but their records generally closely replicated their live sound.
.... Paralleling the Deadhead subculture that surrounded the Grateful Dead all through the Seventies, Eighties and Nineties, the rave scene created a sense of ecstatic tribalistic community. Like Dead shows, each rave constructed a “temporary autonomous zone” in which drugs could be experienced in the most audio-visually conducive environment imaginable. The acid house played at the raves couldn’t have sounded further from the Dead’s meandering country-rock, but it had exactly the same function. As journalist Burton H. Wolfe put it in the 1960s, this was music designed “to blow the mind and provide action sound for dancing.”
DEADHEADS
THE LIVING DEAD
On the face of it, it's difficult to think of anything more distant from Mod and Northern Soul than the Deadheads, that tie dye tribe who followed the Grateful Dead on their arena tours all through the Seventies, Eighties and early Nineties. The turn to psychedelia in the mid-Sixties was precisely what turned off many mods and led to Northern Soul. It's easy to imagine a Northern Soul or Secret Affair fan's disgust at the Deadhead's sense of "style": the long straggly hair and face-fuzz, the cut-off-shorts and loose flowing garments with their unappetizing mix of garish colors and Whole Earth-y shades of brown. The Dead's music--all meandering guitar solos, rootsy grooves, weak whitebread harmonies--could hardly have been more offensive to the mod sensibility.
Still, there are a surprising number of parallels between Northern Soul and the Deadhead scene. Both are style tribes whose members travelled on pilgrimages to particular clubs or one-off events, "temples of sound" where they congregated to create an ecstatic ritual space. At the Dead's long arena shows and the Northern Soul all-nighters loud music and drugs meshed to overwhelm listeners and transport them to a collective high. Dead shows were famous for the ripples that traversed the crowd-body in response to certain shifts in the music. As journalist Burton H. Wolfe observed, the Dead's music was "action sound for dancing" just as much as it was head music designed to "blow the mind". A different kind of dancing, for sure, to the fastidious steps and acrobatic twirls on display at Northern nights. Freeform and fluid, Deadhead dancing was the continuation of the "freaking-out" style that emerged in 1960s San Francisco at former ballrooms like the Fillmore and the Avalon as well as at the Be-Ins and similar triptastic happenings. Orgiastic yet asexual, this sacred frenzy of undulant gestures matched The Grateful Dead’s “search for the form that follows chaos,” as guitarist Jerry Garcia characterized it. But like Northern Soul, the Dead's concert audience was mostly on its feet, moving and grooving.
The main thing that the Deadheads and Northern Soul have in common is their fixation on a particular moment in the Sixties, keeping it alive in defiance of the passage of pop historical time. Neither scene was really retro, but rather an example of subcultural persistence. "Keeping the faith" is the central principle in both fan cultures. So too is an emphasis on community--a sense of togetherness defined against the mainstream, that unlucky majority who aren't in the know. As the Dead's Tom Constanten put it, "Back in the sixties, there was a great sense of community, and I think a lot of the energy and the steam, the wind in the sails of the Grateful Dead phenomenon is from that community." There are even parallels between Northern Soul and the Deadheads in terms of the way a rhetoric of anti-commercialism was combined with a bustling entrepreneurial activity, as with the markets for handcrafted goods (hemp bracelets, jewelry, tie-dyed clothes) and Dead memorabilia that sprang up in the parking lots outside the arenas where the Dead played, which aren't that far removed from the record dealers selling and swapping rare soul singles at the Northern Soul all-nighters. In both scenes there was also a bustling illegal trade going on rather less openly: amphetamines and barbituarates with Northern, and at Deadhead shows, marijuana, "doses" ( LSD), and other psychedelics like peyote, mushrooms and MDMA.
All this parking lot activity was as much part of the total experience of a Dead show as the band's performance. These outdoor bazaars, teeming with backpack-lugging peddlers and gaudily daubed, Merry Prankster-style micro-buses and vans, offered a kind of nomadic surrogate for Haight-Ashbury circa 1967-69. And they had the same upsides and downsides. Familiar faces that you'd see at every show, people passing around the pipe and sharing stuff with strangers, an atmosphere of trust and tranquility…. But also rip-off deals, scam artists, hardcore drug casualties, kids flipping out on bad trips.
Deborah J. Baiano-Berman, who's both an academic and a Deadhead, characterizes the band's following as a "moral community" and argues that Dead's concerts allow their fans "to live out their interpretation of a hippie-like communal value system, based primarily on freedom, experimentation, solidarity, peace, and spontaneity." Inside the auditorium, the crowd created the atmosphere as much as the band or the lighting crew. The emphasis on tie-dye and clashing colours, the painted faces and beads, turned the whole shimmying, swaying audience into a paisley ocean, a spin-art kaleidoscope. Baiano-Berman points out that almost nobody sits at their assigned seats in the concert hall: they move out into the aisles and dance, drift around the auditorium, settling in different places, creating an effect of "incessant movement and circulation". To an audience sensitized on drugs like LSD, which intensifies peripheral vision, to be in the midst of this flickering multitude is entrancing and magical.
Another aspect of Deadhead culture that's about communality and circulation is tape trading. From very early on Deadheads started recording shows, a practice that was first tolerated by the band and then encouraged, with the Grateful Dead making provisions for a special area at each of their shows for tapers. There was a huge demand for cassette recordings of the band's shows, in part because the Grateful Dead's official studio albums were airless affairs that failed to capture the electricity of the band in full improvisational flow. Deadhead culture's communal ethos meant that if anyone requested a tape, the taper had to make them a copy. Tapers also got into trading recordings with other tapers in different parts of the country. All that resulting excessive documentation and redundancy anticipated aspects of today's retro culture, like the multiple clips of the same gig videoed on cellphones and uploaded to YouTube.
The taping phenomenon has a paradoxical aspect. The angle on the Dead has always been that you really had to see them live to "get it": you needed to experience the flow of the moment, the pure quicksilver magic of Garcia's soloing as it rippled out into the cosmos. Taping the shows attempts to capture that evanescent beauty but in the process goes against the "be here now" spirit of psychedelia. Indeed the tapers became obsessed with recording quality. Instead of dancing and getting lost in music, they would spend the show crouched beside their tape recording equipment, constantly adjusting the recording levels (sometimes listening to the show through headphones plugged into the machine) or repositioning the microphones. They'd admonish dancing Deadheads for bumping into the equipment or chatting too loudly on the periphery of the taper's sections. Like the dad with a videocamera welded into his eye socket at his kid's birthday party, the tapers were not fully present; they missed, partially at any rate, the very event they were attempting to save for eternity.
The fact that obsessively stockpiling audio documentation of the live Dead is so central to the Deadhead subculture seems to resonate with its deepest impulse: to freeze-frame History and artificially keep alive an entire era, the late Sixties. The Deadhead scene is a preservation society. Or perhaps it was actually a reservation, a zone of cultural territory set aside for an outcast tribe. The gentle frenzy of the Deadheads is a ghost dance: an endangered, out-of-time people willing a lost world back into existence.
JOHN OSWALD
The Wire, 1995
by Simon Reynolds
There are two different schools of sampling. For some (A Guy Called Gerald, The Young Gods, Techno-Animal), there's a fierce conviction (50 percent aesthetic, 50 percent legal anxiety) that all samples must be masked, all sources rendered unrecognisable. This is the modernist school of sampladelia: digital technology as a crucible for sonic alchemy, musique concrete made easy as pie. I have a lot of sympathy for this ethos, but there's a sense in which this approach reduces the sampler to a synthesiser, and thereby misses what is truly idiomatic to the machine: taking the known and making it strange, yet still retaining an uncanny, half-recognisable trace of the original's aura.
Canadian musician/producer John Oswald falls into the second, postmodern camp. Sampling, or as he prefers to term it, "electroquoting", is a highly self-conscious practice that allows him to interrogate notions of originality, copyright, signature and 'the death of the author'. Long before the sampler became available, he was using more cumbersome, time-consuming techniques of tape cut'n'splice to create his famous if seldom heard Mystery Lab cassettes. But he really made a name for himself in 1989 with the Plunderphonics CD, which caused a major ruckus, sonically and institutionally, with its digital vivisections of songs by The Beatles, Elvis, Dolly Parton, Michael Jackson, Glenn Gould etc. Despite the fact that 'Plunderphonics' was distributed on a non-commercial, non-profit basis, the Canadian Recording Industry Association, acting on behalf of its clients CBS and Michael Jackson, threatened Oswald with litigation. He was forced to destroy the master-tapes and all remaining CD's. 700 remain in circulation, while the intrigued can get bootleg copies from a number of Copyright Violation Squads (see end-note).
Since then Oswald has mostly confined his plunderphonic escapades to cases where his reworkings have been solicited, like his de- and re-constructions of songs by The Doors and Metallica, amongst others, for a limited release CD celebrating the 25th Annivesary of Elektra Records. An exception was "Plexure" (released on John Zorn's Avant label), where Oswald cannibalised the entire audiorama of contemporary pop'n'rock in one fell swoop. The result--5000 songs 'composited' into a 20 minute frenzy of crescendos, choruses, screams, powerchords, etc--is a bit like Napalm Death with samplers.
Last year, at the invitation of the Grateful Dead, Oswald plunderphonized that band's most famous and far-out song "Dark Star", producing the double-CD "Grayfolded". The first disc, "Transitive Axis" came out last year; now the second half, "Mirror Ashes" has been added, and the whole 'Grayfolded' package is being made widely available, following the unexpectedly warm reception 'Transitive' received from the Deadhead community (50,000 copies sold!).
Entering the Dead's legendary vaults, where recordings of virtually every performance they ever made are stacked, Oswald spent 21 days listening to 100 versions of 'Dark Star', and extracted 40 hours of improvisatory material. The original plan was to create just one disc, but Oswald soon realised he had enough good stuff for two. 'Transitive' and 'Mirror' each took three months of painstaking digital labour to construct. The results are astonishing. Whereas the iconoclasm (literally idol-smashing) of 'Plunderphonics' was patently audible, 'Grayfolded' is true to the spirit of the Dead: the nine tracks of 'Transitive', in particular, form one seamless, fluent monster-jam, and sounds almost like a plausible real-time event with the Dead in unusually kosmik form. Although Oswald's techniques allow Garcia, Weir, Lesh et al to jam with their own doppelgangers across a 25 years timespan, the digital methodology doesn't really draw attention to itself on the first disc (it gets a bit more outre on "Mirror Ashes", though).
One of the ironies of "Grayfolded" is that Oswald wasn't exactly a Deadhead when he embarked on the project. "I enjoyed 1969's 'Live/Dead', especially 'Dark Star', and might have heard the odd C&W song or 'Truckin'', but I basically didn't listen to them for twenty five years," he admits over the phone from his Toronto office. "But I found what I expected in the vaults--all kinds of great things were happening in concert. I also went to two Dead shows. The first was in Oakland, their home town, and I thought 'well, this is not great improvising', but it was fascinating sociologically, in so far as there's this relationship between an extremely active, fertile audience and a very untheatrical musical experience onstage. A year later I went to another show in New York, and found that musically it was quite satisfying, almost like a completely different band. So I started to respect the idea that an audience would follow this band looking for these good concerts. I had got one out of two, a good ratio."
In the lysergic daze of late '60s acid-rock, the Dead did weird studio-as-instrument stuff on early albums like 'Anthem of the Sun' and 'Aoxomoa', But today one associates the Dead with a keep-it-live, jam-a-long mess-thetic, possibly because their legacy is godawful American neo- tie-dye bands like Blues Traveller, Phish, etc. Was there a sense in which Oswald was making a case for digital music as the new psychedelia, and making up for the Dead's abandonment of the studio's possibilities?
Actually, no. "The technique of this record--using computers, digital transfers and stuff--is really incidental to the illusion I'm trying to present. People would tell me to stop listening to the tapes and go to a concert, 'cos live it's a totally different thing. And I thought what constitutes this other 'thing'? It's obviously not in the band itself, cos there's no theatricality. Maybe it's 'cos there's so much drugs in the air! What I found at the concerts is there's a give and take between the audience and band, there are audience surges triggered by certain things the band do, or by the lighting, which is very subtle and directs the visual attention back onto the audience every so often. I thought 'well, we're not going to soak the CD cover in acid, so how can I achieve what I think everybody desires--a record that captures this feeling that Dead concerts are magic?' So I did things that are unnatural, like have a young Jerry Garcia sing with an old Jerry, or have an orchestra of multiple Dead musicians, all in order to pump up the sonic experience so that at certain points you think: 'What's happening? Have the drugs kicked in?'".
These paradoxical sensations--a real-time, flow-motion band suddenly transfigured and transcendentalized--were created via an array of intensely artificial and finickety techniques. Like 'folding', whereby Oswald took similar material from different concerts and layered them up, achieving a density similar to the effect Phil Spector got from having several pianos playing the same chords. "For instance, on "Transitive Axis" I took a really nice 12 minute duet between Phil Lesh and Jerry Garcia, trimmed out redundant ideas and folded it down to three minutes. Yet it still feels like a duet. Using a computer, it's easy to take something from later in a musical sequence and slide it in earlier, superimposing it on a different track of the mix. I used to do that in my earlier analog days but it was much harder to do it accurately. With computers, I can move things by a millisecond 'til they fit exactly in the rhythmic pocket, so you still have the 'feel' of a band.
"After the first disc, Lesh said he would have liked to hear even more folding, and in response I took the entirety of 'Transitive Axis' and folded it 14 times. This created 16, 384 layers and squeezed 60 minutes into 2 seconds! It sounds like a feedback rush or a jet engine, and I slipped it into "Cease Tone Beam" on the second disc. It's a bit like that JG Ballard idea that in the future people will listen to Wagner operas that have been compressed from four hours to a few seconds, but still have the flavour, like a whiff of perfume."
"Cease Tone Beam" itself is Oswald's plunderphonia at its most extreme. From the ' drumspace' sections of Dead shows, which often segue into 'Dark Star', Oswald took a minute and a half fragment of ultralow-end percussion timbre, generated on Mickey Hart's custom-made aluminum beam. Oswald slowed it down 16 times into a protracted sub-aural seism, over which he layered progressively shorter, less-slowed down swatches of percussion that went up in ratios (2, 4, 8) that generated a simple armonic relationship. The result, at once ethereal and chthonic, other- and under-wordly, is the missing link between avant-grunge unit The Melvins and Eno's "On Land".
Oswald doesn't really know how the Grateful Dead feel about "Grayfolded". Ex-keyboard player Tom Constanten did send him a thank-you note, but the death of Jerry Garcia left the rest of the guys "pretty preoccupied". Diehard Deadheads responded extremely well to "Transitive Axis", but the more anti-naturalistic "Mirror Ashes" has stirred the first charges of 'heresy!'. Oswald's favourite reaction is "from a guy on the Internet who wrote that Grayfolded makes him cry, because it encapsulates 25 years of Garcia, and it's unreal in a way that gave him a very visceral sensation of it being a ghost."
Garcia's death does shine a peculiar light on the whole project, in so far as it suggests that a kind of involuntary immortality for artists may soon become widespread. Oswald has shown that a sympathetic ear can 'play' another artist's aesthetic like an instrument. (Of course Luddites like Lenny Kravitz and Oasis have effectively already done the same thing, vis-a-vis Hendrix and Lennon/McCartney, by writing new songs in another's old style). But what's to stop an unsympathetic, money-motivated ear doing the same thing? In the future, will artists copyright their 'soul-signature' and then sell it to the highest bidder to be exploited after their demise? Fond of visual and filmic analogies, Oswald mentions that the movie business has been trying to devise ways of taking dead stars and creating simulations of them to play new parts. The mind boggles....
In addition to plunderphonic activity, Oswald works as a producer, where he deploys unique ecording techniques like his Orbital Microphone Navigational Imaging Via Echotronic Radio Stereo Eccentricity, aka OMNIVERSE (a mic' with the aural equivalent of a zoom lens, enabling it to do a 'tracking shot' down the entire length of a piano string). He also writes pieces for orchestra, and, as we speak, is putting the finishing touches to a stage production involving 22 choreographers "none of whom know what the others are doing". Finally, and strictly as a hobby, he plays sax in a quintet confusingly called The Double Wind Cello Trio. On the plunderphonic front, Oswald has a backlog of classical music related stuff to release, and he's about to embark on a massive opus that will somehow "encapsulate this first century of music recording history that is about to come to an end".