Thanks Richard and Grimjack for the Dark Star recs.....will check out one or two later this evening in headphones with a buzz on
Thanks Richard and Grimjack for the Dark Star recs.....will check out one or two later this evening in headphones with a buzz on
Personally, I never heard better "Dark Star" than that version from "Live / Dead". But I love so much this hippy video from 1972; every person under the age of thirty should be forced to watch this!
^^ That is 8/27/72 which one of the posters mentioned.
That's one of myf avorite Dark Stars, even in spite of Weir hijacking the segue away from Jerry into cowboy land. But that was one of the coolest things about the Dead, how they could segue from a fairly conventional song like He's Gone or Truckin into some sort of normal sounding jamming, which in turn segues into some deep space thing, and then they manage to find their way back to a very conventional song. The segues don't always work to well (this one is actually sort of a good example), but other times it's like "How the frell could they do that without discussing it before hand??".Originally Posted by Monet
Anyway, this video was meant to be part of a concert film called Sunshine Daydream, that got shelved because the band was unhappy about their performance (supposedly, they only remembered how hard it was to keep the instruments in tune, due to the heat), but not before it was fully edited and that great animated sequence was edited into Dark Star. Bootleg copies surfaced in the 90's (I've got one on VHS I've had since circa 1996), and it finally got a legit release a few years ago. It's as good a place as any to hear how amazing the Dead at their height was.
And it's kinda cool seeing Jerry play a stock, 50's era Strat (versus the massively customized Alligator or the super one of a kind Wolf, Tiger and Rosebud).
IF they keep them on the ARchive. I know al ot of the shows that were excerpted on the Dick's Picks releases were taken off the Archive (including stuff that wasn't ON the damn Dick's Picks releases!).
A vinyl release is useless to me. I need digital or CD. And the 71 shows ar ethe least interesting there for me. Like I said, too much conventional stuff, too much Pigpen, and not enough weirdness.
"Glastonbury Fayre recordings", aka 4/8/72 Empire Pool, London (The Dead didn't play at Glastonbury). If you go to post #34 in this thread, I give a link to an earlier thread where I posted a bunch of my favourite Dead things, and the last video in post #10 in that thread is the droids you're looking for.
http://www.relisten.net has made the Archive pretty much an also-ran at this point.
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Near the end of the Europe '72 tour Jerry Garcia went to a studio in London and mixed down an edited version of the 4/8/72 "Dark Star" for the Glastonbury Fayre triple album. It would be nice if that album was easier to find now, but no. (The full version, in more recent mixes, was released by the Dead on the Stepping Out 4-CD set and then on the complete Europe '72 box set.)
At one point they took the released stuff off the Archive, but it was quietly put back a few years ago.
I did the 8 April 972 Dark Star, which is exactly one day before I was hatched on Earth
Really great. Starts off very much what I would consider "Krautrock" mode (a la Amon Duul II perhaps?) but is always morphing into something new. At one point Jerry is playing this aggressive minimalist counterpoint riff and its crazy cool. Everybody is in their own little orbit yet they are all travelling together with purpose. Beautiful stuff, I'd place this alongside some great Krautrock jams and even Henry Cow improvs, although they all have different aesthetics. Maybe I'll try another one tonight. Thx for the rec lads.
PS...the fact that they played some pseudo country blues tunes before this makes Dark Star even more unique and bewildering in a cool way.
Indeed, no band has had such a mixture of the great songs and those long, intoxicating jammings as the Grateful Dead had back then. I've already mentioned their Box of Rain the song, but also their other "hits" like Sugar Magnolia, Mountains of the Moon, Uncle John's Band, Ripple, Jack Straw, Unbroken Chain, Scarlet Begonias, Touch of Gray, etc., all are truly magnificent and unforgettable songs that still sound fresh and up-to-date.
Try the Dusseldorf Dark Star from April 24th. I managed to get this show on CD several years ago.
^^^Dude: April 24th of what year?
Cobra handling and cocaine use are a bad mix.
I would assume 1972. The Dead didn't tour Europe a whole lot, if I remember correctly. But that Europe 72 tour was....wow.
Yes, he meant April 24, 1972.
Uncle John's Band sounds like a song that was written several years before the Dead existed. A truly classic-sounding song, IMO.
That melody, that close harmony singing, set against a folk-music arrangement with acoustic guitars, is phenomenal. It is a "classic" song but, in my humble opinion, it has that "something" that elevates the Grateful Dead to another level compared to other bands that did similar things at the time. And I say that as a person who doesn't usually like bluegrass & country music.
edit: An over eight-minute long live version from 1974 that features an otherworldly guitar-solo by Jerry Garcia:
Last edited by Monet; 07-25-2021 at 02:47 AM.
Reputedly, someone asked Robert Hunter (their lyricist) what he thought the person who wrote Cumberland Blues would have thought, if he could have known something called The Grateful Dead would one day record his song. Obviously, the guy didn't realize he was talking to one of the people who wrote the song. The point being, it sound like an old timey country or blues song from the 1920's, not something written by a band who from San Francisco, circa 1970.
Now, Viola Lee Blues actually IS an old timey blues song from the 1920's, but the Dead hotwired their arrangement so it didn't sound like it.
Cornell 77 sounds good. They sound tight and fairly in-tune vocal wise. Bill and Mickey don't sound like a popcorn machine either.
As this is the Grateful Dead 'for beginners' thread, I think that this article about their concert in front of the Great Pyramid and the Sphinx in September 1978, may also be interesting: https://flashbak.com/grateful-dead-l...e-1978-390303/
The Grateful Dead "Bertha" live at the Giza Pyramid Complex, Egypt 1978
Weir could play a cereal killer on TV, or at least when he was younger....he has the crazy eyes 🤪
I remember when I saw Weir and Jerry on David Letterman back in 1987, Dave asked them about playing in Egypt, and Jerry sort of chuckles and says "Oh, we were terrible!", then goes onto say they always dropped the ball on those "special occasions", mentioning Woodstock and Monterey Pop as other examples. Then they go onto talking about Woodstock, about how they were getting electrical shocks from the vocal mics, because they weren't correctly grounded:
And then there was this gag to kick off the night's festivities:
Happy 44th birthday Terrapin....27 July 1977
Do you guys prefer the original mixes for both Aoxomoxoa and Anthem/Sun or the remixed 1971 mixes for both?
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