Here is the latest news from David Gans, producer and host of the Grateful Dead Hour.
I’m moving to Sirius
Review of Dead Symphony
Michael Bell posted this on the Grateful Dead Hour mailing list; I repost it here with his permission.
I listen to a fair bit of classical music and have studied music. I just got the Dead Symphony CD a few days ago and have listened to it twice now. As noted, most other orchestral versions of rock music can be pretty bad, but this one is actually quite good.
First of all, it sounds like Lee Johnson put a good deal of effort into this and that makes a big difference. He wasn’t afraid to take liberties with the music. The Dead’s music of course is very pliable and more open to a variety of interpretations as compared to most pop/rock music. I find the most successful parts of Dead Symphony are where he takes the most liberties with the songs. Related to this, much of the Dead repertoire works very well as instrumental music as we have seen with the various jazz versions of it, and of course the Dead’s own jamming. A lot of pop/rock stuff just doesn’t make it once stripped of the vocal parts.
The renditions of Here Comes Sunshine, To Lay Me Down, Stella Blue and China Doll are really beautiful. Johnson takes a fair bit of liberty with these, and Here Comes Sunshine is almost unrecognizable. That might bother some people, but I think it is a good thing. The “Just a little nervous from the fall” part of China Doll is really effective. Parts of these pieces sounded a bit to me like English composers of the early to mid 20th Century such as Ralph Vaughn Williams.
St. Stephen is dominated by brass and really well done, although I might have liked some more edge to it.
Blues for Allah sounds a little like it might have been written by Arnold Schoenberg, bookended by what sounds like a bit of inspiration from Darius Milhaud. Very fascinating overall.
The woodwind dominated arrangement of Sugar Magnolia is very charming, but I think I might have liked something more rocking and maybe a little more uptempo. It is still very nice though.
My main quibble with Dead Symphony is so much of it is at a slow tempo and the other parts don’t really get beyond a mid tempo. I love the slow parts, they are very beautiful, but a section or two at breakneck speed and some edge would have been really cool and added some contrast. Maybe something based on the Other One.
Anyway, if you are open to hearing different treatments of Grateful Dead music, such as the jazz versions that are out there, then I think you might like this.
Bob Weir interview re file-sharing etc.
Bob Weir interview with Bill Lynch in the Charleston Gazette:
“Jam bands occupy a place that’s ground zero in the file-sharing demographic,†Weir said.
File sharing, he said, is not to be confused with tape sharing, which was never the same thing. From the ’60s through the ’90s, bands like the Grateful Dead encouraged fan taping at concerts. These tapes were later copied, swapped and occasionally sold between fans. As the band was never a strong presence on commercial radio, the free tapes helped introduce the band to new listeners.
“Tape sharing never impacted our record sales,†he said. “File sharing does. Record labels won’t even give jam bands a record contract. There’s no point. If you go to all the effort and expense, the work, to make a record, as soon as you put one out, it’s ‘out’ because everyone has it.â€
File sharing, he said, hurts the jam music genre more than any other. Without the ability to make money from record sales, bands have to devote all of their energy to their live shows.
…
“I talk with a lot of music writers and invariably they say the clubs are closing,†he said. “The reason they’re closing is there aren’t enough musicians out there to put in them. People aren’t going into music, because you can’t make a living at it.â€
Read it all here, and comment below, please.
Owsley meets the media
Today’s San Francisco Chronicle has an interview with Bear, aka Owsley Stanley, who made the best acid, helped the Grateful Dead get started, and practically invented concert sound.
The name Owsley became a noun that appears in the Oxford dictionary as English street slang for good acid. It is the most famous brand name in LSD history. Probably the first private individual to manufacture the psychedelic, “Owsley” is a folk hero of the counterculture, celebrated in songs by the Grateful Dead and Steely Dan.
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By conservative estimates, Bear Research Group made more than 1.25 million doses of LSD between 1965 and 1967, essentially seeding the entire modern psychedelic movement.Less well known are Bear’s contributions to rock concert sound. As the original sound mixer for the Grateful Dead, he was responsible for fundamental advances in audio technology, things as basic now as monitor speakers that allow vocalists to hear themselves onstage.
…
“If you make some [acid], you’ve got to move some to get some money to make it,” he says now. “But then you had to give a lot away to keep the street price down. So anyway, I’m sort of embedded in this thing that I’m tangled up in. … Just as soon as it became illegal, I wanted out. Then, of course, I felt an obligation.”
There’s a more in-depth piece in the current Rolling Stone which I haven’t seen yet, and of course I claim the first-ever extended interview with Bear, conducted in January 1991 and published in Conversations with the Dead. He’s a great man, if somewhat hard to deal with in many ways. From the Chronicle piece:
Bear has always lived in a quite particular world. “He can be very anal retentive, on a certain level, on a genius level,” says Paul Kantner of Jefferson Airplane. “I’ve seen him send his eggs back three times at Howard Johnson’s.”
One member of the Grateful Dead told me, years ago, that you could always tell it was Bear’s acid. I’m not sure exactly what the criteria were, but on the one occasion I knew for sure I was taking Bear’s acid, it was as good as it gets. Sigh.
“The Grateful Dead wouldn’t have been the Grateful Dead without acid,” Phil Lesh told me in 1984. In addition to his work on sound systems (and of course that alchemical wizardry), he provided the band with “meat and milk, and roofs over our heads. He was our patron, in the ultimate sense of the word. He didn’t send us a check every month – we lived together. He paid the bills.”
Old GD Hours on DeadNet
The beautiful new DeadNet today introduces a new weekly feature: podcasts from the Grateful Dead Hour archive.
Analise Dubner created a beautiful image for the landing page.
First up is program #793, the first of a four-part series featuring an interview with Steve Parish on the occasion of the publication of his memoir, Home Before Daylight.
There will be a place for comments and requests – I’ll be very happy to get input on which programs from GD Hour history you’d like to hear. You can search the GD Hour log archive here and/or here.
Speaking of Home Before Daylight, news recently surfaced that a movie is in the works. According to Rolling Stone:
…now moviegoers can start preparing for the most acid-soaked tale of them all: Home Before Daylight, a film based on the formative years of The Grateful Dead. The movie will be adapted from a book by Steve Parish, who has some real credentials: He was a Dead roadie for 35 years.
The story, which has already been endorsed by Dead guitarist Bob Weir, will chart the history of the band, focusing on those times they chilled with Ken Kesey and Jefferson Airplane in the Haight-Ashbury days. We’re totally stoked for this film, if just to see who gets cast as Grace Slick (please not Lindsay Lohan).