I'll be back soon from my little summer holiday, but here is something fun
DEADHEADS; A CONCERT BECOMES A LOVE-IN AS FANS; SHOW THEY'RE STILL GRATEFUL FOR THE DEAD
 |
| 1985 at the Garden |
DEADHEADS; A CONCERT BECOMES A LOVE-IN AS FANS; SHOW THEY'RE STILL GRATEFUL FOR THE DEAD
[THIRD Edition]
Boston Globe (pre-1997 Fulltext) - Boston, Mass.
| Author: | Stocker, Carol |
| Date: | Apr 5, 1986 |
| Start Page: | 7 |
| Section: | LIVING |
PROVIDENCE -- The plaza outside the Providence Civic Center before showtime is a bizarre bazaar. Camp followers selling Grateful Dead T-shirts and bumper stickers share the sidewalk with food vendors as the sweet smells of marijuana and hot dogs with onions mingle in the night air.
Edgy policemen mounted on horses tower over the frolicking crowd like knights from an opposing force. The tide of litter is ankle deep and rising.
The Deadheads, fans of the Grateful Dead, have convened for an audience with their heroes, and the streets of parochial Providence are lined with cars bearing license plates from California, New York, Alabama, Pennsylvania and, of course, Massachusetts.
It has been six years since this band, which came together during the mid-' 60s flowering of Haight-Ashbury, has put out an album, and they've never appeared on MTV. But wherever the Dead tour, they sell out.
Like the few other surviving bands from the '60s, the Grateful Dead hits the road with a history and a hard-to-define mystique. But unlike the Stones or the Kinks, the Dead have always had mixed success with records, have always been primarily a band for live concerts.
After 20 years, theirs has become the most ritualized schedule in the business: every spring, the Providence Civic Center and maybe Portand and Hartford, where the tour is concluding tonight; every fall, the Worcester Centrum and New Hampshire and New Haven.
The band doesn't play Boston anymore because they can't stand the Garden, where, according to guitarist Jerry Garcia, "even the rats wear leather jackets." So every spring and fall, part of the ritual of the Boston faithful is to head out on Route 95, bumper stickers proclaiming their destination, honking their horns and occasionally flashing the peace sign at fellow pilgrims.
The devotion of Deadheads is legendary and, since every show is spontaneous and different, one concert is seldom enough to satisfy them.
John Eschelman, 34, from Pennsylvania, and Jimmy, a 29-year-old Dorchester resident, have planned their spring vacations around the tour. Barbara Lewit, 34, of Berkeley has flown in and rented a car to follow the tour. This is her 290th concert.
Who are these people?
There are many Deadhead stereotypes: middle-age insurance adjusters looking for '60s nostalgia; wannabe kids dressing up as hippies for a night; burnouts caught in a "lost generation" time warp, unable to adapt to the '80s.
There are some ofthese stereotypes here. There are also a lot of people here who just like the music.
Like Chad Gifford, a clean-cut, basketball-tall Brown University freshmanfrom Cambridge, whose professional goal, to "earn a lot of money," is suitably '80s. He finds many of the middle-aged hippie Deadheads who follow the tour "pathetic." But he loves the band. "They're the only rock group doing improvisation."
The bulk of today's Deadheads are college and high school age, 18 to 25, just as the band's followers were in the beginning. But there's been an accumulation over time and a lot of fans are well into their 30s. Some bring their teen-age children, second- generation Deadheads.
For the staunchest, a Dead concert is areligious experience. One couple got married during intermission at one of the Portland concerts last week while their friends stood in a circle, reciting lyrics from the band's songs.
A big part of the show is the atmosphere of sharing that surrounds it. Spare food and spare tickets are passed around. The feeling of mellow fraternity is surprisingly reminiscent of the Fenway Park bleachers on a sunny day.
To young fans, this '60s-style sense of all-inclusive community is as beguiling as the music. "You met someone five minutes ago and they're your best friend!" beams 16-year-old Kelly Gill of Eastham.
"It's been going on since the '60s, just with fewer people," says 17- year-old Michael Jacques as he blows translucent soap bubbles into the air. "It" is "when you walk down the street and you smile at someone and they smile back and people want to love each other, not hate each other."
"There's a feeling of trust between fans. Last fall my friend just wandered around after the show until he found someone who had taped the concert," recalls Jimmy. "The guy didn't know us, but he let us have the tapes overnight to copy."
The band itself, which developed much of its improvisational style playing on LSD during Ken Kesey's experimental public concerts called "Acid Tests," is now on a relative fitness kick, according to its publicist, Dennis McNally. He ticks off regimens of jogging and pumping iron. "They're in it for the long haul."
The preoccupation with health is less evident among the fans. Beer and marijuana are a given at the tailgate picnics in nearby parking lots. Ecstasy is the new drug on the scene. LSD is the old one, and surprisingly common.
"If you're young and you want to take acid, you'd want to take it in a place that felt like the '60s," reasoned a 40-year-old Boston fan, matter-of- factly.
"Don't take any brownies from a stranger," warns Jimmy.
Dress is the gypsy regalia of the '60s revisited: army jackets, long Indian print skirts, dirty red bandanas. Peace signs are knitted into caps, drawn on jeans. But they seem more the symbol of an era than a political idea.
"We're for peace -- but we're not antiwar . . . are we?" 17-year- old Diane Branch says, turning uncertainly to T-shirt vender Gretchen Brown, 30, for confirmation.
"You have to decide that for yourself," Brown answers with a rueful smile.
Branch, who wears a commemorative T-shirt with the message "20 Grateful Years 1965-1985," has never been to a Grateful Dead concert. "I came because the Dead's from the '60s."
"We wish we were here then," adds her 15-year-old companion, who has a peace sign painted on her cheek like a fashionable beauty mark.
Many Deadheads wear symbols specific to their band. Some tie dyed T-shirts spout fragments of lyrics: Wake up to find out that you are the eyes of the world . . . There's a brisk florist business at the edges of the crowd in red roses. Many women wear the flowers in their hair.
One has transformed her face into a macabre skull with heavy black and white greasepaint, looking a little like a theatrical antinuclear demonstrator. Her blouse is partly unbuttoned to display the skeletal black and white rib cage painted down her chest.
Inside the Civic Center, 1,300 skeletons are shaking to the workingman's boogie and the country-ish ballads of the Dead.
Heads are bobbing, shoulders are swaying to the music in an April Fool's Day Dance of the Deadheads.
Chairs are stacked out of the way to make more room for dancing.
Chairs are for piling on coats.
Chairs are for when someone feels faint, and if you sit down, a solicitous neighbor will ask if you're all right.
The body of the audience is young; the bodies on the stage are middle-aged with graying manes, drumming out the rhythms of romantic rebellion. They are the grandfather storytellers evoking such legends as "Cowboy Neal at the Wheel" at a convocation of young braves around the light show campfire.
Not all the music looks to the past. A long drum solo leads into one of the bands' "space jams," using electronic sythesizers and feedback to create deep, abstract whale-like vibrations under an ocean of distortion. Balloons bob sporadically to the surface of the crowd, which bats them softly into the air like porpoises doing their beachball tricks at Marineland.
Eventually, the experimental musical wanderings assume the sounds of a trumpeting elephant dodging jet planes on a landing strip. When the band finally swings into a recognizable song, the crowd coalesces again with relief as it is gathered up again into the palm of the familar.
I need a miracle ev-er-y-day! The Deadheads chant with lead singer Bob Weir.
hey! hey! hey!
I need a miracle ev-er-y-day!
yea! yea! yea!
When the band leaves the stage after three hours, hundreds of lighters are held aloft in the audience like devotional candles, augmented with a sparkler or two.
The crowd tries to linger, to hold onto the evocation but, perhaps as in the '60s, it's too fragile to survive outside the confines of a concert.
Determined ushers clear people from the aisles and shove the civic center doors shut after them. Outside in the chilly night, the realities of the outside world intrude quickly. Stern-faced police sweep the plaza clear of people, and many members of the audience return to their parking spots to find their cars have been towed.
A crowd has gathered at one end of a parking lot.
"What is it?"
"I don't know. But it's something wonderful, I bet."
It isn't. At the center, several policemen with nightsticks are subduing a disorderly man said to be tripping on LSD. The red streaks running down the man's face and arms are not bodypaint.
Across the street, 25-year-old Pauline of Attleboro is still aglow from three days of concerts and partying. She relates how only that morning she had met Bob Weir from the band, and, at her boyfriend's request he had bestowed a kiss upon her.
But now her boyfriend is barely conscious and in an ugly mood to boot. And he wants the car keys. And she doesn't want to give them to him.
They go back and forth, but she is still smiling and wearing her homemade crown of red silk roses, still holding onto the magic she feels.
Nearby a group is playing with a Frisbee, and over by the freeway, someone is shooting off fireworks. Ephemeral soap bubbles dance in the street lights and then suddenly vanish.
Edgy policemen mounted on horses tower over the frolicking crowd like knights from an opposing force. The tide of litter is ankle deep and rising.
The Deadheads, fans of the Grateful Dead, have convened for an audience with their heroes, and the streets of parochial Providence are lined with cars bearing license plates from California, New York, Alabama, Pennsylvania and, of course, Massachusetts.
It has been six years since this band, which came together during the mid-' 60s flowering of Haight-Ashbury, has put out an album, and they've never appeared on MTV. But wherever the Dead tour, they sell out.
Like the few other surviving bands from the '60s, the Grateful Dead hits the road with a history and a hard-to-define mystique. But unlike the Stones or the Kinks, the Dead have always had mixed success with records, have always been primarily a band for live concerts.
After 20 years, theirs has become the most ritualized schedule in the business: every spring, the Providence Civic Center and maybe Portand and Hartford, where the tour is concluding tonight; every fall, the Worcester Centrum and New Hampshire and New Haven.
The band doesn't play Boston anymore because they can't stand the Garden, where, according to guitarist Jerry Garcia, "even the rats wear leather jackets." So every spring and fall, part of the ritual of the Boston faithful is to head out on Route 95, bumper stickers proclaiming their destination, honking their horns and occasionally flashing the peace sign at fellow pilgrims.
The devotion of Deadheads is legendary and, since every show is spontaneous and different, one concert is seldom enough to satisfy them.
John Eschelman, 34, from Pennsylvania, and Jimmy, a 29-year-old Dorchester resident, have planned their spring vacations around the tour. Barbara Lewit, 34, of Berkeley has flown in and rented a car to follow the tour. This is her 290th concert.
Who are these people?
There are many Deadhead stereotypes: middle-age insurance adjusters looking for '60s nostalgia; wannabe kids dressing up as hippies for a night; burnouts caught in a "lost generation" time warp, unable to adapt to the '80s.
There are some ofthese stereotypes here. There are also a lot of people here who just like the music.
Like Chad Gifford, a clean-cut, basketball-tall Brown University freshmanfrom Cambridge, whose professional goal, to "earn a lot of money," is suitably '80s. He finds many of the middle-aged hippie Deadheads who follow the tour "pathetic." But he loves the band. "They're the only rock group doing improvisation."
The bulk of today's Deadheads are college and high school age, 18 to 25, just as the band's followers were in the beginning. But there's been an accumulation over time and a lot of fans are well into their 30s. Some bring their teen-age children, second- generation Deadheads.
For the staunchest, a Dead concert is areligious experience. One couple got married during intermission at one of the Portland concerts last week while their friends stood in a circle, reciting lyrics from the band's songs.
A big part of the show is the atmosphere of sharing that surrounds it. Spare food and spare tickets are passed around. The feeling of mellow fraternity is surprisingly reminiscent of the Fenway Park bleachers on a sunny day.
To young fans, this '60s-style sense of all-inclusive community is as beguiling as the music. "You met someone five minutes ago and they're your best friend!" beams 16-year-old Kelly Gill of Eastham.
"It's been going on since the '60s, just with fewer people," says 17- year-old Michael Jacques as he blows translucent soap bubbles into the air. "It" is "when you walk down the street and you smile at someone and they smile back and people want to love each other, not hate each other."
"There's a feeling of trust between fans. Last fall my friend just wandered around after the show until he found someone who had taped the concert," recalls Jimmy. "The guy didn't know us, but he let us have the tapes overnight to copy."
The band itself, which developed much of its improvisational style playing on LSD during Ken Kesey's experimental public concerts called "Acid Tests," is now on a relative fitness kick, according to its publicist, Dennis McNally. He ticks off regimens of jogging and pumping iron. "They're in it for the long haul."
The preoccupation with health is less evident among the fans. Beer and marijuana are a given at the tailgate picnics in nearby parking lots. Ecstasy is the new drug on the scene. LSD is the old one, and surprisingly common.
"If you're young and you want to take acid, you'd want to take it in a place that felt like the '60s," reasoned a 40-year-old Boston fan, matter-of- factly.
"Don't take any brownies from a stranger," warns Jimmy.
Dress is the gypsy regalia of the '60s revisited: army jackets, long Indian print skirts, dirty red bandanas. Peace signs are knitted into caps, drawn on jeans. But they seem more the symbol of an era than a political idea.
"We're for peace -- but we're not antiwar . . . are we?" 17-year- old Diane Branch says, turning uncertainly to T-shirt vender Gretchen Brown, 30, for confirmation.
"You have to decide that for yourself," Brown answers with a rueful smile.
Branch, who wears a commemorative T-shirt with the message "20 Grateful Years 1965-1985," has never been to a Grateful Dead concert. "I came because the Dead's from the '60s."
"We wish we were here then," adds her 15-year-old companion, who has a peace sign painted on her cheek like a fashionable beauty mark.
Many Deadheads wear symbols specific to their band. Some tie dyed T-shirts spout fragments of lyrics: Wake up to find out that you are the eyes of the world . . . There's a brisk florist business at the edges of the crowd in red roses. Many women wear the flowers in their hair.
One has transformed her face into a macabre skull with heavy black and white greasepaint, looking a little like a theatrical antinuclear demonstrator. Her blouse is partly unbuttoned to display the skeletal black and white rib cage painted down her chest.
Inside the Civic Center, 1,300 skeletons are shaking to the workingman's boogie and the country-ish ballads of the Dead.
Heads are bobbing, shoulders are swaying to the music in an April Fool's Day Dance of the Deadheads.
Chairs are stacked out of the way to make more room for dancing.
Chairs are for piling on coats.
Chairs are for when someone feels faint, and if you sit down, a solicitous neighbor will ask if you're all right.
The body of the audience is young; the bodies on the stage are middle-aged with graying manes, drumming out the rhythms of romantic rebellion. They are the grandfather storytellers evoking such legends as "Cowboy Neal at the Wheel" at a convocation of young braves around the light show campfire.
Not all the music looks to the past. A long drum solo leads into one of the bands' "space jams," using electronic sythesizers and feedback to create deep, abstract whale-like vibrations under an ocean of distortion. Balloons bob sporadically to the surface of the crowd, which bats them softly into the air like porpoises doing their beachball tricks at Marineland.
Eventually, the experimental musical wanderings assume the sounds of a trumpeting elephant dodging jet planes on a landing strip. When the band finally swings into a recognizable song, the crowd coalesces again with relief as it is gathered up again into the palm of the familar.
I need a miracle ev-er-y-day! The Deadheads chant with lead singer Bob Weir.
hey! hey! hey!
I need a miracle ev-er-y-day!
yea! yea! yea!
When the band leaves the stage after three hours, hundreds of lighters are held aloft in the audience like devotional candles, augmented with a sparkler or two.
The crowd tries to linger, to hold onto the evocation but, perhaps as in the '60s, it's too fragile to survive outside the confines of a concert.
Determined ushers clear people from the aisles and shove the civic center doors shut after them. Outside in the chilly night, the realities of the outside world intrude quickly. Stern-faced police sweep the plaza clear of people, and many members of the audience return to their parking spots to find their cars have been towed.
A crowd has gathered at one end of a parking lot.
"What is it?"
"I don't know. But it's something wonderful, I bet."
It isn't. At the center, several policemen with nightsticks are subduing a disorderly man said to be tripping on LSD. The red streaks running down the man's face and arms are not bodypaint.
Across the street, 25-year-old Pauline of Attleboro is still aglow from three days of concerts and partying. She relates how only that morning she had met Bob Weir from the band, and, at her boyfriend's request he had bestowed a kiss upon her.
But now her boyfriend is barely conscious and in an ugly mood to boot. And he wants the car keys. And she doesn't want to give them to him.
They go back and forth, but she is still smiling and wearing her homemade crown of red silk roses, still holding onto the magic she feels.
Nearby a group is playing with a Frisbee, and over by the freeway, someone is shooting off fireworks. Ephemeral soap bubbles dance in the street lights and then suddenly vanish.
DEARD AND GARCIA ALIVE AND WELL
[THIRD Edition]
Boston Globe (pre-1997 Fulltext) - Boston, Mass.
| Author: | Morse, Steve |
| Date: | Apr 3, 1987 |
| Start Page: | 28 |
| Section: | ARTS AND FILM |
MUSIC REVIEW
THE GRATEFUL DEAD -- In concert through tomorrow at the
Worcester Centrum.
WORCESTER - All eyes were on Jerry Garcia. The bearded soul of the Grateful Dead lapsed into a diabetic coma last summer, but has been said to have made a miraculous recovery. He has changed his diet and taken a more serious approach to life, but the final proof was the way his fingers flew across the fretboard last night.
Garcia was still inscrutable -- and again said not a word to the audience -- but he was magnificent on his instrument. He scored with the intricate space-journeying solos for which he's known, but also rocked as hard as ever, lighting up the sold-out Centrum with his sudden burst on the Spencer Davis oldie, "Gimme Some Lovin'."
Having shed some obvious poundage, Garcia absorbed the crowd's emotional, welcome-back applause and time and again lifted fans out of their seats with swinging sprint solos that paid homage to guitarists ranging from Wes Montgomery to Chuck Berry.
This was as fine a Grateful Dead show as any in memory. The band played with manifest joy at being in each other's company -- and dug back to their roots for a show that was of special interest to their earliest, '60s fans. The cover version of "Gimme Some Lovin' " was a giveaway in this regard, as was a transcendent tackling of the Young Rascals' "Good Loving," which found the hallways stuffed with dancers pirouetting, prancing, stutter-stepping and throwing their outside cares to the wind.
But speaking of the outside, it almost impeded on an otherwise positive show. About 2,000 youths -- in defiance of a radio announcement by bassist Phil Lesh to stay away if they didn't have tickets -- came searching anyway. There were close to 20 arrests by a zealous police detail, and it was not a pretty sight to see a flock of Dead Heads rounded up in a police wagon and shipped downtown.
Even for ticketholders, the act of getting into a Dead concert is not an easy task, if just because of the tensions on the crowded sidewalks outside. But last night was fully worth running the gantlet to get in, for this was a truly memorable performance.
For those who keep track of such things, the Dead's first set was top- heavy with old classics, including "Cold Rain and Snow," "Mexicali Blues," "Minglewood Blues," "Me and My Uncle" and "Bird Song."
The second set took off on a like note with "Feels Like Rain" (as rhythm guitarist Bob Weir led the charge), and on through more classics such as Garcia's virtual signature song, "Black Peter," and "The Wheel," with the proverbially country-wise line that "If the thunder don't get you, the lightning will."
Even the second-half drum solos by Bill Kreutzman and Mickey Hart had more punch than usual. Hart ventured off to a realm of Afro-psychedelia in his pounding of the massive tribal drum he calls "The Beast." Portions also echoed the martial, thunderclap percussion of his solo album, "Dafos."
The entire three-hour evening didn't include any new material from the Dead's next album due this summer, but it whetted one's appetite for the July 3 concert by the Dead and Bob Dylan at Foxborough's Sullivan Stadium. It will likely be the first show of the Dead's summer stadium tour, according to a spokesman. And it should be an exhilarating spectacle, assuming Garcia and his cohorts play with as much grace and power as they did last night. morse ;04/02 NIGRO ;04/03,12:29 GRATF
THE GRATEFUL DEAD -- In concert through tomorrow at the
Worcester Centrum.
WORCESTER - All eyes were on Jerry Garcia. The bearded soul of the Grateful Dead lapsed into a diabetic coma last summer, but has been said to have made a miraculous recovery. He has changed his diet and taken a more serious approach to life, but the final proof was the way his fingers flew across the fretboard last night.
Garcia was still inscrutable -- and again said not a word to the audience -- but he was magnificent on his instrument. He scored with the intricate space-journeying solos for which he's known, but also rocked as hard as ever, lighting up the sold-out Centrum with his sudden burst on the Spencer Davis oldie, "Gimme Some Lovin'."
Having shed some obvious poundage, Garcia absorbed the crowd's emotional, welcome-back applause and time and again lifted fans out of their seats with swinging sprint solos that paid homage to guitarists ranging from Wes Montgomery to Chuck Berry.
This was as fine a Grateful Dead show as any in memory. The band played with manifest joy at being in each other's company -- and dug back to their roots for a show that was of special interest to their earliest, '60s fans. The cover version of "Gimme Some Lovin' " was a giveaway in this regard, as was a transcendent tackling of the Young Rascals' "Good Loving," which found the hallways stuffed with dancers pirouetting, prancing, stutter-stepping and throwing their outside cares to the wind.
But speaking of the outside, it almost impeded on an otherwise positive show. About 2,000 youths -- in defiance of a radio announcement by bassist Phil Lesh to stay away if they didn't have tickets -- came searching anyway. There were close to 20 arrests by a zealous police detail, and it was not a pretty sight to see a flock of Dead Heads rounded up in a police wagon and shipped downtown.
Even for ticketholders, the act of getting into a Dead concert is not an easy task, if just because of the tensions on the crowded sidewalks outside. But last night was fully worth running the gantlet to get in, for this was a truly memorable performance.
For those who keep track of such things, the Dead's first set was top- heavy with old classics, including "Cold Rain and Snow," "Mexicali Blues," "Minglewood Blues," "Me and My Uncle" and "Bird Song."
The second set took off on a like note with "Feels Like Rain" (as rhythm guitarist Bob Weir led the charge), and on through more classics such as Garcia's virtual signature song, "Black Peter," and "The Wheel," with the proverbially country-wise line that "If the thunder don't get you, the lightning will."
Even the second-half drum solos by Bill Kreutzman and Mickey Hart had more punch than usual. Hart ventured off to a realm of Afro-psychedelia in his pounding of the massive tribal drum he calls "The Beast." Portions also echoed the martial, thunderclap percussion of his solo album, "Dafos."
The entire three-hour evening didn't include any new material from the Dead's next album due this summer, but it whetted one's appetite for the July 3 concert by the Dead and Bob Dylan at Foxborough's Sullivan Stadium. It will likely be the first show of the Dead's summer stadium tour, according to a spokesman. And it should be an exhilarating spectacle, assuming Garcia and his cohorts play with as much grace and power as they did last night. morse ;04/02 NIGRO ;04/03,12:29 GRATF
Illustration
PHOTO
GRATEFUL DEAD: ALIVE AND WELL 'IN THE DARK'
[THIRD Edition]
Boston Globe (pre-1997 Fulltext) - Boston, Mass.
| Author: | Morse, Steve |
| Date: | Jul 4, 1987 |
| Start Page: | 9 |
| Section: | ARTS AND FILM |
ALBUM REVIEW
The 20th anniversary of the Summer of Love has brought new fuel to the Grateful Dead. The hippie survivors are riding a giddy high, even by their cosmic standards. Last year was their bleakest summer when singer Jerry Garcia lay in a diabetic coma and tour plans were canceled. A year later, they have the summer's hottest tour -- teaming with Bob Dylan and playing the kickoff date for 61,000 fans at Foxborough's Sullivan Stadium today.
The Dead also have something they haven't had in six years -- a new album, "In the Dark" (Arista). The band has always made its money from touring, not albums, but what makes this so special is they finally have an album good enough to be whispered in the same breath as their concerts.
The album will be released to stores Thursday, but it has already been played on local rock stations. The music is vintage Dead -- a mingling of spry rock spiced with progressive R&B and gentle country blues. It is far superior to some of their last studio efforts, including the experimental "Terrapin Station" (1977) and lightweight "Shakedown Street" (1978).
The San Francisco-based Dead have filled arenas for years, but have never had a platinum album. In part, that's because their fans prefer seeking bootleg concert tapes, knowing the group has rarely hit stride in the studio. It was feared the new album would continue that ill-fated studio trend, especially because it was the last album owed to Arista Records -- a label the band has criticized. They have said it took so long to finish the LP because they had no incentive to put it out.
But the Dead have wished to prove themselves since Garcia's health problems. Their concerts have taken on a new life -- and that has spilled over to the album.
Garcia rebounds with an extraordinary performance, starting on the first cut, "Touch of Grey," a zippy song of survival in which he sounds like a carefree Rip Van Winkle: "I know the rent is in arrears/And the dog has not been fed in years/It's even worse than it appears/But it's all right." He later adds like a wise-old mountain man: "Whistle through your teeth and spit cuz it's all right." It's not typical Top 40 music, but it has a euphoric chorus that burrows into your head, along with a chiming, hummable synthesizer line from Brent Mydland.
Garcia's lyrics are again penned by mystery man Robert Hunter, who doesn't like to see his lyrics in print, so regrettably, there is no lyric sheet. Deciphering Hunter's lyrics has always been a Deadhead's pleasure -- and there is plenty to ponder here.
The bluesy "When Push Comes to Shove," which is about being afraid to love, has oblique references to a "shot gun full of silver" and "bullets made of glass." Another collaboration, "West L.A. Fadeaway," a breezy J.J. Cale-type blues number, talks humorously of "looking for a chateau . . . I don't want to buy it, I just want to rent it for an hour or two." And the album ends with the prettiest Garcia/Hunter tune, "Black Muddy River," with a country flavor echoing the Dead's early '70s albums, "Workingman's Dead" and "American Beauty."
The rest of the band is also in peak form. The rhythm section of Mickey Hart, Bill Kreutzmann and Phil Lesh achieves the best sonic production of any Dead album in memory, while co-singer Bob Weir, the group's anchor through the years, is his reliable self. He sings the picaresque "Hell in a Bucket," with its grin-filled line: "I may be going to hell in a bucket but at least I'm enjoying the ride." He then turns serious for a rare Grateful Dead protest song, "Throwing Stones," a slap at bosses who have little regard for their employees.
Traditionally, Grateful Dead albums have been like Jack Kerouac novels. You might have to wade through them before getting stung with a sudden insight. But this album is rich with such moments, suggesting the Dead can still surprise. MORSE ;07/03
The 20th anniversary of the Summer of Love has brought new fuel to the Grateful Dead. The hippie survivors are riding a giddy high, even by their cosmic standards. Last year was their bleakest summer when singer Jerry Garcia lay in a diabetic coma and tour plans were canceled. A year later, they have the summer's hottest tour -- teaming with Bob Dylan and playing the kickoff date for 61,000 fans at Foxborough's Sullivan Stadium today.
The Dead also have something they haven't had in six years -- a new album, "In the Dark" (Arista). The band has always made its money from touring, not albums, but what makes this so special is they finally have an album good enough to be whispered in the same breath as their concerts.
The album will be released to stores Thursday, but it has already been played on local rock stations. The music is vintage Dead -- a mingling of spry rock spiced with progressive R&B and gentle country blues. It is far superior to some of their last studio efforts, including the experimental "Terrapin Station" (1977) and lightweight "Shakedown Street" (1978).
The San Francisco-based Dead have filled arenas for years, but have never had a platinum album. In part, that's because their fans prefer seeking bootleg concert tapes, knowing the group has rarely hit stride in the studio. It was feared the new album would continue that ill-fated studio trend, especially because it was the last album owed to Arista Records -- a label the band has criticized. They have said it took so long to finish the LP because they had no incentive to put it out.
But the Dead have wished to prove themselves since Garcia's health problems. Their concerts have taken on a new life -- and that has spilled over to the album.
Garcia rebounds with an extraordinary performance, starting on the first cut, "Touch of Grey," a zippy song of survival in which he sounds like a carefree Rip Van Winkle: "I know the rent is in arrears/And the dog has not been fed in years/It's even worse than it appears/But it's all right." He later adds like a wise-old mountain man: "Whistle through your teeth and spit cuz it's all right." It's not typical Top 40 music, but it has a euphoric chorus that burrows into your head, along with a chiming, hummable synthesizer line from Brent Mydland.
Garcia's lyrics are again penned by mystery man Robert Hunter, who doesn't like to see his lyrics in print, so regrettably, there is no lyric sheet. Deciphering Hunter's lyrics has always been a Deadhead's pleasure -- and there is plenty to ponder here.
The bluesy "When Push Comes to Shove," which is about being afraid to love, has oblique references to a "shot gun full of silver" and "bullets made of glass." Another collaboration, "West L.A. Fadeaway," a breezy J.J. Cale-type blues number, talks humorously of "looking for a chateau . . . I don't want to buy it, I just want to rent it for an hour or two." And the album ends with the prettiest Garcia/Hunter tune, "Black Muddy River," with a country flavor echoing the Dead's early '70s albums, "Workingman's Dead" and "American Beauty."
The rest of the band is also in peak form. The rhythm section of Mickey Hart, Bill Kreutzmann and Phil Lesh achieves the best sonic production of any Dead album in memory, while co-singer Bob Weir, the group's anchor through the years, is his reliable self. He sings the picaresque "Hell in a Bucket," with its grin-filled line: "I may be going to hell in a bucket but at least I'm enjoying the ride." He then turns serious for a rare Grateful Dead protest song, "Throwing Stones," a slap at bosses who have little regard for their employees.
Traditionally, Grateful Dead albums have been like Jack Kerouac novels. You might have to wade through them before getting stung with a sudden insight. But this album is rich with such moments, suggesting the Dead can still surprise. MORSE ;07/03
| JOBE ;07/04,12:23 GRATE04 |
Illustration
PHOTO
DEAD, DYLAN 'WING IT' '60S-STYLE
[THIRD Edition]
Boston Globe (pre-1997 Fulltext) - Boston, Mass.
| Author: | Morse, Steve |
| Date: | Jul 5, 1987 |
| Start Page: | 22 |
| Section: | METRO |
FOXBOROUGH - The Grateful Dead's Bob Weir said the plan was to "half play and half wing it." Only a few rehearsals had been held with Bob Dylan, who shares this same yen to improvise. Song arrangements, in fact, were still being frantically worked out in the hotel the night before.
But not to worry.
This was a throwback to the '60s, when jam sessions were the rule rather than the exception. And jam they did last night -- with the Dead and Dylan playing a potent 75-minute set that raised each act to impressive new highs.
The Dead didn't just follow Dylan like a normal backup band. They pushed and shoved him dramatically -- driving some songs, laying back on others, yet always giving Dylan the space to vocalize in that snarling, nasal manner so familiar to lovers of the counterculture, new and old.
Looking like a Bohemian outlaw in a raffish beret, metallic silver shirt and chin stubble befitting Tom Waits, Dylan bore down on a number of his most classic songs, including the protest tunes, "Times They Are a-Changin" "Chimes of Freedom," "Masters of War" and "All Along the Watchtower," which drew extra applause in honor of the 4th of July weekend.
Dylan also tore crisply through older hits like the bluesy "Ballad of a Thin Man" and the romantic "I Want You." Plus, he added songs from his born-again Christian period of the early '80s, "Gotta Serve Somebody" and "Slow Train Coming," the last an unexpected highlight as the Dead's guitarist, Jerry Garcia, lit up the stadium with an all-out, barn-burning solo.
Like the Dead, Dylan didn't say a word between songs. The music was all that spoke for him -- and it spoke like a clarion call in this muggy night. He did, however, often show emotion during the songs, smiling or nodding at a particular solo by Garcia, who also played a delicately beautiful pedal steel guitar during the countrified song, "I'll Be Your Lover Tonight."
The Dead played a two-hour opening set that had its ups and downs, but was a special showcase for new songs from their "In the Dark" album, to be released next week. The band actually opened with four songs from that album -- a highly unusual move for a group as casually spontaneous as the Dead.
The band caught fire late in the set, with ageless favorites "Uncle John's Band" and "Truckin,' " showing again what a long, strange trip it has been since the 60's. morse ;07/04 NIGRO ;07/05,18:27 SHOW4
THE DEAD OFFERS UP TASTEFUL, DREAMY SET
But not to worry.
This was a throwback to the '60s, when jam sessions were the rule rather than the exception. And jam they did last night -- with the Dead and Dylan playing a potent 75-minute set that raised each act to impressive new highs.
The Dead didn't just follow Dylan like a normal backup band. They pushed and shoved him dramatically -- driving some songs, laying back on others, yet always giving Dylan the space to vocalize in that snarling, nasal manner so familiar to lovers of the counterculture, new and old.
Looking like a Bohemian outlaw in a raffish beret, metallic silver shirt and chin stubble befitting Tom Waits, Dylan bore down on a number of his most classic songs, including the protest tunes, "Times They Are a-Changin" "Chimes of Freedom," "Masters of War" and "All Along the Watchtower," which drew extra applause in honor of the 4th of July weekend.
Dylan also tore crisply through older hits like the bluesy "Ballad of a Thin Man" and the romantic "I Want You." Plus, he added songs from his born-again Christian period of the early '80s, "Gotta Serve Somebody" and "Slow Train Coming," the last an unexpected highlight as the Dead's guitarist, Jerry Garcia, lit up the stadium with an all-out, barn-burning solo.
Like the Dead, Dylan didn't say a word between songs. The music was all that spoke for him -- and it spoke like a clarion call in this muggy night. He did, however, often show emotion during the songs, smiling or nodding at a particular solo by Garcia, who also played a delicately beautiful pedal steel guitar during the countrified song, "I'll Be Your Lover Tonight."
The Dead played a two-hour opening set that had its ups and downs, but was a special showcase for new songs from their "In the Dark" album, to be released next week. The band actually opened with four songs from that album -- a highly unusual move for a group as casually spontaneous as the Dead.
The band caught fire late in the set, with ageless favorites "Uncle John's Band" and "Truckin,' " showing again what a long, strange trip it has been since the 60's. morse ;07/04 NIGRO ;07/05,18:27 SHOW4
Illustration
PHOTO
Reproduced with permission o
DYLAN & THE DEAD: DREAM FULFILLED
[THIRD Edition]
Boston Globe (pre-1997 Fulltext) - Boston, Mass.
| Author: | Morse, Steve |
| Date: | Jul 6, 1987 |
| Start Page: | 10 |
| Section: | LIVING |
{A PUBLISHED CORRECTION HAS BEEN ADDED TO THIS STOR
FOXBOROUGH - First, the financial news. Saturday's Grateful Dead/ Bob Dylan concert was the single greatest economic event in the history of Sullivan Stadium. It grossed $1.3 million -- more than any previous concert or even New England Patriots football game.
"I can't tell you how pleased we are. I wish we could do two more dates with these acts," said a beaming Chuck Sullivan, whose family owns the stadium.
But what about culturally? Was this a show to invent new superlatives to describe? That's another story -- and depends entirely on your viewpoint.
If your preference runs to polished songs with on-key vocals and tight pacing, then you might have been in musical hell on Saturday. "Oh, did you hear how off-key they were on that last song, 'Knockin' on Heaven's Door' ?" said one woman who had been professionally trained in music. "Ugghhh! My ears hurt."
If, on the other hand, you enjoy a slice of musical anarchy where the next song might as well be coming from Mars, then you would have found nirvana in Foxborough.
Dylan and the Dead aren't going to win any scholarships to the New England Conservatory, but they were a ragged-but-right alternative to the many safe, homogenized acts that pass for rock 'n' roll bands this summer.
There was an emotional bond lacking when Dylan toured with Tom Petty & the Heartbreakers last summer. That tour pitted Dylan, the wily veteran, with a young band that looked up to him as if he were a god. They played well together, but weren't always on each other's wavelength.
The Dead, however, come from the same generation as Dylan, so were not about to let Dylan assume a fatherly role. There was more of a shared spirit in the music, which is not to say the Dead weren't mindful of the impact of the occasion, since this was the first complete set they had ever played with the man.
"Our paths just never crossed through the years. Then last year we played with him briefly a couple of times -- and decided to try a tour. This is really a dream fulfilled for us. I can't wait to play," said Dead singer Bob Weir before the show. He retreated under a backstage tent, adding he had to sit down and calm his nerves.
The concert had another anxious side: "We've never played with acoustic instruments on a stage this size," said Weir. "We're really worried about sound problems."
Some of those problems materialized, but not enough to ransack the show. The problems had been much worse during an opening set by the Dead, who also decided -- perhaps too cleverly -- to begin with four new songs from an album to be released this week called "In the Dark." ("Putting those songs together didn't quite work, did it?" said Weir.)
Later portions of the Dead's set, however, were sterling. Perched on a stage with 12 American flags flying atop the scaffolding in honor of the July 4th holiday, they hit stride with the wrenching blues of "Little Red Rooster," featuring a Martian slide guitar solo by Jerry Garcia, who is apparently fully recovered from the diabetic coma that waylaid him last year. The '60s anthem, "Truckin'," and a punchy Weir protest song, "Throwing Stones," were added shots of adrenalin for the sellout 61,000 fans.
After an intermission, Dylan, who had kept to himself backstage after being flown in by helicopter, skulked on stage and dragged his bootheels as though being led off to hard labor.
But he soon came to life, strumming a pearly white acoustic guitar while the Dead chugged along at his side. The 75-minute set became a Dylan lover's dream, from the opening "The Times They Are A-Changin'," to such rarely played Dylan nuggets as "Queen Jane Approximately" (a heartfelt 1965 love song) and "Joey," a song about Joey Gallo, a gunned-down New York ringleader of organized crime. From the sensitive to the topical, Dylan covered it all.
Besides an emotional resonance, the Dead brought a persuasive shot of funk to Dylan's songs. The Dead's low-down, rumbling percussion, courtesy of double drummers Mickey Hart and Bill Kreutzmann, spun songs into more visceral directions than Petty & the Heartbreakers did last year. This was especially true when Dylan started rocking on such songs as "Slow Train Coming" and the timeless "All Along the Watchtower," with its famous line: "There must be some way out of here . . . There's too much confusion. I can't get no relief." That verse found a sea of hands clapping right up to the upper balcony -- and on into the parking lots, where hundreds of turned-away fans held their own celebration.
The symbiosis between Dylan and the Dead was not as great on more reflective, finesse-laden songs such as "Masters of War" and "Ballad of a Thin Man." {CORRECTION: Because of a reporting error, a review of Saturday's Grateful Dead/Bob Dylan concert incorrectly stated that one of the songs performed was "Masters of War." And another song, "I'll Be Your Baby Tonight," which was performed, was mistitled in the review.} Some chord changes were botched, while Dylan, who plans to rejoin the Heartbreakers and tour Israel and Europe with them later this summer, plainly forgot some of the words.
But these setbacks were more than compensated by the intensity felt elsewhere. With the Dead undergoing a revival these days, and with Dylan earning some of his best on-stage notices in years, it was a match made in hippie heaven.
The hippie dream has obviously eroded in recent years -- and wasn't helped by the Saturday behavior of certain rude, aisle-clogging, elbow-swinging Dead Heads who should more appropriately be called Brat Heads.
But musically -- at least for an afternoon -- there was a stage camaraderie that brought back the best the '60s had to offer. This may not have been the cultural event of the year, but it was a time tunnel to an age when bands took chances on stage and didn't settle for rote, soulless entertainment. MORSE ;07/05 NIGRO ;07/06,12:43 CONCERT0
FOXBOROUGH - First, the financial news. Saturday's Grateful Dead/ Bob Dylan concert was the single greatest economic event in the history of Sullivan Stadium. It grossed $1.3 million -- more than any previous concert or even New England Patriots football game.
"I can't tell you how pleased we are. I wish we could do two more dates with these acts," said a beaming Chuck Sullivan, whose family owns the stadium.
But what about culturally? Was this a show to invent new superlatives to describe? That's another story -- and depends entirely on your viewpoint.
If your preference runs to polished songs with on-key vocals and tight pacing, then you might have been in musical hell on Saturday. "Oh, did you hear how off-key they were on that last song, 'Knockin' on Heaven's Door' ?" said one woman who had been professionally trained in music. "Ugghhh! My ears hurt."
If, on the other hand, you enjoy a slice of musical anarchy where the next song might as well be coming from Mars, then you would have found nirvana in Foxborough.
Dylan and the Dead aren't going to win any scholarships to the New England Conservatory, but they were a ragged-but-right alternative to the many safe, homogenized acts that pass for rock 'n' roll bands this summer.
There was an emotional bond lacking when Dylan toured with Tom Petty & the Heartbreakers last summer. That tour pitted Dylan, the wily veteran, with a young band that looked up to him as if he were a god. They played well together, but weren't always on each other's wavelength.
The Dead, however, come from the same generation as Dylan, so were not about to let Dylan assume a fatherly role. There was more of a shared spirit in the music, which is not to say the Dead weren't mindful of the impact of the occasion, since this was the first complete set they had ever played with the man.
"Our paths just never crossed through the years. Then last year we played with him briefly a couple of times -- and decided to try a tour. This is really a dream fulfilled for us. I can't wait to play," said Dead singer Bob Weir before the show. He retreated under a backstage tent, adding he had to sit down and calm his nerves.
The concert had another anxious side: "We've never played with acoustic instruments on a stage this size," said Weir. "We're really worried about sound problems."
Some of those problems materialized, but not enough to ransack the show. The problems had been much worse during an opening set by the Dead, who also decided -- perhaps too cleverly -- to begin with four new songs from an album to be released this week called "In the Dark." ("Putting those songs together didn't quite work, did it?" said Weir.)
Later portions of the Dead's set, however, were sterling. Perched on a stage with 12 American flags flying atop the scaffolding in honor of the July 4th holiday, they hit stride with the wrenching blues of "Little Red Rooster," featuring a Martian slide guitar solo by Jerry Garcia, who is apparently fully recovered from the diabetic coma that waylaid him last year. The '60s anthem, "Truckin'," and a punchy Weir protest song, "Throwing Stones," were added shots of adrenalin for the sellout 61,000 fans.
After an intermission, Dylan, who had kept to himself backstage after being flown in by helicopter, skulked on stage and dragged his bootheels as though being led off to hard labor.
But he soon came to life, strumming a pearly white acoustic guitar while the Dead chugged along at his side. The 75-minute set became a Dylan lover's dream, from the opening "The Times They Are A-Changin'," to such rarely played Dylan nuggets as "Queen Jane Approximately" (a heartfelt 1965 love song) and "Joey," a song about Joey Gallo, a gunned-down New York ringleader of organized crime. From the sensitive to the topical, Dylan covered it all.
Besides an emotional resonance, the Dead brought a persuasive shot of funk to Dylan's songs. The Dead's low-down, rumbling percussion, courtesy of double drummers Mickey Hart and Bill Kreutzmann, spun songs into more visceral directions than Petty & the Heartbreakers did last year. This was especially true when Dylan started rocking on such songs as "Slow Train Coming" and the timeless "All Along the Watchtower," with its famous line: "There must be some way out of here . . . There's too much confusion. I can't get no relief." That verse found a sea of hands clapping right up to the upper balcony -- and on into the parking lots, where hundreds of turned-away fans held their own celebration.
The symbiosis between Dylan and the Dead was not as great on more reflective, finesse-laden songs such as "Masters of War" and "Ballad of a Thin Man." {CORRECTION: Because of a reporting error, a review of Saturday's Grateful Dead/Bob Dylan concert incorrectly stated that one of the songs performed was "Masters of War." And another song, "I'll Be Your Baby Tonight," which was performed, was mistitled in the review.} Some chord changes were botched, while Dylan, who plans to rejoin the Heartbreakers and tour Israel and Europe with them later this summer, plainly forgot some of the words.
But these setbacks were more than compensated by the intensity felt elsewhere. With the Dead undergoing a revival these days, and with Dylan earning some of his best on-stage notices in years, it was a match made in hippie heaven.
The hippie dream has obviously eroded in recent years -- and wasn't helped by the Saturday behavior of certain rude, aisle-clogging, elbow-swinging Dead Heads who should more appropriately be called Brat Heads.
But musically -- at least for an afternoon -- there was a stage camaraderie that brought back the best the '60s had to offer. This may not have been the cultural event of the year, but it was a time tunnel to an age when bands took chances on stage and didn't settle for rote, soulless entertainment. MORSE ;07/05 NIGRO ;07/06,12:43 CONCERT0
Illustration
| Logged in as: David Davis |
DEAD HEADS' 'SECRET' OUT -- IN A BIG WAY
[THIRD Edition]
Boston Globe (pre-1997 Fulltext) - Boston, Mass.
| Author: | Frank, Robert |
| Date: | Jul 3, 1989 |
| Start Page: | 7 |
| Section: | LIVING |
FOXBOROUGH - Standing on a tall grass bluff near Sullivan Stadium at 1 in the morning yesterday, a 50-year-old Dead Head smiles with maternal pride and nervous concern at the sea of bright tents, bonfires, tie-dye clothing stands, painted buses, vegetable-burger vendors and beer cans packed into the Sullivan Stadium west lot.
"It's the best kept secret," she whispers.
Hours earlier it was a barren 100-acre parking area, with an incongruous row of porta-potties in the center. But beginning late Saturday afternoon, trucks and buses -- covered with bright decals and murals, and laden with camping supplies -- poured through the gate, as drivers yelled to those already parked, "Welcome Home!"
For the over 10,000 fans camping overnight in a Sullivan Stadium parking lot, Sunday's Grateful Dead concert is only part of the experience. The communal gatherings between shows during the Dead's summer tour are powerful rituals unto themselves.
"This way of life is the best-kept secret in the world," said the elder Dead Head, who wished to remain anonymous. "I hope it is. God I hope so." Yet her secret is out -- and out in a big way.
Grateful Dead followers, known as Dead Heads, have until recently been a somewhat small but devoted group, sharing a quiet love of Dead music and a free way of life. Camping was small, and vending was kept to a half-dozen T-shirts.
But over the past five years, the number of Dead Heads has reached the breaking point. Following run-ins with the police and local officials over the "mob scene" created by fans with no tickets, by campers, and by an escalating commercial vending scene at camp sites, the Grateful Dead are giving their fans a warning this summer. "Summer '89 will be the last chance to find out whether this scene can govern itself and make itself work," band members wrote to fans in a recent letter. "Deadheads have to control the scene so that local people can be comfortable with our traveling circus, or the circus will travel no mo'." The Dead close the letter by saying that Dead Heads should leave behind "nothing but footprints. We're not kidding."
"Big time rock 'n' roll has different rules," said Grateful Dead/Dead Head liaison Peter Lee, who has worked for the band for three years, advising Dead Heads about safety and the responsibility to preserve tours and camping. "You have to pay attention at the fun club. Otherwise the fun club will be no mo'."
Patrolling the grounds, Lee scolds his fellow Dead Heads as he would his pals. Saturday night, four young men climbed a tower in the parking lot, and ignored Lee's flashlight beckons and advice to get down. He lobbed a small rock at the group, and they came down. "Better you hear it from me than someone you don't ever want to deal with," he said. He also told people carrying large nitrous oxide balloons, "Don't do it if it the balloon is bigger than your head."
This peer-pressure attempt to bend the Dead Heads into shape has been one successful way to deal with the growing crowds at Dead shows. But most older fans said they just hope the disruptive new fans will be discouraged by the scene and leave. "Some of these new guys jump in the pudding right away and some don't ever catch on," Lee said. "Hopefully we can bore them enough so they move on to some other kind of rock 'n' roll."
Calling the massive number of new fans "In the Darkies," after the Dead's '87 release, "In the Dark," which he said attracted the new listeners, Lee explained that while he welcomes the "younger brothers and sisters" to the scene, "some of these new people just don't understand respect."
On a strict afternoon diet of milk and cookies, Lee and the rest of the Dead "translator/liaisons" quickly pass off a question about drug problems and Dead Heads. "It's not interesting to us," he says. "Though on the East Coast alcohol is bigger, and that gets people belligerent, the people who cause trouble are an ugly minority."
That ugly minority was visible at Saturday night's camp scene. A 19-year-old man was taken away by police after he overdosed on LSD and started hitting other campers. "Usually we just sit down with them and talk them through the trip," said Dicky Cantrell, a volunteer medic for Dead Head camp sites. "Sometimes these new people come in and just don't know the drug scene."
Though there were also a number of undercover crackdowns Saturday, Lee and other Grateful Dead/Dead Head liaisons quickly spread the word about two narcs operating out of a van on the lot. "Just to let them know little brother is watching right back," Lee chuckled.
A more recent threat to Dead Head life, however, is massive vending. Though vendors at Saturday's Sullivan Stadium "village" set up small displays, larger commercial vendors, nicknamed "tie-dye corporations," have started to appear at most camp sites. "These guys don't even know what band is playing most nights," Lee said. "They've probably never heard the Dead. Some of these people come in with over $100,000 in merchandise. At the last show I saw some salesman with a phone-in credit-card machine."
Another sign of encroaching commercial exploitation of the Dead scene is ticket counterfeiting. There were rumors on Saturday that 5,000 counterfeit tickets had been sold, most at twice the ticket price. "It crushes these people to pay $65 for something that turns out to be a piece of trash," Lee said. Scalpers were also out selling on Saturday.
This commercialization and the overwhelming crowd numbers have turned many fans into watchdogs for their peers. Van Delia, of Syracuse, who has been with the Dead for over 20 years and now tours with his wife and 15-month-old baby, collected trash for campers last night, and was out with others this morning cleaning up around the sight. "I have faith that this way of life will continue forever, for our kids and grandchildren," Delia said. "This music and the freedom it teaches will never die."
1. Grateful Dead liaison Van Delia, left, and family in Foxborough Saturday. / Globe photo / Eric Antoniou
2. Some Grateful Dead fans gathered at Sullivan Stadium before yesterday's concert. / Globe photo / Eric Antoniou
"It's the best kept secret," she whispers.
Hours earlier it was a barren 100-acre parking area, with an incongruous row of porta-potties in the center. But beginning late Saturday afternoon, trucks and buses -- covered with bright decals and murals, and laden with camping supplies -- poured through the gate, as drivers yelled to those already parked, "Welcome Home!"
For the over 10,000 fans camping overnight in a Sullivan Stadium parking lot, Sunday's Grateful Dead concert is only part of the experience. The communal gatherings between shows during the Dead's summer tour are powerful rituals unto themselves.
"This way of life is the best-kept secret in the world," said the elder Dead Head, who wished to remain anonymous. "I hope it is. God I hope so." Yet her secret is out -- and out in a big way.
Grateful Dead followers, known as Dead Heads, have until recently been a somewhat small but devoted group, sharing a quiet love of Dead music and a free way of life. Camping was small, and vending was kept to a half-dozen T-shirts.
But over the past five years, the number of Dead Heads has reached the breaking point. Following run-ins with the police and local officials over the "mob scene" created by fans with no tickets, by campers, and by an escalating commercial vending scene at camp sites, the Grateful Dead are giving their fans a warning this summer. "Summer '89 will be the last chance to find out whether this scene can govern itself and make itself work," band members wrote to fans in a recent letter. "Deadheads have to control the scene so that local people can be comfortable with our traveling circus, or the circus will travel no mo'." The Dead close the letter by saying that Dead Heads should leave behind "nothing but footprints. We're not kidding."
"Big time rock 'n' roll has different rules," said Grateful Dead/Dead Head liaison Peter Lee, who has worked for the band for three years, advising Dead Heads about safety and the responsibility to preserve tours and camping. "You have to pay attention at the fun club. Otherwise the fun club will be no mo'."
Patrolling the grounds, Lee scolds his fellow Dead Heads as he would his pals. Saturday night, four young men climbed a tower in the parking lot, and ignored Lee's flashlight beckons and advice to get down. He lobbed a small rock at the group, and they came down. "Better you hear it from me than someone you don't ever want to deal with," he said. He also told people carrying large nitrous oxide balloons, "Don't do it if it the balloon is bigger than your head."
This peer-pressure attempt to bend the Dead Heads into shape has been one successful way to deal with the growing crowds at Dead shows. But most older fans said they just hope the disruptive new fans will be discouraged by the scene and leave. "Some of these new guys jump in the pudding right away and some don't ever catch on," Lee said. "Hopefully we can bore them enough so they move on to some other kind of rock 'n' roll."
Calling the massive number of new fans "In the Darkies," after the Dead's '87 release, "In the Dark," which he said attracted the new listeners, Lee explained that while he welcomes the "younger brothers and sisters" to the scene, "some of these new people just don't understand respect."
On a strict afternoon diet of milk and cookies, Lee and the rest of the Dead "translator/liaisons" quickly pass off a question about drug problems and Dead Heads. "It's not interesting to us," he says. "Though on the East Coast alcohol is bigger, and that gets people belligerent, the people who cause trouble are an ugly minority."
That ugly minority was visible at Saturday night's camp scene. A 19-year-old man was taken away by police after he overdosed on LSD and started hitting other campers. "Usually we just sit down with them and talk them through the trip," said Dicky Cantrell, a volunteer medic for Dead Head camp sites. "Sometimes these new people come in and just don't know the drug scene."
Though there were also a number of undercover crackdowns Saturday, Lee and other Grateful Dead/Dead Head liaisons quickly spread the word about two narcs operating out of a van on the lot. "Just to let them know little brother is watching right back," Lee chuckled.
A more recent threat to Dead Head life, however, is massive vending. Though vendors at Saturday's Sullivan Stadium "village" set up small displays, larger commercial vendors, nicknamed "tie-dye corporations," have started to appear at most camp sites. "These guys don't even know what band is playing most nights," Lee said. "They've probably never heard the Dead. Some of these people come in with over $100,000 in merchandise. At the last show I saw some salesman with a phone-in credit-card machine."
Another sign of encroaching commercial exploitation of the Dead scene is ticket counterfeiting. There were rumors on Saturday that 5,000 counterfeit tickets had been sold, most at twice the ticket price. "It crushes these people to pay $65 for something that turns out to be a piece of trash," Lee said. Scalpers were also out selling on Saturday.
This commercialization and the overwhelming crowd numbers have turned many fans into watchdogs for their peers. Van Delia, of Syracuse, who has been with the Dead for over 20 years and now tours with his wife and 15-month-old baby, collected trash for campers last night, and was out with others this morning cleaning up around the sight. "I have faith that this way of life will continue forever, for our kids and grandchildren," Delia said. "This music and the freedom it teaches will never die."
| FRANK ;07/02 NKELLY;07/05,15:11 DEADHE03 |
| Caption: PHOTO |
2. Some Grateful Dead fans gathered at Sullivan Stadium before yesterday's concert. / Globe photo / Eric Antoniou
Illustration
PHOTO
[THIRD Edition]
Boston Globe (pre-1997 Fulltext) - Boston, Mass.
| Author: | Morse, Steve |
| Date: | Jul 3, 1989 |
| Start Page: | 9 |
| Section: | ARTS AND FILM |
MUSIC REVIEW
GRATEFUL DEAD -- In concert with Los Lobos at Sullivan
Stadium last night.
FOXBOROUGH - The day began early for the Grateful Dead. They arrived at the stadium just after noon to tape a song for ABC-TV's "Nightline" to air during its Fourth of July celebration tomorrow. While standing by a backstage bus, the Dead ended up taping an acoustic duet with Los Lobos of Woody Guthrie's stirring "This Land Is Your Land."
Another celebration was held for a capacity 61,000 Dead Heads who jammed Sullivan Stadium to the gills last night. Traffic tie-ups were monumental -- nearly two-hour delays were not uncommon -- but the crowd policed itself well and the most trouble was a few stalled engines and sore feet from having to hoof it from a parking space several miles away.
The Dead played a surprisingly dreamy, tasteful show in this, their first East Coast date of their summer tour. They rarely rocked out, preferring a midtempo, laid-back mood in keeping with the livin'-is-easy pace of this tropical July day.
This was a calmer crowd than the Dylan/Dead hordes at the stadium two years ago on this same weekend -- and the band responded in kind. Their first set, however, was really too low in energy, as if they'd spent themselves during the TV taping. They sputtered through "Playin' in the Band," never found the trigger on Jerry Garcia's bluesy "Crazy Fingers," and only started showing vital signs on Willie Dixon's zestfully erotic "Wang Dang Doodle," which the Dead infrequently perform but might want to do more often.
The rest of the first set, which followed a barely audible set by the unnecessarily timid roots band Los Lobos, clunked and clattered to its finish. Brent Mydland's raspy new tune, "You Can Run But You Can't Hide" was followed by Garcia's brightening "Tennessee Jed," then Dylan's "Queen Jane Approximately," Garcia's slow-blues "Lay Me Down," and closing, finally, with uptempo faves "Cassidy" and "Don't Ease Me In."
"I'd only give that set a C or C-minus," drummer Mickey Hart sighed backstage during intermission. "But hold on. We'll get it together."
And they did, though it took a couple more cover tunes to do it. Strangely, the best song of the first set was a cover of "Wang Dang Doodle," while the cream of the second set likewise consisted of covers. They were Traffic's "Dear Mr. Fantasy" (Garcia got things rolling with a blistering, bent-note, acid-damaged solo) and the Beatles' "Hey Jude," with loud, tuneful harmonies supplied by the crowd.
The final set also had one of the more bizarre "space jams" in memory. The Dead built up to it by starting with "Friend of the Devil," "Truckin'," "She's Gone" and a rather vapid "Eyes of the World," then Hart and second drummer Bill Kreutzmann went off into never-never land with stunning, phantasmic video images coming from having a camera inside one of Hart's drums. It was followed by an even more cosmic, Philip-Glass-take-note guitar duet between Garcia and Bob Weir, while vivid, hallucinogenic-style computer graphics filled the video screens. The Dead goes MTV? Good question. It was seductive for a while, but went on too long.
All in all, a pleasant night that didn't find the Dead playing at their peak, yet still, if that's possible, they justified the ridiculous Route 1 traffic jams. The Dead's own material sounded a little rusty, but they salvaged the night beautifully with their soulful Traffic and Beatles tunes. Those went a long way toward easing the headaches it took to get to the stadium in the first place.
Jerry Garcia of the Grateful Dead performs at Sullivan Stadium. / Globe photo / Brooks Kraft
GRATEFUL DEAD -- In concert with Los Lobos at Sullivan
Stadium last night.
FOXBOROUGH - The day began early for the Grateful Dead. They arrived at the stadium just after noon to tape a song for ABC-TV's "Nightline" to air during its Fourth of July celebration tomorrow. While standing by a backstage bus, the Dead ended up taping an acoustic duet with Los Lobos of Woody Guthrie's stirring "This Land Is Your Land."
Another celebration was held for a capacity 61,000 Dead Heads who jammed Sullivan Stadium to the gills last night. Traffic tie-ups were monumental -- nearly two-hour delays were not uncommon -- but the crowd policed itself well and the most trouble was a few stalled engines and sore feet from having to hoof it from a parking space several miles away.
The Dead played a surprisingly dreamy, tasteful show in this, their first East Coast date of their summer tour. They rarely rocked out, preferring a midtempo, laid-back mood in keeping with the livin'-is-easy pace of this tropical July day.
This was a calmer crowd than the Dylan/Dead hordes at the stadium two years ago on this same weekend -- and the band responded in kind. Their first set, however, was really too low in energy, as if they'd spent themselves during the TV taping. They sputtered through "Playin' in the Band," never found the trigger on Jerry Garcia's bluesy "Crazy Fingers," and only started showing vital signs on Willie Dixon's zestfully erotic "Wang Dang Doodle," which the Dead infrequently perform but might want to do more often.
The rest of the first set, which followed a barely audible set by the unnecessarily timid roots band Los Lobos, clunked and clattered to its finish. Brent Mydland's raspy new tune, "You Can Run But You Can't Hide" was followed by Garcia's brightening "Tennessee Jed," then Dylan's "Queen Jane Approximately," Garcia's slow-blues "Lay Me Down," and closing, finally, with uptempo faves "Cassidy" and "Don't Ease Me In."
"I'd only give that set a C or C-minus," drummer Mickey Hart sighed backstage during intermission. "But hold on. We'll get it together."
And they did, though it took a couple more cover tunes to do it. Strangely, the best song of the first set was a cover of "Wang Dang Doodle," while the cream of the second set likewise consisted of covers. They were Traffic's "Dear Mr. Fantasy" (Garcia got things rolling with a blistering, bent-note, acid-damaged solo) and the Beatles' "Hey Jude," with loud, tuneful harmonies supplied by the crowd.
The final set also had one of the more bizarre "space jams" in memory. The Dead built up to it by starting with "Friend of the Devil," "Truckin'," "She's Gone" and a rather vapid "Eyes of the World," then Hart and second drummer Bill Kreutzmann went off into never-never land with stunning, phantasmic video images coming from having a camera inside one of Hart's drums. It was followed by an even more cosmic, Philip-Glass-take-note guitar duet between Garcia and Bob Weir, while vivid, hallucinogenic-style computer graphics filled the video screens. The Dead goes MTV? Good question. It was seductive for a while, but went on too long.
All in all, a pleasant night that didn't find the Dead playing at their peak, yet still, if that's possible, they justified the ridiculous Route 1 traffic jams. The Dead's own material sounded a little rusty, but they salvaged the night beautifully with their soulful Traffic and Beatles tunes. Those went a long way toward easing the headaches it took to get to the stadium in the first place.
| morse ;07/02 NKELLY;07/05,15:47 DEAD3 |
| Caption: PHOTO |
Illustration
THE GRATEFUL DEAD: BUSINESS AS USUAL
THE GRATEFUL DEAD: BUSINESS AS USUAL
[THIRD Edition]
Boston Globe (pre-1997 Fulltext) - Boston, Mass.
| Author: | Gilbert, Matthew |
| Date: | Jul 8, 1990 |
| Start Page: | 47 |
| Section: | ARTS AND FILM |
Chances are, you've met the stereotypical Deadhead. And chances are, he irked you. Innocently, but forcefully, he held you hostage to his music, which he claimed was more than music: the good old Grateful Dead. "They're a band beyond description," he'd say, reciting scripture. His hissing, ancient bootleg tapes were endless, and distressing, "Dark Star" sidling in and out again like a bad dream. While God spoke to him through Jerry Garcia's effusive guitar riffs, you wanted to go wash dishes.
The more you voiced your dislike, of course, the more this head espoused the Dead, speaking as if they were old friends. "Jerry's tired on this jam," he'd say knowingly, or "You have to catch them on a good night." His walls were plastered with psychedelic posters, his bookshelves with Kerouac and Kesey. And when tour time arrived, every year or so, he was in full flower, on the road, a spectacle of silk-screen and E-Z Wider. Next Saturday, at Foxboro Stadium, you'll find him dancing and trancing, the hero of his own movie.
This Deadhead, of course, seemed like a cartoon. He was a relic, wrapped up in the romance of a brief '60s past. His Fillmore tapes, his yellowed Beat classics, his love-Haight philosophy -- they were a tired nostalgia trip. But in this, the 25th year of the Grateful Dead, it may be time for reconsideration. With all his dusty faith, our Deadhead friend is very much present tense. He and his fellow fiends, it seems, have created a rock phenomenon that is as enduring as it is unique. And each year, thousands of converts join them in their monomaniacal trek down the golden road.
As proof of the Dead culture's vitality, go to a Grateful Dead concert in 1990. Right beside the many diehard older fans, you'll find scads of teen-agers wearing tie-dyed T-shirts and ponytails. Last year, the Dead were the country's fourth-highest-grossing concert act (behind the Rolling Stones, the Who and Bon Jovi). Since the release of their 1988 album, "In the Dark," the band has reached new heights of popularity. For the first time, you'll find their songs on the charts. Once again you'll find Garcia on the cover of Rolling Stone.
At a Dead show, you'll also find that, as a musical unit, the band seems self-rejuvenating. The players and the song list have remained nearly the same for 25 years, but they still find enough inspiration to play sometimes for four hours. Constantly on the road, they are continually experimenting with new sounds and new technology, particularly Garcia's recent affair with MIDI programmed-guitar effects. "Victim or the Crime," for instance, a song on their new album, features a heavy barrage of high-tech guitar riffs that is cutting-edge all the way. And in the last few years, members of the Dead have been seen onstage with Elvis Costello, Bob Dylan, Ornette Coleman, the Neville Brothers, Edie Brickell, Bruce Hornsby and Suzanne Vega, to name a few.
How have the Grateful Dead come about their longevity? How has this exercise in anachronism weathered a quarter of a century so far?
There's something embarrassing to nonfans about the devotion of Deadheads. The emotional commitment between the band and its following is passe -- it's too sincere. In the late '70s, when bands such as Talking Heads and the B-52's were at their mocking best, irony became the dominant rock-music sensibility. No one got too serious. The Dead, however, continued on their hippie-rock track. You'd never hear them goofing on sexual roles, for instance, or on rock music itself. They have remained stubbornly out-of-time.
This notion is nothing new to Deadheads. In fact, they seem to revel in the stable history of their band, which was known as "good old Grateful Dead" long before it was particularly good or old. As Dead fans, they consider themselves beyond fashion, explorers of the eternal consciousness -- the consciousness that, at one time, was thought to be found only through use of LSD. They hold dear the legends of carefree figures such as Neal Cassady and the Merry Pranksters, who were immortalized in books such as Tom Wolfe's "The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test." Such books are their ibles.
The words of Robert Hunter, the Dead's primary lyricist, promote this aura of legend. His poetic songs are loaded with classical allusions -- to the Bible, to American history, to medieval England -- which he plays off. "Light a candle, curse the glare," from "Touch of Grey," derives from the Chinese proverb "It is better to light a single candle than to curse the darkness." Hunter adapts the Sermon on the Mount's "You are the light of the world" to exhort, "Wake up to find out that you are the eyes of the world." Such references are everywhere in Dead songs, reminders to listeners of the way things have stayed the same, even while they have changed.
In the music, as well, the Dead exude a certain sense of history. At a Dead concert, there is the feeling that not too much has changed since 1970. Songs that the Dead have been playing since their first years together, such as "Morning Dew" and "China Cat Sunflower," are still in the rotation, just as prominent as the newer material. While most long-lived acts eventually eschew their early songs, the Dead continually pump life into their old standards, jamming them into new shapes and sizes. They are still who they were, in some ways.
Furthermore, most of the cover songs they play are traditional in origin. They precede the existence of the Dead, lending another tinge of the past. "Going Down the Road Feeling Bad," "Cold Rain and Snow," "Morning Dew" -- they're in the American grain. They speak of the Depression, the downtrodden, hopping freight trains. The newer cover songs -- such as a group by Dylan including "When I Paint My Masterpiece" and "Queen Jane Approximately," the Beatles' "Hey Jude" and the Band's "The Weight" -- are, in a sense, newer classics; they update the same American canon.
The stability of the personnel also lends a sense of history to the Dead. Since the very beginning, Garcia has been the eternal Captain of lead guitar; Phil Lesh has been the intellectual on bass; Bob Weir's been the whiz kid on rhythm; and Bill Kreutzmann has been strong and silent on drums. While other band members such as Pigpen, Mickey Hart, Tom Constanten, Keith and Donna Godcheaux and Brent Mydland have provided some flux in the lineup, the center has held remarkably.
In these ways, the Dead form a sort of institution, one that is indeed built to last. They grant a sense of membership, a stable identity to rock fans seeking more than the latest fads -- seeking, in fact, the opposite of trendiness.
For most Deadheads, the intimacy of the concert experience is as important as this sense of tradition. They like to feel as though the band members are their friends. The Dead dress as the Dead, generally in T-shirts and jeans. Their tours, which occur with amazing regularity, have no formal names, like "Steel Wheels" or "Blond Ambition" -- it's simply another Dead show. Once they are onstage, and generally not before that point, they decide which songs they'll play. They try to be completely present for their audiences, unobscured by any prepackaged designs.
Often, the songs they choose to play will tweak their fans. Playing "Loose Lucy" for the first time since 1974, for instance, can create a small sensation, as the information is carried from show to show by fans who follow the group on tour. But more than what they play, it's how they play it. As conventional song structures dissolve into extended jamming, the band members follow their imaginations with their instruments. In a sense, as you sit in the audience you are within the group brain as it discovers the song. "The music plays the band," according to one of their lyrics. It's a pensive style, turning one moment to jazz, the next to blues, the next to African heat; it's all very interior and nonconfrontational. There's a rhythm, but it doesn't affront -- it's usually more of a shuffle.
While Dead songs aren't confessional in nature, there's something personal about the band's performances. If they aren't feeling good, or together, then they may play listlessly. And when it's a bad night, Deadheads know it. Mediocre concerts, with aimless space jams, are a constant threat on the tour circuit. But if there's a spark among the band members, the fans are ignited. The songs are lively, the jams are bright. While most fans prefer to hear a hot show, they are generally sympathetic and forgiving of a bad one. No hard feelings.
This friendly environment is in stark contrast to that surrounding other older acts such as the Stones, and newer ones such as Madonna, who are very big business right now. These performers are under stunning financial pressures. To avoid risk of failure, they tend to produce prefabricated concerts, laden with staging and spectacle. Their tours are exercises in ultra-careful planning, and the goal seems to be to make each show look and sound the same. With formidable music-business machinery, these acts draw their audiences into the arena, deliver the product and send them home with a T-shirt. There is a barrier between the musician and the audience that can be summed up in one phrase: business savvy.
The Dead have managed to transcend this business-oriented band/audience paradigm. Their new-found popularity has occurred without any marketing muscle; it simply happened to them. As businessmen, they've remained loyal to their early ideals of small operations and musical experimentation. This is a band that, upon the release of its first Arista album, "Terrapin Station," didn't play any songs from the album at a concert attended by label boss Clive Davis. This is a band that generally allows fans to tape its shows, even designating areas for tapers. Try holding up a mike at a Stones concert.
The Dead actually attempted to keep their entire operation independent of the established music industry. Back in 1973, with the core group of friends that had formed around them, their "family," they began their own record label, Grateful Dead Records. They stepped up contact with fans, via their Dead Freaks Unite program, and by 1974 there were approximately 80,000 names on the mailing list. They developed their own sound system, a 23-ton "Wall of Sound" they lugged from gig to gig.
None of it was viable. Records from the label -- among them "Wake of the Flood," "From the Mars Hotel," "Blues for Allah" -- sounded high in quality, and the Wall of Sound was loud and precise. But the energy and money it took to keep these monster enterprises moving sapped them. Since then, the Dead as a business have pursued the art of compromise. They make the best of rock realities -- arenas, for instance.
Since the "In the Dark" explosion, many of the band's newer fans have caused trouble at the gigs. They arrive early, stay late, make a mess, flaunt their drug use -- and aside from unpleasant concertgoing, the result has been a lot of bad publicity and busts. A few arenas have asked the band not to return. In response, the Dead launched an all-out campaign to educate their new fans. Fliers on concert "Deadiquette" were issued with all mail-ordered tickets; the band asked that all camping at stadiums stop; they sent radio spots, asking fans to be civilized, to areas on their tour route. They've tried a number of experiments in ticketing and promotion as well, such as announcing shows only a week or so in advance, with tickets available only locally, to discourage ticketless travelers from hanging out. They are trying to keep in touch.
The most obvious paradigm for all this shared consciousness is religous ceremony, not rock concert. And it is not uncommon to hear Dead shows referred to as religious events, or Deadheads as religious fanatics (maybe that's why you can't stand your Deadhead friend). The pilgrimage to concert sites; the ritualistic behavior, which sometimes includes the ingestion of drugs, the host; the preachers on the altar; the martyrs, like Pigpen and Janis; the spiritual lift from the words and the music; the unlimited devotion.
But more acurately, the Grateful Dead are a quasi-religion. The ritual is for ritual's sake; there are no teachings, really. The dominant imperative seems to be to have a good time, en masse, without hurting anyone. The Dead recede from didacticism. Their lyrics, by Hunter or not, seem to keep their roots in the hallucinogenic: What is learned is not exactly communicable, and always beyond judgment, except to someone who takes the same strange trip at the same time. The narratives are captivating but so undefined in space and time that their real-world implications often remain nebulous. When there are messages, they are elliptical and existential, or token and uninspired ("Nothing left to do but smile, smile, smile"). If there is a directive in the lyrics, it's about growing older ("Every silver lining has a touch of gray") or about growing through paradox into spiritual enlightenment ("It's all a dream we dreamed one afternoon long ago").
Aside from a commitment to the survival of the rain forests, the band members tend not to preach in public. Their mode is generally apolitical. In a number of interviews, Garcia has said that he doesn't vote, that he's chosen not to choose from among the lesser of evils.
While the Grateful Dead's music may not suit most tastes, it's hard to deny the appeal of their presence in the rock music business. With their seemingly pure intentions, they are its core of integrity. They play for music, not money, reaching for their audience's ears and not their wallets. Wish your Deadhead friends would wear Walkmen; wish they would all move out West. But after all is said and done, perhaps it's time to be grateful for their endurance.
The more you voiced your dislike, of course, the more this head espoused the Dead, speaking as if they were old friends. "Jerry's tired on this jam," he'd say knowingly, or "You have to catch them on a good night." His walls were plastered with psychedelic posters, his bookshelves with Kerouac and Kesey. And when tour time arrived, every year or so, he was in full flower, on the road, a spectacle of silk-screen and E-Z Wider. Next Saturday, at Foxboro Stadium, you'll find him dancing and trancing, the hero of his own movie.
This Deadhead, of course, seemed like a cartoon. He was a relic, wrapped up in the romance of a brief '60s past. His Fillmore tapes, his yellowed Beat classics, his love-Haight philosophy -- they were a tired nostalgia trip. But in this, the 25th year of the Grateful Dead, it may be time for reconsideration. With all his dusty faith, our Deadhead friend is very much present tense. He and his fellow fiends, it seems, have created a rock phenomenon that is as enduring as it is unique. And each year, thousands of converts join them in their monomaniacal trek down the golden road.
As proof of the Dead culture's vitality, go to a Grateful Dead concert in 1990. Right beside the many diehard older fans, you'll find scads of teen-agers wearing tie-dyed T-shirts and ponytails. Last year, the Dead were the country's fourth-highest-grossing concert act (behind the Rolling Stones, the Who and Bon Jovi). Since the release of their 1988 album, "In the Dark," the band has reached new heights of popularity. For the first time, you'll find their songs on the charts. Once again you'll find Garcia on the cover of Rolling Stone.
At a Dead show, you'll also find that, as a musical unit, the band seems self-rejuvenating. The players and the song list have remained nearly the same for 25 years, but they still find enough inspiration to play sometimes for four hours. Constantly on the road, they are continually experimenting with new sounds and new technology, particularly Garcia's recent affair with MIDI programmed-guitar effects. "Victim or the Crime," for instance, a song on their new album, features a heavy barrage of high-tech guitar riffs that is cutting-edge all the way. And in the last few years, members of the Dead have been seen onstage with Elvis Costello, Bob Dylan, Ornette Coleman, the Neville Brothers, Edie Brickell, Bruce Hornsby and Suzanne Vega, to name a few.
How have the Grateful Dead come about their longevity? How has this exercise in anachronism weathered a quarter of a century so far?
There's something embarrassing to nonfans about the devotion of Deadheads. The emotional commitment between the band and its following is passe -- it's too sincere. In the late '70s, when bands such as Talking Heads and the B-52's were at their mocking best, irony became the dominant rock-music sensibility. No one got too serious. The Dead, however, continued on their hippie-rock track. You'd never hear them goofing on sexual roles, for instance, or on rock music itself. They have remained stubbornly out-of-time.
This notion is nothing new to Deadheads. In fact, they seem to revel in the stable history of their band, which was known as "good old Grateful Dead" long before it was particularly good or old. As Dead fans, they consider themselves beyond fashion, explorers of the eternal consciousness -- the consciousness that, at one time, was thought to be found only through use of LSD. They hold dear the legends of carefree figures such as Neal Cassady and the Merry Pranksters, who were immortalized in books such as Tom Wolfe's "The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test." Such books are their ibles.
The words of Robert Hunter, the Dead's primary lyricist, promote this aura of legend. His poetic songs are loaded with classical allusions -- to the Bible, to American history, to medieval England -- which he plays off. "Light a candle, curse the glare," from "Touch of Grey," derives from the Chinese proverb "It is better to light a single candle than to curse the darkness." Hunter adapts the Sermon on the Mount's "You are the light of the world" to exhort, "Wake up to find out that you are the eyes of the world." Such references are everywhere in Dead songs, reminders to listeners of the way things have stayed the same, even while they have changed.
In the music, as well, the Dead exude a certain sense of history. At a Dead concert, there is the feeling that not too much has changed since 1970. Songs that the Dead have been playing since their first years together, such as "Morning Dew" and "China Cat Sunflower," are still in the rotation, just as prominent as the newer material. While most long-lived acts eventually eschew their early songs, the Dead continually pump life into their old standards, jamming them into new shapes and sizes. They are still who they were, in some ways.
Furthermore, most of the cover songs they play are traditional in origin. They precede the existence of the Dead, lending another tinge of the past. "Going Down the Road Feeling Bad," "Cold Rain and Snow," "Morning Dew" -- they're in the American grain. They speak of the Depression, the downtrodden, hopping freight trains. The newer cover songs -- such as a group by Dylan including "When I Paint My Masterpiece" and "Queen Jane Approximately," the Beatles' "Hey Jude" and the Band's "The Weight" -- are, in a sense, newer classics; they update the same American canon.
The stability of the personnel also lends a sense of history to the Dead. Since the very beginning, Garcia has been the eternal Captain of lead guitar; Phil Lesh has been the intellectual on bass; Bob Weir's been the whiz kid on rhythm; and Bill Kreutzmann has been strong and silent on drums. While other band members such as Pigpen, Mickey Hart, Tom Constanten, Keith and Donna Godcheaux and Brent Mydland have provided some flux in the lineup, the center has held remarkably.
In these ways, the Dead form a sort of institution, one that is indeed built to last. They grant a sense of membership, a stable identity to rock fans seeking more than the latest fads -- seeking, in fact, the opposite of trendiness.
For most Deadheads, the intimacy of the concert experience is as important as this sense of tradition. They like to feel as though the band members are their friends. The Dead dress as the Dead, generally in T-shirts and jeans. Their tours, which occur with amazing regularity, have no formal names, like "Steel Wheels" or "Blond Ambition" -- it's simply another Dead show. Once they are onstage, and generally not before that point, they decide which songs they'll play. They try to be completely present for their audiences, unobscured by any prepackaged designs.
Often, the songs they choose to play will tweak their fans. Playing "Loose Lucy" for the first time since 1974, for instance, can create a small sensation, as the information is carried from show to show by fans who follow the group on tour. But more than what they play, it's how they play it. As conventional song structures dissolve into extended jamming, the band members follow their imaginations with their instruments. In a sense, as you sit in the audience you are within the group brain as it discovers the song. "The music plays the band," according to one of their lyrics. It's a pensive style, turning one moment to jazz, the next to blues, the next to African heat; it's all very interior and nonconfrontational. There's a rhythm, but it doesn't affront -- it's usually more of a shuffle.
While Dead songs aren't confessional in nature, there's something personal about the band's performances. If they aren't feeling good, or together, then they may play listlessly. And when it's a bad night, Deadheads know it. Mediocre concerts, with aimless space jams, are a constant threat on the tour circuit. But if there's a spark among the band members, the fans are ignited. The songs are lively, the jams are bright. While most fans prefer to hear a hot show, they are generally sympathetic and forgiving of a bad one. No hard feelings.
This friendly environment is in stark contrast to that surrounding other older acts such as the Stones, and newer ones such as Madonna, who are very big business right now. These performers are under stunning financial pressures. To avoid risk of failure, they tend to produce prefabricated concerts, laden with staging and spectacle. Their tours are exercises in ultra-careful planning, and the goal seems to be to make each show look and sound the same. With formidable music-business machinery, these acts draw their audiences into the arena, deliver the product and send them home with a T-shirt. There is a barrier between the musician and the audience that can be summed up in one phrase: business savvy.
The Dead have managed to transcend this business-oriented band/audience paradigm. Their new-found popularity has occurred without any marketing muscle; it simply happened to them. As businessmen, they've remained loyal to their early ideals of small operations and musical experimentation. This is a band that, upon the release of its first Arista album, "Terrapin Station," didn't play any songs from the album at a concert attended by label boss Clive Davis. This is a band that generally allows fans to tape its shows, even designating areas for tapers. Try holding up a mike at a Stones concert.
The Dead actually attempted to keep their entire operation independent of the established music industry. Back in 1973, with the core group of friends that had formed around them, their "family," they began their own record label, Grateful Dead Records. They stepped up contact with fans, via their Dead Freaks Unite program, and by 1974 there were approximately 80,000 names on the mailing list. They developed their own sound system, a 23-ton "Wall of Sound" they lugged from gig to gig.
None of it was viable. Records from the label -- among them "Wake of the Flood," "From the Mars Hotel," "Blues for Allah" -- sounded high in quality, and the Wall of Sound was loud and precise. But the energy and money it took to keep these monster enterprises moving sapped them. Since then, the Dead as a business have pursued the art of compromise. They make the best of rock realities -- arenas, for instance.
Since the "In the Dark" explosion, many of the band's newer fans have caused trouble at the gigs. They arrive early, stay late, make a mess, flaunt their drug use -- and aside from unpleasant concertgoing, the result has been a lot of bad publicity and busts. A few arenas have asked the band not to return. In response, the Dead launched an all-out campaign to educate their new fans. Fliers on concert "Deadiquette" were issued with all mail-ordered tickets; the band asked that all camping at stadiums stop; they sent radio spots, asking fans to be civilized, to areas on their tour route. They've tried a number of experiments in ticketing and promotion as well, such as announcing shows only a week or so in advance, with tickets available only locally, to discourage ticketless travelers from hanging out. They are trying to keep in touch.
The most obvious paradigm for all this shared consciousness is religous ceremony, not rock concert. And it is not uncommon to hear Dead shows referred to as religious events, or Deadheads as religious fanatics (maybe that's why you can't stand your Deadhead friend). The pilgrimage to concert sites; the ritualistic behavior, which sometimes includes the ingestion of drugs, the host; the preachers on the altar; the martyrs, like Pigpen and Janis; the spiritual lift from the words and the music; the unlimited devotion.
But more acurately, the Grateful Dead are a quasi-religion. The ritual is for ritual's sake; there are no teachings, really. The dominant imperative seems to be to have a good time, en masse, without hurting anyone. The Dead recede from didacticism. Their lyrics, by Hunter or not, seem to keep their roots in the hallucinogenic: What is learned is not exactly communicable, and always beyond judgment, except to someone who takes the same strange trip at the same time. The narratives are captivating but so undefined in space and time that their real-world implications often remain nebulous. When there are messages, they are elliptical and existential, or token and uninspired ("Nothing left to do but smile, smile, smile"). If there is a directive in the lyrics, it's about growing older ("Every silver lining has a touch of gray") or about growing through paradox into spiritual enlightenment ("It's all a dream we dreamed one afternoon long ago").
Aside from a commitment to the survival of the rain forests, the band members tend not to preach in public. Their mode is generally apolitical. In a number of interviews, Garcia has said that he doesn't vote, that he's chosen not to choose from among the lesser of evils.
While the Grateful Dead's music may not suit most tastes, it's hard to deny the appeal of their presence in the rock music business. With their seemingly pure intentions, they are its core of integrity. They play for music, not money, reaching for their audience's ears and not their wallets. Wish your Deadhead friends would wear Walkmen; wish they would all move out West. But after all is said and done, perhaps it's time to be grateful for their endurance.
FOXBORO EXPECTS 61,000 DEADHEADS TOMORROW
[THIRD Edition]
Boston Globe (pre-1997 Fulltext) - Boston, Mass.
| Author: | Morse, Steve |
| Date: | Jul 13, 1990 |
| Start Page: | 35 |
| Section: | ARTS AND FILM |
ROCK NOTES
The summer concert season has been up and down at the box office, but the Grateful Dead, as usual, seem immune. They've got three of the Top 10 grosses in the latest Amusement Business magazine, totaling $1.4 million in Eugene, Ore.; $1.1 million in Mountain View, Calif.; and $935,000 in Sacramento.
There will be more of the same tomorrow when the Dead launch the Foxboro Stadium rock season before 61,000 fans. The show is "absolutely, categorically sold out," says stadium general manager Brian O'Donovan.
Some words of caution, however:
"There will be no camping whatsoever allowed this year," O'Donovan says. "The Dead are on a big campaign against that so they can continue to play these stadium shows. And people will be checked for tickets as they come into the parking lots. We had upwards of 100,000 people on site last year, many of them looking for tickets, and we don't want that to happen again."
Other Dead-related tidbits:
- OPENING ACT EDIE BRICKELL & NEW BOHEMIANS: They'll start things off tomorrow at 4 p.m. Their new album won't be out until October, but they're expected to preview it. Sources say that singer Brickell will also play one or more concerts in the next year with a group consisting of the Dead's Jerry Garcia, Branford Marsalis, Bruce Hornsby (who just joined the Dead in their Raleigh, N.C., show and plays Club Casino Tuesday) and Rob Wasserman. Their music will be largely improvisational.
- BOB WEIR AT GREAT WOODS: Dead cosinger Bob Weir swings back this way to play with bassist Rob Wasserman at Great Woods on Aug. 23. The acoustic version of Hot Tuna will open. Tickets on sale tomorrow.
URBAN DANCE SQUAD: From Holland with love and mania comes the new group Urban Dance Squad, who debut at Axis tonight. A promo concert video arrived from Arista Records this week -- and was a mind-blower, to say the least. Visually, the group was all over the stage, while their sound was a cross between Soul II Soul and Led Zeppelin. As vocalist Rudeboy said, "I'm intense. I'm happy with that. It makes the world more beautiful." Their new album, "Mental Floss for the Globe," is hit and miss, but their live show looks promising.
LINDA RONSTADT'S GREAT WOODS CHARITY: Singer Linda Ronstadt will play Great Woods on Sept. 1 with Aaron Neville. She's also helping out the Cambridge-based Fearless Hearts for Homeless Children Foundation, the same group Steve Earle did a Nightstage benefit for last year. If you're willing to pay $75 a ticket ($50 is a tax-deductible donation), you'll get choice seating and attend a reception with her. The mailing address: Fearless Hearts, PO Box 1034, Cambridge 02140.
MORE CONCERT NEWS: Danzig, Soundgarden and Corrosion of Conformity will take over Citi and Axis for a metal spectacular on Aug. 15. Canadian rocker Colin James, who has a hot new album with Bonnie Raitt on one track, plays the Paradise Aug. 8. Also, Snap will open for Soul II Soul Aug. 26 at Great Woods.
BOSTON WINS AGAIN: Tom Scholz of the band Boston has won another phase of a lawsuit with CBS Records. In March, CBS was ordered to pay back royalties they withheld when Boston would not deliver them a third album. And this time Scholz won copyrights to the songs on the "Third Stage" album, which CBS claimed to own.
BARRY AND HOLLY TASHIAN: Barry Tashian, once with Barry & the Remains and later with Emmylou Harris' Hot Band, joins his wife and harp player Kirk (Jellyroll) Johnson at Johnny D's on Tuesday. The Tashians' debut album, "Trust in Me," released by the local Northeastern label, is a folk-country gem.
BITS AND PIECES . . . Peter Wolf performed a show with Roomful of Blues in Providence last week . . . Matt Johnson, a New Age/jazz pianist of considerable grace, leads a 10-piece ensemble at the Hatch Shell on Sunday at 3 p.m. . . . Tonight: Steve Wynn and Concrete Blonde at the Channel, Peter Murphy at Citi and banjoist Bela Fleck at Nightstage.
The summer concert season has been up and down at the box office, but the Grateful Dead, as usual, seem immune. They've got three of the Top 10 grosses in the latest Amusement Business magazine, totaling $1.4 million in Eugene, Ore.; $1.1 million in Mountain View, Calif.; and $935,000 in Sacramento.
There will be more of the same tomorrow when the Dead launch the Foxboro Stadium rock season before 61,000 fans. The show is "absolutely, categorically sold out," says stadium general manager Brian O'Donovan.
Some words of caution, however:
"There will be no camping whatsoever allowed this year," O'Donovan says. "The Dead are on a big campaign against that so they can continue to play these stadium shows. And people will be checked for tickets as they come into the parking lots. We had upwards of 100,000 people on site last year, many of them looking for tickets, and we don't want that to happen again."
Other Dead-related tidbits:
- OPENING ACT EDIE BRICKELL & NEW BOHEMIANS: They'll start things off tomorrow at 4 p.m. Their new album won't be out until October, but they're expected to preview it. Sources say that singer Brickell will also play one or more concerts in the next year with a group consisting of the Dead's Jerry Garcia, Branford Marsalis, Bruce Hornsby (who just joined the Dead in their Raleigh, N.C., show and plays Club Casino Tuesday) and Rob Wasserman. Their music will be largely improvisational.
- BOB WEIR AT GREAT WOODS: Dead cosinger Bob Weir swings back this way to play with bassist Rob Wasserman at Great Woods on Aug. 23. The acoustic version of Hot Tuna will open. Tickets on sale tomorrow.
URBAN DANCE SQUAD: From Holland with love and mania comes the new group Urban Dance Squad, who debut at Axis tonight. A promo concert video arrived from Arista Records this week -- and was a mind-blower, to say the least. Visually, the group was all over the stage, while their sound was a cross between Soul II Soul and Led Zeppelin. As vocalist Rudeboy said, "I'm intense. I'm happy with that. It makes the world more beautiful." Their new album, "Mental Floss for the Globe," is hit and miss, but their live show looks promising.
LINDA RONSTADT'S GREAT WOODS CHARITY: Singer Linda Ronstadt will play Great Woods on Sept. 1 with Aaron Neville. She's also helping out the Cambridge-based Fearless Hearts for Homeless Children Foundation, the same group Steve Earle did a Nightstage benefit for last year. If you're willing to pay $75 a ticket ($50 is a tax-deductible donation), you'll get choice seating and attend a reception with her. The mailing address: Fearless Hearts, PO Box 1034, Cambridge 02140.
MORE CONCERT NEWS: Danzig, Soundgarden and Corrosion of Conformity will take over Citi and Axis for a metal spectacular on Aug. 15. Canadian rocker Colin James, who has a hot new album with Bonnie Raitt on one track, plays the Paradise Aug. 8. Also, Snap will open for Soul II Soul Aug. 26 at Great Woods.
BOSTON WINS AGAIN: Tom Scholz of the band Boston has won another phase of a lawsuit with CBS Records. In March, CBS was ordered to pay back royalties they withheld when Boston would not deliver them a third album. And this time Scholz won copyrights to the songs on the "Third Stage" album, which CBS claimed to own.
BARRY AND HOLLY TASHIAN: Barry Tashian, once with Barry & the Remains and later with Emmylou Harris' Hot Band, joins his wife and harp player Kirk (Jellyroll) Johnson at Johnny D's on Tuesday. The Tashians' debut album, "Trust in Me," released by the local Northeastern label, is a folk-country gem.
BITS AND PIECES . . . Peter Wolf performed a show with Roomful of Blues in Providence last week . . . Matt Johnson, a New Age/jazz pianist of considerable grace, leads a 10-piece ensemble at the Hatch Shell on Sunday at 3 p.m. . . . Tonight: Steve Wynn and Concrete Blonde at the Channel, Peter Murphy at Citi and banjoist Bela Fleck at Nightstage.
'DEAD HEADS' FIND FANDOM LEADS TO ROCK'S HARD PLACE
[THIRD Edition]
Boston Globe (pre-1997 Fulltext) - Boston, Mass.
| Author: | Kerstetter, James |
| Date: | Jul 15, 1990 |
| Start Page: | 22 |
| Section: | METRO |
FOXBOROUGH - Olaf Stockwell, a devout Grateful Dead fan, is tired of being asked if he sells drugs.
"Just because we're Dead fans, they think we can set them up with something," said Stockwell of St. Catherine, Ontario. "You get real tired of it."
Stockwell and the bohemian Dead Heads, the people who have made following the band around the country their life's work, were accompanied last night to Foxborough Stadium by about 63,000 other fans.
The Volkswagen vans and pickup trucks of the music-loving Dead Heads have been joined in parking lots across the country by Toyotas and Chevys and a mainstream audience since the Grateful Dead's 1987 pop hit "Touch of Gray."
In another sign of its mainstreaming, the band has been cutting back on its drug use -- an integral part of the 1960s Grateful Dead experience -- and that trend is reflected among its diehard fans.
On the front window of the 1972 VW van that Stockwell, 19, and his traveling companions, Moses Berger and Darren, who declined to give his last name, have driven from Kansas to Boston in pursuit of their favorite band is a sign that reads, "If you ask us for drugs, you owe us a nickel. P.S. We don't have any drugs."
As the travelers related their adventures on the road, at least five passersby asked them if they had any drugs to sell. "We're pretty used to it," said Berger, 20, with a shrug.
"Here they come on the stage," Berger said excitedly, as the roar of fans and gentle guitar rhythms streamed out of Foxborough Stadium about 100 yards away. "There's nothing like being at a Dead concert. You have to be there when everyone is dancing and singing and just being together and happy."
Most Dead Heads go to every concert, regardless of whether they have tickets. Hours are spent before the concert trying to get that increasingly elusive seat inside the arena.
But the trio has had trouble getting used to the rowdiness that has greeted them at some East Coast Grateful Dead performances.
"The locals make it real tough for us," said Stockwell, bare-chested and decked out in eclectic Guatemalan hat and skirt. "They come here and stir up a lot. We have to stick together."
Another Dead Head, bearing a striking resemblance to a bearded Willem Dafoe, the actor, stalked up to his fellow travelers with dire news about some hallucinogenic mushrooms. "Some big guys just jumped Sparky and tore out all of his mushrooms and said, 'What if I was a cop?' "
"You guys up for a hoedown?" he asked with growing anger. "We need about 20 guys to do a number here. I'm gonna get bo stick and give a lesson or two here," he said, referring to a staff 5 or 6 feet long used in martial arts.
Berger explained the man's anger over Sparky's plight. "You know, we're on the road all the time, and we have to stick together because we really don't have anyone else to go to. People see that tie-dye and they're going to give you trouble," Berger said.
A spokesman for the Foxborough police said more than 50 arrests were made at the concert.
The three Dead Heads take pride in their "mellow" lifestyle and their drift away from drugs.
"I haven't dropped any acid for about 20 shows now," said Darren, 19, who has seen about 35 Grateful Dead shows since joining the "tour" three years ago.
"Sometimes I like to stay straight and watch everyone else high and watch the energy that goes through the crowd," said Darren, who supports his concert-going habit by selling fruit juice and soda.
"Just because we're Dead fans, they think we can set them up with something," said Stockwell of St. Catherine, Ontario. "You get real tired of it."
Stockwell and the bohemian Dead Heads, the people who have made following the band around the country their life's work, were accompanied last night to Foxborough Stadium by about 63,000 other fans.
The Volkswagen vans and pickup trucks of the music-loving Dead Heads have been joined in parking lots across the country by Toyotas and Chevys and a mainstream audience since the Grateful Dead's 1987 pop hit "Touch of Gray."
In another sign of its mainstreaming, the band has been cutting back on its drug use -- an integral part of the 1960s Grateful Dead experience -- and that trend is reflected among its diehard fans.
On the front window of the 1972 VW van that Stockwell, 19, and his traveling companions, Moses Berger and Darren, who declined to give his last name, have driven from Kansas to Boston in pursuit of their favorite band is a sign that reads, "If you ask us for drugs, you owe us a nickel. P.S. We don't have any drugs."
As the travelers related their adventures on the road, at least five passersby asked them if they had any drugs to sell. "We're pretty used to it," said Berger, 20, with a shrug.
"Here they come on the stage," Berger said excitedly, as the roar of fans and gentle guitar rhythms streamed out of Foxborough Stadium about 100 yards away. "There's nothing like being at a Dead concert. You have to be there when everyone is dancing and singing and just being together and happy."
Most Dead Heads go to every concert, regardless of whether they have tickets. Hours are spent before the concert trying to get that increasingly elusive seat inside the arena.
But the trio has had trouble getting used to the rowdiness that has greeted them at some East Coast Grateful Dead performances.
"The locals make it real tough for us," said Stockwell, bare-chested and decked out in eclectic Guatemalan hat and skirt. "They come here and stir up a lot. We have to stick together."
Another Dead Head, bearing a striking resemblance to a bearded Willem Dafoe, the actor, stalked up to his fellow travelers with dire news about some hallucinogenic mushrooms. "Some big guys just jumped Sparky and tore out all of his mushrooms and said, 'What if I was a cop?' "
"You guys up for a hoedown?" he asked with growing anger. "We need about 20 guys to do a number here. I'm gonna get bo stick and give a lesson or two here," he said, referring to a staff 5 or 6 feet long used in martial arts.
Berger explained the man's anger over Sparky's plight. "You know, we're on the road all the time, and we have to stick together because we really don't have anyone else to go to. People see that tie-dye and they're going to give you trouble," Berger said.
A spokesman for the Foxborough police said more than 50 arrests were made at the concert.
The three Dead Heads take pride in their "mellow" lifestyle and their drift away from drugs.
"I haven't dropped any acid for about 20 shows now," said Darren, 19, who has seen about 35 Grateful Dead shows since joining the "tour" three years ago.
"Sometimes I like to stay straight and watch everyone else high and watch the energy that goes through the crowd," said Darren, who supports his concert-going habit by selling fruit juice and soda.
| LOCY ;07/14 CORCOR;07/16,19:18 CON15A |
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction or distribution is prohibited without permission.
[THIRD Edition]
Boston Globe (pre-1997 Fulltext) - Boston, Mass.
| Author: | Morse, Steve |
| Date: | Jul 16, 1990 |
| Start Page: | 34 |
| Section: | LIVING |
MUSIC REVIEW
GRATEFUL DEAD
with Edie Brickell & New Bohemians
At: Foxboro Stadium, Saturday
FOXBOROUGH - The bumper sticker on one gridlocked car summed it up: "Dead shows -- time out from whomever you are." And so it went at Foxboro Stadium, as a sellout 61,000 fans and thousands fruitlessly seeking tickets, left reality behind in this annual rite of summer.
Some took advantage of the jam-packed, inch-along traffic by selling cases of beer for up to $48, parking spaces for $20, sticks of gum for 50 cents and various other substances -- some herbal, some not -- for inflated prices.
But most still came and partied in friendly, timeless Deadhead fashion, sharing their food, their wares and their highs despite police security double the size of a typical show; and despite an edict against camping. (Some Heads camped anyway, though in a more low-key mode than the permissive, circus-like atmosphere of years past.)
The Grateful Dead responded with a show as grand as Saturday's weather, which was far more pleasant than the sauna bath conditions at their stadium date last year and their withering double bill with Bob Dylan three years ago, when water hoses constantly sprayed the crowd.
In spirit, flow and musicality, the show was also much better than last year's sputtering performance when cover versions of Traffic's "Dear Mr. Fantasy" and the Beatles' "Hey Jude" carried more spark than the Dead's own songs. And it was more pleasing than the Dead/Dylan concert, which had its
moments but promised a bit more than was delivered.
At twilight, after a game set by Edie Brickell & New Bohemans (whose angular, sing-song tunes built a promising mood even if they're better heard in a smaller setting), the Dead kicked off with the easy-loping R&B of "Shakedown Street," originally produced by Little Feat's Lowell George.
There were initial sound problems -- and some zaniness in the crowd as a few ticketless fans leaped fences to get in -- but the Dead steered a smooth course with Dylan's "Walkin' Blues," followed by "Far from Me," a recharged "Candy Man," a burning Bob Weir cover of Dylan's "Stuck Inside of Mobile with These Memphis Blues Again" and a change-of-pace country feel with Jerry Garcia's "Ramble On Rose." They then swung into intermission with Weir's rockified "One More Saturday Night," with Garcia adding powerhouse Chuck Berry licks.
But unlike many bands, the Dead were not content. "I'd give the set a B-minus. It didn't feel right," Weir said backstage at halftime. Drummer Mickey Hart gave the set "less than a B-minus," adding that "maybe we're still coming down from our RFK Stadium gig. We even pulled out 'Dark Star' at that one. The Grateful Dead is a beast you can't control, but the great thing is that you always get a second set."
That later set was magical.
A spiritual "Eyes of the World" led to Weir's twisting "Estimated Prophet," Garcia's elegant "Crazy Fingers," then an electrified romp through "Uncle John's Band" and the obligatory space jam in which drummers Hart and Bill Kreutzmann merged Third World rhythms with an exotic video light show controlled from the audience by Larry Lachman on a Fairlight CVI, a computer video device. The sight of a floating skull (the Dead's logo) amid Indian rice paddies was a special flash, as was Garcia's head sitting atop an outer space photo of the earth. That one drew loud applause from the crowd.
The space jam, which lived up to its name, turned beautifully into pianist Brent Mydland's lullaby to his two young daughters, "I Will Take You Home," the only song from the band's last album. "I don't even remember what was on last album," Hart quipped backstage.) And then the Dead rocked through "Goin' Down the Road," Weir's "Throwing Stones" (a rare political rant), a festive "Turn on Your Lovelight," evoking memories of charter member Pigpen singing it at the Boston Tea Party and getting so carried away he fell off the stage.
The encores were the Rolling Stones' "Last Time" and the a cappella "We Bid You Goodnight," taken from a Folkways album by Garcia's bluegrass buddy, Jody Stecker. No band member was around to rank this later set, but it was a straight A from where this writer sat.
SIDEBAR DRUMMER'S DIFFERENT BEAT
Grateful Dead drummer Mickey Hart is not your average audiophile. His latest project is a series of 12 compact discs on "endangered and vanished musics of the world . . . from Mongolia to the Amazon Basin to the Pacific Rim," he says. The series is in conjunction with the Library of Congress and will come out on Salem's Rykodisc label within the next year.
"I've been poring through 90 hours of Amazon Basin music lately," he says between sets on Saturday. "We're going back to wax recordings and Edison cylinders -- and will regenerate them for the digital domain. A lot of this has never been in the private sector before." (The earliest Library of Congress cylinder is a 1890 recording of music by Passamaquoddy Indians from Maine, which may turn up in the CD series, he adds.)
"There's a lot of rain forest music that's also vanished," he says. "Maybe no one would want to listen to one hour of some of this, but I'll edit different styles onto one CD." And where does he find all the time for this amid band commitments? "I'll sleep when I die," he says with trademark intensity.
1.Jerry Garcia added a change-of-pace country feel to the Grateful Dead concert with "Ramble On Rose."
2. Bob Weir performs with the Grateful Dead at Foxboro Stadium on Saturday.
GLOBE PHOTO / AMY LEVITAN
GRATEFUL DEAD
with Edie Brickell & New Bohemians
At: Foxboro Stadium, Saturday
FOXBOROUGH - The bumper sticker on one gridlocked car summed it up: "Dead shows -- time out from whomever you are." And so it went at Foxboro Stadium, as a sellout 61,000 fans and thousands fruitlessly seeking tickets, left reality behind in this annual rite of summer.
Some took advantage of the jam-packed, inch-along traffic by selling cases of beer for up to $48, parking spaces for $20, sticks of gum for 50 cents and various other substances -- some herbal, some not -- for inflated prices.
But most still came and partied in friendly, timeless Deadhead fashion, sharing their food, their wares and their highs despite police security double the size of a typical show; and despite an edict against camping. (Some Heads camped anyway, though in a more low-key mode than the permissive, circus-like atmosphere of years past.)
The Grateful Dead responded with a show as grand as Saturday's weather, which was far more pleasant than the sauna bath conditions at their stadium date last year and their withering double bill with Bob Dylan three years ago, when water hoses constantly sprayed the crowd.
In spirit, flow and musicality, the show was also much better than last year's sputtering performance when cover versions of Traffic's "Dear Mr. Fantasy" and the Beatles' "Hey Jude" carried more spark than the Dead's own songs. And it was more pleasing than the Dead/Dylan concert, which had its
moments but promised a bit more than was delivered.
At twilight, after a game set by Edie Brickell & New Bohemans (whose angular, sing-song tunes built a promising mood even if they're better heard in a smaller setting), the Dead kicked off with the easy-loping R&B of "Shakedown Street," originally produced by Little Feat's Lowell George.
There were initial sound problems -- and some zaniness in the crowd as a few ticketless fans leaped fences to get in -- but the Dead steered a smooth course with Dylan's "Walkin' Blues," followed by "Far from Me," a recharged "Candy Man," a burning Bob Weir cover of Dylan's "Stuck Inside of Mobile with These Memphis Blues Again" and a change-of-pace country feel with Jerry Garcia's "Ramble On Rose." They then swung into intermission with Weir's rockified "One More Saturday Night," with Garcia adding powerhouse Chuck Berry licks.
But unlike many bands, the Dead were not content. "I'd give the set a B-minus. It didn't feel right," Weir said backstage at halftime. Drummer Mickey Hart gave the set "less than a B-minus," adding that "maybe we're still coming down from our RFK Stadium gig. We even pulled out 'Dark Star' at that one. The Grateful Dead is a beast you can't control, but the great thing is that you always get a second set."
That later set was magical.
A spiritual "Eyes of the World" led to Weir's twisting "Estimated Prophet," Garcia's elegant "Crazy Fingers," then an electrified romp through "Uncle John's Band" and the obligatory space jam in which drummers Hart and Bill Kreutzmann merged Third World rhythms with an exotic video light show controlled from the audience by Larry Lachman on a Fairlight CVI, a computer video device. The sight of a floating skull (the Dead's logo) amid Indian rice paddies was a special flash, as was Garcia's head sitting atop an outer space photo of the earth. That one drew loud applause from the crowd.
The space jam, which lived up to its name, turned beautifully into pianist Brent Mydland's lullaby to his two young daughters, "I Will Take You Home," the only song from the band's last album. "I don't even remember what was on last album," Hart quipped backstage.) And then the Dead rocked through "Goin' Down the Road," Weir's "Throwing Stones" (a rare political rant), a festive "Turn on Your Lovelight," evoking memories of charter member Pigpen singing it at the Boston Tea Party and getting so carried away he fell off the stage.
The encores were the Rolling Stones' "Last Time" and the a cappella "We Bid You Goodnight," taken from a Folkways album by Garcia's bluegrass buddy, Jody Stecker. No band member was around to rank this later set, but it was a straight A from where this writer sat.
SIDEBAR DRUMMER'S DIFFERENT BEAT
Grateful Dead drummer Mickey Hart is not your average audiophile. His latest project is a series of 12 compact discs on "endangered and vanished musics of the world . . . from Mongolia to the Amazon Basin to the Pacific Rim," he says. The series is in conjunction with the Library of Congress and will come out on Salem's Rykodisc label within the next year.
"I've been poring through 90 hours of Amazon Basin music lately," he says between sets on Saturday. "We're going back to wax recordings and Edison cylinders -- and will regenerate them for the digital domain. A lot of this has never been in the private sector before." (The earliest Library of Congress cylinder is a 1890 recording of music by Passamaquoddy Indians from Maine, which may turn up in the CD series, he adds.)
"There's a lot of rain forest music that's also vanished," he says. "Maybe no one would want to listen to one hour of some of this, but I'll edit different styles onto one CD." And where does he find all the time for this amid band commitments? "I'll sleep when I die," he says with trademark intensity.
| MORSE ;07/15 CORCOR;07/17,20:44 DEAD16 |
| Caption: PHOTO |
2. Bob Weir performs with the Grateful Dead at Foxboro Stadium on Saturday.
GLOBE PHOTO / AMY LEVITAN
Illustration
PHOTO
A long, strange trip: eternal Grateful Dead 26 years of mystique comes to Boston
[City Edition]
Boston Globe (pre-1997 Fulltext) - Boston, Mass.
| Author: | Gilbert, Matthew |
| Date: | Sep 20, 1991 |
| Start Page: | 1 |
| Section: | METRO/REGION |
The operative word will be jam.
For six nights over the next week, Boston's arteries and airwaves will be thick with Grateful Dead. On the congested expressway near the Boston Garden, shiny sedans will mingle with rusty Volkswagens. On radio stations, Dead classics like "Sugar Magnolia" will clog playlists.
Within the Garden itself, some 15,000 crowded fans per night will reinvent a psychedelic Eden, while extra thousands mill about North Station seeking a "miracle," a ticket. And onstage, the San Francisco band that inspires a quasi-religious fervor will weave its bright, celestial funk, jamming on the songs they've been reviving for 26 years and counting.
How is it that the most hippie-passe, most gimmick-free, most idealistic rock band ever is, so far, America's No. 1 top-grossing concert act of 1991?
While fresh mainstream players like Whitney Houston and Guns N' Roses have struggled to fill recession-era concert halls, the graying Grateful Dead sold out six Garden dates in three hours last month. Tonight's Dead arrival comes on the heels of nine packed shows at the even larger Madison Square Garden in New York, where a media circus including a visit from Dan Rather encircled the band.
There is, it seems, something about the Dead that is recession-proof. They are even sturdier than Wall Street at this point. Most rock-era listeners will sneer at the band, damning them as tired '60s relics dwelling on a bygone love-Haight romance. But their fans, known as Deadheads, are profoundly, eternally dedicated.
There are Deadheads who follow the band cross-country, catching every show in every city at sometimes $25 per ticket, talking of the musicians as if they're old buddies. Promoters, aware of the Deadheads' tenacity, are increasingly eager to book their guaranteed full-house shows.
And there are fresh crops of Deadheads every year. While curiosity-seekers come and go, new converts arrive and never leave, college-age youths eager to don the tie-dye and grow the ponytail. Now at shows they sway and boogie alongside the elder statesmen, daydreaming of the fiction of Jack Kerouac and Ken Kesey and canonizing free-thinking figures like Neal Cassady and the Merry Pranksters.
What exactly has engaged the unlimited devotion of these fans, young and old? Ironically, it's the opposite of what draws the masses to, say, Madonna. The Dead is a family-like band that has never had financial triumph, or even simple icon status, as its goal. Their mission has always been low-rent and iconoclastic, in league with the working-class characters on one of their most popular early albums, "Workingman's Dead." Musical craftsmanship has always been their priority.
Dead fans revel in the intimacy of the Dead endeavor. For instance, when a Dead show is announced, close to half of the tickets are reserved for Deadheads by the Dead's West Coast organization, then distributed through a mail-order system. Also, at Dead shows there is a section reserved for tapers, whose microphones reach into the air like eager giraffes. The Dead have officially condoned bootlegging, aware of the importance of tapes to their many fanatical archivist fans.
In such small but critical ways, the psychic distance between the Dead and their audience is closed. They are a band of six middle-aged men who refuse to lord it over their fans. Dressed in T-shirts and jeans, they stand unassumingly on the stage, no egos flaring, no limelight, no choreography. Jerry Garcia, pudgy and gentle, emits an undeniable solar force, a dynamism that is far from sexual. But the attention stays on the music.
The music itself is discursive and democratic. There are no backup musicians in the Dead; each band member has the same musical say. The songs, and especially the extended jams within them, are like conversations among equals, with Phil Lesh playing bass to match the two drummers, Mickey Hart and Bill Kreutzmann, or perhaps carrying on a subtle dialogue with Garcia's lead.
Similarly, no single musical style predominates. Grateful Dead music is an uncanny melting pot of bluegrass, folk, blues, jazz, reggae, experimental "acid rock," African rhythms . . .
Deadheads also thrive on a spontaneity found at Dead shows that flies in the face of MTV-era prefabricated touring. The band draws impulsively from a song repertoire that can take them through six or so nights without a repeat. As they reach back to early, trippy tunes like "China Cat Sunflower" and forward to the more poppish strains of "Touch of Grey," they reward the Deadhead who is attending every show with variety. The Dead also grant themselves the room to jam on songs as long as they like -- sometimes as long as 30 minutes.
With all this flexibility, Dead concerts are free to vary radically in quality. If the inspiration doesn't flow -- the band members are tired, say, or the sound system is vexingly muddy -- then it shows. A bad Dead concert can be like a summer cold: You feel listless and burnt. But a good show, fans will say, makes the bad ones worth bearing.
The concert experience is the cement between the Grateful Dead and their fans. Except for moments on albums like "From the Mars Hotel" and "Blues for Allah," the true Dead sound has evaded their studio efforts; they are first and foremost a performing band. And a Dead concert is a Scene, what some might even call a religious rite. As Deadheads descend on a city, in full silk-screen regalia, there is a sense of pilgrimage. The preachers are at the altar, spiritual lift is in the air, magical hymns are in the ears . . .
The Dead have turned out to be quintessentially American shamans. They are children of technology and freedom, of electric guitars and improvisation. They travel across the country, taking their music and business in new and democratic directions. They offer their fans a dose of group spirit and organic music -- for a night for some, a lifetime for others.
For six nights over the next week, Boston's arteries and airwaves will be thick with Grateful Dead. On the congested expressway near the Boston Garden, shiny sedans will mingle with rusty Volkswagens. On radio stations, Dead classics like "Sugar Magnolia" will clog playlists.
Within the Garden itself, some 15,000 crowded fans per night will reinvent a psychedelic Eden, while extra thousands mill about North Station seeking a "miracle," a ticket. And onstage, the San Francisco band that inspires a quasi-religious fervor will weave its bright, celestial funk, jamming on the songs they've been reviving for 26 years and counting.
How is it that the most hippie-passe, most gimmick-free, most idealistic rock band ever is, so far, America's No. 1 top-grossing concert act of 1991?
While fresh mainstream players like Whitney Houston and Guns N' Roses have struggled to fill recession-era concert halls, the graying Grateful Dead sold out six Garden dates in three hours last month. Tonight's Dead arrival comes on the heels of nine packed shows at the even larger Madison Square Garden in New York, where a media circus including a visit from Dan Rather encircled the band.
There is, it seems, something about the Dead that is recession-proof. They are even sturdier than Wall Street at this point. Most rock-era listeners will sneer at the band, damning them as tired '60s relics dwelling on a bygone love-Haight romance. But their fans, known as Deadheads, are profoundly, eternally dedicated.
There are Deadheads who follow the band cross-country, catching every show in every city at sometimes $25 per ticket, talking of the musicians as if they're old buddies. Promoters, aware of the Deadheads' tenacity, are increasingly eager to book their guaranteed full-house shows.
And there are fresh crops of Deadheads every year. While curiosity-seekers come and go, new converts arrive and never leave, college-age youths eager to don the tie-dye and grow the ponytail. Now at shows they sway and boogie alongside the elder statesmen, daydreaming of the fiction of Jack Kerouac and Ken Kesey and canonizing free-thinking figures like Neal Cassady and the Merry Pranksters.
What exactly has engaged the unlimited devotion of these fans, young and old? Ironically, it's the opposite of what draws the masses to, say, Madonna. The Dead is a family-like band that has never had financial triumph, or even simple icon status, as its goal. Their mission has always been low-rent and iconoclastic, in league with the working-class characters on one of their most popular early albums, "Workingman's Dead." Musical craftsmanship has always been their priority.
Dead fans revel in the intimacy of the Dead endeavor. For instance, when a Dead show is announced, close to half of the tickets are reserved for Deadheads by the Dead's West Coast organization, then distributed through a mail-order system. Also, at Dead shows there is a section reserved for tapers, whose microphones reach into the air like eager giraffes. The Dead have officially condoned bootlegging, aware of the importance of tapes to their many fanatical archivist fans.
In such small but critical ways, the psychic distance between the Dead and their audience is closed. They are a band of six middle-aged men who refuse to lord it over their fans. Dressed in T-shirts and jeans, they stand unassumingly on the stage, no egos flaring, no limelight, no choreography. Jerry Garcia, pudgy and gentle, emits an undeniable solar force, a dynamism that is far from sexual. But the attention stays on the music.
The music itself is discursive and democratic. There are no backup musicians in the Dead; each band member has the same musical say. The songs, and especially the extended jams within them, are like conversations among equals, with Phil Lesh playing bass to match the two drummers, Mickey Hart and Bill Kreutzmann, or perhaps carrying on a subtle dialogue with Garcia's lead.
Similarly, no single musical style predominates. Grateful Dead music is an uncanny melting pot of bluegrass, folk, blues, jazz, reggae, experimental "acid rock," African rhythms . . .
Deadheads also thrive on a spontaneity found at Dead shows that flies in the face of MTV-era prefabricated touring. The band draws impulsively from a song repertoire that can take them through six or so nights without a repeat. As they reach back to early, trippy tunes like "China Cat Sunflower" and forward to the more poppish strains of "Touch of Grey," they reward the Deadhead who is attending every show with variety. The Dead also grant themselves the room to jam on songs as long as they like -- sometimes as long as 30 minutes.
With all this flexibility, Dead concerts are free to vary radically in quality. If the inspiration doesn't flow -- the band members are tired, say, or the sound system is vexingly muddy -- then it shows. A bad Dead concert can be like a summer cold: You feel listless and burnt. But a good show, fans will say, makes the bad ones worth bearing.
The concert experience is the cement between the Grateful Dead and their fans. Except for moments on albums like "From the Mars Hotel" and "Blues for Allah," the true Dead sound has evaded their studio efforts; they are first and foremost a performing band. And a Dead concert is a Scene, what some might even call a religious rite. As Deadheads descend on a city, in full silk-screen regalia, there is a sense of pilgrimage. The preachers are at the altar, spiritual lift is in the air, magical hymns are in the ears . . .
The Dead have turned out to be quintessentially American shamans. They are children of technology and freedom, of electric guitars and improvisation. They travel across the country, taking their music and business in new and democratic directions. They offer their fans a dose of group spirit and organic music -- for a night for some, a lifetime for others.
Illustration
PHOTO; CAPTION:1. Grateful Dead leader Jerry Garcia in New York this month. / NEWSDAY PHOTO / DAVID POKRESS 2. The Grateful Dead at one of the nine packed concerts the band gave in New York this month. / NEWSDAY PHOTO / DAVID POKRESS
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction or distribution is prohibited without permission.
[City Edition]
Boston Globe (pre-1997 Fulltext) - Boston, Mass.
| Author: | Morse, Steve |
| Date: | Sep 15, 1991 |
| Start Page: | A.1 |
| Section: | ARTS & FILM |
No Grateful Dead story is complete without telling of the first encounter. A striking first memory came at the Boston Tea Party in the late '60s. Organist Ron McKernan, alias Pigpen, sang his climactic tune of the night, "Lovelight." Wobbly after hours of serious hedonism, he fell off the stage in midsong, splatting on the floor. Helped up by a roadie, he dusted himself off and finished the song as if nothing had happened.
A fitting sign of the band's spirit?
For sure.
That's life in the Grateful Dead -- the stubbornly determined hippie band that's defied the odds of the fickle pop world, plus the deaths of three keyboardists (Pigpen, Keith Godchaux and Brent Mydland) and the diabetic coma of guitarist Jerry Garcia to keep making music based on instinct, not commercial greed. For rock's greatest antitrend band, the song is still the same.
"What keeps it alive is our approach," says guitarist Bob Weir, whose compatriots -- bolstered since their last visit by new keyboardists Bruce Hornsby and Vince Welnick -- play Boston Garden for six sellout shows starting Friday. "We try to walk out each night with our eyes open, as if we were playing together completely anew.
"I like to think we're a bit more articulate than back in the '60s, but there was a certain brutal honesty about what we were doing then," Weir adds from his home near the band's birthplace of San Francisco, where they often jammed in Golden Gate Park back when Haight-Ashbury was a melting pot of experimentation, not a tourist trap.
"We're more sophisticated now, but we're still into the moment," Weir says. "We're still into deeply improvisational stuff where we have no idea where we're going. We do our best to achieve a sort of hallucinogenic realm and just go there and live a little while."
"Still into the moment" is the key, since juggling continuity and continuous reinvention is what the band's about. But the Dead are not a completely free-form group, whatever some Deadheads like to believe. While they rarely repeat songs night to night, there's more structure than meets the eye. For a typical concert of two 90-minute-plus sets, they plan the first song of the first set and the first four of the second. And they always do their ritualized "space jam" in the second, sparked by dual drummers Mickey Hart and Bill Kreutzman.
A few song arrangements have also become formalized, such as "Touch of Grey" (their only Top 10 hit), their many covers of Bob Dylan tunes (they backed Dylan on a live album four years ago) and their country covers, such as "Big River" and Merle Haggard's "Mama Tried."
But improvisation colors most everything else. The one constant through the years, despite personnel changes, is that the Dead can resemble a genre-splitting jazz troupe more than a rock band. Maybe that's because they never fit any pop pigeonhole, since they've ransacked the whole closet of musical influences, from Chuck Berry to Bill Monroe and back again. Certainly that image is enhanced by their latest chemistry with the jazz-trained Hornsby, who studied at Boston's Berklee College of Music; and former Tubes keyboardist Welnick, who's been known to play John Coltrane tunes during sound checks.
"There are times when I get goosebumps with this band," says Hornsby, the well-known solo star who has an open invitation to sit in with the Dead and expects to make 60 of their 80 shows this year, including all the Boston dates. As a teen-ager, Hornsby joined his brother in a Dead cover band called Bobby Hightest & the Octane Kids in his hometown of Williamsburg, Va. He first met the Dead in 1986, after they heard he was doing an occasional Dead cover with his Grammy-winning band, the Range.
"There really is a magic some nights," Hornbsy adds from a tour stop in Cleveland. "One thing the Dead do, which not many bands dare do, is they're willing to wing stuff and play songs with minimal rehearsal. The Dead are a group willing to screw up to get to the great stuff -- and I admire that. There's a certain recklessness. They don't play it safe in that sense. And there's a time when it all comes together. It can be a certain thing the drummers do" with bassist Phil Lesh. "It has its own build; and the ebb and flow is unique. It's a collective thing that just happens. I can't explain it. And that's one good thing about it. It hasn't been whittled down to a formula."
"There's an immeasurable amount of freedom," adds Welnick, who studied at the San Francisco Conservatory and played with the Tubes (anyone remember their hit "White Punks on Dope"?) and Todd Rundgren before auditioning for the band last year, after Mydland's death.
"The Dead are like a cross between a Dixieland band and a progressive jazz band, blues band, country band and folk band," says Welnick. "Kind of folkie-country-bluesy-jazzy-progressive-avant-garde."
That ought to do for definitions. Whatever you call it, don't look for it on MTV, or on any of the image-drenched, computer-programed package tours that have become the rage.
"These days, there's too much importance placed on trends," says Weir. "And music to me is not a matter of fashion or trend. It's a matter of feeling. All too often these days, if you're concentrating on whether something is appropriate for the times or the current trend, you're forgetting about the feeling you're putting into it and what it is you're doing. And the music comes out sounding like that. It may be polished, it may be glamorous, but it's lacking in depth."
The Dead are still led by the R&B-based Weir, whose chunky chords marry a garage-rock feel with a Stax/Volt session; and Garcia, the congenially inscrutable singer/guitarist who grounds the band in country, blues and bluegrass when he's not traversing psychedelic realms. The two trade songs during a Dead concert and, through subtle nods and gestures, urge other members to solo.
"Garcia and I tend to go back and forth and play off of each other a lot," says Hornsby, who moves from piano to accordion on stage. "That's been happening more and more lately. He likes me to get in his face sometimes and enter the fray." Adds Hornsby: "I'm not up there to hang out. I'm up there to push it and some nights to jack up the energy level."
"The nod comes at any time," says Welnick, who grew up in Phoenix and attended Dead shows there. "You never know. It doesn't happen at the same time in every song, or necessarily ever in the same song again. So you don't have preconceived notions of what to play and you just do it for better or worse. Maybe they'll be laying back, so you might play a big synth solo; or maybe play something in half-time, so it doesn't sound so busy."
Sounding busy has reportedly been a problem sometimes for the 1991 Dead. With two drummers, two guitarists and, on many nights two keyboardists, the potential is there for mayhem. "A lot of my input has been to get people to play a little less," says Hornsby. "There's so many people on stage now. It's easy to get up there, get excited and overplay. I'm really aware of it."
"Knowing when not to play is the biggest challenge. . . . And you've got to be careful you don't step on the big fellas," says Welnick, meaning Garcia and Weir.
After all, the big fellas and their rhythm sections have been at this a long time; and it's hard to argue with the Dead's unique brand of success. The group has been the No. 1 concert draw of the last several years in terms of average grosses per show. They're playing Boston Garden for an unprecedented six nights, following nine nights at New York's Madison Square Garden. And the recent tribute album "Deadicated," featuring Dead covers by everyone from Los Lobos and the Indigo Girls to Elvis Costello and Jane's Addiction, only confirms the group's stature among their peers.
"They're an absolute phenomenon -- and it's not based on any obvious thing," says a recently chatty Robbie Robertson, formerly of the Band, who played the legendary 1973 Watkins Glen, N.Y., show with the Dead and Allman Brothers in front of 600,000 people. "They don't have the greatest vocalists or the greatest songs or the greatest musicians. There's nothing you can really pinpoint, except they give off a kind of love that's unique in music."
That uniqueness is about to invade Boston Garden, which is a long, long way from Golden Gate Park. Or is it?
Stay tuned.
A fitting sign of the band's spirit?
For sure.
That's life in the Grateful Dead -- the stubbornly determined hippie band that's defied the odds of the fickle pop world, plus the deaths of three keyboardists (Pigpen, Keith Godchaux and Brent Mydland) and the diabetic coma of guitarist Jerry Garcia to keep making music based on instinct, not commercial greed. For rock's greatest antitrend band, the song is still the same.
"What keeps it alive is our approach," says guitarist Bob Weir, whose compatriots -- bolstered since their last visit by new keyboardists Bruce Hornsby and Vince Welnick -- play Boston Garden for six sellout shows starting Friday. "We try to walk out each night with our eyes open, as if we were playing together completely anew.
"I like to think we're a bit more articulate than back in the '60s, but there was a certain brutal honesty about what we were doing then," Weir adds from his home near the band's birthplace of San Francisco, where they often jammed in Golden Gate Park back when Haight-Ashbury was a melting pot of experimentation, not a tourist trap.
"We're more sophisticated now, but we're still into the moment," Weir says. "We're still into deeply improvisational stuff where we have no idea where we're going. We do our best to achieve a sort of hallucinogenic realm and just go there and live a little while."
"Still into the moment" is the key, since juggling continuity and continuous reinvention is what the band's about. But the Dead are not a completely free-form group, whatever some Deadheads like to believe. While they rarely repeat songs night to night, there's more structure than meets the eye. For a typical concert of two 90-minute-plus sets, they plan the first song of the first set and the first four of the second. And they always do their ritualized "space jam" in the second, sparked by dual drummers Mickey Hart and Bill Kreutzman.
A few song arrangements have also become formalized, such as "Touch of Grey" (their only Top 10 hit), their many covers of Bob Dylan tunes (they backed Dylan on a live album four years ago) and their country covers, such as "Big River" and Merle Haggard's "Mama Tried."
But improvisation colors most everything else. The one constant through the years, despite personnel changes, is that the Dead can resemble a genre-splitting jazz troupe more than a rock band. Maybe that's because they never fit any pop pigeonhole, since they've ransacked the whole closet of musical influences, from Chuck Berry to Bill Monroe and back again. Certainly that image is enhanced by their latest chemistry with the jazz-trained Hornsby, who studied at Boston's Berklee College of Music; and former Tubes keyboardist Welnick, who's been known to play John Coltrane tunes during sound checks.
"There are times when I get goosebumps with this band," says Hornsby, the well-known solo star who has an open invitation to sit in with the Dead and expects to make 60 of their 80 shows this year, including all the Boston dates. As a teen-ager, Hornsby joined his brother in a Dead cover band called Bobby Hightest & the Octane Kids in his hometown of Williamsburg, Va. He first met the Dead in 1986, after they heard he was doing an occasional Dead cover with his Grammy-winning band, the Range.
"There really is a magic some nights," Hornbsy adds from a tour stop in Cleveland. "One thing the Dead do, which not many bands dare do, is they're willing to wing stuff and play songs with minimal rehearsal. The Dead are a group willing to screw up to get to the great stuff -- and I admire that. There's a certain recklessness. They don't play it safe in that sense. And there's a time when it all comes together. It can be a certain thing the drummers do" with bassist Phil Lesh. "It has its own build; and the ebb and flow is unique. It's a collective thing that just happens. I can't explain it. And that's one good thing about it. It hasn't been whittled down to a formula."
"There's an immeasurable amount of freedom," adds Welnick, who studied at the San Francisco Conservatory and played with the Tubes (anyone remember their hit "White Punks on Dope"?) and Todd Rundgren before auditioning for the band last year, after Mydland's death.
"The Dead are like a cross between a Dixieland band and a progressive jazz band, blues band, country band and folk band," says Welnick. "Kind of folkie-country-bluesy-jazzy-progressive-avant-garde."
That ought to do for definitions. Whatever you call it, don't look for it on MTV, or on any of the image-drenched, computer-programed package tours that have become the rage.
"These days, there's too much importance placed on trends," says Weir. "And music to me is not a matter of fashion or trend. It's a matter of feeling. All too often these days, if you're concentrating on whether something is appropriate for the times or the current trend, you're forgetting about the feeling you're putting into it and what it is you're doing. And the music comes out sounding like that. It may be polished, it may be glamorous, but it's lacking in depth."
The Dead are still led by the R&B-based Weir, whose chunky chords marry a garage-rock feel with a Stax/Volt session; and Garcia, the congenially inscrutable singer/guitarist who grounds the band in country, blues and bluegrass when he's not traversing psychedelic realms. The two trade songs during a Dead concert and, through subtle nods and gestures, urge other members to solo.
"Garcia and I tend to go back and forth and play off of each other a lot," says Hornsby, who moves from piano to accordion on stage. "That's been happening more and more lately. He likes me to get in his face sometimes and enter the fray." Adds Hornsby: "I'm not up there to hang out. I'm up there to push it and some nights to jack up the energy level."
"The nod comes at any time," says Welnick, who grew up in Phoenix and attended Dead shows there. "You never know. It doesn't happen at the same time in every song, or necessarily ever in the same song again. So you don't have preconceived notions of what to play and you just do it for better or worse. Maybe they'll be laying back, so you might play a big synth solo; or maybe play something in half-time, so it doesn't sound so busy."
Sounding busy has reportedly been a problem sometimes for the 1991 Dead. With two drummers, two guitarists and, on many nights two keyboardists, the potential is there for mayhem. "A lot of my input has been to get people to play a little less," says Hornsby. "There's so many people on stage now. It's easy to get up there, get excited and overplay. I'm really aware of it."
"Knowing when not to play is the biggest challenge. . . . And you've got to be careful you don't step on the big fellas," says Welnick, meaning Garcia and Weir.
After all, the big fellas and their rhythm sections have been at this a long time; and it's hard to argue with the Dead's unique brand of success. The group has been the No. 1 concert draw of the last several years in terms of average grosses per show. They're playing Boston Garden for an unprecedented six nights, following nine nights at New York's Madison Square Garden. And the recent tribute album "Deadicated," featuring Dead covers by everyone from Los Lobos and the Indigo Girls to Elvis Costello and Jane's Addiction, only confirms the group's stature among their peers.
"They're an absolute phenomenon -- and it's not based on any obvious thing," says a recently chatty Robbie Robertson, formerly of the Band, who played the legendary 1973 Watkins Glen, N.Y., show with the Dead and Allman Brothers in front of 600,000 people. "They don't have the greatest vocalists or the greatest songs or the greatest musicians. There's nothing you can really pinpoint, except they give off a kind of love that's unique in music."
That uniqueness is about to invade Boston Garden, which is a long, long way from Golden Gate Park. Or is it?
Stay tuned.
Illustration
PHOTO; CAPTION:Garcia (left) with newcomers Bruce Hornsby and Vince Welnick.
DAY OF THE DEAD While Garcia & Co. rock the Garden, the lyricist gratefully works at home
[City Edition]
Boston Globe (pre-1997 Fulltext) - Boston, Mass.
| Author: | Gilbert, Matthew |
| Date: | Sep 20, 1991 |
| Start Page: | 43 |
| Section: | ARTS & FILM |
THE MUSIC SECTION
"A box of rain will ease the pain . . ."
Tonight, while cowboy-adventurers Jerry Garcia, Bob Weir and Phil Lesh tread the frontier of rock improvisation at the Boston Garden, one of the most vocal members of the Grateful Dead will be at home sharpening pencils, pruning roses, or possibly playing cards.
He is the official lyricist of the "band beyond description," painter of the images that are essential to the Dead's peculiarly psychedelic but earthbound gestalt. While the band also sings Bob Dylan and Chuck Berry classics, originals by John Barlow, as well as American traditional pieces like "I Know You Rider," the lyrics written by Robert Hunter inevitably form the definitive script of a Dead show.
Some of Hunter's lines, which Viking has collected in a book called "Box of Rain," have slipped permanently into the mass-cultural memory, most notably "What a long strange trip it's been." Others are found among nouveau-American folk classics -- "A friend of the Devil is a friend of mine," for instance, or "Come hear Uncle John's Band by the riverside." Still others, Hunter's most far-flung lines, have given voice to the logic/illogic of LSD: "Dark star crashes / pouring its light / into ashes."
On the phone from his home 25 minutes outside of San Francisco, drawing on light cigarettes through an aqua-filter ("Hot air in, hot air out," he says), Hunter describes the art of songwriting as "freedom within a box. . . . You're in a certain box and you have to make the best you can out of that." In other words, like the Dead's starlit jams, Hunter's lyrics take giant leaps but must fit within a tight rhythmical rhyming structure.
Early in his connection with the Dead, which began in the late '60s, Hunter was a traveling band member. "We used to compose on the road, so there was a purpose for me being there. It was a way to corner people to get songs written." But over the years, he says, the road has become so all-encompassing that "it's best to get work done at home." Either way, he's considered full-fledged Dead, and unlike most nonperforming lyricists, he's listed in the band lineup on album jackets.
Hunter says that working with Garcia and the Dead is a predictably unpredictable process. "Any way that you can think of coming up with a song we've done it. Sometimes a jam during rehearsal has turned into some lyrics, where the whole band and myself have worked together. That's a very fine way. Everybody really feels a sort of common ownership of a song."
"Dark Star," the eternal Dead classic that has yielded some of the most cosmic of jams, was born by such committee, Hunter says. "I had just joined the band. We were in Rio Nido down on the Russian River and I was in my cabin, and I heard this far-out music coming from the hall where they were going to be playing, and I grabbed my pencil and ran over there and started writing."
Other times, Hunter brings his words to Garcia, who then sets them to music. While Hunter composes with guitar in hand, he doesn't play his music for Garcia. "The most effective songs," he says, "come up when Jerry has worked out the changes, and gives me something which is not what I would think of. I used to give him tapes with my version of how something went -- and there came a point when he said, `You know, I'd just as soon not have this stuff. Because it takes a while to get your changes out of my head, man.' " Hunter laughs.
Other times, Garcia or another band member will approach Hunter with a set of chord changes and scat-like phrasing. Hunter will then color in the lyrics. This was the case recently with "So Many Roads," a new, as-yet-unplayed song with Garcia. It also happened with "Box of Rain," which he wrote for a melody by bassist Phil Lesh more than 20 years ago. "I had scat stuff to work with. So that I heard Phil singing, just minus the words. I knew exactly what it would sound like then." The song, highly melodic and plaintive, was written for Lesh's father, who was dying of cancer.
Hunter feels that the song "Box of Rain" has held up since its creation. "You can listen to it many times over the years and it will go ahead and fluctuate with you; it'll change with you. As opposed to say, `Itsy Bitsy Teeny Weeny Yellow Polka Dot Bikini,' which will probably mean the same thing 20 or 30 years later." Other songs Hunter thinks have withstood the years are "Ripple" and "Stella Blue." "When I'm asked a question about specific songs," he says, "I mostly go blank."
As a songwriting team, Hunter and Garcia have gained a reputation not unlike durable, influential duos such as Mick Jagger-Keith Richards and Elton John-Bernie Taupin. Earlier this year, a tribute album called "Deadicated" featured mainstream artists like Elvis Costello, Suzanne Vega and Midnight Oil performing a number of Hunter-Garcia songs. "I was just knocked out," Hunter says about the best-selling release. "It was like somebody sent me chocolates, roses and a Jaguar all at once. . . . It was just such a pleasure to hear someone else do the material, and to feel that the material did have an independent existence. It validated it."
When the Dead tour -- which is nearly always -- they play the older songs as frequently as the newer ones. A glance at a recent song list will show titles reaching back to the late '60s, such as "China Cat Sunflower," which Hunter mailed to the Dead before he'd even joined up. For Hunter, this causes some creative frustration. "The fire that was, well fine. But it doesn't keep you warm in the present. Not a writer, anyway. It does the band because they're out playing that stuff.
"There's kind of an idea flying around that the band wants new material, and maybe were going to take some time off and get that done this year. And if that happens -- ooh, to have that excitement again. It's something dynamic for me to do. I'm sort of hanging here on the vine turning into a raisin."
Meanwhile, Hunter has "drifted off into other directions," which includes writing songs for a band called Zero, as well as a pair of songs for Bob Dylan. Hunter has also just released a Rykodisc CD called "Box of Rain," a live solo outing on which the songwriter sings a group of his Dead songs (he's toured alone and with bands like Comfort since the late '70s). He has also just published a book of poetry with Viking called "Night Cadre" and finished a long, commissioned poem called "Idiot's Delight" for Hanumen Press, which publishes work by writers like Jack Kerouac and John Ashbery. But his poetic endeavors, he says, are "rather minor compared to the Grateful Dead."
"Night Cadre," which he wrote in a three-year period, "was a way of working out a hard and difficult time. I was trying to put pieces of my life back together and getting into some serious stuff, and that's done. I don't intend to be the world's darkest poet. I've got another book of poetry completed since, and its considerably brighter."
Hunter is perhaps the most well-read of rock lyricists, and his songs are deeply allusive. All over his lyrics are references to American and English history, Chinese proverbs and Biblical events. "Roll away the dew," for instance, the exquisitely enigmatic line from "Franklin's Tower," has its roots in rolling away the stone from Jesus' grave.
"Whatever comes in goes through my own little matrix, and if it impresses me sufficiently, it will probably enter my work somewhere. . . . You digest things and they become your own. And my readers will digest what I do, and it will come out in their work. It's nice. This is the unbroken chain."
But even with his literary links, Hunter remains a unique talent, a sculptor whose finely sanded lines resemble nothing else on the rock 'n' roll landscape. "I can touch that dreamspace," he says. "The stuff you dream is kind of close to consciousness for me, which is a bit of a talent and in normal life it's a bit of a disability. I've got a little tunnel into my subconscious . . . There's a space you get into. I know when I'm there. And I know that I couldn't manufacture it."
"A box of rain will ease the pain . . ."
Tonight, while cowboy-adventurers Jerry Garcia, Bob Weir and Phil Lesh tread the frontier of rock improvisation at the Boston Garden, one of the most vocal members of the Grateful Dead will be at home sharpening pencils, pruning roses, or possibly playing cards.
He is the official lyricist of the "band beyond description," painter of the images that are essential to the Dead's peculiarly psychedelic but earthbound gestalt. While the band also sings Bob Dylan and Chuck Berry classics, originals by John Barlow, as well as American traditional pieces like "I Know You Rider," the lyrics written by Robert Hunter inevitably form the definitive script of a Dead show.
Some of Hunter's lines, which Viking has collected in a book called "Box of Rain," have slipped permanently into the mass-cultural memory, most notably "What a long strange trip it's been." Others are found among nouveau-American folk classics -- "A friend of the Devil is a friend of mine," for instance, or "Come hear Uncle John's Band by the riverside." Still others, Hunter's most far-flung lines, have given voice to the logic/illogic of LSD: "Dark star crashes / pouring its light / into ashes."
On the phone from his home 25 minutes outside of San Francisco, drawing on light cigarettes through an aqua-filter ("Hot air in, hot air out," he says), Hunter describes the art of songwriting as "freedom within a box. . . . You're in a certain box and you have to make the best you can out of that." In other words, like the Dead's starlit jams, Hunter's lyrics take giant leaps but must fit within a tight rhythmical rhyming structure.
Early in his connection with the Dead, which began in the late '60s, Hunter was a traveling band member. "We used to compose on the road, so there was a purpose for me being there. It was a way to corner people to get songs written." But over the years, he says, the road has become so all-encompassing that "it's best to get work done at home." Either way, he's considered full-fledged Dead, and unlike most nonperforming lyricists, he's listed in the band lineup on album jackets.
Hunter says that working with Garcia and the Dead is a predictably unpredictable process. "Any way that you can think of coming up with a song we've done it. Sometimes a jam during rehearsal has turned into some lyrics, where the whole band and myself have worked together. That's a very fine way. Everybody really feels a sort of common ownership of a song."
"Dark Star," the eternal Dead classic that has yielded some of the most cosmic of jams, was born by such committee, Hunter says. "I had just joined the band. We were in Rio Nido down on the Russian River and I was in my cabin, and I heard this far-out music coming from the hall where they were going to be playing, and I grabbed my pencil and ran over there and started writing."
Other times, Hunter brings his words to Garcia, who then sets them to music. While Hunter composes with guitar in hand, he doesn't play his music for Garcia. "The most effective songs," he says, "come up when Jerry has worked out the changes, and gives me something which is not what I would think of. I used to give him tapes with my version of how something went -- and there came a point when he said, `You know, I'd just as soon not have this stuff. Because it takes a while to get your changes out of my head, man.' " Hunter laughs.
Other times, Garcia or another band member will approach Hunter with a set of chord changes and scat-like phrasing. Hunter will then color in the lyrics. This was the case recently with "So Many Roads," a new, as-yet-unplayed song with Garcia. It also happened with "Box of Rain," which he wrote for a melody by bassist Phil Lesh more than 20 years ago. "I had scat stuff to work with. So that I heard Phil singing, just minus the words. I knew exactly what it would sound like then." The song, highly melodic and plaintive, was written for Lesh's father, who was dying of cancer.
Hunter feels that the song "Box of Rain" has held up since its creation. "You can listen to it many times over the years and it will go ahead and fluctuate with you; it'll change with you. As opposed to say, `Itsy Bitsy Teeny Weeny Yellow Polka Dot Bikini,' which will probably mean the same thing 20 or 30 years later." Other songs Hunter thinks have withstood the years are "Ripple" and "Stella Blue." "When I'm asked a question about specific songs," he says, "I mostly go blank."
As a songwriting team, Hunter and Garcia have gained a reputation not unlike durable, influential duos such as Mick Jagger-Keith Richards and Elton John-Bernie Taupin. Earlier this year, a tribute album called "Deadicated" featured mainstream artists like Elvis Costello, Suzanne Vega and Midnight Oil performing a number of Hunter-Garcia songs. "I was just knocked out," Hunter says about the best-selling release. "It was like somebody sent me chocolates, roses and a Jaguar all at once. . . . It was just such a pleasure to hear someone else do the material, and to feel that the material did have an independent existence. It validated it."
When the Dead tour -- which is nearly always -- they play the older songs as frequently as the newer ones. A glance at a recent song list will show titles reaching back to the late '60s, such as "China Cat Sunflower," which Hunter mailed to the Dead before he'd even joined up. For Hunter, this causes some creative frustration. "The fire that was, well fine. But it doesn't keep you warm in the present. Not a writer, anyway. It does the band because they're out playing that stuff.
"There's kind of an idea flying around that the band wants new material, and maybe were going to take some time off and get that done this year. And if that happens -- ooh, to have that excitement again. It's something dynamic for me to do. I'm sort of hanging here on the vine turning into a raisin."
Meanwhile, Hunter has "drifted off into other directions," which includes writing songs for a band called Zero, as well as a pair of songs for Bob Dylan. Hunter has also just released a Rykodisc CD called "Box of Rain," a live solo outing on which the songwriter sings a group of his Dead songs (he's toured alone and with bands like Comfort since the late '70s). He has also just published a book of poetry with Viking called "Night Cadre" and finished a long, commissioned poem called "Idiot's Delight" for Hanumen Press, which publishes work by writers like Jack Kerouac and John Ashbery. But his poetic endeavors, he says, are "rather minor compared to the Grateful Dead."
"Night Cadre," which he wrote in a three-year period, "was a way of working out a hard and difficult time. I was trying to put pieces of my life back together and getting into some serious stuff, and that's done. I don't intend to be the world's darkest poet. I've got another book of poetry completed since, and its considerably brighter."
Hunter is perhaps the most well-read of rock lyricists, and his songs are deeply allusive. All over his lyrics are references to American and English history, Chinese proverbs and Biblical events. "Roll away the dew," for instance, the exquisitely enigmatic line from "Franklin's Tower," has its roots in rolling away the stone from Jesus' grave.
"Whatever comes in goes through my own little matrix, and if it impresses me sufficiently, it will probably enter my work somewhere. . . . You digest things and they become your own. And my readers will digest what I do, and it will come out in their work. It's nice. This is the unbroken chain."
But even with his literary links, Hunter remains a unique talent, a sculptor whose finely sanded lines resemble nothing else on the rock 'n' roll landscape. "I can touch that dreamspace," he says. "The stuff you dream is kind of close to consciousness for me, which is a bit of a talent and in normal life it's a bit of a disability. I've got a little tunnel into my subconscious . . . There's a space you get into. I know when I'm there. And I know that I couldn't manufacture it."
Illustration
PHOTO; CAPTION:Jerry Garcia, left, and Bob Weir, below, are highly visible members of the band. Robert Hunter, far left, performs his magic far away from the madding crowd. / PHOT
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