Binge-ing the Dead

Remembering the Grateful Dead show I attended with Mike Woodhull (RIP) at the Dallas Convention Center back in '78 (which Jeff Liles has hilariously written about elsewhere). The show is reputed to have been so egregiously shitty that Heads don't even trade tapes of it -- borne out by the setlist, which includes both "Estimated Prophet" (my GD equivalent of "Eminence Front," the Who song I loathe more than any other) and Donna Godchaux's vocal feature "From the Heart of Me"(she and her pianist husband Keith were about to get the wheels put under them). The second set ended abruptly with the exploratory "Wharf Rat," rather than the uplifting conclusion that usually followed the Dead's most "outside" excursions. (I find it charming that the Dead's sets mirrored the flow of an LSD experience; in the case of Dallas '78, the odd ending may or may not have been due to 16-year-old Liles, on his maiden acid voyage, bumming Bob Weir out). Woodhull surprised me by sleeping through more than half of the show. When I asked him about it later, he told me, "the secret to being a Deadhead is knowing when to wake up."

Since the pandemic took away the option of playing with people (I see folks doing it all the time, but with the Delta variant, I've also seen more people I know get Covid than I saw all last year, all but one of them fully vaccinated, and as a heart failure patient, I'm not taking any chances), I've become particularly attuned to the "group mind" in improvisation, and aside from Can, the Dead (on vehicles like "Dark Star," "The Other One," "China > Rider," "Playing in the Band," and "Scarlet > Fire") are probably the best place in rock to hear it.

I recently laid hands on a copy of the double Dead DVD The Closing of Winterland, December 31, 1978. I had my interest piqued when I realized that this show was just nine days after the one Woodhull and I witnessed and I wanted to see if the Dead of that era did any better on home turf.  Originally simulcast (remember those?) on KQED-TV (who gave me my first look at San Francisco rock via a couple of documentaries featuring Jefferson Airplane, Quicksilver Messenger Service, and Santana, as well as the Dead, that aired when I was 13-14) and KSAN-FM, the Winterland show isn't the greatest video representation of the Dead. That distinction belongs to Sunshine Daydream, the filmed document of an August 1972 performance in Veneta, Oregon, which in its DVD form concentrates for the most part on songs with transcendent jamming. One of the challenges to collecting the Dead, besides the expense, even used, of the multi-disc "Dick's Picks" series of complete shows is the high ratio of chaff to wheat in the setlists. The Grateful Dead Movie, shot on film, not videotape, at Winterland in 1974, is inferior to '78 if only because of the inclusion of the opening cutesy animation and much dispensable audience business. (The setlist in the original theatrical release was pedestrian, but some of the good stuff is now available in the DVD special features.) 

And Winterland '78 isn't back-to-front gems, either. At times while watching I was reminded of the boredom I felt during parts of their Dallas set. The first two sets both start running out of gas around the halfway point. The highlight of Set One, to these feedback-scorched ears, is a version of "Scarlet > Fire" that reminds me why that sequence was my favorite part of the Dallas show I saw. After that, though, comes a glacially-paced version of "Friend of the Devil" from which the energy level never recovers. (To hear the opposite of this, check out the peppy 1972 Frankfurt set released as Hundred Year Hall, for which I am indebted to Jerry Garcia biographer Blair Jackson's useful discography.) The first four songs in Set Two aren't the Dead's most distinguished material -- while I once rated Pigpen their weakest link, I now own up to being a partisan of the period when he was on board, in both the experimental psychedelic phase and the one where they morphed into a country-rock bar band that even Lester Bangs admitted to liking -- but they provide ample opportunity to scope out Jerry G.'s technique, and Weir's authority as a front man.

Garcia's no slouch, but he eschews all the attention-getting devices favored by the guys I grew up wanting to emulate (Hendrix, Beck, Winter, Zappa). No wide vibrato here, no saturated tone, no fast hammer-ons/pull-offs. Jerry picks every note (except for the occasional descending chromatic pull-off), can bend with any finger (unlike most rockers of his time, who were position dependent to allow bending with the ring finger), likes to phrase in triplets and use the mixolydian mode (also beloved by Zappa during the time when I could still sort of understand what he was doing, at least guitar-wise). Weir, who became the Dead's rockin' rabble rouser as well as its singing cowboy with Pigpen's departure, still tends to over-project his voice a little (you can see him struggle toward the end of the third set). And he plays more guitar than I gave him credit for -- lines and slide as well as chords, which he plays the way McCoy Tyner did for Trane, making the piano a little redundant, except for textural relief. 

After a nice "Playing in the Band," the second set runs aground on the shoals of a drum interval so tedious that even the presence of a couple of Merry Pranksters and the harmonica player from War can't salvage it. A lugubrious "Not Fade Away" follows. Fortunately, the third set's the charm, opening with abbreviated runs at "Dark Star" and "The Other One" (probably to mollify the picketing fan who was protesting the former's absence from the set for over 1500 days!), followed by "Wharf Rat" (apparently a favorite jamming vehicle that year), "St. Stephen" (also unplayed for more than a minute), and a flag-waving "Good Lovin'" on which Weir exhorted the crowd to "Turn on your light," recalling another beloved set closer from the Pigpen era. I see that John Cippolina from Quicksilver (aka "the good-looking Grateful Dead") was onstage for the encores. I didn't notice; no matter.

I'll admit to being pretty satiated on the Dead for now. People whose opinions I respect swear by Blues for Allah, which I remember as a sort of Doobie Brothers-Steely Dan take on the Dead. But my memory is unreliable. Perhaps next time I get a hankering to have this itch scratched, I'll go there.