Skip to main content

The Longest of the Grateful Dead’s Epic Long Jams: “Dark Star” (1972), “The Other One” (1972) and “Playing in The Band” (1974)

As a dedicated fan of the long jam—I always felt like I should try to dig the Grateful Dead. I didn't not dig the Grateful Dead. But I suffered from underexposure to their music, if not to their reputation as endless noodlers. By the time I gave the Dead a chance my head was full of ideas of what a long jam should be, from the likes of Kraftwerk, Coltrane, Neil Young, Velvet Underground, Sonic Youth, Pink Floyd, Sun Ra...

Herein lies a difference. Some jams are structured, controlled, almost orchestral, building into movements or droning on into a haze of noise and sonic wash. Then there’s the Dead, the world’s finest purveyors of meandering endless noodling. I don’t mean that to sound derogatory. One could say the same thing about many jazz ensembles—like Sun Ra’s Arkestra or Miles Davis’ Bitches Brew period—without taking away from the brilliant abstraction, the keen conversational interplay, the dynamic range and moments of anticipation, the phenomenal solos....

Maybe there's a lot more going on than noodling, after all, even if the “endless” part can seem accurate when it comes to the Dead, a point on which I’ve seen Deadheads agree. Of what might be the band’s longest jam—a nearly 47-minute live rendition of “Playing in The Band” from 1974 (top)—one Reddit fan, MrCompletely, writes, "Playin' is significantly longer than it is good.” Form your own opinion. Your attention span might make up your mind for you.

A far more common topic  in forums like Reddit’s r/gratefuldead are conversations about not only which live song ranks as the longest jam, but how blissful and magical said jam was and whether the Deadhead saw the jam or forever regrets missing the jam. One Dead fan, Pyratefish, cites “The Other One” from 9-17-72 as “a beast” to beat them all. “Forty minute ride in to the far reaches of the universe that culminates in a battle for your very soul.” Top that.

Maybe we can, with another candidate for longest jam, a performance of “Dark Star” in Rotterdam in 1972. Mention of this jam brought up other contenders, most of them versions of “Dark Star” or “Dark Star” medleys. One fan, lastLeafFallen, even suggests a “jazzy, experimental, and mind-bending” version of the song from 1990, but they don’t get any takers on that one, even though “Branford Marsalis sits in on sax making this jam especially special!”

The Grateful Dead were genuine jazzheads and meshed well with musicians like Marsalis and Miles Davis. But they didn’t play jazz themselves so much as they used loose jazz figures and ideas to make experimental rock. When done well, it is done exceptionally well, as in the inevitably-overstuffed, 48-minute-long Rotterdam “Dark Star” further up. We can hear strains of future post-rock bands like Tortoise and even late Radiohead, hints of music that hadn’t arrived yet on the planet. And other long passages that sound like something only the Grateful Dead could play.

Just as their early fusion of country, rock, and blues had produced something unlike any of them, their fusion of jazz and rock could synthesize new forms. Or it could fall apart, or both several times over in the same song or at the same time. Hear the full 1974 concert at the University of Seattle at the site Live for Live Music. The epic, 47-minute "Playing in The Band" is track 17. Suggest other candidates for longest Grateful Dead jam in the comments.

Related Content:

How the Grateful Dead’s “Wall of Sound”–a Monster, 600-Speaker Sound System–Changed Rock Concerts & Live Music Forever

Take a Long, Strange Trip and Stream a 346-Hour Chronological Playlist of Live Grateful Dead Performances (1966-1995)

Stream 36 Recordings of Legendary Grateful Dead Concerts Free Online (aka Dick’s Picks)

Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness

The Longest of the Grateful Dead’s Epic Long Jams: “Dark Star” (1972), “The Other One” (1972) and “Playing in The Band” (1974) is a post from: Open Culture. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Google Plus, or get our Daily Email. And don't miss our big collections of Free Online Courses, Free Online Movies, Free eBooks, Free Audio Books, Free Foreign Language Lessons, and MOOCs.



from Open Culture http://bit.ly/2WuVujd
via Ilumina

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

What Voltaire Meant When He Said That “We Must Cultivate Our Garden”: An Animated Introduction

“Voltaire’s goal in writing [his 1759 satire Candide ] was to destroy the optimism of his times,” says Alain de Botton in the School of Life video above, “an optimism that centered around science, love, technical progress, and a faith in reason.” These beliefs were folly, Voltaire thought: the transfer of faith from a providential God to a perfect, clockwork universe. Candide satirizes this happy rationalism in Doctor Pangloss, whose belief that ours is the best of possible worlds comes directly from the philosophical optimism of Gottfried Leibniz . The preponderance of the evidence, Voltaire made abundantly clear in the novel’s series of increasingly horrific episodes, points toward a blind, indifferent universe full of needless cruelty and chaos. “Hope was, he felt, a disease,” de Botton says, and “it was Voltaire’s generous goal to try and cure us of it.” But as everyone who has read Candide (or read a summary or brief notes on Candide ) knows, the novel does not end with ...
Post a Comment
Read more

When Albert Einstein & Charlie Chaplin Met and Became Fast Famous Friends (1930)

Photo via Wikimedia Commons “You do not really understand something unless you can explain it to your grandmother,” goes a well-known quote attributed variously to Albert Einstein, Richard Feynman, and Ernest Rutherford. No matter who said it, “the sentiment… rings true,” writes Michelle Lavery , “for researchers in all disciplines from particle physics to ecopsychology.” As Feynman discovered during his many years of teaching , it could be “the motto of all professional communicators,” The Guardian ’s Russell Grossman writes , “and especially those who earn a living communicating the tricky business of science.” Einstein became one of the world’s great science communicators by choice, not necessity, and found ways to explain his complex theories to children and the elderly alike. But perhaps, if he’d had his way, he would rather have avoided words altogether, and preferred acrobatic feats of silent daring to get his message across. We might at least conclude so from his reverence f...
Post a Comment
Read more

An Interactive Map of Odysseus’ 10-Year Journey in Homer’s Odyssey

The Odyssey , one of Homer's two great epics, narrates Odysseus' long, strange trip home after the Trojan war . During their ten-year journey, Odysseus and his men had to overcome divine and natural forces, from battering storms and winds to difficult encounters with the Cyclops Polyphemus, the cannibalistic Laestrygones, the witch-goddess Circe and the rest. And they took a most circuitous route, bouncing all over the Mediterranean, moving first down to Crete and Tunisia. Next over to Sicily, then off toward Spain, and back to Greece again. If you're looking for an easy way to visualize all of the twists and turns in  The Odyssey , then we'd recommend spending some time with the  interactive map created by Gisèle Mounzer .  "Odysseus' Journey"  breaks down Odysseus' voyage into 14 key scenes and locates them on a modern map designed by Esri, a company that creates GIS mapping software. Meanwhile, if you're interested in the whole concept of ...
Post a Comment
Read more