1972 Melodic Jams

One unusual trait of the Dead’s long jams in 1972 was that they would sometimes end Other Ones or Dark Stars with unique melodic sequences. Out of spacy or abstract passages, chord patterns would emerge that sounded rehearsed or familiar, but you couldn’t quite place where you’d heard them before, and generally they were never played again.

Of course this kind of jam happened in other years as well – I might just mention the 2/18/71 “Beautiful Jam” or the end-of-Dark-Star jam on 2/24/74 as examples – but for some reason there was a whole cluster of them in 1972.

Though they were improvised, I suspect these pieces may have been based on themes the Dead tried out in rehearsals, so when one bandmember suggested a chord sequence, the others could quickly latch on. Since ’69 the Dead had worked out a frequent technique of following a spacy or tense section of the jam with a “happy” chord sequence, relieving the tension and adding structure & dynamic contrast to the jam. They also had enough practice playing together that if Kreutzmann started tapping a new beat, or another player laid out a few chords or new melodic line, the rest of the band could rapidly form around it.

As I wrote elsewhere (about the Tighten Up & Feelin’ Groovy jams in 1970), “The Dead had a knack for doing these sequences that sounded familiar even if you couldn't quite place them, and their habit was often to play these after a passage of formlessness or building tension, so that these happy melodic passages would be kind of a release for the audience.”

Audiences frequently cheered these thematic jams, responding to them with joy even though they probably couldn’t have recognized the riffs. One reader suggests that this may have been a subconscious process that the Dead intentionally aimed for: “I think the Tighten Up jam as used by the GD worked a really cool magic trick on the listeners - it made a seemingly improvised piece of music suddenly sound perfect and just-right and totally satisfying… It is a pretty good trick to produce the enjoyment of something familiar within the framework of an improvisation. In other words, for a "typical" listener in 1970, the Tighten Up jam would have the best of both worlds - the newness and excitement of improvisation combined with the familiarity and satisfaction of a known theme, and without the listeners being aware of the precise reasons for their response.”

https://archive.org/post/383872/tdih-1970 

Weir described the Dead’s jams in a September 1972 Crawdaddy interview:

“We play cues to each other, and depending upon whether or not anybody’s listening, or whether anybody cares to second the motion, we’ll go that way. If you can get two on a trip, you generally go there. It can be something we all know or a completely new idea introduced within the context of what we’re doing. If the movement gets adopted, then we can go to a completely new place. Or if somebody introduces a familiar line from an old place – it may be a song or a passage that we’re more or less familiar with – we can go that way… Sometimes we know what we’re doing. Sometimes we’re completely lost in what we’re doing, and maybe it just grabs us and takes us there too. It seems to fall into place a lot to me also. It’s a tenuous art of trying to make format out of chaos, of course. As we get better practiced at it, we can get looser and freer in our associations, and let the music more or less move us in a given direction. Sometimes, if what we’re doing just really wants to go somewhere and the air is just pregnant with it, it’s undeniable, we’ll just go there. On a really good night, it’ll happen a succession of times. No one will even play a cue, yet bang we’re just off.”

Blair Jackson wrote about this process at work at the end of the Other One on 4/21/72 (in the CD liner notes): “The band doesn’t seem to have any idea about what, if any, song they might play next…so the Dead just float from one musical notion to the next. Squealing feedback gives way to a brief, lilting jam. At one point Billy clicks into a little groove and the others follow, and it develops into one of those lovely passages that feels familiar but isn’t quite – are those hints of Wharf Rat? is Sugar Magnolia around that bend? Instead they keep drifting about – Jerry gets into a hypnotic fingerpicking pattern at one point – until it all just peters out.”

Sometimes the band was not so successful, of course, and jams could peter out, drift away, or die undeveloped. They didn’t always play in perfect unison. There are plenty of instances when Weir & Lesh would play a chord pattern for Garcia, and he would ignore them. But there was also another side to “making format out of chaos” – the band generally had a strong sense of structure in the jams, keeping their destination in mind and listening to each other’s cues. A long jam would pass through several varied movements – a jazzy combo feel, a noisy Tiger jam, a peaceful quiet space, perhaps a bluesy interlude or fast rock shuffle – before ending in a new song or reprise. This broad outline could give even long Dark Stars a feeling of direction rather than aimlessness. And one of the Dead’s central techniques was to contrast sequences of noise, space or atonality with balancing sequences of melody and rhythm, bringing audiences from the void back to familiarity, as it were.

There were a few memorable times in 1972 when the melodic passages used to “climax” a jam took on a brief life of their own apart from the larger jam; when the groupmind took over and new themes poured out, never played before yet somehow familiar.

I thought I would make a list of the main unique structured jams from ‘72. I had a few rules for defining them:

- they almost always occur at the end of an Other One or Dark Star, often after a chaotic or spacy section, or around the verse.  

- they sound like distinct composed songs, with particular melodies or chords, and are sustained for more than a minute. Often they sound like familiar Dead tunes “recombined” and played in a new way.

- Feelin’ Groovy is not included. By 1972, the regular “thematic jams” the Dead had been playing back in ’70 were mostly gone. A couple early examples of the Mind Left Body theme are included, since the Dead wouldn’t develop that into a regular repeated jam until fall ’73. It’s possible some of these other themes could have turned into repeated jams, had the Dead chosen to do that; but clearly they decided not to play them more than once.

3/22/72 end of Caution [on the Rockin’ the Rhein bonus CD] – After a tense space and ominous conclusion to Caution, Garcia segues into a gentle Bobby McGee-type melody (at 3:30 on the CD), joined instantly by the band. This closely resembles the Bid You Goodnight theme, but is clearly a developed melody of its own. The fragile beauty lasts just three minutes before Phil awkwardly switches to Uncle John’s Band.

3/23/72 end of Dark Star, after 16:10 – Kicked off by Phil, this goes through several phases, including a Feelin’ Groovy and a country-picking Sugar Magnolia-type finish before returning to the Dark Star theme at 20:50.

https://archive.org/details/gd1972-03-23.sbd.miller.100000.sbeok.flac16

4/8/72 end of Dark Star [28:10 on the official CD] – This comes out of a scary meltdown and has an ecstatic start similar to the 3/23 jam, with Garcia starting it off and the others immediately backing him. Weir & Garcia transition into an early descending Mind Left Body theme, and after four minutes Weir deftly blends in the Sugar Magnolia intro at the same tempo. (On a personal note, I broke down in tears the first time I heard this.)

4/21/72 end of the Other One [18:20 on the official CD] – After the verse ends, the Dead head into a short feedback space before Garcia enters a passage of Love Scene-type picking. As they float freely, Kreutzmann starts tapping a beat, and the band conjures a unique little jam from the air. Within two minutes Garcia brings it to an end with a repeated fingerpicked arpeggio in high notes.

7/25/72 Other One – Unusually, this jam is played before the first verse, from about 12:35-19:15. Growing out of a beautiful Garcia/Lesh duet, a beat materializes and something like an Allmans-style Spanish Jam emerges (some people also hear shades of St Stephen in there). Garcia even plays slide until Phil nudges them back into the Other One.

https://archive.org/details/gd1972-07-25.sbd.miller.124017.flac16

8/20/72 end of the Other One – After a jazzy Phil/Keith-dominated passage, they enter a stomping jam from about 18:45-20:30, structured by Phil’s chords, before falling back into the Other One theme.

https://archive.org/details/gd1972-08-20.sbd.miller.83733.flac16

9/21/72 end of Dark Star [30:35 on Dick’s Picks 36] – After a searching passage, Garcia starts a fingerpicking pattern; the band joins in and it turns into a Cumberland Blues-type jam that soon morphs into another lengthy, forceful Mind Left Body theme. Garcia emulates slide playing near the end (foreshadowing the late-’73 versions of this jam), before moving into Morning Dew around 36:50.

12/31/72 end of the Other One – After the verse ends, Garcia heads immediately into a peaceful, bluesy jam, the others & Crosby accompanying him so closely it must have been planned. They bid farewell to the year in amazing style (from 21:00-26:20), until Garcia finally volume-swells his way into Morning Dew.

https://archive.org/details/gd72-12-31.prefm.vernon.20559.sbeok.shnf

One repeated theme that’s unique to 1972 is the Philo Stomp. In summer ’72 Phil had been playing inchoate solos in the Other One – in the fall these bloomed into the Philo Stomp, a distinct chordal riff in which the rest of the band would join. This was played in a few shows in Dark Star and the Other One (10/18, 10/24, 10/28, 11/13), but was dropped in the shows after that. Phil’s solos in later months would quote the theme, but remained more meandering and free-flowing. He also started frequently playing a jazzy 6/8 riff which would become a regular feature of 1973 jams (for instance, in the 6/24/73 Dark Star, after 6:20).

One thing about the Dead’s style of jamming was that the band would often coalesce around little structures within the flow of a longer jam. These might soon evaporate, or they could develop for a few minutes as short mini-jams. So there are plenty of shorter semi-structured jams that could be considered here. A few examples, at random:

4/17/72 Dark Star – jam after 24:20, lasts about 4 minutes

5/4/72 Dark Star – jam starts about 7 minutes after the drum solo (there’s a slight family resemblance to the 4/8 jam, til Phil starts a Feelin’ Groovy jam at 9:50)

5/10/72 end of the Other One – from roughly 32-33:30 minutes in (Weir’s chord pattern gives a solid structure to an airy space section)

11/19/72 Dark Star – from about 22:20-24:45 (a spontaneous chord structure is born and passes away; then from the void Weir pulls a familiar Prelude)
https://archive.org/details/gd1972-11-19.122784.sbd.miller-gans.flac24 

12/10/72 Other One – from about 18:00-22:35 (out of space, a rhythmic, jazzy proto-Eyes of the World jam)
https://archive.org/details/gd72-12-10.sbd.gorinsky.5801.sbeok.shnf

One reader also suggested a jam in the 9/10/72 Dark Star, which loosely builds from around 7:15–12:50. (This Dark Star also features small sub-themes at 4:20-5:10 and 17:00-18:15, and ends with an Other One-type jam after 27:55.)
https://archive.org/details/gd72-09-10.sbd.winters.17690.sbeok.shnf 
Earlier sections in the 12/31/72 Other One could also be considered: out of the bass/drums break, a fast jazzy jam lasting about 6 minutes; then later, a chordal jam from about 13:40 that blends into an Other One jam. Parts like these I think of more as rhythmic grooves rather than distinct melodic themes.

I haven’t done a comprehensive search, and I’m sure many more examples could be found. Perhaps someday we’ll have a complete catalog of these little structured sub-jams. (On the other hand, going too far down this path with numerous possible examples might obscure the structured melodic jams that are really distinctive and memorable.)

I may have missed some good ones – please let me know if there are other jams you think should be included here.