Rosemary is one of the simplest, shortest songs to appear on a Grateful Dead album. A graceful tune, accompanied by only a couple acoustic guitars, it tells the mysterious, atmospheric tale of a solitary lady in an ominous garden.
The actual narrative is left out, and we’re left with a few lines that allude to some unknown story. Rosemary herself is only indirectly described – “boots were of leather, a breath of cologne” – as she sits by her mirror and leaves her garden. She’s given the name of an herb that was long associated with mourning and remembrance, strewn on people’s graves, but was also a love charm worn at weddings. (Hunter very likely had these folkloric associations in mind when he wrote the song.)
http://www.ourherbgarden.com/herb-history/rosemary.html
The song has a wistful, lonesome setting, starting with one person “quite alone” and ending with an empty sealed garden where “no one may stay;” but nothing is explained. We’re left only with questions – is she waiting for someone? pining for a lover? in mourning? – that the song doesn’t answer.
Blair Jackson wrote that “lyrically, Rosemary feels almost fragmentary, as if it’s just a part of some larger song.” This was deliberate. As a song consciously written in ‘the folk tradition’ (though not, as far as I know, based on any particular song), ambiguity was key to Rosemary for its writers.
Garcia told Jackson in an ’88 interview, “I love it when a song is ambiguous... Hunter is able to leave just enough out… He actually writes more clearly than I let him; he explains things if I let him… Sometimes it doesn’t have to mean anything and it can still evoke a great something.” Jackson observed that Garcia would even “deliberately cut out verses of songs if they seem to be explaining things too much.”
Hunter told Jackson in ’88, “Jerry favors a certain type of folk song. He loves the mournful death-connected ballad, the Child Ballad stuff. This is a venerable source which has always spoken to him, and to me as well, which is one reason we got together writing songs – because of that haunting feel certain traditional songs have… I’m generally deep-sea diving in imagery and getting things that sometimes, as in folk music, you don’t know quite what it means, but it’s resonant. Like that line in that folk song, ‘ten thousand was drownded that never was born.’ It makes the hair stand up on your arms.”
In a 1991 interview with Garcia, Hunter brings up the same line: “You know, Jerry, you once said something to me about a lyric that really impressed you when you were young, and it impressed me the same way, and I almost feel that line is where we took off.” Garcia agrees: “That line really scared me. It’s from a tune called ‘The Mummer’s Song,’ that Jean Ritchie used to sing. It’s an a capella song with only two verses, and they’re nonsense insofar as that if they have any sense, it’s so deeply symbolic we don’t know what it’s actually about… Not knowing, though, is part of what makes it so evocative. The mystery is part of what makes it interesting to me.”
(Garcia was slightly off: the tune was Nottamun Town, which was sung in medieval English mummers’ plays.)
http://blog.allmusic.com/2008/06/27/when-down-is-up-2/ (the story of Nottamun Town)
“Sat down on a hard hot cold frozen stone
Ten thousand stood round me and yet I’s alone
Took my hat in my hand for to keep my head warm
Ten thousand got drownded that never was born.”
Hunter & Garcia brought this sensibility to Rosemary: what Hunter called “the notion of evocativeness,” or Garcia, “the lack of specificness, the power of the almost-expressed. It seemed to speak at some level other than the most obvious one, and it was more moving for that reason., since you don’t know what it’s about.”
Garcia talked about the Lord Randall ballad as an instance: “The versions that made it to Appalachia were two hundred years after the fact for those English ballads – they got sung from father to son or mother to daughter so much that eventually nobody remembered who Lord Randall was, but they did remember the guy’s head rolling down the stairs in that verse. (Hunter added, “You’ve got all those incredibly evocative lines like ‘black eel and black broth, mother’ and ‘I fain would lie doon.’”) You get these little hunks of good stuff and you don’t need all 29 verses to get the feeling of it. You only get three or four verses, but they’re so rich in weirdness because they’re the ones that made enough of an impression that they could last…through the generations.”
Though it has the timeless feel common to many of Hunter’s songs, Rosemary has a particularly medieval tone. The lyrics seem reminiscent of ancient Arthurian ballads: “On the wall of the garden, a legend did say, ‘No one may come here, since no one may stay.’” (The acoustic setting and medieval-inspired lyrics are also shared by Mountains of the Moon, which is kind of a sister song to Rosemary.)
The annotated GD lyrics site speculates on some of the literary influences that may have been floating around Hunter’s head:
http://artsites.ucsc.edu/GDead/agdl/rosemary.html
The lady in her private walled garden is a staple of medieval literature, for instance in the famous Romance of the Rose and many of Chaucer’s poems:
http://englishhistoryauthors.blogspot.com/2011/10/boundaries-medieval-women-in-medieval.html
http://www.teamsmedieval.org/scientia_scholae/0308/garden.html
One historical reference is Rosamund, the mistress of Henry II in the 12th century, who became famous in English romance and folklore. The story goes that Henry hid her in a bower garden surrounded by a forest labyrinth, so only he could find the way in; but his jealous queen Eleanor used a thread to discover the path, and poisoned Rosamund. This is one old ballad on the subject:
http://www.sacred-texts.com/neu/eng/boeb/boeb06.htm
One possible inspiration for Rosemary is Hawthorne’s story “Rappaccini’s Daugher,” about an alluring but toxic young lady in a garden of poisonous plants:
http://www.shsu.edu/~eng_wpf/authors/Hawthorne/Rappaccini.htm “All around her the garden grew scarlet and purple and crimson and blue.”
(This story was also featured in a Vincent Price movie, Twice-Told Tales, in 1963.)
Another parallel is Tennyson’s poem “Lady of Shalott,” about a lady who pines alone in her walled isle while gazing in a mirror, and comes to a solitary end:
http://charon.sfsu.edu/tennyson/tennlady.html “Her mirror was a window, she sat quite alone.”
(Hunter in the 1991 interview even mentions that the British folk tradition he admires “reaches its culmination with Alfred Lord Tennyson, things like Morte d’Arthur. Certainly I liked that sort of writing.”)
There may also be an echo of Shelley’s poem “The Sensitive Plant,” about a lady who tends a garden – when she dies, the garden dies with her:
http://www.kalliope.org/digt.pl?longdid=shelley2003060601 “She came and she went and at last went away; the garden was sealed when the flowers decayed.”
And so on. There are many such literary pieces about women in gardens that could be found; but which exactly Hunter might have been thinking of, is uncertain. It’s possible he had particular old folk songs in mind, though in general Hunter seemed to take inspiration more from poetry and literature than from older songs.
(Oddly enough, he had recently written another song with a prominent garden: “Saint Stephen with a rose, in and out of the garden he goes.” But Hunter’s later songs would tend to leave English gardens for more American themes.)
How Hunter & Garcia came to write Rosemary is a story in itself – the song came right at a turning-point in the Dead’s music, as they shifted from writing weird acid-rock tunes to more straightforward, acoustic-based, traditional-flavored songs.
The Dead’s songwriting patterns changed in mid-1968. Up til then, most songs had been written by the whole band, with each person pitching in – many of their best songs came out of band jams. Anthem of the Sun is a good example of a true Dead collaboration, with six different songwriters contributing to the songs. Lesh and Garcia both felt equally free to work with Hunter’s lyrics, with Lesh arranging Clementine and the Eleven – and the first Hunter song the band did, Alligator, was also co-written by Pigpen.
Suddenly, once the Anthem album was finished in spring 1968, the band’s compositions narrowed drastically. Several of the bandmembers quit writing songs: each for their own reasons, neither Lesh, Weir nor Pigpen would write another song until 1970.
Into the breach stepped Robert Hunter. The band had enthusiastically accepted some lyrics he’d mailed from New Mexico back in ’67 (Alligator and China Cat) and invited him to join them as songwriter, since they felt their own lyrics were lacking. He had been writing an occasional song for them (Dark Star and Clementine) since arriving in summer ’67. St Stephen, in a way, was the last song from this initial Hunter phase – it was a song he had been working on in New Mexico and was apparently one of the ones he’d mailed in spring ’67, though Garcia and Lesh didn’t get around to working up an arrangement until spring ’68.
Not all of Hunter’s efforts were accepted. (Hunter: “I wrote endlessly.” Garcia: “He never stopped… The amount we set was nothing compared to the amount we didn’t set.”) In the 1991 Hunter/Garcia interview, he mentions the ‘Eagle Mall’ suite that he intended the Dead to perform: “I started writing that thing when we were down recording Anthem of the Sun. It was more a personal project – I had eyes for the band doing it, but then I was informed by [Garcia], ‘Listen, basically we’re a dance band and there’s no way in the world people will be able to dance to this sort of thing.’” (Or, as he puts it in the Box of Rain book, “It was too ambitious a lyric project for practical consideration.”)
Garcia recalled, “We did actually take a few cracks at trying to set some of it, but I couldn’t come up with anything that didn’t sound very hackneyed.” Hunter thought, “It almost had to have an old English flavor, and that wasn’t really where the Grateful Dead was going then.” Garcia suggested, “What we need is the New York Pro Musica to make this sound the way it’s supposed to go, with the bells and recorders and viola da gambas…” (The Pro Musica group performed medieval and Renaissance music.)
Though the Dead never did perform that suite, 1968 saw a shift in direction in which the “old English flavor” became exactly the mood Garcia was looking for. He admitted in ’91, “Mountains of the Moon had a little bit of the ‘Eagle Mall’ thing.” Once the band’s other songwriters fell silent, Garcia took charge of the Dead’s compositions, and he and Hunter started spinning out more antique-styled songs. These two had spent much of the early sixties seeking out forgotten folk songs, and those old traditions were now coming back up in their own songwriting.
Hunter said later that some of his early songs (like Dupree’s Diamond Blues) were “studied efforts to continue the oral tradition.” Garcia told Jackson in ’89, “Hunter and I always had this thing where we liked to muddy the folk tradition by adding our own versions of songs to the tradition… Dupree’s Diamond Blues is one of those. It’s the thing of taking a well-founded tradition and putting in something that’s totally looped.” Though the Dead would become more known for their takes on American folk (with Dupree’s being their starting-point), Rosemary and Mountains of the Moon seem to be deliberately patterned on older English folk traditions – a vein the Dead would not often return to.
Perhaps since Garcia & Hunter were working up most of the songs themselves at home, particularly at the end of the year, Aoxomoxoa featured more acoustic-based songs than before, some of them downright acid-folkish. Though the recordings didn’t necessarily include “bells and recorders and violas,” the Dead did throw in glockenspiels, choirs, or harpsichords as needed. Garcia & Hunter felt free to indulge themselves in epics like What’s Become of the Baby – as Garcia said in 1971, “Hunter and I were being more or less obscure, and there are lots of levels on the verbal plane in terms of the lyrics being far out – too far out, really, for most people.”
The songs recorded for Aoxomoxoa, in the order they appeared:
China Cat Sunflower – first played January ’68, but left off the Anthem album, and considerably overhauled for Aoxomoxoa.
Clementine – also debuted January ’68 and recorded for Aoxomoxoa, but abandoned.
St Stephen – probably composed in May ‘68; our first live tape is from June.
What’s Become of the Baby – improbably, one of the first songs the band tackled once they started Aoxomoxoa in September.
Cosmic Charlie – another of the first-recorded album songs, and played at a Hartbeats show on Oct 8.
Barbed Wire Whipping Party – an experiment done during the October recording sessions, but rejected.
Rosemary – we don’t know when this was recorded, but the song was finished by late November.
Mountains of the Moon – live debut Dec 20.
Dupree’s Diamond Blues & Doin’ That Rag – live debuts Jan 24 ’69.
Garcia said in his 1971 Rolling Stone interview that many of the Aoxomoxoa songs were “new tunes that I had written, that I hadn’t really bothered to teach anyone in the band, and I was trying to record them from the ground up and everyone was coming in and doing overdubs… We went about it in a very fragmentary way; we didn’t go about it as a group at all.”
One thing the Aoxomoxoa outtakes tape reveals is that for many tracks, Garcia would go in with just one drummer and record a rhythm track, and the rest of the band would overdub themselves later. Tom Constanten wrote about the process for Skeleton Key: “It was decided to record [the tracks] separately, About half a dozen tracks were dedicated to the drums, and at least two to the bass. Next, the guitars, and then my keyboard. Then came whatever trimmings – glockenspiel, cowbell, whatever – we’d thought of… Finally the vocal tracks were added.”
What’s Become of the Baby is another track that, instrumentally speaking, started out as just Garcia and acoustic guitar – though it was then layered over with sound effects. (The guitar-only version on the outtakes tape is much simpler than the weird album version, though identical song-wise.) Mountains of the Moon was also relatively easy, as Constanten recalled: “Jerry, Bob, Phil and I recorded the basic tracks in the same room at the same time.” (They couldn’t help adding a choir later, though Garcia stripped it off again in the ’71 remix.)
But Rosemary was kept simple: the Dead did not record a full band version that we know of. Garcia’s solo effort was just put straight on the album as it was.
Garcia recorded Rosemary as a four-track demo by himself, and brought it finished to the band. It seems he only used three tracks, two guitars and a vocal. (Though he unfortunately applied an electronic effect to his voice, running it through a Leslie organ cabinet, which makes him sound like a singing lamb.) One guitar plucks the chords, and the other provides a vaguely Spanish-sounding accompaniment. Musically, Garcia enhances the desolate air of the lyrics by pausing in-between each verse, then repeating the chords in cyclical fashion.
The recording was simple enough that Garcia made few changes to Rosemary when remixing the album in 1971. He basically made it more ‘straight’ – the two guitars are on each side while the voice is in the middle. On the original album, each track floated randomly around the stereo channels, and the voice was much lower in the mix, somewhat buried beneath the guitars (making the words even harder to decipher). The original mix is also about five seconds longer, as the guitars slowly wind out to a concluding chord at the end – as with most of the tracks on the album, Garcia faded a bit early in the remix.
Rosemary on the Aoxomoxoa outtakes tape is, of course, the exact same track, just in mono. It fades out a little too early, too. (However, you can actually hear the first line, “Boots were of leather.” This doesn’t actually appear on the album track, as Garcia’s voice fades in on “leather”! He sings it on the one live version, though.)
http://www.archive.org/details/gd69-xx-xx.sbd.dodd.16760.sbeok.shnf
Rosemary was long thought never to have been played live, until a stash of December ‘68 live tapes turned up in 1999. One of these was a loose, tripped-out show at Bellarmine College in Louisville, KY, from December 7. It was the last show of a midwest tour, and the Dead may have been a little tired after playing in Philadelphia the previous night - they also faced some equipment problems early in the set, abandoning the Eleven.
After a meandering New Potato, Weir announces a little break; and when they return, it’s with just one drummer. (Garcia explains a little later on that “one of our drummers broke down.”) They have no plan about what to play next, and Garcia abruptly starts playing Rosemary, perhaps to fill up a long wait. (Bear stopped taping in the break, so the recording cuts back in during the opening notes.)
It’s a quiet, delicate performance – unfortunately, the tapesource is a mono cassette recording which sounds particularly hissy at this point. Nonetheless, the unique live Rosemary is done somewhat differently than the album track – for one, Lesh plays along with Garcia, so we get to hear what the bass line for Rosemary would have sounded like. Weir also seems to join in unobtrusively by the end, filling out Garcia’s guitar part. (This makes me think they may have attempted a fuller band version in the studio prior to this. Then again, they may have been catching the song on the fly – Garcia himself sounds a little shaky.) Garcia sings the same verses as on the album (though he slightly forgets the line, “The garden was sealed when the flowers decayed”), but the song is extended by a minute with a longer instrumental ending. Very impromptu and fragile, but nicely done! Then it’s time for some tuning…
http://www.archive.org/details/gd1968-12-07.sbd.miller.88674.sbeok.flac16
Unless another version is hiding in an unknown live show in the Vault, that’s the last we hear of Rosemary. A couple weeks later on December 20, Mountains of the Moon shows up live for the first time – after the Dead abandon another Eleven, Garcia actually pulls out his acoustic to play it (possibly for the first time in a Dead show), and is only accompanied by a few notes from Constanten. Since Garcia particularly liked that song, Mountains became a regular feature of Dead shows in early 1969, but Rosemary was left behind.
“She came and she went and at last went away…”
Someone at Warner Bros must have liked Rosemary, though, for it later appeared on the 1974 best-of compilation Skeletons From the Closet.
February 1, 2012
November 2, 2011
Hiatus
It may be some time before my next post - I'm having some delays and don't have much free time for writing these days. I've started on a very long post, but it may be several weeks before I'm finished. Sorry about the wait!
UPDATE: At this point I don't think I can post again until January.
UPDATE #2: I am busier than expected this month, with many things to attend to. But I will try to post something by the end of January. I hope my next posts will make up for the long delay...
UPDATE: At this point I don't think I can post again until January.
UPDATE #2: I am busier than expected this month, with many things to attend to. But I will try to post something by the end of January. I hope my next posts will make up for the long delay...
October 18, 2011
The Dead In The Studio, 1966
Those of you hoping for a painstaking breakdown of all the instrumental takes from the Dead’s Scorpio sessions are going to be disappointed! I’m actually going to discuss a different set of studio demos the Dead did in 1966, which have mostly not been released, may not even exist anymore, were never mentioned by the Dead as far as I know, and as a result are very little-known.
Our main lead comes from Rock Scully’s book Living With The Dead:
Scully: “In July [1966] our first single comes out on a small local label, Scorpio Records: Don’t Ease Me In with Stealin’ on the B-side, both recorded in John Estribow’s attic. Estribow was a friend of the band who had a small label with almost zero distribution… We do quite a few demos in ’66 – the above plus Otis On A Shakedown Cruise, an original rocker, and the old country traditional Silver Threads & Golden Needles. We owe these demos to Dan Healy, a friend of ours who is a technology wizard and has done amazing things for Quicksilver.
Healy works at a place called Commercial Recorders, in a turn-of-the-century firehouse on Natoma Street. The studio is closed at night, but Healy sneaks the band in to make tapes… It is at Commercial that the Dead make demos of many of the songs that will appear on our first album. A few arrangements of traditional tunes, two or three of our own songs, and that’s pretty much it…
Dan Healy also has the midnight-to-six shift at KMPX, and often plays the single and the demos. KMPX does not have a strong signal at the time – the police band probably has more listeners – but this is the onset of our music being played in the middle of the night…
The band is eager to take the next step – an album! – and so we hustle up more demos. Coast Recording, on Bush Street, is a big, boomy place, a former church at which Bing Crosby once recorded. There we do a bunch of demos including Early Morning Rain (with Phil singing lead), Silver Threads & Golden Needles, and a take of Otis On A Shakedown Cruise.”
It’s well-known that Scully’s book has numerous accuracy issues – but a lot of this story has actually been confirmed. Scully tends to be more reliable in the early years of the band’s history, and I suspect many of the hyperbolic descriptions, dialogues, misstatements etc. are due to the co-author (David Dalton) creatively rewriting what Scully told him.
For instance, this is one line from the book where Scully discusses the band’s early-’66 repertoire in Los Angeles:
“They’d written a song a year earlier, Otis on a Shakedown Cruise, a 2 ½-minute rock & roller that was the B-side of their first independently released single (as the Warlocks).”
Obviously bogus. The Warlocks never released a single, let alone a B-side!
And yet, this is from an actual Scully interview (with Blair Jackson) where he talks about their L.A. trip: “They had a couple of originals, like Otis on a Shakedown Cruise, which was this wonderful song that I think Pig and Jerry mainly put together. There must be tapes of it around somewhere. We were going to put it on as the B-side of Don't Ease Me In.”
Now it makes sense. Otis is a real song (both Jerry and Phil have referred to it), and is almost certainly You Don’t Have To Ask, which is a song they put together in Los Angeles and recorded at the Scorpio sessions. (See the comments to my “1966 Songs” post.) It actually would have been a good choice for the Scorpio single, so I imagine there may have been some heated band discussion about the song choices before they ended up with two old jugband tunes…
In short, Scully can be more reliable than his book makes him appear. So how does his story about the other 1966 demos hold up when cross-checked with other sources?
Dan Healy was indeed an engineer at Commercial Records studio - he said in an interview with Sandy Troy: “Along about 1963 I moved into San Francisco and got a job in a little recording studio called Commercial Records. It’s defunct now. At the time it was the state-of-the-art studio in San Francisco. It had a 3-track tape recorder on half-inch tape. That was big time in those days, when 4 tracks were really rare… I worked days in this studio.”
Healy confirmed briefly that he did tape bands in the studio after-hours: “Because I was working in a studio which only operated from daylight to dark (8:00 to 5:00), after they locked up the studio at night we’d sneak in and record. So I would take all the bands in there. That was really a good trip.”
The book Skeleton Key also mentions: “Healy would sneak the Dead into Commercial Recorders at night, and they would record until dawn. Top 40 AM radio wouldn’t touch the tapes, because the Dead were an unsigned band, but Healy took them down to KMPX-FM and played them on his late-night radio show. Word got around that KMPX was playing some interesting music at three in the morning…”
(I don’t know what their source here is, but it’s probably not Scully’s book, since this was published over a year before Living With The Dead was.)
I haven’t read elsewhere about Healy’s KMPX radio show; but it’s not unlikely, as Healy’s first love was radio. He had built himself a little radio station in grade school, and his first job in San Francisco was maintenance work at KSFO. It’s quite curious to think of what unreleased Dead demos might have been played on the nightly airwaves as early as mid-1966…
In any case, Healy had met the Dead at their Fillmore shows of June 3-4, when they opened for Quicksilver. Being an engineer, he was appalled by the state of the Dead's PA system when he first saw them. "From working in a studio, I was used to pretty good sound… The PA for rock & roll shows was almost nonexistent; it was just terrible. On each side of the stage there’d be a little teeny box about 1 foot by 2 feet, and when the bands played you could barely tell the system was on. You could never really hear or understand the vocals."
As he told the story to Blair Jackson:
"I originally met the Grateful Dead via John Cipollina at a Quicksilver gig at the Fillmore, where the Dead were opening... It was during the Dead's set that we showed up, and the music had just stopped. There was no such thing as 'spare equipment' for the band in those days. Oftentimes, if an amp died, it could stop the whole show. I think in this case it was Phil's amp that died... So Cipollina basically shoved me up there, and I fiddled a little with Phil's amp, and it started to work. At the end of the show, Phil and Garcia walked up to me and said 'Hey thanks man' and all that, and we introduced ourselves...
I remember making some crack to Phil and Garcia about how the sound system really sucked, and Garcia sort of challenged me... I said, 'All right, you're on.' The next time they were going to play was about two weeks later, also at the Fillmore, so before that I went around to the three major places in the area that rented sound equipment, and I got all this stuff from them, and I took it to the Fillmore…" Healy patched up a new system for the Dead, which worked: "It was a horrible-looking monstrosity, but when the gig came, you could hear the singing."
(A more detailed telling is in the Grateful Dead Gear book, p. 41.)
Healy told Troy a little about his studio career over the next year, while he was fixing the amps and rigging up new sound systems for Quicksilver and the Dead:
“I was never really with [the bands] – I was actually independent, working in the studios and making tapes. I wasn’t deeply involved in doing PA systems…my career was in the recording studio… But I was interested and concerned that these guys have good sound systems and be heard, because it was cool music…It outraged me that they were being burnt off by horrible sound systems…
By [mid-1967] I had logged quite a bit of time in recording studios – three or four years of ass-kicking, everyday studio use doing a lot of commercial jingles, and some rock & roll songs. I recorded Paul Revere & the Raiders, a couple of old hit records, and obscure local San Francisco hits… I had outgrown the studio I was working in, in San Francisco. Several of the groups had asked me to take them into the studio, and I was using everybody’s studio because these were record-company situations. I would just go rent the time and take the group in. I was using Coast [Recorders], Golden State, and another small studio [Columbus Recording] that was built for the Kingston Trio… Since I was using other studios, I had quit my job at Commercial Recorders. They were into lots of commercial work, and I wanted to get more into music production… By then I was traveling with [the Dead] and doing sound live at gigs, so I went to L.A. with the band…to work on Anthem of the Sun.”
Blair Jackson noted in his Grateful Dead Gear book that there were few studios to choose from in San Francisco as of 1966, and most bands used four studios: Commercial Recording, Columbus Recorders, Coast Recorders, and Golden State Recorders.
The Dead had recorded their Emergency Crew demo for Autumn Records at Golden State back in 1965, and apparently never returned. Commercial Recording was Healy’s home studio in 1966, and where the band spent some midnight hours that year. Columbus Recorders was where they finished Anthem of the Sun in 1968. Coast Recorders was little-used by the band, except possibly for the ’66 demo session Scully recounts; Blair Jackson speculates that they may have recorded some of the Scorpio sessions there as well.
Scully’s details about the Scorpio sessions are mostly accurate, except that Gene Estribou was not really a “friend of the band.” Estribou had built a home studio called Buena Vista Studio on the fifth floor of his house – he was a local music fan who wanted to form his own record company, had good recording equipment, and had recorded some demos with other bands like Big Brother.
The Dead, though, did not have a good time recording – Weir was very irritated about hauling the band’s gear up to the fifth floor; Lesh dismissed Estribou as a “dilettante”; and Garcia summarized the sessions: “we never got in on the mixing of it and we didn’t really like the cuts and the performances were bad and the recordings were bad and everything else was bad, so we didn’t want it out…it doesn’t sound like us.”
Estribou himself also had a hard time: “It was an effort to get out of the zone of indecision, as you can imagine. The early Dead was trying to find themselves…and get a product out, when Phil wanted to do one thing and Jerry wanted to do another… So it was frustrating for everybody, but we had to get something finished rather than nine thousand hours of shit that was unusable.”
Even Estribou’s hopes for his record label came to grief when it turned out that there was already a Scorpio Records in San Francisco!
And as Scully says, he had almost zero distribution. It seems only 150 copies of the Scorpio single were printed, and mostly vanished. Garcia said, “Those records never went on sale. That was a guy who was starting his own record company, but he didn’t really have any connections, so it’s not as if that single was released to any stores apart from maybe one or two in Haight-Ashbury. The Psychedelic Shop probably had 20 or 30 of them.”
One sidenote is that Estribou said he took the band to Western Recording to finish recording for the single. But Blair Jackson suggests that, since Western Recording was actually in Los Angeles, they more likely went to Coast Recorders. This seems to dovetail nicely with Scully’s recollection that the band recorded some demos at Coast, though with Estribou at the helm rather than Healy.
(The Scorpio sessions are covered in more detail in the Taping Compendium vol. I p. 110-112, and the book Grateful Dead Gear p. 36-38.)
The final confirmation for Scully’s story came with the release of Rare Cuts & Oddities. We knew You Don’t Have To Ask had been recorded at the Scorpio sessions; Early Morning Rain had been part of the 1965 demo (and was still in their live set as of November ’66). But a studio demo of Silver Threads & Golden Needles? Impossible.
And yet, there it was, on the Rare Cuts CD, sounding nice and professional. (It’s the one track on the CD dated “late 1966,” hence possibly the only one not recorded by Bear. Where Bear recorded his studio tracks earlier that year is unknown.)
http://www.whitegum.com/livedate/rarecuts.htm
Unfortunately, it’s hard to say how much more of their 1966 demos might survive. Their reels were not well-taken care of at the time, and the survivors are locked up in the Vault with little chance of release.
David Lemieux talked a bit about his selection for the Rare Cuts CD, from a box of mostly unlabeled old reels from Bear’s collection:
“It was about 15, 20 reels of tape. Some were blank. Some were garbage. Some were what you hear… We originally focused on a two-disc set and what I was finding at that point was material that was a little less compelling, that one disc made it absolutely perfect.”
For early Dead collectors (or historians), it’s not too joyful to hear that Rare Cuts could have been a 2-CD set, but they decided one disc would be stronger! A very few more selections have also been aired on the Taper’s Section (listed in my “1966 Songs” post), but how much more remains in the Vault is a mystery.
There are a couple more circulating tracks of Pigpen’s songs that may come from the 1966 demos. There’s a very nice studio cut of Smokestack Lightning (somewhat improbably paired with the Anthem sessions on the Archive), and there is a great 1966 recording of Who Do You Love which circulated on tape, but sadly seems unavailable digitally.
Of course the Dead were not doing all these studio recordings just for the joy of hearing themselves, or for the delight of posterity. While Bear had a mania for taping the band for his “sonic journals” and playbacks, the studio time must have had a more specific purpose. What was the band doing making basically a vanity record for Gene Estribou and his tiny record label anyway?
Scully hints at the reason, when talking about the Dead’s mid-’66 demos:
“Suddenly antennae begin twitching in glass & steel skyscrapers in L.A. Corporate dogs are sent to sniff around. Talent scouts in sharkskin suits, getting on planes and showing up at the ballrooms. All of the major record labels virtually overnight establish branch offices in San Francisco. And we begin to attract serious attention from the L.A. pack. Tom Donahue…talks Warner Brothers into checking us out… Tom Donahue is making trips down to Warner Brothers himself on behalf of [his label] Autumn Records, and mentions us to them. We are a little wary of getting involved with a major label, but over the next few months we warm up to the idea. Then Warners starts sending people to come and hear us. Early summer of ’66 some executives from Burbank make several trips from San Francisco to see us play.”
This is more or less accurate (though major-label interest in the Dead and the SF scene may not have been quite so intense as early as mid-’66).
Although Tom Donahue had rejected the Dead for Autumn Records back in fall 1965, his opinion of them had gone up considerably since then. Unfortunately, Autumn Records had also gone into deep decline in the meantime, and the company ended in early 1966.
Donahue said, “We got into desperate trouble. The studio had locked us out for the $10,000 we owed them and they were holding all our tapes. So we made a deal with Warner Bros. Records and sold them all our acts.”
In August ’66, Donahue urged his friend Joe Smith (promotional director at Warner Bros) to see the Dead at the Avalon (on Aug 19 or 20). The story was recounted in the book San Francisco Nights –
Smith remembered: “They were playing this weekend at the Avalon and I was supposed to meet them late, after the gig… So there we were, walking up the steps of this startling place, and there were these kids lying around painting each other’s bodies, and all these lights and smells everywhere. Somebody wanted to dance with my wife. I told her, ‘Don’t come with me to meet the band. You must understand.’ The Grateful Dead: even the name was intimidating. What did it mean? No one knew.”
Donahue: “Joe told me that night, ‘Tom, I don’t think Jack Warner will ever understand this. I don’t know if I understand it myself, but I really feel like they’re good.’ I told him, ‘You’ve got to sign them, because this is where it’s going.’”
Smith: “I was talking to all of them. They always moved in a phalanx, and the ones I really remember were their managers, Rock Scully and Danny Rifkin. Those two were scammers from eight miles back. I could figure them out…the others were out in space somewhere. Garcia was the most visible, but he refused to speak for the group. Pigpen never said ten words, and Lesh was very nasty, constantly negative, because I was a record-company guy and he was a serious musician. We had this conversation about the right kind of equipment to record with, and I later found out that the stuff they wanted hadn’t been invented yet. Lesh felt they were selling out by not getting it… I told them I wanted them, that we were a good record company. That was before I found out that to them, every record company was square. They lived in terror of being ripped off.”
Nonetheless, both sides were interested enough to get a contract discussion going, and just a month later, September 30, the contract with Warner Bros was settled. (Though the Dead themselves hesitated to sign it until December!) The recording sessions for their first album down in Los Angeles soon followed.
So the Dead may have had a couple purposes in recording various studio demos in mid-’66. Possibly they were more eager to sign to a major record label than they let on, and wanted to have good demos available to offer (plus a nice ‘indie’ single to their name). Just as likely, they were checking out the various small, local post-Autumn Records labels in San Francisco, in the belief that they would have more control over their music and releases than they would on a major label. If so, the Scorpio Records experience that summer would have been a letdown, and may have been one reason they ended up signing to Warners so quickly. (Note Lesh’s interest in getting the right recording equipment!)
Scully suggests that even before Warners came knocking, the Dead had been hoping to record an album – at that stage, their studio disillusionment had yet to arrive, and a studio album would have seemed an obvious step. But who would record and release it? It must have seemed like a happy stroke of fate that Joe Smith would turn up shortly after the Scorpio single was dropped into an uninterested world. And the promises of unlimited studio time, complete creative control, RCA Studio facilities, and the same engineer who’d recorded the Rolling Stones, must have been quite tantalizing after lugging their amps up to Estribou’s fifth-floor home studio and sneaking into Healy’s commercial studio after dark…
Our main lead comes from Rock Scully’s book Living With The Dead:
Scully: “In July [1966] our first single comes out on a small local label, Scorpio Records: Don’t Ease Me In with Stealin’ on the B-side, both recorded in John Estribow’s attic. Estribow was a friend of the band who had a small label with almost zero distribution… We do quite a few demos in ’66 – the above plus Otis On A Shakedown Cruise, an original rocker, and the old country traditional Silver Threads & Golden Needles. We owe these demos to Dan Healy, a friend of ours who is a technology wizard and has done amazing things for Quicksilver.
Healy works at a place called Commercial Recorders, in a turn-of-the-century firehouse on Natoma Street. The studio is closed at night, but Healy sneaks the band in to make tapes… It is at Commercial that the Dead make demos of many of the songs that will appear on our first album. A few arrangements of traditional tunes, two or three of our own songs, and that’s pretty much it…
Dan Healy also has the midnight-to-six shift at KMPX, and often plays the single and the demos. KMPX does not have a strong signal at the time – the police band probably has more listeners – but this is the onset of our music being played in the middle of the night…
The band is eager to take the next step – an album! – and so we hustle up more demos. Coast Recording, on Bush Street, is a big, boomy place, a former church at which Bing Crosby once recorded. There we do a bunch of demos including Early Morning Rain (with Phil singing lead), Silver Threads & Golden Needles, and a take of Otis On A Shakedown Cruise.”
It’s well-known that Scully’s book has numerous accuracy issues – but a lot of this story has actually been confirmed. Scully tends to be more reliable in the early years of the band’s history, and I suspect many of the hyperbolic descriptions, dialogues, misstatements etc. are due to the co-author (David Dalton) creatively rewriting what Scully told him.
For instance, this is one line from the book where Scully discusses the band’s early-’66 repertoire in Los Angeles:
“They’d written a song a year earlier, Otis on a Shakedown Cruise, a 2 ½-minute rock & roller that was the B-side of their first independently released single (as the Warlocks).”
Obviously bogus. The Warlocks never released a single, let alone a B-side!
And yet, this is from an actual Scully interview (with Blair Jackson) where he talks about their L.A. trip: “They had a couple of originals, like Otis on a Shakedown Cruise, which was this wonderful song that I think Pig and Jerry mainly put together. There must be tapes of it around somewhere. We were going to put it on as the B-side of Don't Ease Me In.”
Now it makes sense. Otis is a real song (both Jerry and Phil have referred to it), and is almost certainly You Don’t Have To Ask, which is a song they put together in Los Angeles and recorded at the Scorpio sessions. (See the comments to my “1966 Songs” post.) It actually would have been a good choice for the Scorpio single, so I imagine there may have been some heated band discussion about the song choices before they ended up with two old jugband tunes…
In short, Scully can be more reliable than his book makes him appear. So how does his story about the other 1966 demos hold up when cross-checked with other sources?
Dan Healy was indeed an engineer at Commercial Records studio - he said in an interview with Sandy Troy: “Along about 1963 I moved into San Francisco and got a job in a little recording studio called Commercial Records. It’s defunct now. At the time it was the state-of-the-art studio in San Francisco. It had a 3-track tape recorder on half-inch tape. That was big time in those days, when 4 tracks were really rare… I worked days in this studio.”
Healy confirmed briefly that he did tape bands in the studio after-hours: “Because I was working in a studio which only operated from daylight to dark (8:00 to 5:00), after they locked up the studio at night we’d sneak in and record. So I would take all the bands in there. That was really a good trip.”
The book Skeleton Key also mentions: “Healy would sneak the Dead into Commercial Recorders at night, and they would record until dawn. Top 40 AM radio wouldn’t touch the tapes, because the Dead were an unsigned band, but Healy took them down to KMPX-FM and played them on his late-night radio show. Word got around that KMPX was playing some interesting music at three in the morning…”
(I don’t know what their source here is, but it’s probably not Scully’s book, since this was published over a year before Living With The Dead was.)
I haven’t read elsewhere about Healy’s KMPX radio show; but it’s not unlikely, as Healy’s first love was radio. He had built himself a little radio station in grade school, and his first job in San Francisco was maintenance work at KSFO. It’s quite curious to think of what unreleased Dead demos might have been played on the nightly airwaves as early as mid-1966…
In any case, Healy had met the Dead at their Fillmore shows of June 3-4, when they opened for Quicksilver. Being an engineer, he was appalled by the state of the Dead's PA system when he first saw them. "From working in a studio, I was used to pretty good sound… The PA for rock & roll shows was almost nonexistent; it was just terrible. On each side of the stage there’d be a little teeny box about 1 foot by 2 feet, and when the bands played you could barely tell the system was on. You could never really hear or understand the vocals."
As he told the story to Blair Jackson:
"I originally met the Grateful Dead via John Cipollina at a Quicksilver gig at the Fillmore, where the Dead were opening... It was during the Dead's set that we showed up, and the music had just stopped. There was no such thing as 'spare equipment' for the band in those days. Oftentimes, if an amp died, it could stop the whole show. I think in this case it was Phil's amp that died... So Cipollina basically shoved me up there, and I fiddled a little with Phil's amp, and it started to work. At the end of the show, Phil and Garcia walked up to me and said 'Hey thanks man' and all that, and we introduced ourselves...
I remember making some crack to Phil and Garcia about how the sound system really sucked, and Garcia sort of challenged me... I said, 'All right, you're on.' The next time they were going to play was about two weeks later, also at the Fillmore, so before that I went around to the three major places in the area that rented sound equipment, and I got all this stuff from them, and I took it to the Fillmore…" Healy patched up a new system for the Dead, which worked: "It was a horrible-looking monstrosity, but when the gig came, you could hear the singing."
(A more detailed telling is in the Grateful Dead Gear book, p. 41.)
Healy told Troy a little about his studio career over the next year, while he was fixing the amps and rigging up new sound systems for Quicksilver and the Dead:
“I was never really with [the bands] – I was actually independent, working in the studios and making tapes. I wasn’t deeply involved in doing PA systems…my career was in the recording studio… But I was interested and concerned that these guys have good sound systems and be heard, because it was cool music…It outraged me that they were being burnt off by horrible sound systems…
By [mid-1967] I had logged quite a bit of time in recording studios – three or four years of ass-kicking, everyday studio use doing a lot of commercial jingles, and some rock & roll songs. I recorded Paul Revere & the Raiders, a couple of old hit records, and obscure local San Francisco hits… I had outgrown the studio I was working in, in San Francisco. Several of the groups had asked me to take them into the studio, and I was using everybody’s studio because these were record-company situations. I would just go rent the time and take the group in. I was using Coast [Recorders], Golden State, and another small studio [Columbus Recording] that was built for the Kingston Trio… Since I was using other studios, I had quit my job at Commercial Recorders. They were into lots of commercial work, and I wanted to get more into music production… By then I was traveling with [the Dead] and doing sound live at gigs, so I went to L.A. with the band…to work on Anthem of the Sun.”
Blair Jackson noted in his Grateful Dead Gear book that there were few studios to choose from in San Francisco as of 1966, and most bands used four studios: Commercial Recording, Columbus Recorders, Coast Recorders, and Golden State Recorders.
The Dead had recorded their Emergency Crew demo for Autumn Records at Golden State back in 1965, and apparently never returned. Commercial Recording was Healy’s home studio in 1966, and where the band spent some midnight hours that year. Columbus Recorders was where they finished Anthem of the Sun in 1968. Coast Recorders was little-used by the band, except possibly for the ’66 demo session Scully recounts; Blair Jackson speculates that they may have recorded some of the Scorpio sessions there as well.
Scully’s details about the Scorpio sessions are mostly accurate, except that Gene Estribou was not really a “friend of the band.” Estribou had built a home studio called Buena Vista Studio on the fifth floor of his house – he was a local music fan who wanted to form his own record company, had good recording equipment, and had recorded some demos with other bands like Big Brother.
The Dead, though, did not have a good time recording – Weir was very irritated about hauling the band’s gear up to the fifth floor; Lesh dismissed Estribou as a “dilettante”; and Garcia summarized the sessions: “we never got in on the mixing of it and we didn’t really like the cuts and the performances were bad and the recordings were bad and everything else was bad, so we didn’t want it out…it doesn’t sound like us.”
Estribou himself also had a hard time: “It was an effort to get out of the zone of indecision, as you can imagine. The early Dead was trying to find themselves…and get a product out, when Phil wanted to do one thing and Jerry wanted to do another… So it was frustrating for everybody, but we had to get something finished rather than nine thousand hours of shit that was unusable.”
Even Estribou’s hopes for his record label came to grief when it turned out that there was already a Scorpio Records in San Francisco!
And as Scully says, he had almost zero distribution. It seems only 150 copies of the Scorpio single were printed, and mostly vanished. Garcia said, “Those records never went on sale. That was a guy who was starting his own record company, but he didn’t really have any connections, so it’s not as if that single was released to any stores apart from maybe one or two in Haight-Ashbury. The Psychedelic Shop probably had 20 or 30 of them.”
One sidenote is that Estribou said he took the band to Western Recording to finish recording for the single. But Blair Jackson suggests that, since Western Recording was actually in Los Angeles, they more likely went to Coast Recorders. This seems to dovetail nicely with Scully’s recollection that the band recorded some demos at Coast, though with Estribou at the helm rather than Healy.
(The Scorpio sessions are covered in more detail in the Taping Compendium vol. I p. 110-112, and the book Grateful Dead Gear p. 36-38.)
The final confirmation for Scully’s story came with the release of Rare Cuts & Oddities. We knew You Don’t Have To Ask had been recorded at the Scorpio sessions; Early Morning Rain had been part of the 1965 demo (and was still in their live set as of November ’66). But a studio demo of Silver Threads & Golden Needles? Impossible.
And yet, there it was, on the Rare Cuts CD, sounding nice and professional. (It’s the one track on the CD dated “late 1966,” hence possibly the only one not recorded by Bear. Where Bear recorded his studio tracks earlier that year is unknown.)
http://www.whitegum.com/livedate/rarecuts.htm
Unfortunately, it’s hard to say how much more of their 1966 demos might survive. Their reels were not well-taken care of at the time, and the survivors are locked up in the Vault with little chance of release.
David Lemieux talked a bit about his selection for the Rare Cuts CD, from a box of mostly unlabeled old reels from Bear’s collection:
“It was about 15, 20 reels of tape. Some were blank. Some were garbage. Some were what you hear… We originally focused on a two-disc set and what I was finding at that point was material that was a little less compelling, that one disc made it absolutely perfect.”
For early Dead collectors (or historians), it’s not too joyful to hear that Rare Cuts could have been a 2-CD set, but they decided one disc would be stronger! A very few more selections have also been aired on the Taper’s Section (listed in my “1966 Songs” post), but how much more remains in the Vault is a mystery.
There are a couple more circulating tracks of Pigpen’s songs that may come from the 1966 demos. There’s a very nice studio cut of Smokestack Lightning (somewhat improbably paired with the Anthem sessions on the Archive), and there is a great 1966 recording of Who Do You Love which circulated on tape, but sadly seems unavailable digitally.
Of course the Dead were not doing all these studio recordings just for the joy of hearing themselves, or for the delight of posterity. While Bear had a mania for taping the band for his “sonic journals” and playbacks, the studio time must have had a more specific purpose. What was the band doing making basically a vanity record for Gene Estribou and his tiny record label anyway?
Scully hints at the reason, when talking about the Dead’s mid-’66 demos:
“Suddenly antennae begin twitching in glass & steel skyscrapers in L.A. Corporate dogs are sent to sniff around. Talent scouts in sharkskin suits, getting on planes and showing up at the ballrooms. All of the major record labels virtually overnight establish branch offices in San Francisco. And we begin to attract serious attention from the L.A. pack. Tom Donahue…talks Warner Brothers into checking us out… Tom Donahue is making trips down to Warner Brothers himself on behalf of [his label] Autumn Records, and mentions us to them. We are a little wary of getting involved with a major label, but over the next few months we warm up to the idea. Then Warners starts sending people to come and hear us. Early summer of ’66 some executives from Burbank make several trips from San Francisco to see us play.”
This is more or less accurate (though major-label interest in the Dead and the SF scene may not have been quite so intense as early as mid-’66).
Although Tom Donahue had rejected the Dead for Autumn Records back in fall 1965, his opinion of them had gone up considerably since then. Unfortunately, Autumn Records had also gone into deep decline in the meantime, and the company ended in early 1966.
Donahue said, “We got into desperate trouble. The studio had locked us out for the $10,000 we owed them and they were holding all our tapes. So we made a deal with Warner Bros. Records and sold them all our acts.”
In August ’66, Donahue urged his friend Joe Smith (promotional director at Warner Bros) to see the Dead at the Avalon (on Aug 19 or 20). The story was recounted in the book San Francisco Nights –
Smith remembered: “They were playing this weekend at the Avalon and I was supposed to meet them late, after the gig… So there we were, walking up the steps of this startling place, and there were these kids lying around painting each other’s bodies, and all these lights and smells everywhere. Somebody wanted to dance with my wife. I told her, ‘Don’t come with me to meet the band. You must understand.’ The Grateful Dead: even the name was intimidating. What did it mean? No one knew.”
Donahue: “Joe told me that night, ‘Tom, I don’t think Jack Warner will ever understand this. I don’t know if I understand it myself, but I really feel like they’re good.’ I told him, ‘You’ve got to sign them, because this is where it’s going.’”
Smith: “I was talking to all of them. They always moved in a phalanx, and the ones I really remember were their managers, Rock Scully and Danny Rifkin. Those two were scammers from eight miles back. I could figure them out…the others were out in space somewhere. Garcia was the most visible, but he refused to speak for the group. Pigpen never said ten words, and Lesh was very nasty, constantly negative, because I was a record-company guy and he was a serious musician. We had this conversation about the right kind of equipment to record with, and I later found out that the stuff they wanted hadn’t been invented yet. Lesh felt they were selling out by not getting it… I told them I wanted them, that we were a good record company. That was before I found out that to them, every record company was square. They lived in terror of being ripped off.”
Nonetheless, both sides were interested enough to get a contract discussion going, and just a month later, September 30, the contract with Warner Bros was settled. (Though the Dead themselves hesitated to sign it until December!) The recording sessions for their first album down in Los Angeles soon followed.
So the Dead may have had a couple purposes in recording various studio demos in mid-’66. Possibly they were more eager to sign to a major record label than they let on, and wanted to have good demos available to offer (plus a nice ‘indie’ single to their name). Just as likely, they were checking out the various small, local post-Autumn Records labels in San Francisco, in the belief that they would have more control over their music and releases than they would on a major label. If so, the Scorpio Records experience that summer would have been a letdown, and may have been one reason they ended up signing to Warners so quickly. (Note Lesh’s interest in getting the right recording equipment!)
Scully suggests that even before Warners came knocking, the Dead had been hoping to record an album – at that stage, their studio disillusionment had yet to arrive, and a studio album would have seemed an obvious step. But who would record and release it? It must have seemed like a happy stroke of fate that Joe Smith would turn up shortly after the Scorpio single was dropped into an uninterested world. And the promises of unlimited studio time, complete creative control, RCA Studio facilities, and the same engineer who’d recorded the Rolling Stones, must have been quite tantalizing after lugging their amps up to Estribou’s fifth-floor home studio and sneaking into Healy’s commercial studio after dark…
September 29, 2011
The Dead & Glastonbury Fair
In June 1972, two triple albums came out that included live, unreleased Grateful Dead music. The Fillmore: The Last Days album featured Casey Jones & Johnny B Goode from the Dead’s 7/2/71 concert at the Fillmore West, a year earlier. But deadheads in the US might not have known that in the UK at the same time, a Dark Star from the recent European tour was also being released on an obscure, limited-edition triple-album commemorating the Glastonbury Fair in June 1971.
The Europe ’72 album would not be released until November, as the Dead spent months overdubbing their live tracks in the studio – but while they were still in Europe, the Dead had mixed and donated this Dark Star specially for the Glastonbury album. While the Dead were quick to play benefits and festivals, they almost never offered their live performances for release on compilation albums. In fact this would be the last live recording they donated to anyone, and the only non-overdubbed Europe ’72 performance to be released, until the mid-‘90s.
An interesting tale lies behind this Dark Star...
Our story begins back in 1971, when the Dead flew to France. As Phil Lesh wrote, “One day in June ’71 an offer came in out of the blue for us to play a big festival near Paris... Someone must have decided that it would be hip to have at least one American band; why they chose us I’ll never know. Nonetheless, we jumped at the chance. Upon arrival, we learned that the festival had been rained out...”
Bill Kreutzmann recalled the next year: “We tried to play once in Paris. The festival was rained off, and we ended up playing for the local farmers and little kids… We just had a giant party.” They were staying at the Chateau d’Herouville for a few days, and although they didn’t do any recording in the new studio that was on the premises, they did play a spontaneous solstice show on June 21 for the residents of Herouville. It was a party the Dead would fondly remember.
Over in England, another solstice festival was starting up: the Glastonbury Fair, which ran from June 22-26. The Glastonbury promoters had the same idea as the French promoters – a big rock festival just wasn’t complete without the Grateful Dead! So the Dead were invited. Unfortunately, though it would have been but a short trip to England from France, they decided not to go, and just flew home.
As was written in the Book of the Dead (printed in London, May ’72): “Last summer there was a surprise flight to Paris to play a festival that was rained off. It was hoped then that they might play at Glastonbury. ‘We didn’t go because somebody told us it was a sea of mud, and we weren’t about to take our equipment through that, having just been rained out in Paris,’ says Phil Lesh. They were disappointed; they’d like to play at Glastonbury, it is one of Lesh’s special projects, but as Garcia says: ‘It just didn’t seem right at the time.’”
As it turned out, the Glastonbury Festival went quite well, with good sunny weather, joyous hippie crowds, and free music. As one newsletter reported: “For the people who came it was all they could have asked for. About 8,000, together for nearly a week to hear 35 groups, sit in the sun, get stoned, make love, and roam around in the beautiful countryside – all for free… Even though the long-awaited and much-talked about superstars The Dead, Airplane, CSN&Y etc, never actually made it, the music was very good and continuous.”
The Dead actually shared a lot of the mystical ideas that lay behind the Glastonbury festival.
This site describes the original festival –
http://www.ukrockfestivals.com/glasmenu.html
Andrew Kerr, who organized the festival, said, “There seemed to be a need for a truly free festival. All the others had some profit motive behind them.”
A contemporary news article wrote that Kerr chose Glastonbury as the site because “Glastonbury Abbey is supposed to have been built as a spiritual successor to Stonehenge, and in accord with the same hidden elements of geometry and numerology… [Kerr] claims he is trying to recreate a prehistoric science, whose huge energies are not recognized by modern society.
“His ideas are based on the writings of antiquarian John Michell, who in a book called The View Over Atlantis, recently elucidated the spiritual engineering which, he says, was known over the ancient world. All bodies in the universe, according to Michell, give off natural energy… At the summer solstice, energies from the planets, the sun, and the constellations are at their height. The earth gives off energies through certain valves in its surface, called blind springs. The Great Pyramid in Egypt, Stonehenge itself, and the great pre-reformation Gothic churches were designed to accumulate this terrestrial current, to conduct the solar spark and fuse the two.
“For the festival, Kerr has had his own pyramid of steel girders built over a blind spring…exactly a tenth of the size of the Great Pyramid… ‘Imagine,’ says Kerr, ‘we’re going to concentrate the celestial fire and pump it into the planet to stimulate growth… I am sure we shall all experience something very wonderful.’”
Lesh had a synchronous experience in France during the days the Glastonbury fair was being put together: “For some time, I had been reading in an alternate history of consciousness…that earlier cultures might have been vastly more advanced in some areas of wisdom than we. The research I’d been doing in sacred geometry and ancient earth science had revealed the existence of a completely new perspective on spiritual history, especially the knowledge that many Christian holy places in Europe…had been erected over ‘pagan’ sites of worship, and those in turn were sited upon or near places of geomantic power, involving currents of telluric energy and underground springs.” Lesh visited the Notre Dame cathedral, as one of these sites of power.
On arriving in England in April 1972, Lesh and Garcia lost no time in visiting Stonehenge and Glastonbury, and were particularly impressed by Glastonbury Tor, an ancient hill used as a place of worship in medieval times. Lesh wrote that they “had become fascinated by the lore and legend surrounding this area, and while on the road had shared many books about its connection with Arthurian legend.”
McNally writes that Lesh had started studying “John Michell, who was the contemporary father of geomancy, the study of ley lines, lines of magnetism and power on earth. Ley lines form a grid on the earth that connects megalithic power spots like the ancient stone circles. It was upon these sites that old English churches were frequently built, which was how early Christianity co-opted the ancient Druidic/goddess religion.”
Per the Book of the Dead, on Sunday, April 9, "Phil Lesh went to talk to flying saucer expert John Michell."
Steve Silberman writes how Lesh & Garcia toured England’s ‘sacred sites’ and “hung out with author John Michell, whose book The View Over Atlantis impressed them with its meditations on ley lines, vectors of power running through particular locations on the earth – a phenomenon they’d noticed themselves, musing on why they seemed to play better in certain places.”
Lesh was quite taken by Stonehenge: “It clarified my whole idea of trying to put our music into a place, how it would change. How it could be different. And the whole concept of places of power…so much consciousness poured into it, that it still vibrates.”
The Dead wouldn’t put this idea into action until Egypt ’78, with dubious success. But it is obvious how much Lesh’s ideas were in accord with Andrew Kerr’s, and why Lesh would have regretted not playing at the Glastonbury festival! As late as 1981, Lesh visited the Glastonbury site and (Alan Trist writes) “examined the pyramid stage built on the line from Stonehenge to Glastonbury Tor and scaled to some fraction of the Great Pyramid.” Lesh says he was hoping “to discuss the possibility of playing the famed festival at midsummer, our contemporary version of Druidical solstice rites. Alas, it never happened…”
Kerr had located the Glastonbury Fair stage according to the principles of ‘sacred geometry’: the stage site, he wrote, “is linked to Stonehenge, the Glastonbury Zodiac, and the great cosmic pattern of ley lines and energy points,” and he built the pyramidal stage so it would be in alignment with the sunrise and the constellations. “The stage at Glastonbury Fair was built in the form of the Great Pyramid on a powerful blind spring in the hope that it would draw to it beneficial astrological influence into our tired planet. We hoped that people would go away feeling a lot better for the experience, more creative, happier, and more appreciative of the wonders of the Universe…”
In organizing the festival as a free event, Kerr and the other promoters had lost quite a bit of money. Kerr wrote, “Unfortunately you can’t put on anything these days without it costing a lot of money… All the bread it took up to now has been given without thought of any profit. Everyone gave their ability, their energy, their love… If you have any more to give, it would make us feel even better. Glastonbury Fair has started something which must not be allowed to stop. The energy, the ability, the impetus can now be used to do more research… Solstice Capers Limited are forming an ecological trust which will enable nuts like us to continue the experiment. We hope to acquire an island off the west coast of Scotland where we can play music to the land and learn to live in harmony with the Universe…”
In early 1972 Kerr had the idea of putting together an album of music by the bands who’d played at Glastonbury, as one way of raising the money. (A film of the festival was also being edited, and was released in May ’72.) A number of bands were contributing tracks – and though the Dead hadn’t even played there, Kerr asked them as well!
The Book of the Dead tells us that when the Dead came to England in ‘72: “In London this time they were approached by Andrew Kerr, who organised the Festival at great financial loss, to lay down some tracks for the double LP he is putting together to recoup money. Garcia and Lesh both hope the band can do it, if they aren’t too wasted by months on the road…”
The Dead decided not to wait til they were back in the US, but arranged some studio time on their return trip to London in May. Blair Jackson writes: “There was a plan afoot before the tour for the Dead to spend a few days in London after the Lyceum shows, to do some recording at Olympic Studios, but that was abandoned early on. The British engineers they wanted to work with weren’t available, and besides, they’d just recorded their entire tour and had the prospect of wading through…17 miles of tape.”
It’s interesting to speculate what the Dead might have recorded – a studio version of He’s Gone or other new songs? – but they used the London studio time to select and mix one of the live tracks they’d taped.
Alan Trist writes that while they were playing at the London Lyceum in May, “Garcia, Matthews and I went down to a studio in Soho to mix a track from the earlier Wembley Stadium concerts… John Coleman of Revelation Enterprises was producing an album to benefit the empty coffers of Solstice Capers, the organizers of the previous year’s inaugural Glastonbury Fair. We were on our way with a contribution from the Dead…
The year before, a visionary Englishman, Andrew Kerr, had put forward the idea that a festival in the heart of Southwest England’s megalithic countryside would be attractive to the band… They couldn’t make it in 1971, but now they agreed to donate a 24-minute Dark Star as part of a commemorative album to help the Fair continue.”
The resulting Revelation Enterprises release, Glastonbury Fayre, turned out to be a lavish triple-album set:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glastonbury_Fayre_(album)
There’s a link there to the allmusic review – and there’s also a very wordy review of the album here:
http://www.headheritage.co.uk/unsung/review/1610
It’s said that only 5,000 copies were distributed in the UK, making the original album a rare collector’s item. As the review says, it was “released in the summer of 1972 with the aim of clawing back some of the money lost in the throwing of the ‘first’ Glastonbury festival…and featuring music recorded at that event along with donated contributions from other sources by artists who had played or were sympathetic to the cause.”
There was a mix of live and studio tracks from artists who’d played at the 1971 festival like Hawkwind, Gong, and the Pink Fairies (only some of which had actually been recorded at Glastonbury), and donations from other luminaries. The Grateful Dead took pride of place on side A.
The Dead’s track, titled ‘Dark Star…bury’, was 24 minutes of the Dark Star from 4/8/72.
Now this is famed as one of the Dead’s peak Dark Stars, with an ending that defines the heights they could reach. It’s also one of the only non-Live/Dead Dark Stars that’s been the subject of a long musical analysis, which is well worth reading:
http://www.ridethewind.org/DarkStar040872Odd-essay.htm.htm
(The author points out that since ’73 he’s listened frequently to “the 24 minute extract (5.28 – 29.43) that the Dead gave to the…‘Glastonbury Fayre’ LP as a token of apology for not making the 1971 solstice Festival.”)
It was the second live Dark Star to be released (and the last until the ‘90s), and a very interesting choice. Of course Dark Star was probably out of consideration for the Europe ’72 album since it had been on a live album just three years earlier. Also, the ‘special’ cosmic qualities of Dark Star as a song would have made it a natural selection for the Glastonbury Fayre album.
It’s hard to say whether the Dead picked this Dark Star because it was particularly magical, or simply because it had been played in London and so was geographically the closest Star to Glastonbury! They were familiar with their tapes, so by the end of the tour they already knew what the best performances had been. (The Book of the Dead mentions that back on the boat journey to Denmark, they had listened to the tapes of the Wembley shows.)
Dennis “Wiz” Leonard, on the Alembic taping crew, writes: “I would write [the setlists] on the tape boxes… We would chat on our intercom after songs, and Matthews, Betty, and I would decide how many stars to give a song: three stars meant it was a really good performance! The star system was used when we got back home in order to focus on candidates for the Europe ’72 album.” (The few tapeboxes that have been reproduced show that they were rather sparing with their stars, along with a few notes, such as 5/10/72 Amsterdam: “This is dynamite,” or 5/26/72 London: “We’re all really stoned now.”)
The mix is quite democratic, with Garcia off on one side, Godchaux on the other, and Lesh and Weir in the middle. Comparatively, this tends to emphasize Keith’s contributions. (And here is a point where I must complain that the new box-set mix has buried Keith in the back for some senseless reason, though he was still up all right in the Steppin’ Out mix. This was a major error by the 2011 mixing crew...)
That Dark Star was 31:30, hence too long for an album side – LP records generally did not go over 25 minutes a side, or the sound quality would go down (the Dead’s 24-minute track is the longest side on the Glastonbury Fayre set). Since the Dead had to cut somewhere, they dropped the intro of Dark Star, and the track fades in about 5:30 into Dark Star, during an expectant moment. The effect is actually similar to the fade-in on Live/Dead!
Dark Star continues to nearly the end – they leave out the last two minutes, fading as the band starts the descending Mind Left Body-type riff. (I would’ve liked it to go for another minute or so to capture the concluding happy groove, but they apparently felt it was complete enough – at any rate, most of the highlights of this Star were included.)
And so, the Glastonbury Fayre album was quickly released to an uncertain world, and the Dead returned to California to record studio overdubs for Europe ’72 over the next few months. (After which, the Europe tapes were left untouched until the Hundred Year Hall release in 1995. The Dead didn’t contribute unreleased live tracks to any more benefit albums until 1994, when they gave the 3/29/90 Bird Song to a CD raising funds for Bay Area music school programs.)
The Dark Star excerpt from the Glastonbury album eventually started circulating in deadhead collections as a tape filler, prompting many to wonder about the full Dark Star it had come from. The horrid 4/8/72 audience tape that was available didn’t satisfy the few who tried to listen to it. Finally, in 1996 David Gans played the whole Dark Star suite on his radio show for all to enjoy; and in 2000 the entire show emerged at last.
The Glastonbury festival was later revived in 1979 to stimulate the tired planet, and continues to this day, though the Dead never made it there...
The Europe ’72 album would not be released until November, as the Dead spent months overdubbing their live tracks in the studio – but while they were still in Europe, the Dead had mixed and donated this Dark Star specially for the Glastonbury album. While the Dead were quick to play benefits and festivals, they almost never offered their live performances for release on compilation albums. In fact this would be the last live recording they donated to anyone, and the only non-overdubbed Europe ’72 performance to be released, until the mid-‘90s.
An interesting tale lies behind this Dark Star...
Our story begins back in 1971, when the Dead flew to France. As Phil Lesh wrote, “One day in June ’71 an offer came in out of the blue for us to play a big festival near Paris... Someone must have decided that it would be hip to have at least one American band; why they chose us I’ll never know. Nonetheless, we jumped at the chance. Upon arrival, we learned that the festival had been rained out...”
Bill Kreutzmann recalled the next year: “We tried to play once in Paris. The festival was rained off, and we ended up playing for the local farmers and little kids… We just had a giant party.” They were staying at the Chateau d’Herouville for a few days, and although they didn’t do any recording in the new studio that was on the premises, they did play a spontaneous solstice show on June 21 for the residents of Herouville. It was a party the Dead would fondly remember.
Over in England, another solstice festival was starting up: the Glastonbury Fair, which ran from June 22-26. The Glastonbury promoters had the same idea as the French promoters – a big rock festival just wasn’t complete without the Grateful Dead! So the Dead were invited. Unfortunately, though it would have been but a short trip to England from France, they decided not to go, and just flew home.
As was written in the Book of the Dead (printed in London, May ’72): “Last summer there was a surprise flight to Paris to play a festival that was rained off. It was hoped then that they might play at Glastonbury. ‘We didn’t go because somebody told us it was a sea of mud, and we weren’t about to take our equipment through that, having just been rained out in Paris,’ says Phil Lesh. They were disappointed; they’d like to play at Glastonbury, it is one of Lesh’s special projects, but as Garcia says: ‘It just didn’t seem right at the time.’”
As it turned out, the Glastonbury Festival went quite well, with good sunny weather, joyous hippie crowds, and free music. As one newsletter reported: “For the people who came it was all they could have asked for. About 8,000, together for nearly a week to hear 35 groups, sit in the sun, get stoned, make love, and roam around in the beautiful countryside – all for free… Even though the long-awaited and much-talked about superstars The Dead, Airplane, CSN&Y etc, never actually made it, the music was very good and continuous.”
The Dead actually shared a lot of the mystical ideas that lay behind the Glastonbury festival.
This site describes the original festival –
http://www.ukrockfestivals.com/glasmenu.html
Andrew Kerr, who organized the festival, said, “There seemed to be a need for a truly free festival. All the others had some profit motive behind them.”
A contemporary news article wrote that Kerr chose Glastonbury as the site because “Glastonbury Abbey is supposed to have been built as a spiritual successor to Stonehenge, and in accord with the same hidden elements of geometry and numerology… [Kerr] claims he is trying to recreate a prehistoric science, whose huge energies are not recognized by modern society.
“His ideas are based on the writings of antiquarian John Michell, who in a book called The View Over Atlantis, recently elucidated the spiritual engineering which, he says, was known over the ancient world. All bodies in the universe, according to Michell, give off natural energy… At the summer solstice, energies from the planets, the sun, and the constellations are at their height. The earth gives off energies through certain valves in its surface, called blind springs. The Great Pyramid in Egypt, Stonehenge itself, and the great pre-reformation Gothic churches were designed to accumulate this terrestrial current, to conduct the solar spark and fuse the two.
“For the festival, Kerr has had his own pyramid of steel girders built over a blind spring…exactly a tenth of the size of the Great Pyramid… ‘Imagine,’ says Kerr, ‘we’re going to concentrate the celestial fire and pump it into the planet to stimulate growth… I am sure we shall all experience something very wonderful.’”
Lesh had a synchronous experience in France during the days the Glastonbury fair was being put together: “For some time, I had been reading in an alternate history of consciousness…that earlier cultures might have been vastly more advanced in some areas of wisdom than we. The research I’d been doing in sacred geometry and ancient earth science had revealed the existence of a completely new perspective on spiritual history, especially the knowledge that many Christian holy places in Europe…had been erected over ‘pagan’ sites of worship, and those in turn were sited upon or near places of geomantic power, involving currents of telluric energy and underground springs.” Lesh visited the Notre Dame cathedral, as one of these sites of power.
On arriving in England in April 1972, Lesh and Garcia lost no time in visiting Stonehenge and Glastonbury, and were particularly impressed by Glastonbury Tor, an ancient hill used as a place of worship in medieval times. Lesh wrote that they “had become fascinated by the lore and legend surrounding this area, and while on the road had shared many books about its connection with Arthurian legend.”
McNally writes that Lesh had started studying “John Michell, who was the contemporary father of geomancy, the study of ley lines, lines of magnetism and power on earth. Ley lines form a grid on the earth that connects megalithic power spots like the ancient stone circles. It was upon these sites that old English churches were frequently built, which was how early Christianity co-opted the ancient Druidic/goddess religion.”
Per the Book of the Dead, on Sunday, April 9, "Phil Lesh went to talk to flying saucer expert John Michell."
Steve Silberman writes how Lesh & Garcia toured England’s ‘sacred sites’ and “hung out with author John Michell, whose book The View Over Atlantis impressed them with its meditations on ley lines, vectors of power running through particular locations on the earth – a phenomenon they’d noticed themselves, musing on why they seemed to play better in certain places.”
Lesh was quite taken by Stonehenge: “It clarified my whole idea of trying to put our music into a place, how it would change. How it could be different. And the whole concept of places of power…so much consciousness poured into it, that it still vibrates.”
The Dead wouldn’t put this idea into action until Egypt ’78, with dubious success. But it is obvious how much Lesh’s ideas were in accord with Andrew Kerr’s, and why Lesh would have regretted not playing at the Glastonbury festival! As late as 1981, Lesh visited the Glastonbury site and (Alan Trist writes) “examined the pyramid stage built on the line from Stonehenge to Glastonbury Tor and scaled to some fraction of the Great Pyramid.” Lesh says he was hoping “to discuss the possibility of playing the famed festival at midsummer, our contemporary version of Druidical solstice rites. Alas, it never happened…”
Kerr had located the Glastonbury Fair stage according to the principles of ‘sacred geometry’: the stage site, he wrote, “is linked to Stonehenge, the Glastonbury Zodiac, and the great cosmic pattern of ley lines and energy points,” and he built the pyramidal stage so it would be in alignment with the sunrise and the constellations. “The stage at Glastonbury Fair was built in the form of the Great Pyramid on a powerful blind spring in the hope that it would draw to it beneficial astrological influence into our tired planet. We hoped that people would go away feeling a lot better for the experience, more creative, happier, and more appreciative of the wonders of the Universe…”
In organizing the festival as a free event, Kerr and the other promoters had lost quite a bit of money. Kerr wrote, “Unfortunately you can’t put on anything these days without it costing a lot of money… All the bread it took up to now has been given without thought of any profit. Everyone gave their ability, their energy, their love… If you have any more to give, it would make us feel even better. Glastonbury Fair has started something which must not be allowed to stop. The energy, the ability, the impetus can now be used to do more research… Solstice Capers Limited are forming an ecological trust which will enable nuts like us to continue the experiment. We hope to acquire an island off the west coast of Scotland where we can play music to the land and learn to live in harmony with the Universe…”
In early 1972 Kerr had the idea of putting together an album of music by the bands who’d played at Glastonbury, as one way of raising the money. (A film of the festival was also being edited, and was released in May ’72.) A number of bands were contributing tracks – and though the Dead hadn’t even played there, Kerr asked them as well!
The Book of the Dead tells us that when the Dead came to England in ‘72: “In London this time they were approached by Andrew Kerr, who organised the Festival at great financial loss, to lay down some tracks for the double LP he is putting together to recoup money. Garcia and Lesh both hope the band can do it, if they aren’t too wasted by months on the road…”
The Dead decided not to wait til they were back in the US, but arranged some studio time on their return trip to London in May. Blair Jackson writes: “There was a plan afoot before the tour for the Dead to spend a few days in London after the Lyceum shows, to do some recording at Olympic Studios, but that was abandoned early on. The British engineers they wanted to work with weren’t available, and besides, they’d just recorded their entire tour and had the prospect of wading through…17 miles of tape.”
It’s interesting to speculate what the Dead might have recorded – a studio version of He’s Gone or other new songs? – but they used the London studio time to select and mix one of the live tracks they’d taped.
Alan Trist writes that while they were playing at the London Lyceum in May, “Garcia, Matthews and I went down to a studio in Soho to mix a track from the earlier Wembley Stadium concerts… John Coleman of Revelation Enterprises was producing an album to benefit the empty coffers of Solstice Capers, the organizers of the previous year’s inaugural Glastonbury Fair. We were on our way with a contribution from the Dead…
The year before, a visionary Englishman, Andrew Kerr, had put forward the idea that a festival in the heart of Southwest England’s megalithic countryside would be attractive to the band… They couldn’t make it in 1971, but now they agreed to donate a 24-minute Dark Star as part of a commemorative album to help the Fair continue.”
The resulting Revelation Enterprises release, Glastonbury Fayre, turned out to be a lavish triple-album set:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glastonbury_Fayre_(album)
There’s a link there to the allmusic review – and there’s also a very wordy review of the album here:
http://www.headheritage.co.uk/unsung/review/1610
It’s said that only 5,000 copies were distributed in the UK, making the original album a rare collector’s item. As the review says, it was “released in the summer of 1972 with the aim of clawing back some of the money lost in the throwing of the ‘first’ Glastonbury festival…and featuring music recorded at that event along with donated contributions from other sources by artists who had played or were sympathetic to the cause.”
There was a mix of live and studio tracks from artists who’d played at the 1971 festival like Hawkwind, Gong, and the Pink Fairies (only some of which had actually been recorded at Glastonbury), and donations from other luminaries. The Grateful Dead took pride of place on side A.
The Dead’s track, titled ‘Dark Star…bury’, was 24 minutes of the Dark Star from 4/8/72.
Now this is famed as one of the Dead’s peak Dark Stars, with an ending that defines the heights they could reach. It’s also one of the only non-Live/Dead Dark Stars that’s been the subject of a long musical analysis, which is well worth reading:
http://www.ridethewind.org/DarkStar040872Odd-essay.htm.htm
(The author points out that since ’73 he’s listened frequently to “the 24 minute extract (5.28 – 29.43) that the Dead gave to the…‘Glastonbury Fayre’ LP as a token of apology for not making the 1971 solstice Festival.”)
It was the second live Dark Star to be released (and the last until the ‘90s), and a very interesting choice. Of course Dark Star was probably out of consideration for the Europe ’72 album since it had been on a live album just three years earlier. Also, the ‘special’ cosmic qualities of Dark Star as a song would have made it a natural selection for the Glastonbury Fayre album.
It’s hard to say whether the Dead picked this Dark Star because it was particularly magical, or simply because it had been played in London and so was geographically the closest Star to Glastonbury! They were familiar with their tapes, so by the end of the tour they already knew what the best performances had been. (The Book of the Dead mentions that back on the boat journey to Denmark, they had listened to the tapes of the Wembley shows.)
Dennis “Wiz” Leonard, on the Alembic taping crew, writes: “I would write [the setlists] on the tape boxes… We would chat on our intercom after songs, and Matthews, Betty, and I would decide how many stars to give a song: three stars meant it was a really good performance! The star system was used when we got back home in order to focus on candidates for the Europe ’72 album.” (The few tapeboxes that have been reproduced show that they were rather sparing with their stars, along with a few notes, such as 5/10/72 Amsterdam: “This is dynamite,” or 5/26/72 London: “We’re all really stoned now.”)
The mix is quite democratic, with Garcia off on one side, Godchaux on the other, and Lesh and Weir in the middle. Comparatively, this tends to emphasize Keith’s contributions. (And here is a point where I must complain that the new box-set mix has buried Keith in the back for some senseless reason, though he was still up all right in the Steppin’ Out mix. This was a major error by the 2011 mixing crew...)
That Dark Star was 31:30, hence too long for an album side – LP records generally did not go over 25 minutes a side, or the sound quality would go down (the Dead’s 24-minute track is the longest side on the Glastonbury Fayre set). Since the Dead had to cut somewhere, they dropped the intro of Dark Star, and the track fades in about 5:30 into Dark Star, during an expectant moment. The effect is actually similar to the fade-in on Live/Dead!
Dark Star continues to nearly the end – they leave out the last two minutes, fading as the band starts the descending Mind Left Body-type riff. (I would’ve liked it to go for another minute or so to capture the concluding happy groove, but they apparently felt it was complete enough – at any rate, most of the highlights of this Star were included.)
And so, the Glastonbury Fayre album was quickly released to an uncertain world, and the Dead returned to California to record studio overdubs for Europe ’72 over the next few months. (After which, the Europe tapes were left untouched until the Hundred Year Hall release in 1995. The Dead didn’t contribute unreleased live tracks to any more benefit albums until 1994, when they gave the 3/29/90 Bird Song to a CD raising funds for Bay Area music school programs.)
The Dark Star excerpt from the Glastonbury album eventually started circulating in deadhead collections as a tape filler, prompting many to wonder about the full Dark Star it had come from. The horrid 4/8/72 audience tape that was available didn’t satisfy the few who tried to listen to it. Finally, in 1996 David Gans played the whole Dark Star suite on his radio show for all to enjoy; and in 2000 the entire show emerged at last.
The Glastonbury festival was later revived in 1979 to stimulate the tired planet, and continues to this day, though the Dead never made it there...
September 26, 2011
A Country Jam in the Chapel
Jerry Garcia, May 1972: "We haven't been playing enough. I'm a music junkie and I have to play every day. The gigs are too far apart. It's like we're not fucking off enough to enjoy that, or not playing enough to enjoy that."
Bob Weir: "On our days off when we were traveling, we would have our acoustic guitars, and Jerry and I and whoever was around - if the New Riders were traveling with us, we'd all fall together and kick stuff around. A lot of it was folk material of one sort or another. We had a whole repertoire that we never played onstage - country gospel tunes that we sang in three- and four-part harmony, and all that kind of stuff. We did that just for fun, and for the exercise."
John Dawson: "The best part was when Garcia, Weir and I took our guitars and jammed in this amazing 10th-century chapel. It was really, really great sounding. It was kind of eerie, especially thinking about all the people who'd been through there over the centuries."
Garcia, Weir & the New Riders - St John's Jerusalem chapel in Kent, May 1972:
Bob Weir: "On our days off when we were traveling, we would have our acoustic guitars, and Jerry and I and whoever was around - if the New Riders were traveling with us, we'd all fall together and kick stuff around. A lot of it was folk material of one sort or another. We had a whole repertoire that we never played onstage - country gospel tunes that we sang in three- and four-part harmony, and all that kind of stuff. We did that just for fun, and for the exercise."
John Dawson: "The best part was when Garcia, Weir and I took our guitars and jammed in this amazing 10th-century chapel. It was really, really great sounding. It was kind of eerie, especially thinking about all the people who'd been through there over the centuries."
Garcia, Weir & the New Riders - St John's Jerusalem chapel in Kent, May 1972:
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)