Thoughts On The Dead

I've been ambivalent about seeing The Dead when they play Madison Square Garden in April. For me, what I really loved about the Grateful Dead was Jerry Garcia. I loved his sweetness and soulfulness, and how he was the linchpin of an American music that took so much in and spanned so much - rock, R&B, folk, jazz, experimental, bluegrass, psychedelia and more. When the Grateful Dead were on, they had a power that was overwhelming and undeniable.

But after reading about the shows and listening to Monday night's show at Roseland, I must admit that I'm excited for the shows. They're playing tight, if a little tentatively - but that is to be expected given that the tour is just starting. And vocally, it's much stronger than I would have thought. It's not that I won't miss Jerry - I will. But listening to the show, you can feel his spirit. And more importantly, I think the tour will be less a celebration of the band, and more a celebration of the songs, which gain resonance with each passing year. While techies and futurists continue to blather on about how the Grateful Dead gave away their music (they didn't), they'll continue to miss the most important point - it was about the songs and the shows. If new bands write songs as good as the ones on Workingman's Dead, American Beauty and Europe '72, and perform with the power that the Grateful Dead did at their best, they'll need to worry far less about new business models and how to market themselves.

*Interestingly enough, Monday's shows in New York conincided with the 20th anniversary of my atttending my first Grateful Dead show in Greensboro, North Carolina. Here's an account of how I got there.

Download: "Althea" 3/30/09, New York, NY

Bootleg Friday: Grateful Dead & Etta James, 1982

As 1982 turned into 1983, the Grateful Dead, as per custom, were onstage at the Oakland Auditorium, bringing in the new year. Their set that night was an uneven one, and during a somewhat tepid "(Turn On Your) Lovelight," Grateful Dead rhythm guitarist and vocalist Bob Weir brought Etta James on stage, and immediately, the energy shot up several notches. The combination may have seemed an unusual one, but Etta brought the Dead back to an important part of their roots - when Pigpen, an unruly and low down blues and r&b devotee, fronted the band.

With the Tower Of Power horns behind them, Etta fronted the band for a four song mini set, including her own "Tell Mama," Jimmy Reed's "Baby What You Want Me To Do," Wilson Pickett's "In The Midnight Hour," and Otis Redding's "Hard To Handle." I don't know if the Dead were "the baddest blues band in the land," as Etta called them, but the combination for what I'm sure in the moment was a pretty amazing end to the evening.

Download: "(Turn On Your) Lovelight" 12/31/82, Oakland, CA
Download: "Tell Mama" 12/31/82, Oakland, CA
Download: "Baby What You Want Me To Do" 12/31/82, Oakland, CA
Download: "Hard To Handle" 12/31/82, Oakland, CA
Download: "In The Midnight Hour" 12/31/82, Oakland, CA

Bootleg Friday: Merl Saunders & Jerry Garcia, 1972

This is inexcusably late of me, but losing Merl Saunders, organist extraordinaire, at the end of October was a loss I felt keenly. Saunders played with Jerry Garcia, Grateful Dead, B.B. King, Frank Sinatra, Lionel Hampton, Bonnie Raitt, Miles Davis and many more. His playing was warm, fluid and soulful – with an obvious debt to Jimmy Smith, with whom he studied.

But more importantly, Saunders had a spirit that lit up a room – his playing was immensely joyful, and if you were lucky enough to be in a room in which he was playing, it was almost impossible not to be swept up in the good feelings he conjured. Saying someone is “all about the music,” can occur as cliché, but in Merle’s case, it was the glorious truth.

Today’s Bootleg Friday consists of a few selections from a Jerry Garcia and Merl Saunders show from San Francisco, early in 1972. It features great ensemble playing from both Saunders and Garcia, and it’s heavy on the soul, with some great, extended versions of Dylan, Stevie Wonder and Marvin Gaye classics. Really wonderful stuff.

Download: “It Takes A Lot To Laugh, It Takes A Train To Cry” San Francisco, CA 2/6/72
Download: “Expressway To Your Heart” San Francisco, CA 2/6/72
Download: “When I Paint My Masterpiece” San Francisco, CA 2/6/72
Download: “I Was Made To Love Her” San Francisco, CA 2/6/72
Download: “How Sweet It Is (To Be Loved By You)” San Francisco, CA 2/6/72

Thoughts On Niches and the Long Tail

Nowadays, it’s taken for granted that we live in an era of “niche.” We have several-hundred cable channels, YouTube, websites to appeal to anyone’s deepest interests and literally an infinite amount of entertainment and information options at our disposal. And we are told that reaching a broad audience is now just about impossible. It’s all part of the Chris Anderson’s “Long Tail” thesis; in the future, entertainment products will sell less of more – meaning that there will be fewer blockbusters but more things will sell over time – and it’s been taken for granted, especially by techies, to be true. (Not all of them.)

But is this theory true and does it effect how art is made? Once upon a time, popular art was designed to be, well, popular. Up until the late 70’s, movies and music, even if substantive and complex, were intended to reach as broad an audience as possible. From the 30’s to the 60’s, the biggest Hollywood films were written to reach everyone. In popular music, be it rock or r&b, just about everything was made with a mass audience in mind. Even the godfathers of punk – the Velvet Underground, Iggy and the Stooges and the MC5 - had designs to hit the top. Back then, it was the only game in town.

In left-of center rock, that hasn’t been the case for almost three decades. The failure of 70’s punk to break commercially in the U.S. spawned a self-sustaining alternative music economy where music from the fringe could emerge and thrive, which obviated the need to try to please the mainstream. And in the face of the failure of punk to reach a broad audience, an attitude emerged from the punk and post-punk world that just about any commercial music was to be looked upon with suspicion at best, and utter and complete derision at worst. (That was an attitude fostered in self-defense; the Ramones were devastated when they realized they weren’t going to be an enormous band.) In the post-punk world, just like the folk world of the early 60’s, selling a lot of anything usually inspires cries of “selling out.” (The history of jazz post be-bop is similar – the avant-garde took over the vanguard of the music, its popularity declined, and it ceased to be truly popular music.)

In the R&B world it is, of course, different. In the R&B and Hip-Hop game, you’re either huge, or you haven’t made it. (There are a few exceptions to this – but the alternative hip-hop scene has no real cache in the urban areas where the music comes from.) Dr. Dre and Jay Z brag about being great businessmen. (No revered indie-rocker would ever call himself a businessman.) Black music is still a blockbuster game, no matter what anyone says. While it is true that those blockbusters sell less than they used to, there's no popular black music scene that exists powerfully on the margins the way indie rock does in the rock world. (There's no Pitchfork for black music.) Big hits are venerated in black music. One can't say that about Radiohead or Wilco.

So in the black music game, the Long Tail has no real resonance, but in the world of indie rock and post punk, it does. Why is that? I would assert that it’s because due primarily to cultural differences – i.e., attitudes about the worthiness of the pursuit of popular and mass success, money and rebellion, rather than a fundamental truth about how technology is affecting our consumption of media. The Long Tail is a theory that exists in theory, not reality, and in the veneration of the theory, it has accumulated resonance, and people have begun to work within its confines. So instead of believing that they can reach a big and broad audience, artists who work within the limited vision that they see as possible and "appropriate" for their music. For years, I've seen many talented left-leaning rock artists making insular music designed to reach a narrow audience. And as a result, they make insular and small music with little lasting resonance. And this had been happening way before records stopped selling.

In June, I attended a conference at the Advertising Age convention in New York. At one of the panels I attended, the panelists touted the fashionable wisdom that the “Grateful Dead Model” (where you give your music away and make your money touring) was the way for artists to go. A nice theory, but it ignored the fact that the Dead only made more money on the road because on their best nights, they were transcendent live, and they were pretty crappy record makers. (It also ignored the fact that they never really gave their music away, but that’s another matter.) Not to slag them (they were all smart guys), but I bet they couldn’t name ten Grateful Dead songs between the five of them.

I only bring up the point to remind music lovers that most tech people who come up with these theories don’t really know much about music or art. They see the world through the prism of their world – technology. All the theories in the world about technology and its interaction music can be made irrelevant by one epochal song. Here’s hoping that song comes soon. Niches may be a fact of life, but it is the role of great create art to tear up and expose as folly assumed truths about what’s possible - in both music and in life. And it's fun when great stuff is popular, too.

Of New Commerce And The Grateful Dead Myth

**This piece was written on Thursday. Fortuitous timing - check out Paul Krugman's column in today's NY Times.

I’m attending the Advertising Age 2.0 conference this week, as part of a new music and advertising venture I’m involved in. It’s my first time attending a non-music conference and it’s interesting to hear new terms, new languages and hear the different discussions going on. And yet…it’s all the same.

The first panel I attended was about how the Internet is transforming the advertising world and how advertising, which used to be a controllable, easily measured, one-way communication has become a fragmented, two-way dialogue between advertisers and consumers that’s difficult to monetize and even harder to gauge the effectiveness of. As I was listening, I said to myself, “Uh, I think I’ve heard this somewhere before.” It’s the exact thing the music business has been going through – except in the case of the music business, it’s been going on for the better part of a decade and the resultant carnage to companies, employees and artists (in terms of record sales) has been far more drastic.

The dinner panel I went to was more music business intensive. A lot of talk was about brands and business models, and then to my surprise, the conversation turned to the Grateful Dead, who apparently are being held up as the model to emulate because “they gave away their music for free,” which as the myth goes, ensured them becoming the stadium (and merchandising) juggernaut they were in from the mid-80’s until Garcia’s death in 1995.

Like most myths, this contains the element of truth but are usually used to justify someone else’s ideas of what good “business models” are. Here are some useful separations of myth vs. what actually happened.

Myth #1 – They gave away their music away for free.

The Dead didn’t give away anything for free (with the exception of an occasional free benefit concert). They just didn’t bust tapers at their shows and they turned a blind eye to their fans exchanging live tapes (unless the tapers and/or traders were trying to make a profit). It wasn’t a business model; it was simply an extension of the band’s anti-authoritarian attitude and aversion of control. All of the band’s studio work and their countless live albums were available for pay only.

“I don’t have any desire to control people as to what they’re doing and what they have. There’s something to be said for being able to record an experience you’ve liked, or being able to obtain a recording of it. Actually, we have all that stuff in our own collection of tapes. My responsibility to the notes is over after I’ve played them. At that point I don’t care where they go.” - Jerry Garcia

Myth #2 – “Giving away their music” was the key to their success.

Certainly, the live shows in circulation that hardcore Deadheads traded help build the devotion between the audience and the band, and it helped hardcore Deadheads spread the word. But it was only one element (and probably a smaller one than others) among many.

The Grateful Dead were a touring as opposed to studio band – despite wanting to make great records, and doing so with 1970’s Workingman’s Dead and American Beauty (which took their following up a level in the early 70’s), they were mainly a failure as a recording act. The live show was their strength. Equally influenced by jazz as they were with rock, their devotion to improvisation ensured that each show would be a unique one, never to be repeated. This stood in stark contrast to most rock bands, who played roughly the same set each night. And so they build an enormous cult audience, many of who traveled the country to follow them band; all of which became a story and curiosity in its own right.

In addition, the Grateful Dead live experience wasn’t simply a concert – it encompassed so much more. There was the bazaar outside the show, a self-sustaining economy with everything from veggie burritos, tie-died t-shirts and LSD. There were the Deadheads themselves, thoroughly anachronistic yet welcoming to just about all who entered. Entering a Grateful Dead show was like stepping out of planet earth and into another dimension – and that experience became a ritual and rite of passage for thousands of young Americans for during the course of the band's career.

And what is also conveniently ignored is that the biggest factor in the Dead’s 80’s explosion was what is now called, in new media circles, an “old school driver;” the hit single, “Touch Of Grey,” which went top 10 in 1987. It brought a huge influx of fans (many of who stuck around) and took them from being a band that could sell out arenas, to a stadium band, earning the enormously high grossing touring numbers (and merchandising) they enjoyed in the last years of their career.

Myth #3 – “The Grateful Dead are a great business model to emulate”

Again, this contains an element of truth, but the real story is that the Dead were in serious financial trouble at various points in their career. In the mid to late 70’s and early 80’s, the band may have allowed tape trading, but there was no huge merchandising set up for the band. That all came later, after their late 80’s renaissance. In truth, the band skirted financial difficult for years.

The Grateful Dead were one of the great American bands, but in a climate where everyone is worried about how they are going to get paid for their content, people are confusing the methods of their success for the reasons they were successful. The Grateful Dead became who they were because at their best, the provided an experience of the soul and spirit. Drummer Mickey Hart once said, "The Grateful Dead aren't in the music business. They're in the transportation business," and he was right. They provided a singular experience. Artists and businessmen would do well to concentrate more on the quality of their creation and the singularity of its experience and a little less with the means with which they sell their product.

*This piece from CBS from 1985, just as the Dead scene was getting larger, addresses their appeal from various vantage points. Note that no one says anything about tape trading or getting the music for free.

Sing Sweet Songs To Rock My Soul

August 9th was the 11th anniversary of Jerry Garcia's death and listening to him today, I can't help but think that no band has ever been as critically punished for their fans as have the Grateful Dead. Because they became the epitome of "hippie rock," much of their incredible body of work has been ignored in the post-punk universe that we live in today. It's a shame, because they left behind one of the strongest and most moving body of works in the rock era, one that resonates luminously today.

I first saw the Dead in Greensboro, NC while on spring break in 1989. I was with some friends and another friend of ours, who was doing the whole Dead spring tour, had a problem with the van he was traveling in. He asked me if he and his tour mates could borrow my car so they could see the shows, and I said no. Actually the conversation went something like this:

Friend: "Ben, can't we please borrow your car? Nothing will happen to it."
Me: "No."
Friend: "Do you want to come to the Dead shows with us?"
Me: "No."
Friend: "Drive us to the shows and we'll pay for your tickets both nights."
Me: "No."
Friend: "Drive us to the shows and we'll buy your tickets and put you up in a hotel."
Me: "No."
Friend: "Drive us to the shows, and we'll buy your tickets, put you up in a hotel and pay for your food."
Me: "No."
Friend: "Drive us to the shows and we'll buy your tickets, put you up in a hotel, pay for your food and pay for your drugs."
Me: "Ok."

Much of those two days is a blur to me, but I do remember sitting in the arena before the first show, amidst a sea of tie-dye, feeling like I was on another planet, the mushrooms kicking in, and thinking to myself, "Please God, don't let me become like these people!" I even started singing "God Save The Queen" softly to myself so as to be inoculated against all the hippieness around. I didn't think that highly of the shows, although I certainly didn't dislike it - and I had a great time in general over the two days. But I left Greensboro without thinking much about what I had just seen and heard; it just seemed like a good party. I drove back to Charleston with three Deadheads passed out in my Toyota Tercel, playing Springsteen live at the Roxy in '78 to get my head back to normal.

Fast forward about three and a half months, July 10, 1989, to be exact. It's a stormy night at Giants Stadium, rain pouring down, and I'm on the floor about thirty feet from the front of the stage. I'm totally sober, by the way. The band is playing "Tennessee Jed," and they're nailing it, playing tight and focused. Jerry is smiling at all the heads who are blissed out in the rain and it's a moment between the band and the crowd, unspoken but totally understood by all. I look at the guy next to me, get his attention, and shout, "They're kicking ass!" He doesn't say a word, but grins and returns to the band and his reverie.

It was an ecstatic moment of music, and it made me a fan of the Grateful Dead for life. I went to about thirty more shows over the next five years, and while I certainly saw my share of dud shows, emblematic of a band and band leader in decline, some of my favorite concert moments came from them. And as the years have passed I've come to truly appreciate the depth and breadth of what Garcia and the Dead did, mixing and synthesizing so many styles and genres into something truly original and American. As Bob Dylan said about Garcia after his death, "There are a lot of spaces between the Carter Family, Buddy Holly and Ornette Coleman, a lot of universes, but he filled them all without being a member of any school." And any catalog that includes Workingman's Dead, "Terrapin Station," "Box of Rain," "Ripple," "Ramble On Rose," "Stella Blue," "Loser," "Black Peter," "Althea," "Candyman," "Help On The Way ->Slipknot!->Franklin's Tower," "Brown Eyed Women" and "Foolish Heart" is one that should be regarded in the upper echelon is history of rock.

Photo by Robbi Cohn. Copyright Robbi Cohn.

It's not Garcia's guitar playing that moves me nearly as much as his voice. It was not a particularly strong instrument; it was somewhat thin and limited in range. But damn, could he sing a ballad. As Garcia biographer Blair Jackson wrote, "When Garcia was truly in the moment on his ballads, he was able to communicate the most complex feelings and emotions with a directness and simplicity that could touch almost any soul." A great Garcia performance on songs like "Stella Blue," "Morning Dew," or "So Many Roads" could make the listener stand inside the shoes of the singer, and for a moment, even share the same soul. Those moments are what kept me coming back, and they're the moments that still have me listening. And if you've never understood what the appeal of the Grateful Dead was about, if you can separate their music from their myth and just be present to listen, there are treasures that will rock your soul.