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| From | "Sager, Greg" <greg.sager@bankofamerica.com> |
| Subject | The Dead, gratefully or ungratefully |
| Date | Mon, 14 Jul 2003 02:15:59 -0500 |
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> Date: Sat, 12 Jul 2003 11:20:10 -0700
> From: ronald and karen sanchez <eldeluxe@mcn.net>
> To: audities@smoe.org
> Subject: Re: Greatful Dead
> Message-ID: <3F10515A.9ACEF45E@mcn.net>
>
> I saw the Dead in '68 and they were awful. It was pretty disappointing as
> I'd
> loved the first album. I still think it's my favorite. I have to admit to
> warming up to them, but only through the next four or five albums. Once
> Micky
> Hart left, I thought they lost it. By coincidence I saw the return of MH
> at an
> unannounced gig, well it was billed as Jerry Garcia and friends. That was
> the
> debut of Blues For Allah. It was totally enjoyable. The One From The Vault
> cd
> is from the next gig, which wasn't nearly as good. A year later they
> opened for
> the Who at Oakland. I went late to avoid the crush of 40,000 people and
> only
> saw the end of Johnny B Goode one day and missed them completely the next
> day.
>
As time goes by, I find myself becoming more and more tolerant of
the musical enthusiasms of others that I don't share. Whether that's a sign
of wisdom accrued through aging or of increasing inertia I'll leave for
others to decide. But reading Mike Nicholson's joke about the Grateful Dead
and Sean Palmerston's angry riposte got me to thinking about this, since few
acts have ever irritated me as much as the Grateful Dead. It wasn't so much
their music, since they were never ubiquitous radio fodder even on FM
stations and were thus easily avoided (unless I was at a party long enough
for someone armed with a bong to commandeer the turntable and slip on
*Shakedown Street*). It was more their fans, a great many of whom seemed to
think that the path of enlightenment led to Jerry Garcia's unwashed feet and
that if you didn't like the Dead you were a thoroughly unevolved soul.
I can remember going to a punk show at a small Chicago club in the
eighties the same week that the Dead was playing at Soldier Field, and
hearing the beefy bristle-haired frontman declaim from the stage that the
audience should follow the band downtown to the Soldier Field parking lot
after the gig, where they would apply their Doc Martens to the backsides of
countless hippies and leave "nothing but f***ing patchouli smears all over
the parking lot." The crowd lapped it up. A little extreme, I thought, but I
certainly understood why the Dead in particular seemed to grate on the
punks. It got me to wondering, though, if anything positive can come from
stirring up the negative energy of your fans. Releasing pent-up frustration
through music is a tremendous thing that rock'n'roll does particularly well,
but I'm not sure that breeding an us-versus-them attitude in the process is
a helpful side effect.
It's funny, but the more tribal I get about music (and the power pop
underground is definitely my tribe), the less likely I am to evince the
combative attitude associated with tribalism. Perhaps that's the positive
aspect of what I sometimes consider a negative: my increasing propensity to
wall myself off from music I don't like. I hardly ever listen to the radio
anymore, since I can find out about new bands and songs and hear my favorite
oldies in ways that don't involve having to sit through jam-band or
prog-rock songs over the FM airwaves (not to mention the commercials). Most
of my friends who are active music mavens share similar tastes with mine. My
older friends who have differing tastes for the most part don't listen to
music much anymore (i.e., they don't force me to listen to stuff I don't
like when I'm at their houses). And I don't write music reviews for
publication anymore, partly because it began to feel both redundant and
vaguely masturbatory, but mostly because having to write reviews about
artists who trafficked in subgenres I didn't like not only felt like a
dreadful chore, it felt as though I was doing an injustice to an act that
deserved a more neutral reviewer's ear.
I wasn't always this live-and-let-live. I never owned a "disco
sucks" t-shirt, but I certainly wasn't shy about yelling those two words
when I was an adolescent. But now I figure, hey, life's too short. As long
as you aren't piping some drecky soft-rock station into my office all day,
or driving your hip-hop-thumping boom car past my front window every three
minutes, I can leave well enough alone as much as the next guy.
Comparisons are another matter, of course. If you compare Band A to
Band B and unequivocally declare that A is better than B, well, then you're
clearly begging for a rebuttal.
> Historical note: The '68 gig I saw was a two day fest at the Santa Clara
> Co
> Fairgrounds. Pretty impressive line up Big Brother, Steve Miller,
> Airplane,
> Youngbloods, Dead, Sons Of Champlin and a couple others. The only problem,
> Kim
> Fowley showed up with a barrel of PCP. He was calling himself Hog Man.
> Jefferson Airplane were so whacked out they could hardly play. Steve
> Miller
> lived up to his self proclaimed reputation of being the best SF band at
> the
> time.
>
I have a hard time believing that there was a band in San Francisco
in 1968 that was better than the Flamin' Groovies. Just the thought that the
Groovies were at that time fronted by wildman Roy Loney in his prime ...
well, I gotta think that the Groovies were Willie McCovey, and the Dead, the
Airplane, Steve Miller, Big Brother, etc., were Hal Lanier, Jim Davenport,
and Ron Hunt.
Just one man's opinion, as always.
Gregory Sager
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