Grateful Dead Hour No. 17 Week of December 26, 1988
Featuring excerpts from the Grateful Dead's second set July 26, 1987
at the Big A (Anaheim Stadium), not far from Disneyland and Leo
Fender's house. The Dead played a set with Bob Dylan that night, and
there's a live album from that tour due out very early in 1989.
Part 1 26:28
If I had the world to give...One pane of glass...Blue suede shoes...A
ruffled dress, a necklace made of gold...all the French perfume you'd
care to smell...Ribbons, ribbons, ribbons...Bucket hanging clear to
Hell...A broken angel...Just a box of rain...I'll take a melody...Just
a plaintive little tune...Ten gold dollars...Money money, money money
money...A thousand dollars, please...A dime for a cup of coffee...
Little Ben clock...An electric guitar...Something like a bird...
Burgundy wine...Couple shots of whiskey...Couple more shots of
whiskey...Couple more shots of whiskey...Just a cup of cold coffee...
Pile of smokin' leather...A leaf of all colors...And very few rules to
guide...A land that's free for you and me...You know the one thing we
need is a left-hand monkeywrench...You know I'm ready to give
everything for anything I take...There is nothing like a Grateful Dead
concert! <applause>
Shakedown Street 7/26/87 Anaheim Stadium
Notes from the Rosetta Stone (first section) Peter Apfelbaum and the
Hieroglyphics Ensemble with Don Cherry, 10/14/88 Palace of Fine Arts
Theatre, SF
China Doll Grateful Dead from the Mars Hotel
(Mobile Fidelity MFCD 830 (orig. released 1974))
Part 2 25:59
Terrapin->
percussion 7/26/87 Anaheim Stadium
Throwing Stones 7/26/87
Not Fade Away Rolling Stones, The Rolling Stones (1964)
Peter Apfelbaum and Hieroglyphics Ensemble was Phil Lesh's choice to open the show on New Year's Eve this year. It's a 15-piece band from Berkeley, using some "World Beat" dance rhythms for composition and improvisation in a big-band context. I think this band should appeal equally to the dancers and the serious listeners in the Grateful Dead audience. The following is an excerpt from an interview with Apfelbaum on the December 1988 instalment of Rex Radio, hosted by Phil Lesh.
Lesh: [Recalling a newspaper article in which] you were extolling the virtues of Reggae and African rhythms as opposed to swing rhythms... You were saying that most jazz composers only rely on swing rhythms, and that Reggae and African are a whole new untapped resource, in a way. And to my ears you've taken those rhythms and developed them considerably - especially overlaying more than one at one time.
Apfelbaum: That is a product of our continuing investigation of the roots of what we call jazz. In the process of investigating that root we realized that the basis of swing and the basis of the rhythms that make up what we call jazz come from Africa - specifically, from West Africa. There've been numerous attempts in this century to combine African rhythms with American jazz. Dizzy Gillespie was somebody who did that by way of Afro-Cuban music; Ellington did it, and more recently the Art Ensemble of Chicago, Sun Ra... There was an outgrowth of awareness in the sixties that contributed to the overall awareness of African music, and it became an element that is more and more used in composition. What we're doing is taking modern dance forms and using them as a basis for composition and improvisation, much in the way that Ellington did, and people of his time that were orchestrating for a large ensemble.
The creators of the Grateful Dead's 1987 video So Far talk to the press.
And for you tape collectors: one of the all-time great performances of
"Sugaree," plus the first electric "Ripple" since 1971.
Part 1 22:08
Jerry Garcia, Len Dell'Amico and Bob Weir talk about
So Far and In the Dark NYC 9/14/87
Queen Jane, Approximately - Dylan & the Dead (Columbia 45056, 1988)
Part 2 25:58
Sugaree - 3/18/77 Winterland
Claire: I want to get married again.
Grant: You hear that?
Claire: Come on, is that so much to ask? To show me how much you love me?
Grant: No, no, it's perfectly easy. We'll just go out and
find a nice dead minister... a dead band - maybe the Grateful Dead.
Should be a night to remember.
One More Saturday Night
Ripple - 9/3/88 Capitol Center, Landover MD
In 1987 the Grateful Dead released their most successful album ever, In the Dark, and made news with two best-selling home videotapes: The Making of the "Touch of Grey" Video [directed by Justin Kreutzmann] and So Far.
So Far, directed by Jerry Garcia and Len Dell'Amico, is 55 minutes of
nonstop Grateful Dead, bouncing back and forth between a studio
session and the 1985 New Year's Eve show at the Oakland Coliseum. The
performance includes Uncle John's Band, Playing in the Band, Lady with
a Fan, Space, Rhythm Devils, Throwing Stones and Not Fade Away. Jerry
and Len spent more than a year building a visual feast to match the
soundtrack, using different images and techniques for different
passages. They covered a lot of technological ground, from optical to
electronic to computer animation, using newsreel film, tarot cards,
microscopic and telescopic photography, religious images, human faces
- all kinds of stuff, interleaved with shots of the musicians playing
music. It's not only a fabulously entertaining piece of video, it's
also pretty good music to watch with your eyes closed.
The following is from a press conference held in New York City September 14, 1987.
Dell'Amico: We did a live show at Oakland Coliseum, and the live
pieces were taken from that show. Then we shot four days at Marin
Vets - which is where the album basics were recorded - without an
audience, and then intercut them.
Garcia: The gamble was, could we go into a place with no audience
and, just relating to ourselves, could we... find some energy there.
And we had hits and misses. Some of it worked out pretty good, some
of it was interesting - but it's definitely a different kind of
energy. A lot of this stuff is... mad luck. There's a cut in there
that goes from "Playing in the Band" - studio version, say - to
"Playing in the Band" live - that just happened to be just about
identical tempo. That kind of stuff is luck - you can't really
rehearse it. There's no way for us to have... We didn't plan
continuity from one situation to another, but every once in a while
something like that works.
* * *
Garcia: The way this developed was not a result of planning, so
much....We started off with all kinds of plans. We had real specific
things we were going to do - something scripted, something very tight
and formal. That sort of dissolved. After we did the shoot at Marin
Vets the whole contour of it started to look different, so we started
to look for a different methodology to be able to do what it seemed to
call for.
Q: What's Marin Vets?
Garcia: It's a nice, tasty concert hall in Marin County, about five
minutes from where we all live... An 1800-2000 seater, small but very
nicely articulated so it really sounds beautiful. It really has a
good, crisp recording sound.
Q: Is it a theater in the round? I noticed you were all facing each
other.
Garcia: No. We just set up that way... 'cause we were addressing
ourselves rather than addressing an audience.
Q: Why isn't "Touch of Grey" on [So Far]?
Garcia: We didn't have a workable arrangement of it, really. We tried it...
Q: With the exception of "Touch of Grey," which has a fade ending,
all the songs [on In the Dark] are set up the same way they would be
live. Was that a conscious effort to get the songs out on an album the
way they are live?
Garcia: Not intentionally. Sometimes we let 'em run out. We didn't
really plan the ends. [giggle]
Weir: We never do.
Garcia: Y'know, it's us, man! [laughter] ... Some of them sort of
trail off, some of them build. They tended to be as idiosyncratic as
they are at live shows. The performances were quite different from
each other.
* * *
Dell'Amico: You have to find the most talented people, and the place
where the machines are, and then set 'em loose. The main thing is the
"setting 'em loose" part: telling them that you want them to help you
rather than just do what you tell them to do. If you give them time
to play, they can come up with great stuff.
Q: Considering most of the concerts go three, four hours, why only 55
minutes? Why not an hour and a half? ...two hours? ...three hours?
Garcia: It really has to do with what we get. If you record five
shows and get maybe an hour's worth of good stuff, say...in this case
it's something like that, although the ratio is probably steeper. It
just really is the stuff that works.
For me, it's a process of recognition. You put stuff together: "These
two tunes sorta go together, but it needs something here to make this
passage work..." You assemble it, and it starts to look like
something... We constructed the shape, kind of the way they do
animated films: we constructed the shape that was the soundtrack, and
then used that as the basic template for everything else: all the
visuals, the live action stuff, the cutaways, and the rest...
The interesting thing about it, methodology-wise, was that we
approached a video editing facility as though it were a multitrack
audio facility, so we had many levels of images to choose from at any
given moment, which is kind of an unusual way to work in video. There
were never decisions up until the last edit about what image actually
goes where at what moment. That stuff came together toward the end;
really, we were assembling layers of possibilities, all on individual
machines.
Dell'Amico: Like if you had a track with a kick drum and a track with
a snare drum and a track with a guitar, you could have tracks which
have different types of visuals and decide later how to mix them.
Garcia: There is no multitrack video; video does not exist in that
realm, so it was a matter of kluging a version of that that would
deliver that notion.
Dell'Amico: - using a lot of machines.
* * *
Q: Where did you get the vintage film clips? I think we saw Adolf
Hitler in there, the KKK...
Garcia: Trotsky... Lenin...
Dell'Amico: We started by coming up with image lists of what we
wanted to stick in there. Then we'd come up with places to get it.
Associate producer Ann Uzdavinis went out and found all this stuff,
and editor Veronica Loza put it together. It comes from the National
Archives... all kinds of archival places. You buy it and use it.
A great deal of work went into editing all the cutaway images. First
we shot it, and then it took a year, year and a half to substitute
visuals: get 'em, try 'em, throw them away, get new ones, work out the
special effects.
Q: Was it a conscious effect to get trails on a video?
Garcia: Yeah. Sure.
Dell'Amico: What do you mean by trails? [laughter]
Garcia: You know, man - trails.
Dell'Amico: Oh, that ! That's an easy effect. Just so you know,
that's called "image strobe decay" in video. You just push a button
and you got it.
Garcia: What we're doing is sort of painting along with the music.
You see what you'll see in it, y'know.
Q: Has this wave of success taken you by surprise... the album going
platinum so quick?
Weir: Not me. [laughter]
Garcia: Fifteen years ago it would have taken us by surprise, but we
sort of crept up on it, really.
Weir: We've been building up to it. We knew we had good songs to
record for the last few years, and we finally got around to recording
them...
Q: Has success spoiled the Dead?
Garcia & Weir: Yeah. [laughter]
Q: How so?
Weir: He looks pretty rotten to me. Doesn't he to you?
Q: So how has it changed you?
Weir: I was noticing the other night, for instance, that when I'm
going through pistachios, the hard-to-open ones - I don't bother with
them any more. [laughter] Who's got time?
* * *
Q: What was it like doing the mega-gigs with Dylan?
Garcia: It was fun. Yeah.
Q: Think he enjoyed it?
Garcia: Yeah, he did enjoy it. It's tough to get it out of him, but
he did enjoy it.
Q: Why didn't he join in on "Touch of Grey"?
Weir: Sometimes he did. Depended on how it was going.
Q: Did it take more rehearsal than usual?
Garcia: [laughs]
Weir: We rehearsed a lot of stuff...
Garcia: And when we went on the road we didn't have the slightest