tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5195590583641426943.post3816235260019536573..comments2024-03-26T23:10:34.814-07:00Comments on Grateful Dead Sources: October 1, 1967: Greek Theatre, BerkeleyLight Into Asheshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06943335142002007213noreply@blogger.comBlogger1125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5195590583641426943.post-21550625869558934062018-09-05T18:28:59.586-07:002018-09-05T18:28:59.586-07:00The rest of the review covered jazz acts at Pier 2...The rest of the review covered jazz acts at Pier 23. Note that 5000 attended the Dead concert, while only 500 went to see "eleven hours" of jazz bands! <br /><br />Elwood found the Dead a bore. He seems to be getting less impressed with them over the course of '67 - back in '66 he'd praised them for having a good beat and being "especially good for dancing," and he always complimented Garcia. But at Monterey, he protested that they "played too long" - in spite of their "fine experimental sounds" and "wonderfully rolling blues beat," they were "straying from the typical dance format." At an Oakland show, they were "pedestrian," still a step up from this uninteresting set where "no one danced." <br />It wasn't that he was opposed to long improvisations, since he was thrilled by Lloyd's band (and other jazz acts) - but he was bored with the Dead's "ordinary chord changes" and "undistinguished rhythms." <br />It could be that he caught the Dead on a bad day, or that they didn't come off so well playing next to a top-flight jazz band. Pigpen was no Keith Jarrett!<br /><br />The audience itself may also have been shifting over the year, from enthusiastic dancers to listeners who'd just sit and contemplate the band. (Though they "roared with delight" at Jarrett.) This change in the rock audience was often remarked on, but Elwood may have assumed that a quietly seated audience was just as uninterested as he was. <br />Ralph Gleason had worried in a 9/3/67 Examiner article that rock music, like jazz before it, was becoming "more and more a show, more and more a music not to be danced to but to listen to, and going to the ballrooms became less and less involved with dancing." He feared that rock audiences would become like jazz audiences, "standing like statues digging the band. But not dancing...the music was impossible to dance to by anyone but virtuoso dancers. <br />"At the Fillmore and the Avalon this past couple of weeks, the halls were packed so thick it was impossible to breathe. There were no seats and one could only stand, another subway rider at rush hour, jammed in the body of the audience which was watching the bands. <br />No one, or almost no one, danced. There wasn't room to dance. The floor was packed with people sitting on it and the sides were packed with people standing... <br />[The bands are] oriented less to dancing than to the show. But...their audience sits and stands and doesn't dance." <br />("History May Repeat Itself," SF Examiner 9/3/67) <br />I'm reminded of the Midnight Hour at Rio Nido that day, with Pigpen exhorting everybody to get up and dance...maybe he needed to try that at the Greek Theatre! Light Into Asheshttps://www.blogger.com/profile/06943335142002007213noreply@blogger.com