tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5195590583641426943.post6770459673310300108..comments2024-03-26T23:10:34.814-07:00Comments on Grateful Dead Sources: December 31, 1969: Boston Tea PartyLight Into Asheshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06943335142002007213noreply@blogger.comBlogger1125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5195590583641426943.post-37738016612788919002017-11-03T03:23:34.415-07:002017-11-03T03:23:34.415-07:00A remarkable article. Lots to observe:
- Crouse ...A remarkable article. Lots to observe: <br /><br />- Crouse had reviewed the Dead's 12/29 show at the Tea Party, and found himself so impressed he went back on 12/31 to see them again and talk to them between sets so he could write a longer article! (And the Herald ran it, too.) <br />- As with many 1970 articles, there's a strong nostalgia for the golden days of 1966, so long ago, when the world was young and everything was possible. (Or to put it another way, back in '66 the doors of perception had been open, and now they were being closed.) The Dead shared that feeling - Crouse notices their "look of Paradise Lost," and it's observable in their interviews, like here when Kreutzmann laments that those great days "seem as though they were a long way away." Crouse suggests that the Dead "see themselves as guardians of the good old days," keeping the true spirit of the Acid Tests alive and bringing it around the country. <br />- Crouse did his homework: he gives a secondhand account of the Trips Festival and briefly covers the last few years in San Francisco, and quotes Garcia from the Rolling Stone article a few months earlier. Boston seems to be some backwards province in comparison: the Dead "gave us Easterners a little taste of what the Trips Festival must have been like," "awed Easterners" ask them about the giants who strode the earth back then, and the Tea Party is merely a pale copy of what was done best in San Francisco. <br />- Crouse sees the Acid Tests as the origin of "today's" dance halls (lights, bands, drugs) - no Trips Festival, no Tea Party - although the combination may actually have been pretty widespread in '66. But he does have a point in comparing the scene at the Tea Party to the 'big bang' of a few years earlier that started it all - and in a larger sense, it's still a valid point, since culturally speaking we still live in the sixties today. <br />- He's able to get a few brief comments from some of the Dead. Garcia just says, "We jam with EVERYBODY" without naming anyone, probably impatient to get back to playing. Great description of Garcia bobbing onstage, in the days when Garcia still bobbed while he played. <br />- Phil on Cassady: "He was the greatest." The New Year's Eve '65 ride through an Oregon blizzard left quite an impression on Phil, and he wrote about it in his book - Pigpen also described the ride at length in an interview. (By the way, though secondhand and years later, this bit might confirm that the Portland Acid Test was on New Year's day.) <br />- It's funny to hear Constanten say, "There's no room for fooling around in rock." One reason the Dead were dissatisfied with him was that he wouldn't loosen up onstage, chained to a strict rhythm without any swing - and here he protests that "in a rock band you can't take those freedoms," he has to stick closely to the rhythm! <br />- There's a short but accurate description of the music, with "hypnotic...constantly repeated phrases" and Garcia's "lovely melodic fragments" leading the band. The "wall of feedback and volume" doesn't really come across on tape, though many early reviewers remarked on how loud the Dead were. And Crouse exaggerates when he says "their songs average twenty minutes"! But some of the jams on the 30th-31st went on for quite a while, and no doubt he lost all track of time... <br />- The Western they were debating was Zachariah, which they'd agreed to be in and had written Mason's Children for. (Country Joe & the Fish would take their place, after the film was rewritten.) I don't know if it was really right then, backstage in Boston, when they decided not to be in the film, but perhaps it was... Garcia was in a hurry to make an album (they would start recording in February). Note that he's unambiguously "the leader," ending the debate when he says "forget that." Light Into Asheshttps://www.blogger.com/profile/06943335142002007213noreply@blogger.com