tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5195590583641426943.post7367707071157098928..comments2024-03-26T23:10:34.814-07:00Comments on Grateful Dead Sources: March 1967: Larry Miller InterviewLight Into Asheshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06943335142002007213noreply@blogger.comBlogger5125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5195590583641426943.post-86442467430323038042016-04-06T00:13:11.978-07:002016-04-06T00:13:11.978-07:00(cont.)
Garcia: Viola Lee Blues, the long one on ...(cont.) <br />Garcia: Viola Lee Blues, the long one on the album...the words to that and a certain amount of the phrasing, the way the words are sung, come from a record by Noah Lewis, who used to be the harmonica player in Gus Cannon & His Jug Stompers. Really beautiful lyrical harmonica player, one of the early guys. And this song, a good example of how it used to go when Noah Lewis had it, was the Jim Kweskin Jug Band, they do it almost the same way Noah Lewis does it, in terms of the way they sing it. Our way is a lot jazzier and it has a newer rhythm, and we've also done some things with the bar lengths in it. We've slipped in a half bar where there would normally be a bar... It's sort of like a 12-bar blues, but in this case it's 11 1/2-bar blues, 'cause we left out half a bar to make the phrasing and the background work together. It's pretty interesting. And then of course, we will improvise with it for a long time and do a lot of things in it. It's a framework more than anything else. But the words are real powerful, simple direct things...<br />Gleason: When you play it, do you play it the same way all the time?<br />Garcia: No, never... That's the part that's fun about it, because it's like we all have to be on our toes. All of a sudden there's something new entering and we all try and pick up on it. That's when we're playing good; if we're not playing good, that doesn't happen... Sometimes you can do it and sometimes you can't.<br />Each night when we went into the studio we played Viola Lee Blues for as long as we wanted to play it, and we recorded it. And then at the end of the week we went through them and listened to them, and the one that turned us on was the one we used... It isn't as good as it could have been, but it's still okay.<br />(Grateful Dead Reader, p.20-22)Light Into Asheshttps://www.blogger.com/profile/06943335142002007213noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5195590583641426943.post-27498745104957623682016-04-06T00:12:37.126-07:002016-04-06T00:12:37.126-07:00Garcia also talks about some of the songs on the a...Garcia also talks about some of the songs on the album in his March '67 interview with Ralph Gleason. Garcia mentions that the artists "were going to put that really ostentatious oriental 'Egyptian Book of the Dead' quotation on the top" of the album, but the Dead dissuaded them. (This was the "in the land of the dark..." quote, which was changed to garbled lettering on the album, though it was used in ads.)<br /><br />Garcia: Being in a recording situation is really a lot different than playing. A recording situation brings out a special, sort of like another side of creativity. It's something like painting or drawing or anything that you do over a long period of time for a finished product. And so when you get a recording studio, you begin to have a different feeling about what you're doing. And that's something we're just starting to get into...<br />Gleason: Where did you get the tunes on the album from? <br />Garcia: They came from a lot of different places. Like on the album...some of the material is from blues, recent blues, like the last ten years' blues, Chicago style blues.<br />Like Good Morning Little Schoolgirl is a song that's in the public domain, and we left it in the public domain by the way, we didn't copyright any of this shit, the stuff that's traditional we left traditional. Good Morning Little Schoolgirl is a traditional song, but it's only as far as I know maybe 10, 15 years old. [Actually from 1937.]<br />Some of the others are much older. Cold Rain and Snow is a fragment that I learned from a banjo player named Obray Ramsey, a traditional singer from someplace like Indiana [actually North Carolina]. It's in the same kind of mode as it originally was, but the melody is different. And we've added a harmony line and of course it's us, it's our rhythmic structure and our ideas. <br />Sittin' on Top of the World is another traditional song that was copyrighted sometime not too long ago by some country & western guy, but it's still essentially a folk song. [Originally a 1930 blues.] There are just two or three verses and they're standard blues verses that turn up everywhere. And again, that's our arrangement... Most of these things, what we've done is we've just taken an idea and developed it. Light Into Asheshttps://www.blogger.com/profile/06943335142002007213noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5195590583641426943.post-20731310549046731602016-01-26T15:00:25.970-08:002016-01-26T15:00:25.970-08:00Michael Kramer writes in his book The Republic of ...Michael Kramer writes in his book The Republic of Rock that in "Larry Miller's show from October 11, 1967...Miller discusses his recent interview with the Grateful Dead and his admiration of Jerry Garcia's vibrato skills, which Miller laughingly comments sound like an electronic effect but in fact are similar to Buffy Sainte-Marie's singing style. Then [he says] the Grateful Dead focus will be 'enough devotion' for one night..." (p.74) <br /><br />There was a site with audio clips from KMPX - http://www.jive95.com/kmpx.htm - but unfortunately, the audio no longer seems to be available. (The internet is built on shifting sands!)Light Into Asheshttps://www.blogger.com/profile/06943335142002007213noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5195590583641426943.post-6574432694965850442014-02-17T17:58:40.846-08:002014-02-17T17:58:40.846-08:00In the magazine Swing 51 (#6, 1982), Garcia was as...In the magazine Swing 51 (#6, 1982), Garcia was asked about traditional song credits. <br /><br />JG: I'm anxious not to step on anybody's copyrights. I've always thought it was bullshit to cop the credits for traditional music, so I always make an effort to find out who wrote the tune or whether somebody else has copywritten it, which is frequently the case with traditional tunes. I mean, four out of five of them were copywritten by AP Carter in the '30s or country-music sharpies. They got smart fast! I have no idea what it says on the jacket. When we hand in our list of titles and say, "This is what's going to be on the record," I say, "Look and see if you can find who originally recorded this or who has the publishing on this." It's just one of those things I try to keep straight. <br />SF: If that were the case, why were some of those early songs credited to the Grateful Dead? 'Cold Rain and Snow,' for example, on the first album. <br />JG: It should say "arranged by Grateful Dead." If it doesn't, it's an oversight on the part of Warner Brothers. I'm an old folkie. I've always hated that. As far as I know we don't get publishing royalties for that. We didn't write it. <br />SF: I also noticed on a copy of 'Stealin''/'Don't Ease Me In' that the two songs are credited to you. <br />JG: That's awful. That's totally wrong too.Light Into Asheshttps://www.blogger.com/profile/06943335142002007213noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5195590583641426943.post-69184746263296406192013-04-02T03:28:03.988-07:002013-04-02T03:28:03.988-07:00I'm sorry the second part of the interview was...I'm sorry the second part of the interview was not found. I would have really liked to hear what they had to say about Morning Dew & Viola Lee... <br /><br />This is not a verbatim transcription. I omitted lots of "ums," "likes," "you knows," muttered asides, repeated sentences, crosstalk, DJ chatter, and whatever I couldn't make out - Weir's comments were often hard to hear - so the interview doesn't sound much like it reads.<br /><br />When this interview was recorded, Miller did not have the album in hand, so they had to pretend they were listening to the record! After some awkwardness, though ("this is a recording"), Garcia gets into the spirit of it.<br /><br />Miller says he played the interview & album at midnight after the record release party at Fugazi Hall, which was on Monday March 20. (And he starts the interview saying it's "Monday night.") He also said he was the first to play the album on the air; though the release date was actually March 17.<br /><br />Garcia & Weir are notably less at ease with Miller than Garcia & Lesh were with Tom Donahue in a KMPX radio show only a month later. Part of this may be because Miller was a new radio personality on the scene, while they'd known Donahue since 1965. Also, prerecording a radio interview to promote their new album probably felt pretty artificial to them (only two bandmembers bothered showing up; and in the future they'd be even less interested). Lesh was also more assertive than Weir, who has very little to say here! <br /><br />The Stones had played the famous "censored" Let's Spend the Night Together on the Ed Sullivan show in January 1967. In the US that song was the lead track on the Between the Buttons album, which Garcia here calls "amazing," and of course he would play that song in the JGB in later years.<br /><br />Garcia's comment that "the songs that are traditional, we've left them traditional" is somewhat disingenuous. Cold Rain & Snow and New Minglewood Blues were attributed to McGannahan Skjellyfetti (a band pseudonym), despite having clear lyrical predecessors. Perhaps the Dead felt these were "floating" folk lyrics.<br />Schoolgirl was also mistakenly credited to a mysterious "H.G. Demarais," a record-label owner who'd managed to snatch the song credit for the Yardbirds' version, which had little resemblance to the Dead's - who got theirs from a Junior Wells album - while the original song itself had been written by Sonny Boy Williamson in the '30s. This is one of the "famous burns in the folk music business" that Garcia mentions...Light Into Asheshttps://www.blogger.com/profile/06943335142002007213noreply@blogger.com