rcd@opus.UUCP (Dick Dunn) (03/21/85)
From a non-DeadHead who favors a dead subgroup to get rid of the non-music trivia about the Dead in net.music: > Someone has asked what makes the music of the gdead so different from all else > that they deserve their own group? My answer is absolutely nothing. Their > music, to my ears, is far less destiguishable from standard radio fare than > some of the progressive groups recently put-down by one of the deadheads > campaigning for gdead (ELP, Yes, etc.). It's certainly not possible to make any meaningful comparison of the Dead to other groups based on what's played on the radio. The standard radio fare includes no more than ten of their standard "hits" (Truckin', Playin' in the Band, Shakedown Street, etc.) You just don't hear ANYthing from Blues for Allah, Anthem of the Sun, Live Dead, or Wake of the Flood, unless the station has a DeadHead DJ. The first problem is that radio defines a subset of the Dead that CAN'T be different. They've chosen a handful of common songs which fit a standard mold, when the band has an active repertoire (i.e., songs commonly played live in recent shows) which is probably in the neighborhood of 150 songs. The second problem is that the Dead do NOT record well. They never have. They are a performing band, not a studio band. The audience presence is essential to their performance. The albums which come closest to defining their live performances are Reckoning and Dead Set, and these aren't that close. Moreover, there aren't any recent albums--Dead Set is the most recent and it's four years old. They have been touring instead of recording. (As I commented in another posting, their fans love them for this but it keeps them from being very interesting to record-industry oriented folk; Rolling Stone, for example, detests them.) The third problem is that listening to one song from the radio or an album gives no sense of continuity. A concert reveals their eclectic approach-- rock, folk, blues, jazz woven from one song to the next as the situation demands. It also reveals how the various songs can be fitted together as a whole. Different shows put the pieces together in different ways. (Occasionally the pieces don't fit quite right. Those are the breaks when you're putting it together in real time.) All of these factors taken together starts to explain the rabid nature of a lot of D'Heads--you can hear them on the radio a hundred times and have an absolutely ho-hum reaction to them, then go to a concert and get blown away. You get the idea that a recording on the radio is no more a recreation of the real thing than a line drawing can be a recreation of a beautiful sunset. The suddenness of realizing the contrast makes it all that much more effective. I managed to dislike them, based on what I heard on the radio, for 12 years before I finally saw them live (somewhat against my wishes, actually). It isn't easy to define just what makes them SO different--even the members of the band aren't quite sure. When the individual band members are playing in some of their other projects (Bobby & the Midnites, Kingfish, JGB, etc.) they may even play Dead songs, but it just doesn't work the same way--and they know it. -- Dick Dunn {hao,ucbvax,allegra}!nbires!rcd (303)444-5710 x3086 ...If you plant ice, you're gonna harvest wind.