I'm going to need some time to process all the videos you posted. Reactions/comments to follow. Somewhere along the line I saw a question about the Grateful Dead. I'm going to borrow a trick from American presidential debates and tell a marginally related story.
BackgroundIn my youth I didn't pay much attention to the Grateful Dead. Casey Jones and Truckin' were regular fare on WMMS but they never grabbed me. When I got to Bowling Green I saw a guy who lived on the same floor who looked likely to party. We talked and my suspicions were confirmed. We became friends and eventually shared the downstairs of an off-campus house at 306 Frazee.
Bob had a huge record collection but he didn't listen to the Grateful Dead studio recordings all that much. What he loved were the live recordings.
For those of you who don't know the Grateful Dead subculture, their live shows were incredibly popular. (Some of the surviving members can still pack a stadium when they grab the likes of John Mayer and put on a show as Dead and Company.) Before there was Phish and Pearl Jam, the Dead were the original jam band. They had no setlist. One of the musicians would start to play a song and the others would fall in. I'm not a musician; I don't know how they do it. The concerts had a flow. The first set was generally more lively. The second set featured long instrumental breaks and always a drum session known as Space. This was a legacy from their early psychedelic years in the Haight Ashbury area. (
Old joke: Why does the Grateful Dead have two drummers? In case one falls asleep.)
Because no two Dead shows were alike, fans sought recordings of these, and a gray market industry was born. The history of Dead fans and their tape trading is the subject of an enjoyable
99% Invisible podcast. As the podcast describes, these bootleg recordings were often of dubious quality to begin with, and then they were copied and copied and copied. In our digital age, copies of copies are no problem. Unless you're using lossy compression. But I digress. The point being, in the analog world, each copy degrades and loses some of the original quality. In the end you have a tape with more hiss than hits.
So my first real immersion into the music of the Grateful Dead was a bunch of crappy sounding cassettes played at high volume. I wasn't excited. But we drank beer and got high and I would eventually pick a record from his vast collection, put it on, and shut off the tape player. We got along well and he introduced me to other Deadheads he had somehow managed to find on a midwestern state school campus surrounded by cornfields.
BrendanOur group consisted of Bob and his roommate Mike, Jeff and Greg from nearby Waterville, OH, a guy from the east suburbs of Cleveland named Rich, and me. Except for me, they had all seen the Dead multiple times in multiple states. But there were legends, practically whispered, of a guy named Brendan who had seen the Dead more than anyone. He was rumored to have a massive collection of cassettes. He was indisputably the Biggest Deadhead on Campus.
But Brendan was elusive. He allegedly was rarely on campus because he was off at Dead shows. None of our whole sick crew ever met him. Finally Greg managed to get a dorm number from a classmate who knew Brendan. An introduction was made through intermediaries. A meeting was arranged.
Expectations were high. I envisioned a dark room with black lights, posters covering the walls, incense burning. Brendan jovially sharing a bong full of California sinsemilla with his new friends. Some obscure early '70s recording of Dark Star playing.
Instead we found the room brightly lit with the overhead fluorescents. Brendan was lying on his bunked bed. Word had gotten to us he wasn't feeling well. He barely acknowledged us. He was listening to Squeeze.
Our ambassador Greg did the talking. They exchanged some pleasantries. Finally Greg got the nerve to suggest that Squeeze was an unexpected musical choice. Brendan got testy: "Time Magazine said that Chris Difford and Glen Tilbrook are the greatest songwriters since Lennon and McCartney."
We left shortly after that. No tapes were exchanged. No joints were shared.
CodaI saw Brendan one more time at a reggae show featuring
Carlos Jones. A woman with long blonde hair was dancing near the stage. Brendan came running from the back of the room at incredible speed and began dancing wildly near her. She moved away.
Regarding Squeeze, I didn't love them at the time and I thought it was blasphemous to compare any songwriting duo to Lennon and McCartney. But I've grown to love them. If I had to choose between Squeeze records and Dead records for desert island listening, I'm pretty sure I'd pick Squeeze.
