Episode 060: Kiel Auditorium Dark Star w/ Jonathan Hart

In Episode 060 we’re joined once again by Jonathan Hart (@rowj), host of the Brokedown Podcast (@BrokdownPod) to discuss our very first Grateful Dead jam, the Dark Star from the Kiel Auditorium in St. Louis, MO, on October 30, 1973. An overlooked jam from a phenomenal tour, this features a full Mind Left Body Jam, and a jamming approach that emphasizes lucid dreaming and melodic beauty in its nearly 30-minutes.

In a tour that essentially stretched from September to mid-December, with a few breaks in between, much of which has been released, nearly every show the band played is worth hearing. This show from a Tuesday night in the midwest is proof of the band’s strength at the time. Set I opens with Here Comes Sunshine, and features Ramble On Rose, Deal, They Love Each Other, Row Jimmy, Jack Straw, China>Rider, and a 20-minute mind-fuck Playing In The Band to close it out. Set II, while not only featuring the Dark Star we’re focusing on, follows it with a Stella Blue, Eyes Of The World and Weather Report Suite, a 70-minute segment of music that should immediately heard by all dedicated and novice heads alike.

Throughout the episode, the notion of lucid dreaming is a theme we return to often. The Dark Star in question is less the inter-galactic exploration that so many fans are familiar with from their 1972 highlights. Here, the band explores the melodic framework of Dark Star, diverting here and there, but more or less poking & prodding at the finite edges of the song’s extended structures. What results is a musical experience that feels akin to waking life, nodding in and out of a day dream, and exploring a world that’s vaguely familiar, though not of this world — not unlike reading Vonnegut’s The Sirens of Titan for the first time.

Songs featured in this episode are:

Steve Gunn: “Way Out Weather”

Underworld: “Jumbo”

Elkhorn: “Lion”

Mountains: “Sand”

The Sea & Cake: “I Missed The Glance”

Daniel Bachman: “Invocation”

In addition, we discuss three new 2019 records we highly recommend: Dave Harrington Group: “Pure Imagination, No Country,” FEELS: “Post Earth,” and Larry Ochs/Nels Cline/Gerald Cleaver: “What Is To Be Done”

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We’ll be back on Tuesday, April 15 with Episode 061!

Until then, we’ll see you beyond the pond…