Experiencing Grateful Dead’s Concert Recording
The following is adapted from Infinite Dead by David Cain.
There was nothing like a Grateful Dead concert.
Each performance featured different songs, and every lead guitar solo was invented on the spot. You never knew what might happen next.
This improvisational approach made recordings of their concerts compelling. Every bootleg cassette tape contained mysteries dark and vast.
More than 25 years after their last performance, the universe of Grateful Dead concerts is better known. Thousands of recordings have been uploaded onto the Internet Archive’s Live Music Archive, enabling fans to listen and post their comments.
But new fans and old Deadheads now face the daunting task of exploring this ocean of concert recordings and mountains of memoir. What should I listen to next? And within that two-hour concert recording, where should I begin?
Live Concerts: Capturing The Magic
In 2017, I began to listen to Grateful Dead concert recordings on a daily basis in the hope of producing a guidebook of well-researched reviews. My goal was to offer both new and veteran fans a relatively objective description of what you’d hear on the recordings.
There’s a big difference between hearing music live and hearing a recording. And your experience at a live concert may vary greatly depending upon where you were located (first row? back of the balcony?) and many other subjective factors.
Given the vagaries of memory, none of these reviews is based upon remembrances of concerts past, only upon recent experience with the recordings.
Each concert review provides headlines and highlights, identifying brilliant musical moments sometimes overlooked by other commentators.
Listening hard to the Grateful Dead every day for many years was both an enjoyable experience and a very humbling one.
As I listened to the performances — on some days across a four-decade arc — it forced me out of my comfort zone, and I found myself revising many of my preconceptions and perhaps prejudices. Or as Robert Hunter might have said, I began to look at it right.
Recorded music is forever alive, a living thing, and in each interaction with a listener something new can happen to the consciousness. The Grateful Dead’s music is like the universe, in that it is infinite, and ever-expanding.
Avoiding Personal Bias
Garcia famously stated that the people who like licorice really like licorice, and when it comes to Grateful Dead music listeners often like their licorice a certain way: with Pigpen; before Brent; before Vince; or in as many different permutations as Baskin-Robbins has flavors.
People are often predisposed to favor concerts based upon positive experiences they had while attending (try convincing someone that their very first show was a lousy performance).
Even authors bent on impartiality are prisoners of their own experience to some extent. Having come of ears in 1979, my own personal bias likely favors the late ’70s (and the ’70s generally) over any other time period.
Reviews in other books and forums typically reflect this kind of personal bias. If you love 1969 concerts, you are more likely to review them extensively, and to review them favorably.
As much as possible I’ve tried to nip that bias in the bud. One helpful tool was listening to concerts only by calendar date, forcing my head to traverse four decades of Grateful Dead performances on a weekly and sometimes daily basis.
Despite the challenges and perhaps the inherent conflicts, it is still possible to put on the cloak of a neutral observer and employ impartial criteria to provide some guidance on what was happening musically.
For more information on The Grateful Dead, Infinite Dead can be found on Amazon.
David Cain has been listening to the music of the Grateful Dead for over forty years, including seeing live performances of the band in twenty-five cities in thirteen states during the course of three decades. David’s writing on music, sports, and other subjects has appeared in publications ranging from Addicted to Noise to USA Today Baseball Weekly.