Grateful Dead

[John2]

I have been out of the Dead for a while (which happens) and just not feeling it (to the extent that I can relate to those who don't understand the devotion people have for them), at least not for anything new I've been hearing.

A fellow Dead Head suggested the year 1981, which I'd somehow never heard or even thought about before, and I spent some time exploring that, but while it doesn't strike me as a bad year (and in fact it exceeded my expectations), I'm still not "feeling" it.

But as I noted somewhere upthread, I have a soft spot for the year 1966, their earliest full year, because of their "innocent" garage band sound and the then-blossoming Haight-Ashbury scene. I suppose it's not as "complex" as their later stuff, but that's part of the appeal of it. It's "easy listening" Dead for an older guy like me.

But there is also 1965, the year in which they became the Grateful Dead, with an even more "innocent" garage band sound, and that's been fun to explore too. In this earliest studio recording of them (from November), they weren't even called the Grateful Dead yet, but rather the Warlocks, but it's the Dead in all but name (by which they would be called by the end of the month).

And they manage to "do what they do" in 1965 and 1966 too, it's just in places I'm less familiar with. Before they had songs like Dark Star and the Other One to jam out to, they had Caution and Viola Lee Blues (a song I used to hate but am coming around to). I may not be "hearing" their later years right now, but I'm always down for 1965 and 1966.

[John2]

As "primitive" as the 1965-1966 Dead may be, before they were the Warlocks/Grateful Dead they played acoustic music (in keeping with the pre-Beatles early 60's) and called themselves Mother McCree's Uptown Jug Champions. And before that Jerry taught banjo at a music store and played gigs with his first wife Sara.

And while I prefer the electrified sound of the Warlocks/Grateful Dead, I am amazed that recordings exist of Mother McCree's and of Jerry playing with his wife.

“Palo Alto was the magic carpet. It was where everything happened. That’s where the music was…Jerry [Garcia] was there and [Bob] Hunter was there…all the characters were there. Palo Alto was the beautiful golden basket that this all came out of...Palo Alto was INCREDIBLE in those days.” –Carolyn “Mountain Girl” Garcia ...

The jug band was Mother McCree’s Uptown Jug Champions, Garcia’s nod to the particular niche of folk music that took off as a minor craze in the early 1960s. But despite his love of banjos, jugs and bluegras, Garcia found that playing “old-timey” folk in Palo Alto was not so easy. As Garcia would explain in 1981, “in the area there were virtually no bluegrass musicians…I was operating in a vacuum.” After 25 or 30 gigs over the course of eight months, Jerry began to move away from the nostalgic style of Mother McCree’s and toward cutting edge rock ‘n’ roll. And there was something that was pulling him hard in that direction--the soaring phenomenon of the Beatles ... As Garcia and Weir turned toward rock ‘n’ roll, Mother McCree’s evolved into the harder-rocking Warlocks ...

Over the next few years, as the Warlocks officially became the Grateful Dead, the band rose to ever greater heights. As LSD and hallucinatory drugs infused the Palo Alto scene, author Ken Kesey and his band of Merry Pranksters began to stage elaborate drug parties dubbed Acid Tests in Palo Alto and other California cities. The Grateful Dead essentially became the house band of the Acid Tests, furthering their reputation and reach. Soon they were off to the Haight-Ashbury and eventual stardom as the Grateful Dead became the most iconic counterculture band of the 1960s. They would end up the greatest and highest grossing live music band in history.

Along the way the Dead acquired an insanely devoted following of fans—nicknamed Deadheads— who worshipped the band for decades and followed them from place to place on their “endless tour.” Even today, some 2,314 concerts later and long after Garcia’s fatal heart attack in 1995, Deadheads still scour the internet looking for old mementos of the band. It seems sure that some still hope to find a piece of that magic carpet from the Grateful Dead's earliest days, back when “Palo Alto...was where everything happened."


https://www.paloaltohistory.org/the-grateful-dead.php