The Dead Thing
Please don’t dominate the rap Jack
If you’ve got nothing new to say
Either those lyrics are burned into your DNA or you’re clueless, there’s no middle ground. If I play you "New Speedway Boogie" you won’t say RIGHT, I remember hearing that on the radio… Either the closing track on side one of "Workingman’s Dead" is more memorable than anything you learned in college, which is probably where you heard it first, or you’re clueless.
And those clueless are a bigger tribe than those in the know, but those in the know are linked by this music, and their number is HUGE!
After the breakthrough of "Workingman’s Dead" and "American Beauty", Jerry Garcia cut a solo album. It was not a sales juggernaut, but it penetrated the brains of everybody in higher education in those days, the early seventies. And what’s staggering, it’s got legs. They laugh and say no one will be playing the hits of the nineties and early aughts at weddings in the future, but "Sugaree" is as relevant, as much a part of the culture as it was back in ’72, even though Jerry’s been dead for a decade and a half.
Sure, you heard "Sugaree" a bit on FM radio. I’d argue you heard "Deal" more. But you really didn’t hear much of either. These tracks lived on record and live, where the Grateful Dead played them over and over again, never exactly the same. Just like you look different from year to year, Dead staples evolved, changed, they were not calcified, they were alive.
To the point when Jackie Greene lit into "Sugaree" on Saturday night at Club Nokia, it was like your best friend walking through the front door, like hearing a hit of yore, that you know every note of.
In Mr. Greene’s hands, "Sugaree" lived again. It was the same, yet a little bit different. And in classic Dead fashion, when the vocalizing ended the noodling began, the improvisation, the jamming that gets a bad name but is so riveting when you experience it live.
And this goes on for a while, until Jackie has changed the riff. Yes, could it be, NEW SPEEDWAY BOOGIE?
This was the best song written about Altamont. It’s my favorite on "Workingman’s Dead", I thought I was the only person who noticed the change Saturday night. But soon everybody in attendance gave a whoop! And when Jackie reached the chorus, he stopped singing, and the assembled multitude yelled out MOUNTAIN!
Yup, "Spent a little time on the MOUNTAIN, spent a little time on the hill, Things went down we don’t understand, but I think in time we will."
What we understand now is everybody but Neil Young sold out, ran for the bucks. Reagan legitimized greed and the acts went for it and the business has never been the same since. All we’ve got is endless complaints that you just can’t get rich.
But somehow the Dead figured it out.
Sure, they ended up signing to Arista and having a hit with "Touch Of Grey", Jerry Garcia even designed ties, but if anything, those mainstream efforts detracted from the band’s image and its success. You see long after the Dead’s run in the mainstream’s consciousness, to the degree that was even achieved, the band went on the road and played to an ever-increasing audience, to the point where it was a problem, everybody who showed up without a ticket and wanted to hang on, from city to city.
Imagine that today. A band that’s too successful. YEAR AFTER YEAR!
And they’d work in some new songs. Eventually recording took a back seat, unless you’re speaking of the tapes traded amongst the faithful. To truly get the Dead you had to go, and so many did.
And people say the band was successful because they gave it away for free. That was an element, but the real reason the Dead lived on was the music itself, fans liked it, lived for it, never burned out on it.
You might think the history of music can be quantified. That you can go back into the charts and see what was happening. But that’s untrue. After all the hit bands have faded, gotten plastic surgery and are eking out a living in dives, if that, the Grateful Dead are still monstrous.
It was the music. And Jerry’s image as one of the people who cared about the people.
A hit is not a song on the radio.
It’s something everybody knows.
And more people know "Sugaree" and "New Speedway Boogie" than so much of the dreck that reached mass consciousness once. That tripe has faded away. The Grateful Dead gems live on.
