Sad news. Phil Lesh died yesterday. While I am not a Deadhead, I do love some of their stuff. Plus, many friends/lovers/acquaintances over the years have been die hard fans.
I saw the Dead in 1993 and found the show to be incredibly lackluster. Jerry Garcia didn't appear to be in good health and the band had to slow down and just work with what he offered. In 1998 I went to see The Other Ones and thought the show was wonderful. The rhythms were muscular and the songs were tight and just had a lot of energy which the Dead show in 1993 distinctly lacked.
This is a bit from that show. And now I feel silly because Phil Lesh is not in the photo. D'oh! However, he is playing.
Comedienne and writer Bridget Phetasy was a recent guest on the Maiden Mother Matriarch podcast which is hosted by the English social critic and author Louise Perry. Phetasy's "How divorce never ends" was recently published in the U.S. edition of The Spectator, a UK-based publication and this seems to have prompted the invitation to appear on the podcast, although other topics were discussed.
During the interview Phetasy largely reiterated and expanded upon the article. Its precis, at the most basic level, is simply that divorce hurts children and that the negative consequences redound into adulthood for people whose parents divorce. While not advocating for the abolition of divorce, she quipped on the podcast that it should be "safe, legal, and rare". If your husband is abusing you and/or your children, for example, then divorce is warranted. Simply wanting to be single so you can go on a voyage to discover yourself does not warrant the end of a marriage, in her opinion.
That divorce hurts children isn't controversial. But that it should be an act of last resort is, apparently, these days, for many. Phetasy's piece serves as a riposte to the likes of Lara Bazelon's 2021 New York Times essay, "Divorce Can Be an Act of Radical Self-Love". I am not sure how common Bazelon's egoistic laissez-faire attitude towards marriage is but Phetasy argues that it is ascendant in our culture and that many abdicate responsibility and view commitment in cold, Lockean terms of contract.
Reading Phetasy and listening to her interview got me thinking about the dissolution of my parents' marriage and how it affected me.
Back when I was 13 or so, my father saw a notice on the announcement board at the office one day saying that his employer was looking for people to take an early retirement. (The company was downsizing.) He immediately made his way to HR and volunteered - without consulting my mother.
A year or so later my parents had sold our home in Chicago and purchased one in west central Wisconsin. My father and brother made the trek north in April while my mother and I remained in Chicago until the school year ended in June.
When we finally arrived at the new house out in the boonies, my parents' marriage was already over. I didn't know it at the time and I don't know if my mother did.
My father greeted us at the door shirtless and tanned from working outside. He was also a bit drunk. I can picture in my mind the smile on his face that I now know disguised his true feelings. After a short time spent unpacking and settling into my new bedroom, my father said he wanted to take me into town - Eau Claire - and show me around.
This was a lie.
Rather than cruising around town to get a feel for it, we went straight to the bar of a bowling alley where my dad drank martinis and chatted with the blonde bartender. Sitting there nursing a soda and looking around uncomfortably, if not in total disbelief, I couldn't have imagined that she would become my stepmother.
After an unknown amount of time which seemed like days, my father announced that we were heading out. I felt a wave of relief wash over me. However, the bartender's shift had ended and instead of going home, we went to her apartment where I ended up watching some TV with her daughter, who was 5 or so years older than me, while my dad and his new girlfriend carried on in the kitchen.
My soon to be stepsister was very nice to me and I have never had reason to complain about her. Still, I did not want to be there and kept glancing towards the kitchen for a sign that we'd be leaving soon. Instead I caught sight of my father laughing with his pecker hanging out of his shorts while his girlfriend, thoroughly embarrassed, hastily tried to get him to put the thing away.
Truthfully, we probably weren't there very long but every second seemed like an eternity to the 14 year-old me. When we left, my father declared himself to be too drunk to drive and that I'd have to shuttle us home.
It wasn't too long before I noticed that my father was never around. He had moved out of the house and into an apartment in Eau Claire. I admit that I wanted nothing to do with my father at this point and it seems he felt much the same way.
Busy establishing a new life with his girlfriend, he never made any attempts to be a father or to reach out in any way to me unless prompted by my mother. Some of my grades were slipping at this time so, when we'd get together for dinner, conversation was dominated by expressions of his disappointment in me and mild threats of repercussions if I didn't do better in school.
By this time, my brother had moved back to Chicago and my mother followed suit after I started college.
I cut off most contact with my father after high school and he reciprocated. He didn't tell me of his cancer diagnosis and I never went to see him during his treatment after I had heard of his illness from someone else.
I lived at his house the summer after my freshman year of college and reached a kind of détente with him. We treated one another politely but kept each other at a distance. Come August I made Madison my permanent residence and home.
********
A couple weeks ago I heard the news that the father of a friend of mine from high school had died. I, being rather out of touch with events from my old stomping grounds, found out a couple months or so after he had passed and 4th or 5th hand.
My friend and I had lost touch back in the mid-90s when he married and, if I recall correctly, began his new life way up north while I was busying doing the same to the south. Nothing unusual, no falling out. I also lost touch with his parents at the same time.
Shortly after hearing the unfortunate news, I found that it had made me profoundly sad, even to the point of tears welling in my eyes. I was genuinely shaken.
I am going to call my friend's father S here and his mother T.
When I knew them, S and T were hippies. I don't mean that in a derogatory way or that they in any way put on pretenses. From what I recall, they lived in or near San Francisco's Haight-Ashbury neighborhood in the late 60's before moving to Colorado. Their Rocky Mountain sojourn didn't last too long and they would go on to settle down in west central Wisconsin.
Unlike a lot of their counterculture peers, S and T never abandoned their ideals to become 80s cocaine addled cliches on Wall Street. They lived on a small farm. S had long hair and an equally long beard which caused many a local to declare that he looked like Jerry Garcia even though he didn't. He did, however, love the Grateful Dead and I recall him working in a barn and on a tractor with a Dead bootleg playing on a nearby boom box. He'd been a pig farmer at one point but gave that up, though he still practiced the swine trade now and again for his family's consumption or as a favor to a friend.
For her part, T was a nurse. She was the exact opposite of 80s trends and excesses. No poofy Aquanet-laden hair and I think shoulder pads were forbidden on their property. Instead she refused to shave her legs or armpits. T was also a wonderful cook and baker and I recall smelling the bread she made as it baked. Later I would eat it along with eggs collected that morning from their chicken coop and bacon from a pig that had lived in a pen not far from the coop.
T and S were both smart, kind, and cheerful people. (T is still with us, to the best of my knowledge, and I hope she remains so.) They took the whole "back to the land" ethos to heart and lived it and I felt and continue to feel great respect for the way they chose a lifestyle and refused to abandon their principles.
Many people in the area were suspicious of T and S and held them in low regard. Because they were hippies, there were those who denounced them as pot smoking druggies while the goat skulls on the barn door were, some surmised, surely a sign of Satan worship. I ran into precious few people who took them at face value instead of feeling wariness and keeping them at arm's length. There must have been a fair amount opprobrium directed at them.
When S died, I fondly recalled the gentle mock sneer in his voice when he called my friend and me "teenagers" or me "that kid from down the road". The first time I ever had a hangover was on my birthday one year at their house. My friend and I both woke up feeling terrible from all the rum we had consumed and S cranked up "Birthday" by The Beatles quite loudly. (It was one of those original numbered copies of The White Album from back in 1968.) The song echoed through my skull and amplified the throbbing ache that was consuming my brain. S stood there with a wide trickster grin as my friend and I clutched our heads and grimaced in pain.
While I never viewed S as a surrogate father, perhaps he was. Certainly a mentor. He looked out for me. When a classmate got pissed off at my friend and me and decided that we needed to meet his shotgun, S was there to calm our nerves and offer protection and reassurance.
He didn't just point out when I had screwed up, as was my father's wont, he also offered words of praise and encouragement. S made the ability of my friend to go out and have fun contingent upon getting work done. And so I, a city kid, found myself helping to collect eggs, slop pigs, throw hay bails around, etc., things that I never dreamed of doing when I lived in Chicago.
S had a wonderful sense of humor that could be wicked. One time I went with him and my friend to protest the pro-lifers in front of the Planned Parenthood in Eau Claire. S dressed as the Easter bunny and held up a sign saying something to the effect of, believing in me is just like sharing their beliefs.
Both T and S were extremely welcoming and kind to me. S provided paternal guidance to my lost teenage self when my own father wanted nothing to do with me. As a middle-aged man I look back and see how he was a role model for me as I was developing into a man. He showed that kindness and strength were not mutually exclusive. S demonstrated that there was more to being a father than exacting discipline. For all of this and more, I am ever grateful. I wish that I'd thanked him in-person. (And Uncle Des too.)
And so I raise a glass to S's memory - and to T as well. Thank you for all you did.
As I noted in my introductory post to this little San Francisco blogging tangent, I had a girlfriend who loved the city. She also loved jam bands, the Grateful Dead perhaps chief among them. This isn't to say she enjoyed this kind of music alone - she didn't - but I think songs like "China Cat Sunflower" held a special place in her heart.
I've been meaning to listen to a performance of the Dead at one of the Acid Tests for a while as part of a regimen of listening to famous, infamous, and/or historically important rock concerts. Shows such as when Dylan went electric, that night a wasted Grace Slick called her German audience Nazis, or Jimi Hendrix's last concert. These Grateful Dead performances at Ken Kesey's big LSD parties fit the bill as they not only document the early days of one of the most popular and successful rock bands, but also are a part of a larger cultural movement that had a profound impact on America.
And now that I am writing about various things San Francisco, it seemed like an opportune time to blast some early Dead into my earholes.
From what I gather, The Warlocks changed their name to the Grateful Dead just a few weeks before their performance at the Fillmore Auditorium in San Francisco on 8 January 1966. Wikipedia says this was the 5th Acid Test. I read The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test because my hippie girlfriend loved it but I cannot recall much of the book. That's drugs for ya, I guess. So I'm not sure if the book described anything that went down on this particular night but I would bet that it involved a lot of black lights, DayGlo paint, and a very trippy liquid light show.
I've wondered what the Dead's music was like at the Acid Tests and assumed they were playing these lengthy psychedelic jams - epic versions of a proto-"Dark Star", perhaps, where audience members danced to endlessly improvised guitar solos that penetrated their very essences or simply watched the tracers of their cigarette cherries create nicotine-laced mandalas in the air before them.
But that's not what they played. At this gig, anyway.
The recording we have seems to be a soundboard and contains 4 songs. Those are bookended by stage banter, most of which I assume is Ken Kesey, speaking to the audience about Neal Cassady, the captain taking everyone on Operation Cystalization, and other profundities of that moment. That's drugs for ya, I guess. I found it as part of a 6 CD set that collects (some of?) the Dead's Acid Test performances and related recordings.
After a couple minutes of chaos relating to microphones not working, the Dead launch into a cover of Slim Harpo's "I'm a King Bee". At just under 7 minutes, they have doubled the running time of the original but they've also slowed it down a bit and made it into more of a slow blues tune than Harpo's original with its insistent beat.
This is followed by a fun cover of The Coasters' "I'm A Hog For You, Baby". Mickey Hart hadn't joined the party yet so Bill Kreutzmann's playing stands out. Here he really propels the song forward and throws in some nice fills too. A Dead original comes next: "Caution (Do Not Step On Tracks)". This would appear on their second album, Anthem of the Sun, in the summer of '68. It's a speedy blues rock jam with Pigpen doing the vocals, I believe, and adding harmonica. Kreutzmann is manic here.
The set closes out with a slow blues rendition of Rev. Gary Davis' "Death Don't Have No Mercy". At 9 minutes, we get a lot of guitar soloing but also some organ that I don't think we heard much of in the preceding tunes.
This was definitely not the kind of stuff I figured the Dead would be playing at the Acid Tests. Very bluesy, lots of covers. The band sound like any number of late 60s blues rock groups here but I suppose that was their M.O. at that time. Still finding their feet. Kreutzmann is fantastic on this night with his drumming leading the charge. It seems that in later years the drumming took a back seat, it became cautious lest it trample on Jerry Garcia's delicate, fluttery guitar sound.
While there is a generic white boy blues rock thing going on here, the show has a wonderful energy to it and the songs are great.
“In the beginning was noise. And noise begat rhythm. And rhythm begat everything else.” – from Mickey Hart’s Drumming at the Edge of Music
Mickey Hart is best known as one of two drummers for the rock band The Grateful Dead but he has, for nearly 30 years, been pursuing his own path both within and without The Dead. For Hart, playing percussion is not merely his profession – it is his passion.
He joined The Grateful Dead in 1967, creating a dual-drum attack with Bill Kreutzman. As the 1960s became the 1970s, The Dead’s studio sound moved from the psychedelic to one that was more mellow and folk-inflected. (Their lives performances retained their trademark improvisation and lengthy jams.) In 1971, Hart took a hiatus from the band because their manager was found to be stealing money and their manager was also Hart’s father.
The air cleared after three years and Hart rejoined the band in 1974. During the interim, he developed an interest in percussion outside of the usual drum kit of snare, bass, tom toms, and cymbals. This was reflected in The Dead’s live performances as Hart and Kreutzman were given time for a drum duet which is generally called “drumz”. This drum interlude really began in earnest in 1976 and it eventually took on a life of its own. It became more complex and new percussion instruments sounds were incorporated with each tour.
Hart began to record music outside of The Grateful Dead including pieces for the soundtrack of Francis Ford Coppola’s epic film Apocalypse Now. During the 1980’s, he began to dig into the lore of percussion which led him to shamanism and the alteration of consciousness. He wrote two books which explored this aspect of his passion: Drumming at the Edge of Music and Planet Drum. In 1991, he appeared before the U.S. Senate Special Committee on Aging and testified to the healing power of music and recommended drum playing as a form of music therapy.
As one can see, Mickey Hart sees music and especially rhythm as very potent forces and he has schooled himself extensively in the history and performance of percussion. (The only other rock drummer I can of think of who has pursued a similar path is Rush’s Neil Peart.) This perspective is integral to his music, as we shall see.
The album is a best of collection and provides a good, if cursory, overview of Hart’s pursuit of his passion. The tracks span the period of 1976 through 1998 which is where it begins with the song “Angola” from the Supralingua album. It is a wonderfully upbeat song which he co-wrote with some of the other performers on the album including Giovanni Hidalgo and Zakir Hussain. It moves along at a brisk pace with the trap kit providing a solid foundation for various other rhythms to play off of as washes of keyboards add tonal color. It is mostly instrumental but voices weave in an out reminding us of the first instrument to give us music.
One of the great things about this song is the seamless blending of instrumentation from diverse cultures. Caribbean and Middle Eastern flavors are absorbed and blended. Although the song also mixes acoustic instruments with triggered samples of various drums and percussive devices, it does not have an overly “processed” sound and has a lot of warmth.
A pair of songs from the Mystery Box album follow: “Where Love Goes (Sito)” and “Down the Road.” The album features a host of percussionists but also the women of the English a capella group The Mint Juleps on vocals. The first song is a mid-tempo slice of thoroughly modern R&B with a very tangible world beat feel to it. Although the music is a wonderful sonic confluence of styles, I didn’t find the melody or the beat to be particularly inviting. It has a rather generic feel to it. I did, however, enjoy “Down the Road.” With the addition of Bruce Hornsby’s accordion and the relative paucity of non-Western drums, the world beat element has been greatly downplayed. It lilts along with Hart himself providing an almost spoken word set of vocals. While it isn’t a bad song, there’s nothing special about it either.
The oldest piece comes next – “Sweet Sixteen” from 1976’s Diga album – and gets things back on track. It’s a very spirited jam that begins with a marimba melody that is joined by tabla, bongos, and, eventually, by Hart’s traps kit. When the song kicks into high gear, it floats like a sprinter in at full speed that seems to hover just above the ground. Although the instrumentation is sparse compared to the previous songs, there is enough variation to make its eight minute length seem short and leave the listener wanting more.
“The Eliminators” from 1990’s At the Edge is kind of a let down. This is more than likely a sequencing problem because the song itself is a good one. Despite having a bit of an electronic sound to it, the stuttering rhythm kind of keeps the listener second guessing where it’s going to go next. On top of it is some very ethereal synthesizer that creates an enchanting mood.
1991’s Planet Drum album is represented by the two songs “Udo Chant” and “Temple Caves.” The polyrhythm of “Udo Chant” is intriguing. Marimba and drums of all sorts provide a steady beat while woodwinds and synthesizers add color and the barest hint of a melody. Voices periodically weave in and out of the wash of sound. “Temple Caves” is darker, more mysterious. Drum rhythms slowly emerge from a dense wall of keyboards and tension is evoked through minimal playing. A great song.
Sandwiched between the tunes above is “Compound”. It was written for the Apocalypse Now soundtrack but didn’t see the light of day till 1989. It has an alluring rhythm with lots of other instruments layered on top. It does a good job of evoking the Cambodian jungle and giving off a slightly sinister air as the compound in the film was not a happy place.
The final track is “Call to All Nations,” which was part of the opening ceremonies at the 1996 Summer Olympics. The synthesizers that open the song seem to bubble underneath the surface, as if there were something waiting to be released. Voices of men and women from various nations chime in. After a couple minutes, a propulsive tabla beat kicks up and the song gets going. Other varieties of drums take their turns in hammering out the rhythm and the voices return near the end in chorus.
This album is quite good and I do recommend it despite a couple weak inclusions. It gives a glimpse at Hart’s passion for percussion as well as a good overview of his repertoire for anyone looking to delve into his work further. Heck, you might find yourself wanting to do so after hearing this disc. If nothing else, there is plainly some great music to be had. And much of it is just good ol’ ass-shaking music. It is music which invites you to get lost inside a rhythm and inside yourself.
