fragments...

The weekend kind of got away from me. Friday after work I came home eager to listen to some live Grateful Dead. One of my oldest and dearest friends is a GD obsessive and made me a comprehensive list of shows worth hearing. It's easier than ever these days to find live recordings thanks to the internet. No more dealing with undesirable people who want to trade tapes, no more having to buy the mostly so-so shows that are available commercially. There's a part of me that feels nostalgic for having a tangible object, in this case a tape or a cd, but this goes out the window when it becomes clear just how much stuff is readily available for free with the press of a few buttons. ...I decided to get things started with a few shows from 1971. I vacillate depending on my mood, but I do 'objectively' think that '71 was the peak year for live Grateful Dead music. There's still some leftover fumes from the psychedelic 60s, but they get sifted through the tighter roots/folk/rural approach the band moved towards at the dawn of the new decade. I listened very carefully to a show from the Hollywood Palladium from 1971, and I was struck by how much shorter and more compressed a lot of the songs were. I think I like it better in some ways when they get to it more quickly. There are some exceptions to this, of course, like when they started playing Here Comes Sunshine, Eyes of the World, and Mississippi Half Step in the mid 70s, but something about a nice compact version of Loser, Deal or Me and My Uncle, played crisply and without any extra fat on the meat, is very satisfying indeed. I'm sure I'll change my mind as I begin to explore the decade in more depth, but right now I'm liking things when the Dead do things more concisely. This clip is a little bit later, from the Europe '72 tour, but it's in the same stripped-down vein...

...In between dosages of Grateful Dead, I supercharged with some early Fleetwood Mac. In their late 60s and early 70s incarnations, the Dead and the Mac seem to complement each other nicely. It's not that they sound alike. Nobody sounds like the Grateful Dead. I hate it when people find out that I'm a head and assume that I'll also like New Riders of the Purple Sage, or Quicksilver, or Hot Tuna, or Little Feat. I don't like any of that stuff. I don't like 'jam bands' per se. I like bands with great songs, and if they happen to throw some good jamming into the mix then that's great, but the jamming itself is almost never what draws me in to, say, the Allman Brothers or Jefferson Airplane. I don't really get Phish. They sound like muzak to me - stoner muzak for college kids. It's not my thing at all. The Dead are a completely distinct animal, though there are records you can play alongside live Dead music that go really well. Peter Green-era Fleetwood Mac would be in this category for me, and maybe even two or three albums after Peter Green left the band. Then Play On, Fleetwood Mac's masterpiece from 1970, might just be the greatest guitar album

ever made, though not in an ostentatious way. The playing is in fact quite understated when it needs to be. Their approach to music is similar in my mind to Richard Thompson. He is a phenomenal guitar player, but he doesn't feel like he has to beat you ever the head with it. Sometimes it's what isn't played or what's left to the listener's imagination that counts just as much as what what is played. Don't mistake what I'm saying. There's furiously slashing interplay between Peter Green and Danny Kirwan throughout the Then Play On, but it's never showy, always just exactly right in setting the proper mood and vibe. I'm fascinated by Fleetwood Mac and want to say more about them at some point when I get my shit together...

I saw The Social Network last night with a friend and found it to be very depressing. I don't think the folks who made the movie were intending to make a depressing movie, but it ends up projecting an image of such ruthless social darwinism, where high-tech hyper-capitalism is as natural and unquestioned as a morning piss. The movie made me feel even more acutely out-of-touch with the way we live now. I was not made for the world of today. I'm an extra and not a principal actor. I don't mind being an extra except that the world depicted in The Social Network is one in which extras are the wretched of the earth. And just to give you a feel for how apparently out-of-touch I am, all the scenes in the movie that made me wince the hardest were the ones that the audience howled with laughter at and applauded most vociferously. It's only a movie, sure but it's never only a movie, and the deeper implications of this one made me feel like finding a big rock to crawl under...