Bobby Weir & John Perry Barlow’s classic “The Music Never Stopped” came into being when the music was briefly in danger of stopping, the song transforming from live jam to final form as the Dead struggled to solve the financial difficulties that came with a retirement from the road.
Blues For Allah 50: The Music Never Stopped supplementary notes
by Jesse Jarnow
Bobby Weir and John Perry Barlow’s classic “The Music Never Stopped” became a signature song, but came together at a precipitous moment for the Grateful Dead, struggling to resolve the financial difficulties that came with their retirement from the road.
One source of emergency cash sometimes came from a pot smuggler friend of the band, part of the band’s connections to the fast-flowering but quite illegal underground industry. But in 1975, especially, pot was becoming big and increasingly mainstream business, demonstrated by the rise of High Times magazine during this same period, documented by guest Sean Howe’s Agents of Chaos: Thomas King Forçade, High Times, and the Paranoid End of the 1970s.
Christopher Coffman speaks of the literary underpinnings of “The Music Never Stopped” in this episode, and is the author of the forthcoming Clowns in the Burying Ground: The Grateful Dead, Literature, and the Limits of Philosophy.
Comment
Legion of Mary
Jesse, great work as always, however, when you listed the members of Legion of Mary you forgot to list Marin Fierro on sax.
Peace
Pdx dawg
Heaven Help The Fool
the second half of the mind left body progression you talk about (around 9 minutes and 15 seconds in), are basically the chords for Heaven Help The Fool.
A line is repeated by Jesse…
A line is repeated by Jesse twenty-one minutes into the episode