Blues For Allah 50: Slipknot!
The Deadcast uses Blues For Allah’s complicated instrumental Slipknot! to explore the musical and creative ambiguity the Grateful Dead pursued in early 1975, when there both was and wasn’t a Grateful Dead, & their public reemergence at Bill Graham’s S.N.A.C.K. benefit that March.
Blues For Allah 50: Slipknot! supplementary notes
by Jesse Jarnow
When the Grateful Dead retired from the road in late 1974, their intent was to reformulate in some new musical capacity, but left many open questions about what that would look like, sound like, and even what it would be called. Gathering at Bob Weir’s studio in Mill Valley, they workshopped music throughout the spring of 1975, pursuing ambiguity that carried from their personnel down into the harmonic structure of their music, including the dense instrumental “Slipknot!” that sat between “Help on the Way” and “Franklin’s Tower,” but which was almost certainly conceived before either.
One of the recurring features of the band’s new music was the use of diminished chords, an uncommon move in rock music, with Trevor De Clercq and David Temperley showing just how uncommon in their 2011 work, “A corpus analysis of rock harmony,” published in Popular Music.
Musicologist Melvin Backstrom approached the full “Help on the Way”/”Slipknot!”/”Franklin’s Tower” song-suite in “‘Spring from Night into the Sun’: Metaphors of Dark and Light in the Music of the Grateful Dead,” published in Grateful Dead Studies, as well as this period at large (and much else!) in his thesis, “The Grateful Dead and their world: popular music and the avant-garde in the San Francisco Bay Area, 1965-1975.”
For more information about Ned Lagin and the Birthday Jam on March 17th, and much else about Lagin’s music and visual art, please point yourself to NedBase.
One topic of discussion at the Ace’s sessions was the ongoing work on Phil Lesh’s Osiris bass, sometimes known as Mission Control. We were sad to learn of the recent passing of George Mundy, the instrument’s primary designer.
Comment
Slipknot
I’m surprised there wasn’t any mention of the song Tubular Bells which was released in 73, and featured in the Exorcist. Garcia’s isolated figure sounds like it was inspired by that.
I remember playing the Blues for Allah album for my dad, who was pretty open minded in many ways, but not with Slipknot. He said “That could be one of the worst pieces of music I’ve ever heard.”
correction to Garcia's Lucille Bal comment
It was probably Hedy Lamarr
- she was a code breaker & was awarded patents on what we now know as cel networks
New Music in 75
I was lucky enough to be at the 6/17/75 show at Winterland (after having been at quite a few earlier shows). We were all blown away by completely new material - the Crazy Fingers opener was one of the best I ever heard.... And then the first Help-Slip-Franklin's followed up by a very unusual (and rare) version of Blues for Allah. Cant remember if I had heard the SNACK benefit before or if that was another complete surprise.....
And then lucky enough to be at the Swing Auditorium on 2/26/77 to hear them open with the first Terrapin (of course we had no idea what it was or the name - I think we just called it "Inspiration"). And then a few songs later the first Estimated Prophet... Just pure luck nothing planned in both cases...
It really is odd (after hearing a lot of shows and tapes) to hear completely new pieces come out of nowhere - exciting in these cases as they were long and very different kinds of pieces....
treasure
as always this podcast is an absolute treasure. best GD education money can buy :)
great stuff - thank you all immensely
east