Grateful Dead

Monday.. ?

Bigger the better, more the merrier.

A Complete Unknown: positive experience
The star TC performs Dylan songs on SNL, including Tomorrow Is A Long Time
Then he comes back with a sketch that involves flatulence in a person's face

W
T
F

glorious tribute to BD and then 5th grade "humor"

Very unfortunate follow up.

Why is that show still on the air?

(I know, I know....because schlubs like me might watch on occasion.)

It's the 55th anniversary of 1970?

Since it is the 55 th of 70 can we get The Fillmore West February show's with the Fillmore East September shows.

Bonus: Real Gone Dick's Picks, Volume Four Vinyl.

Just like Floyd did. Several mini-Boxes that could be purchased separately, or as part of a big Box that had additional material and schwag.

I don’t need the schwag, so just make several era’s Boxes that are sold separately or can be purchased together for a discount.

65-71 The Grease Box
71-74 Keith joins
76-79 through K&D
79-84 Brent
85-90 Brent
90-92 Bruce/Vince
92-95 Vince

Playing now.
Had to turn down the 12-inch sub because Phil was vibrating the whole house.

SBD>DAT>cassette master.
Recorded by Pearson and Healy.
DAT>cassette transfer by Latvala.

The cassette was later digitized.
So Dick introduced an analog generation then released it.

I would like to hear more of the 90’s DAT’s that are in the Vault. We got a little taste with 30Trips.

....put me in the minority.
Touchhead checking in!

A very passing Beatles reference

I indicated many layers

I guess they had to limit the number of layers

Some Hollywoodization....ultimately, the movie is worth experiencing

Again....the bottom line is that BD is amazing

I like that idea. I would split it up slightly differently though, separating the 60's from the 70's. So the first two for me would be more like;
65-69 - dayglo
70-71 - sepia
Grease always reminds me of more of Memphis soul - more horn driven. Soul was a part of what The Dead did, 65- 69 and 70 -71, but it was quite a minor part for me.

I'm not interested in the schwag either. I got the big Pink Floyd Early Years box set, but all the bits of paper that came with it are worthless to me.

Touchheads are banned from buying GD merch

One BIG omission in A Complete Unknown is the complete lack of any drug references.

Dylan does appear kind of inebriated in a couple scenes. He takes a drink here and there. But he never smokes any weed (unless I just didn't look closely enough at some of those cigarettes) and there's never any mention of amphetamines. And I think we all know Bob was smoking lots of weed and taking plenty of speed around the time he was going electric. I wouldn't go so far as to say that's why he started writing such crazy shit, but it was part of his world and his sensibility for sure.

So why avoid the subject? Maybe it makes it more of a family movie? Maybe making a movie that even somehow remotely suggests that drugs have in some cases contributed to an artist's creativity is not acceptable in this day and age (even though lots of previous films about Dylan depicted his weed/speed use for all to see)?

Beats me. But it kind of reminds me of how they photoshopped the cigarette out of Robert Johnson's hand when they put him on a stamp. I suppose it's not a big deal either way, but why deny the reality?

an American value now

Good call Crow! The omissions seem quite Disneyfied indeed. Hell! LSD was still legal in that early half of the 1960's and much of the hard drugs was pharmaceuticals that were in pill form, amphetamines too. I recall the biopic Johnny Cash~Joaquim Phoenix film had a major plot line around them lil black pills.

My kids and I would have fun with the lyrics:

Daddy's in the alley
He's looking for food

I dig how Dylan changed the lyric for modern times on this live album. "Daddy's in the hallway getting high from the fumes" sounded more 1980's gritty. Me personally, I've got the "Granite-Stone Blues" when I'm over the stove, though the cookware comes in other colors.
🎼🎶🎵The man in the kitchen he's a cookin' with pride, ... Got a pan on the stove with salmon, steak and chicken inside,... puts down his spatula and points to the brine, and says,... Look in the pan! Nothin's stickin'.🎵🎶

Did he ever talked about his drug use ? On one of the shows in the live 1966 box set - possibly one of the final shows at The Royal Albert Hall - he puts critics down for suggesting that "Visions of Johanna" is a drug song. He responds by saying that it isn't, and that he would never write a drug song as he thought it would be vulgar.
He might just have been being defensive - he sure sounds stoned when he says it - a bit like John Lennon denying that Lucy In the Sky with Diamonds wasn't about L.S.D.
There is also more of a stigma about taking speed than weed . Or there was - so if that was your drug of choice you might have been less keen to go on about it.

Is up

Yay

:)

I am enjoying everyone's observations about Dylan

Well, he did write Rainy Day Woman #12 & 35. Which my friends and I certainly took as an endorsement of smoking pot. But even in a song like that there's room for interpretation. People used to say "stoned" for being drunk, so maybe it's just a drinking song?

But a lot of people thought it was about marijuana. Also, so many other songs just seemed to reflect a stoned sensibility. Gates of Eden, just of example.

The motorcycle black Madonna
Two-wheeled gypsy queen
And her silver-studded phantom cause
The gray flannel dwarf to scream
As he weeps to wicked birds of prey
Who pick up on his bread crumb sins
And there are no sins inside the Gates of Eden

Not necessarily stoned, but beautiful.

I don't know if Bob ever publicly acknowledged drug use. His public statements always tend to be enigmatic, no matter what the subject. Most of the stories about him getting high come from other people, such as the legendary tales of how he got the Beatles high. But part of the reason he was embraced by the counter culture was that the songs to reflect an altered (expanded?) consciousness that a lot of people at that time associated with being high.

Previous movies about Dylan expressed his drug use pretty directly. There's a scene in I'm Not There where the Dylan character gobbles some pills and says something about not having slept in days. Complete Unknown doesn't go there. Which is fine. No movie about a figure as complicated as Dylan is going to cover all bases and please all people. But it's worth noting that they Disneyfied the story a bit.

I always took it as the biblical style of stoning!?

Seaside Chat is up.

Big year ahead.

no comments section available yet

release date 1/31/25

will probably get to me mid-week next week

I recently listened to 7/16/76 bonus disc...yowsah

GD76 is awesome for several reasons...one of the big ones is the varied setlists, before "the format" came into play. (My research shows that that debuted 9/28/77.)

GBtGD

Sweet-sounding recording - a shame they didnt give us the "H/S/F" from the night before - there seems to be room for it on disc two..

Has landed welcome to 2025!!!!!
It's PLAY DEAD TIME!!!!
Where is the comment section?

Okay, on DP 53, I'll be curious -- have not heard this one. While many favor late '76 because the band had time to work things out, I actually prefer a few of the June shows when they were fresh out of the gate. Especially the jammy songs like Playin', but at a slower tempo, so the improv unfolds at a slower pace. The jams are like crazy weird at that slower tempo. (Apply copious Indica...)

That didn't seem to matter in the shows we caught that month, but became noticeable later as we got the tapes. Now that I'm, er, older, I still enjoy the slower pace but maybe not for a whole show. Actually, it was in June '76 at the Capitol in lovely Passaic, NJ, that I had the closest seats ever -- like 7th, 8th row center, when I clearly perceived the band's back line of crackling amps rather than the filtered PA. Plus, um, a bag of tootskie...

I'm much more stoked for the four discs of Baltimore '73.

Two curve balls coming: 50th of Blues for Allah (outtakes anyone?) paired with, I presume, 6-17-75 (Betty board returned in ABCD deal, IIRC), from which I've had a really good audience tape since fall '75 when a buddy returned from California with a large tape reel and we quickly found a machine to play it on and hooked up our cassette decks. With Thai stick. Mmm, good! Funny how I remember that so clearly and I can't remember details of the French-Indian wars from early U.S. history.

Then there's the box. We'll just have to see what they have in mind. If the 17-20 disc box has been the standard focus, I do wonder if "commensurate" -- our only real clue -- refers to size or period. Now that I'm thinking more in Rhino's commercial terms, they might toss in some key recordings from '66 to '69, but we know '70 tapes in the vault are rare, and that they gotta hook the younger folks (those in their 40s and 50s, hah hah!) with shows they want and/or attended, which means tossing in 80s and 90s. BIG anniversary may well mean BIG box and BIG $$. It'll be what it'll be.

I don't have high hopes for DP 55 and 56, as a '76 and '73 implies '80s, '90s later in the year. Not dissing the goodies from those years. But I'd say time to release the Aug. 12-14, 1979 run from Red Rocks/McNichols. (Stop me before I wish-list again...)

It's all a gamble, folks. And no cost to wish or speculate. Except perhaps the reaction to overly long posts from a ramblin man...

Cheers, HF

Hope they all also give us a MUATM again this year. You Tube showings of past releases are fine, but I enjoy being at the theater.

The email announcement of 53 which was just delivered has a link to the seaside chat but it doesn’t work. Going into the store and looking at the info for 53 allows the seaside chat to be found but says that you have to log in to keep out bots. This happens even though I’m already logged in! It isn’t on utube yet either.
I expect it will probably function correctly soon.

Edit: The Seaside Chat is working for me now.

I accessed it from the store page a couple of hours ago and it was working then. I got the email after that. Still no comments section working yet though.
Cheers

I like the extra crap, makes a "box" special, or else you're just buying "albums".

Stupid I know.

As much as I got to hate the "shot/taste" glasses for two years, I went and ordered the fuckin' magnet!!

As if 18 for a fridge magnet isn't bad enough, 8 bucks to ship,,,, damn magnet was 28 bucks out the door!

Once again, I'm an idiot. Like I need another fridge magnet, if I get anymore on my fridge it will fall over!

This release sounds A LOT better than my copy, so I'm happy. I like they gave us the balance of the other show.

Yes, I have always thought of that as being "stoned" in the Biblical sense. That we will all get persecuted, no matter what we do. But I think it was also a sly nod to the emerging drug culture.

Dylan didn't really seem at one to me with the 66-67 psychedelic ethos. A bit too cynical and knowing. In that famous sequence in "Don't Look Back", where he meets and puts Donovan down, Donovan comes across as the younger weed smoking hippy, while Bob seems more like the elder street smart speed user.

By 1967, Dylan was moving away from the counter culture in general, and returned to embracing tradition.
His association with the Band, which did not have much to do with the prevalent youth culture of the day, and general attitude toward parents, made that pretty clear.
The Music From Big Pink "next of kin" picture perfectly illustrates that point(also a dig at Sgt Pepper's cover, in a way), along with the opening track, Tears of Rage, co-written with Richard Manuel, that relates parents' pain from their daughter rejecting them.
Actually, now that I think about it, I don't think he ever really embraced Psychedelia or hippie ethos, besides taking LSD.

I don't think Dylan was ever psychedelic, even if his lyrics were often surrealistic. I think he was drawing from the Beats, obviously, but also a lot from the French Symbolist poets who inspired them.

I don't think he was that much of a druggie, either. But I do think he was smoking a lot of weed during the period covered in Complete Unknown, and taking a goodly amount of speed as well. And, you know, that affects your outlook and puts you in a mindset that's bound to affect your lyrics, if you're a songwriter.

Then again, part of what's great about Dylan's lyrics (and Hunter's btw) is that they suggest meanings but don't insist on a particular interpretation. For me, Rainy Day Women seems clearly to be about getting high (especially the raucous keg party atmosphere of the recording) but other people hear "getting stoned" as a biblical reference.

Goes to show you don't ever know. Now, I'm gonna go hear that seaside chat.

As Joan said about Bob in Diamonds & Rust

Now you're telling me, you're not nostalgic
Then give me another word for it,
you were so good with words and at keeping things vague

Man, just put the Live at Keystone 2 LP(purple swirl vinyl) on the turntable. Had not heard it in years, the playing is great, Jerry's tone is so good, and his voice so clear! Forgot David Grisman was on it too. Listening to it brings so many memories.
Spent many hours at both Keystones, small clubs where you could get really close to the band, and I don't recall these shows selling out(tickets at the door only) At the Berkeley location, Jerry and the band had to make their way through the crowd to get to the stage; cool room upstairs with a foosball game, and couches. These days are long gone; I always get nostalgic listening to Like a Road!
Pretty sure BTK went to a few of these :-)

Man do I wish I was a fly on the wall on some of those nights. Well, at least we have some of the tapes and hopefully more to follow.

Thanks Cousins

I used to go and see Garcia play there all the time, he played there a lot. I saw Garcia and Hunter play there one night and Hunter said ,I remember when this place was a grocery store, we used to shop lift here. I saw Muddy Waters play there, Big Mama Thorton and Charlie Musslewhite one night. I saw Garcia play a fantastic acoustic show there one night I believe it was Jan. of 86 , hopefully it will be released one day.

The most psychedelic album Bob Dylan cut, to my ears, is Bringing It All Back Home. Lyrically, not musically. Mr Tambourine sounds like a celebration of tripping to me. There is also a sense of fun and wonder on that album that seemed to disappear on the albums that followed. Not that I don't think Highawy 61 and Blonde On Blonde aren't great - amazing records - but they had a hardness about them that didn't exist before. And Positively 4th Street must be one of the harshest songs ever written. Welcome to the summer of love!

With Rainy Day Women, I'm sure he was aware of both connotations of the word stoned. The fact that he never stooped to explanation encourages different interpretations. Which is surely for the best.

Daverock seems to be right on about that lyrical subject matter. I may be a youngster and all this was before my time but analytically speaking I can hear exactly that point that was made! The early folksy stuff of Dylan was way more peaceful fun time 'hippie' than Hwy61 and it's gritty element of hard time living. What a trip!
The songs "Ballad of a Thin Man" and "Tom Thumb Blues" really set the true tone of the motif from the book-ended "Rollin' Stone" to "Desolation Row" and all of the last gasps of any good time hippie dream desperation along the way. Weirdly that album was in 1965~'66. The Dead and the happy San Francisco scene was just swinging into full bloom. I guess Dylan had foreshadowed something that wouldn't be realized out west till a few years later at the festival in Altamont. What happened Bob? Was it the New York City living?

I saw this film earlier today. Really enjoyed it, too. When I got back home I dipped into the 1966 box set of live recordings, with Copenhagen and then Dublin from 1st and 5th respectively. Great stuff - although you do basically get the same set repeated over and over again. The first 3 songs of the electric set have always seemed a bit of an odd choice to me, considering all the other great songs he had at his disposal. But it's a great box to own - one to take all year to get through, though.

RYXS - it's not just his music that seems at odds with the psychedelic dream - from 1965 his attitude to his audience and peers seems quite hostile too. In some ways, his behaviour seems a bit more in line with the punks of the following decade than with hippies of the 60's.

Curiously, in some ways Pete Seeger comes across as a more sympathetic character than Dylan, with his life long commitment to civil rights and support of left wing causes and community based projects.

But maybe the earlier comments that he was taking speed is what influenced his song writing.
If he was taking acid instead, his writing may have been more like the hippies at that time.

I had previously considered getting the Dylan Box but then decided against it due to the lack of variety in the set lists.
I do have the Don’t Look Back Blu-ray, which is pretty good.

Two other good dvd's - I haven't got the blu ray discs of these or Don't Look Back, are "The Other Side of the Mirror", which features great performances from the Newport Folk Festivals of 1963,1964 and 1965 and Martin Scorsese's " No Direction Home" which takes us up to May 1966.

We can't really know about another's drug use unless they tell us about it themselves. But if pushed, I would say his work in the 60's seems more driven by amphetamines than any other drug.

I can't remember the where the clip I saw that was at or on, but Bob and The Band are in a taxi cab somewhere in the U.K. after a show and Dylan is hollering out the window in response to someone's inaudible yet supposed positive comments.
I wonder how much influence all that specific negativity had upon his songwriting then? Top that off with being a bit spegeetered on them "diet pills" I sort of understand why he could become a cynical assholio!
Personally I dig the Rolling Thunder Review era and the "Street Legal" album. Though the final tour with The Band in 1974 was a pinnacle of music. Dylan is the one musician with the most 'eras' and longevity through metamorphosis it would seem, Even more than The Dead.
Neil Young also had similar life tribulations and musical themes to his long professional career journey. Though I think Neil was honestly a true 'hippie dream' believer {till he wasn't} unlike Dylan who may have really never been.