Reading on mobile? Listen to this Grateful Dead playlist on Spotify here 6 Cumberland Bluesīlack Peter is a typical Hunter character: poor, unremarkable, not particularly lucky. But are they there out of concern for him, from curiosity, or maybe just to chat about the weather? As so often in Hunter/Garcia songs, the bridge shows us the only truth we know for sure about the situation: "See here how everything led up to this day/ And it's just like any other day that's ever been/ Sun going up and then the sun going down/ Shine through my window and my friends they come around." Here, poor Peter is on his deathbed awaiting the end, his friends around him. It has to be noted that death is a much more common theme than love in the Grateful Dead repertoire, whether in original compositions or cover versions. Built around the fear of being dumped ("You were gone, my heart was filled with dread"), it starts out as a country "crying song" featuring Garcia’s pedal steel and ends up as (almost!) a full-blown power ballad. More common is the heartache song, of which this – one of the first Bob Weir songs with lyrics by John Perry Barlow – is a prime example. They Love Each Other is, I think, the only positive love song in the Dead songbook. Bob Weir’s two-speed music reflects the duality of the song immaculately. This tale of two buddies on the run from the law could be a film script, with its dramatic incidents and open landscape, but the climax of the tale is marvellously ambiguous: "Jack Straw from Wichita cut his buddy down/ And dug for him a shallow grave, and laid his body down." Maybe Jack’s companion was caught by the law and hanged, so Jack cut him down and gave him a decent burial. 3 Jack StrawĪmbiguous characters populate many a Hunter song: outlaws, oddballs and chancers fit nicely into the Grateful Dead family, itself comprising outlaws, oddballs and chancers. I like to think the "ripple in still water" is analogous to the sound waves made by a song in silence. But: "I don't know, don't really care/ Let there be songs to fill the air." Jerry Garcia gave Ripple the simplest of simple tunes and, at the end, the opportunity for everyone to sing their own song with their own words and meanings. Well, yes, but it’s more likely that you’ll get some "broken", "hand-me-down" thoughts like those in the rest of the song. "Don’t we all want a song to encapsulate our own thoughts in golden words delivered over sublime music?" he asks. Ripple may be admired for its Zen-like observations about life, but the introductory verses are the real meat of the song. Having defined the musicians’ function in Playing in the Band, here lyricist Robert Hunter defines the songwriter’s goal. Playing in the Band is a classic Dead game of risk: start an intricately-tooled song in 10/4, turn off halfway through down a road of unspecified length and content (different keys, time signatures or even different songs), then somehow coalesce back to the 10/4 song, several minutes, hours or even days later. And at the heart of that process was this belief: "Some folks trust to reason, others trust to might/ I don't trust to nothing, but I know it come out right." It didn’t always work, of course, but the belief was constant and the off-road musical journeys were an essential part of any concert. With no burning desire for fame or fortune, the Dead were driven instead by a need to stand on a stage and play their music, irrespective of what anyone else thought. It could be the Grateful Dead’s mission statement.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |