Vijay Iyer and the American Experience

I first discovered Vijay Iyer when I heard an interview he gave on NPR. Well-spoken, interesting and with a captivating story, I then purchased and fell in love with his album Solo which, as its name suggests, features Iyer playing solo piano. The first piece is a cover of Michael Jackson's "Human Nature." It must be said that the first recording I ever bought as a kid was Thriller which I got at Pay-Less when I was about 6 years old. I saved up my quarter a week allowance I got for taking out the trash and think I wore out the cassette playing it on a small tape recorder millions of times. I still think it's one of the best albums of all time, but I don't think I ever really heard "Human Nature" until I heard Vijay Iyer perform it by himself on Solo. It made me go back to the original that I had spent my childhood listening to over and over again without really truly, truly appreciating. Iyer just crushes it.

I then took some time with other Iyer albums that he recorded with his trio like Historicity and Accelerando and Tirtha, recorded with South Asian virtuosos Prasanna and Nitin Mitta. Besides Solo, Accelerando is probably my second favorite Iyer album, but these other albums are also sublime.

Iyer's version of Jazz is extremely percussive. We see music as movement in the way he lays down rhythms. And it's very exciting.

What I like about Iyer, about Jazz in general, is how it's such an American story. The son of parents from India, Vijay was expected to go into maths and sciences. Which he did. And he went really deep. He got his undergrad in Math from Yale, his Masters in Physics from UC Berkeley, where he also got a PhD in Technology and the Arts. Somewhere along the line he departed from Maths and Sciences, though it's not really a departure because his music is so mathematical. Like a series of patterns, each of the rhythms he creates is intricate and precise, syncopation taken to the nth degree. Iyer dissects music with a scientific precision that is still very heartfelt at the same time. His music pulses with life.

As a son of parents from India, Vijay didn't see himself as a Jazz pianist for a very long time. It certainly wasn't expected that a child of Indian parents play Jazz piano. He did start the violin very young at age 3. But for the most part, he became a self-taught pianist. You can hear influences from the Karnatic music from South India in some of his music's  mathematical, hypnotic nature. But Vijay's music is decidedly American. Vijay is deeply rooted in the great legacy of American Jazz. He recalls seeing Dizzy Gillespie on Sesame Street as a kid and being influenced by Johnny Costas' piano work on Mister Rogers' Neighborhood. He follows in the line of Thelonious Monk with a wonderful Harlem stride piano on his own version of Duke Ellington's "Black and Tan Fantasy." This sort of stuff isn't taught or learned. It's felt. And you can tell Vijay spent a long time just feeling the stride piano and making it his own. Like Monk, who taught himself Harlem stride and put his own unique angular spin on it, Iyer offers a unique angle on  stride. Harlem stride is a deceptively rich style that gives performers a lot of leeway to add their own touches. And this version of "Black and Tan Fantasy" is extraordinary and haunting. What a fantastic American composer Ellington was and we gain a new perspective of his work through Iyer's interpretation.

Vijay has truly lived the American experience, the same one I grew up with, having grown up with Star Wars, Michael Jackson, Thelonious Monk, Sesame Street and Mister Rogers. He took that experience, along with his background, and made it his own, which is what the American art experience is all about.

You have to respect Iyer's ability to keep breaking into new territory as he did with Tirtha, playing with tablas and a guitarist, and the trio plays some mesmerizing Eastern tunes in celebration of the 60th anniversary of Indian independence. Iyer's latest effort is Mutations, recorded with strings and electronic instrumentation. And it is even a further departure, sounding like the more rhythmic recordings of Philip Glass, particularly the Kronos Quartet's recording of his work. Mutations isn't for a beginner, but it's daring and captivating.

There's a pervading view in our times that Jazz music is elitist or too intellectual (especially in a country that has turned very anti-intellectual)--I can't claim that I understand this view as I do not share it, but I think Vijay Iyer's music could break this mould if people gave it a chance. Vijay Iyer's music has the potential to be like the music of Duke Ellington's band in the 1940s, the last time in this country when the most popular music was also the best music being produced. I don't think Vijay Iyer will ever sell as many albums as say a Kanye West or a Katy Perry or a Jay-Z, which is fine. His latest work Mutations is certainly no aspiration for the sales numbers those artists have, but if people gave the time to listen to Iyer's version of "Human Nature" or Ellington's "Black and Tan Fantasy," people might give an extra minute or two to listen to Jazz and appreciate it as America's greatest indigenous art form.

Behind the scenes of the Internet...

A couple of weeks ago, I went on a quest with some of the engineers with whom I work.

I'm not an engineer but I love a quest and that's why this little adventure was fun. We went to look for a VHUB, which is a virtual hub site. Here's a technical description of a hub site: Hub sites are way stations on the routing patterns that our bits and bytes take to get over the Intertubes to go from the point of origin to our devices. Typically, a hub site is a physical hut and could be as big as a nondescript building that we pass each day without noticing. But a VHUB is virtual. A piece as small as a shoe box could serve the fiber optics for 20,000 wireline internet customers.(See my post on Data Movers and the Pipes that get our information to us for more details on hubs, pipes and how our Facebook posts, Tweets and Instagram photos get to us.).

But we weren't as interested in the VHUB as we were in the power supply and the transponder and how that power supply talks to the VHUB. It's strange that these contraptions talk to each other, but they share a lot of important information.

A good specimen of the power supply, so we thought, was going to be near Pioneer Square in downtown Seattle. The power supply was supposedly at such and such address. There we went and in a typical downtown building, part residential and part office space, a number of small businesses were tapping away on the keys in the midst of a normal business day, using the bits and bytes that we are powering.

I peered through the fuzzy glass of a closed office door. A pile of cash was laying on the table. I point out this detail of the cash because, in this day and age, when it feels like all of our transactions are taking place in this semi-fictional space, where large quantities of money are literally swept from one account to another over the electronic Intertubes, it seems strange to see cash. It seems strange to imagine these brick and mortar places where cash changes hands. Where cash could occupy an entire table.

I can't remember the last time I paid for something in cash. Here we were doing some maintenance on the Intertubes so that people can sweep large amounts of money to each other electronically, virtually, and there was a pile of cash on the table.

I paused to reflect on this detail of the cash while we waited for Ricardo, who works for the real estate company as a gopher, and he had the keys to the office where the power supply was. 20 minutes later he came from another address downtown and opened an office door for us.

"No, this isn't what we're looking for. It's a box about yay big." We gestured the size and shape of a power supply. "Aha," Ricardo retorted and took us to the basement. To a broom closet, really, in the remote corner of the building. Deep underground. In the bowels of the city. Surrounded by brooms, mops and ancient office equipment, we found the object of our quest. With some fiber optic and coaxial cabling strewn around in random fashion, we found our power supply in a strange home. And it was blinking.

Imagine 4 engineers standing around a box with a blinking red light as if it were a bomb. And they were trying to defuse it. With deep concentration, theories were abounding. There were lively discussions of Ohm's Law. Wattage. Voltage. Is it a 3 amp or 7 amp power supply? Will this power supply talk to the VHUB? What's up with that blinking red light?

None of the engineers knew what the blinking meant. But I did. My dad had asked me about the blinking red lights on the power supplies, and several months ago I had asked around to figure out the answer. Failed inverter test. Temp sensor not working. A pile of old insulation was laying on the power supply enclosure. At least the thing was well insulated. But here we were and Ricardo said that red light had been blinking for several years. Since they installed it, he said.

And it seems strange. The critical information for some 20,000 households was just sort of hanging in some limbo because of a blinking red light that nobody knew what meant.

I really wanted to see that VHUB. I'd seen what they look like in a brochure but I wanted to see what it looked like in its milieu. Deep under the ground, it would require another field trip. We could either open the manhole cover and descend into the bowels of old time Seattle. Or we could take the tour that goes through underground Seattle to find the VHUB. Did you know that there is another Seattle right underneath the Seattle we currently know? Maybe they'll build another Seattle on top of this Seattle someday.

Behind the Scenes of the Internet: Infrastructure engineers looking at a power supply powering a device providing fiber optics to 20,000 customers. At least it's well insulated. 

Do we really need an app for that? I still do that manually...

Whenever somebody mentions to me that they have a new app to do some task for them, I can only think of a conversation from the cult classic The Big Lebowski between Brad (played by the late and very, very great Phillip Seymour Hoffman) and the Dude himself. 

Brad: Interactive erotic software. The wave of the future, Dude. One hundred percent electronic!

The Dude: Yeah well, I still jack off manually.

And I suppose I'm like the Dude. I still do things manually. Most things, really. 

The most used app in my family is probably the Peterson Bird Guide app for birders (great app by the way), so I'm not totally anti-app. And there are some things I don't do manually, though I'm perfectly OK with looking up birds in a hardcover book. 

I've spent a long time questioning our app culture, but a line I saw recently really solidified some of my harsh feelings towards our app-centric culture. It was really paradigmatic of how we have sort of degraded as a society: "I have an app to tell me when it's raining. How cool is that?" Well, actually, it's not very cool. Because if you need an app to tell you if the sun's shining, you're probably missing some real important things in life (you know, like going outside). Bob Dylan called it pretty well in 1965: "You don't need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows." 

When I lived through the first dot com boom of the late 90s, early 2000s, the most lasting line I ever heard was from a fat cat wealthy tycoon (actually he wasn't really a tycoon or a fat cat, but he was definitely living the good life and it was a life to aspire to). His wise line, something I'm still trying to aim toward was about cell phones. At that time, when cell phones (you know, the old flip phones) were still a novelty, people would conspicuously talk on them in public places (we still do, but it's becoming more ingrained into our culture). The cell phone was like a status symbol to look important because you had another conversation that was more important than being present with those who were with you. This almost tycoon (but too wise to be a tycoon) told me: "Kendall, the goal in life is not to be one of those guys standing around with a cell phone in public places. The real goal in life is not to have one of those things." He was right. Hopefully, I'll become so important and lose some of my insecurities enough so that I can ditch my phone and become 100% present in what I am doing. I'll know that I have made it in life when I can ditch my phone. 

In English: "Put your cell phone here/The first to use it pays the bill." (Spanish grammar nerds, note the spelling mistake.)

I grew up with Star Wars and so I like technology. I like the idea of us as a species going to space and exploring other planets and using technology to live longer and better lives, but I feel like we've lost the story a bit. A line that made a big impression on me in college was from an interview with George Lucas. He said, "Technology is only a tool." In Lucas's case, technology is a tool he uses to tell a story. It's interesting that his worst movies were made when he forgot that important life credo, when his movies became about the technology itself and not about the story. 

My cautionary tale for app makers and app users is that we should spend more time thinking about the story, our story. What are we really using that app for? Do we really need an app for that? I use the map apps that everybody else uses and they're fine for getting the general direction of where I am going, but I'll do a little jig in my car the next time (the first time really) that one of those navigational apps actually gives me the right directions to where I'm really going. 

I'd like to live a good life. I don't need an app for that. 50 years from now we're not going to regret not having invented an app for X. We'll regret not having cured cancer, stopped the spread of malaria, or having figured out how not to completely destroy the place where we live.

Doctor Zhivago: A Russian Story of Life Itself

It will all pass--politicians, war --but if there’s one grain of art it will last forever. Tolstoy to Pasternak

I have always hated the old cliché that says that the book is better than the movie. Certainly, there are millions of books that are "better" than their movie adaptations. But we're talking about two different genres. Apples and oranges. And when they're both done well, and with art, why compare? This post will refer to both the book by Boris Pasternak (or at least its English translation) and the 1965 film, directed by David Lean (whose previous film was Lawrence of Arabia) starring Omar Sharif and Geraldine Chaplin, and both are wonderful and different.

Dr Zhivago is my father's favorite film. Over last Thanksgiving, we watched it together and I realized why. The film version is just a huge, fairy tale-like, brilliant synthesis of the story capturing the more melodramatic and less grim aspects of the novel into 3 hours on the big screen.

After seeing the film, I knew I had to read the book to even more fully appreciate the story of the Russian poet doctor.

Zhivago is  a derivation of the Russian word meaning life and the story of Doctor Zhivago is a fanfare for life itself in the midst of the chaos that man creates for himself on this earth with his civil war and politics that destroy him and those around him.

Zhivago, the poet, is a spark of of humanity in a land where the revolutionary intent itself is an original action worthy of art, but then becomes a parade of automatons, of bad decisions, of inhumane consequences. And what is beautiful is that life overcomes despite all the horrors.

For Dr. Zhivago, Yura or Yuri, art is life. And that's how he makes it through the horrors that Russia is suffering. He realizes that "art has two constant, two unending concerns: it always meditates on death and always creates life."

Dr. Zhivago's story is one of history happening to him. Surrounding him throughout his personal story, we see Russian history happening. The Revolution. The Civil War between the Reds and the Whites and all the other factions. Zhivago finds himself part of the Russian story. He goes out on the front of World War I as a doctor and then comes back to a Moscow in the throngs of revolution and starvation. He escapes with his wife to a bucolic existence in a town far off in the Urals only to be kidnapped and to serve as a doctor and a prisoner for Red partisans. Dr. Zhivago lives history, like all of us. But his is a story of life itself as he is so close to all of the horrors taking place around him. It's sad and beautiful. And is life itself.

"Now what is history? It is the centuries of systematic explorations of the riddle of death, with a view to overcoming death. That's why people discover mathematical infinity and electromagnetic waves, that's why they write symphonies."

The story of Dr. Zhivago is one of fateful meetings, chance encounters and re-encounters of characters years later in different circumstances. You get a sense of how the revolution and war and history, life itself, has changed them and how they have survived despite it all. Some characters die, like Pasha, only to be reborn as fearsome military heroes in Strelnikov. Nobody can forget Strelnikov with "his great moral purity and sense of justice." And with each meeting of Lara, all of which happen serendipitously, Yuri's love grows for her, even while he is still in love with his wife.

Strelnikov's Train

The original exuberance for the Revolution can be felt in lines from like "Just think what's going on around us! And that you and I should be living at such a time. Such a thing happens only once in an eternity. Just think of it, the whole of Russia has had its roof torn off, and you and I and everyone else are out in the open! And there's nobody to spy on us. Freedom! Real freedom, not just talk about it, freedom, dropped out of the sky, freedom beyond our expectations, freedom by accident, through a misunderstanding [...] Mother Russia is on the move, she can't stand still, she's restless and she can't find rest [...] The revolution broke out willy-nilly, like a sigh suppressed too long. Everyone was revived, reborn, changed, transformed. You might say that everyone has been through two revolutions--his own personal revolution as well as the general one. It seems to me that socialism is the sea, and all these separate streams, these private, individual revolutions, are flowing into it--the sea of life, the sea of spontaneity. [...] These days I have such a longing to live honestly, to be productive. I so much want to be a part of all this awakening."

Cossacks and Revolution in the Streets

But then we see the horrors of the revolution, which can never sit still and enjoy what it has accomplished without causing more upheavals and violence and death: "it turns out that those who inspired the revolution aren't at home in anything except change and turmoil, they aren't happy with anything that's on less than a world scale. For them transitional periods, worlds in the making, are an end in themselves." It's all more complicated than what it seems. "It's only in mediocre books that people are divided into two camps and have nothing to do with each other. In real life everything gets mixed up!" And mixed up it gets. Everybody has reason to be afraid, even the heroic Red army hero Strelnikov.

Strelnikov is the very embodiment of what a Russian could be in this time--a Red army hero sentenced to death because of his success, because of his devotion to the very cause that the Reds celebrated. His third death in the novel--the real one--is just the epitome of tragedy and there we see Russia die a little.

Strelnikov himself

Pasternak's very candid portrayal of the civil war that takes place after the revolution made it impossible for him to publish his novel in Russia in 1956. When he eventually did get the novel published in Italy and then won the Nobel Prize for it, he did not attend the ceremonies for fear of reprisal by the Soviet government. Fortunately for him, he was dying of cancer and it wouldn't be nice of them to torture a dying man. Even still, publishing it was an act of bravery.

When, by chance, Zhivago scores a duck in a Moscow that is literally starving during the beginnings of the civil war, his family has a party but it is like a betrayal. "You could not imagine anyone in the houses across the street eating or drinking in the same way at the same time. Beyond the windows lay silent, dark, hungry Moscow. Its shops were empty, and as for game and vodka, people had even forgotten to think about such things. And so it turned out that only a life similar to the life of those around us, merging with it without a ripple, is genuine life, and that an unshared happiness is not happiness, so that duck and vodka, when they seem to be the only ones in town, are not even duck and vodka. And this was most vexing of all."

The citizens of Moscow are ripping out fences and benches for firewood and it becomes hard to find one's way around the city as pieces of it are crumbling away. And Dr. Zhivago runs into a centenarian woman digging for mushrooms in the city. "And it's true, you know, the town is getting to be like the woods. There's a a smell of decaying leaves and mushrooms."

As the city crumbles, history seems to be happening around them and still there is jubilance. "This is history. This happens once in a lifetime. Put on your coat." With so much life happening in the city--gun battles, skirmishes, etc.--Dr. Zhivago, though, can't even go out to get basic supplies like milk. "All life in the city was suspended until the situation would be definitively clarified." He reads the official announcement that Soviet power and the dictatorship of the proletariat had been established in Russia.

A new page has been turned. The revolution and its effects are brilliantly described. "And the real stroke of genius is this. If you charged someone with the task of creating a new world, of starting a new era, he would ask you first to clear the ground. He would wait for the old centuries to finish before undertaking to build the new ones, he'd want to begin a new paragraph, a new page. But here, they don't bother with anything like that. This new thing, this marvel of history, this revelation, is exploded right into the very thick of daily life without the slightest consideration for its course."

Love in the time of war

Perhaps the best descriptions are of the landscape and those horrible Russian winters, made even more horrible by the misery taking place around them. "Winter came, just the kind of winter that had been foretold. It was not as terrifying as the two winters that followed it, but it was already of the same sort, dark, hungry, and cold, entirely given to the breaking up of the familiar and the reconstruction of all the foundations of existence, and to inhuman efforts to cling to life as it slipped out of your grasp. There were three of them, one after the other, three such terrible winters, and not all that now seems to have happened in 1917 and 1918 really happened then--some of it may have been later. These three successive winters have merged into one and it is difficult to tell them apart. The old life and the new order had not yet come in contact. They were not yet openly hostile to each other, as when the civil war broke out a year later, but there was no connection between the two. They stood apart, confronting each other, incompatible."

Nobody really does trains quite like Pasternak or David Lean, director of the 1965 film, for that matter. If you've seen the movie, you'll never forget the trains moving through epic snowy landscapes with large firs (filmed mostly in Canada with city scenes in Casillas, Spain) and scenes of destruction along the way. I would say it's some of the most spellbinding cinematography in film history. The novel even includes a section describing how all of the 300+ passengers on the train spent 3 days digging the train out of snow. It's just bigger than life.

Trans-Siberia

The film hits hard. The score and original music by Maurice Jarre stays with you for a long while after watching. There is something about Russian music and I'm not just referring to the great composers. Shostakovich, Rachmaninov, Tchaikovsky. I remember being in a den of iniquity in a port town in the tropics, experiencing a bacchanal of epic proportions. And it was raucous beyond belief. A keyboard, a guitar, some trumpets, an electric bass, some girls dancing and singing, belting out some cumbias. And then some drunken Russian sailors strolled in and they were bigger than life. There weren't that many of them, but all of a sudden, they belted out in song, each with a bottle of vodka in his hand, and they were much louder than the artificially amplified cumbias. So much louder that patrons were moving outside. The Russians were bigger than life, had so much soul. It was an indelible experience.

There is something deeply poetic about the bigger than life aspect of Russia that Zhivago's story captures so well.

It's like an old Russian folk song that "is like water held back by a dam. It looks as if it were still and were no longer flowing, but in its looks as if it were still and were no longer flowing, but in its depths it is ceaselessly rushing through the sluice gates and the stillness of its surface is deceptive. By every possible means, by repetitions and similes, the song slows down the gradual unfolding of its theme. Then at some point it suddenly reveals itself and astounds us. That is how the song's sorrowing spirit comes to expression. The song is an insane attempt to stop time by means of its words."

What is great about Zhivago's story is that it's apolitical at its heart. Great art loses power when it becomes too political because, as the epigraph to this post from Tolstoy indicates, politics passes. Everything is politics, but it's such a fleeting, shortsighted element of human beings. Politics is so far from the truth. Zhivago makes this point when someone calls Marxism a science: "Marxism is too uncertain of its ground to be a science. Sciences are more balanced, more objective. I don't know a movement more self-centered and further removed from the facts than Marxism. Everyone is worried only about proving himself in practical matters, and as for the men in power, they are so anxious to establish the myth of their infallibility that they do their utmost to ignore the truth. Politics doesn't appeal to me. I don't like people who don't care about the truth." Indeed, "what's going on isn't life--it's madness, an absurd nightmare." Even though it might be inevitable because "gluttons and parasites sat on the backs of the starving workers and drove them to death, and you imagine things could stay like that? Not to mention all the other forms of outrage and tyranny. Don't you understand the rightness of the people's anger, of their desire for justice, for truth?"

It's a time when just knowing--no, just thinking--about someone who might be on the wrong side of the war is enough to arouse suspicion and brings thoughts of the firing squad. A time when feeding yourself and keeping warm by stocking your house with firewood could be and is illegal, but nobody can really keep track of all the laws.

And during the civil war, "White and Red atrocities rivaled each other in savagery, outrage breeding outrage." We witness really grim scenes of torture by the Forest Brotherhood. Zhivago spent 18 months on the front, kidnapped by the Red partisans, and eventually deserts on skis in a moment of inspiration.

What Dr. Zhivago sees on his long walk back to Lara, in his attempt to get back to his family, is just absolutely devastating and about as good as it gets in literature: "For almost half his journey on foot he had followed the railway track. All of it was out of use, neglected and covered with snow. He had passed train after train abandoned by the Whites; they stood idle, stopped by the defeat of Kolchak, by lack of fuel, and by snowdrifts. Immobilized and buried in the snow, they stretched almost uninterruptedly for miles on end. Some of them served as strongholds for armed bands of highwaymen or as hideouts for escaping criminals or political fugitives--the involuntary vagrants of those days--but most of them had become mortuaries and mass graves for the victims of the cold and of the typhus raging all along the line and mowing down whole villages. That period confirmed the ancient proverb, 'Man is a wolf to man.' Traveller turned off the road at the sight of traveller, stranger meeting stranger killed for fear of being killed. There were isolated cases of cannibalism. The laws of human civilization were suspended. The jungle law was in force. Man dreamed the prehistoric dreams of cave dweller."  The images of trains buried in snowdrifts across all of Siberia are like paintings that stick with you forever.

And when Dr. Zhivago finally reaches Lara's house, her letter left behind, with rats crawling over the apartment, it's just unreal. He has to read the announcements on the wall with the Red propaganda that he needs to read to know all the rules that could break him later. "Only once in his life had this uncompromising language and single-mindedness filled him with enthusiasm. Was it possible that he must pay for that rash enthusiasm all his life by never hearing, year after year, anything but these unchanging, shrill, crazy exclamations and demands, which became progressively more impractical, meaningless, and unfillable as time went by?"

Pasternak keeps revisiting the horrors caused by the revolution. "No single man makes history. History cannot be seen, just as one cannot see grass growing. Wars and revolutions, kings and Robespierres, are history's organic agents, its yeast. But revolutions are made by fanatical men of action with one-track minds, geniuses in their ability to confine themselves to a limited field. They overturn the old order in a few hours or days, the whole upheaval takes a few weeks or at most years, but the fanatical spirit that inspired the upheavals is worshipped for decades thereafter, for centuries."

Tonia, his wife, has been swept away from him, exiled in Paris, with his son and his daughter, who he has never met. Tonia's letter to him is devastating and aches with the reality of separation.

But Dr. Zhivago is able to find a tiny bit of brief happiness with Lara in an abandoned house in Varykino, a village far off in the Urals in Siberia. He finds happiness in Lara, who is like "a spring evening. The air punctuated with scattered sounds. The voices of children playing in the streets coming from varying distances as if to show that the whole expanse is alive. And this vast expanse is Russia, his incomparable mother; famed far and wide, martyred, stubborn, extravagant, crazy, irresponsible, adored, Russia with her eternally splendid, and disastrous, and unpredictable adventures. Oh, how sweet to be alive! How good to be alive and to love life!"

Varykino

The happiness lasts for a short few days and then we have more death and misery amidst all of the horrors. But how Dr. Zhivago makes it, how we all make it through the miseries we have to face each day, is through art. Dr. Zhivago scribbles a note to himself "reaffirming his belief that art always serves beauty, and beauty is delight in form, and form is the key to organic life, since no living thing can exist without it, so that every work of art, including tragedy, expresses the joy of existence. And his own ideas and notes also brought him joy, a joy full of tears that exhausted him and made his head ache."

Sure, the Hollywood film is more a love story and the book itself more a recounting of Russian history with all of its tragedies and one man's tragedy in the attempt to not merely exist but to live through it all. But both are a story of life itself. Of the beauty of making life art and art life.

Dissertations, Loser Theory, Fail Fast, Fail Cheap, Don Quixote, and Getting Lost

In 2009, I finished a dissertation on Loser theory and getting lost that went totally (and rightfully) unnoticed. So miserably was it a failure that I've even left academia with no real interest in furthering my writings on Loser theory. The topic still interests me greatly. I just don't think academia is the venue in which to pursue it.

What I find hilarious is that in my recent reincarnation in the business world, I hear mentioned a lot of the principles of my (what I thought was original) Loser Theory. The mantra of the Lean start-up philosophy--"Fail Fast, Fail Cheap"--is constantly being repeated to the point of being a cliché, not just in the start-up world but in traditional companies who are borrowing the Lean philosophy.

Beyond the idea of a bunch of corporate types talking about "failing," an idea that would have been totally unthinkable not too long ago, especially during the 80s, the pinnacle of American greed and materialism when being a winner was the only way, I love the fact that "Loser theory" is quietly catching on. It also makes sense that during our new gilded age--a time of such rampant greed for so few--that Loser theory is coming on strong.

We've always been a wildly optimistic nation--there was no way we could have settled the West without an optimism that bordered on extreme delusion--so it's crazy that we've so strongly embraced Losing recently. Wallace Stegner famously called the Western United States "The Geography of Hope," even while recognizing all of the rampant destruction we wrought in our path on our way to settling the West. Our current president so completely tapped into the American psyche and rightfully based his entire first campaign on "Hope" because we're a people that is always thinking about the future (and sometimes sadly forgetting about our present). An English Lord visiting Bismarck, North Dakota in the late 19th century rightfully wondered why the town was building the capitol a mile or 2 from downtown out in a woody wilderness on top of a random hill. And he got the most American answer you could possibly expect: "Because in the future the town's going to grow out 2 miles toward that hill."

Every week, my boss has me read the Monday Morning Memo, a column written by an"ad wizard," a copywriter with an impeccable ability to sell with the written word. And his organization has a contest looking for a story about failing and learning a hard lesson. And the picture is of Don Quixote. Don Quixote is the origin and pinnacle of my Loser theory. Everybody knows about how Don Quixote goes and attacks windmills, thinking they are giants, and everybody knows about the tragicomedic antics that Cervantes wrote about in the first 1605 edition of his famous work.

What people don't know about is what happens to our famous hidalgo in the second 1615 edition, which is truly the saddest (all tragic and no comedic) work ever written. Don Quixote isn't just about failing, but about losing your ideal. Losing your illusion. Or Losing your religion, like the famous REM song goes. And that's a lot heavier than failing in a battle against windmills and learning a hard lesson.

What all these business gurus talk about--even my favorite Sales/Marketing guru Seth Godin who brilliantly writes a number of posts on How to Fail--is failing on a project or in a business and how we can learn from those mistakes. Classic and ancient Japanese mantra: Fall down seven times so you can get up eight.

That's easy.

But what happens when you lose your ideal?

If you're looking for a pithy, uplifting answer, you're not going to find it here, because I haven't found the answer to that question.

But I can tell you what the characters in the novels I analyzed for my dissertation did: They got lost. They wandered. They daydreamed. They took strong drugs to erase their memories. They resorted to art to escape.

What the losers teach us is how to live. Rather than play it safe, they go deeper and further into the Infinite Abyss. You have to be not afraid to explore your Infinite Abyss. It's about going so far out that you lose the form. You have to lose the form for a bit. You have to make it safely back, but you need to go dangerously off the path. You have to get lost in order to find yourself. There's a movie, Garden State, that's really my generation--I'm really old to be a millennial and a tad on the young side for an X Generation--and it's about this guy who has been on lithium and all sorts of cocktails of drugs to "manage" his anger so that he basically has no feelings anymore (so my generation!) and he comes home (coming home is so wild, isn't it?) and he goes off his meds. And he starts to feel again. Well not at first. His old hometown buddy takes him on this wild quest. And they find the Infinite Abyss. And it's a beautiful scene.  One of those scenes that makes me cry every time I watch it. He finds feeling again--you have to find the feeling again, both the happy and the sad.

The Infinite Abyss

Another film that always reminds me of Loser Theory is Wes Anderson's (maybe) under-appreciated Darjeeling Limited. There's a scene where the 3 Loser brothers are on the Darjeeling Limited in the middle of nowhere in India and their train gets lost--always heavy when a vehicle on rails gets lost--and their guide says to them: "We haven't located us yet." And it's true. They hadn't located themselves (as brothers, as humans, as buddies on a quest).

"We haven't located us yet." 

You have to be Out There in order to come back and re-center and find yourself.

It's the age old human story: Fail. Go out on a quest. Survive the travails. Find yourself. Repeat. There's no "they lived happily ever after." It's a struggle that never ends. We tell ourselves these stories and have told ourselves these stories since the beginning of time--through religion, literature, music, film--so that we don't go completely insane along the way.

-----------------------------------

It took a while. I forgot the title of my dissertation and part of me would like to erase that grad school era of my life, like the memory eraser narcotics that I write about in one of the chapters on Loser theory (one has to lose memories, too, of course), but I found my dissertation and fitting with Loser theory it has been cited only once, according to the citation counter (I wonder who that lost soul was?). With it, regardless, I can say that I am one of the world's foremost experts on being a loser and getting lost.

Reflections on Robert Ellis's The Lights from the Chemical Plant

Robert Ellis first album Photographs (2011) was a revelation for me. There are a number of shades to the album. On the one hand, on the B-side you've got the sounds of a "Dim Lights, Big Smoke and Loud, Loud Music" kind of smokey honky tonk, the type of place where there used to be a mechanical bull but it's now rusty and broken because the bar, which serves Bud, PBRs and straight whiskey, couldn't pay the liability insurance on it. On the other hand, you've got the tender stories that begin when looking at old photographs. The album, appropriately titled, features old photographs of  Ellis's parents in their teenage days and inside you've got older photos, the kind that you could spend an afternoon looking at with grandma who has baked some cookies and made some watered down tea. 

I was immediately entranced by Photographs. Maybe it was the nostalgia of looking at old photos or imagining looking at old photos. Being his first commercially released album, Ellis gives us an introduction to himself and name-checks what one would assume are his influences in "Comin' Home" when he sings "I got Lefty, Willie, Hank, and Townes to keep me company, I'm headed back to Houston, headed back to see baby," referring to Lefty Frizzell, Willie Nelson, Hank Williams and Townes Van Zandt. One can hear the influence of all of those greats, but given Ellis's youth and the inherent tragedy in some of his songs, I can't help but think that we're hearing a twenty-first century Hank Williams. What a compliment that is, but Ellis is maybe that good; he's like that one-in-a-billion meteor that we got in the short-lived life of Hank. 

Like Hank, Ellis is older than his years. A voice that seems capable of contemplating, of making time-honored affiliations, Ellis connects images beautifully. Coming home, returning to one's roots, seems really important to Ellis, and Lights from the Chemical Plant  (2014) features a song entitled "Houston," the second longest song which features both excellent storytelling and great musicianship. Ellis seems really good at connecting images from the past and this tradition, which he lays out beautifully on Photographs, continues on Lights from the Chemical Plant. I don't know how old Ellis is (really young, though, apparently 22 at the time of Photographs, so 25 now by my basic arithmetic),  and I don't claim to know anything about him, other than what I've heard on his 2 albums. His Wikipedia entry said he recently relocated from Houston to Nashville, but he grew up real baptist in Lake Jackson, Texas, according to an interview I was able to find. On "Houston" he sings "From Houston I'm movin' tonight/I've got to pick up and wipe the slate clean/Oh, Houston I'm losin' the fight/You remind me of too many things." These feelings I've felt myself, too, and the rest of the song does a wonderful job of telling the story of breaking up with a former life, with a city, a place and a time. Reinventing yourself is the most American thing you can do, and we live in a strange, wonderful country where this is possible, and listening to Ellis's music, you know it's possible.

I don't know much about Houston. My only connection to Houston is driving through the city on a long road trip that began driving the Mississippi River Route, starting in Kansas and heading down to New Orleans by way of Memphis and Natchez and then returning to Kansas through Houston. We drove through Houston late at night. I knew it had bad traffic and I didn't even want to know what Houston traffic was like. All I remember was driving through the city listening to the Flaming Lips' Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots, one of the most important albums for me, and it was real late. The lights were kinda funny; there was a smokey quality to the air, the music was like a strange space voyage and Houston hit me hard ,though our encounter was brief. 

The other connection to Houston I have is from Wim Wenders' film Paris, Texas, one of my favorite films of all time and one that also deals with diving deep into memories. A lot of the film takes place in Houston, as does the climatic scene in which Travis, the main character, converses with an ex-love through the one-way mirror of a Houston striptease club. 

Ellis's music is like this. Coming back to a place,  to a time, speaking to someone through a one-way mirror. It's deep and dark and sad, but it's rooted and focused. When I first heard the title of his new album, The Lights from the Chemical Plant, it once again returned me to that road trip when we drove through Houston, but this time it recalled when we entered Texas through Louisiana and drove through Port Arthur, Texas, and we got lost driving through these old post-industrial chemical factories and oil refineries, and it was awful and strange--it was dusk and the town was a disaster and all these plants were spewing out horrible pollution, but there was something more there,  and it was my first real impression of Texas, and it was wild and I loved it in its wide-open way.  

The musicianship on both albums  is excellent. I've always had a soft spot in my heart for the pedal steel guitar, as anybody who has ever loved old timey American music. Jerry Garcia, one of the most impressive practitioners of the pedal steel, famously said "I would love to play the pedal steel if I had another lifetime in which to play it," and yet he still left a wonderful lifetime of work on the instrument-- with his wonderful pedal steel playing with Jefferson Airplane, Crosby Stills and Nash, and New Riders of the Purple Sage albums. Will Van Horn is also outstanding on Lights from the Chemical Plant and Photographs. I particularly like the playing on "Steady as the Rising Sun" and "Pride" on the new album and "What's in it for me" on Photographs. "Steady as the Rising Sun" is one of the prettiest songs I've heard in a long time and it took a real mature band to make that song because it sounds like it could be from any era--initial impression is 1950s classic country, but there's more there that requires peeling through the onion layers. Another wonderful addition is Ellis's cover of Paul Simon's "Still Crazy After All These Years," a song that has always made me think of Lupe, my border collie mix who is still crazy after all these years. It's a wonderful rendition that reveals some new depth to and a different look at Ellis. 

While Photographs reveres the old timey classic country music that profoundly influenced him, clearly chronicling it, Lights from the Chemical Plant has a more contemporary feel and sets out a new direction for Ellis. The photographs inside the album are reminiscent of the photos on Magnolia Electric Co's Fading Trails and Ellis's music has more of the more somber tones that Jason Molina was able to achieve with Songs:Ohia and Magnolia Electric Co. You can tell that there's a lot more to Ellis than just the Hank and Willie and Lefty and Townes, a whole lot more, and Ellis makes reference to this new direction in an interview I found that he gave when touring Photographs. He says, "...at this point, a lot of what we are doing is sometimes a little too far out from what may be expected as 'country.' I find that a lot more of the people who like what we doing are more open-minded, like the younger folks, and are people I would say that would not call themselves fans of country music." 

Here Ellis is at this strange crossroads of making American music but not wanting to be associated with a lot of the horrible commercial country music that seems so popular nowadays. He's smart, gifted and mature, takes time to obsess over the important details, recognizes where he came from, and should give a great new direction to American music. I can't recommend his work enough.

John Coltrane: The Translation of Energy into Sound

If each great musician presents us a thesis, an overarching idea that encompasses all of their work, the thesis behind John Coltrane, what he offers to those of us who listen, his great contribution to the world, is the transfer and translation of energy into sound.

Along with Miles Davis's various groups during the 1950s and 60s, the John Coltrane Quartet and its classic period from 1962-1965 is probably the most influential Jazz group of all time and, in a way, you could say that all Jazz since then has flowed from the influence of the groups formed by Miles and Coltrane. Like all of the Jazz from the Glory Years (the bop and hard bop), Trane's work stems from his contact with Charlie "Bird" Parker. As Trane said, "the first time I heard Bird play, it hit me right between the eyes."

Coltrane's canonical 1957 recording with Blue Note, Blue Train, could be the swingingest album of all time and should be in anybody's record collection, even non-Jazz fans. This period between 1957-1960 is incredibly busy and he plays on Miles Davis's album Kind of Blue (1959), which also should be in the record collection of any self-respecting music appreciator. Here we get some more impressionistic playing on a modal jazz based more on modes than chord changes. And in evidence is what jazz critics have called Coltrane's "sheets of sound" which feature him playing hundreds, almost thousands of notes per minute, streaming by like sheets of sound.

With Cannonball, Miles and Bill Evans recording Kind of Blue (1959)

The most prominent example of the sheets of sound is on Coltrane's album Giant Steps (1960). "Giant Steps" contains probably the most complex and difficult chord progressions of any Jazz composition and features what has become known as "Coltrane changes," which employ chromatic third relations and multi-tonic changes and use substitute chords over common jazz chord progressions. What we get with the sheets of sound is the translation of a mad energy into sound. The original recording from Atlantic records is hilarious because Trane just wails and takes us to another dimension with his sheets of sound and then we get to Tommy Flanagan's turn to solo on the piano and he just flails. He can't keep up with the blistering pace that Trane has set and he just about gives up midway through his chorus.

But to say that Trane stopped there would be selling us short, as he continually evolved these complex changes throughout his career and takes them out further and further until his death in 1967. For me, Coltrane really peaks in 1964 with albums like A Love Supreme, a spiritual about a love supreme for God and my personal favorite Crescent. 

Coltrane's work with the Classic Quartet (1962-65), with McCoy Tyner on piano, Jimmy Garrison on bass and Elvin Jones on drums, really is the perfect blend of experimentation, of free jazz and anti-jazz but with a melodic and harmonic form that still gives the group a solid foundation. A Love Supreme is a culmination of his work and is an ode to faith and love for God. This spirituality would continue to influence his playing. The fourth movement of A Love Supreme is "Psalm" and is based on a poem Coltrane wrote to God, with exactly one note for each syllable of the poem, with the phrasing based on the actual words. The story I've heard, which I'm not sure if it's true, is that in 1957 Coltrane quit heroin by locking himself in a room for 3 weeks and just playing his horn. And this refuge  gave him an epiphany. And the way I see it an epiphany that lasted for 10 years until his death--a lucid clarity and sharpness that built on his formidable skills as a musician prior to quitting his addiction. He was already one of the best sax players of all time and then he takes it to a whole new level with the work that just builds and builds until his death. Coltrane found God and his music is a translation of that spiritual energy into sound.

Coltrane was later canonized by the African Orthodox Church as Saint John William Coltrane and I remember when I lived in San Francisco going to the St. John Coltrane Church and people would translate God's energy into sound and just blow on instruments. The translation of energy into sound in its purest form. Music is as close to the spiritual as I can get. Coltrane found God. And when you listen carefully, you can find God, too.

Like a lot of Jazz, Coltrane takes standards, reinterprets them in a way that is original and more complex than the original, in such a way that you get a richer appreciation for the composer. This is the case for how Coltrane interprets Rogers and Hammerstein's "My Favorite Things" from The Sound of Music. "My Favorite Things" is featured on a number of Coltrane albums and every time Coltrane takes it deeper and deeper, including an 18-minute version on Newport '63. The trance-like vamp Indian raga achieved by the quartet on the original recording is pulsating, haunting and is a perfect picture of a quartet in total lock-step--Jimmy Garrison propelling the group with a simple but smooth bass line, Elvin Jones quietly but energetically spurring the group on with quiet fills, and McCoy Tyner in the background, never taking over but directing the improvisation of Coltrane with a pulsating vamp that carries the group forward. The version on Live At The Village Vanguard Again! (1966), with wife Alice Coltrane and Pharoah Sanders, goes into the ridiculous, hyper-kinetic explosive stuff that borders on the insane and clocks in at 26 minutes with a long intro.

When we think of Coltrane, we usually remember his blistering sheets of sound. But one of his great albums is simply titled Ballads (1963), which features standards like "Too Young to Go Steady," "You Don't Know What Love Is" and "Nancy (With the Laughing Face." Coltrane's energy shines through but in softer palettes and at much slower speeds. Coltrane achieved such a wonderful sound--too hard for some, but his playing on other ballads like "Naima" is even deeper, more energetic than the more up tempo tunes associated with him.

With the spiritual Eastern tinge that Coltrane found in the early sixties, McCoy Tyner quietly but elegantly keeps the spirit of John Coltrane's music alive with albums like The Real McCoy (1967), Fly with the Wind (1976) and Extensions (1970), all of which are five-star albums. Extensions features Alice Coltrane on harp and Fly with the Wind puts together unusual instrumentation with oboe and strings and some of the most smoking drumming by Billy Cobham. Coltrane's spirit lives on. His energy continues pulsing in smart, spiritual music that inspires and takes us further.

Coltrane, along with Miles and Duke Ellington, was one of our greatest American interpreters of music, and what we can do now is celebrate him by playing his music over and over again.

5-14-1974. Missoula, Montana. Dave's Pick 9: A Review

After missing gems like 11-17-1973 and 10-22-71 in the first 2 rounds of the Dave's Picks subscriptions series, I finally succumbed to ordering the third round of subscriptions. Yes, they're CDs. And CDs are dead as a media form. But who cares?

And the beauty is in the surprise. Like being at a concert and waiting for a particular tune and then they either play it or surprise you with something even better, it'll be like Christmas here the 4 times this year that a Dave's Pick, a selection from any one or a combination of the Grateful Dead's 2500+ shows, comes to my house. I'm really game for anything from any era. 60s Primal Dead, the Glory Years of 72-74, with the totally original blend of Americana and jazzy psychedelia, the almost perfectly perfect years of the late 70s, the sometimes off but really-on-when-they're-on shows of the mid-80s, there's always a surprise. I'll even take a pick from the 90s. There is so much to choose from with the huge body of work the Dead left us in their 2500+ shows. Some fans have complained that there is too much emphasis on the 70s with the Dave's Picks series, but there really is a deep, deep well to tap there.

Though I'm a fan of all eras of the Dead, let's be totally honest. I'm totally overjoyed that the first pick is from 1974 and features the Dead at the very peak of their jamming. If you believe in the dichotomy of songs versus jams or 1st set versus 2nd set tunes or warm-ups versus deep spacey space jazz hiatuses, 1974 is the year of some of the most powerful jams, which isn't to say the songs are bad. It's just that the jams are what make the year stand out. But this pick has both wonderful extended jams and tasty songs. 

And as a historical side note, the most recent pick represents the Dead's only show in Montana, which is surprising given that Montana, with its strange country vibe, seems like a very Dead kinda place.

Love the Moose and Dancing Bears here. Perfect for Missoula.

5-14-1974 from Missoula, Montana has arrived and it's time to dig into it a bit here, and here are my impressions after several listening sessions:

The first thing I need to mention about the show is its crystal clear sound. With 23 tons of equipment that took 12 hours to set up, the 459-speaker Wall of Sound wasn't about blasting people's eardrums away but making laser sharp clear sound, which is the case for all recordings from 1974, when the Dead were so ahead of their time in terms of sound. (Check out my post here about the Dead's revolutionary sound equipment.)  All fans of this era know that there is one slight defect with the tinny effect to the vocals. But that's a compromise to be made when there is the huge booming bass of Phil Lesh coming in full effect. I can think of no other time other than '73-'74 when Phil's bass shines so clearly and spectacularly. And I'm the type of guy that if I'm reading reviews of a show and someone chimes in with "Phil's dropping huge bass bombs on this one," then I'm in. And Missoula is no different. Phil explodes across both sets, and so do the rest of the band members. Sound: 5/5 stars.

Setting up the Wall of Sound. Sheer work of genius.

Though "Bertha" is a great opening song, after my first listening I thought that the first set didn't really get cooking until the Dead do their rendition of Johnny Cash's "Big River," and in 1973-74 the Dead's version beats any Grand Ole Opry version--just smoking, it leaves the audience exuberant and the band also seems to take note of the high emotion they created in the crowd. The"Brown Eyed Women" that follows deserves multiple listens, as it doesn't have the long, sweet, smooth Jerry solos of versions from '77 or the more down home country feel of '72 versions, but the Dead are lock tight, playing on all cylinders, and this might be my new favorite version. When I listened to the first set again, I don't know what I was thinking on my first listen: just about every song here is cooking, starting with that "Bertha," one of my personal favorites "Me and My Uncle;" "Loser" is powerful, even "Mexicali Blues" is good. But I must have been sleeping on the new at that time "Scarlet Begonias"-->"It Must Have Been the Roses" played with energy and verve. Even the audience is singing a nice harmony with Jerry and Donna on "It Must Have Been the Roses." Great versions here, folks! 

The "Playing in the Band" that ends the first set is slow, introspective and at one point sloppy. There is a missed transition before the reprise, and because of  it we are treated to not just one but two Donna howls in the reprise of the melody. But the meat in the middle of the song is where it happens.When the drums stop for a bit, Phil, Bobby, Jerry, and even Keith take the spaceship out to the ninth dimension. Phil's bass is, as mentioned before, just booming and grooving, especially on this "Playing." And at no time I can think of is Bobby Weir's comping on rhythm guitar just so rhythmically and harmonically original. Nobody was doing what Bobby was doing. Bobby's big hands give him the ability to construct totally wacky, jazzy chords, and the best comparison I can think of is how his strange chords and heavily rhythmic playing are like those of McCoy Tyner, pianist in John Coltrane's quartet. Missoula is one of the best examples of this unique playing style and this version of "Playing" is just an absolute clinic on Bobby's totally original rhythm guitar strumming. 

"Playing" was always a vehicle for Jerry to display his rich grasp of American music in long solos, and you can identify the Jazz, Folk, Space Rock influences here, just like any of the other just marvelous versions of "Playing" that were consistently on display in the 72-74 period, but it's Phil and Bobby who are really cooking here.The unsung hero of this "Playing," who I do not praise nearly enough on this blog, is Billy, whose drumming is just masterful and defines the genre of Space Jazz drumming. Like a number of Dead songs, "Playing" has a strange time signature, 10/4, and Billy really kills it with hyperkinetic work on the cymbals, snare and high-hat, and really moves the band throughout most of the song. Great version at a slower tempo than the classic '72 versions, and if it weren't for the sloppy transition at the end, which gave the spaceship a bumpy landing, it would really reach into the canon of utter Dead greatness.

Jerry and Bobby circa 1974 in deep jam form

1st set: 5/5 stars

Another song that requires multiple listens to really appreciate is "Row Jimmy" in the second slot of the second set. Slow, tender, felt, you could miss it if you weren't paying attention, but it's subtle swaying beauty and Jerry's slide solo are a real treat. The band, once again, is lock tight with a shy groove.

Then we move into the real meat of the show: the spacey jam section. In a recent interview with Rolling Stone magazine, Bobby Weir mentions how songs grow and age and take on a life of their own. Songs are living things and this notion is especially true with the Dead, who play a song differently every night. Weir even mentions how some songs go to sleep for awhile. ""Dark Star" went to sleep for a long time and then came back," Weir said, referring to how the Dead stopped playing one of their most requested tunes between 1974 and 1978 (and at other times). 

The Dead only played "Dark Star" 4 times in 1974 and this version is as deep and as dark as they come during an era when the Dead were peaking in their ability to explore deep space with long jams. The Dead weren't just playing in paragraphs but long, detailed and textured novels. And the "Dark Star" from Missoula is an outstanding example of the Dead's ability to play novels. It comes in a wonderful sandwich squeezed between "Weather Report Suite" and "China Doll," so that we get just under 52 minutes of uninterrupted brilliance from the band at the peak of their abilities to extend long-winded improvisation together. "Weather Report Suite" just streams out of the mountains crystal clear, exploratory but tight and then the deep, dark pull of "Dark Star" pulls us out of the perfect Western landscape of the "Suite" and takes us, once again, way out to outer space. The "Weather Report Suite" is so good it almost made me cry on first listen and rivals the wonderful '73 Winterland versions of it, but the 6-28-74 version captured on Dick's Picks 12 and the 28-minute medley jam that follows it still might take the cake. The "Suite" builds and we have a quick transition into "Dark Star" that builds slowly but deliberately in the 12-minute prelude to the first verse and is filled with very intricate rhythm guitar work from Bobby and delicate, masterful soloing from Jerry and some polyrhythmic drumming from Billy. Minutes 10-12 are extraordinary with some subtle work by Phil who plays his bass like a cello or the tenor in the quartet: swift, in line with the guitars, rather than below them. Keith is quietly shining here, too, on the keys as he does in most of this show, standing out in his "Loser" fills, a "Big River" solo that cooks and at a few other moments, like the "Not Fade Away" that will come after the "Dark Star." 

At about 19 minutes into the "Dark Star," we hear Jerry's fingers going warp speed across the fretboard, taking us to one of the weirdest sounds I've heard since the wild droning of the space rocket engines taking off in the middle of the "Other One" jam from 12-19-73, which is quite literally the most interesting sound I've ever heard in my life and is something I can only listen to about once or twice a year because the sound makes my bones tingle in such a strange way. This is the most out I have ever heard the Dead play and is really not for the uninitiated. The sounds made in minutes 19-21 of the "Dark Star" are about as weird as they come. 

The last 4 minutes of this "Dark Star" come at a blustering pace--hyperkinetic, polyrhythmic, explosive, this is the Dead taking music and sound to another level--and then suddenly, magically, we transition into the quietest, prettiest moment of the show as "China Doll" begins. One wonders what hand signals or musical cues are given between the band members because this switch between wild, chaotic, exuberant playing to a quiet, clear "China Doll" happens so smoothly and quickly and really reveals the band playing as a collective unit--beyond telepathic, one mind, completely focused.

What's hilarious is how a reviewer of the concert from the Missoulian just didn't get what the Dead were all about and wrote of this section: "But the night was not all roses. One incoherent jam in the four-hour concert rambled on for 40 minutes." Just listening to the recording of this "Dark Star" 40 years later is frightening, but it must have been truly mind-bending at the show, and easily impossible to grasp for the uninitiated. Had I been there, I might have run out of the building screaming in absolute fear. The ethereal quality of a well-played "Dark Star" can be almost too much to handle. But really that's what the Dead were really about: Taking music to places it had never been before. And as much as I love this version of "Dark Star," and the wonderful places it can take the listener, it's the Dead's ability to follow the seeming "rambling incoherence" of a deeply spacey "Dark Star" with a song that is so crystal clear, so pristine, so focused with such rich poignant purpose in "China Doll" that does it. The Dead could go from the ninth dimension of a universe far, far away to a deeply rooted laudanum-laden country western tale about a pistol play gone bad told with an absolute precision at the turn of a dime. 

Missoula's version of "Dark Star," by the way, belongs in the canon of 2/27/69, 2/13/70, 10/31/71, 8/27/72, 9/21/72, and 11/11/73 "Dark Stars," all perfect but different. We can see a natural progression over the years and the growth of the song over time. And wow did it grow. It's nearly impossible for me to pick a favorite from these--lately I've been partial to 11/11/73, but re-listening to this Missoula version and especially the last 5 minutes shows the total progression of the Dead and their dedication to each other and to improvisation. Absolutely spellbinding. Each "Dark Star" shows a deep development and this one fits into the progression. 

What's crazy is that after 50 of the most intensely serious minutes of music, we get a rousing, barn-burning, totally un-serious version of Chuck Berry's 1964 "Promised Land," which is just a warm-up for a "Not Fade Away"-->"Going Down the Road Feeling Bad" that knocks the socks off. If Jerry was at an 11 for the earlier part of the show, following the logic of Nigel in the mockumentary "This is Spinal Tap" (check this link to watch the discussion of amps going to 11), Jerry goes to 13 during both Buddy Holly's "Not Fade Away" and Woody Guthrie's "Going Down the Road Feeling Bad." He really knocks it out of the park here, folks! What's amazing is that after the spacey section of the second set, we go from Chuck Berry to Buddy Holly to Woody Guthrie, 3 of the most important American composers I can think of. Second set: 7 out of 5 stars.

It's this sort of versatility displayed in the "Weather Report Suite"-->"Dark Star"-->"China Doll" collective stream of consciousness that makes me believe that the Dead probably had/have the richest repertoire in American music. Their songwriting is genius in its storytelling abilities, both in a musical and a lyrical way, as Hunter's lyrics tell the story of the nomadic West in a way that is poignant but leaves so much up to the imagination. It's not just their songwriting but their interpretation of other American classics, like those of Buddy Holly, Woody Guthrie and Chuck Berry.The Dead took their songs and made them their own. They were deliberately apolitical and the power of their message was so palpable because it didn't conk the listener over the head with a social or political agenda, leaving the listener to make it up in his/her head and blend into the creative design of the Dead world. For me, the Dead tell a more complete story of the West, of a wild America of the sixties and seventies and times before, like the gold mining days in California, with just as much richness as the best of the folk troubadours. 

The Dead's creativity still seems under-appreciated, as their ability to create utterly new music with new twists and turns every night left us with a body of work that is staggeringly immense, unique and utterly telling of us as a people: the American West in its most purest form. 

What we get in '74 is a band that has been together at least 200 nights a year for almost 10 years straight, who'd see one key band member die and another leave (temporarily), whose bonds of brotherhood must have been so incredibly strong (almost frayed and fatigued by 1974, which is why they took their hiatus in 1975 and 1976. But the word hiatus is a strange because of the sheer volume of work they were able to achieve in those "hiatus" years.) And because of those bonds the band's collective mindset was perfect for orchestrating longwinded, incredibly sophisticated and drawn-out Jams that I believe are the peak of American improvisatory music, rivaling even the works of two of my favorite Jazzers, Miles Davis and John Coltrane and all of the players who played with them, who also are at the pinnacle of improvisational music. But what also surprises with Missoula is not just the jams, but the songs are really at their peak here, too. Between "Row Jimmy,""Brown-Eyed Women,""Loser," a brand new "Scarlet Begonias," even "Tennessee Jed" impresses, you've got some subtle yet distinctively beautiful tunes for the American songbook. The Wild West at its best. 

There have been many "jam bands" that have followed in the wake of the Dead--some, more technically proficient--but they pale in comparison with the rich body of work the Dead have offered us. The Dead were master imitators, and I mean this in the best way, before they had many imitators themselves. They were studied scholars of American musical history, perfectly synthesizing so many genres that are distinctly American--country, bluegrass, Jazz, minstrel, blues--in a totally unique way. The "Weather Report Suite"-->"Dark Star"-->"China Doll" stream is really the American West at its best. Wild with reckless abandon, one sees landscapes beyond description in their mind's eye while listening. 

Like all meaningful music and most music by the Dead, Missoula demands multiple listens in order to appreciate. And it's staggering once you appreciate it. Unfathomable that it hadn't been released commercially before. 



kendall.whitney@gmail.com