The Devil's Club Forest

We found this patch of forest off a frequently traveled, nondescript logging road in the Mount Baker National Forest. To the untrained eye, the patch of forest might not seem like much--but it was extraordinary. A working forest, but managed properly. A rich ecosystem with lots of natural undercover, varying ages of trees, lots of animal sign--elk, bear. Lupe ran wild and Mar reluctantly came along while Kirsten snapped pics of plants. It all got me to thinking...

I've walked so many trails in Whatcom and Skagit counties, here in the most Northwestern parts of the Evergreen state, yet I've only come across a handful of tiny pockets of Old Growth forest. They tend to be small sections of land protected by a token land grant to appease some environmentalists, surrounded by clearcuts, or land right below the alpine zone, "so high the chainsaws run out of oxygen."  

Given that I can count on one or two hands the number of tiny pockets of Old Growth left in Whatcom county, I would take a wild guess and say that probably around 1 % of the old growth that once was still exists here. 

What is an even rarer find than a pocket of Old Growth forest, and one that I appreciate possibly more than the true Old Growth forest, is forest land that has been logged but managed in such a wise way as to leave it in good condition for future generations. Left to its own devices, the land finds a way to remain rich, the soil healthy, erosion minimized, the biomass great--land that supports life. I appreciate this land because I live in a house made by wood and use wood products every day, so it would be ridiculous to say we should protect every square inch of the land to remain Old Growth, though clearly we do need to protect what little we have left. 

A particular good sign of land that is on its way to becoming rich and healthy again is the spiky plant known as Devil's Club, which likes soil that has been disturbed but is healthy, like the forests I tend to walk. Seeing the Devil's Club is a sign of a forest on its way to recovery. 

Devil's Club

For so many lands outside the token lands left unlogged, the forest is left looking like a graveyard or a post-apocalyptic war zone. The remains of a clearcut look like bombed-out craters, like a prairie slashed and littered with bleached buffalo bones. Scraggly trees, erosion, poor moisture retention. In essence, a destroyed ecosystem. You can find these lands all over the Pacific Northwest. If you fly over in an airplane, with the exception of a few volcanoes, what you see is a checkerboard. An arbitrarily plotted checkerboard with squares going back and forth between monocultures and wastelands. It doesn't take a biologist to see that this strategy is short-term at best and destructive in the long term. Sure, there are a few token parks and wilderness areas--"artificially preserved lands." What is rare is land managed with any sense of conservation, like this second growth forest that we recently found, which I'll call the Devil's Club Forest.



For so long in American history, conservation efforts were equated with anti-business sentiment, which really isn't a healthy approach. Ecology and economy are not mutually exclusive terms. Protecting land isn't what has ruined the economic realities of logging communities during the last 30-some years. Poor land management practices and robots have done more damage to rural economies than any spotted owl. Not just logging communities bear the brunt of these "lost forests"--all of us do. And we can't just blame timber companies that managed their inventories only for the short term and shipped off raw product to be made into value-added product in foreign countries, again robbing logging communities of a lot of revenue and jobs. We have to blame all of us--for wanting more stuff and cheaper. But this cheap stuff is only cheap in the short term.  

Robots, mechanization, in general, and automation have quietly killed more jobs than any immigrant or any trade deal.

Does this look like healthy land management?

Fast thinking, the connection economy, and a laser focus on efficiency measured in the short term have killed any dream of a peaceful day in the factory. These things have also killed the forest and communities that depend on forests. As Wendell Berry notes, "Bad logging, like bad farming, comes from estrangement between the industrial economy and nature's ecosystems." Possibly no greater exception to the rule of a free market capitalism is the forest. Short-term land management always leads to long-term exhaustion of resources and in turn has produced the ghost towns of the west.

Land management, which has always been for the short term, has brought about the demise of logging communities across the Pacific Northwest. As a vowed free market capitalist, I can see what's good about free market thinking--the free exchange of ideas and goods, making decisions by efficiencies over creed. I can also see clearly where free market capitalism fails--unfortunately, these efficiencies are measured in the short-term--a quarter, or year at best--when the cycles of our planet, particularly forests, are measured in centuries or decades at the very least.

With forests, the problem is that state-funded ag schools and schools of forestry have long taught that trees are "crops" to be "harvested." The problem with this nomenclature is that "crops" tend to work in annual cycles while trees' cycles tend to be measured as stated above in decades or centuries. Harvesting this year's "crop" of trees affects the forest and thereby the "next crop." 

Rather than "crops" to be "harvested," a slightly more reasonable approach might be to see the forest as livestock. As Wendell Berry points out, "No sane farmer would sell all her brood cows, keep their heifer calves, and wait for another calf crop until the heifers have become old enough to breed and calve [...] Nor would a sane cattle farmer 'highgrade' his herd by selling his best cows and keeping and breeding the worst." But these are precisely regular practices in forestry. 

A stand consisting only of the "best" trees is a tree farm, not a forest. Healthy forests require dying trees and unmarketable species.The source of wood products is not trees but the forest. Tree farms work in places with exceptional growing climate (like the southeast United States) while producing mediocre product, which is fine because that's in general what the market wants--wood composites for making cheap Ikea furniture.

The sustainable forest yields both higher quality wood and more wood over the long term. In his essay "The Last Stand" Aldo Leopold mentions a forest called the Spessart on the north flank of the Alps. Half of it has sustained cuttings since 1605 but has never been clear cut (slashed in Leopold's terminology) and the other half clear cut in the 1600s: "Despite this rigid protection, the old slashing now produces only mediocre pine, while the unslashed portions grows the finest cabinet oak in the world; one of those oaks fetches a higher price than a whole acre of the old slashings. On the old slashings the litter accumulates without rotting, stumps and limbs disappear slowly, natural reproduction is slow. On the unslashed portion litter disappears as it falls, stumps and limbs rot at once, natural reproduction is automatic. Foresters attribute the inferior performance of the old slashing to its depleted microflora, meaning that underground community of bacteria, molds, fungi, insects, and burrowing mammals which constitute half the environment of a tree." Indeed, "there is no significant difference between forest ecology and a long-term forest economy." 

Indeed, a healthy large tree makes more wood per year than many small ones. Wendell Berry's illuminating essay "A Forest Conversation" from his aptly titled book Our Only World recounts his time with a Pennsylvania logger who employs a crew of Amish teamsters and their horses to sustainably yield a healthy forest, producing veneer-quality cherry trees and maple syrup. The Pennsylvania logger formed a Foundation for Sustainable Forests whose goal "is an abundance of intact forest ecosystems that provide for the widest range of native biodiversity possible, sustainable forest products, the economic viability of rural communities, and recreational opportunities." The novel concept is that this logger's family lives with the land cooperatively rather than from the land. And, here's the kicker, the logger, his land and his community are healthier, even in an economic sense, when logging in this more sustainable way.

The Amish teamsters operate horses, which are kinder to the forest than mechanical skidders, leaving less scars and damaged life. The other significant advantage is cost--a skidder might cost $150,000. A team of horses with accompanying tools $5000. Yes, they have to be fed and trained and there are huge economies of scale achieved with the mechanical skidder. But once you make the significantly larger capital outlay for the mechanical skidder, the economic pressure to log as quick as possible skyrockets, just about always resulting in reckless land use that is only good for the very short term. 



There are 3 Amish teamsters employed per every one mechanical skidder operator. Which would give another significant efficiency gain to the mechanical skidder, except that two local jobs are lost. The purchase of the mechanical skidder only aids the economy of a remote corporation that lives off the "rent" of monthly payments on the skidder--it may even be that the logging outfit brings in a remote driver to live temporarily in the community and then abandon the community once the forest has been slashed. 

I've never been a believer in "job creation"--a government or even government policies don't "create jobs." Having meaningful work is what really makes it possible for people to work. And using the teamsters in the end makes more economic sense--by employing local people, keeping economic gains within the community, and producing a more sustainable yield, which is also a more valuable yield.

Business talk refers to vertical integration. With a sustainable forest, the land works within a "vertical structure." The growth of a fern depends on the deer population, which may or may not affect the blackberry population and be affected by the wolf or cougar populations, all of which play a role in the health of the forest. Not to mention all of the microflora and microfauna. With better land management practices and creative fixes like using the Amish teamsters doubles the productivity of poorly managed lands, while also increasing the number of human workers doing real work that creates value for the community and the forest.

One success story for managing our resources on the sustainable yield principle is Alaska seafood. Alaska seafood proves how valuable the principle of sustainable yield is. In Alaska, it came as the result of watching other places--California, Oregon, Washington, New England, and Europe almost completely eradicate salmon from their watersheds. What's important beyond the sustainable part of this equation is the yield. Because if we were just to say "Let's never touch a salmon again," that would be worse for the salmon and the habitats within which they live. Fishermen and those whose lives depend on yielding salmon have fought hard to protect watersheds from large mining, timber and other polluters that wouldn't have "touched" the salmon but would have completely ruined the places where salmon dwell. The same goes for the forest. 

The Economist recently reported on the extreme damage to forests caused by fires and beetles as the result of climate change, a problem that only looks to get worse before it gets better. Smart partnerships between the unlikely bedfellows of forestry and NGOs, like the Nature Conservancy, have intelligently thinned forest areas, both protecting the forest from rampant logging and rampant forest fires. It might be too little, too late, but these partnerships give forests life in an economic and ecological sense. Ecology and economy are not mutually exclusive terms--in fact, their partnership is essential for life. 

On Alexander von Humboldt and The Invention of Nature

Alexander von Humboldt might have been the first European to truly observe, acknowledge, document, and describe so eloquently the impact human beings have on this planet. Yet few recognize his name now despite the fact that in 1869 cities in multiple continents, including North America, held gatherings and parades with hundreds of thousands of merry-makers that celebrated what would have been Humboldt's 100th birthday. Andrea Wulf's The Invention of Nature (2015) seeks to make Humboldt relevant again through an in-depth history of Humboldt's life, tracing those he influenced including Darwin, Walt Whitman, Thoreau and Muir, among others.

Humboldt's greatest contribution to thought is the invention of the concept of nature and the idea that we are indeed part of and have an important role to play both in our earth's health and destruction. Humboldt's pivotal moment comes in the year 1800 in Venezuela while on his most epic expedition through South America and observing the effects that deforestation was having on erosion. Humboldt wrote the following words, which so poignantly describe the people-nature-planet connection, which is important because we still need reminding that not only are we part of nature but we have an impact on the planet's inter-workings: "When forests are destroyed, as they are everywhere in America by the European planters, with an imprudent precipitation, the springs are entirely dried up, or become less abundant. The beds of the rivers, remaining dry during a part of the year, are converted into torrents, whenever great rains fall on the heights. The sward and moss disappearing with the brush-wood from the sides of the mountains, the waters falling in rain are no longer impeded in their course: and instead of slowly augmenting the level of the rivers by progressive filtrations, they furrow during heavy showers the sides of the hills, bear down the loosened soil, and form those sudden inundations, that devastate the country." Anyone who has lived where human activity affects water flow can recognize the alarm Humboldt is sounding with these sentences.

I see this 1800 moment as a turning point in human history. For so long it had been "go forth and propagate," but at this moment, Humboldt markedly points out that human beings have a negative impact on the planet. Being aware of our impact should affect personal and policy decisions, yet 216 years later we still try to sweep what we do under the rug rather than change course on our actions, thereby inflicting more stress upon the ecosystems within which we live.

"Everything," Humboldt later writes, "is interaction and reciprocal." The balance is key, and humankind--whether because of its success, its greed, or just its very existence--has thrown out the balance. Humboldt pins down humankind's long-term effects on the environment--namely, the 3 big ones: deforestation, ruthless irrigation or careless water use, and "the great masses of steam and gas" produced in industrial centers. Sound familiar? Yet, even so, nature has a tendency to auto-correct very well without us. Humboldt was the first European to document that nature is a web of life, a powerful force interwoven by a "a thousand threads." We can see hawks feeding on small birds, small birds on spiders, spiders on dragonflies, dragonflies on hornets, and hornets on aphids. Each animal has its own God-given purpose, and without our help (or our harm) can maintain a healthy, stable balance through perpetuity. And maybe that is our ecological role--to throw off the fine-tuned inter-workings of this planet and maybe, just maybe, use our ingenuity to improve it, even when hubris frequently leads us astray in our attempts.

In Humboldt's time, there was no real name for what he was, but today it could be fair to call Humboldt, an intrepid explorer who sought to document everything he saw, forming important connections, the world's first naturalist. Humbolt writes in  Cosmos: A Sketch of the Physical Description of the Universe (1851) that it was his obsession "to pursue one and the same object until I can explain it." His subject: The Universe. Which means that beauty and order were also applied to the universe as an ordered entity. Perhaps Humboldt's greatest legacy is leaving us with his idea that the Earth is living and that we indeed have an effect on it. Indeed, we are part of it. This is his, and still our, concept of nature, and it's a notion we tend to lose sight of.

Without Humboldt's writings, Wulf notes that it's highly likely we might not have a Charles Darwin, whose writings on evolution were also based in the idea that everything is interconnected. Later, in General Morphology of Organisms, a fervent salute to Darwin's Origin of the Species, German biologist Ernst Haeckel finally gives a word for what Humboldt did--oecologie--ecology. Oikos is Greek for "household" and ecology takes "household" and applies it to the natural world. Haeckl, whose Art Forms in Nature (1899) would shape the stylistic language of the Art Nouveau, featuring illustrations of calcareous radiolarians, sponges, jellyfish and other microscopic creatures. That illustrations of microscopic creatures could become the voice of architects and designers is pure Humboldt in action. The synthesis of the organic living world into the mechanical world furthers Humboldt's thesis. At a broader level, this interconnection is important because, as Humboldt and all of his followers have noted and I repeat here because we forget, we are all part of nature.

What's perhaps most telling is the title of Wulf's book, and the emphasis on the invention of nature rather than the idea of nature as innate part of the world. It begs the question: Are we separate from nature? Does their need to be a man-nature dichotomy? It's always been there; Humboldt just helped us describe it. Or was the concept of nature really so far outside of  the reality, the inner worlds of the Europeans of his time that it took Humboldt to invent it? Too often we have segregated what we do, how we see the world, into different little categories. Particularly now, our careers have become more and more specialized. Division between the arts, the sciences, humanities, has never been greater in the academy. All of this division, which really hurts our understanding of the health of our world in the end, was just the opposite of how Humboldt saw the world. Humboldt's legacy is his holistic approach, which has fallen out of favor in academia and the tech pursuits these days in which everything is so highly specialized that we are witnessing robots take away our jobs. We've become single-minded cogs, and perhaps a more well-rounded Humboldtian approach would help us.

We've become so compartmentalized that we've lost sight of the Big Picture as a society. And this is why Humboldt matters. Because nature is a global pattern, it is made up innumerable complex parts that interplay in ways we don't understand because we now have a much more myopic me-first perspective of the world.

When Thoreau's science and poetry journals became one in the same, we see the work of Humboldt and his more holistic approach to the world at hand. Thoreau sought a unifying perspective: the lichen on the rocks and the trees in the distance were perceived in relation to each other and "reduced to a single picture." There is an order in the Cosmos. Everything is interconnected. Humboldt's concept of Cosmos captures the relationship between human beings and nature. Thoreau takes this idea, but deepens our sense of nature: The Earth is "living poetry...not a fossil earth but a living specimen."

Humboldt's vision of nature also resonates with what George Perkins Marsh writes in Man and Nature (1864) when he is sailing down the Nile and observes how man leaves trails of destruction in his path. Marsh lists off numerous examples of how humankind interfered with nature and the curious but illustrative results: When a Parisian milliner invented silk hats, fur hats became unfashionable and decimated beaver populations began to recover. Farmers, who killed birds to protect their harvests then had to deal with swarms of insects that were previously the birds' prey. Wolves reappeared in Europe during the Napoleonic wars, as men were too busy fighting each other to kill off wolves.

Wulf's great contribution in her biography of Humboldt is her tracing of the influence Humboldt had on great thinkers and hence on the way we think. You can see Humboldt as Muir traces the scars of glaciation in Yosemite Valley. As Muir writes in 1869, also under the influence of Humbolt, "[w]hen we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe...The whole wilderness seems to be alive and familiar, full of humanity. The very stones seem talkative, sympathetic, brotherly." Wulf traces Humboldt from Darwin to Marsh to Haeckl to Muir and you can extend his vision out from Muir, for when I read Muir, I extrapolate him out to thinkers like Kerouac and his wild descriptions of man in nature out on a fire watch.

But we also need to have a deeper appreciation of nature and our place in it. Wendell Berry, another Humboldtian protege, puts it so well: "There is in fact no distinction between the fate of the land and the fate of the people. When one is abused, the other suffers." And now we suffer. Or, do we get off this planet to mine and log the others?

Without knowing it, I've been influenced by Humboldt. I've always tried to live by the Boy Scout motto: To leave things better than how you found them. Because the unified whole is made up of complex interconnected parts--like a tight band, a good novel, or the interconnected pieces that make a trout stream special.

A Review of Day of the Dead: A Grateful Dead Tribute Album

The Day of the Dead Tribute album celebrates 50 years of the Grateful Dead. And what it illustrates is an ongoing, ever-changing, ever-evolving rich music whose only thesis has been continual exploration. 

The Dead's music always changed because the original band members, who came from such different schools of music--Pigpen with the blues, Bobby with rock and country, Jerry with bluegrass, Mickey with his multi-ethnic crazy poly-rhythmic percussion, Phil with the classical and modernist Stockhausen influence--knew how to listen to each other. The band never, ever, not for even one minute, sat still. None of them forced their own vision too much onto the the concept of the band--it grew organically and constantly throughout their careers. Some times they weren't great musicians, but man did they to listen to each other well, which is what created the magic, as Weir explains in this latest interview with Rolling Stone: "if somebody was a little unsure of where we were or was hearing something differently, if you could hear that and jump on that, then the song would transform. It was magical." It still is magical, as Weir explains the current configuration of the band. But it continues to breathe on with these younger bands that pay tribute to the Dead in this 5-disc tribute album. Unafraid of exploration, they dug in and they used their ears, really listening in order to create beautiful music. 


What the Day of the Dead tribute album also shows is that the Grateful Dead's magic was in the songs. The Dead's shows were legendary for the positive energy the band co-created with their audiences and the monstrous freewheeling experimental jams they were capable of. But it all started with exceptional songwriting, the launchpad for musical joy. Jerry Garcia and Robert Hunter were a perfect pair in songwriting. Hunter's penchant for storytelling--always allusions, never absolute statements, made it possible for listeners to create their own songs in their heads. Making it personal, giving the listener the option to make their own story up about the song, makes it much more powerful than an outright declaration. Put together with Jerry's tastefulness in incorporating such a broad space of the American music idiom created a whole world for listeners to get lost in. If nothing else, Jerry was an encyclopedia of American music. Whether it was blues, gospel, soul, R & B or country, he made it fit without forcing it. And the stories always fit the songs, too. Bob Weir is also a gem of a songwriter with tunes like "Jack Straw" and "Estimated Prophet" that are just timeless.

The tribute starts with "Touch of Grey" by The War On Drugs (the band name for Kurt Vile, Adam Granduciel and company). It's a perfect beginning because it's an impeccable re-imagining of the song. If you dissect the new version, bit by bit, it's the same song--similar tempo, same rhythm guitar and keyboard licks, similar inflections on the vocals, though some notable changes. But when you're done, it's a completely different, almost unrecognizable new song and could very much exist on its own. The new version is also an earworm to say the least--I heard it for days after listening to it--and it also caused me to re-think the lyrics. The truly melancholy aspect of Hunter's lyrics comes out a little better in The War On Drugs version. Hunter recollects the creation of the song in this stimulating interview and says it's strange that a song so popular you can hear it in the supermarket was written when he was in the absolute dregs. If you listen to the lyrics, it comes out, but the chords are bittersweet and you can taste some hope. "I will survive." The lines "Every silver lining's got a touch of grey" have always gotten me and maybe the song rings truer because now I, too, have a touch of grey. 

There are too many highlights to mention all. I really like Courtney Barnett's take on "New Speedway Boogie"--the rhythm is perfect and along with the deadpan delivery of the lyrics, the song comes out powerful and spooky, like the original, but it's a new song. I could listen to Bryce Dessner's "Garcia Counterpoint" on repeat all day--just Jerry-like noodles on the guitar. Not Jerry, but echoes of Jerry. Bonnie 'Prince' Billy doing "Ruben and Cherise," "Bird Song," and "If I had the world to give." Another delight is the full-on symphonic and over-indulgent "Terrapin Suite." The Dead did many things in excess but they never performed "Terrapin Suite" in its entirety in concert, and this version is excessive, grandiose, and beautiful--truly inspired. Performed by The National, Grizzly Bear, members of the Brooklyn Youth Chorus, and a small symphony, they really nail it.

Banjoist Bela Fleck and bassist Edgar Meyer do a wonderful take on "Help On the Way." A longtime collaborator/friend/admirer, it does not surprise that Bela Fleck nails it. I'd like to imagine that if Jerry didn't pick up the electric guitar, he would be a lot like Bela Fleck, a virtuoso of the bluegrass world. On paper, I didn't think "Help on the Way" would work as a banjo tune, but Fleck and Meyer's technical chops do justice to when the band nailed this song, like how they did during the 8-13-75 show captured on the recording One From the Vault. 

There are plenty of bands totally new to my ears included on the tribute. Up pops Charles Bradley and Menahan Street Band doing a fun, almost unrecognizable version of "Cumberland Blues." The Tallest Man On Earth & Friends doing "Ship of Fools." Never heard of these bands, but I like them now. 

But musicians familiar to me showed up in different ways. 

As a Jazzer, I love Vijay Iyer, who I've written about before, and I like his take on the rarely played "King Solomon's Marbles" and I appreciated Bill Callahan's laid back version of "Easy Wind." Never took Callahan as a fan of the Dead, but it makes sense. I like what Callahan said about the Dead: "I feel like the Dead managed to show the bridge from the past to the future in a respectful way. Much more so than the Stones who felt like pillagers to me. The Dead breathed life into the old songs, expanded the lungs of the old songs." It wasn't just the old songs that the Dead respected; it was the feel of the old songs. The lineage that makes us who we are as Americans playing American music.

Deadheads are known for their dogmatism. There are Grateful Dead purists who say that nothing without Pigpen is worth listening to. Given Pig died in '73 and his last show was in June 1972, we're shutting ourselves out of a lot of good music. I stand by that statement of not closing our ears to the new stuff. 

I also stand by another statement I made in my Ode to Pigpen: 'If you put on, let's say, the 2-22-1969 "Turn On Your Lovelight," 22 minutes of a rollicking frenzy led by the late, great Pigpen, a true one-of-a-kind, and then compare it to, let's say, anything created in the rock and pop genres afterwards, or at least in the last 20 years, the latter is going to sound like a bunch of mopey, whiny shit made by douchebag-cleaning pansies.' It's hard to compare anything now to what the band did with Pigpen. And yes, I do believe listening to a lot of the songs on the tribute (not all), there is more of a tendency toward mopey and whiny--I'm not sure what it is with the current generation of musicians. Where is that overwhelming sensation of optimism inherent to that American sound that the Dead encapsulated? One example is Ira Kaplan's take on "Wharf Rat," but there are a number of others, even those I did like, that were on the mopey side. I'm a huge admirer of Yo La Tengo and Ira Kaplan's work--have seen them in concert multiple times in multiple continents--but "Wharf Rat" for me is a song of redemption, the closest maybe that the Dead get to the salvation trope that is the basis for Christianity. When the narrator of the song sings "I'll get up and fly away," and what a glorious feeling it is when Jerry sings those lines, we are saved. All of us. In Kaplan's version, it feels a little more like resignation than redemption. More sadness than joy. There is deep sadness in the original song, of course, like just about all the songs in "our long list of songs about tragedy,"as Bob Weir calls the Dead's repertoire. But I missed the redemption in this version. And there is missing hope in some of the other songs on the tribute, too. Even though the Dead's songs were all about desperadoes losing their way through misadventures, there was always hope and humor. Maybe it's not a bad thing that there is less hope in some of the versions on the tribute. I did like this particular version of "Wharf Rat"--didn't love it, though, admittedly, but maybe the lack of optimism says something about our times. We're not quite as innocent as we were in say 1967 or even 1990. The Times They Are A-Changing and that's what's special about timeless music. It can be re-invented to fit the new times. And I'm sure we'll be listening to re-imagined versions of the Dead 200 years from now.

Ode to Pigpen

Let's get one thing straight:

If you put on, let's say, the 2-22-1969 "Turn On Your Lovelight," 22 minutes of a rollicking frenzy led by the late, great Pigpen, a true one-of-a-kind, and then compare it to, let's say, anything created in the rock and pop genres afterwards, or at least in the last 20 years, the latter is going to sound like a bunch of mopey, whiny shit made by douchebag-cleaning pansies.

But what was it about Pigpen? Here was a guy.

I mean: HERE WAS A GUY...

There are just no words...

Pigpen leading a rave-up at the Fillmore East in 1970

There are Grateful Dead purists who say that nothing without Pigpen is worth listening to. Given Pig died in '73 and his last show was in June 1972, we're shutting ourselves out of a lot of good music. Really good fucking music.

Pig only spent 7 years as a member of the Dead and there were 23 other good years--some great--and Pig dying also opened up the Dead to more musical experimentation. To get deeper. But there's something true in the Pigpen purist notion. Even Jerry said when Pigpen died: "That's not Pigpen in the coffin. That's the Grateful Dead."

Pig died of either liver cirrhosis or from internal bleeding from a burst duodenal ulcer or from complications from Crohn's Disease or from drinking too much. But who cares how he died? I say he died of a broken heart because anybody who feels as deeply as Pigpen with as big a soul, which clearly showed in his music, has too big a burden to bear.

But what was it about Pigpen?

Pigpen was okay as an organist and with his harmonica he could entertain for a few minutes. But why so important?

On the surface, Pig was most famous for leading the band through his rollicking freestyle renditions of The Rascals' "Good Lovin'" or the R&B classic "Turn on your Lovelight." Both of these songs became 2 songs in one. The Dead would thrash through some high-spirited, blues-inspired improvisations while Pig would do free verse--usually something to get people on their feet, something about the joy in life of having good lovin' --and ain't he right? These were frequently the highlights of the Dead's early shows.

And then you have the 2-13-70 "Smokestack Lightning." Turn out the lights, put a blindfold on, forget that these are 5 guys from the San Francisco Bay Area, and if you listen to the Dead do Howlin' Wolf's "Smokestack Lightning," you'd think it was an all-negro blues outfit from Mississippi getting big in Chicago. Pigpen is a man possessed with Howlin' Wolf's soul.

But when I really got Pigpen was re-listening to to what he did on the Europe '72 spring tour. When he was real sick and slowing down. He musters up some rollicking "Lovelights" on the tour, but it's the real soulful stuff that gets you. His rendition of the blues standard "It Hurts Me Too"--you better believe it will hurt you, too. His original, "The Stranger: Two Souls in Communion," only played a handful of times before he died, is just a tear-jerker. A killer.

The soulful Pigpen

Here's what it is about Pigpen...

When the rest of the band was all about wild musical experimentation, Pigpen brought them back to the Blues, the root of all American music.

When the rest of the band was a bunch of goofy, zitty, awkward nerds, Pig was the only one to stand up in front of the crowd and engage with the people. He really embraced an American notion..."by the people...for the people." It took Jerry Garcia a lot of work to get over his deep innate shyness and sing or take a lead. And Pig had to show him how.

When the rest of the band was unsure of themselves, Pigpen was totally okay with being himself. Zits and all. And here is the legacy he left behind with the band for them to carry on: To be totally confident with your weirdness. To let it shine.

---

Live/Dead is widely regarded as one of the greatest live rock n' roll albums of all time, even among non-Dead Heads. Do yourself a favor and put on your headphones, turn it up and ruin your hearing, and listen to Pigpen rave through "Turn On Your Lovelight."

Meaningless Data and Marketing

Did you know that 99.8% of the time you drop a meaningless, uncited but hyper-precise number people will take you more seriously and think you’re smarter than you really are? I’ll take instinct and art any day over just another direct marketer citing numbers only meaningful when they’re painted to make a case. Start with the data, but don’t let it dictate who you are, what you do, and the art you create. We’re not only dumbing down marketing. We’re dumbing down society when we do that. Seth Godin really nails it with this post: 

"They got us hooked on data. Advertisers want more data. Direct marketers want more data. Who saw it? Who clicked? What percentage? What's trending? What's yielding?

But there's one group that doesn't need more data...

Anyone who's making a long-term commitment. Anyone who seeks to make art, to make a difference, to challenge the status quo.

Because when you're chasing that sort of change, data is the cudgel your enemies will use to push you to conform.

Data paves the road to the bottom. It is the lazy way to figure out what to do next. It's obsessed with the short-term.

Data gets us the Kardashians."

I support Hillary Clinton for president.

I support Hillary Clinton for president.

I don’t like to dive into political conversations or debates but I had to get this out because it’s so uncool to say it and I’ve been deluged with so much other information that would lead me to believe that she’s not a candidate worth supporting or that I should hide my support for her.

I’m not a big follower of politics and find politicians in general to be some of the lowest scum on the planet. With eyes open, I fully am including Hillary within this category. (And Bernie.) Trump is his own category and I won’t comment any more on him because the media and even his naysayers have given him way too much press. Please take the mic away from him. Democracy is great but we need to be careful with the good ole fashioned populist hate-mongering.

I get my news mainly from NPR, The Economist, BBC. I’ll read the WSJ and The National Review to balance out my views. I’m not a registered Democrat---though fairly liberal on social issues, I can be a staunch conservative on some fiscal matters. I’d give my ear to a rational Republican candidate, though we were too busy listening to a big blowhard shout for any rational Republican candidates to appear on my stream. I like my news to whisper, to trace out the nuances. If it shouts, if it simplifies, if it looks at one side and makes the other side out to be an imbecile, if it makes the complicated world within which we live a meme, I shut it off. I will not tolerate heavy-handed one-sidedness. I will listen to those with views very different than my own—as long as they don’t shout. Or even worse, simplify without respect for others. We all need to do a better job of not just listening but empathizing with those that are different from us.

The very first reason for which I support Hillary is that she’s a woman. This, I know, is a very superficial reason to support a presidential candidate. But very important.

There is a very positive correlation between women’s rights and economic prosperity and poverty reduction. For the past 200+ years, we’ve lived in a country in which the only thing that could be commented on with regard to a woman and the White House is the color of her dress.

For 39 years, I’ve watched women get silenced, trounced upon for having an opinion, for doing things. We’re an extremely sexist nation. And what we don’t realize is that this sexism hurts men, possibly even more than women. It really hurts us all. Having a woman president won’t solve it, nor is voting for someone because they are a woman a way to solve it.

At first glance, I wished it were someone else, not Hillary. She's a Clinton, she comes off as insincere, she’s so uncool (see the memes comparing her music interests and those of Bernie—come on, Bernie bros, that’s just childish). She is insincere, but I believe that’s because, even more than men politicians (let’s face it, we all have public personas), she has had to have this very fake way of talking to even have a chance of being heard. In her starkly boring pants suit, she has had to play it very safe as a woman, much more safe than a man. She can’t just blurt out her opinions without thinking them through, like a man in a "real" suit. But what she’s got is real experience. She’s been on the big stage, she’s taken big hits. Not even Obama has been as mocked and held to more completely unreasonable standards.

And yet here she is. Totally unflappable. Totally strong. Solid. She’s a horrible campaigner (no wonder people think she's so uncool), but she’s the only one able to speak with any depth about policy. She’s someone who gets the details. Someone who can act like an adult. Who can compromise when necessary, someone who has our financial security in mind, someone who has made mistakes, but has grown, someone who isn’t a demagogue painted as a unicorn.

If you get Bernie off his one issue, he stumbles, he falls back on a self-righteous, blame others attitude. This paint the rich as the enemy really shoots us in the foot. It’s a very crooked and unfair world--I’d like to see campaign finance reform, I’d like to see some reformation of our 2-party system, I recognize income inequality as a very major issue, I wish education were more affordable, but you get rich by working hard and being smart and not whining about people who have more than you. The Rich are not the enemy. It’s the Us versus Them mentality that’s killing us and I hate to see a candidate spend so much time continuing to divide us.

Am I inspired by Hillary? Not really.
Should politicians be inspiring? Not necessarily.
Am I inspired to vote for Hillary? Absolutely.

I have not felt the Bern one iota. He strikes me as a well-meaning person. I find his speeches rather dull—just another old white guy pontificating. And not really in any depth. Or with much regard to reality. I’m also very much over the “savior” mentality. I voted for Obama twice because I thought him to be a very thoughtful, pragmatic candidate, infinitely more talented and more inspiring than Bernie. I really think Obama’s handled the job with a lot of grace and dignity, despite the naysayers. Obama experienced so much opposition in this country, partly because of a latent racism so obviously present, but moreso because the media, the pundits, put so many unreasonable expectations on him that he became painted like a savior. And though I really respect him(despite the fact that he's made lots of mistakes and he's not perfect), he ain’t no savior. Nor is Bernie. And having a savior mentality makes it very difficult to overcome the fact that nobody is a savior. The Bernie bros have already shot Bernie in the foot by painting him as a savior.

There are lots of other quiet, maybe overly pragmatic, Hillary supporters like me. She’s winning the popular vote, too, all voting conspiracies aside. If Bernie overcomes the voting conspiracies, the Super Delegates, and the evil establishment, I will reluctantly support him, too.

Paddling BC

 Chilliwack Lake, BC

$13.33/# for potato chips, the eat local myth, Real Food, and Farm To Fable

Laura Reiley's top-notch investigative reporting in her article in "Farm to Fable: At Tampa Bay farm-to-table restaurants, you're being fed fiction,"  which appeared in the Tampa Bay Times, really pins down a number of important issues in Americans' attempts to eat better, eat more local, and what we're really trying to get at...eating more "real food." Judging by comments, the article drove people to a lot of anger towards restaurants. And people should be mad. Reiley exposed just how rarely restaurants really are serving local fare despite their chalkboards announcing local producer names and nearby farms. But maybe American consumers should be more mad at themselves.

I looked at a bag of potato chips being sold nearby: $1.25 for 1.5 ounces of salt and fried potatoes. If my math is right, that's $13.33/pound. Meanwhile, I sell premium-quality line-caught wild salmon from Alaska for $10.33/pound. Delivered to the customer's door (shipping included to all 50 states). And I've read comments and heard on the phone from Americans that it's expensive to buy fish. Fish with so much more nutrition and so less nasty fat and salt than those chips that cost not only $13.33/pound, a full $3.00 a pound for more for a lot less nutrition but also cost us so much in hospital bills (heart disease, type II Diabetes sound familiar, anybody?)

The Farm to Table movement and other food fads have put unrealistic expectations on all of us.

The expectations for restaurants these days are completely unrealistic. I was speaking with a chef friend, owner of a very hip, very high-quality farm-to-table type restaurant, and he was telling me about butter. He used to spend $600 a year on butter. Then his customers wanted organic butter. So he started spending $4000 a year on butter. And then his customers wanted local organic butter. Which he got. And he started spending $8000 a year on butter. The cookies are really damned good and worth it because, as anybody who bakes knows, the secret is in the butter. But...there's a reason restaurants order from Sysco, the largest food distributor probably in the world. You can save $7400 a year ordering from Sysco. And get plain old butter. And a good number of clients aren't going to notice the difference. This chef friend got just the nastiest review on Yelp when he served a $13 burger, made with ingredients all sourced within 50 miles of his restaurant. He  lost money selling that local burger, but nevertheless, people are nasty cheapskates. My chef friend does lose money at his business, but it's a labor of love. He didn't pay himself last December because he wanted to be able to pay his top-notch employees during the holiday season. Yet he gets complaints about his "expensive," albeit super-delicious, high-quality food made with locally sourced ingredients, nutrition, and lots of value. I'd like to see the Yelp reviewer write write the same review about those $13.33/pound potato chips.

But clearly,  there are two issues: economies of scale and distribution. For all the local food devotees, it's hard to come to grips with the fact that moving a 40,000-pound container of food attached to a big Kenworth truck is a lot more efficient than the farmer in his pick-up truck making local deliveries. I'd really hate to say it...moving that container is also, in general, more environmentally friendly than that farmer driving around in his pick-up truck with half a pig. It's also a reason I'm not too sad when I see cheap electronics "Made in China." What makes me sad is seeing food "Made In China." What people don't realize is that American industry sells a lot more important goods to China than the cheap electronics and junk we get from overseas. Like the fish company I work for. Chinese pay much bigger bucks for high-quality fish "Product of USA" than even Americans do, so we end up selling a lot more fish in Asia than you'd think. It's just a sad statement on American priorities: Per our GDP per capita, Americans spend a lot less on food than other countries where salaries are lower. It's a priorities thing...

I really blame the consumer here. For a dollar or two, people are willing to sacrifice quality, nutrition and health. We'll take the Thai shrimp harvested by slaves in dismal conditions over shrimp harvested in the USA. For a few bucks. It's all it takes. Meanwhile, American toddlers' vegetable of choice is...you guessed it....potato chips.

I can't get too mad at the restaurants. The supply chain is opaque at best. It's so rare to find a producer that has the time, the skills, the persistence to walk up to a restaurant and start selling direct. The producers are busy producing! Same thing for a chef. A chef might make a contact who produces a cage-free heritage breed chicken for him and he orders once. How does the chef maintain the relationship? Can the producer sell these chickens year-round? Does Mr. Chicken farmer have the health regs in line? Can he legally sell direct to the restaurant? Should he be able to sell direct? Some times the regs are ridiculous, but there's also basic food safety. Recognizing that food safety regs can be just plain crazy, food safety, to me, is still more important than local, organic.

Restaurants have something like a 90% fail rate at best. I've watched so many try to do the right thing and go out of business. It's really hard when we're a country that prioritizes cheap shit from China over eating well. I've just watched too many American friends who have TVs bigger than cars who spend several hundred bucks a month on video entertainment (cable, Netflix, Hulu, X-Box, etc.) and don't bat an eye. They get these over-sized TVs once every 2 or 3 years so they can see "every blade of grass" when they watch golf and so the experience is "better than going to the movies." These same people freak out over spending a couple of extra bucks on quality food. And restaurants cut costs to stay alive or make up stories about selling produce from John the Farmer down the street.

All of this relates indirectly to the common myth we have in our minds of hungry people being skinny. In this country, hungry people are more likely to be obese. Because, not just because they can't afford unprocessed food (because as I've shown, you get more value per $ with unprocessed food), it's because they haven't been educated to not eat the junk. It's easier to acquire junk food. The distribution model does indeed favor going to the convenience store and getting expensive, nutrition-less, value-less food. The difficulty/challenge isn't: Eat local or Eat organic. It's recognizing the value of eating real food.

When people get overly dogmatic about eating local, I go back to a conversation I had as a freshman in college about how lucky we were to have Orange Juice. In the middle of winter. In Washington state. No matter how you dress it, orange juice in Washington state isn't very local. Yet, as a modern American, I find it a basic essential. A little perk of being alive in the developed world in 2016. Sure, we could harvest and dry the needles of Douglas fir (reported to have pretty good levels of Vitamin C) or harvest some devil's club (another supposed flu fighter), and that would definitely be more "local" than drinking OJ. My wife and I do drink a fair amount of Doug fir tea and devil's club tea. But heck, I like orange juice. In winter. In Washington state. If harvesting devil's club became a popular fad, I could easily see rain forests in the Pacific Northwest being stripped bare of ground cover. Given economies of scale, growing conditions, and how we've made more efficient transportation logistics in the modern world, orange juice is a nice perk.

There are also other certain economies of scale that certain places enjoy and I'm really glad that we're able to take advantage of the great efficiencies made in transportation logistics. The growing seasons are longer in California, Texas, and, of course Mexico, where the labor is cheaper, too. Why not take advantage of these economies of scale? I like root vegetables in winter, too, but it's nice to have other things, too. It's okay to get strawberries from Mexico in February if you're really craving them. Sure, the local ones are going to be better, more nutritious during those 3 weeks in summer when they're available, but if you've got a craving for pineapple and you live in Wisconsin, get a fricking pineapple. Don't beat yourself up about it. Or, if you want potato chips that cost $13.33/pound, go for it. It's your choice. But being compassionate with the idea that it's difficult, and sometimes, maybe not even necessary or prudent, for restaurants to go completely "Farm to Table." Stop getting hung up on food fads and recognize that every food choice you make has consequences, both positive and negative, on your health and the physical and social environment.

On Neal Stephenson's Seveneves

Neal Stephenson's Seveneves (2015) is just massive and hard to synthesize into a blog post, but I had to do it to help myself work through its themes. If you're interested  in reading it and don't want a SPOILER, stop! There are a number of twists and turns that I had to work through, and some of the surprises are worth working through on your own.

The plot's basic premise is that the moon explodes into 7 large chunks. In fact, that's the very first line of the book. Running a variety of experiments, scientists learn that planet Earth has roughly 2 years before these large chunks eventually become small bolides that will rain on the earth for several thousand years. Time starts again at Zero, when the moon explodes. During the two years of preparations for the end of the world pre-Zero, humanity "casts lots" to send "arks," not unlike Noah's, into orbit. These Arks contain humans selected by the casting of lots. Those selected and a lot of digital genetics stored on hard drives will be  the genetic material to start a new planet Earth. In essence, they're saving the species by sending the best and brightest from each community. You can imagine how sour the politics could get here with the Casting of the Lots, though.

The novel can be broken down into 3 basic parts: 1) Zero and the  two years leading up to Zero; 2) The Hard Rain, and within this time we have the Arks, the Break, and the Big Ride; and 3) 5000 years later.

The novel imagines a scenario in which the world ends and we have sufficient lead time to prepare, but it really succeeds in envisioning what re-building the Earth might look like and what humans are capable of to make that happen. But what stands out is that Seveneves illustrates how natural and deeply ingrained humanity's tendency toward division really is. From the start, the instinct to form factions rather than coming together is powerful. There are the Arkies (those selected to be on the Arks, during the Casting of Lots) versus the GPop (the General Population of Space Station workers, necessary technical personnel on the Space Station that was already in orbit prior to the moon exploding).

Then there is the Big Break that separates the factions. The Arkies send a contingent to Mars never to be seen again while the GPop brings a comet back--the water from the comet is potable when filtered, can be used to grow crops, and the hydrogen when split from the oxygen makes for propellant for the spacecraft. But it's a huge endeavor with all dying on the mission except for one.

Later, we have the Sooners/Indigens versus the Spacers, the Diggers versus the Spacers, and then the Pingers. The Spacers are those that went to space and comprise the the GPop and Arkies who spent the 5000 years after the Hard Rain first living in the valley of a huge asteroid where they re-build and then plot to repopulate the Earth. The Diggers are a group of miners, who at Zero, buried themselves sufficiently deep in the Earth to survive the Hard Rain, much to the surprise of the Spacers. The Sooners are the first Spacers to inhabit the new Earth that has been terraformed with comets. The Pingers evolved from those stuck in a submarine at Zero.

If wolves became poodles in only a matter of a few generations, you can how imagine how the Pingers adapted/evolved underwater and how the Spacers and the Diggers differ not just in philosophy and mannerisms but also even physically. At this point, keeping with the theme of our natural division, it shouldn't surprise to know that the Diggers think the Spacers unwelcome cowards for having left the planet.

The Spacers are divided between Blue and Red. Red's good at creating their own narrative, propaganda if you will, while Blue are the technocrats, the engineers. They seek knowledge, but aren't as good at politics.

The Blue and Red are larger factions of an entire society divided based upon the  Seven Eves. The Seven Eves are the last human beings left in Space after the Hard Rain. There are actually 8 women, but one is already in menopause. Men don't do as well in space--take up too much oxygen, more vulnerable to radiation, and most end up doing the risky jobs because they realize their oxygen intake is taxing the air filtration system in Space, so that's why there are none left during the first council of the Seven Eves. One of these Seves Eves is a geneticist and the other six work with her to form their progeny, picking out the characteristics of their offspring, who swear allegiance to their race; in essence, their Eve. Julia, or JBF, is the president of the United States at Zero and it's "her idea" to build the Arks and "her idea" to go to Mars--she's full of division, politics, smooth talking, and the ability to influence. Clearly a Red. There's Ivy, the captain of the Space Station and technically left in charge after the previous Space dictator dies getting the comet with the new Space Constitution. Ivy seeks knowledge and so do her progeny. A Blue. Dinah's father is the first Digger and her boyfriend the one of those who died getting the comet, so Dinah makes her progeny heroic. There's Aida, She pronounces Aida's Curse at the first council of the Seven Eves in which it was decided how to proceed with the genetic information available. The curse is that the Seven Eves and their progeny will always be divided and Aida develops a number of sub-races designed to counter the strengths of the other races. Aida's quite competitive. One of the more interesting Aidan sub-races is the Neoander--a neolithic Neanderthal--that comes from her learning that most Europeans still have some Neanderthal blood in them, which is good because they have big brains and are big and strong... And so on...

We learn 5000 years later that what was going on in the Arks and the Space Station is being filmed by cameras capturing 3 angles of every conversation and every decision being made. The footage of which, studied and analyzed, with dissertations written about specific moments, becomes the Spacers' Epic. All of the Races quote their Eves as Gospel. Another crucial side effect of the Epic is what becomes known as Tad's mistake. Tad was a blogger and heavily trolling and screeding on social media. It must be noted that there is a Spacebook. Tad blogs all of the events, questioning some of the technical decisions being made at the time of the Break. He has quite a following, and even convinces his fellow Arkies to cannibalism when they get desperate. He live Tweets eating his own leg. But meanwhile all we see him doing during this time in the Epic is trolling and looking at space porno. Despite his purported scientific expertise, which some of his followers take as gospel, he makes no contribution and just trolls. I'm sure most of us have some Facebook friends like that, making no other tangible contribution to humanity other than trolling, from their sample size of 1. Tad's mistake is alive and well.

One thing is clear and Stephenson elucidates it very well: The future is robots. And robots will be how we re-build planet Earth, at least in Stephenson's imagining. But it's going on now. More and more of us will have our jobs taken not by immigrants and foreign factories, but robots. It's neat to see what they're capable of...but at what cost?  It will be a question of philosophical import for the next few centuries at least...Another fascinating concept Stephenson introduces is Amistics, which is the propensity of cultures to either embrace or scorn technologies, sometimes seemingly in an arbitrary way, like why do the Amish uses roller skates but not cars?

Stephenson hits a few other really important and poignant philosophical and technical questions: An essential part of science is what has become known in this era somewhat poignantly as "Wargaming," which is the idea that, given a scenario, you can play out (like a video game) every possibility to come up with a statistical model, a bell curve, of every possible outcome. What's unique about the end of the world is that you don't have time to run a program for every possible scenario. There's a character, Dr. Harris, a thinly veiled Neal deGrasse Tyson, who, when pressed for info on what will happen, says: "We can't run this experiment a 1000 times to see the range of different outcomes. We can only run it once. The human mind has trouble with situations like that. We see patterns where they don't exist, we find meaning in randomness." This great line alludes to one of my sourest complaints about people unfamiliar with science. And herein lies a great danger for our future. Everything these people with myopic vision of themselves and the world see is framed in a data set of one. An n of 1 confuses people--making them feel that what they experience is all that exists, that it must be gospel. Of course, seeing the world this way is unscientific, it's irrational, but it's also just plain dangerous, and explains the great rise of extremism and the proliferation of hardliners having a disproportionate percentage of voice in our national and international discussions. Though only a tiny theme in a novel with much bigger implications, I'm glad Stephenson presents this concept of the "n of 1" and shows the fallacies of thinking too unilaterally. We're really killing ourselves with the extremism and you can see the bad effects imagined in this speculation of what the end of the world and its re-building will look like.

In the end, what Stephenson shows is how humans react to calamity, the potential to end the world: with war, with entrenched belief systems that cause hyper-reactionary responses like intolerance and violence. To the cynic, maybe that's not surprising. However, despite the propensity for unfounded beliefs and sometimes violence, we see that humans are also capable of profound loyalty and friendship. We see the Diggers and the Pingers' ability to hang on, the Spacers' propensity to build a new world. Humans are guided by a Purpose or what they purport to be a Purpose. Something bigger than themselves, bigger than the stupid wars, the politics and all the other bullshit we have to go through to be who we are.

Seveneves is a trip. And I'm glad I rode out the 800 pages. Great stuff. Not just sci-fi or speculative fiction--what it has is great characters in who you can really see the human condition. How it was, is, and probably will be.

On 80-hour Box Sets

30 Trips Around the Sun: A Review

In a time when everything is distilled to short 3-word memes, quick posts that are funny for a second or two and relevant for less, and music that's streamed once and forgotten, I've decided to go deep and against the grain, to be defiant. Longer books, more meaningful movies, emails and blog posts that attempt to be thoughtful and hopefully of value tomorrow and the next day. That's why I'm going with 80-hour box sets.

Box sets as a genre are going to have imperfections, things only a true fan would love. That the Dead are able to keep releasing recordings of their live shows after 20 years of releasing live shows and they've still got really good material, some of it outstanding, and nobody's really bored yet of the re-releases, is a testament to the treasure trove of music and good times that the Grateful Dead left us with.

30 Trips Around the Sun is a selection of one show per each year of the 30 years that the Grateful Dead were active playing as a group (1966-1995). 80 hours. My wife and I listened to each show in chronological succession, every minute, appreciating the evolution of the band. What really struck us was how the band never, ever, not for even one minute, stood still. They were constantly evolving, experimenting to improve their sound, both from a musical perspective and a technological perspective. Did they have some off years? Absolutely. Horrible years, there were a few shows, dare I admit it, that were barely listenable even for a true fan. But even in the off years, or the shows when their playing was inconsistent or uninspired, there was a progression of growth. You could hear the band members growing as people, growing as a single unit, even during the years when they were going their separate ways.

People only superficially aware of the Dead tend to write them off as '60s nostalgia, but not for one second did the band indulge in nostalgia. Like Miles Davis, they were both musically and technologically a decade ahead of their peers once they really found their feet.  Because when the band really worked, it wasn't about one guy, it wasn't about some egomaniac hogging a mic as the cocky leg-splitting lead singer or some folkie self-indulging his own misery or a show-off doing some pyrotechnics on a guitar. Though for his chops we could easily put Jerry alongside a Jimi Hendrix and make a case for him as one of the best rock guitarists and without question he certainly was the most versatile. Actually, I'd call Jerry the best folk banjoist that ever decided to play jazz guitar with a rock band. As Bob Dylan eulogized Jerry at his funeral in one of the most fitting praises I can think of: "There are a lot of spaces and advances between the Carter family, Buddy Holly and, say, Ornette Coleman, a lot of universes, but he filled them all without being a member of any school. His playing was moody, awesome, sophisticated, hypnotic and subtle. There's no way to convey the loss. It just digs down really deep." In the same way, the rest of the band members had their own unique sounds but knew how to fit together. Is Phil Lesh the greatest bassist ever? Emphatically no. But did Phil Lesh pioneer a completely new sound for the bass, did he bring a completely new approach to rock bass by bringing classical music trained chops + Jazz feel + avant garde sound approach to fit into a band, to actually listen to his bandmates, to create a sound as a whole that was completely organic and absolutely authentic. A superficial listen to Bob Weir and you would think he was the most awkward guitarist ever, but he was really Jerry's McCoy Tyner, a perfect compliment. And probably the most original rhythm guitarist that ever lived. Each drummer brought so much to the band, without ever taking over as individuals. Billy kept it simple when the band needed it most and Mickey made time and rhythm and the polyrhythms he created absolutely imperative to the band and the band's sound. The Grateful Dead worked when all members worked as a single collective unit. The whole is better than the sum of the parts is the thesis of the Grateful Dead.

There are several undisputed peak periods for the Dead--February of '69, Spring of '72, Spring of '77, and the 1990 Spring tour--though great cases could be made for Fall '72, Fall '73, summer of '74...well a real fan could pick out times and shows throughout all of the 30 years. What really struck me were the surprises. Just like when you go to a Dead show or any live show with performers rooted in improvisational music, what inspires and entertains are the surprises. Sure '66 was interesting from a historical perspective and the '67 show was a gem, a real treat to re-visit and appreciate. What's clear, though, is that Phil Lesh and Jerry carry the band musically, and PigPen is the wildly entertaining front man, but they haven't completed coalesced as a unit (they're almost there).
 The band becomes outstanding when everybody equally contributes. The '68 show is beautifully played. But the first real barnstorming, mind-blowing show should not have been a surprise--the show from February '69. I should have been mentally prepared for it. Even non-Dead Heads are familiar with Live/Dead, also recorded in February '69, and widely regarded as a masterpiece. Music critics touted it as containing "the finest rock improvisation ever recorded," and I would argue that it etches in history some of the peak moments of human creativity ever. I should have been prepared. I've listened to other shows from February '69, but when we listened to the 2/22/69 show at the Dream Bowl in Vallejo, California, I had no desire to listen to music again for 10 days or more, so satiated was I by the absolutely mindbending show. A real pinnacle moment. This show should not have been a surprise, but it was, and dare I say it, better than the Live/Dead album that put the Grateful Dead on the map.

My personal favorite era for the Dead is, as for many, the period between '72 and '74. And the shows here weren't a surprise. '72 majestic (though Jerry's guitar isn't perfectly perfect into the mix on the second set, though), '73 perfect, '74 sprawling, weird with that clear, clear '74 sound. No surprises. The Dead only played 4 shows together in '75, their hiatus year. And the show selected from that year started off as a dud. But there were some interesting takeaways for me. This show from Kezar Stadium in SF was one of their first big free shows in SF since the Flower Power days and you can hear the free, trying to be sunny in the city vibe. The band is out of practice and hard to listen to at the beginning, but surprisingly comes together in the second set. Not the technically most proficient show of the box set, but I'd call this latter half of the second set another surprise and it was fun to listen to on a rare sunny January day in Skagit county driving country roads.

It must be said that '80 through '83 are unlistenable and I don't think I'll return to these shows. What's interesting is that the band's recordings switched from analog to digital and the recording quality dips tremendously. This is a huge testament to "Bear" aka Owsley Stanley, without whom we would not have the Dead, and Betty Cantor-Jackson, who were real geniuses when it came to live recording. The recordings they made of the Dead in the 60s and 70s have a big warm and clear sound and are just as beautiful as it gets. Bear's '66 analog recording of the Dead is of much higher quality than the shows recorded from '79 through '84. Digital could not match the analog recordings they were making. The 1984 show selected from Augusta, Maine was the next really nice complete show. Great energy that you can feel throughout. But the biggest surprise for me was their 9/18/87 show from Madison Garden, NYC. This show is just as good as it gets. The best version of "Sugaree" since the 16-minute versions from May of '77. Just perfect. The "Terrapin Station" as clear, as perfect as I've heard. We get to hear Jerry singing in Spanish--pretty good Spanish, too--on a brief "La Bamba" that comes sandwiched in a "Good Lovin'" following probably the best version of "Morning Dew" in the modern era that the Dead ever did. Outstanding stuff.

And my next big, big surprise is that my wife actually started to like '80s Dead. At first, she was averse to it. Like a lot of Dead heads, she didn't like the '80s sound. Brent is good, but those weird keyboard sounds he made...they're kinda cheesy sometimes. You've gotta love Pigpen in the late sixties and Keith's jazzy keys were such a perfect compliment to Jerry in the '70s, so Brent had huge shoes to fill and it's hard to start listening to Brent when the Dead you know is the early stuff. But then, like I've said before, you have to appreciate the evolution. It's easy to love 80s Dead when the shows are so good and you can feel Brent breathing so much life into Jerry and the band, taking them to new levels, which you can hear in '84, '85, even the earlier shows (just bad sound quality). Each show following '87 is absolutely outstanding, though. The '88 selection, a show from the Oxford Plains of Maine with an absolute delicious version of "Bird Song" during which a hang glider flew over the crowd right as Jerry was peaking on a solo and you can hear in the crowd, you can feel in the music, that something wild and magical was happening. It finishes off with an extremely emotional "Dear Mr. Fantasy>Hey Jude" and then a "Not Fade Away" with the crowd chanting the lyrics of the song for 5 minutes after the band leaves the stage. Just beautiful, beautiful tear-jerking stuff. The '89 show has the darkest "Dark Star" 30-+ minute meltdown of the modern era and is also just packed with both emotion and good playing. 10/27/1990 from the Zenith in Paris is crystal clear and emotional. Great to hear the band full of chops, playing tightly together, and the always playful Bruce Hornsby accompanying them with his great jazz piano and accordion. And what a wonderful addition to the box set, a complete show with Branford Marsalis on sax in the 1991 selection. The Dead loved Branford and Branford loved the Dead. That Branford could keep up with the Dead is a real compliment to the guy and that the Dead--"just a rock band"--could keep up with Branford shows just the full talent of them and their chops as musicians. As Branford said, "Guys who play jazz and don't only listen to jazz knew those guys." "Jerry had a unique style of soloing. There are a lot of musicians with a one-style-fits-all mentality." Not Jerry. "Jerry found a way to adapt to whatever the situation was and add a color." What's amazing is that '92 keeps going with that energy. In the '94 selection, the band is as tight as ever. The nice thing about the later years is that the Jerry Garcia/Robert Hunter songwriting is in its Golden Years with chestnuts like "So Many Roads" and "Days Between."

The chronological succession of shows is a testament not just to the music but the technology that preserved the sound of each of these shows. The Grateful Dead were not just a band, but a traveling family of technological wizards who were always at the forefront of making extremely clear sound. Everything they did was to make sure that everybody had a good time. It only could have started in the Silicon Valley/Bay Area, an epicenter of engineering and creativity. When these wizards built their infamous "Wall of Sound" the hallmark of their '74 tour, it wasn't about being loud but about the guy in the very back row, a quarter mile away, being able to hear the music just as clear as the gal dancing in row 8. Very egalitarian. Very much in the spirit of that ancient myth--is it Egyptian or Navajo--of the Grateful Dead. Here is a business organization that kept their concert ticket prices very reasonably priced even after a Billboard Top 20, which was only one and not very popular anyways. But they were consistently one of the top grossing touring bands, even with the ticket prices that were a tenth of what the big, popular bands were charging.

One enormous addition to the box set was a beautiful booklet that told the story of the Dead chronologically, the strategic, creative, and financial decisions that led them through their 30 Trips Around the Sun. As a student of business, I had to appreciate the marketing decisions. Long before the Internet, the Dead were really the first to take advantage of connecting band with fans with mailing lists. Long before Facebook, listservs electronically connected fans who compared notes on shows, allowed them to trade downloads of show bootlegs, and gossip about the band. The Dead pioneered ticket mailing schemes, trying to keep it all egalitarian, giving everybody a chance to get a good seat. In the off years, Phil Lesh wrote in his autobiography/biography of the band, the band kept playing just so that their office staff/technical support/roadies could continue to have salaries and health insurance. It really was a family/egalitarian effort. They kept going even when they probably should have taken a break.

Yeah. 80 hours. Yes, there are some shows that I will not return to in this box set. But I made a point to pick up the unique, the beautiful, 2 to 4 songs from each show, and I made a highlight playlist. It's at just under 20 hours. I know. Another mammoth box set in itself. But that's the beauty of box sets.

The next box set I'm going through is another 80-hour one: All 22 shows from their 1972 Europe tour. Truly the Golden Age of the Dead. Sure, there are some legendary shows. We know. The Europe '72 double album was how I was introduced to the Dead and it really is a gem and I get a little weepy thinking about it, because it's just that good, but I know what will matter, will be the surprises in this next mammoth box set.

Box Sets are perfect for DeadHeads. The music of the Grateful Dead is tedious, it's long, it's hard to get into for the uninitiated, it's full of zits and imperfections, but what we like doing is finding the gems, the surprises, the moments when, as Bobby Weir would say, "it's just exactly perfect," and when we find these moments, after long hours of fruitless exploration, it's just better than sex. It's just about as good as life gets. And that's what art is.