Grateful Dead

i never played A Link to the Past and I never knew who Bruce Cockburn was and somehow when my life flashes before me I wont be thinking I wasted my life because of it

"The blues started with field workers on farms who got it from gospel and African roots". Seriously??? Thank you HendrixFreak for the correction - holy moly, how far can we disassociate the musical contributions of slaves? Let's give then credit... I think they earned it, no? Mononhahela regarding your 1980 dilemma... stay loud on the topic until your miracle appears. Unless you're dying for the actual article, in which case go ahead and spend the $40 (but that's a lot of money). Sixtus re: 2/15/73 Dark Star.. the accessible melodic ones are my favs. Thanks for the signpost. I believe the Wembley 4/7 or 8/72 Dark Star is also very melodic.... love that one. Anybody notice something different????

Now it is plain for all to see the problems that arise from trying to label different types of music. So whatever happened to country rock, for instance. Were the Beatles rock'n'roll? Who cares. Daverock, your ignorance of who Bruce Cockburn is, is indeed inexcusable. To put another pointless label on him, he could be called the Canadian Bob Dylan, but then again...

Yes, I'd go along with what you say about his Bobness. To me, he raised the bar lyrically in the same way Hendrix did instrumentally. Maybe people who would otherwise never have considered setting their poems to music did so as a result of Dylan. This wasn't always a good thing, mind you.Incidentally, excuse my ignorance...but who's Bruce Cockburn?

In anticipation of 09/02/83, I've been listening to some other well regarded fall '83 shows today, notably 09/06/83 and 10/11/83. If 09/02/83 is cut from the same cloth, it will be a solid pick. Totally digging those other 83 shows (as I do the other official releases from '83 - 10/14 and 10/21). Next up while I wait for DaP 27, I think I'll spin 10/17/83. Don't compare '83 to shows from '67 to '79, just enjoy them for what they are. Also perhaps not as cleanly played or recorded as '87-'89, but more crispy in between song jams in '83 IMO than in those later years. Bless the digital archives!!

Rock music, pop music, Prog music blah blah blah. The point that was being made is that our generation and our parents generation were around for the invention of rock pop Prog whatever you want to call it music. it's not classical it's not baroque,it's not rap. We were around when the artists were alive and their records were being made and our parents played their records and we played their records. In 200 years there may not be anything that sounds even remotely like this, yet we were here to see live concerts of it. In 200 years they will most likely look back on the Beatles And The Rolling Stones and Elvis and say wow to have been alive when all of that was happening, all of that great music. Nobody's trying to identify when the first rock record was made. A point was made that the elements that came together to make modern rock and roll were a perfect storm that will never happen again, and WE got to live to see it. And to say The Beatles weren't a rock band, well by that logic I could listen to Dead Flowers by the Stones and say they're not a rock band. Or I could listen to the Song is Over by The Who and say that's easy listening. Or I could listen to That's the Way by Led Zeppelin and say they're not rock they're folk. I'm starting to hear hairs being split just to split hairs. We got to see all of these people while they were alive that's the point. And the styles they developed will never be redone again because all of the things that went into making it are already done. It was clearly stated that the Beatles brought it to the world and they did. It was never said that they did it without anyone's influence. Mind left body I thought you made a good point. Birth is bringing it to the world which is what the Beatles did and continued to do until their breakup. It's nonsense to attribute the explosion of pop / rock music to anyone other than the Beatles. Without the Beatles it would have all remained esoteric. And yes other bands picked up where they left off and carried the torch. The Beatles brought it to the world. And to be honest I don't even like the Beatles that much. The White Album should have been cut in half, and the first five albums I'm mostly throwaways and are summed up in the one red greatest hits album. Sergeant Pepper Magical Mystery Tour and Abbey Road are pretty good. My point is I don't even like him that much but I know what their role was in the birth of rock and roll music.

Interesting discussion of rock history, but I think everyone here is forgetting the man who changed the course of music forever: Mr. Robert Zimmerman, aka, Bob Dylan. He turned on the Beatles. Before Dylan, they were "She loves you, yeah, yeah, yeah." After Dylan, they began to see song lyrics as poetry, an art form. Jimi Hendrix? Same thing. Look at the covers: Like A Rolling Stone, arguably the most important song in rock history; All Along the Watchtower; Drifters' Escape. etc, etc. The Dead? Don't even get me started. Without Dylan, Robert Hunter and Jerry Garcia never would have gone beyond playing some old folk and bluegrass tunes together. Look at the covers with them, too: they were covering It's All Over Now Baby Blue when they were still playing tiny venues in 1966. Meanwhile, Dylan was conquering Europe on a mass scale. Dylan pushed everyone: the Stones, the Byrds, the Doors. Without Dylan's massive influence, going back as far as '63, songs played on the radio - rock and pop alike - would always have remained boy/girl love songs and cheesy pop. Without Dylan, we never would have had the Dead as we know them, or the Beatles (beyond the first couple albums), Bruce Cockburn, Hendrix, or any form of prog rock. Dylan is The Godfather of all modern music that has lyrics with any depth whatsoever.

Some great views expressed on here on this subject. I love The Beatles, and there is no question that they started life as a rock n' roll group. And that they periodically revisited it to great effect-especially on "The Beatles For Sale". But the music that they will be remembered for is not, to me, rock n' roll-or rock. It is pop music. That isn't a bad thing-but its what it is. No way hozay is "Sergeant Pepper" rock n' roll. Actually there is more of a case for claiming that The Beatles invented prog rock than rock n' roll. Finer men than me have tried to identify the first rock n' roll record. But for what its worth, Robert Johnson definitely played with more rhythm than earlier country bluesman. Fast forward to 1948, and we have John Lee Hooker and Muddy Waters playing electric guitars with a much heavier beat. Any of these artists could be credited with starting rock-but its probably Elvis Presley and Chuck Berry, both seemingly independently of each other, mixing country with blues to create what is known as rock n' roll today. After the pop of the early 60s, the man who really invented "rock" as we know it today, and as distinct from "rock n 'roll" was surely Jimi Hendrix. He brought his blues and soul chops to London in 1966, added the volume and power chords associated with Pete Townsend, the craziness of Jeff Beck, wrapped it all up in ball and kicked it out of the park. A far greater influence than The Beatles-every band I saw in the 70s owed something to him. There is surely room for ongoing development, too. Rock n' roll is a hybrid of earlier musical forms, from different cultures, combined together to create something new. Its a great blueprint for the future.

What I took from Keith fan's essay is that the Beatles did not invent the first rock and roll song, they took all of the primal elements that define today's rock and roll from various sources and put them together into one whole and brought music that had rock elements from an esoteric underground entity to a worldwide industry. While you all make good points about the history of rock in general, I don't believe that Keith fan means to say none of that is true, only that it was the precursor to what has become today's rock and roll music. The rock music of the 60s and 70s and 80s and 90s is molded after the Beatles and their contemporaries like the Rolling Stones and The Kinks and The Who and many others, not Elvis not Jerry Lee Lewis not Bill Haley, not anything before the Beatles. What I see in some of the counterpoints being raised here are people missing points in the original article. For example someone might respond to my comments by saying lots of musicians were influenced by Elvis so how can I say that modern music wasn't in part due to Elvis's career? The answer is, that's not what I'm saying. I am saying that modern music doesn't take on the arrangement and style of Elvis, it takes on that of The Beatles and their contemporaries. And the contemporaries that I mentioned worked off of The Beatles and took their lead from the Beatles and then added their own elements. The artists before the Beatles that some people mentioned, collectively produced elements that the Beatles then unified and brought pop sensibility to. This brought about a seismic shift in the way the bands that were the Beatles contemporaries approached music. In the late 60s and early 70s they all fed off of each other, but it started with the Beatles. And those other bands contributed to the continued development, such as the Rolling Stones, The Who, Led Zeppelin The Grateful Dead Etc. The Beatles were the birth of rock and roll. They did not write the first rock song, they put the puzzle together and industrialized it. In doing that, there was a birth. Nobody is wrong here in any of the smaller points they've made about the significant contributions of some artists who came before The Beatles. The over arching main point though is that the Beatles brought it all together and introduced it to the world. The embryo analogy was spot-on. In its simplest manifestation you could say that without the Beatles there would be no Rolling Stones or Who or Zeppelin as we know them today. If they were to exist at all, meaning if they were able to even break out of the underground, the Stones would sound like their first record which was all R&B covers, Led Zeppelin 1 would all sound like you shook me and I can't quit you baby, and The Who would all be like shout and shimmy and I'm a man. Rock music as we know it today would not sound as it does today without the Beatles. But if you take away any one single other group that was mentioned pre-beatles, The Beatles would still have been the Beatles. I'll stop rambling now. I just have always connected with what Keith fan said here but I can't say it as eloquently. And then I saw some responses that didn't seem to get the point. I mean everyone's disputing the term birth. Birth is not the invention of something. Birth is to bring something to the world. The Beatles didnt invent rock, they brought rock to the world (and with a genetic makeup that was all their own). That's what I took from Keith fans original comment when he said we witnessed the birth of rock and roll. That we did. We didn't witness the conception of rock and roll we witness the birth. That's what I took Keith fan correct me if I'm wrong.