Grateful Dead

I like to think I am open minded...but I draw the line at opera.

DaveRock - I agree, you have to give everything a chance. I even gave opera a chance - twice! - and it was ok. Just not my thing, but either is death metal or Broadway music, but I don’t put it down. Punk had its place, and some truly great artists emerged from it (Iggy, Ramones, Patti Smith), but I was deeply into the Dead et al long before the Pistols etc played a note. In fact, the guy that really introduced me to the Dead and the Byrds was a huge New York Dolls fan. Funny how that works.

....going with Jimi Hendrix The BBC Sessions for the Eagles/Niners game.

....hallowed ground. I wish I could've visited.

ThatMike - yes, I have always liked music across supposedly conflicting genre's. The year of punk - 1976 - was also the year I started getting into The Dead. "Steal Your Face" - a but perplexing, but hey. Johnny Rotten had a Pink Floyd tee shirt, on which he scrawled "I Hate" in front of the bands name. It was designed to annoy people - Pink Floyd were like rock royalty at that time, so expressing an opinion like that was like heresy. It was drawing a line - that was then - this is now. It wouldn't surprise me to hear that he actually liked them, and had been to see them a few times. It seemed very important to distance yourself from the older generation when I was a teenager. it was quite unusual to have it pointed out that The Stones, Led Zep, Yes, Pink Floyd etc and their fans now WERE the older generation.
Nick Mason included a reproduction of the offending tee shirt in the big Pink Floyd exhibition a few years ago. He saw it as a compliment!

Fast Fact: ON THIS DAY, JANUARY 29, 1961, BOB DYLAN, 19 YEARS OLD, TOOK A BUS TO MORRIS PLAINS, NEW JERSEY, WHERE HE MET FOR THE FIRST TIME HIS IDOL AND INSPIRATION WOODY GUTHRIE..

As for Punk, or New Wave, by the time the first wave ramped up, I was pretty entrenched in Dylan, the Dead, the Byrds etc, all the bands and performers that seemed to piss the hardcore punks off, which I never understood. I always felt there is room for all music; I don’t care for Pink Floyd, for example, which seemed to be a target for the punks, but I just figured if I didn’t like them, I didn’t have to, I didn’t need to put down them or their audience. Just play, man.

A truly original and exceptional guitarist. As Crow said, he used different scales to the ones practised by other guitarists at that time. Incredible tone too. It was pointed out at the time that he sounded more in the realm of Barry Melton and John Cippollina than the prog and heavy rock players of the time. "Marquee Moon " is the classic, but the follow up, "Adventure" is almost as good.

The American bands from the mid 70's grouped together as punk seemed to be ones that played regularly at CBGB's in New York. They were a refreshing antidote to stadium rock. As Joey Ramone once said, not country rock, blues, rock, jazz rock, prog rock or heavy rock....but rock rock. They seemed to take their lead from the so called garage bands of the mid 60's, commemorated on Lenny Kaye's brilliant "Nuggets" collection. The 13th Floor Elevators, The Standells, The Chocolate Watchband etc. Plus The Stooges and the MC5.
In England in 1976, punk was great at first. The first Ramones album, released that summer, I think, was the blue touch paper. I used to go to a dump called The Electric Circus in the backstreets of Manchester - very different from The Free Trade Hall-home of The Halle Orchestra, where I saw the likes of Genesis. I felt at home there for about 6 months. Not many people attended and it seemed to attract a motley collection of misfits like me. By mid 1977 it was jammed to the rafters with identikit "punks" who had jumped on to the band wagon. Short of hair and short of temper. Gangs of spitting, punching hooligans. The musical style was reduced to three chord blasts ripped off from The Ramones, but without their style or humour. Time for me to move on.

English punk hasn't aged well with me at all. Most bands I liked in the 70's, I still like - but not that. Apart from the first 4 Sex Pistols singles. Television, on the other hand, still sound great.

That’s what some people used to call Television. Because they knew more than three chords, played songs that lasted longer than two minutes, and didn’t wear safety pins through their cheeks, I guess. But they got called ‘punk’ in the mid-70s, along with Patti Smith, Pere Ubu, Talking Heads, and a lot of other great bands who didn’t fit the stereotype. Because the stereotype hadn’t been invented yet.

It wasn’t till the late ‘70s/early '80s that “punk” came to mean three chords and a mohawk. When it first started, it basically meant you could do whatever you wanted. And it meant you wanted to reject the tired old bullshit that most arena rock bands were peddling and do something new. But when it started to become a “movement,” and people wanted to jump on the bandwagon, they found that it was fucking hard to come up with anything as original as Patti Smith or Television. That took talent. But it was really easy to get a buzz cut, buy a leather jacket, learn three chords, and imitate the Ramones. And eventually everybody sounded like the Ramones (who I love, btw) and the punk scene became even more rigidly conformist than mainstream rock.

Anyway … sad news about Tom Verlaine. He was a HUGE influence on so many, including me personally: back when I was learning guitar, two guys I copied the most were Garcia and Verlaine, precisely because they were different from everybody else, played scales most rock guys didn’t play, had a sense of time that was different than 99.9% of rock guitarists. Go listen to Verlaine’s solo on “Marquee Moon” and tell me Jerry wouldn’t have approved.

Don’t fret the relatively slow sell out of DaP 45. If the series was sustainable financially back when they were doing 12,000 copies, you can be sure that it’s still sustainable when they’re doing 25,000, even if it takes a few weeks, or even a few months to sell them all. Having a run of 25,000 that doesn’t sell out in a day just means more copies are going to people who actually love the music, at list price, as opposed to paying double or triple or quadruple or quintuple or sextuple that to the scalpers who’ve been leaching off everybody for years.

My prediction? The GD archival release program will go into warp speed overdrive for the next 5-10 years, trying to sell as much of the vault as they can before all of us dinosaurs who still buy physical media hit the boneyard. It’s going to be glorious. The releases, that is. The boneyard, not as much.

The one good reason I can think of to be concerned about a Dave's Picks not selling out is our long term release prognosis. There was a time when we waited a relatively long time between releases. I don't want to go back to those days. Regardless of why they're not sold out in a day, it's always better for us if the Grateful Dead release program is doing well. Who wants to see fewer releases per year? Not me.

I think the Dave's Picks sales have been impacted because they manufacture the 25K as already mentioned. This is a double whammy against them. I know that a large number of subscriptions were purchased by eBay resellers. Resellers are not doing as well for 2 reasons.
- The 25K saturates the eBay market, so the resellers don't make as much per unit, and they can't flip the product as quickly. This is usually a second business for people. Now resellers buy fewer subscriptions.
- The government passed laws that require eBay sellers to charge sales tax to buyers, as well as pay income tax on their sales. It was always a requirement to report eBay sales, but small pedlars were not doing this. Now eBay is required to report Seller income to the the IRS, so pedlars have no choice but to pay close to 50% of their profit to the IRS, eBay, and PayPal. And the cost of shipping has gone up.

This means pedlars are screwed. They need to charge 3x as much as they did a couple of years ago, and inflation is through the roof. The average Deadhead isn't go to pay $100+ for the new Dave's Picks.

Eventually the pain will trickle down to us. It won't be this year or next, but we've all been in this over the long haul, so when you add in the fact that there are lots of officially released shows from many years already, demand is on the down.

Dead and Co is also going away. Their touring helped drive sales. I'm not saying the Vault release program is going away, but maybe I am. I don't know anything about their contract with the Dead or their budget for new releases. What we all need to do is buy 2 subscriptions each year and will a set to our children. One day they will be true collectors items.

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