The Deadcast finishes its season by examining Bob Weir’s ambitious Weather Report Suite with collaborator Eric Andersen & following the launch of Wake of the Flood on the band’s own label with company president Ron Rakow, plus Yo La Tengo’s Ira Kaplan, Erik Davis, & more.
by Jesse Jarnow
Our season-concluding suite-like episode was made possible by many voices, but especially the songwriter Eric Andersen, Bob Weir’s collaborator on “Weather Report Suite, Part 1” in 1973. Eric remains active as a musician, perhaps on tour near you right now, and is the subject of “The Songpoet,” a documentary now streaming on PBS.
Ira Kaplan and Yo La Tengo are probably also on tour near you, and their latest album, This Stupid World (with the Dead-referencing “Tonight’s Episode”) is available from Matador. Their unrehearsed cover of “Bertha” to benefit WFMU can be heard on Murder In the Second Degree, available from Egon. My book, Big Day Coming: Yo La Tengo and the Rise of Indie Rock, is available from Penguin Random House.
Erik Davis writes the Burning Shore newsletter, and is the author of High Weirdness: Drugs, Esoterica, and Visionary Experience in the Seventies. Listener can take professor Kenneth Hartvigsen’s survey on Grateful Dead Visual Culture.
For more on what immediately followed the release of Wake of the Flood, our Listen To The River: October 1973 episode.
Comment
GREAT AS ALWAYS
a most valuable documentary and history of this most treasured scene. Long live The Dead and all of it spiraling fractals
Great Episode!!