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After 40-some years, is listening to old Grateful Dead shows
something you can do for fun, or is it something that you do when it's necessary
but wouldn't choose to do on your own time?
I will say that life was simpler then, and we were a tight, lean
outfit and could turn on a dime. The bigger ensembles maybe had more thump to
them, but that band was like a powerful sports car, agile.
It's a chore, it's a responsibility, and I try to dodge it as much as I can.
If I go back and listen to one of our shows, I just want to make sure it's well
recorded and not get involved in the aesthetic decisions, because I'm always
going to hear stuff that we could have done better. That would just be
tormenting myself.
Is there anything in this particular show that surprised you when you went
back to it?
Well, the surprises came with regularity -- probably every other song. So it
is kind of intriguing to go back to it, but there's only so much I can listen to
before something comes over me and I need to move on.
Speaking as someone who is not a Deadhead, this album presents probably my
favorite version of the band -- the five-piece lineup recorded some of the
things I enjoy the most.
I will say that life was simpler then, and we were a tight, lean outfit and
could turn on a dime. The bigger ensembles maybe had more thump to them, but
that band was like a powerful sports car, agile. We were listening hard to each
other and providing each other corners and really taking those corners.
This show came the year after the release of "American Beauty" and
"Workingman's Dead," albums
which represented the Dead's most focused songwriting efforts. How did that
discipline in the studio manifest itself onstage?
As we matured as songwriters, what that gave us was a body of songs to
interpret, with more facility with the craft and the art of songwriting. It was
more fun onstage, more adventure, the more we had. And these songs were never
written to be played the same way twice. So the more we wrote, the more involved
we got, the more fun we had and the more the songs revealed themselves to us.
Also, we were developing facility at the performance level, taking more
structured songs and finding new covers and new punches for them. Not long after
these songs were written, they had become completely different. A recording of
any of our songs, even in the studio, is just a snapshot of a moment, at best.
It's an intuitive kind of endeavor to play the way we did -- you try to find
your thread in a song, the place you could fit in. For me, it was somewhere in
the middle of the rhythm section. So you had to understand the words, the
characters -- you had to understand The Song, in capital letters; you couldn't
just arbitrarily come in and make noise.
Was it different for you to find that proper place in this smaller lineup?
Did your actual plan of attack for the songs change as the group's composition
changed?
We always approached songs the same. We got good at it in that small
ensemble, and then the facility we gained there we were able to bring back to
the larger group. If you learn it doing it smaller, you can always do it larger.
And we only got but so big, and always added pieces incrementally.
When you signed the deal with Rhino, you said that one of the priorities
would be figuring out digital plans for the band's enormous archives. Are you
making progress on that project?
It will be very expensive and very time-consuming to digitize our vaults. It
should be done, but it will be a while in coming. Certainly one of the first
orders of business with Rhino has to be starting to kick around ideas of how we
can get this done. I have no idea yet when it will happen, but it should
definitely be sooner rather than later.
What do you think is the biggest misconception about the Grateful
Dead?
For some people, there seems to be some sort of sense that we were gurus,
that we were implying in our lyrics that by grasping some sort of key that we
had that it could open you up to some sort of cosmic consciousness. And that
does exist in our lyrics, but it also exists in everything on earth. So I think
there was a tendency to read too much into our lyrics.
I think the bulk of the people understand what we were up to and loved it for
what it was -- and I think that probably will be our enduring legacy. And for
those who did make too much of it, maybe that's working for them, and that can
be their own sense of the legacy.
When you say that people understood what you were up to, how would you
define what that was?
On a nightly basis, we stated a theme, and then we took it for a walk in the
woods.
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