Blues For Allah 50: King Solomon’s Marbles/Stronger Than Dirt or Milkin’ The Turkey

Announcing Dogfish Head Grateful Dead Juicy Pale Ale. Collaborating for over a decade now, Dogfish Head and Grateful Dead have crafted a light-bodied pale ale brewed with sustainable curds of grains, granola, and heaps of good karma for a refreshing brew that's music to your taste buds. Check out dogfish.com for more details and to find some Grateful Dead Juicy Pale Ale in your neck of the woods. Dogfish Headcraft Brewery is located in Milton, Delaware. Please drink responsibly. The Good Old Grateful Dead Cast. The official podcast of The Grateful Dead. I'm Rich Mayhan with Jesse Jarno, exploring the music and legacy of The Grateful Dead for the committed and the curious. Ladies and gentlemen, fellow Dead Heads, welcome to Season 12 of The Good Old Grateful Dead Cast. I'm your co-host Rich Mayhan. Thank you very much for tuning in. In this episode of The Good Old Grateful Dead Cast, we dive into an instrumental from Blues Ferala, the twisting, turning King Solomon's marbles stronger than dirt or milking the turkey. Well, folks, the Grateful Dead Blues Ferala 50th anniversary deluxe edition is out now. This 3CD set features the newly remastered album with unreleased soundcheck and concert recordings. Check this out. The set features almost two hours of unreleased recordings. Among the highlights are rehearsals from the band's August 12, 1975 soundcheck at the Great American Music Hall, including the album tracks Sagan Spirit, Help on the Way, Slipknot, and Franklin's Tower. This collection continues with performances from the June 21, 1976 show at the Tower Theater in Pennsylvania, spotlighting five Blues Ferala songs alongside favorites like Eyes of the World. Rounding out the set are selections from Bill Graham's snack that students need athletics, culture, and kicks benefit at Kesar Stadium on March 23, 1975. There are also a few vinyl variants of this album available, including a picture disc, a midnight fire red vinyl edition, and 180 gram black vinyl. Very cool looking Blues Ferala 50th anniversary merch is now also available and all of these can be found at Dead.net. And over at Rhino.com you can check out the Dolby Atmos mixes on Blu-ray disc. They were mixed by Stephen Wilson and yes, they are ready to blow your mind. All of these fine releases are out now via Dead.net and Rhino.com. Did you know if you head on over to Dead.net slash Deadcast, you can check out all of our past episodes, including the complete seasons one through eleven, and you can link from there to your favorite podcasting platform so you can listen how, where, when, and whenever you like to listen. Please help the good old grateful Deadcast by subscribing, sharing us with your friends on social media, hit that like button, and leave us a review. It helps more than you realize. Thanks so much. Do you have a great story about any of these songs? Well, the ones we haven't covered yet. Hey all in Blues Ferala. Were you lucky enough to catch the band at one of their shows in San Francisco in 1975? Then we need to hear from you. Head on over to stories.dead.net and record yourself telling us all about it. You may just hear yourself on a future episode of the Deadcast. We have transcripts for many of your favorite Deadcast episodes of available now for your reading pleasure. Head on over to Dead.net slash Deadcast dash index and check them out. Well Blues for Aula is a grateful dead album like no other. And one of the things that sets it apart is the number of instrumentals on the album. King Solomon's Marbles, Stronger Than Dirt or Milk in the Turkey, gotta say that title always caught my attention and still does, highlight the bands creativity and breath and show they weren't afraid to venture into uncharted territory. Here's cartographer Jesse Giorno to guide us through it. The third track of Blues for Aula, counting as its fourth and fifth songs, brings us straight into the album's weird core. King Solomon's Marbles and Stronger Than Dirt are a pair of bass-driven instrumental motifs developed during the intense spring 1975 workshop sessions at Bob Weir's Aces Studio. They didn't survive past that year's few performances. It's thrilling high-wire music and one of the tracks that makes Blues for Aula, Blues for Aula. Grateful Dead Archivist and Legacy Manager David Lemieux. This is 11 level Grateful Dead in terms of how complex it is and how hard it must be to play until you know how to play it. That observation works on a few levels. David means the 11. The Dead's explosive song written in 11.8 time, released on 1969's Live Dead as the third segment of the album's suite and a high watermark for complexity in the Dead's Canon. But also, as only occasional bassist Nigel Tufnel famously put it, we're talking about two interconnected pieces of music, often confused with one another. But taken as a whole, they definitely go to 11. The first part is called King Solomon's Marbles. Remember the poster in the early 80s, the 100 Grateful Dead songs? I had that on my wall and it was really fun to kind of, I'd mark them off. I'd tell them this one, this one, and I never, I don't think I got all 100, but I got, you know, in the 90s maybe. But I do remember there's King Solomon playing marbles on the ground. The second part is titled Stronger Than Dirt or Milk in the Turkey. We'll introduce a handy musical mnemonic to remember the difference later, but to disambiguate right now, this is what's called Stronger Than Dirt or Milk in the Turkey. With the hindsight of now 50 years, I think it's maybe a bit too easy to dismiss some of the soon abandoned songs on Blues for Allah and the events of the Grateful Dead's 1975 at large as failed experiments, or even worse, footnotes and trivia. In the world of the Grateful Dead, what always really mattered was the now, and they made some of their most radical nows in the mid-1970s. And most importantly for us, they did it with tape running. In 1975, the Grateful Dead were pursuing some pretty far-out ideas about music and technology and everything else, and that collective pursuit wasn't anything new. The band had their roots in one of the most popular and complex technologies of the 1960s. LSD has passed through three distinct phases. The first was a period of scientific investigation when a variety of mental aberrations were examined. Later, some of the scientists observed that many of the reactions were not madness at all. And they proceeded to explore the possibility that the drug might be effective in the treatment of certain mental disorders, that it might help us understand the creative process, the nature of perception, and other human mental activities. When the Warlocks changed their name to the Grateful Dead in late 1965, LSD was in the late phases of transforming from a so-called miracle drug into something newer and scarier, at least to some people. To others, it was new and adventure-making technology, and it created the matrix for a counterculture that aimed to change the human mind and society at large. Here's Mary Prankster's Stuart Brand, speaking in a 2003 documentary about the birth of the Whole Earth Catalog, the publication that would draw together the worlds of heads and technology, starting in 1968. The Whole Earth Catalog project specifically came out of an LSD afternoon, where I was on a rooftop with, you know, probably 200 micrograms of LSD in me, nothing better to do, and thinking about, or in context of lectures I had recently heard by Buck Mr. Fuller, and Fuller, like McLuhan, was one of the people we were paying attention to then. Not coincidentally, those 200 micrograms were left over from the Trips Festival, held just before that. In our two-part Long Strange Tech episode, which we've linked to at dead.net slash deadcast, we outlined the dead's entwined connections with the experimental tech culture of California. And of course, we've discussed the innovations of the wall of sound, which included Phil Lesh's Quad Bass, coming to bloom in 1974, but still an active project in 1975. All of this is what I mean when I say the dead were a progressive band. It wasn't just the weird time signatures, though we'll get back to those momentarily. So when The Grateful did announce new plans in their January 1975 newsletter, it was from a band that had just spent a few years inventing a new way to present live concert sound, building their own instruments, founding their own record companies, and had gone to work trying to reinvent their own music from the ground up. Please welcome back then president of Grateful Lead and Round Records, Cadillac Ron Rakow. There was a fan in New York, his name was Eugene Dolgoff, D-O-L-G-O-F-F. He came backstage and, you know, he said to somebody, it might have been Jackson, somebody, you know, I'm a scientist and I do this, I have an idea, I gotta talk. So they brought him to me. He was a young guy and I think he was just in undergraduate school, but he was taking a science-based curriculum so that he can go on and get his advanced degrees. He was an expert in holography. And please welcome to the good old Grateful Bedcast, Eugene Dolgoff. I've been involved in holography and laser work since 1964. I worked on developing holograms for advertising and for display and trying to find a way to mass produce holograms, which I eventually did. And the technique is used, you know, all the credit cards and debit cards in the world. That was my invention. Eugene Dolgoff began studying holography when he was still a teenager. Around the same time as his interest in holography began, so did his interest in rock and roll. I've been playing since I was about 14. I was in non-success, just neighborhood bands. There was one group that I was in, actually, they wound up being famous, but I left them. We were called the trench coats. We played the churches and the neighborhood and so on. We got a gig at the Night Owl Cafe in the village. There was another band that played with us. Eventually, this guy came in from Mercury Records, I think it was, and he signed up both of our bands and he changed the names of our bands. So my band, the trench coats, was changed to the Blues Magooz. And the other band? They changed the name to the Love and Spoonfool. By the early 1970s, Gene's work with holography was starting to take shape. I had the idea of making a hologram mass produced to put on a Beatles album cover, and I went and contacted John Lennon and wound up meeting him in his apartment in Manhattan and showing him and Yoko all the holograms that I had made. He just was blown away by it and he said, yes, let's do it. The Beatles had recently disbanded, but John and Yoko were living in New York, in the midst of their radical early 70s projects. He had recorded this song called Mind Games, and he got the idea that he would make a picture of the earth with him on it, and then Yoko on the moon in 3D. And as you moved, you could look around the moon and see Yoko. He took me to his lawyer manager to pitch this project. His name is Alan Klein. Like a lot of dreams, the holographic cover for Mind Games died in Alan Klein's office, as Beatle George sang Beware of Abco. Some of the dates in this story are a bit murky, but I'm pretty sure Gene Dolgoth entered the Grateful Dead narrative in August of 1974, when the Wall of Sound stopped at Roosevelt Stadium in Jersey City, and the Grateful Dead were in New York for a week. I had a friend who was working at a company in Manhattan involved in this new sound system called Apex, and it was really an advanced thing, and they called it a holographic sound system, which was just a marketing gimmick. It was not holographic, but it was an advanced sound system. The Apex Aural Exciter would be launched to the music world in 1975 as a way to pull out the brightness and sonic frequencies, an alternative to traditional EQ. They still exist, and the Apex Exciter has been used as a production tool on Dead archival releases. Naturally, the Dead came in for a demo. This girl knew the work that I was doing and that I tried doing the album cover with Gail Lennon. She thought of me in the context of music and records. She thought, hey, maybe they want to see your holograms and do an album cover. So she called me up. She said, come down to my office today. They're going to be here. So I went down to their office in Manhattan. And so Gene Dolgoth met with Jerry Garcia and Bobby Weir for the first time. The day I met them at Apex, they were talking about the wall of sound, and they wanted to include the Apex technology with that wall of sound. But coincidentally, probably that very same week, the Dead also decided to retire from the road, a decision that put them on the path towards Blues for Aula, and the story we're telling this season on the Deadcast. That only meant they were looking for the next big trip. I met Jerry Garcia. I met Bob Weir, showed them holograms, and they loved it. And they said, wow, this is really great stuff. But what else are you doing? So I told them, we work on a lot of different things. So I invited them to my lab. I was also teaching a course at City College of the City University of New York. And I had created that course and written the textbook for it on light, lasers, and holography. And the college put some money together and funded me. So they funded a laboratory for me at the college. We'll pause here to shout out the Deadcast musicologist buddies at the City College of New York, located in Harlem. I invited them to come see the lab. One day I met with them, and this time it was Jerry Garcia, Bob Weir, and Phil Lesh. And they met me and I drove them to the college and parked it in the South Campus parking lot. And then we had to walk all the way through the campus to the north of the campus to get to my laboratory in the engineering building. So the four of us walked through the entire campus of City College and no one recognized them. I was astounded. You imagine us all walking in in a single file? I mean, it was amazing. And right next to my holography lab was a nuclear reactor. So when we went in there, we all had to put on the dosimeter badges to make sure we didn't get radiation dosages. So all the guys put them on as well. And it added to the mystique of the whole experience. It was kind of fun. So anyway, I showed them the lab and I showed them some of the other things that I was working on. One of Eugene Dolgoff's claims to fame was in production and about to unfold in the fall of 1974. And sure to impress the science fiction fans in the dead. In 73, I wrote my first and published my first paper on the holographic model of the brain. Because once I learned how holography worked, it blew my mind. And I realized that the whole universe was holographic and that the brain was holographic, which is a complicated technical thing to go into. But it's definitely true. The paper put Gene in touch with none other than Gene Roddenberry, creator of Star Trek, who is then producing a new documentary. They set up a meeting for me and Gene Roddenberry in early 73. And I explained to him this one invention of mine, which I call a matter hologram. And I said, so you could have a room where you can reconstruct anything you like. You can have jungles, you could have a new location, you could have physical objects, whatever you like. And you could use it as a recreation room or a training room or simulation of war or whatever you want. Star Trek, the animated series, went on the air in September 1973. And in September 1974 aired the episode The Practical Joker, featuring the first appearance of the holodeck, then known as the wreck room. We're cutting a lot out of this particular story, but we've posted links to more about Gene Dahlgauf's connection to Star Trek at dead.net slash deadcast. Creating a functional holodeck was perhaps a bit out of the Grateful Dead's price range and ambitions, even in 1975. But Gene Dahlgauf had another line of research that was more relevant to the dead's interests. One of the things I was working on, I had the idea that since you can take a laser beam and modulate it, we could put sound on a laser beam. And I had a little modulator connected to a radio, and then I sent the music on the laser beam to a receiver, and then I had a amplifier, and you could hear the music. And whenever you put your hand in the laser beam, the music stopped because you were blocking the laser. So that showed that I was transmitting sound on a laser beam, and I did it live on the TV show. This radio is now sending its sound over the laser beam. Now this is a receiver. As soon as we put the receiver in the laser beam, the sound will come out of here. Ready? Let me go over here. The beam is now being projected onto this little radio thing, and the beam is going to turn it on now. And I can hear sound coming out. There is sound coming out of that. Here. And every time you put your hand here, it stops. Good. My idea was, well, why don't we instead of playing a record with a needle and wearing down the needle and the record, why don't we read the grooves with a laser beam? Because we can put the sound over the laser beam. And so then I got the idea of making a record that way and have it on a film, and that would be the new record. So I told that to the dead, and they introduced me to their manager, a guy named Ron Rakow. He lived in the Bronx, and he came and gave us all an eye test at the Navarro Hotel. That was really brilliant. You were using a holography just on a wall, and if you put the holograph on the wall and you move around a certain way, if the thing moves with you, your eyes are normal. If it moves against you, you're either... You got something wrong with your eyes. It was an eye test that really pinpointed that people had had something wrong and needed to go further. I really enjoyed Ron. He was a brilliant guy, a creative guy. When I eventually met Ron, and Ron took me down to meet his father who worked in the garment district, and we became friendly. His idea was to get something and put the record on that and make a holographic reader. He was going to design this stuff. Anyway, the dead was so loving this idea, and they said, okay, maybe we can put our records on your new type of record. So Ron, being the creative guy he was, said, why don't we just forget about discs? Let's make the record in the shape of a pyramid. Can you do that? I said, yeah, we could scan the laser beam around the pyramid and still get the data from it. He said, okay, so imagine two cigarette cases, and you open it up, open up the two cases, and you put the pyramid in and you close it, and that's the record player. Then the laser reads it, and the album would be on the pyramid. And I said, sounds great. His goal was to get us to do a little pyramid in a pyramid reader, and you put this little pyramid in it, and it had all the Grateful Dead albums in it. The newest one was right at the top, but everyone was on the sides of the thing. So every time you bought a Grateful Dead album, you got the entire, their entire release set of albums. That was, that was, that was an early plan. This is actually pretty funny. Now that I think about it. In January 1975, the band announced their holographic intentions. As Rakhouse Alterigo, Anton Rown, put it in the band's newsletter, this would have the advantage of no surface noise, no pops, scratches, skips, or any of the baloney about present-day records and tapes. The pyramid's musical quality wouldn't change until it is broken clean through, which wouldn't be easy even on purpose. Technically, it is possible to make a small player, same size as two packs of cigarettes, to retail in stores for about $13. Of course, we have lots of music to listen to over such a device, and the pyramids would cost no more than a record and perhaps less. So really, how serious were you about this? Call it a third serious. We had props and we could show it to people and all that stuff. And here's where the story gets murkier, because while Eugene Dolgoff was beginning research in New York, Ron Rakhouse was beginning hype out in California. I bought one of these. It's a little plastic board. I would call it four by six inches. And on it, it has pyramids that supposedly have the same structure as the Great Pyramid. And I went to Ramrod and I had one of those boards cut up on a bandsaw, so I had the little pyramids all separate. And then I asked Ramrod to make me two palm wall packs linked together by a hinge. And in the bottom one, put the base slide that would accept the base of this little pyramid. And then when you closed it, the top would go into the cutout at the top. This had to be done with the chisel. And we painted them black and told everybody that this was the future. And we were going to have just a cable that went from this into your sound system. And we were going to put the entire library of Great Saldad albums on the pyramid. Progressive indeed. Maybe a little too progressive. But the holographic project would receive lots of mentions in articles about the dead over the next few years. Rakhouse concept of encoding the music on a pyramid shaped object marked the first appearance of a pyramid into the dead's personal iconography. A somewhat subliminal introduction of a shape that began to recur and iterate over the next few years of the band's creative life. Please welcome back historian Nicholas Merriweather, founder of the Grateful Dead Studies Association and author of the Liner Notes for the new Blues for Aula 50 release. This business of the holographic pyramids, I think it's more likely, it's most likely just a riff on the standard bullshit of the whole pyramid power nonsense that was going around. So the pyramid power scammed. It's right on up there with pet rocks. And it was the idea that there was an inherent power to the pyramid shape such that you could make a little glass pyramid and put your razor blades inside it. And they would not only stay sharp, they'd get sharper. Pyramid power made it to English speaking minds through the popular 1970 book psychic discoveries behind the iron curtain. But even at the time, other members of the dead family were beginning their exploration of Egyptology that would result in the band's 1978 visit to the pyramids. We'll get back to the desert soon. I didn't show it to anybody by Jerry at the thing and one time in a meeting, he said, give me that black thing that you walk around with. He said, this is the most amazing thing I ever saw. You see this shit? This is two pig cigarette packs. And we both smoked palm oil at that time and he pulled them out. He said he's a two palm oil packs hinged together. Ramrod made this shit. Racko made us millions. This is what he used. Everybody got everybody. You know, we was out of our minds laughing. Racko's hype prop and the vague idea of pyramid power make it seem all pretty imaginary. Thought of next to Magic Alex, the Beatles would be in house visionary. But that would be wrong. Rolling Stone reported in March that there was quote, a crew of scientists plugging away at the dead's round record headquarters in Marin County, end quote. At the time, Racko estimated it would be available for sale between nine and 15 months. Both those were inaccurate. But Jean Dalgoff's holographic playback system was very much under research in 1975, though he says he never went to California for the project. We really had prototypes. I mean, it was real work going on. So I do remember checks from round records. But whenever I'd see them, they'd give me cash. He was a regular when the dead or one of Jerry Garcia's projects came through New York. One day, when I was at the Navarro with Jerry, I told him that his new song, US Blues, was number one hit material. And he said, no. And I said, really, it could be top 40. And I said, but could you teach me how to play it? So he gave me a guitar and he had a guitar. And together we played US Blues. And that was really a fun experience playing guitar with Jerry Garcia. I don't think it will be spoiling anything to say that the holographic pyramid reader didn't come to fruition. But there's a little more to Eugene Dalgoff's story with the dead, which will return to you down the road, and a lot more to Dalgoff's career, which includes the patent on the very first LCD projector in the early 1980s. As usual, we've posted links at dead.net slash deadcast. In 1975, holography was a very real project in development. For the rest of this season, consider it to be in the present tense, part of the dead's ongoing experiments and form, trying to reinvent the universe. In this window, there was another just as wild idea somewhere in the works. Jerry Garcia hinted at it in his late March 1975 interview with Peter Simon. If we keep playing in the same room, we get really understand it. So the music gets really articulate, which is one of the directions it needs to go in, to be more clearly stated and more greater subtlety and greater nuance, you know, all that. And that has to do with understanding a room really well. And you can do that if you're playing it really often. So that's one possibility. A few years earlier, the band had even purchased a small parcel of land on Lucas Valley Road in Nevada with the project name Dead Patch. But nothing came of it. So far, the situation at Aces was the closest they'd been able to find. And just the thing of being trying to fit in responsible consciousnesses with what's happening in the world and feeling that it's really as much our responsibility as anything to create the right situation for what we're doing to be in, just on any level. But in 1975, a new line of research began. Ron Racco. It was a plan to make a round ballroom that you could move around. We had a drawing made of a rolled up blueprint of how to make it and what the elevations and so on. It was rolled up in a big leather sheath. And it was 24 inches, 20 inches high. And when you rolled it up, it was two inches around. Somebody told me it was my Buckminster Filler, but I don't believe that. In fact, Racco himself told Rolling Stone in November 1975 that Fuller was working on the project. It sometimes got called a floating venue, but they meant in the portable sense, not the aquatic sense. Unfortunately, we're unable to get the late Bucky Fuller on the line to confirm or disconfirm this information. It was drawings made of exactly what the sphere is now. The drawing that we had, in other words, the walls are separated by three or four feet, just like the sphere is separated by five or six. The sphere is put in one place and left there, but we intended to pull ours from place to place and have our setup all already there and just land and play. The sphere is exactly that, but is anchored. And it wasn't the size of the sphere. It wasn't that big. It was an idea of projection in inward and outward, just like the sphere does. It was set up to 6,200 seats, which is about one-third the size of the sphere. So a progressive band. And inside the progressive dead, there were progressions within progressions in all manners of the word. As the band's classical head in residence, bassist Phil Lesch had long been one of the group's primary instigators of new music in the sense that that phrase is used in classical circles. Compositions written in the 20th century, basically. It was one of the dead's ongoing missions, as Jerry Garcia told Peter Simon. The thing of being able to progress or come up with new ideas, we always felt free to do that. In fact, compelled. It was a mission so compelling that they were tired from the road to chase it. We used this quote last episode, but it's once again relevant. What we hope to be able to accomplish by not performing a lot, which is get away from our habits, get away from our old repertoire, and just cut ourselves loose from the past, basically. Shocking is that my sound. And develop new levels to go off of, really, to depart from. Garcia was pretty blunt about the band's new directions. It's a little bit more difficult, and it's also considerably more experimental. I mean, it's really questionable as to whether the things will work, whether it'll be successful musically, but we're sort of into defining new spaces for ourselves musically to go to. King Solomon's Marbles was almost certainly one of the pieces he was thinking of. Like Slipknot, but even more ambiguous, it's sort of possible to trace the ideas of King Solomon's Marbles back to earlier dead eras and compositions. The 11 remains the dead's most famous excursion into a rhythmic space outside the standard 4-4 beat of rock. But it was hardly the only one. So let's count up, going through some of the dead's odd time signatures up to and including the blues for a la sessions. The dead had surprisingly few pieces in the fairly normal time signature of 3-4, known as Walt's time. There's the bridge to Warfrat. Most of the dead songs, and most rock songs in general, are in 4-4. Music Colleges Our music colleges correspondent, Sharno Donnell insists that while it only matters if you're trying to write the song out on paper, El Paso can be counted in 6. Music And next episode, we'll expand on the roughly 15-second flash of 6-8-time on Blues for A La. by 1975 the dead had a few pieces in seven for starters there was the rarely played instrumental just known as the seven played a few times between 1968 and 1970 here it is at the Capitol Theater on March 21st 1970 thanks to Ken Lee's audience tape during the Blues for Allah sessions they were also working on a new piece by Bobby Weir which might sound familiar early versions of lazy light and supplication turn up throughout all phases of the Blues for Allah sessions and we're finished it in time to recorded at aces that fall leading off Kingfish's debut album the next year also in development at aces in the spring was a piece that was labeled as on some of the session tapes and eventually took on the name orpheus recorded by the full dead during the sessions for Jerry Garcia's Reflections album later in the summer and eventually released on the all-good things box in 2004 it sounds like a jam but it's another composition that feels genetically related to King Solomon's marvels counting our count the original instrumental seed for playing in the band was called the main 10 because it was in 10 for here it is from one of its early performances in November 1969 now on Dix Pics volume 16 we've mentioned the 11 already trucking can be counted as a groove in 12-8 the blissed-out jam at the end of new potato caboose has a long moment in 13 8 like this take from August 24th 1968 now on to from the vault perhaps the reason why it got as far as it did was that by Phil Lesh's standards King Solomon's marbles was actually a pretty loose piece of music compared to many of the examples we just heard from the City College of New York welcome back Sean O'Donnell what I like most about it is that they're like this is what we're doing we're just doing this this is a pedal to the floor romping seven as Sean points out Garcia isn't really soloing in seven just following his inner Fred that's sort of where the bravery comes in again Phil seems the one most willing to take the chance and that sounds opposite of like he has this very complex things that he's building but but he also is totally willing to freewheel it may be more than the rest of them he'll just do it and put it on the record and this that's gonna go and it's equal to all the other things to happen but in that way I think that might be deliberate while the blues for all the sessions were an attempt to generate songs the dead were also an improvising band and I think we're thinking about creating explicit new launching points in his conversation with Peter Simon Jerry Garcia used the phrase new levels several times here's one cut ourselves loose from the past basically shocking is that my sound and develop you know a new new levels to to go off of really to depart from and another in a sense we've just bankrupted our own material by using it so much and so the the idea is to you know create new levels of places to get off I think King Solomon's marbles was exactly that a jumping off point that felt both distinct but also wide open and comfortable enough to just you know shred we've talked before about how blues for all a represented perhaps a final moment where the dead made an album filled with musical ideas that seemed fully contemporary with the music of their peers except in their own dead away King Solomon's marbles is a place where that's definitely true I'm virtually certain that Phil lash never heard cans album soon over Babylon and this track Splash released in November that became King Solomon's marbles it's also in seven but like Franklin's towers resemblance to walk on the wild side I suspect it's just a coincidence a similar musical path arrived at from similar approaches it's so extraordinarily adjacent to King Solomon's marbles that we'll listen to slightly more we've talked about can before on the deadcast back in our Europe 72 season especially I'm pretty sure for example the can did hear the dead song one more Saturday night on the German television show beat club in 1972 not long before recording this and can definitely saw pictures of the wall of sound and built their own version of it which we talked about with their engineer Renee Tinner back in our West Germany episode but King Solomon's marbles had its own particular evolution starting in the later part of 1974 during the same window that Jerry Garcia began to fool around with the prototype of slipknot lush began to lead a jam the dead scholar light into ashes has called the proto Solomon jam it's not exactly what became King Solomon's marbles either in terms of the notes played or their rhythm but it's easy to hear the connection that's from the February 26 1973 Dark Star in Lincoln Nebraska now Dixpix 28 during the early iteration Lash would sometimes play the riff in 5-4 as we just heard and sometimes in 6-8 as they switched to right afterwards on this version we've of course linked to the post about the proto Solomon jam sometimes known as Phil's jazz jam at dead.net slash deadcast rather than a song or even a groove in the conventional sense it's more like a feeling the relationship between Lesha's bass and the rest of the band and as light into ashes points out not dissimilar to Wayne shorter's footprints the theme appears throughout 1973 in parallel with another bit of Lesha's in an odd time signature the ending sequence to the original eyes of the world arrangement here from that same February 26 1973 show tuning into the circulating sessions from aces it's easier to hear how those ideas perhaps re manifested into the piece we now know of as King Solomon's marbles this is from an early session on February 28 1975 and by a few weeks later at Ned Lagen's birthday jam on March 17 1975 which we discussed on the slipknot episode there's a definite form to it but that's only the first part of what became the final song the piece was rehearsed extensively and incorporated into the sequence known as space age performed at the snack benefit but what was performed at the snack benefit was only the piece that we call King Solomon's marbles and in a slightly different form than the final album after the snack benefit the dead got back to work and King Solomon's marbles continued to evolve it's not until the May 12th session after Garcia's return from the Legion of Mary tour that we first hear the second section of the song known as stronger than dirt and there's a ridiculously easy way to remember which part is called King Solomon's marbles and which part is called stronger than dirt specifically can you sing the phrase stronger than dirt over it that was the Ajax commercial jingle circa 1965 and like the product it's advertising it makes clear what's behind stronger than dirt you ever see socks this white new Ajax long-been detergent is stronger than dirt Hank Harrison's dead book includes the reproduced text of a notebook page from 1962 that indicates that Phil Lesch had the phrase stronger than dirt in mind since at least then Ned Lagen was around for this part of the workshop sessions when stronger than dirt came into existence Ned Lagen thinks the music came first and then somebody realized what it sounded like somebody labeled it from the resemblance I don't know who but the resemblance is there because of subliminal absorption of things that were going on that once Jerry or Phil heard stuff heard the idea of stuff being used he would do it himself subliminally or overtly and consciously quotation of popular sources was a device often used in contemporary classical including Phil Lesch's beloved Charles Ives not to mention being the basis for a lot of bebop where familiar themes got reharmonized and turned into new songs using quotes both in C-stones and in studio sessions that's pretty important to me part of my education and improvising and being taught improvisation and some of the record prerecorded tracks or C-stones performances were musical quotes but some of them appear only as rhythmic or what I learned from Renaissance music can't this firm is bass sound the bass sound so they were the basis upon which other harmonies and other themes and rhythmic structures were created Phil Lesch would have been familiar with the technique from both his jazz and classical backgrounds the piece on blues for a la has been labeled and mislabeled in numerous ways over the years the most common mistake is to call the entire piece King Solomon's Marbles and then label part one is stronger than dirt and part two is milk in the turkey but this is incorrect part one is King Solomon's marbles part two is stronger than dirt or milk in the turkey again here's part two stronger than dirt the version of the full piece on blues for a la only existed for a limited amount of time as we heard it was still in development on the keys are stadium show from march beside some of the rehearsal tapes the two parts can only be heard together on the studio version from blues for a la and the live recordings from the great american music hall in august and linley meadow in september here it is at the august 12th soundcheck rehearsal for the great american music hall show but without that section all you've got is a sparkling king Solomon's marbles now let's go back to the top and talk about the two-part piece of music heard on blues for a la the tracking sheet for king Solomon's marbles stronger than dirt seems to be m i a from the final tape reel so i'm not sure when the final version was recorded i'm going to guess sometime after the bob freed memorial boogie on june 17th because i think otherwise they would have played the full piece here's billy croydsman's drum intro but then you have this additional part which i think is mickey heart overdubbing the smaller latin percussion setup that you can see on stage in the photos of the september 28th show in linley meadow while he was on tour with the legion of mary that spring jerry garcia told an interviewer in philadelphia that the new album sessions were an attempt to quote de grateful that ourselves so like slipknot the pieces combine rhythmic and harmonic ideas that were part of the dead's evolving vocabulary which we talked about extensively during our slipknot episode associate professor from the city college of new york chadwick jenkins that major six though for the minor chord is a big part of it that that first real lick by jerry once you get past that that opening it's a b minor and he hits the seventh above it and then the major six a minor chord with a major six over it shows up constantly in this album like it's not that they never used it before but it's a major just sound of this album if you listen to king settlements marbles bob weir's doing that chord over and over again on all the b minor jams and and quite a few of the a minor jams like it shows up that that minor six chord again and again and then there's this part it's just an a a um nine chord right but what he's doing is he's coming up to the third and then he's he's got this neighbor figure which makes it sound really cool right because you have the the notes that don't quite fit resolving the notes that do fit and you get that that very jazzy sound so that's king solomon's marbles and then there's the stronger than dirt section don't the doors refer to it and the end of one of their tunes the stronger than dirt thing i'm obviously not a golfer but chadwick's right it's at the end of touch me from 1969 as i said i'm not sure when in the sessions the band track king solomon's marbles but at one point the song was considered as a possible title for the album as late as july 1975 united artists in-house cover designer bob kato made a mock-up for the dead album to be titled king solomon's marbles depicting a statue presumably king solomon dropping a marble into a larger ocean of marbles or perhaps a ball pit of marbles including the floating torstos of richard nixon dwight eisenhower and others before his position at united artists bob kato had worked at columbia designing covers for bob dillon the band and others and i'm also not sure when in the session the instrumental took on the name king solomon's marbles phil ash addressed the title briefly in his memoir searching for the sound we've linked to the audiobook from simon and shuster at dead dot net slash deadcast this time we wanted to start off just playing together to see what would surface that could then be elaborated into more extended structures in that spirit jerry brought in a strange almost a tonal melodic entity that would evolve into the title song and sequence for the album and i had sketched out a little latin flavored seven beat instrumental number inspired by shelly's poem ozamandias called king solomon's marbles i met a traveler from an antique land who said two vast and trunkless legs of stone stand in the desert here we have a subtle egyptian connection that lesh must have known about we've linked to an essay about the topic at dead dot net slash deadcast and i'm pretty sure i'm getting this right shelly's poem was built on a series of historical conflations that connected with the egyptian statue known as young mimon of the pharaoh ramsey's two set to soon arrive in london and the poem blurs the identities of ozamandias with the king of kings king solomon and yielded a pretty famous line and on the pedestal these words appear my name is ozamandias king of kings look on my works he mighty and despair nothing beside remains round the decay of that colossal wreck boundless and bare the lone and level sands stretch far away though it wasn't composed as a piece of a bigger suite that's how king solomon's marbles often ended up functioning when performed live on the album though it flowed in a different way between franklin's tower and the music never stopped great for lead archivist david lemieux and the way they end it is just so classic it's like the with that note that me and then i mean it's one of those albums that i've again listened to so many times as as all of the great albums have been listened to that many times by us um just the transition of the way the note on which jerry ends the song and the way that they they then pick up the music never stopped it's just so freaking perfect so hold that thought king solomon's marbles and stronger than dirt were extremely short lived but their brief live existence is worth noting the king solomon segment was played at all four shows of 1975 but the tightest and the only version who approached the blues for a la take was unsurprisingly the august 13th 1975 show at the great american music hall at that gig it came out of the first eyes of the world since the band's road retirement almost like a replacement for the song's old seven eight ending and of course it never quite worked like that again they played it again in the post drums weirdness slot during the september 28th show at lindley meadow but by then the groove had slipped back to the looser feel heard earlier in the year and poof that was it for king solomon and his marbles never heard on a dead stage again unsurprisingly phil leshing friends took up both pieces of the suite when phil returned to the road at the turn of the 21st century key feet and left us this story about phil lesh's fuller realization of the music i'm thinking back to july 3rd 2001 at the cuthbert amphitheater and after having been brought out of the hiatus my own hiatus of seeing shows uh by my friend quarry we end up um at the cuthbert amphitheater and seeing phil lesh and friends the quintet the q and out of this long sort of dreamy alternately rocky warfret well suited to warren hains and um his pathos um the bend out of nowhere just bursts into king solomon's marbles and and it isn't just that they play this and it's i'm sort of shocked but not surprised because phil lesh and friends has been amazing every time i'd seen them thus far listening back to it recently it struck me just how polished and fully formed it was at that moment john molo phil and jimmy herring as this core trio just absolutely bounce it's like it's suited for jimmy's jazz is dead style and rob baracko hangs right tight with them and warren more acts like a rhythmic foil but i hadn't even thought about the fact that i don't even know if anyone had rehearsed or played that song since 1975 or 76 rehearsals and bam there it is out of nowhere but remember what we said earlier about the prevailing nowness of the blues for a la sessions we're gonna go back to aces for the remainder of this episode and listen to some more bits of the sessions for the album that was then known maybe as king solomon's marbles looking at phil lesh's songwriting on dead albums and in the dead set lists it's sometimes easy to miss how much music phil lesh worked on during the 1970s and especially during the blues for a la period not that he was nearly as prolific as jerry garcia nor even bobby weir but phil lesh had a number of pieces in development alongside king solomon's marbles he had no less than three other songs that made it to various stages during the blues for a la sessions i think phil was playing acoustic guitar here that was phil lesh teaching a song to bobby weir early in march 1975 of the three pieces it's the one we know the least about no title or anything else but there's an extraordinary 45 minute stretch of tape that starts with phil talking through the chords to weir and ending with a full band playing the piece net legend made an observation about phil lesh's collaborative skills in this period an unbroken chain that was a learning growth experience for phil in terms of what he could expect from the rest of the band in terms of of how to play his tunes phil had evolved i can just say that because we were very close at the time obviously phil had evolved while the music we're talking about in this segment mostly got put to the side the tensions from the unbroken chain session only surfaced between the cracks i would like to lay back on that cake and you have a tendency to rush it uh i i really think the important thing is not to be late with the two that comes after the new one that's the only important yeah that's the two yeah okay then then rush it and be right on and you should do it too when i rush it it sounds really good it doesn't sound like rush it's learning now you guys um you'll be unsurprised to find that it has some kind of odd time signature and jerry garcía does some clarifying so i think that if anything you're tending to try to do two put it in three and four four times into the natural thing in terms of playing it normally so in in in in so far as that figures after that the band doesn't quite get through a full take but they're able to play it through a bit almost so and at least for the aces tapes we currently have that's it for that piece of music disappearing backwards into the chasm of nowness of 1975 lush's other two pieces unfolded in more notable ways later on that same march fourth tape he runs through another set of changes with the band these ones are pretty gnarly remember how we told you about seventh chords in the slipknot episode on the bottom or something else on the front with a d right actually you can play this it was a dominant of d right right it's not always a smooth process they don't get nearly as deep into this one but there are some places where phil makes it through the song while singing a vocal melody so i asked ned lagen if he felt the pieces phil introduced during the blues for a la sessions with words by bobby peterson or another collaborator yes was that clear enough this piece is one of those if i'm hearing it right it's a song that would resurface at the terrapin station sessions in 1976 in 1977 with the name equinox featuring lyrics by peter monk who also wrote the words to passenger by then phil had heard his vocal chords and was no longer singing so just as passenger was handed over to bobby weir and donna gene god show equinox was assigned to jerry garcia that's the version released on the beyond description box set hopefully we'll have a chance to work backwards from the terrapin session somewhere down the line the other piece phil started working on during the blues for a la sessions had an even more convoluted evolution so that's the song labeled proto 18 proper also released on the beyond description box as you might surmise from the title or maybe not it's in the time signature of 188 and is referred to on the tapes as phil's thing in 18 thanks to chad wick jenkins for the consultation there and thanks to my pal dav mandl host of wfm use marvelous show it's complicated for pointing out that many songs and odd time signatures often call them out in their titles like dav brubex take five proto 18 proper is one of the first pieces the band worked on at the early sessions in february and started out as a more sprawling and slightly jammy or proposition but just as distordo would turn into crazy fingers proto 18 proper was destined to molt as well there were many notes and notes about the notes garcia can't find his there's really some conspiracy that all pieces of paper that have chords are not all the proto 18 proper leads to this band conversation where phil tells his bandmates that he wants to play with the expectations of the dancers with the song's weird time signatures and his bandmates are a little skeptical did it throw me if i was dancing god sure like to hear you play the whole thing now you just throw it in a ballroom dancing class yeah even by then though the tapes document lash in the band trying to figure out how everything fits together also let's figure out how the other part fits into that and also how does the 18 fit into it the other part comes out of the 18 all right we've we've only been playing this part we haven't been playing the 18 yes i know is part of it and then this middle section is another part of it by the end of march it was shaped into something more like a song like this take from march 26th which david the mu excavated for a taper section drop a few years back feeling simultaneously complete but also missing the manic energy of its starting point they really worked on it the instrument that sounds like an acoustic guitar is bob weir's new cowboy fancy model ibanez probably run directly into the studio board it shows up with a diamond sharp clean tone at various points in the sessions so but proto 18 proper didn't have a future as a song at least like that listen closely to this section so sound familiar it would turn up on the next grateful led studio album known as add a side in in the full tera pen station suite the time signature has been stripped from 18 eight to six and the calypso factor turned up the lesh wouldn't receive a writing credit pour one out for proto 18 proper alive in the eternal now of the 1975 blues for allotapes during these months of 1975 the grateful led were in jerry garcia's phrase a more or less permanent musical association the research and development flowed both ways so while the dead met up at aces for regular workshop sessions every member of the band engaged in other musical activities such that the lines continued to blur and blur some more one of the most interesting sessions took place on april 17th that was king solomon's marbles as played by the one-time lineup of phil lesh bobby weir billy croitman ned leijin and david crossby in some regards it was a typical day at aces alongside king solomon's marbles they worked on weir's new song then known as eac which will delve into next episode but like ned leijin's birthday jam on march 17th they also worked on pieces by david crossby including low down payment so john chipolina of quicksilver messenger service stopped by uh steve brown's session logs refer to this ensemble as snack a reference to the band that had rehearsed for the gig at keys our stadium in march but ned's not so sure about this that's just an error on steve's part or he meant to write cstones because they both begin with s you got to remember that people were smoking very strong weed the apps and band members on the april 17th session could be accounted for and planting a flag in that date is a good place to reflect on the swirling worlds of the dead in spring 1975 jerry garcia was on tour with the legion of mary there's no tape of this atlanta show on april 17th but here he is the next night april 18th in chicago i'll be coming through the keith and donna gene god show we're in nearby san anselmo on april 17th debuting their brand new live band at the lion's share uh in mid 1975 the dead were feeling more spin-off bands than they ever had before or after a whirlwind of musical activity that peaked around april may in june of 1975 it was probably sometime in june that billy croitzman signed on for duty as the drummer with the keith and donna band we've posted a link to kory arnold's keith and donna chronology at dead dot net slash deadcast they gigged intensely playing more than four dozen gigs around california between april and september and then setting off on an east coast tour with king fish jerry garcia occasionally joined them too here they are doing art peppers straight life at the great american music hall in august uh bobby weir and king fish were mega busy in this window too king fish didn't have a gig on thursday april 17th but they played on monday at the lucky lion edgewater in oakland on monday the 14th on friday the 18th they were in san bernadino opening for joe walsh and on saturday the 19th they were at the infamous north hollywood honky tonk the palomino whereas fate had it they were down two key members of the band bassist vocalist dav torbert and lead guitarist robbie hotnott in their place was none other than sir douglas sam of the sir douglas quintet oh preparing for their debut gig in early june was ned leaghan and a seastones ensemble set to feature garcia crossby lesh and heart which we'll talk about more later this season so by the count of active members of the dead we've got legion of mary king fish the keith and gana band and seastones also debuting that spring of 1975 was the diga rhythm band mickey heart's second formal appearances since leaving the dead in 1971 that was the diga rhythm band in golden gate park a show we're going to zoom in on slightly because it also helps locate us in the history of san francisco live music another timeline important to the grateful dead our friend michael parish was in golden gate park's linley meadow on may 30th 1975 that was really a a wonderful afternoon it was one of those things where they announced it in the morning i think that the starship was going to play in the park and i don't remember if they actually announced the diga was playing i think so i think it was announced as as the starship um the sun's and the diga rhythm band which of course at that point there hadn't there wasn't any product out so nobody really knew what the diga unless they'd gone to the starship shows at winterland which i did not the year before had seen the surprising and delightful return of live music to golden gate park you might be familiar with this recording of jerry garcia and murl sauners playing in marx meadow in early september 1974 just before the dead went to europe that show as well as the diga gig were presented in golden gate park by an organization known as the people's ballroom an offshoot of the michigan group known as the white panthers and right now right now right now it's time to take out the jails motherfucker that of course was brother rob tiner of the mc five at the grandie ballroom in detroit one front of the radical organization known as trans love energies founded by poet john sinclair which also spawned the white panthers inspired of course by oakland's black panthers the white panthers san francisco offshoot organized the people's ballroom in the bay area starting in 1974 a program to create hundreds of one-day jobs using government funding and minimal donations for music heads too young to have experienced the initial wave of free shows in the park from 1966 through 1969 it was a chance to catch san francisco music in its natural state it was a nice afternoon that was really one of the few times pre hardly strictly bluegrass i heard free music in golden gate park it was a pretty brief window for the revival of shows in golden gate park but the people's ballroom itself would last into the 1980s though will certainly make some arguments this season about how popular music underwent a few radical shifts in 1975 that seemed to sever it from the counterculture there were still groups like the people's ballroom who provided a continuity it was it was a very large crowd it was a nice sunny day and diga was the first group that came out photographer ed pearlstein a few months from picking up a camera was also there i actually ended up helping members of the diga band carry their instruments on to the stage michael parish i made a tape i actually had a little mono sony recorder and i recorded it it's long gone it was not good quality but zakir seemed to be the you know like the front person more than mickey was i mean mickey wasn't wasn't announcing anything it was really zakir the diga rhythm band were a new configuration that had started recently recording in mickey heart's barn ed pearlstein that the only other thing i remember about that is being really stupid and coming in shorts and no shoes and you know free freeform hippie style and it being freezing with the fog in and then they brought out garcia and fryberg to huge applause which certainly the crowd was going crazy and zakir hussein announced the name of the band's final piece which would turn out to be another piece of tariff and station that had its origins during the era of blues for a la we're gonna do a piece for you which is known as the fire on the mountain but it seems like we got fire here in ourselves today fire on the mountain already had two lives being originally recorded for heart's scrap 1974 album of the same name after being written during a jam session while neighboring hills in nevado burned and sometime in this period the diga rhythm band recorded a version known as happiness as drumming for what would become diga's debut album but on may 30th 1975 it was fire on the mountain there was a lot of speculation about whether other members of the dead were going to show up later in play and of course they didn't in the summer of 1975 for one last time in golden gate park free sounds rang out they wouldn't last past the year but they'd last through the summer anyway the eternal now of live music manifesting powerfully we'll return to the park soon but let king solomon's marvels carried you back to that momenticken Thanks very much for tuning in to the good old Grateful Dead Cast, friends. We'd like to thank our special guests in this episode, David Lemieux, Ned Lajian, Ron Rackow, Eugene Dolgoff, Michael Parrish, Ed Pearlstein, Keith Eaton, Nicholas G. Maryweather, Sean O'Donnell, and Chadwick Jenkins. Extra special thanks to friend of the dead cast, David Gans, for his ongoing contributions of audio from his interview archive. Executive producer for the good old Grateful Dead Cast, Mark Pinkes. Produced for Rhino Entertainment by Rich Mayhem Promotions and Jesse Jarno. Special thanks to David Lemieux, Brian Dodd, and Doran Tyson. All rights reserved.