Blues For Allah 50: The Music Never Stopped

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 one of Bobby Weir's grand contributions to the Grateful Dead catalog, The Music Never Stopped. Well, folks, The Grateful Dead Blues for all of 50th anniversary deluxe edition is out now. This 3-CD set features the newly remastered album with unreleased sound check and concert recordings. This set features almost two hours of unreleased recordings. Among the highlights are rehearsals from the band's August 12, 1975 sound check at San Francisco's Great American Music Hall, including the album tracks Sage and Spirit, Help on the Way, Slipknot, and Franklin's Tower. The collection continues with performances from the June 21, 1976 show at the Tower Theater in Pennsylvania, spotlighting five Blues for All of songs alongside favorites like Eyes of the World. Rounding out the set are selections from Bill Graham's Snack Benefit at Keys Art Stadium on March 23, 1975. There are vinyl variants of the original album available, including a picture disc, a midnight fire red vinyl edition, and 180-gram black vinyl. Very cool looking Blues for all of 50th anniversary merch is also available, and all of these can be found at Dead.net. And if you head over to Rhino.com, you can also check out the Dolby Atmos mixes on Blu-ray disc. They were mixed by Stephen Wilson, and they sound amazing. All of these fine releases are out now via Dead.net and Rhino.com. Head on over to Dead.net slash Deadcast and check out all of our past episodes there, including the complete seasons one through eleven. Everything will be released up to now, and you can link from there to your favorite podcasting platforms. You can listen how, when, where, etc. You like to listen. Please help this podcast by subscribing, sharing an episode on your social media so people find out about us. Believe it or not, a lot of heads don't know we exist. Tell a friend. Help us out. Thank you very much. Do you have a great story about any of the songs on Blues for Alla? Were you lucky enough to catch the band at one of their shows in San Francisco in 75? Then we'd like to hear from you. Head 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 available for your reading pleasure. If you go to dead.net slash deadcast-index, you can check them all out. Well, when you hear that intro drum beat by Billy Kreuzman, you know that a serious groove is about to drop, and you're about to get swept away by the magic that is the music never stopped. You know it. You love it. And today you're going to learn all about its genesis and the changes it went through on the way to becoming one of Bobby Weir's absolutely classic compositions. Here's Jesse Giorno. Today we reach another certified Grateful Lead Classic. Like Franklin's Tower, Bob Weir and John Perry Barlow's The Music Never Stop was released as a single. Unlike Franklin's Tower, it made it to the outer reaches of the Billboard Top 100, hitting number 81 with a bullet in late 1975. But more important than a Billboard chart position, The Music Never Stop was a serious deadhead favorite, a staple of the band through 1995 and one of Bobby Weir's signature songs. Grateful Lead Archivist and Legacy Manager David Lemieux. I always loved hearing it. To me, it's a little bit of a kind of an update on trucking in terms of an autobiographical song, but a little bit more whimsical about the dead coming to town. I gotta also say that I think it's the best Don Ajean ever sounded on a Grateful Dead record. I mean, you really start hearing it on Scarlet Pogonias a year earlier, but this record, Music Never Stopped, boy, Don Ajean. It's a co-lead vocal. And I remember it's kind of like one of our songs, a song that's singing about us being on the road with the dead. Along with its cheerable line about the band Beyond Description, operating in a full-flow state while the music plays the band, it was the kind of song title that the mainstream media could grab for an easy headline. The Music Never Stopped on the Grateful Dead special. Next up, The Dead Heads. It's a typical Weir song where it's got an interesting structure, it's got a cool little jam at the end that gets a little space, he gets a little out there, lot of room for Jerry to play around in, and then they come back to the landing, and then they do the nice big ending. The Music Never Stopped is also a song with a long tape trail that would take a few months to find its destination, a micro-period that also happens to include a major shift for the Grateful Dead as a whole. Bobby Weir's songwriting could sometimes take years, and today's episode really underscores and celebrates how much editing and refinement went into this process. The Dead jammed and took influence from the beatwriters, but their songwriting and studio album, The Dead, their songwriting and studio albums were virtually never raw ideas, nor first takes. They were all great editors. We think of The Music Never Stopped as one of Bob Weir's classic songs, and John Perry Barlow's only contribution to Blues for A la, a song that could make whole stadiums boogie and cheer. But it seemingly shares something with the music that preceded it on Blues for A la. It began life as a fragment of group-driven improvisation with the song Reverse Engineered from there. Music That was what Dead tapers call the Mind Left Body Jam, from the Wall of Sounds proper road debut in Reno, May 12, 1974. The Mind Left Body Jam, at its most articulated, had two parts, the four descending chords that we just heard, and a flip into a B section, where you can kind of hear what the jam would become. Music It was kind of different each time, but we delved into Mind Left Body's origins during our Listen to the River, October 1973 episode, and we'll summarize some of it here. The jam was so-named Mind Left Body, because of its apparent resemblance to the Paul Cantner song, Your Mind Has Left Your Body, released on Baron von Tolbooth and the Chrome Nun in 1973, featuring Jerry Garcia on Petal Steel. Music But that four-core descending theme began to appear in Dead Jams before that, in 1972. Like the chord changes to Franklin's Tower, it's almost inevitable that an improvising musician will end up on this descending progression at some point. Let's revisit what the great musicologist Graham Boone told us in that discussion. Graham Boone That descending riff is so fundamental, and it comes up in so much music, that it can come up for different reasons. I mean, Phil doesn't, apparently he has no interest in the idea that would have come from Paul Cantner, right? And he could see it from other places. Dear Prudence, of course, uses that riff. Music There's been a number of different songs that people have talked about. It actually goes back for centuries. The Falling Tetra Chord, as it's called, is one of the most important stock baselines in the Baroque era, and often tied to laments, but also used for other things. It's just a great thing, that Falling line. It was a theme the Dead got into pretty regularly during 1973 and 1974 especially. Here it is on October 17th, 1974, at the band's so-called retirement shows at Winterland. Music That theme shows up on the earliest full tapes we have of the Blues for Alla Workshop sessions at Bob Weir's Aces Studio, on the recordings of February 28th, 1975. In some of the earliest runs through the piece, the theme known as Mind Left Body is pretty recognizable. Weir is articulating the chords more than he did in the live versions, but the shape is the same, as is what Garcia does at first. On the second pass, Weir now divides the chords rhythmically, giving it more momentum. Music But that's now a B section that comes after a new A section, which fits together like this. The A section would give the song its working title, E-A-C, that is, the three main chords behind what would become the song's verse, which you can sing along with here more or less. Music The song's intro is familiar, but not quite in place yet. Music The E-A-C jam was one of several pieces of music in development during the earliest parts of the workshop sessions at Aces, but even in its earliest stages, it was starting to take shape by these February 27th and 28th tapes. Music Last episode, we talked about a few pieces of music that Phil Lesch seemingly conducted, including early versions of equinox, eventually recorded for Terrapin Station, and the ambitious, unfinished piece called Proto 18 Proper. Music One reason why Proto 18 Proper went to the side, and King Solomon's Marbles didn't, is because King Solomon's Marbles was easier to play, relatively speaking. In trying to push their musical language, the dead still had to navigate the sweet spot between comfortable and complex. During the early sessions, there were several instrumental pieces in development that it's worthwhile to catalog here before getting into how, and maybe why, E-A-C transformed into the music never stopped. There's the piece called Groove Number One, which is on the Beyond Description box, which feels collectively driven to my ears. Music Likewise, there's Groove Number Two, also on Beyond Description, which also feels pretty collective. Music One tape, for March 5th, has what I think is Garcia playing changes on piano, accompanied by weird Leshen Kreuzmann. Music Maybe there's a slight hint of the song that would become Gamora. Music It's followed by a brief discussion of the joys of playing secondary instruments. Music And there's A to E Flat, which shows up labeled on some of the tapes as blue noodle soup, which perhaps bears Weir's fingerprints. Or possibly even Keith Godshaw. There's a brief reference on one tape to him having a piece in development. Music There's also the similar, but kind of different, A to E. Music The slight change seemingly allows them to open it up into a pretty barmy jam, though this variation doesn't turn up again on the tapes we have. Music And David Lemieux excavated a track for the taper section on Deadnet from the April 29th session, labeled Swing Warm-Ups, which might only have been that, but they were included on a band work tape, perhaps considered for future development. It's also one of the places on the workshop tapes where we can clearly hear Ned Leaghen playing Rhodes alongside Keith Godshaw's piano. Music Depending if we count Phil Lesh's unused music as two or three different songs, or if we distinguish between the A to E flat jam and the E to A jam, that's another five or six pieces we can add to the tally of music and development for Blues for A la. That's another four or five pieces we can add to the tally of music and development for Blues for A la. So how did EAC turn into a song? Perhaps for starters, because of the way it probably grew for Mind Left Body. It wasn't merely a groove, but already had some distinct section changes. On February 28th, there's one version where they keep running back and forth between the two sections for a bit over 20 minutes. Music They tried it a few different ways, like this slow down half-time Blues version from March 6th. Music Phil Lesh is pretty tickled by it. Music Though the full Blues meltdown wouldn't survive, they did discover a fun bit of arrangement here that would survive. At least as a gesture, if not quite the final chords. Music It requires a little subsequent discussion. But then they try it. It's not how the final song would go, but you can hear how they're getting closer to one of the song's big moves. Sorry for the tape dropout. Within a month, the structure is pretty apparent and even tight. The E-A-C will be at a nice groove and clip, and the descending chords will go to halftime. This turns up on the same April 2nd tape as the first fully formed help on the way slipknot instrumental. That last little 5 seconds section would expand into a coda of its own. And eventually one of the song's jams. When Jerry Garcia was back from the Legion of Mary's Spring Tour, they caught a version they liked on April 29th that went on an album work tape, and they've gone and changed the song. That work tape may have gone to lyricist Robert Hunter, who was perhaps back in the States or had just mailed a batch of lyrics to the band. A few episodes back, we dipped into one of the only tapes from the album sessions to feature live in the studio vocals for May 5th, including what I think was the first sing-through of Franklin's Tower. Then, two days later on May 7th, Billy Kreuzman's 29th birthday came the first sing-through for the new words to E-A-C. It didn't quite go as smoothly. As with Garcia on Franklin's Tower, Weir is singing live with the band, probably reading off a lyric sheet. In this early phase, E-A-C was called Hollywood Cantata, with lyrics by Robert Hunter, included on the Beyond Description box. Archivist David Lemieux. Very different same song sort of structure, but with Hunter's lyrics. Hunter included a full set of the lyrics in the lyric collection A Box of Rain, and their darkness and modernity are shockingly un-Hunter. It feels like a spiritual kin to John Perry Barlow's lyrics to Money Money, perhaps not Another piece to observe about the existence of Hollywood Cantata is that it's an example of Weir working with lyricist Robert Hunter. The story goes that the pair's creative partnership ended over a fight in 1971, when John Perry Barlow took up lyric duties. But that's not quite correct, with evidence of a few other Hunter-Weir collaborations that never made it to the stage, like a version of Yellow Moon from 1973, and the Hollywood Cantata. It's definitely the only piece of music in the dead catalog to use the phrase, fuck me shoes. Incidentally, at least according to the memoir of the late Shelley Winters, that phrase was in use in Hollywood by the late 1940s, when Winters was Marilyn Monroe's roommate. I'm very glad we found that and got to put it on there, because I think it's an important part of the dead's history that, of how a song goes from one thing to something completely different. One thing the take of Hollywood Cantata has going for it, is that it seems like the moment that Weir gets the idea to turn his 6'8 turn around into an expanded ending section of its own. Stay here! And if you listen at the end, Weir says, I don't like them lyrics much. I can totally see why Weir might not want that set of lyrics. But the lyrics could be heard as at least mildly prophetic. Not that the dead were going Hollywood, but there were some LA connections unfolding in 1975. Partly the inevitable byproduct of the Grateful Dead movie, now about a half year into its long production. And partly the not totally inevitable byproduct of the Dead's big gamble on starting their own record company. Before we pivot away momentarily from the music never stopped, and the very chill scene up at Aces, let's call on Peter Simon's late March 1975 interview with Jerry Garcia. And for most of the time we're working on an album, there's stuff going on in life, that is more has your attention than working on the album. And working on the album is just like going to work, it's like having your job and you go in and you work on it. And you don't really know what's on it until much later. And sometimes you never know, sometimes you don't know until somebody says to you one day that album says this and that and whatever, you know, sometimes you just don't know. Going to Aces with his guitar might have been Jerry Garcia's job in 1975. But if you want to count it out, Jerry Garcia was working three very real jobs that year. He was the guitarist and legion of Mary with Merle Saunders and Ronnie Tut and John Kahn. He was directing the Grateful Dead movie. He was also a co-owner of Grateful Dead Records, Round Records and Round Reels. That might be more than three jobs. In the spring of 1975 though, times were starting to look a bit tough for the labels. Please welcome back Cadillac Ron Racco, then president of Grateful Dead and Round Records. And here was the only one, including Jerry, the only one in the group that really understood what I was doing. The only one. Weir is a savant, no doubt about it. He knew exactly what I was doing. When it came time for him to calm everybody down about it, he said it perfect in a meeting up in my office in the San Rafael. He knew that I was putting the Grateful Dead into a position where they could fail because their life was not providing them with that. And you need that, otherwise that's what keeps your stuff good. You have to take some risk. One sub theme, bubbling underneath the blues for all of the sessions, was the unspoken musical question. What would happen if the music ever actually stopped? Everybody knew that we could blow it and be absolutely impoverished at any time. And that kept us together. That kept everybody pulling on the rope. And that's the way you do it in big companies. When it stops being that way, it doesn't work anymore. The record companies were both enormous gambles and serious creative endeavors. It was a great experiment. And the experiment, we pulled it off. The experiment got pulled off. We wound up being able to run. We could did run a record company. They floated various solutions for more capital. The record release flow did not sustain an independent record company. You know, Jerry was a very important social leader in that scene. And he said, why don't we get some more people pulling the wagon? There had been discussions of bringing other artists into the band stable. We talked in our Scarlet Begonia episode about how the dead entered into discussions with Bob Marley. And there's another pretty wild what if story from roughly this period. There was another band coming up. They came to us to see if we were interested in having them join with us at the record company level. It's a very famous band, but I don't remember the name. They had a guitar player that was very good, but he made faces when he played it made me nervous. It was a Bay Area band and part of the band I think played with Santana. Are you talking about Journey Rack? Yeah, Journey. Yeah. Yeah. That's the band. They became a big time band. Never heard of them. We talked earlier this season about how many of the Bay Area's big acts were malting in the 1970s, including Santana. Two former members, guitarist Neil Sean and organist Greg Rowley, co-founded Journey in 1973. But one of their dead connections was guitarist George Tickner, who played a handful of shows with Garcia and Saunders after the departure of Tom Fogarty. When Journey started, the Santana connection was a little more apparent. With the biggest dead connection in Journey was manager Herbie Herbert. Herbie Herbert was not only a serious dead fan, but one smart enough to cherry pick some of the handy things the dead had discovered. He commissioned a mouse and Kelly logo, built an in-house sound and lights operation, and took control of the band's merchandise. Journey signed with Columbia Records and released their debut album in April 1975, as the dead were working on Blues for A La. It peaked at 138 on the Billboard charts and probably wouldn't have saved round records. It took another few years for Journey to find their road to the middle. In the spring of 1975, Ron Racco was figuring out how to make a payroll. I had other sources of money. We never didn't make a payroll. There was a smuggling outfit run by a guy named Cousin David, that's not his real name. We had an arrangement where when I needed money, he had a lot of cash always. He had six planes. He was smuggling pot from Mexico. I would call him and I would ask him for one, two, three, or four ammo cases. An ammo case was a metal case sold as a surplus article by the government, but it's where he kept his money. Every ammo case had $42,000 in it, so if I called him and asked him for three ammo cases, I knew $126,000 was coming. This is what Jerry Garcia called hip economics, a concept I wrote about a bunch in my book Heads, where income earned from counter-cultural activities like say rock records or drug dealing is used to fund other counter-cultural activities. As Garcia described it, it was a way of moving money around really fast. The dead world had long operated on this principle, starting when they were the recipients of Ausli's patronage in 1966. We had connections with all the people that grew in California for sure. It's actually a real estate issue. We provided a place for those guys to be safely able to meet. In every business in the world, the exchange of data is very, very important. In a legal business, the exchange of data is a crime, aiding and abetting. It's a crime. Well, to safe place for drug dealers to meet was a grateful dead show. Cops didn't come to grateful dead shows. They were afraid of being ghost. One of the reasons we kept feeding the myth that we dosed everybody was we scared the tune out of the police. That was the union of the mind of Ausli Stanley and Cadillac Ron. Using their own record companies was an intentional way to exist inside their own economy, and Cousin David helped keep them afloat a little while longer. Using pot sales to fund creative endeavors wasn't anything new, and lots of bands had done that over the years. But the dead didn't have many contemporaries at their scale in the hip economy. We've been talking about how the 1975 grateful dead related to their musical peers, but perhaps their biggest institutional peer had launched the year before and was becoming a big business in 1975. High Times Magazine launched in June 1974, branding themselves as the magazine of high society. We've talked on the dead cast before about how the dead scene became an alternative to the oppression of the Reagan 80s. But in 1975, recreational drug use was arguably reaching its first mainstream peak. We're delighted to welcome to the dead cast the great writer Sean Howe, author of the wild book Agents of Chaos, Thomas King Forsad, High Times, and the paranoid end of the 1970s, which we've linked to at dead.net slash dead cast. It launched shortly before the dead took their sabbatical by the time the dead returned. High Times was rivaling Rolling Stone in numbers, which is extraordinary. They had started by distributing the magazine largely through drug networks. You could probably find it in most head shops around the country. It's not something that a person who didn't go into a head shop would necessarily know about. That was already maybe starting to change a little bit. Richard Nixon's administration had up their attempts to keep pot from coming into the United States from Mexico, starting with Operation Intercept in 1969. In direct parallel, American heads began to figure out how to grow their own pot, with Northern California's Emerald Triangle starting to come into bloom in the early 1970s. One of the reasons that High Times was such an opportune launch was because states were starting to decriminalize, and that only sped up in 1975 and 1976. There are many, many editorials in High Times that are just talking about the inevitability of legal weed by 1980. It just seems like this is a done deal. Well, perhaps not quite, but the times were certainly high. It was a couple years before there was an outright panic about High Times. That was kind of a general panic about drug use among teenagers. Things would take a screeching turnaround in 1977 and 1978, a story very much worth reading in Sean's book. But in the now of 1975 that we're occupying this season on the deadcast, pot was in the air. It certainly was at ACEs. In 1973, Oregon decriminalized weed, and in 1975, they were followed by Alaska, Maine, Colorado, Ohio, and of course, California. SB95 was introduced to the California State Senate by George Moscone on February 7th, 1975, just before the start of the Blues for Olah sessions, and just as Moscone was gearing up for his successful San Francisco mayoral run. Not only are there High Times editorials about the importance of legalization, and there are many articles critical of what the DEA is doing, but High Times was kind of the chief funder of normal, and normal was the organization that really made those state actions possible. I would actually say that as much as anything, the goal of High Times was to spread the word on the importance of decriminalization. But High Times was very much a New York enterprise. They were never really kind of a piece-and-love magazine. It was really more of a, we like drugs, we are fighting for the legalization of drugs, and we dislike what America is becoming. They're not coming out of the whole earth catalog world. It's not about living a good life, a simple life. They were a bit more confrontational. One of High Times associates was the yippyist legendary Aaron Kaye, known as the Pie Man, for the yipp honoured tactic of publicly and peacefully shoving tasty cream pies in the faces of the odious. Tom Fressad, the founder of High Times, was just, he was set up to be an antagonist. His whole personality was just very much like whatever it is, I'm against it. The Grateful Dead were not set up to just bring the force of laws down on them. They wanted to play music. I think that High Times kind of relished the fight to a many times destructive degree. Tom Fressad and the Dead never crossed direct paths, but he did have some run-ins with the band's extended family on the infamous Medicine Ball Caravan tour in 1970. The Dead themselves bailed on the trip the night before it departed, but the road crew and the Olympic recording team all went. As did Tom Fressad, there to antagonize, and who would claim he got dosed by a certain member of the Dead's road crew, which I find eminently believable. There's lots more in Sean's great book, Agents of Chaos. In the context of the Grateful Dead in 1975, High Times is a big business that grew from the underground economy, specifically Tom Fressad's pot operations. This is a little bit of a chicken egg thing, but there were also sort of proto dispensaries in New York City that the founder of High Times was running that were really pioneering and that they really reflected a lot of the things you see today, which is carefully measured out stuff in a somewhat sterile environment and like menus. And mainly, Fressad and the Dead shared the sense that they were parts of broader counter-cultural communities. The High Times in part came out of a desire to keep the underground newspapers going. The money that came in to High Times was kind of like turned back around to help prop up the remaining underground press papers. The ones that hadn't fully made the transformation to the kind of alternative weeklies that made their money with restaurant listings and big record label ads. In many ways, High Times was kind of the last bastion of a lot of 1960s things. In the mid-1970s, the 60s were ending quickly. In August 1974, Richard Nixon had the good sense to resign in disgrace. And in April 1975, the Vietnam War ended officially with the fall of Saigon, another piece of blues for A La's background. North Vietnamese and Viet Cong troops rolled into the city to the cheers of some Saigonese, but not to all. In the same way that the Grateful Dead sort of funneled its money into other projects, when High Times became successful, they backed other business endeavors. There was a bookstore in SoHo that sold a lot of kind of cutting edge magazines and underground newspapers. Punk magazine was funded by High Times for a while. High Times didn't cover a lot of music and even less of the San Francisco scene. Mostly more concerned with the politics of legalization, mechanics of smuggling, and the details of the escalating drug war. And they had a record review section which sort of perversely seems to have avoided the Grateful Dead. The kind of stuff that they ran a lot of were like field recordings from Afghanistan or Balinese gamelan music. The issues that I've perused show some pretty heady tastes. Too bad, Seastones would have fit right in. But in their earliest days, High Times succeeded at being an underground publication free of entertainment advertising and its inevitable influence over the publication's contents. The record companies kind of started to come around in about 1976. And I think among the early ones were Steel Your Face and the Jerry Garcia Reflections album. Jerry Garcia Reflections looking good. I long know it must be in the rose. On round records and tapes distributed by United Artist Records. That intersection is what we're going to begin slowly pivoting towards now. Just as in mid-1975, the Grateful Dead started to inch perceptibly towards the border between the hip economy they'd built around themselves and their startup independent record companies and hip capitalism. The more traditional model where the distribution of their work was organized by a larger corporation that also stood to make money from it. The breaking point was we didn't have any money. Henry and I had limitless amount of money available from the first National Bank of Boston. Limitless. But that's for projects and that's not for paying rent. That's not for buying food. So we had enormous quantities of capital. All we had to do was tie our needs to the capital with eventual output and we'd have all the money we wanted. But you couldn't get those guys to commit to make stuff. The only one that made stuff was Jerry. Well Bobby helped a great deal. Bobby had Kingfish. Kingfish got to be really big really quick. But in summer 1975 Kingfish's debut was still more than a half year from being released. The band needed money immediately and more than cousin David could provide. The record company was 100% dependent on my running it. So the decision was 100% mine. There was a sit down. It was we got to come up with a bigger pocket book and they knew that I could handle it. They had a lot of faith in me. Two things are fascinating about the decisions they came to in the summer of 1975. The first is that the Grateful Dead did not go out on the road nor even seem to talk about it. They were committed to the process of staying at ACEs and out of the giant Torrain Hassel. And despite needing more capital they all still at least wanted to have their own record company. I wanted us to have our own identity in the record company and everybody else wanted that also and they just told me to go out into the world and see what happens to make it happen. The record companies were big projects. Was there any sadness to the decision to sell them? Yeah the word is not sadness. The word is you know it was yeah it was yeah it is. It's melancholy. And Cadillac Ron Rackow was set loose in LA. For a while I liked the Sandy Kofax Motel on Santa Monica Boulevard. That was my home base. In LA I took two renting mansions. They were cheaper than hotels and much more luxurious. Record World reported that things were afoot on June 7th under the heading Summer of Love almost revisited. And the band had just figured out how to connect help on the way Slipknot and Franklin's Tower. They were still leisurely working on Wearspeace, EAC, having already scrapped Hunter's Hollywood Cantata lyrics. Ron Rackow didn't search too far for what he needed. He made contact with the company's president. United Artists was founded in 1919 as a creator friendly film studio by Charlie Chaplin, D.W. Griffith, Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks. They got into the record biz in the 1950s, but it was their film business that continued to give them their strength, getting into rock and roll by gobbling up smaller labels like Liberty Records, home of the chipmunks. Rackow went down to LA a few times. One of the times through, Kingfish was in town too. We had an evening during the course of that negotiation where we played at the whiskey, I think, or someplace like that, the Roxy. And the president of United Artists Records went that night with the leader of a band called Moth the Hoople. Do you remember them? And Ian Hunter said that guy, and he pointed at weir, is doing brilliant, brilliant things on rhythm guitar. He's playing chords right out of Thelonious Monk. It would have been nice to warn her or Columbia or Capitol or anybody to get us. We had a little reputation. It wasn't literally, it was a big reputation. We didn't sell very much though, but United Artists could build a company on us. And so I went at them looking for seven figures in advance and all kinds of stuff and got everything I wanted. The final negotiations took place at the Trident and Sausalito, where the final deal was made on a cocktail napkin. We did it on their napkins. It was not a one napkin deal. It was a, it might have been a three napkin deal. We'll have more on the dead's deal with United Artists next episode. The United Artists was really, they were really good to us. They advanced me several million dollars. The deal was announced on June 28th, 1975 and serves as a before-after date in the history of the dead with ramifications that would continue to spill out. It included a immediate transferral of all Grateful Dead and Round Records releases into the UA catalog, including the still-unnamed Blues for Ala, forthcoming solo projects by Jerry Garcia and Bobby Weir, future round projects, and a soundtrack for the band's forthcoming movie, expected to come out in 1976. We'll be sorting through the fallout on this podcast for a while, but it was unquestionably an enormous turning point in the Grateful Dead's history, the end of their imperial period. But some of the impact was more immediate. Suddenly, they had a deadline. On the day the UA deal was announced, the Grateful Dead were in the studio at ACES, recording the basic tracks for one of Weir's new songs. There's a shared memory that pops up several times from different Blues for Ala participants. Jerry Garcia told Blair Jackson in 1991, When we got towards the end of the album, we had some time restrictions and we started working pretty fast. But up until then, we'd been pretty leisurely about it. That is, the press releases had promised a new Dead album by the end of August, and it was time to finish. When they recorded the basic tracks, it was still titled on the tracking sheet, EAC. Please welcome back from the City College of New York, musicologist Sean O'Donnell. He's a very mature Bob Pease. He's not working towards something, this is sort of a finished synthesis of what he's absorbed from all these different projects. Something about the very crisp opening, particularly on the record, makes me think of Superstition, the Stevie Wonder tune. That was from Stevie Wonder's 1972 album Talking Book, which the Dead surely knew. To me, music never stopped is this sort of Weir Barlow Uncle John's band. Like if you're going to say you have to pick one tune to share with someone who tried to get as much of the Dead across to them in some way, that would be up in the running for me. Because it has the dead groove solidly. The song begins with Billy Croydtsman's drums. In any other band, you can imagine this being a place where the rest of the stage goes dark and just the drummer, or drummers, are illuminated. The Dead never played it like this again. The basic track is, of course, the five-piece Grateful Dead, led by Bobby Weir's guitar. On the final version, it's a combination of a microphone on his amp, a direct line into the studio board, and a pass through a Leslie rotating cabinet. But there's a lot of really smooth things, so the verse starts out very eccentric. By the end, it modulates away to A, but you don't notice it. Garcia of course, Garcia is all over it. In one of his signature modes, that inevitably cut through the thick air whenever it was played live, no matter how many chompers were in your section. Garcia holds the groove down in his own way too. His sort of background playing during it, like the sort of low register guitar stuff that he does as the accompaniment is just peak, gerry backup. There are two surviving tracking sheets from the music never stopped, both in Bobby Weir's handwriting. I'll note that he does not write his own name as Ace on them, as the other engineers have done. And on both tracking sheets, Weir spells the name of the bassist, F-I-L, who's once again found his own weird James Jamerson-derived way to play funkily. I suppose this is an appropriate place as well, to note that on the tracking sheet, in the blank field where one is supposed to write the artist's name, Weir is written Godzilla and Friends. And Keith Godshaw is once again on roads, though only played direct, with the live in-room Before we go through the really fun overdubs on the song, let's finish talking about its structure. The craft work is very high here, where it's not like I'm going to cram this unusual stuff in here. It has a flow that's very well done. So great tune and the sort of meter changes are not arbitrary or overly, um, attempts to be clever. They're organic to the lyrics and references to time, where the time kind of stops in there and you break away from the steady groove. That's one of the tunes on this record that feels like it grows as a sort of the wake of the flood trajectory of where it seems to be in the language they were developing. But it does have some elements of what's new here. When they sort of stop time and they do these descending diminished chords, it's very much in line with the language we heard on the other tunes here on this record. That's the part that I think may have articulated out of mind let's body. That's where he's using the diminished chords that are like part of this current language, little more traditionally in the way they had used them in the past, but it brings a kind of rag time thing to it. So it's different than mind the body other than the sort of descent feeling. But the combo of stopping time there and using these descending diminished chords to land back on the A is really effective. It's one of my favorite segments. It breaks into a carnival at points which is very old school. And if you thought we were going to get through this episode without using this season's secret word, well, you know what to do when you hear it. Please welcome back musicologist Chadwick Jenkins from the City College of New York. And you're seeing a lot of that in this album, I think, is more emphasis on ambiguity. Both with respect to chordal identity and therefore key identity and modal identity that you see especially in blues for a la, but also even in the time signatures. The great example for me is music never stopped, right? There goes in the 6-8 and then it snaps back in the 4-4. Exactly. It's a little bit of a carousel to me. It's all B minor stuff before they snap back to the main riff. So it's a sort of B Dorian jam that they've got going on over that. When it happens on the album, it happens so fast that it's like this little effect. And I always think of it because he mentions calliope's at one point, you know? I'm like, oh, this is a little bit of carnival music and then we're back to the real thing. A fascinating thing about the carousel feel of that section is that it still didn't have any finished lyrics when it was recorded, as far as I know. Certainly, it was no longer Hollywood cantata. Archivist David Lemieux. And then I guess that's when he called Barlow and said, I got this great song. Can you put something to it? And Barlow came through. Though John Perry Barlow had contributed a number of songs to Weir's solo album Ace in 1972, the music never stopped was only Barlow's third set of lyrics to appear on a proper dead project, following Let It Grow in 1973 and Money Money in 1974. On his old lyric archive, he notes the song as Quora Wyoming, hyphen Mill Valley, California, and is dated June 1975. I think this means that if the song was still called EAC on June 28th, then Weir's call to Barlow came in the next few nights. Weir told Acoustic Guitar magazine, so I played this over the phone to John and he just started spitting stuff at me. He was living in Wyoming at the time on a ranch, and he started describing a situation that I'd seen with him, where it was late summer in a dry year and things were hot and kind of dull and dead. There's mosquitoes on the river, fish are rising up like birds. It's been hot for seven weeks now, too hot to even speak now. Did you hear what I just heard? That last line came after some deliberation. It's a pregnant line, sort of like a leading tone in a harmonic development. Say it might have been a fiddle, or it could have been the wind. But there seems to be a beat now, I can feel it in my feet now. Listen here it comes again. Barlow told Dennis McNally that he wrote the rest of the words while he spent the day at work on the Bar Cross Ranch and called Weir back at sunset to dictate the rest. One went down in honey, moon came up in wine, stars were spinning dizzy, Lord the band kept us so busy, we forgot about the time. It's easy to hear the lyrics as a meta description of The Grateful Bed, much the same way that if you get confused listen to the music play in Franklin's Tower often seems to be about the experience of being at a dead show. As we heard on the Franklin's Tower episode, that wasn't Robert Hunter's intention. But I think, like one more Saturday night, the music never stopped had less qualms about being about the rock and roll experience. There a band beyond description, like Jehovah's favorite choir, people join in hand in hand while the music plays the band, Lord they're setting us on fire. Master lecturer from Boston University, Christopher Kaufman, author of the forthcoming book Clowns in the Bering Ground, The Grateful Dead, Literature and the Limits of Philosophy, available from Duke University Press, which we've linked to at dead.net. My book is looking at the dead and kind of implicitly asking or explicitly I think at some points like what happens if we take their lyrics seriously, you know, in the context of literary studies and it's something people have done here and there but there hasn't been any really extended analysis of that sort. My thinking about the song and in terms of how I deal with it in my book is that it comes up in a chapter where I'm dealing a lot with the dead and Dylan. And one way that I decided I wanted to talk about was to find a common ancestor for them. And that was the French poet Arthur Rambeau. So we know that Dylan likes Rambeau. He mentions him in You're Gonna Make Me Lone Someone You Go From Blood on the Tracks. The French symbolist poet Arthur Rambeau was pretty hip in the mid-1970s, especially in the punk scene fermenting in New York at CBGB that same spring and summer of 1975, another distant thread of contemporary music to which the dead were connected. Patti Smith, a dead fan herself, called her early performance series Rock and Rambeau. And her boyfriend at the time, who probably liked the dead but perhaps Quicksilver and John Cipollina a bit more, was Tom Miller, who, when co-founding the band television, took the last name of Rambeau's lover, Paul Verlaine. Rambeau has this poem. It's called Drunken Boat. It's just like key pieces. It's about this crueless boat, right? The people sailing the ship are out of the picture and the boat's kind of floating around in the seas, having all these wild adventures. And you know, it's going to the polar regions and it's going through the tropics and it's just all over the place and it sees these fantastic things. And it's drunken because it's taking on water. So it's this kind of intoxicated thing. Free and soaring trailing of violet haze, shot through the sky, a reddening wool wet with the jam of poets' inspiration, lichens of sun and snots of bright blue sky. That's Arthur L. Wood reading Paul Schmidt's translation. One of the things that hunters forward to Peterson's poems includes, and the excerpt is one of the most famous lines from Rambeau or from one of his bits of prose, where he talks about the work of the artist or the work of a poet being periodically to kind of undertake what he calls the systematic disorientation of the senses. The systematic disorientation of the senses sounds like a job for a certain band, I know, both in the carnival-esque sense that the song describes, but also the actual musical sense of music that shifts into different time signatures or no time signatures at all. And when they get into town, suddenly everything goes topsy-turvy, right? It's like that kind of disorientation that Rambeau talked about and that Dylan taps into because suddenly even the natural world is working in a weird way. Crazy rooster crowing midnight, balls of lightning roll along. It becomes this sort of song for me about the troop of musicians coming into town, kind of reordering the world and renewing the community of the townsfolk in a way. With the lyrics in place, the music never stopped turned into a semi-alabbert arrangement. The most obvious addition is saxophonist Steve Schuster, a sax and flute player around the Bay Area, heard that year in the Kiefen Donovan, but as well as on Robert Hunter's Tales of the Great Rumrunners and Mickey Hart's Rolling Thunder. Please welcome to the good old grateful bedcast, Steve and Schuster. I am friends was and am friends with David Freiberg. I can't even remember how that happened, but it's been many, many good years. You can see Mickey Hart was next door, so I mean two miles away and had a studio there, so it was a very small community at the time. In fact, Steve Schuster was part of the original core of musicians that connected seemingly separate scenes. Rumors with both David Freiberg and David Crosby in Venice Beach in the early 1960s, and is probably on many of the albums in your collection if you're a fan of 60s and 70s West Coast music. My heart is with jazz. I took everything that came along and there wasn't a lot happening in the jazz world at that point for me in that area. But I think I tried to play jazz when it was inappropriate with rock groups, so. On the music never stopped though. It was not inappropriate. Well, they always had a certain jazz edge to them and outlook. But even more than his memories of a few afternoons overdubbing at ACEs, Stephen Schuster was employed frequently by the dead's in-house publishing company, Ice Nine, to create sheet music of their songs. Road lead sheets for a lot of people. For, you know, to protect the copyright. You had to have a notated version of what it was you were doing. Oftentimes, that's the music that would end up in official song books. Writing lead sheets, if you write exactly what they're doing, it'll never get played properly. What you have to do is what was intended, kind of, and take the rough edges out so that you're writing down the most folk-songy version of it and it will sound exactly like the thing is, but it is not as accurate as writing exactly what happened, which would be very difficult to read. It was a good skill set to have in the Bay Area. The more harmonically interesting, the more I liked it, actually, and the more fun it was to transcribe. I liked the music more when it was less simple. It seemed kind of pointless in a way to do accurate transcriptions of very simple stuff. Blues for A La must have been a fairly satisfying project then. I remember it fondly and I think partly because without mentioning any names, but some of the stuff that I transcribed, I just didn't like. And I did like that record a lot. I liked it. I liked it. I liked it. I liked it. I liked it. I liked it. I liked it. I liked it. I liked it. I liked it. I liked it. I liked it. I liked it. I liked it. Steve Schuster appears on two tracks on Blues for A La and plays pretty much across the entirety of the music never stopped. It's not that he's got a solo, but it's soloing the whole time, sometimes with Garcia. I mentioned a few episodes back that there's no synthesizer on Blues for A La, but this is incorrect. On the music never stopped, Keith plays synth, though the band mostly recorded over that track with backing vocals, and it's barely audible in the final mix, if at all. Here's a bit from the middle of the song, where you can hear how the two parts sat together on track 11 of the multi. And the bag is playing all. And there's a synth part that runs through the whole outro, though again, I don't think it's in the final mix. But my favorite thing about the studio version of the music never stopped is probably all the layers of vocals. Donna Jean of course gets her vocal spotlight. Until now, I didn't realize that Weir and Donna are singing different words under this section. Here's Weir. And Donna. I know I said a few episodes back that Franklin's Towers, probably the place where Keith Godd shows vocals appear on the album, but I'm going to amend that. I think it's actually on the music never stopped. In the later verses, Garcia sings a fun vocal pickup under Weir that didn't survive into the live takes. I gotta highlight Donna Jean's second spotlight too, obviously. Donna Jean gets a moment in the outro as well. And there's this part, one of my favorite vocal breakdowns on a dead song. And as a reminder, they were recording over an earlier synth track. Then they doubled the whole thing. Donna added another part on top of that. I'm charmed by Donna's occasional off-mic vocalizing too. And still another layer is the song's nifty second percussion part. And the second part is the finger snaps. Maybe we can all learn that and snap along the next time we see a band playing the song live. And all stacked together in the final mix. Before we discuss the song's live versions and get ready to flip over the record to side B, let's listen to a supercut of the music never stops individual elements as they come together. There a band beyond description like Jehovah's favorite choir. People join in hand in hand while the music plays the band. But they're setting us on fire. Keep on dancing through the daylight. Greet the morning air with song. Look the band's all packed and gone. Was it ever here at all but they kept on dancing? Well the Cool Breeze came on Tuesday. And the corn's a bumper crop. And the fields are full of dancing, full of singing and romancing. The music never stops. I said, uh. Listener Eric Lindquist left us this story. I was raised in a very conservative religious household and my parents never let me listen to rock music because they were worried that I'd be corrupted by the lyrics. And well, so being who I was, I also wanted to do was listen to rock music. And I remember my mom would always tell me, oh you can't believe what they're saying. Can't believe what they're saying. Well quite frankly I really didn't listen to what they were saying. I went to my first dead show in 1981 in Seattle and of course became obsessed with the band. And then one time on a ski trip my friend Scott put in the cassette player Blues for Allah. There's mosquitoes on the river. Fisher rising up like birds. It's been hot for seven weeks now. Two I do even speak now. Did you hear what I just heard? And I remember listening to that just going, oh my gosh, this is just amazing. I can't believe the way that they're invoking such visual imagery into music. And then from then on I really started listening to the lyrics and really enjoying Grateful Dead music and the story songs and just the way that both Hunter and Barlow could turn a phrase. But boy it sure was just amazing to have my eyes opened in that way. Grateful Dead archivist David Lemieux. Before I got the album I had Blair Jackson's first book which was called The Music Never Stopped. I just realized. It came out in 1983 and it was, you know, an overview of Grateful Dead culture and the Grateful Dead and the music and the end. At the back there was a discography and for each album it had a paragraph of why this album is good and why this album might not be as good. And for Blues for Allah it raved about it and it's a great album. And for Music Never Stopped it said great little song but it pales in comparison to live versions of the song. And then I got the album and I was like, I don't know, I kind of like this version a lot. Us too man. From a distance it was probably obvious how the song signaled a change in the band's direction. Benny Lander left us this story. I love the music of Blues for Allah but one from the vault. That album means just so much to me as a dead head. I was introduced to it probably at the age of 12 or 13. At that point I had known the album's American Beauty and Working Man's Dead because that's what my dad had. Fresh from the sessions, the music never stopped and made its debut on August 13th, 1975. The show now known as One from the Vault. But it wasn't until my brother gave me One from the Vault that I finally was floored and understood the magic of the dead. And in my years since I've come to realize that's more of a one of one show. They never really played like that before or since. This batch of songs that were introduced in 1975 were a real turning point for the band. A lot of the Americana and country vibes that kind of fueled the early 70s weren't really there on this album. It was kind of the first time you hear this new almost prog rocky and very funky sound. Particularly, Music Never Stopped was the introduction of more of a funk disco vibe which they hadn't had before. The music never stopped pointed towards much of Bob Weir's future work. Less than three weeks after recording the song and before the album was even out is this fragment from Aces labeled on the tapes as Bose Blues. The music never stopped pointing towards the music. The music never stopped pointing towards the music. The music never stopped pointing towards the music. The music never stopped pointing towards the music. That Blues for Olive fragment would be repurposed in 1976 to become the so-called disco arrangement of Dancing in the Streets. Here it is from September 25th 1976 in Landover. Now Dix Pics 20. Lazy lightning supplication were already in development and it's a short hop from there to other weird groovers like Feel Like a Stranger. But the music never stopped especially became a flagship. Its lyrics gave a place for dead freaks to cheer and it developed a life of its own. David Lemieux began to come around to Blair Jackson's logic. I do remember the first ever live version of The Music Never Stopped. I did hear it was in late 85 early 86 and I was in the cafeteria at my high school with my Walkman headphone and I just done this tape trade and I got a show that I knew nothing about. And I used to do my tape trades with unlabeled tapes is before Dead Bass. So I would listen and write down the songs as they went. So I was kind of like at the show kind of like hearing it for the first time. And I put on the cassette number two of this new tape or new show I got in the thing from a little place called Hershey, Pennsylvania 62885. So I put on set two and I knew enough about tapes and dead shows that I'm expecting Scarlet Fire, Shakedown China Rider expecting something like that. And they open it up with The Music Never Stopped, which I'd never heard of them doing and it turns out it was very rare. And I remember hearing it saying, oh, you know what, there is something to what Blair said. Some of the earliest versions from fall 1976 really lean into the descending chords so much that it's almost possible to label your tapes with the mine left body jam. Like the October 3rd version from Detroit, now on 30 trips around the sun. The music is so good that I can't wait to listen to it. And I'm sure you'll be able to hear it. And I'm sure you'll be able to hear it. And I'm sure you'll be able to hear it. And I'm sure you'll be able to hear it. It's not that the song had an open ended jam exactly, so much that it grew new places to expand when it was in the mood. Chadwick Jenkins points out the importance of the 6-8 carousel section in the building drama. Chadwick Jenkins. And on the album, it's cold, but it happens quickly. But live, especially 78-79, they expand that so that it feels like it's such a big shift. Like you really feel that shift from the 6-8 back to the 4-4 so that it feels like you've moved through another universe. Chadwick Jenkins. And on the album, it's cold, but it happens quickly. Chadwick Jenkins. And on the album, it's cold, but it happens quickly. Chadwick Jenkins. And on the album, it's cold, but it happens quickly. Chadwick Jenkins. And on the album, it's cold, but it happens quickly. Chadwick Jenkins. And on the album, it's cold, but it happens quickly. Chadwick Jenkins. And on the album, it's cold, but it happens quickly. Chadwick Jenkins. And on the album, it's cold, but it happens quickly. Chadwick Jenkins. And on the album, it's cold, but instead of it ruining the whole situation, it makes it better. It's like, oh, wow, that snapping back in just, it even caught Jerry by surprise, even though he couldn't have, because he signals it. With the different possibilities of the mind-left body descent, the carnival-like 6-8 breakdown, and the big ending peak, it made the music never stop to song both dramatic and more importantly, fun. On rare special occasions, the 6-8 breakdown turned into a more open-ended musical space. In 1982, at Alpine Valley, now Dixpix 32, this happened. Music Music Music Music Music And then, at the end of Sugary, Music Music Music Music Music David Lemieux. And it wasn't until I heard some live versions from 78 in particular and 79 that I really realized that this song, the ending of it, you think of 2578, you think of 42478, some of the December 79 versions, I mean, these endings blew the roof off the place. Music Music Music Music Music That was February 3rd, 1978, at Dane County Coliseum, now Dixpix 18. And it keeps peaking from there. Music Music Music Music Music There are many great versions from over the years, and probably you have many favorites too. As I mentioned, it certainly lent its name to plenty of headlines, review leads, puns, riffs, and other short hands. But as far as I'm concerned, the one to beat comes from Bobby Weir himself, from the Beacon Theater on June 14th, 1976, after a long tech break during which Weir also wishes Phil Lesh a happy birthday a few months late. And in order to celebrate the event, what we're going to do is we're going to try to answer that musical question, what would happen if the music ever starts? Music One version that's part of the official canon is from October 14th, 1980, at the Warfield in San Francisco, on the So Many Roads box set. Music Music And to tell us about it, and to end today's episode, we have a story from the late and frankly painfully missed Steve Selberman. One of the tracks from 10, 14, 80, which was, I believe, the climactic night of the Warfield run, ended up on the box set, So Many Roads, which I co-produced with Blair Jackson and David Gans. It's just so tight. It's like whipping when they transition into the kind of waltz time section. Like, it just does not get tighter than that. Music Music Music Music Music Music Everybody in the hall knew that they were recording an album. We didn't know it was going to be two different vinyl sets, dead set and reckoning, separating the electric and acoustic music, but when they played the Let It Grow, Music Never Stopped to, I believe, close the first electric set, maybe, on 10, 14, 80. I was absolutely certain that that jamming sequence was going to be on the album. There was no question. And so when that jam was over, I said to myself, well, okay, at least we know what one side of the record is going to be. And then it wasn't. And it was massively frustrating. I mean, I'd listen to those records, they're good. Their performances were well chosen, but it feels chopped up. It doesn't have the flow of actual sets. So I put that music Never Stopped because I thought it was sort of a karmic error that David made, but I wanted to try to fix. And I still love it. I just listened to it 10 minutes ago, and it sounds as good as it's ever did. Music Music Music Music Music Music Thanks very much for tuning in to the Good Old Graffle Dead Cast Friends. We'd like to thank our special guests in this episode, David Lemieux, Ron Rackow, Stephen Schuster, Steve Silberman, Sean Howe, Sean O'Donnell, Chadwick Jenkins, Christopher Kaufman, Graham Boone, Eric Lindquist, and Barry Lander. 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 Graffle Dead Cast, Mark Pinkas. Produced for Rhino Entertainment by Rich Mayhem Promotions and Jesse Jarno. Special thanks to David Lemieux, Brian Dodd, and Doran Tyson. All rights reserved. Music .