Rock Music’s Finest Hour
It was 49 years ago today
that the Grateful Dead took the stage at the Fillmore West and delivered a
musical performance that is arguably rock’s finest hour.
The iconic version of Dark Star was performed in what was then
its typical sequence: followed by Saint
Stephen, into The Eleven and ending
with Turn On Your Love Light (though
just as often terminating with Death Don’t
Have No Mercy).
The set was immortalized on
the band’s fourth album: “Live Dead.” Unbeknownst for many years, the quartet
of tunes was actually a graft of two concerts. The Eleven and Love Light were
from the Avalon Ballroom a month earlier, but the collating was seamlessly
engineered and thousands of listeners remained none the wiser.
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| "Live Dead" by the Grateful Dead |
The improvisational
tour-de-force that is Dark Star
evolved over the years. Various themes came and went, but it was this period,
early 1969, that will forever represent the canonical form—because of the impeccable
version performed on this night.
Those unfamiliar with the
early years of the band might think it laughable to laud Jerry Garcia’s guitar
playing, as it decayed so rapidly, first into a “delicate doodling” and then,
after discovering heroin, into a putrid pantomime of hard rock.
But here’s what Phil Lesh had
to say of the band’s improvisations at the time:
“We orbit around a common
center that is impossible to define but it has something to do with making good
music of any kind.”
And more often than not, in
those early years, it was the winding fluid runs of Garcia that surged from
that center, tugging the other musicians along a spiraling accretion disc of
musical exuberance.
The 2-27-69 performance of Dark Star ranges from the exquisitely
sublime to the ecstatically euphoric. The band is fully 100 percent in the
moment. This is the essence of ensemble improvisation. No rock band before or
since comes close. Though the various sections/themes that they run through are
standard for the period, there are moments of inspiration where Garcia finds notes
he never played before and never did since.
It was said that the Dead
could make time stand still. Many are the Dead
Freaks who “blew their minds” listening to this performance on acid.
On the album, the tune appears
to slowly emerge out of an ambiguous musical ether. But the actual 2-27-69
performance is a set of six consecutive tunes that begins with the jug-band rag
Dupree’s Diamond Blues, which then
flows into the ballad Mountains of the
Moon. Both of these are played acoustically (though Phil is playing his
electric bass), and Mountains ends
with a little jam, during which the boys discard their acoustics and uncork their
electrics. It is this moment that the Dark
Star track on “Live Dead” picks up the performance. A minute or two of
teasing then lands with stately confidence into the belly of Dark Star proper.
And thus it begins. Twenty-one
minutes of musical majesty. Forty-nine years ago today.
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