Junk for Code

Grateful Dead: Stepping Out

It is a sunny Saturday afternoon and I'm listening to the Grateful Dead's Stepping Out, a 4 disc CD from their European tour in 1972.
They had the Workingman's Dead/American Beauty classics behind them; classics that paid tribute to the country music of Merle Haggard, Robert Johnson, Bob Dylan, Johnny Cash, Hank Williams and Bob Wills; as well as incorporating the music of Crosby, Stills, and Nash, The Byrds and The Band.

The music was recorded from seven of the Grateful Dead’s eight concerts in England. It fuses these fragments together to form a rather cohesive collection of blues, folksy Americana and the new, jazzier direction that began to take form on a slower, more deliberate, jazz-fusion pace of Dark Star.

Stepping Out has many defining moments, in terms of songs and the jams of the Other one and Dark Star. Europe ’72 was a strong tour for the band. Much stronger than the bits and pieces of the 1970 Festival Express that has been rescued from the archives.

I came across this article in The Age ex-Eagle Don Henley comments about the rock n' roll music business. He says:

"The business is rotten, basically, rotten to the core, and it's always been unfair. Artists have always got ripped off by record labels from day one. It's not quite as egregious as it used to be, but it still has a long way to go in terms of reform....A huge problem is the reduction of independent radio outlets. Radio is now completely corporatised. There's very few independent stations left....This narrowing of the arteries stops the flow of diversity in music. Everyone loses... Payola is rife, but what is more, the music that gets most airplay is abysmal. The radio stations have an interest in playing music that's frankly, dumb. I don't think they want anything with any kind of content that might possibly cause people to think about the state of affairs culturally or politically."

I understand that the Eagles have had a reunion tour, are still touring as a band and will play in Australia this year. Corporate comfort music for baby boomers?

Personally I never thought much of the Eagle's music. Their early country schmaltz became a kind of slick, AM-friendly soft rock that sounded overproduced and sugary to my ears. In the process of breaking from their country roots and turning to went for the most radio-friendly AOR sound possible.they emptied out the substance of country rock that had been opened by The Bryd's Sweatheart of the Rodeo, Gram Parson's Grievous Angel, The Band's The Band and the Grateful Dead's American Beauty which opened up new terrain in popular music in the late 1960s and early 1970s.

However, Henley's observations on the music business are to the point. The Grateful Dead's Stepping Out CD is a way to around this rootness. It gives us a big collection of very good performances from a strong tour at a very reasonable price from the Grateful Dead Store. This is not junk from thr archives. The Grateful Dead’s concerts from 1972 through 1974 are what many consider to be the band at its best. It was during this period that the group was consistent, its sets diverse and its music exploratory. The Grateful Dead were much better than most of the rock world gave them credit for their songwriting and the spontaneity of improvisational music that went beyond a jam.

Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at August 14, 2004 11:50 PM | TrackBack