May 17, 2005
music & cancer
I returned from the day clinic after having some cancer cells on my legs and back surgically removed to hear the news that Kylie Minogue has been diagnosed with breast cancer, and has cancelled her Showgirl: The Greatest Hits Tour tour in Australia.
Cancer has a layer of meanings in our culture at the social, scientific and cultural levels even though it is a biologically based disease.
The word "cancer" has taken on broad cultural meaning as a metaphor for a number of uncontrolled and self-destructive processes---cancer everyday as a cultural metaphor for something evil. Those with the disease become cancer patients with its sick role and given styles of coping and managing. Many patients still experience a diagnosis of malignancy as a notice of imminent doom, whilst many see the sick individual as solely responsible for their healing.
I've been recuperating this afternoon listening to the Grateful Dead's 1978 four-disc set Closing of Winterland.
This is a legitimate piece of rock and roll music history that heralds both the closing of the venue, and the effective end of an era shaped by a city, people and place.
During the 1960s and '70s, San Francisco's Winterland Arena was home to some of the era's most memorable rock concerts, hosting such musical legends as Janis Joplin, Jefferson Airplane, The Doors, and The Who, The Band and Bruce Spingsten.
When the world-famous venue closed its doors in 1978, rock promoter Bill Graham commemorated the event by organizing one last farewell concert--and he chose his favorite band the Grateful Dead to bring the party to a close.
By the end of the 1970s, the Grateful Dead were commonly seen to be at the beginning of their musical decline as drugs began to erode the unit from within. Despite the husband and wife team of Keith Godchaux (keyboards) and former Muscle Shoals session vocalist, Donna Jean Godchaux (vocals), leaving the band shortly after this concert, the band's improvisation and in-the-moment musicality continued to remain the core of their concerts.
The improvised music of Terrapin Station and Playing In The Band is a jazzy Dead, and very different from the Pigpen/Fillimore music of the 1968-70 period. The jazz-oriented framework, which started to be tentatively explored on Wake of the Flood and put in place with the much underrated Blues for Allah, was done through quietly appropriating Miles Davis' fusion experiments of 'In a Silent Way' and 'Bitches Brew.'
Around 1972-75 Miles pointed to a door into another musical universe and he'd go through it every night when he played a concert. He and the band would create this weird free-flowing stuff and share what they made with the audience. It is a way of way of music-making more akin to the Dead playing Dark Star than to conventional jazz. The improvisation in Dark Star can differ greatly from night to night. Similarly with Miles.
Judging from the Closing of the Winterland CD The Grateful Dead circa 1978 was not a freakish hold-over from the 60s: an anachronistic hippie band that would never fade away and just went through the motions of playing their sets. The bracket Terrapin Station and Playing in the Band on disc 2 are the new launch pads for improvisation (replacing The Other One); an interplay that leads to an extended foray into a musical space that formed into free-flowing aural collages.
Though there was not much of a segue of the Terrapin Station blending into Playing in the Band, the musicians expand and elaborate on the song form, always implying the melody, groove, sense, and mood of the vocal in their solos. Thus, the better the song, the better the solo. In jazz improvisation the song form is often abandoned entirely as the soloists tackle harmony and rhythm in their purest, most abstract form.
Alas the 1980s were different story. Garcia was ill, there was a lack of inspired original material to fire them up as musicians, and they went through the motions. Apparently things looked up in the early 1990s.
Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at May 17, 2005 07:46 PM | TrackBackGary - hope the cancer removal does the trick and everything goes ok.
A few more pieces on the Dead and you'll nearly have me convinced to give them another go. Although I've tried I just haven't been able to "get it" so far. Where would you recomend I start? I have a few Dead vinyl albums and I even asked a dedicated deadhead to give me their best live concert 2 x CD set.I can't work it out. It just hasn't grabbed me yet.
On the cancer issue I get iritated by all the coverage on media on Kylie and everyone saying "she'll beat it", "she's determined" and "Kylie's battle". There is no evidence that a "positive attitude" or "fighting spirit" or "determination" makes any difference whatso ever and it is a gross insult to people who have cancer to imply that somehow a person's attitude is responsible for cure, remission or progression. It's the nasty narcisitic creeping Oprahisation and Hillsonging of our lives.
Posted by: Francis Xavier Holden on May 18, 2005 08:12 PMHi guys... I produce a twice-weekly podcast called Closet Deadhead. I think both of you folks would make for excellent guests. Could I interview for broadcast? let me know... drop me a line at sam@closetdeadhead.com. You can learn more about Closet Deadhead at http://www.closetdeadhead.com
Posted by: Sam Whitmore on May 18, 2005 11:59 PMFrancis,
mine was the knife, not the poison and burn. Still it helps to make you realize that the fear of death must be looked at in the eye.
The Kylie stuff is part of being a good cancer patient. She has the proper mental attitude. Unrelenting optimism is what is required from the cancer patient.
It is part of a regimen of self-management that offers patients a sense of choice, autonomy and control at a time when they often feel taken over by disease or an alienating medical establishment.
Such an approach leaves those who do not triumph in fighting cancer with a profound sense of failure.
There is some weird stuff around cancer.
Posted by: Gary Sauer-Thompson on May 19, 2005 12:24 AMFrancis,
I dunno how I can help but I'm happy to help.
The band is electic, musically diverse and has low points. I'm no deadhead; I'm reapproaching the music in terms of aesthetics, the avant garde and American popular music and the politics of music and intellectual property rights. The Grateful Dead proved that musicians could earn a good living out of free music.
My preference lies with the 1977 band. I do not know the band of the 1990s at all. I may not be the best guide as I'm attracted to the experimental side--eg. the early Anthem of the Sun--and the way it points to, and overlaps, with John Oswald's reworking of Dark Star on Grayfolded. Oswald is interesting. He constructs music anew in the act of deconstructing it. His most powerful creations have a life independent of the parent pieces from which they were sample cloned. Grayfolded is Oswald's music not the Grateful Deads.
I clicked to Live/Dead and American Beauty way back, then I stopped listening to all music for well over a decade. I came back to music last year and I picked up with the Grateful Dead where I left off. So I'm slowly discovering and exploring the music made after Europe 1972.
The weblogs are an indication of my rediscovery from the perspective of cultural criticism. Suprisingly I'm not really finding all that much on the web other than the usual fan stuff.I'm constantly suprised by the way the well known rock critics have ignored the music rather than engaged with it.
To help in your discovery/listening I need to know what you have listened to previously, why it hasn't grabbed you, and what the 'best concert 2x CD set is'.The way I reconnected to the music prior to 1973 was to listen to this free download whilst working on the computer
Posted by: Gary Sauer-Thompson on May 19, 2005 10:34 AMgary - thanks. I'll have to take a bit of a raincheck as I havent got time to do any serious listening right now as I've been a bit crook and I've got to finish a couple of albatrosses [a report, then do my bloody company tax for 2003 - 2004] maybe in a week or so I'll get back and have a listen.[i've just finished Andrew Ford's book on Van which cheered me up and made me revisit Van on a few tracks]
I am an admirer of the way the Dead took the live concert format and encouraged tapers and also were perhaps the first group, or at least the fans were, to take to the internet very early on to facilitate deadhead tape swapping. [if i remember corectly a lot of the lossless compression formats and various stuf was writtenby deadheads] Wasn't John Perry Barlow a big part of The Well too?
As far as I know they all ended up millionaires without any radio play, whilst encouraging fans to tape and circulate shows.
So I have an interest from that point of view.
I bought stuff years ago and I could see that some of the loping tunes would be great at an extended outdoor concert but none of the recordings made me want to relisten and relisten and turn them up loud. Not that I thought they were bad, it just didn't click. The Flying Burritos clicked, Gram Parsons clicked, Little Feat sparked, Greg Quills Country Radio, Fred Neil, all the Austin crowd, Guy Clarke seemed like a genious, I could go on but you get the picture, just to make the point I think I was / am pretty wide open to most music.
I got a bit interested around 12 years ago (not sure may have been longer) when a USA friend of mine told me her teenage son had taken 6 months off to become a Deadhead and follow them around. So I had another listen. I have no objections - just puzzled as to the gap between those who get the music and people like me.
So I'll get back to you after I have done some more homework.
Sam Whitmore
happy to do an interview or joint show - whatever after I've done my homework. I don't know where you are but I have SKYPE which might be a way to do something - let me know - either here or by email.
Francis,
your comments refer to 'Americana Dead'-- the 'good old Uncle John’s Band' and their trilogy' of Workingman's Dead, American Beauty and Europe 72; music with its ethos of modest craft, sweet tunes full of structure and texture. It was produced by post-World War II American bohemia on their way to become hippie capitalists through combining art and commerce.
Though this is seen as their most prolific period some conservative critics say that the band is mediocre at best; a band that cannot sing, and engages in pointless countrified jams full of lethargic guitar riffs that are endlessly repeated without variation. They were seen as the standard bearers for an ignorant, torpid, left-wing mystical hippie cult and an awful band of shapeless, self-indulgent musicians. The music culture was seen as a cult.
These albums are parallel to the innovative work of Gram Parsons, The Flying Burrito Brothers, The Band's Music from Big Pink Bob Dylan's John Wesley Harding and, like them, the music expresses a reverence for American country/folk music and an honoring of American culture.
I woukld argue that The Grateful Dead are musically more sophisticated than the Flying Burrito Brothers and they have better lyrics courtesy of Robert Hunter. A rock ’n’ roll band playing folky bluesy songs with a jazzman’s dedication to improvisation.
It is possible to talk about the Hunter-Garcia poetry of Workingman's Dead and American Beauty: western songs in which the frontier has closed; a laissez-faire libertarianism; the security of the road and the music, the friendship of strangers; narratives of miners and pioneers, gamblers and jackballers.
Its less a question of open mindedness and more of a clicking.
Posted by: Gary Sauer-Thompson on May 19, 2005 08:11 PM