128. 1972-04-24

youtube; youtube Dusseldorf 40:39 (25:46, 14:53)

Main theme at 8:03 and 10:08 and 10:55.

First verse at 11:10.
Tiger at 19:55.
Main theme at 14:38.

Goes into Me and My Uncle and Wharf Rat.


The Dusseldorf Dark Star begins with Garcia playing the lick over the main theme pattern that we heard on 4-14, which I mentioned was familiar, although I wasn’t sure whether he had done it prior to that rendition. The band sounds very relaxed and in the pocket here. The music comes in waves, with little returns to something like the theme alternating with hovering broody bits. From 2:03 to about 2:30, Garcia emphasizes the F#, which is the 6th of the A mixolydian scale, or the 3rd of D major, which seems to create an anticipatory mood, as it isn’t a note that would usually be resolved to…then at 3:25, the band slips into a spacey E minor section, setting up a heavy, brooding mood.


At 4:25 Lesh begins repeating a high, descending riff while the others play low tones, with Garcia repeating an emphatic A, and then Phil starts to play some slow, low and distorted chordal stuff. Godchaux starts a haunting octave pattern at 4:52, and his piano sounds echoey here. At 5:10 the band subsides as Garcia plays a repeating note, and the music gets atonal and spacey, with Phil playing up the neck. At 5:38 Garcia starts a little melody that resolves into a kind of gallop at 5:54.


At 6:21 Garcia starts another simple, almost child-like melody and then spins it out, as the band gains momentum and centrifugal force until by 7:20 or so they take it into a meltdown. As this dissipates at 8:03, Garcia starts the theme melody, filtered through a cracked glass, and they spin out again into a crescendo; the tempo seems to be picking up here, and it turns into a frenetic jam. This starts to come to a peak at 9:20, and they keep it there until it starts winding down at about 9:45, and they coast down and hit the theme at 10:08. They play around with it a little, and then slide back in at 10:55, slow and majestic so that, when the verse hits, the tempo seems to have worked its way down again.


At 12:34, coming right off the verse, Garcia is spinning a Sputnik-like web of notes, and the band swells and ebbs and swells. Godchaux’s piano again sounds kind of echoey here. At 13:04 Jerry has a little wah, I think, kicked on, and he starts in with the Sputnik-y stuff again. Now it sounds like they’re heading into space, with feedback and lots of drawn out, distorted notes. As we get to the 15 minute mark, this is almost ambient music, played with a lot of volume and distortion.


Garcia starts a line at 15:16 that may lead them back to earth. The band kicks up, and soon they are in another (somewhat) frenetic jam. Bright Star peeks out briefly at 16:38, and the band heads for another peak, with Garcia getting in some country and western licks. By 17:20 or so they seem to be coming down the other side. Garcia plays a long descending run and touches bottom at 17:32, and he stays there, repeating a low note as Godchaux trills, Weir weirds out, and Lesh rumbles around.


They want to get strange tonight, and at 17:57 they seem to be heading back to space, or into a meltdown. The lines aren’t entirely clear, though, as the more cohesive jams often have plenty of oddness lately…but by the 19 minute mark it seems clear we’re going into a meltdown. Weir is sort of the low key hero of this segment, as he’s not that loud in the mix but he is doing a lot of work to push the music along. At 19:55, Garcia starts the fast wah wah scrubbing characteristic of the so-called Tiger jam, taking it right over the top.


At 21:26, Weir plays two repeated notes that sound like the intro to St Stephen, and at 21:32 Godchaux quotes the introduction. Weir feeds it back to him a little, but they’re not going to play St. Stephen; instead, they wander into another spacey grotto, with Lesh making playing a sawing pattern and Garcia circling around. From 22:57, Weir contributes some bluesy leads; then Garcia starts to play a faster line and a frenetic jam seems to be in the works. They start to get it going, but they’re not ready to come out of space yet. At 25:19 Weir starts up a two-chord pattern, but it’s not clear where it’s going until about 30 seconds later, when they pause as Garcia spins a circular figure, and then Weir starts the chords that take them into a blistering Me and My Uncle.


When Dark Star returns, it comes as an ethereal minor key jam without drums. From :41 to about 1:00, either Weir is exactly mirroring Garcia’s lines a second or two later, or else there is some kind of delay effect turned way up. The latter seems more likely because of how exact the match is, but I don’t really hear Weir in here otherwise. At 2:22, Garcia starts a fast Sputnik-like pattern. By 3:25 the music has swelled to a kind of peak, although the mood stays spooky, and when Kreutzmann comes in at 3:52 he’s lightly tapping the high hat or maybe some sleigh bells.


At 4:48 Garcia resorts to the morse code maneuver which marks a lot of transitions in this era. Kreutzmann assays a few more taps, but the mood doesn’t really shift yet. There’s a kind of ebb, and at 5:48 Lesh starts to a sliding pattern and the music gains intensity until something midway between space and a meltdown takes shape. By 6:33 Kreutzmann, who has been creeping back in, is ready to assert himself more, and soon he’s venturing around the kit.


We are now at about the 7 minute mark, and a jam that sometimes recalls the Main Ten is getting underway. This has come together smoothly and subtly, but we’ve traveled quite a way from the first minutes of this segment, as the band is starting to rock pretty hard. Garcia has been working his way into a winding melody; just after 9 minutes now and it’s come together, and as the band works it he spins it higher, as together they come to a peak beginning at about 10:22.


As we reach the 11 minute milestone Garcia is galloping along with some double stops, the band cooking until at 11:26 they seem ready to lay off again. At 11:28 Garcia lays in a high rolling pattern while Weir supports it with a simple melodic pattern. At 11:50 Garcia introduces an ascending ADE figure, anthemic and triumphant. He turns it into a riff at 12:20, and then returns to the ascending bit with some double stops. His guitar here has the kind of tone he uses on Sugar Magnolia, which has been the usual destination so far this tour, although tonight they will go to Wharf Rat.


At 13:38 Weir starts a riff, and Garcia locks in with him for a little while. There are so many ideas in this jam it’s almost too much to take in! But at 14:38, Jerry decides to bring it all back home to the main theme. It’s a little surprising they didn’t go to the second verse here (which will still happen occasionally), since they came all the way back to the theme, but after a brief visit it shifts into Wharf Rat, which is such a natural and easy transition it’s a bit odd that they did it so rarely.


At this point the Grateful Dead have attained a proficiency with collective improvisation that is genuinely remarkable. More than that, though, they are consistently inspired here, pulling together segments on the fly that would be worthy of turning into songs in their own right. The music is heavenly and powerful; there are no rote licks, no down patches, no longeurs or meaningless transitions. Music like this is why there are Deadheads in the world, and why a Deadhead is someone who has figured out something the rest of the world hasn’t yet, but should. There is no other music like this, and for those of us who care about it, it is a priceless treasure.


What was said:

JSegel: 


Rockin’ the Rhein with a bunch of cowboy songs—some of which had been very popular there for years, you know: there was a huge American country music presence in Germany due to servicemen there after WWII, lots of German fans of American country music. In this set we get the El Paso and Me and My Uncle, surrounding and within Dark Star, its other worlds.

The intro, riff repeated a few times and then relaxed rolling around, lithe waterfalls of notes and drum fills, from guitar and piano alongside each other, little chordal bits. Some eddies of low notes, little Dark-Starry-riff bits. It’s very relaxed in a latent way: anything could happen and the music accepts that.

Nice little following bits, a stretch from Jerry and then one from Bob. They go into a minor key area, some phrygian seconds, for a bit in the third minute, and back out again. In the fourth minute Jerry is trying some repeated phrases and there’s an echo, it sounds like he’s testing what the echo units from the front of house are doing (of course German technicians would already have echo units in the front of house racks in 1972. Typisch.) The house-sound gives a big space sound to the mix overall. This exploration moves the band into a more atonal and arhythmic, and then more minor modal space, and when it dies out at 6:30 or so, Jerry starts a pretty little nursery rhyme melody, but this builds into chaos also! More exploration follows, they are really stretching it out, waves of chaos and harmony. Some very avant-garde stuff. Sounds like the front of house got the piano in the echo for a bit there at 8:30. They build it into a fast groove by 9 minutes and continue it upwards until it comes down into a pretty area again and into Dark Star themes a minute later, in a harmony setting between the guitars. This music is very diegetic in its dramatic ups and downs, like story-telling.

Volume swell playing, pedal steel-like stretches, and then back to the theme.

Verse one at 11 minutes. Piano waterfall into line two, some pausing from the drums on the downbeats and builds into the next line. The echo is in on the vocals on line three (“Casting…..casting…”) but no real casting about from the bass this evening, he’s pretty static, though he tries to build it up in the refrain. Some interesting piano chord interjections in here.

Outro, and into the Transitive Nightfall. The entry is often as if they’re going to keep grooving along with the Dark Star chords, and it breaks apart. Here, as soon as they reach the downbeat of the end of the outro it devolves into repeated riff bits immediately, we’re in a deep ocean already. Then Jerry plays with arpeggiated tones with a rolled off wah pedal and everybody is hovering, some small bits of feedback and held notes from guitars and bass seem to shift like a chord progression, but then Phil starts booming and it goes spacey and atonal. The drums come in raggedly. Piano trills and bits of chords, sounds like the piano signal is moving around. They take their time getting into a new quick groove, all jamming along by 16 minutes in. Jerry builds it up to heights and then into a riffy area and back down again. As it comes down the rhythm dissipates into sparse licks, lots of fast little atonal turns from Jerry and Phil. Wah wah pedal back on, it’s pretty scary in here, they have a 6/8 TOO style rhythmic theme for a second, that too is left by the roadside, Jerry is building it up in wah-tones and tremolos, everybody is trilling and tremolo-ing. Jerry is scrubbing the heck out of his strings with chromatic close-note phrases and building it up to a climax with the wah wah in the 20th minute. Wow, this is incredibly dramatic! At the top, it breaks into isolated notes and suddenly a harmony appears between the bass and the guitars. Still playing with isolated note, the pinch harmonics come in, and Phil is rubbing something on his strings up and down.

A sparser playground is reached. Bill plays on tom toms, the band remains extra-modal though Jerry is still playing fast phrases, now at a quieter level. He starts a little jaunty repeated descending phrase at a few pitch levels.

Out of the chromatic chaos, Bob starts Me & My Uncle. Odd window into “reality” here that we’ve arrived at. I hear organ in here a bit, so I guess Pigpen came back to the stage for a second?

Three and a half minutes of relative song-based normalcy and the last chord falls back into the sea of improvisation with some arpeggiated movement from Jerry into legato phrases from all players. The echo is back on Jerry’s guitar. Jerry is really feeling some melancholy melodic sense this evening as much as he was the monster movie frightening stuff, some of the melodic phrases he lands on are extremely evocative and he obviously feels it and repeats it.

A sputnik-y area a couple minutes in for a minute, bits of his toolbox. This section is a slow build in the e minor area, though a phrygian F appears also, and it leads back into chromaticism.

Jerry repeats an E for a while at 5 minutes, before going back to more atonal/polytonal lead playing, Keith right along with him. Phil tries some short phrases, pulling his strings. Chromatic again for a bit, then Keith has a minor key phrase at 7 minutes into this section and it moves into a more tonal/minor (E dorian) area a brisk clip. It sort of lands on A again at 9 minutes in and then Jerry emphasizes that with a G# leading tone in his folky little descending melodies he brings in here. The rhythm section is pulsing, everybody heads toward a rhythmic unison. Latent growth here again, they sound like they’re heading somewhere specific, a theme jam, Jerry is playing A-D-E, and then the country-style licks that usually head to Sugar Magnolia, they play a riffy little country jam. Bob has some chord progression ideas besides the A-D-E-D-A, he throws in a b minor now and again. but what happens? A feint sideways, the rhythm slows and it’s back to the Dark Star theme as if a second verse might bring us home from this journey, but instead! Wharf Rat appears, and we head to skid row, back to reality indeed.

(Though they do get to Sugar Magnolia after this down and dirty visit to skid row.)

Well, wow is all I can say. This is great piece of music. They are really developing the musical storytelling, the improvised sections tell incredibly dramatic stories here. A tone poem.

They must have been enjoying this tour to let their music develop like this.


adamos:



Nice collective sound at the outset; there's a patient vibe as they glide along. Phil's bass has some fuzz or distortion on the recording and he's quite active. Jerry wanders out with Keith and Bob accenting nicely. Bill is alternating between a shimmering sound and more forceful playing. Around 1:45 they eddy briefly and then Jerry heads lower, winding out with some flourishes from Keith. This whole segment has an immersive, contemplative sound.

At 3:25 they shift into a spacier zone with things getting low-key freaky before slowly heading towards more melodic territory again. After 4:25 Phil and Jerry get into this back and forth repeating thing that creates a building feeling. Phil's fuzzy, distorted sound becomes more prominent with Keith doing some cool, freaky stuff as well. They reach a gathering point around 5:10 with Jerry, Phil and Keith playing repeating notes that add to the mood. Things start to build and the vibe is The Other One-esque for a spell.

After 6:20 it starts to transform with Jerry varying his line and some nice complementary sounds from Bob and Keith. They create a spiraling, descending feel that gathers momentum and then starts to fray into meltdown territory. Phil's distorted and emphatic playing fits in well as they collectively freak out for a bit.

Around 8:00 Jerry touches on the theme but in a choppy way that blends in with the freakiness. Then they start to ratchet up the intensity again and spiral upwards into a fast-paced, powerful jam with Jerry's leads crying out at the peak. Eventually they find a rumbling plateau and then after 9:50 start bringing it down with a lovely return to the theme at 10:08. The patient, gliding feel is back as they head into the verse. Jerry's vocal delivery sounds like he's deep in the zone.

After the verse they reset (with a fleeting, Hendrix-like note from Bob at 12:30) and Jerry plays some Sputnik-ish notes gently in the background. They collectively rise up with Phil and Bob most prominent and Keith complimenting what Jerry is doing. After 13:00 Jerry steps forward more strongly with the Sputnik type line that sounds spacey and freaky. It feels like everyone is gathering and swirling around it and the collective sound is powerful and compelling. By 14:00 Jerry is holding a high note as Phil thunders in multiple times and they proceed further into this freaky yet melodic zone that Keith adds to nicely. It's really artful. After 15:00 they gather up again and thrust further into the void.

This builds to a peak and then after 15:35 they start to downshift and transition into a new jam that feels like coming out of a tunnel into the light. The pace soon quickens and they work up a good head of steam with Jerry really letting it rip. There's a slight touch of Bright Star as bzfgt noted and then they continue to ascend to another peak. Yowza. It crests after 17:00 and they start to slowly take their foot off the gas and bring it down.

By 17:30 Jerry shifts into a descending run and they swirl downwards before leveling off into a low and freaky zone. They explore these deep caverns with winding lines from Jerry and lots of activity from all the players. The momentum builds and some wah kicks in and they seem to be careening towards a meltdown. They work up a lather and the Tiger is unleashed, screeching out into the night! Intense passage.

Around 20:53 they start to ease off but continue to bounce around in weirdness. By 21:25 it's quieted further and Bob comes in with some repeated strumming that Keith adds to with some pretty notes that bzfgt called out as St. Stephen-esque. Things stay freaky with lots of string scraping in the background and various building weirdness ensues. Keith complements the spacey freak-out with ominous sounding keys.

Bob decides to play a little blues riff which briefly quiets things down, perhaps as they adjust to this new input, but Jerry continues forth with his freaky line and things stay weird. Then around 23:25 Jerry shifts into a more TOO-esque line and they work around that adding lots of collective textures. This builds up some intensity and frays out into the weird again; they cast about in this zone and then Bob comes in with his own line parallel to Jerry. They ease up and then after some low repeating notes from Jerry Bob steps forward with Me & My Uncle and suddenly they're off.

As MAMU ends they hold some notes and swirl a bit with prominent organ swells, creating a base for Dark Star to remerge in pretty fashion. Ethereal is a good word for the ensuing jam as they drift along in the heavens, accented by the apparent delay effect on Jerry's guitar.

The collective interweaving sets a contemplative mood; it starts to shimmer as everyone gets into some quick repeating notes. Jerry shifts into a Sputnik-esque line that they stretch out until around 2:50. After this they begin to make things a little freakier but still melodic and with more repeating patterns. They conjure up a foreboding feeling and explore that for a good spell playing off each other nicely. Around 5:50 Phil gets into some deeper repeating notes and things get more ominous as the intensity starts to build. They pick up the pace and it feels like a meltdown is imminent; they dip into that territory but opt to shift out of it, transitioning into a new jam starting around 6:57.

Jerry heads out on a fast, winding line with Phil working notes hard and lots of accompaniment from Keith. Bill has become active again too. They get cooking pretty well, ebbing briefly at 8:08 and then winding up and ascending to a peak. It ebbs again around 9:10. They keep rolling at lower altitude before spinning up and heading to another peak starting at 10:20 with Jerry's leads reaching out into the sky. Beautiful collective playing.

Around 10:53 they start to pivot with Jerry getting into some fast, low repeating notes that the others play off of. They ease up at 11:25 and things get Sputnik-y again for just a moment after which they launch into a wonderful rising groove. The triumphant vibe is strong; at 12:20 Jerry shifts into a twangy, rocking riff and the others join in and they rise up again in uplifting fashion. They ease up at 12:35 and keep riding along that plateau and the music continues to have that quality that just reaches in and grabs you.

By 13:00 they're bringing it down and at 13:15 Phil starts a hopping bass line and they work in this adjacent zone for a bit. Bob steps forward with a funky riff at 13:37 and they shift into another groove that sounds really nice. Jerry plays this lovely rising line that dances along the collective sound. Then at 14:23 they downshift and start to bring it down with Jerry seamlessly sliding into the theme at 14:38. Bravo! From there they move into the lovely opening lines of Wharf Rat.

There's so much to listen to, process and enjoy in this performance. It's a remarkable version that deserves its place among the best Dark Stars ever played. And to witness it at a venue like the Rheinhalle must have been quite an experience.