144. 1972-09-24

2202 Waterbury, CT 34:32 (33:25) (DS 28:28[27:51]>Drums 1:58>DS 4:06)

Main theme at 11:03.
First verse at 11:14.
Tiger at 21:55.
Goes into China Cat Sunflower.


There’s a lot of Weir and Lesh on this recording. Things get off to a bouncy start, with Lesh deviating from the primary pattern fairly quickly while Weir keeps it pumping along. At 2:01 Bob starts to digress a bit himself, throwing in little tremolo runs in between his triad splashes. This intro provides a good example of the band maintaining a groove while each individual plays idiosyncratic and offset lines that would make little sense on their own.


At 3:31 Garcia launches into a series of triplets that culminates at 3:58 with some squalling double stops, and the band pauses a little on the tail end of this. Jerry comes back with some low runs and by 4:55 they’re working toward another of the minor peaks that often occur in the early going. The playing here is somewhat reminiscent of 1969, insofar as there is a rapid succession of dynamic shifts. Lesh brings us into the modern era, though, with one of his repeating jazz licks beginning at 5:22; as is often the case, this comes and goes without too much commentary from his peers, although it all fits together.


At about 6:35 Godchaux briefly switches to the Rhodes, I think, unless he just open the wah-wah pedal he sometimes uses with the piano. In any case, shortly afterward he seems to be back on the regular piano. At 7:27 Garcia starts a windup which brings them to another minor peak at about 7:43, and then the music slides into a more ruminative zone. They start to rise again, but something subtly poignant has entered the jam at this point. At 8:30 there’s a lull, and the phrases come back a little longer and less emphatic until at 9:05 Garcia crests and initiates a line that gestures toward Bright Star, and as he descends and then ascends again the rest of the band drops down to a whisper and the tempo slows; at 10:50 Weir decides it’s time for the theme; Jerry takes it for a couple spins and goes right to the verse, which is softly deliberate this evening.


The second half starts with some heavy and distorted bass to which the others add color. At times it seems Garcia is trying to latch on, and Lesh is changing it up, so a coherent jam is deferred. At around 14:40 Kreutzmann starts to lay down a groove, but the rest of the band comes to a virtual halt. Godchaux and Lesh are signaling their willingness to groove by 15:20, but nothing is coming together. As we get to the 17th minute Garcia has engaged his wah effect, and probably has a meltdown jam in mind. Kreutzmann gets on the toms and gently but emphatically offers the groove again. Weir is scritching, Lesh is trying to groove, and Garcia is indicating a meltdown; Godchaux sides with the weirdos, and Kreutzmann recedes back to the cymbals.


By 18:45 this is starting to coalesce, there is a groove but it’s a pre-meltdown groove. But they seem a bit uncertain with it or, to be more charitable, they are taking their time in any case. And slowly but surely, it is coming together, but Weir drops out at 20:35 and this takes some of the wind out of it, so Jerry gets more Tigerish, since the groove seems to be scotched. When comes back at 20:51 he’s switched to the meltdown team, and this seems to add the needed impetus to move things in some direction. By 21:22 they seem to be driving toward a Tiger, but then they pull back rather suddenly. At 21:55 Garcia goes all in and starts his Tiger roll, and the band follows suit. This Tiger seems a little bit restrained, but it will have to serve.


At 23:45 Godchaux is pounding a repeated note; if they all latch on, this will lead them out of the meltdown, but it doesn’t happen that way, and he finally releases it and a more drawn out expression of the meltdown ethos ebbs into an interstice at 25:00 that Garcia soon fills with a melodic line. Lesh is game, and they duet a little on a mournful melody. By 26:05 the band has arrived at a pretty little jam, and they milk it a little before Garcia starts bending it out of shape and they all start weirding out again.

They’ve left the jam, and they don’t want to go to another meltdown, so they seem to be at a bit of an impasse; they deal with this by stopping, and Kreutzmann is left to fill the gap with a short drum break. This goes on for a couple of minutes until Lesh joins back in, followed in short order by Garcia, and then Godchaux and finally Weir. What we have here is a choppy little jam that gets bouncing along pretty well, with everyone on the same page. They threaten to color outside the lines a few times, but it holds together, with Garcia playing some frenetic runs; as we approach the four minute mark, it start to shift, and somehow they smoothly drop into China Cat Sunflower and the Dark Star is over.


This is a well-known rendition, and it’s far from bad, but it seems to me to lack direction at times in the back half. As always, there is plenty to love here, however. At times they seem to be holding the door open for inspiration, but this can be stated negatively as a reluctance to commit. Either way, it’s another rich and rewarding improvisation, and relative judgments aside, it’s worth spending 35 minutes on.


What was said:

143. 1972-09-21

150281 Philly 37:18

Main theme at 11:30.
First verse at 12:05.
Tiger at 24:55.
Mind Left Body Jam at 33:49.
Goes into Morning Dew.


A bubbling start with the theme chords and some plaintive Garcia, who at first lays back and adds color, and then at :34 gets mesmerizingly active. This is a classic intro, beautiful and understated, with the vigorous but relaxed feel that they have perfected at this point. The playing is very dynamic with little swells and flurries; a beautifully languid stretch begins at 2:49; Keith seems to be playing with a volume knob somehow here, it sounds like a guitar but I can hear everyone else.


Garcia suddenly gets louder at 4:12 and the band kicks up, rather surprisingly. At 4:34 Jerry states the theme, almost, but he backs off before anyone follows him along that route. Instead they get quiet again, and again Garcia seems to be in the lead at 5:04 as some triplets lead into a more assertive jam section. This reaches a small summit at about 5:42, and then more decisively at 6:05 or so. They are playing with degrees of intensity in the way that they first perfected in 1969, so that the dynamics are shifting quite frequently.


At 7:25 there’s a kind of pause; rather than go to the theme, Jerry plays some rolls, hinting at a minor shading, and starting at 8:05 it is quite reminiscent of Sputnik. Coming out of this, Garcia draws out a feedback shriek from 8:25 all the way up until 8:43, and then comes back at 8:49 with a light tremolo. There are traces of Bright Star at 9:12, and then Garcia starts hinting at the theme, but it is still not time for that.


From 10:12, Weir and Lesh feint back and forth with touches of an out-of-sync funky jam, playfully refusing to commit. Godchaux starts a tremolo at 10:20, and Garcia joins him at 10:25; they draw it out, and Lesh again bounces around with one of his funky licks (10:40) without expecting anyone to follow. As it finally starts to come apart, Garcia enters the breach with the theme at 11:30, and this leads pretty quickly to a confidently perfect reading of the verse.


After the riff there’s a quietly bustling little jungle scene, with Keith laying on the wah; Garcia and Weir start playing somewhat frenetic lines, and a bouncy little jam develops. This comes to a head a little after the 15-minute mark, and then attains a steady simmer. There’s a kind of knotty peak beginning at 15:33 where all the threads come together, and as they come out of this there’s a kind of transition—Garcia disappears at 16:00, and now Godchaux comes to the fore as they play a more subdued version of the preceding jam.


At 16:54 Lesh strikes up one of his funky riffs. It’s always remarkable to me how, without ignoring him, they usually forgo the opportunity to settle into a groove, and the riff recedes without leaving too much of a mark. He brings it back around 17:35, and they rally around him a little before he lets it go again. After a couple minutes this jam starts to feel a little aimless, though…not unpleasant, but exhausting itself nonetheless. And just before we reach the point of exhaustion, Garcia is back, coming in at 19:04, and perhaps heralding more excitement in what follows. He’s got a little wah going, and might have a meltdown in mind.


As we cross the 20-minute mark the intensity is increasing, but gradually at first, and by 21:00 Garcia is flashing some Tiger licks. But they take their time; Godchaux’s wah-wah piano and Weir’s little squalls are flashes of weirdness in a slow burn, with no one in a hurry to bring it to a head. Rather than a Tiger, this is a freaky jam with Tiger-like bits scattered throughout. They seem to have harnessed the power of a meltdown and channeled it into a more consequent and coherent stretch of music.


Finally, however, they seem ready to take the next step at 24:55, and we seem to be headed for a true meltdown here. The Tiger is brief and a little subdued, relative to others, and we reach the other side pretty quickly, into a slow meltdown taking place from around 25:35 to 26:38. At 26:46 Garcia is losing some of the wah, and we are at an inflection point; many Dark Stars would end here, but there is still 10 minutes to go. They ease into a gently twinkling jam, ratified by Phil’s easy melodic line. By 28:20 they could almost be shifting into Morning Dew or Stella Blue, but there is no clear referent here yet. It’s just gentle, melodic Dead, a little bent out of shape for good measure.


At 30:10 Lesh and Weir are adding little syncopated stabs and bending the music further toward something else. 30:50 sees Garcia start a fingerpicked roll, echoed by Lesh. This develops with some gorgeous country licks, and Weir and Lesh pick it up and push it forward. It really snaps together at 32:00, and a new jam emerges. Jerry keeps going around and elaborating his fingerpicked roll with ridiculous facility; at around 33:05, he even strikes a figure where he’s playing an ascending run on the bass strings and an ascending run on the higher strings at the same time. Then he bears down on it and the band kicks it up some more, and at 33:49 they break into the chord pattern known as the Mind Left Body Jam, which last made its appearance in a Dark Star (for the first time) when it was played double-time in the end jam of 1972-04-08. They go around a few more times, and Garcia strikes up Morning Dew.


This is an astounding ending to a gorgeous, magisterial Dark Star. This one is rightly well-known; it’s one of the high points of the entire corpus. It moves slowly compared to some, but there is plenty of excitement to be had, even outside the stellar end jam, for anyone who cares to listen closely.


What was said:

142. 1972-09-16

77442 Boston 27:31



Main theme at 10:35.
First verse at 10:49.
Tiger at 21:25.
Goes into Brokedown Palace.


There isn’t a great recording of this. I went with the matrix because it gives us slightly more Phil Lesh, but the biggest problem with all available options is that he’s too low in the mix. As others have pointed out, Ned Lagin is here tonight, but not particularly audible. And Garcia has the Alligator back.


The Bostonians are audibly pleased about the song selection as Dark Star begins. These days Dark Stars generally commence with some kind of reference to the main theme, and we get that here with Godchaux in the lead before Garcia starts his line; this one kicks off with a more ruminative feel than the last did. There’s an intensification leading to a small peak at about 2:40, and then they recede into a beautiful marshiness. At 3:22 Garcia starts hinting, and not for the last time tonight, at the little descending lick that I pointed out last time as something I associated with another song; I wonder now if it wasn’t just other Dark Stars of which I was thinking.


At 5:00 and environs we’re immersed in a bog that is glittering with starlight. From 5:55 Godchaux’s twinkling piano echoes Garcia’s high descending runs, and Lesh can just be heard underpinning them with a repeating riff. As we get to the 7 minute mark there begins an uptick in intensity, but with the same overall feel. They keep pushing it a little at a time, and it starts to transform a little and acquire an edge. Kreutzmann bangs the snare with a lagging backbeat gives the music a kind of lurch, and the polyphonic twinkling of the early going is transmogrified into a loping jam. As the jam starts tapering off at around 10:20, Lesh picks up the theme and they smoothly glide into it; there’s a marked slowing of the tempo at 10:41, and they promptly arrive at the verse.


Garcia comes out of the post-verse lick with a high peel-off; this is a move that will become a trademark of his playing years later, but which we encounter less frequently in 1972. They enter a marshy, pondering scene that is reminiscent of the early part of this Dark Star. Lesh is in the lead here, more or less, with Garcia adding color with his volume knob. Weir weaves in some chordal stuff; these sections are very cohesive tonight, even when they’re searching around. The crowd incongruously claps along a bit. Godchaux comes in and from about 14:19 he and Garcia knit together some Sputnik-like rolls, and as it gets spacier the audience hoots and hollers.


At 15:30 now, it is sounding more and more like a space jam. The band is really taking its time, while the audience seems to be almost inexplicably fired up by this! Maybe they just really dig space. As we arrive at the 17:45 mark Garcia is starting to hint at a buid-up to a meltdown. He starts playing some rolls with the wah effect creeping in, and a Tiger seems to be in the offing. Meanwhile, Godchaux strikes an ominous groove at 18:31 with a few well-placed notes. In typical fashion, he doesn’t exactly settle into this groove, but he does start to build on it as Garcia pushes toward the Tiger. Kreutzmann and Lesh are picking it up, and the band is simultaneously moving toward a meltdown and a funky groove.


At 20:45 Garcia still has the wah pinned, but he catches the beat for a bit here before going back to a Tiger pattern. The Tiger finally comes to a head starting at about 21:25, and at 21:40 Garcia seems satisfied—he groans out some lugubrious tones as Kreutzmann and Godchaux strike up a lilting groove, and soon they all come together and drop right into an upbeat jam. 23:35: I think Weir and Godchaux both have a wah-wah on now, it’s difficult to be certain. Garcia is playing a frenetic line and it really gets cooking. He gets more repetitive with it, and then Godchaux locks in with him at 24:50 and they bring it to a peak that goes on for a good minute. This is really cooking, and if Lesh were mixed better it would be even better, because he is really going at it here too. At 25:52 the jam winds down into an intermediate space, and after some thoughtful throat-clearing Garcia takes them into a beautiful Brokedown Palace.


This is perhaps not the most ambitious Dark Star, but it is nevertheless an excellent rendition. In the midst of a golden period, this is less well-known than some of its contemporaries, but it is a wonderful piece of music; by turns beautiful and frenetic, it has a lot of force and a lot of range. It is a shame there isn’t a better recording, but what we have here is sufficient evidence of a damn good Dark Star.




What was said:

141. 1972-09-10

22793 Hollywood 35:21 (DS 32:18, Drums 1:33, DS 1:30).


Main theme at 18:42.
First verse at 19:02.
Goes into Jack Straw.


David Crosby apparently sat in for this. I can’t really hear him, or else my mind can only take in so many instruments; at times I think I’ve got him, but then it dissolves into another instrument and I’m not entirely sure if it was there. Weir is very loud in the left channel, and is playing a lot of aggressive riffing stuff that takes this Dark Star in unwonted directions; I considered whether this was perhaps Crosby, but it doesn’t seem likely. It seems more likely that they adjusted their approach a bit due to the presence of a guest, but I’m pretty sure that’s Weir playing guitar over there.


Right off the bat Weir and Lesh are very upfront with the chord pattern, suggesting the theme with a chunky vamp on the chords until Garcia comes in at :19 with some high leads. There’s a bouncy and playful cadence to everything that feels quite different already. There are several feints away from the Dark Star pattern. At around 2:46 Weir starts a bluesy ascending/descending riff that Garcia picks up for a moment, but it doesn’t stick. Then at 3:25 Garcia’s triplets instigate a little frenetic jam, but this is also short-lived.


At 4:05, they seem to be at a crossroads and they start a jam with a minor feel. This pays out until 4:55 when Garcia switches gears with a Sputnik-like sequence that brings everyone together on a minor key thing. At 5:25 Garcia starts toying with a descending sequence that he sometimes plays in a different song, but I can’t remember which one for the life of me. Weir and Godchaux echo him with some arpeggios and there is a pretty section here. By 6:30 Garcia is again playing Sputnik stuff, and the others echo him with more swirling arpeggios. This comes down to almost nothing just after the seven minute mark, and Lesh and Kreutzmann decide to establish a light and jazzy jam, which Weir picks up on quickly.


Garcia is mostly laying out here until about 7:48, when he comes back with some chords, and then he throws in that descending line again at 8:01—I could swear it’s from something else! This keeps coalescing into a moody jam in the neighborhood of E minor. This seems to be coming to an end around 9:50; it eases into something else in A, with Garcia leading the way with some rolling chord stuff. It comes to a head at around 11:25 with everyone coming together on some bouncy chording, moving to a little peak that starts at about 11:45. This keeps rolling for a while, and Garcia is very busy, hitting a funky lick at 12:14 that he rides until 12:30.


By 12:55 Jerry seems to be starting a new thing, but it’s just the last thing winding down. The riff elongates and turns elastic, and then they leave to Phil and Kreutzmann for a little while from 13:30. Finally the others start to return at 15:00, and there is another bouncy jam. Weir’s harmonics at 15:23 really get me wondering if this hasn’t been Crosby the whole time but, if so, where is Weir? The jam starts to meander a little now, but it’s still percolating along pretty well, and it starts to gather steam again until by 17:25 they’re cooking again.


Starting at 17:55 I can briefly think I’m hearing three guitars, but inevitably I lose it again. At 18:34 there is a seemingly telepathic shift among the instruments in the direction of the main theme (another reason the left-hand guitar has to be Weir!). Garcia brays out the verse (rather shakily, at first) and the lefthand guitar is right on top of the shift to E minor on the second line, and takes its usual part on the post-verse riff…it has to be Weir, but his playing has at times been unusual tonight.


We descend into space after the verse. I can hear four instruments here (plus drums) until 21:06, when I finally start to think there’s another guitar. I lose Keith for a while though, but then from 23:10 I think I have them all…that’s about the extent to which I’m willing to strain my brain, which seemingly wasn’t designed to hear five instruments. The space gets kind of intense by about 24:45, and Garcia seems to be pushing them toward a meltdown, which arrives at around 25:25. I wouldn’t label this a Tiger, but it’s in the ballpark. This turns into a kind of hybrid of a meltdown and a frenetic jam, and by 26:45 Lesh and Kreutzmann are pushing them toward the latter. Garcia and Weir are keeping it weird, though; at 27:40, they start edging a little closer to terra firma and the band is banging away on a really freaky jam. There are hints of Me and My Uncle throughout from both Lesh and Garcia.


By 29:30 this all seems to be cooling down as they return to earth, but also simultaneously start to disperse a bit. But then they pull together again and seem to be driving toward some kind of peak until at 31:30 they begin to disperse again. They do a little fade in favor of Kreutzmann who finally takes over at 32:18.


Lesh comes back in after a minute and a half, and the others trickle in for some brief noodling, and once again it is possible to make out a third guitar. This doesn’t really amount to anything before Weir starts Jack Straw.


This is a really cool rendition. The stuff before the verse is very groove-oriented; in that respect, even though I can’t hear Crosby, it reminds me a bit of some of the previous versions we’ve considered where the band accommodated other musicians. In this case, the approach proves to be very effective, as there is a lot of rather stellar interplay among the musicians. The way another groove-based jam forms out of space in the second half is something to behold, and the definite highlight here. I really like this one!




What was said: