166. 1973-09-11

184 Virginia 23:18 (22:16)




Elastic Ping Pong jam at 11:00.
Main theme at 17:02.
First verse at 17:27.
Goes into Morning Dew.

The debut of the Wolf. At this point the Grateful Dead are well into 1973, and well on the way to the drippy, laidback Fall sound which would fully emerge when they returned after a short break on October 19th. The opening here is loose and flowing; it’s almost lackadaisical, but yet somehow gorgeous. At 3:17 Garcia initiates a staccato line that might have led to a frenetic jam if they were doing anything like that, but the others barely acknowledge him; everyone goes in their own direction, aware of the overall direction of things but refraining from anything so crude as playing together.


And yet, at around 4:30 they start to cohere—still loosely, but noticeably—and they drive to a peak at around 4:50. They’re still loose as hell, but they’re a lot louder and they seem to be coming together a bit. They crest pretty quickly, and once again there are some rather scattershot ruminations. By 6:45 they all seem to be tuned in to the same wavelength, although it’s unsure precisely what wavelength it is.


Godchaux has been very faint on the Rhodes, but he trickles in a little more here in spots. The band kind of wanders away from each other again, until Garcia starts a kind of variation on the theme at 8:32; Weir picks it up, although Lesh hangs back, and now Keith is getting more audible as he joins in. The band shies away from the theme after a little while, and Weir starts a gently rocking riff at 9:32 which they could rally around, but will they? Keith is game, and Lesh eventually picks it up. Jerry seems to have an idea about it for a moment, but then he disappears altogether.


Phil smoothly pivots to the Elastic Ping Pong jam at 11:00, and this gets going for a while, but where is Jerry? He finally comes back, tentatively at first, at 11:55. By 14:00 or so the jam has been stretched beyond recognition, and they are ready to try something else. Garcia plays a lick to get everyone on the same page, then drops out, then clearly refers to the theme at 14:57 and bounces off into a beautiful lead line while the band kicks up behind him, sounding more cohesive and energized than they have yet.


I should add here, though, that everything so far has been really wonderful in its shambolic, oddball way. The band gets it together here, Jerry fires up the theme, and they head right to the verse.


Lesh takes the lead with some weird doomy stuff, and Garcia makes some noises that are rather reminiscent of a few years prior, with the bell-tolling tone in evidence. Phil hints at the Philo Stomp a few times—another throwback—although he doesn’t quite pull the trigger on it, instead drawing out some very distorted tones while Jerry adds feedback. At 21:58 Lesh starts a very heavy riff, and Kreutzmann clicks his cymbals a few times, but otherwise it’s still just Jerry and Phil, aside from a few tentative sounds from the others. Then, rather suddenly, Phil drops into Morning Dew, which may have been planned because Jerry joins him before it the song is really recognizable.


This is an odd one! A lot of the pre-verse is so loose it’s almost like a between-song “tuning,” the kind of noodling around they sometimes do when they’re trying to decide what to play. At the same time, it is often really beautiful. There’s a way to play tentatively that requires a lot of confidence, paradoxical as it may sound, and that’s what they do here. Anyway, whatever this is, I think it’s great, although not a whole lot happens after the verse.


What was said:

JSegel:


First Dark Star with Wolf guitar, I believe!

I have the audience tape of this, so my timing is off by 2 minutes I think? it starts with lots of noisy fans, Phil strumming his bass and some noodling around for a bit amidst tuning. They count it in and start it slowly and methodically, playing around with the theme exactly one time through the theme notes before venturing off into stretchy notes and then stately runs of notes. Keith is playing organ? Long tones, wow. Jerry continues in light runs of modal notes.

At 3:40 they start a rhythmic idea but it seems to fall away again after a short time, building back to a Dark Start groove. Jerry starts the runs again. The long chords from the organ are cool in there. Heading for a crest at 5 minutes, Jerry eddies on a high stretch area and Keith warbles in arpeggios. Over that hill, he’s holding long chords again, till he switched to the short stabs and starts in on a groove with Phil. Jerry backs it with double stop second before going off again in runs, Keith back on long chords. Phil playing very sparsely but intently, heading to some high notes like a bell ringing against the rhythm of everything else.

Minute 8, Keith has altered to a flutier sound, Jerry feints the Dark Star melody, but it lands in the accenting the minor 7 like the English folky thing of the other day, finally starting the melody right before 9 minutes, it takes a while for people to come back to it, and it takes a bit for the audience to realize what is happening and clap. It’s a very weird version, Jerry goes off into other modal areas, but then Bobby and Bill start up a marching rhythm on a major (3,4,5 melody) chord and the flat 7 again. Keith is back to his electric piano, and rocking out with Phil in the 11th minute, Phil finds the Ping Pong riff, goes a few times through and they get down on it. Sounds like the guitars are backed off to let the bass and keyboards play. It starts to go into chromatics after a minute, falls apart a bit, Jerry comes in with runs again, they’re in a minor key area with a climbing riff, everybody playing with that. The jam plateaus and keeps going, Phil eventually hits a big chord at 14:20, and it stalls the jam out for a bit, Jerry continues with a finger picking pattern on a suspended chord melody, then at 15:35 he does the sweep from the A to the high A which he used to do to start the Dark Star melody, here it takes them back into the Dark Star world a bit, though the melody isn’t explicit. Keith goes into undulating electric piano turns under the suspended mode lead playing, Phil gets going, even stretching the bass strings.

At 17:40, Jerry starts the Dark Star melody for real, setting them into a slower tempo. The settle in and the verse starts, people clap. Nice delivery, rolling into fermatas on line 2, bass noodling and organ on line 3.

The refrain has some awkwardness to it again, not everybody in the same rubatos. Outro and Bobby starts his TN intro lick, repeating it several times before it dissipates into bass feedback and guitar feedback under it. Big bass heaviness happens, big chords, and then some riffing in between. Bass solo goes on for a while, he moves into a riffy Philo stomp in the 22nd minute, a few guitar trills join in, he heads off to feedback and big chords, guitar feedback leads it out and into Morning Dew, a really cool segue.


Mr. Rain:


Dark Star is prefaced with some tuning and solemn bass strums. The GEMS source is the only one that actually tracks the 22:17 Dark Star correctly (the others start the track with the tuning, adding an extra minute), so I used that for my timing. It sounds like Bob counts in Dark Star.

Dark Star starts very loosely, and gets diffuse really quickly. Within a minute they've already dropped any momentum, with only Bill providing a pulse. For a couple minutes it's just quiet spacey wanderings, not very together, Keith dropping in some distant outer-space tones. By 3:30 they've oriented themselves a bit, and they turn things around and kick up a frenzy for a little while, Jerry popping out some high notes. This dissipates around 4:20, and they go straight back to spacey meandering. Jerry practices some standard licks and Phil gets obsessed with a repeated note around 5:40, regardless of what anyone else is doing. It's really disjointed, there doesn't seem to be much band purpose here. This is about the least cohesive Dark Star opening I can remember. Hello guys, wake up!

At 6:55 Jerry brings up the theme and the others start to think, oh yeah, maybe we should start playing Dark Star now, and they start making space for it. At 7:35 Bob & Jerry slip in the theme very nicely, but (as per their usual routine) it's an early feint, and they soon exit to more loose drifting. At 8:30 Jerry drops out and it's just Bob chording over Bill's backbeat, a total stylistic departure like they're laying down the rhythm to a whole different song. Phil joins in, and also Keith -- Keith is very low in the mix so it can be hard to place what he's doing, but he seems to be getting more active now. I think Jerry broke a string considering how long he stays out. At 10:00 Phil brings up his inevitable Marbles riff and the others join him, the jam getting vaguely funky. If Keith were up more in the mix it might even rock a little. Jerry comes back at 11:00, by which time the Marbles line is fraying, and they carry on a rather generic upbeat jam on this groove. It's weakened because, for some reason, Bob stops playing after Jerry's return, so it's just Jerry/Phil, drums & quiet keyboard. The energy is flagging again, and after 12:50 Phil delivers some serious strums -- back to business!

Some cymbal rustles usher in a nice droney segment with Jerry repeating one hypnotic note. Bob quietly sneaks back in. Then at 13:55, Jerry plays the theme at double-time and they do some nice fast theme jamming, kind of a better version of what they'd been doing in the Marbles jam. Bob gets stirred to life and starts strumming harder, and it finally starts sounding like the whole band's united. At 16:00, Jerry tries repeating the theme at normal speed, which the band has some trouble adjusting to (reminiscent of the speed changes they'd do in '69). Jerry doesn't give them long to settle in before singing a hoarse verse at 16:25.

Like they've been doing lately, they drop straight into deep space after the verse. Initially it's pretty similar to 8-1, but Phil soon dominates with his growly bass roars. While Jerry makes faint wah tones, Phil takes over with a Big Bass Solo (with some Morning Dew hints). He gets into some feedback, and some distorted Philo Stomp riffing; Jerry adds some notes now & then but is nearly drowned out. The crowd digs it. (Once again, Phil doesn't seem to do any of the stereo-bouncing that he did briefly earlier on.) After a few minutes of this, they synchronize with Morning Dew, and Phil has to calm himself down.

One thing I'm noticing about mid-'73 is that with more than a month between Dark Stars, there's not that much continuity from one version to the next. At times like 6-10 or 8-1, they're excited enough to join forces impressively; here it sounds like they're out of practice and it takes them over 10 minutes to get their heads together. Finally they deliver a few good minutes of jamming, and then.....then, well, Phil doesn't feel like doing space, he wants to test out his speakers with some deafening blasts. I like this solo anyway because it's so noisy, but it sure puts an end to Dark Star. They're really not playing at their best here; this is probably one of the weaker Dark Stars of the year. For whatever reason, they wouldn't play Dark Star on the rest of this tour.

The audience tape captures more of the tuning before Dark Star. It's actually a pretty good AUD with very clear drums, and Keith is a lot louder at the beginning than he is on the SBD, giving Dark Star a spookier feel with his ghostly whines (during the verse & bass solo too!). His interaction with Jerry & the others is a lot more clear, he's playing things you can't even hear on the SBD and it makes a big difference: the band sounds way more unified on this tape with Keith providing the glue. The opening jam still stumbles around a lot, but it's better. In the Bob/Phil jam, it turns out Keith is actually the lead player, and he kicks ass! With Keith missing, the SBD really misrepresents what's going on. Seriously, I would say skip the SBD and just listen to Dark Star on this AUD tape, it's a much better & more exciting experience.




adamos:


First Dark Star with Wolf. It looks like each of you listened to a different version of this one so I just stuck with the SBD that bzfgt used for timing consistency. But I'll check out the AUD too to get more of Keith.

After some casual Dark Star-ish tuning and strumming they set off. The laid back vibe continues as they saunter along. Jerry and Phil work their respective lines complimented by periodic textures from Bob. Bill takes it nice and slow putting emphasis on the cymbals. It does feel like everyone is doing their own thing to a certain extent.

Jerry gets into a choppy thing at 3:17 that Phil joins in on briefly but then they continue on. This seems to kick things up a little though as Jerry brings more oomph to his winding line, at least for a time. He then goes higher with some added sharpness. By 4:30 the momentum has picked up and then suddenly they're charging towards a peak, relatively speaking. This runs its course by 5:20 and they wander on; it's a bit tighter than the initial opening but still spread out.

Phil works a repeating note in a couple of stretches. The second time it turns into a whale call of sorts while Jerry spins up a quickly moving high line. Phil keeps at it for a good while as the others swirl around it. By 7:30 it feels like something more collective is rising up but it doesn't go anywhere in particular. Keith is faint in the mix but can be heard at times. Billy adds a little march to his beat and they percolate for a bit.

After 8:00 it feels like they are heading loosely towards Dark Star territory again. Jerry sets the scene briefly but then wanders in a spacier direction before coming back more succinctly at 8:30. Bob joins in with some faint strumming and other textures and Keith can be heard more as well. Phil takes his time joining in and by the time he does they're moving in other directions. The thematic touches fade and Bobby starts up a new riff around 9:30. Billy adds a hopping beat and Phil and Keith join in and they work it for a stretch.

This slowly eases up and then at 11:00 Phil shifts right into the Elastic Ping Pong jam. Keith became more audible before this and he and Bobby play off Phil. The low-key yet driving beat is punctuated by Bill. Jerry slowly reenters around 11:53 and they continue to work in Ping Pong adjacent areas. They pick up some steam and then ease off a little although Billy keeps working his kit and Phil throws in a few revving chords for good measure.

Things seem to have run their course after 14:00 and they hover briefly with Jerry still working a lovely, gentle line. They start spinning something up and it feels like they're ready to launch again. Then they quiet briefly and Jerry touches on the theme at 14:57 before shifting into a nice, pretty line. Phil adds some buoyancy to the proceedings while Billy works the beat. Jerry's lead winds higher and just sings. The theme is on the horizon but they're getting there in lovely fashion. After some rolling mini-peaks with nice interplay they ease up and hit the main theme at 17:02. The tempo is slower and it feels like it takes them a moment to sync up, after which they quickly move on to the verse. Jerry sounds like he hasn't used his voice for a while.

After the verse they reset and shift into weirdness. Phil plays some heavy, intermittent lines while Bob continues to add his textures. There's a subtle, rising, foreboding sound in the background. Then Phil revs it up even more. At 19:58 it sounds like he's going to start up Morning Dew but he keeps going. Phil's sound is big and crunchy and I agree that he ventures towards a Philo Stomp. He thunders along for a good spell with feedback coming through at the seams. He then brings a bit of quicker-paced rhythm to the crunchiness, accented subtly by Jerry. Then after slowing up a bit they shift right into Morning Dew.

It's an interesting version. Definitely loose and casual at the start and not everything fully comes together. But there's a nice early peak and Phil is very active between his whale call sounds and Philo Stomp. And it sounds like more cohesiveness comes through on the AUD. The gradual shift back into theme prior to the verse is lovely and one of the high points. Phil's thundering crunchiness after the verse is interesting too although there's not much collective interplay going on. Perhaps the others opted to just let him do his thing on the way to Morning Dew.