Playing Dead, Part 2

Rich Mahan (0:05)

The Good Ol Grateful Deadcast, the official podcast of the Grateful Dead. I'm Rich Mahan with Jesse Jarnow, exploring the music and legacy of the Grateful Dead for the Committed And The Curious.

Hello friends, welcome to The Good Ol Grateful Deadcast. This episode is part two of Playing Dead, our exploration into the world of the Grateful Dead's music as heard and played by musicians around the world. Again, we have a cavalcade of guests on today's episode to help lend their perspectives. We'll hear from Jerry Garcia, Jeff Mattson, Peter Shapiro, Oteel Burbridge, Gary Lambert, Dave Harrington, Steve Bernstein, Jake Rabenbach, Shuhei Uwasa, David Gans, Rebecca Adams, Joe Russo, Holly Bowling, Bob Weir, Stephen Malcomas, Ira Kaplan and David Lemieux. As always, you can get new episodes of The Good Ol Grateful Deadcast right here every other week. Visit us at our website, dead.net/deadcast, and check out the extra materials we have for you to explore for this episode. Also at dead.net/deadcast are all of our past episodes, including the complete seasons one and two, as well as the five part Skull and Roses series we just wrapped up. You can link from there to any and all the podcasting platforms out there so you can listen where you like to listen. Please give us a hand by subscribing, hit that like button and if you're up to it, leave us a review, thanks very much.

Have you listened to the second disc of the new Skull and Roses 50th Anniversary Edition? It's out now and there's more than an hour of unreleased music from The Dead's final Fillmore West Show on July 2nd, 1971 Pig Pen is well represented on the second disc with a rollicking good lovin and a great big boss man. Check it out at dead.net.

Well, it's no surprise that a 17 person guest list means this episode is a monster. Not only in length, but there's just so much great music here that this episode easily became our longest episode to date. The music of The Grateful Dead is far reaching in its appeal and a multitude of musicians have embraced it and made it their own. Get ready for a mind-bending variety of interpretations from around the globe. Ladies and gentlemen, here's your translator, Jesse Jarnow.

Jesse Jarnow (4:18)

I'm a deeply rooted anti-authoritarianism.

Jerry Garcia (4:20)

The band that I'm in, remember, I mean, everybody has the same disease that I have, which is the inability to do something exactly the same way twice. Sometimes it drives you nuts, you know? I mean, if you're composing something and you feel that there's a delicate little interaction that you want to hear, and you always want to hear it, forget it. You know, it doesn't happen in the Grateful Dead, but other stuff does, which is much, much more wonderful, but you have to be prepared to relinquish a certain amount of your ego involvement.

Jesse Jarnow (4:49)

In the last part of our two-part Playing Dead special, we talked about the history of how Grateful Dead music became an underground school for young musicians, both the first generation of dead cover bands, as well as artists who left the dead well behind. But in 1991, Dead Covers went mainstream with the tribute album DEDICATED, featuring a truly impressive array of artists. The great East LA rock band Los Lobos did Bertha. Thank you. British songwriting legend Elvis Costello did Ship of Fools.

In Transgressive LA Weirdos, Jane's Addiction mashed up Ripple and the other one.

The album's pitch was to make a tribute to the dead without jam bands, and it worked, shining a light on the band's catalog of songwriting. Robert Hunter told producer Ralph Saul that it was like getting a dozen roses every day for the rest of his life. Dedicated was an enormous hit. Not only did it make the top 30, but it helped launch a new boom of tribute albums, as well as the career of producer Ralph Saul. I really loved Ray Paget's recent book, I'm Your Fan, part of Bloomsbury's 33 and a Third series, which gets into Dedicated and the history of tribute albums. Dead songs turned up increasingly in the songs of non-jam acts. In the years before Jerry Garcia died, none other than Bob Dylan made a number of Garcia Hunter tunes a regular part of his sets. This was released on the great compilation Stolen Roses, Songs Of The Grateful Dead, produced by David Gans. None of this, of course, was gonna stop the jammers from jamming. And ironically, by performing dead songs over and over, it was perhaps the cover acts and interpretive jammers who were also responsible for transforming the dead into a kind of folk music all its own, a spectrum between traditional and radical. And there was maybe no single place where that spectrum extended and fractalized more than the Wetlands Preserve, opened in 1988 at 161 Hudson Street in New York City, just outside the exit to the Holland Tunnel. Wetlands was the launch pad and home base for many local and touring acts, playing a truly eclectic variety of original material, both of the jamming persuasion and not. But it was also perhaps the first venue where the owner had an opinion about whether the dead cover band playing tonight was going to close the first set with Deal Or Not.