Let's get some tie-dye up in this piece

I started getting along with the proprietor of this blog a lot better once I decided to strike all mention of the Grateful Dead from our conversations. They are a lightning rod of a band, and by that I don't mean that they were ELECTRIC, although they were! Instead, I mean divisive. (This is what "lightning rod" means, right?) If I tell you I like the Grateful Dead you'll probably assume that there's a good chance I'm high right this second. I'm not even going to dignify that with a response.

When I think of primal, late '60s psychedelic light show at the Fillmore West-era Dead, the song "Dark Star" comes to mind quickly. In concert, it was one of their sprawling, long-ass exploratory numbers often exceeding 30 minutes in length. The version on Live/Dead, often hailed by heads as the definitive version is 23 minutes, for example. To know the song and its live context and then later discover its initial beginning as a 7" 2 minute-long single is a revelation. They certainly had many other hit-friendly tunes at the time when this was recorded in 1968 that would have been more amenable to the single format. The decision to record "Dark Star" this way--fast, as though the tape had been sped-up; short; bathed in weird noises swooping in and out of the mix; using instruments such as organ and sitar(?) like sound effects; with Silver Apples-like vocals that emerge and then get reburied in echo, with a brief yet startlingly effective noise coda at the end--goes a long way to highlight the band's more disciplined experimental inclinations. This is the Grateful Dead who were at the forefront of what was going on in American avant-garde recording and music-making at the time, and throughout their career--one of the first to use ring modulation in recordings, for example, or whose members were hanging out with Steve Reich and Terry Riley at the San Francisco Tape Music Center.

Dark Star is also the perfect song to listen to while enjoying a great drug trip. As such, if the 30 minute 2-13-70 version were a multi-day peyote-fuelled vision quest, let this be your DMT, your "business man's trip"-- 2 minutes of mutilayered, textured psychedelia, bursting forth and then receding into the nightfall of ashes, for the busy psychonaut.

Dark Star