A Combination of Things

Dark Star - The All Song

That friends, is not the name of a fantasy novel.I would never call myself a Grateful Dead fan, but i do appreciate the idea of the Grateful Dead. I dont think i have to explain what that idea is, everyone knows what they need to know about the Grateful Dead and if you dont know anything then thats how much you need to know and im not going to force the Dead down anybody’s throat. However, if you must know only one thing about the Grateful Dead, then you must know Dark Star. It was originally a three minute studio experiment on Anthem of the Sun but by the time they had gotten around to recording the shows that would be featured on Live Dead, the bands first of many hundreds maybe thousands of live recordings, the song had ballooned to over 23 minutes of improvisational glory. This song i think is the closest rock music has ever gotten to being legitimate jazz ( I welcome other opinions and examples, mostly for my own listening enjoyment). Phil Lesh plays the main melody very occasionally on  bass, Bob Weir bangs out a couple of ‘Weir’d (sorry) oddly formed but perfect rhythm chords and the rest of the song is just Jerry soloing, sometimes quietly with that almost new age guitar sound Jerry likes but sometimes wailing, with the whole band kicking in behind him. The interesting thing about this is that normally, and when i say normally i am referring to standard jam bands, todays jam bands, when the improvisational section reaches this fever pitch it means the jam, and more often than not the song, is over. Not with Dark Star though. They just bring everything back down from space inside the Earth’s atmosphere and start again, Phil laying down the melody and everything folding and unfolding itself around it.Im talking about the Dead and specifically Dark Star because my band, Disjoinedin (pronounced Dis-Joined-In), has decided to undertake this monster of psychedelic rock to great effect. we had practice yesterday and i think we played the song 5 times. We never got up to 23 minutes but we consistently reach hit five or six improvising on the main melody before miraculously it turned into something completely different. The first time we played it turned into Love Will Tear us Apart by Joy Division, the second time it turned into A Love Supreme, the third Ten Years Gone by Led Zeppelin. After it turned into Sparks by the Who and then Shakin’ All Over we started dubbing it The All Song meaning that Dark Star is all songs combined into one and much like white is all of the colors mixed together. Or is that black? I dont remember, either way, Dark Star truly is the centerpiece of not only psychedelic rock but of all rock. It all revolves around Dark Star, like the solar system around the sun man.No, I am not on drugs. 

Tags: Dark Star, Disjoinedin, The Grateful Dead