Image by Herb Greene, via Wiki­me­dia Com­mons

“Once we’re done with it, the audi­ence can have it.” — Jer­ry Gar­cia

It so hap­pens that one of the great­est things about the Inter­net is also one of the not-so-great­est things: you hard­ly ever have to leave the house any­more. Of course, for traders and col­lec­tors of bootlegs, this has been a major boon. Obscure tapes a fan might spend years track­ing down in pre­vi­ous times can now be searched, found, and down­loaded with ease. And — as a spe­cial added bonus — their qual­i­ty won’t degrade with every copy.

For Dead­heads, espe­cial­ly, such easy online access has been crit­i­cal­ly impor­tant in main­tain­ing a com­mu­ni­ty of peo­ple who love the Grate­ful Dead, when there hasn’t been a Grate­ful Dead show in years. That’s enough time for new gen­er­a­tions of Dead­heads to emerge, and to dis­cov­er and grow up with a resource their elders could only dream about: the Inter­net Archive’s Grate­ful Dead col­lec­tion, which cur­rent­ly fea­tures over 15,000 record­ings (most­ly com­plete con­certs) and con­tin­ues to expand as more are added.

Sure, it’s not quite com­pen­sa­tion for nev­er get­ting to see, and tape, the band in per­son, but these days, such a thing would prob­a­bly be impos­si­ble in any case, even if Jer­ry Gar­cia hadn’t died in 1995. (Last year, to keep fans’ spir­its up, band mem­bers Mick­ey Hart, Bob Weir, and Don­na Jean God­chaux wel­comed famous spe­cial guests on YouTube and broad­cast unre­leased filmed con­certs in the week­ly “Shake­down Stream.”) For those raised on Dead tapes, the archive must feel like com­ing home. For oth­ers, it can be a bewil­der­ing col­lec­tion of dates, venues, and loca­tions.

How to nav­i­gate the thou­sands of record­ings of the esti­mat­ed 2,200 con­certs cap­tured on tape by the band and their fans over the course of decades? A few years back, one fan made a list of the “10 Essential/Best Grate­ful Dead Shows,” all of which you can down­load and/or stream and pore over to your heart’s con­tent.

“I am not an old Dead Head, or a mem­ber of the 4‑decade club,” he admits. “In fact, I nev­er saw a show, see­ing as I was born in 2001.” It’s not his fault, but he’s entered an are­na where fun­da­men­tal dis­agree­ment about such things is a mat­ter of course.

1. 09–21-72, The Spec­trum, Philadel­phia, PA
2. 05–08-77, Cor­nell Uni­ver­si­ty, Itha­ca, NY
3. 02–27-69, Fill­more West, San Fran­cis­co, CA
4. 05–02-70, Harpur Col­lege, Bing­ham­ton, NY
5. 08–27-72, Vene­ta, OR
6. 07–07-89, JFK Sta­di­um, Philadel­phia, PA
7. 05–26-72, The Strand Lyceum, Lon­don, Eng­land
8. 12–31-78, Win­ter­land Are­na, San Fran­cis­co, CA
9. 11–08-69, Fill­more The­ater, San Fran­cis­co, CA
10. 12–06-73, Cleve­land Pub­lic Hall, Cleve­land, OH
11. 06–26-74, Prov­i­dence Civic Cen­ter, Prov­i­dence, RI

See the top ten list above (includ­ing links to shows), find hon­or­able men­tions here, a short­er list by Mike Mineo here, and add your own picks in the com­ments. And con­sid­er the fact that a band who devot­ed more time to tour­ing than any­thing else “had just one Top Forty hit in thir­ty years,” Nick Paum­garten writes at The New York­er (though “not for lack of try­ing”). They more than their share of ter­ri­ble nights onstage (by their own admis­sion) but still inspire peo­ple who will nev­er see them play.

“Each tape seemed to have its own par­tic­u­lar note of decay, like the taste of the barn­yard in a wine or a cheese,” writes Paum­garten of learn­ing to savor these con­certs: “You came to love each one, as you might a three-legged dog.” For Dead­heads, it can be hard to pick favorites, espe­cial­ly if you haven’t heard them all yet. Immerse your­self in live Dead now at the Inter­net Archive’s Grate­ful Dead Col­lec­tion here. Browse by the year of the record­ings here.

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

The Grate­ful Dead Movie: Watch It Free Online

How the Grate­ful Dead’s “Wall of Sound”–a Mon­ster, 600-Speak­er Sound System–Changed Rock Con­certs & Live Music For­ev­er

The Grate­ful Dead’s “Rip­ple” Played By Musi­cians Around the World (with Cameos by David Cros­by, Jim­my Buf­fett & Bill Kreutz­mann)

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

“That one was the gift of God… of Ja actually—the god of mar­i­jua­na, right? So Ja gave me that one.”

The Bea­t­les 1966 Revolver, a mini-mas­ter­piece, con­tains all the ele­ments that would inform the band’s rev­o­lu­tion­ary late-60s sound on Sgt. Pepper’s, Abbey Road, The White Album, and Let it Be. The album’s first track, “Tax­man,” announced “a sweep­ing shift in the essen­tial nature of the Bea­t­les’ sound,” writes music his­to­ri­an Ken­neth Wom­ack. Its ulti­mate track, “Tomor­row Nev­er Knows,” was “the great­est leap into the future” up to that point in their career, argues pop cul­ture writer Robert Rodriguez, who lit­er­al­ly wrote the book, or a book, on the sea change that was Revolver.

Crit­i­cal to dis­cus­sion of this peri­od, how­ev­er, is a sin­gle that appeared at the same time, and proved just as impor­tant to the Bea­t­les’, and thus pop music’s, evo­lu­tion. Though not espe­cial­ly inno­v­a­tive musi­cal­ly or lyri­cal­ly, “Paper­back Writer” was the first Bea­t­les’ record­ing to bring Paul McCartney’s bass for­ward in the mix, show­cas­ing the utter­ly dis­tinc­tive play­ing that would lat­er form the back­bone of songs like “Come Togeth­er.” The record’s B‑side, “Rain,” more­over, is the first Bea­t­les song to use back­wards tape, a sta­ple of psy­che­del­ic music there­after.

In fact,  “Rain” was “the first back­wards tape on any record any­where. Before Hen­drix, before The Who, before any f*cker,” John Lennon bragged. (He con­ced­ed that the nov­el­ty hit “They’re Com­ing to Take Me Away, Ha Haaa!” got there a lit­tle ear­li­er, “but it’s not the same thing.”). Lennon claimed the song as his, although McCart­ney lat­er claimed co-author­ship. But Lennon gave cred­it for the back­wards voic­es and gui­tars to “Ja,” telling Play­boy in 1980:

I got home from the stu­dio and I was stoned out of my mind on mar­i­jua­na… and, as I usu­al­ly do, I lis­tened to what I’d record­ed that day. Some­how it got on back­wards and I sat there, trans­fixed, with the ear­phones on, with a big hash joint.

There’s much more to the sto­ry of “Rain,” as you’ll hear in the You Can’t Unhear This video above. The track came out of “what would arguably be the most rev­o­lu­tion­ary week of their record­ing career… work­ing close­ly with their beloved pro­duc­er George Mar­tin and an eager young EMI engi­neer named Geoff Emer­ick.” In “Rain,” specif­i­cal­ly, they took full advan­tage of a dis­cov­ery made on “Tomor­row Nev­er Knows” — the impact of slow­ing down record­ings.

The band “played the rhythm track real­ly fast,” dur­ing record­ing, “so that when the tape was played back at nor­mal speed every­thing would be so much slow­er, chang­ing the tex­ture,” remem­bered Emer­ick. This led to what McCart­ney would call a “big omi­nous noise”:

The drums became a giant drum kit. If you slow down a foot­step it becomes a giant’s foot­step, it adds a few tones to the weight of the per­son. So we got a big, pon­der­ous, thun­der­ous back­ing and then we worked on top of that as nor­mal. 

Ringo called it the great­est per­for­mance of his musi­cal career: “I think I just played amaz­ing… I think it was the first time I used this trick of start­ing a break by hit­ting the hi-hat first instead of going direct­ly to a drum off the hi-hat.”

Con­trar­i­ans love takes about icon­ic artists like the Bea­t­les that over­state the impor­tance of deep cuts and minor record­ings. But in the case of “Rain” — the B‑side of a 1966 sin­gle that didn’t appear on the album that changed rock and roll and the coun­ter­cul­ture that same year– believe the hype. The Bea­t­les them­selves sin­gle out the song as sem­i­nal­ly impor­tant to their musi­cal devel­op­ment for good rea­son. Or as Sir Paul recalls, “It was nice, I real­ly enjoyed that one.”

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

How “Straw­ber­ry Fields For­ev­er” Con­tains “the Cra­zi­est Edit” in Bea­t­les His­to­ry

Hear the Beau­ti­ful Iso­lat­ed Vocal Har­monies from the Bea­t­les’ “Some­thing”

Lennon or McCart­ney? Sci­en­tists Use Arti­fi­cial Intel­li­gence to Fig­ure Out Who Wrote Icon­ic Bea­t­les Songs

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

Paul McCartney’s “Black­bird” com­petes with Lennon’s “Julia” as the most ten­der song on the Bea­t­les’ White Album and maybe in the band’s entire cat­a­logue. Inspired by a Bach piece that McCart­ney and George Har­ri­son learned to play when they were young, its fin­ger-picked acoustic gui­tar has the sound of a folk lul­la­by. But the song’s shift­ing time sig­na­tures and del­i­cate melody make it some­thing of a tricky one: record­ing ses­sions at Abbey Road involved a series of 32 takes, most of them false starts and only 11 com­plete. The ver­sion we hear on the album is the final take, fin­ished while Lennon worked on “Rev­o­lu­tion 9” in the stu­dio next door.

You can see 1:33 of that ses­sion in the footage above, cap­tured on 16mm by a film crew from Apple Records direct­ed by Tony Bramwell, part of a 10-minute pro­mo that also includ­ed footage of McCart­ney record­ing “Hel­ter Skel­ter” and “var­i­ous oth­er scenes from inside the stu­dio, in the Apple Bou­tique, Apple Tai­lor­ing, McCartney’s gar­den and oth­er loca­tions,” the Bea­t­les Bible notes. It’s an ephemer­al doc­u­ment of time pass­ing peace­ably dur­ing the gru­el­ing 5‑month White Album ses­sions, which for all their leg­endary ten­sion and ran­cor, includ­ed many moments like these.

The three-day ordeal that was the record­ing of “Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da” (after which engi­neer Geoff Emer­ick quit) pro­vides stark con­trast, and maybe con­fir­ma­tion that the Bea­t­les were at their best when they worked sep­a­rate­ly in 1968. The brief film above also con­firms a more tech­ni­cal record­ing con­cern: the tick­ing we hear in the stu­dio track is not a metronome, but Paul’s feet alter­nate­ly tap­ping on the wood stu­dio floor to mea­sure out the bars of the com­plex song, which shifts between 3/4, 4/4, and 2/4 time. “Part of its struc­ture is a par­tic­u­lar har­mon­ic thing between the melody and the bass line which intrigued me,” he remem­bered, and we see him striv­ing to get it right.

After the Bea­t­les, McCart­ney made “Black­bird” a reg­u­lar part of his set, play­ing it at near­ly every con­cert from 1975 on. It wasn’t only the beau­ty of the song that has moved him all these years, but its inspi­ra­tion, the Civ­il Rights move­ment, which “all of us cared pas­sion­ate­ly about,” he said. “Black­bird” is “sym­bol­ic, so you could apply it to your par­tic­u­lar prob­lem,” but the song’s intend­ed mes­sage, he said, was “from me to a black woman, expe­ri­enc­ing these prob­lems in the States: ‘Let me encour­age you to keep try­ing, to keep your faith, there is hope.’”

Below you can watch McCart­ney talk about the sto­ry behind “Black­bird” in a 2005 pro­duc­tion called Chaos & Cre­ation at Abbey Road.

via Boing Boing

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

When the Bea­t­les Refused to Play Before Seg­re­gat­ed Audi­ences on Their First U.S. Tour (1964)

How “Straw­ber­ry Fields For­ev­er” Con­tains “the Cra­zi­est Edit” in Bea­t­les His­to­ry

Hear the Beau­ti­ful Iso­lat­ed Vocal Har­monies from the Bea­t­les’ “Some­thing”

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

Dave Grohl, like many rock musi­cians, does not come from a clas­si­cal­ly trained back­ground. Instead he has an abil­i­ty to write accord­ing to what sounds good, and where noodling around in the stu­dio can bring great rewards. That’s where The Foo Fight­ers’ best song “Ever­long” orig­i­nates.

In this 2020 clip from Oates Song Fest, Grohl tells the sto­ry of “Ever­long,” and how it came to him in the stu­dio one day in between work­ing on the band’s sec­ond album. It start­ed with a chord.

“I’m not a trained musi­cian, so I don’t know what that chord is,” he says. (The Inter­tubes seem to agree it’s a Dmaj7). At first he thought it was a chord from Son­ic Youth (“Schiz­o­phre­nia,” in fact), one of his favorite bands of all time. So that was a good start. One chord led to anoth­er and soon he had a sketch of a song.

At the time, Grohl was essen­tial­ly home­less after a divorce from his wife, pho­tog­ra­ph­er Jen­nifer Young­blood. And the band were at a low ebb as well, not hap­py that their debut album hadn’t tak­en off like they want­ed. But Grohl then fell in love again, this time with Louise Post of the band Veru­ca Salt. Over Christ­mas 1996, he wrote the lyrics. He would tell Ker­rang mag­a­zine in 2006: “That song’s about a girl that I’d fall­en in love with and it was basi­cal­ly about being con­nect­ed to some­one so much, that not only do you love them phys­i­cal­ly and spir­i­tu­al­ly, but when you sing along with them you har­mo­nize per­fect­ly.”

He record­ed a demo of the song, play­ing all the instru­ments (he might not be a *trained* musi­cian, but he is a well round­ed one), and the fin­ished stu­dio ver­sion real­ly didn’t stray too far from the orig­i­nal. Post pro­vid­ed har­monies record­ed down a tele­phone, as she was in Chica­go at the time. (You can hear them iso­lat­ed, along with a lot more gear­head chat on this Pro­duce Like a Pro episode): “I nev­er con­sid­ered doing this acousti­cal­ly, I thought it was a rock song,” Grohl adds. That was until he did the Howard Stern show, ear­ly in the morn­ing at 6 a.m., and per­formed it with just solo gui­tar. “It gave the song a new life,” he said. “It makes the song feel the way I always wish it would.”

The song cat­a­pult­ed the band to the top of the charts, and is con­sid­ered one of the great rock songs of the 1990s. David Let­ter­man con­sid­ers it his favorite song, and asked the band to play it at the close of his final show in 2015. For a very spe­cif­ic lyric writ­ten about a very spe­cif­ic woman, with chords dis­cov­ered while just goof­ing about, it has a uni­ver­sal qual­i­ty.

via Boing­Bo­ing

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Paul Simon Tells the Sto­ry of How He Wrote “Bridge Over Trou­bled Water” (1970)

Dave Grohl & Greg Kurstin Cov­er 8 Songs by Famous Jew­ish Artists for Hanukkah: Bob Dylan, Beast­ie Boys, Vel­vet Under­ground & More

AI Soft­ware Cre­ates “New” Nir­vana, Jimi Hen­drix, Doors & Amy Wine­house Songs: Hear Tracks from the “Lost Tapes of the 27 Club”

Nir­vana Refus­es to Fake It on Top of the Pops, Gives a Big “Mid­dle Fin­ger” to the Tra­di­tion of Bands Mim­ing on TV (1991)

Ted Mills is a free­lance writer on the arts who cur­rent­ly hosts the Notes from the Shed pod­cast and is the pro­duc­er of KCR­W’s Curi­ous Coast. You can also fol­low him on Twit­ter at @tedmills, and/or watch his films here.

The top flight crew of L.A. stu­dio musi­cians known as The Wreck­ing Crew acquired their name, leg­end has it, because they “were wreck­ing the busi­ness for every­one else,” writes Janet Maslin at The New York Times­, mean­ing old­er ses­sion play­ers who couldn’t keep up. Drum­mers like Hal Blaine (“who jus­ti­fi­ably calls him­self ’10 of Your Favorite Drum­mers’ on his Web site”) and gui­tarists like Tom­my Tedesco and Car­ol Kaye could play any­thing put in front of them per­fect­ly, in one take, with the style and per­fect tim­ing that char­ac­ter­ize the absolute best rock, folk, pop, and soul of the 1960s.

With some excep­tions, this group kept a low pro­file and have only become known in sub­se­quent ret­ro­spec­tives that reveal just how much they con­tributed to the music of the era. The answer is: more than any­one sure­ly sus­pect­ed at the time. But “the Wreck­ing Crew was not sup­posed to attract atten­tion. Groups like the Beach Boys, the Byrds, the Mon­kees and many oth­ers didn’t care to point out why they sound­ed so much bet­ter on records than on the road.”

Not only did mem­bers of the Crew “work mir­a­cles,” play­ing a “first-take, no-glitch ver­sion of ‘The Lit­tle Old Lady From Pasade­na,’” for exam­ple, but in many cas­es, they com­posed icon­ic parts with­out which songs like “The Beat Goes On” or “These Boots Were Made For Walk­ing” would prob­a­bly not have become hits.

“Nine times out of ten the pro­duc­er or arranger would tell us to use the charts as a guide, that’s all,” Blaine remem­bered. “We were encour­aged to go for it, to go beyond what had been writ­ten. We had the oppor­tu­ni­ty to cre­ate, to be a team of arrangers.”

Though most­ly unknown to lis­ten­ers, the cou­ple dozen or so musi­cians in this group of excep­tion­al per­form­ers did pro­duce two major stars, Leon Rus­sell and Glen Camp­bell, who toured with the Beach Boys in the mid-60s until he became a major super­star with the Jim­my Webb-penned songs “By the Time I Get to Phoenix” and “Wichi­ta Line­man,” both record­ed, of course, with mem­bers of the Crew. They played on jazz records and record­ed icon­ic TV theme songs like The Twi­light Zone, Green Acres, Bonan­za, M*A*S*H*, Bat­man, Mis­sion: Impos­si­ble, and Hawaii Five‑O.

The only female mem­ber of the Crew, Car­ol Kaye, was described as “the great­est bass play­er I’ve ever met,” by no less than Bri­an Wil­son. Report­ed to have played on some­thing like 10,000 ses­sions, she wrote basslines for songs from “Cal­i­for­nia Girls” to the “Theme from Shaft.”

You can learn much more about the once-hid­den work of some of the best stu­dio musi­cians in the coun­try, rivals of the best play­ers in Motown, Mem­phis, and Mus­cle Shoals, in the doc­u­men­tary above direct­ed by Dan­ny Tedesco, son of Wreck­ing Crew gui­tarist Tony Tedesco. Or Kent Hart­man’s book, The Wreck­ing Crew: The Inside Sto­ry of Rock and Rol­l’s Best-Kept Secret.

Lis­ten to a YouTube playlist of clas­sic Wreck­ing Crew tracks here. And see why when you thought you were lis­ten­ing to The Byrds, Beach Boys, Mamas and Papas, Mon­kees and even Simon & Gar­funkel, you were real­ly often lis­ten­ing to the Wreck­ing Crew.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

How Car­ol Kaye Became the Most Pro­lif­ic Ses­sion Musi­cian in His­to­ry

Meet Car­ol Kaye, the Unsung Bassist Behind Your Favorite 60s Hits

Visu­al­iz­ing the Bass Play­ing Style of Motown’s Icon­ic Bassist James Jamer­son: “Ain’t No Moun­tain High Enough,” “For Once in My Life” & More

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness