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It seems very unlikely that the Graun will come up with a replacement for RR; they are more likely – as Ravi has pointed out – to resort to an existing format like more Ten Of The Bests. So maybe we should steal their idea and do our own.
This is the list I put together for the Music section back in 2014, slightly modified to take into account some of the feedback I received. Please feel free to disagree or ignore it altogether, but it would be good if someone did commit to producing a list next week, with the ambition of this being a regular series. Obviously, if no-one takes the baton, then this idea wasn’t much of a runner in the first place….
- Playing In The Band (Hunter, Weir, Hart)
Standing on a tower, world at my command
You just keep a-turning, while I’m playing in the bandIf a man among you, got no sin upon his hand
Let him cast a stone at me for playing in the band
It could be the Grateful Dead’s mission statement.
With no burning desire for fame or fortune, the Dead were driven instead by a need to stand on a stage and play their music, irrespective of what anyone else thought. And at the heart of that process was this belief:
Some folks trust to reason, others trust to might
I don’t trust to nothing, but I know it come out right
It didn’t always work, of course, but the belief was constant and the off-road musical journeys were an essential part of any concert. PITB is a classic Dead game of risk: start an intricately-tooled song in 10/4, turn off half-way through down a road of unspecified length and content (different keys, time-signatures or even different songs), then somehow coalesce back to the 10/4 song, several minutes, hours or even days later.
[Many commenters insisted I should have Dark Star in this position, as it (and The Other One) often produced the most experimental playing, but PITB was a similar vehicle for jamming and it has the right words for a list of best songs, as opposed to performances (although Dark Star‘s invitation go exploring the unknown together is pretty central to the band’s philosophy). It’s also a Bobby song (to maintain the customary vocalist alternation) and its time signature is perfect to head a list of ten.]
- Ripple (Hunter, Garcia)
Having defined the musicians’ function in PITB, here Robert Hunter defines the songwriter’s goal.
Ripple may be a song admired for its Zen-like observations about life but the introductory verses are the real meat of the song. ‘Don’t we all want a song to encapsulate our own thoughts in golden words delivered over sublime music?’ he asks. Well, yes, but it’s more likely that you’ll get some ‘broken’, ‘hand-me-down’ thoughts like those in the rest of the song. But:
I don’t know, don’t really care
Let there be songs to fill the air
Jerry Garcia gave Ripple the simplest of simple tunes and, at the end, the opportunity for everyone to sing their own song with their own words and meanings.
I like to think that the ‘ripple in still water’ is analogous to the sound waves made by a song in silence.
- Jack Straw (Hunter, Weir)
Ambiguous characters populate many a Hunter song: outlaws, oddballs and chancers fit nicely into the Grateful Dead family of outlaws, oddballs and chancers. This tale of two buddies on the run from the law could be a film script, with its dramatic incidents and open landscape, but the climax of the tale is marvellously ambiguous:
Jack Straw from Wichita cut his buddy down
And dug for him a shallow grave, and laid his body down
Maybe Jack’s companion was caught by the law and hanged, so Jack cut him down and gave him a decent burial. But I don’t think so.
Bob Weir’s two-speed music reflects the duality of the song immaculately.
- Looks Like Rain (Barlow, Weir)
They Love Each Other is, I think, the only positive love song in the Dead songbook. More common is the heartache song, of which this – one of the first Weir songs with lyrics by John Perry Barlow – is a prime example.
Built around the fear of being dumped (You were gone, my heart was filled with dread), it started out as a country ‘crying song’ featuring Garcia’s pedal steel and ended up as (almost!) a full-blown power ballad. It’s a fine example of how different Dead vintages of the same song could be. The example here is from its middle life: mature, somewhat resigned, sadness.
- Black Peter (Hunter, Garcia)
It has to be noted that death is a much more common theme than love in the Grateful Dead repertoire, whether original compositions or cover songs. Here, poor Peter is on his deathbed, awaiting the end, his friends around him. But are they there out of concern for him, or from curiosity, or maybe just to chat about the weather? As so often in Hunter/Garcia songs, the bridge shows us the only truth we know for sure about the situation:
See here how everything lead up to this day
And it’s just like any other day that’s ever been
Sun going up and then the sun going down
Shine through my window and my friends they come around
- Cumberland Blues (Hunter, Garcia, Lesh)
Black Peter is a typical Hunter character: poor, unremarkable, not particularly lucky. He’s the sort of man you’d find in an old country song working down the mine, complaining at the hours, moaning at his girl and dreaming of escape. Hunter tells of an actual Cumberland miner who, when he heard the song, wasn’t keen on the idea of the Dead playing what he thought was an old traditional song from the area.
The gradual mood and musical changes mark it out from most country songs however, making it more like a compact country musical.
- Estimated Prophet (Barlow, Weir)
The Deadheads were/are such an integral part of the band’s existence that they occasionally ended up in songs. This one takes a doped-up West Coast crazy from the stage door and lets him rave. Barlow gives him the language of Revelations and old spirituals, acknowledging the religious fervour sometimes found in the band’s following, who often quote lyrics as if they were divine wisdom…..
My time coming any day, don’t worry ’bout me, no
It’s gonna be just like they say, them voices tell me so
Weir’s music, again, is a delicious oddity: a reggae tune in 7/4 (Burning Spear sang it as straight reggae in common time).
- Stella Blue (Hunter, Garcia)
Ambiguity, love, loss, regret, the passage of time…this is one of Hunter’s most poignant and beautiful lyrics set to one of Garcia’s most poignant and beautiful tunes. Even if it is about a model of old blues guitar, it’s still brimming with emotion and sad truth:
It all rolls into one
And nothing comes for free
There’s nothing you can hold
For very long
Stella is one of several sad, slow songs that the band used to flow into at the end of a second set extended jam, just to calm everyone down and put everything into perspective after the chaos.
- Victim Or The Crime (Graham, Weir)
This first collaboration between Bob Weir and actor Gerrit Graham produced the band’s most controversial, yet by far the best, song of their late career. Possibly referring to Garcia and Weir themselves, it looks at drug and sex addiction. The uncomfortable nature of that reality – and its on-going existence in the life of the band – is reflected in Weir’s angular music, based on a theme by Béla Bartók. It’s an ugly, dark, disturbing, yet glorious, piece that remains unresolved at the end, like the question in the title.
- China Cat Sunflower (Hunter, Garcia)
A song inspired by a trip to Neptune and the works of Dame Edith Sitwell and Lewis Carroll, China Cat is pure psychedelic joy. And since that is the foundation on which the band grew up, it has to be in this list. It is attached – as it invariably was on stage – to the traditional song I Know You Rider, in which a condemned woman’s thoughts are aired. The juxtaposition of life and death, joy and sorrow, hope and despair, are typical of a Grateful Dead setlist and the musical transition between songs was a treasured feature of almost every concert.
