Just Like Jazz
Hello hello!
I hope everyone is safe and well. I am very happy (and proud) to be writing this upon the release of my 20th episode. I really had no idea what was in store when I started this, but thanks to listeners like you it has turned into something somewhat sustainable.
It was such a treat to get Donna Jean for my 20th episode and it has turned into quite the coup. This episode had more listens in the first 24 hours than any other episode had in its’ first seven days. I could not be happier with the response.
My plane just landed and I am sitting in a hotel lobby just outside LAX at the moment. Waiting for a few of my band mates to come down. We are here to play a some private engagements this weekend but Dino, Barraco, Mattson and myself came in a day early to do a side project, which leads to the theme of their blog entry.......
In my last episode, I asked Garret Deloian of Jerry’s Middle Finger what it was about this music that was so special and his answer was (to paraphrase)-
The catalog has become similar to the jazz standards in the way that they are well known by a certain group of musicians and you can just get together and play them. I thought about how true that was. In the jazz world we have something called the Real Book, which is a book of charts that includes all of the jazz standards. These are the tunes that all of the jazz cats have to know and they can get together and play them on any gig. They can be interpreted anyway they see fit, but the bones of the music ( the chord structure and melody) stay the same.
I’ve always known this to be true of the Grateful Dead catalogue, but having Garrett express it verbally really summed it up....... and then this week I am living it.
A friend of mine who puts on a festival every year near St. Louis called me last Wednesday. His Saturday night headliner had bailed and he needed a band. It turned out that I was available. I already had a gig set up for Tuesday with another past guest, Scott Cooper of Santa Cruz’s China Cats. He is from St. Louis and was already in town so we got to work trying to find some folks to fill out the group. After exhausting all avenues close by, including another past guest, Lee Owen from Kentucky, we had to spread our search out a little further. Long story short, Garrett and bassist Burt Lewis, both of Jerry’s Middle Finger flew in from Cali to fill out the band. Garrett and I had only spoken up to this point and I had never met Ben. We texted a bit to come up with some songs everyone was comfortable with, but didn’t actually meet until about 45 minutes before we were supposed to play. These are all good musicians, so everyone was comfortable doing this, but you do have to stay on your toes the entire time. Not only did the gig come off without a hitch, there were some great jams in there, as well. A perfect example of the music plays the band.
2 nights later, I found myself seeing Dead and Company for the very first time. They are on Super Covid Lockdown, so I wasn’t able to see any of my friends in the band or crew. I hung out in the crowd just like 26 years ago at the very same venue. I had a blast. Was every song to my liking?.... No, but it was a great time nonetheless less. I could get into all of that, but I digress.
The next night was my scheduled gig with Scott Cooper. Also in the band was a younger bass player from St. Louis named Josip Capan. Great player! The 4th was Brad Sarno of Sarno Music Solutions and Blue Jade Audio who sponsors the podcast and does occasional segments with me. Brad and I have played together for about 30 years and always have a blast.
Same thing- let’s get a text thread going about what tunes to play and we will hit. This was not all Grateful Dead which is incredibly appealing to me. When I am outside of DSO, I want to play more than Dead tunes for sure. In fact, I could be very happy playing zero Dead tunes, but again I digress....
Scott, Brad and I all went to high school together so this was kind of a special night for us. We don’t play together often and there would be a lot of old friends there to watch.
It was an outside gig and wouldn’t you know it, it poured!!! I mean poured. We hadn’t even set up yet. Now you get into the “is it going to clear? Should we wait it out” mode. Everyone checking their radar and it doesn’t look good. Call your wives out in the burbs and see what is happening out there. Is it coming? Yada yada yada. It didn’t look good and I wanted to bail on it (begrudgingly) but Sarno would have none of it. He was jonesin’ to play and was goading us on. We decided to set up, knowing full well we would probably only get in 3 songs and it would start raining again. Not to mention that no one will show up. We were supposed to start at 7, had the fastest set up ever and hit the stage( Sidewalk) at 8 pm. Alas, NO RAIN the rest of the night. Not many people either, but once again, the power of this music takes over and we had a blast with some really good jams.
That leads us to today. Soon I will meet my band mates and we will head to a little club in LA to play with a couple of guys from the local Dead band Cubensis. We know the keyboard player, Tom Ryan. he spent a minute in DSO back in 2005 and has also been a guest on the podcast. The other is their guitar player, Nate LaPointe who only Dino has met. We have not talked about what we will play tonight but there is no worry. I am sure it will be fun, the music will have some great moments and we get that edge of the seat feeling of playing with folks we know nothing about.
All of this comes back to what Garrett said on the podcast and further drives home the point that the music of the Grateful Dead has truly entered the Great American songbook forever.
Thanks for reading!