Introduction: A Document
In
my post "Keith Speaks", I threw out some raw materials on
Fall 1971, Keith, FM broadcasts, as illuminated by a great little piece in the
Chicago music mag The Now Sound. But I didn't really add any value. Well
a new piece has just come across my brain, and I wanted to revisit that set of
crossings, and say some other stuff.
This
is the new piece:
 |
| Circular 3, 31 (October 4, 1971): The
Dead Deliver. |
Warner
Brothers declared October 1971 Grateful Dead Month. As I'll elaborate below,
using the imaged issue of Circular, the
"weekly news
device" of Warner/Reprise Records, this was no trivial undertaking, no
mere encomium, no bone thrown to an artist way out in the long-right tail of professional
acts' profitability distribution, 6 sigma or wherever it was, but also on that
was always a little squirrely, and was maybe especially restless since money
was coming in, chafing against its various corporate obligations and trying to
figure itself out. This is the Real Deal Holyfiel'. The document represents a
massive promotional investment, massive corporate effort from Burbank to the
boonies, a chunk of money, something that gets mobilized, through these
channels anyway, the planned ones, only twelve times a year. Warner Brothers
went all in.
The company went
in because, retensed, "The Dead Delivered". Grateful Dead, a.k.a. "Skull and Roses" a.k.a. "Skullfuck"
came out September 1971 (Warner
Brothers 2WS-1935) culled from shows recorded earlier in the year, super-hot
live Grateful Dead with material from across the Dead's many American musical
styles, from big jams to Garcia-Hunter and Weir-Barlow originals, churchy and
folky stuff, rockabillies and straight out rockers, country numbers, a little
jazz and blues flavor, the whole kit and caboodle. Americana Stew. Some great
stuff to get high to, and some great stuff to groove to over anywhere young
people listen to the radio, i.e., everywhere but in school in fall 1971.
FM radio formed a
centerpiece of the promotional campaign. LIA:
"Warner Brothers paid for the broadcast of one show per city in the
fall ’71 tour to promote the Dead’s new live album." It seems to have
worked," he goes on, "as the album went gold." I think there's
more to it than that – a later part of this post will try to deconstruct the
many splendored that is the Warner Bros.' marketing campaign, but I don't deny
that FM was maybe the most important part.
For now, I want to think about Keith Richard Godchaux (July 19, 1948 – July 23, 1980).
No
Pressure, Keith
Who
knows how others' pressure feels? I can barely figure out my own. We all
routinely do things that would prove impossible to others, for reasons of
expertise, inclination and circumstance, and the attempting of which would be
difficult for others. Insofar as it touches our stress triggers, stress ensues.
Playing live on the radio would destroy me. Yet Keith Godchaux played
heroically on the Fall 1971 Grateful Dead tour. He came out of the gate like a
bat out of hell, played his ass off. He is mixed really high (too high, to the
point of distortion, on many tapes), so he's totally audible, and I suspect
that was true on the rooms, on the radio, etc. The jams from this tour are
legendary: with 10/19 (Keith's first show!, 10/21, 10/29 and 10/31 alone making
October 1971 among the best the Dead ever played.
It's
a credit to the whole band, of course. They had tons of new material together, which
Robert Hunter intended as the last piece of a trilogy, Rambling Rose to follow 1970 masterpieces Workingman's Dead and American
Beauty. (Silberman
2001; h/t LIA),
but which ended up mostly on Europe '72
(mostly, I gather, to get loose of Warner Brothers!). The songs are great and
the arrangements are together (one can only think that they practiced a lot
between the existing known sessions at the Santa Venetia Armory in San Rafael
in late September and the start of the tour three weeks later). Musical professionalism
is the order of the day, no sloppy/sick Pigpen at this moment, no sluggish dual
drumming; Bill's attacking metronome, Phil's rich melodiousness, Weir's light
speed progression – not just the songwriting, but the leadership, and of course
the guitar playing, which by 1974 would become an indispensable strong thread
in the bandweave—It's a great unit and they are getting shit done.
Anyway,
all of this by way of saying "Welcome to the band, Keith. No
pressure." I have always argued that there's only so much plasticity to
the human soul, and that if you take it too far you might find yourself discovering
all kinds of unpleasantness, reservoirs of stress and anxiety and exhaustion
and fatalism which, tapped, can't be untapped; they can never go back to being
unundiscovered, which is where they're best left. I don't have enough insight
into Keith to see whether the baptism by fire left any scars. But it sure could
have. Got pain? Seek comfort, immediately, and more fire is probably not a good
call. Maybe being a musical idiot savant,
as Garcia not kindly characterized him a few months before his untimely (and, I
believe, fiery) death at 32 (Rowland 1980; see also "Bloody
Hell"), maybe that helped; lacking emotional depth, maybe he just put
his head down and played the fuck out of the piano –this he surely did!— maybe he didn't let it
bother him. But I don't think so. No sense of continuity, indeed.
Welcome
to Modernity
Roger
Waters had it as "Welcome To The Machine", resonant with LIAs
"brotherhood versus the machine" analysis of the Grateful Dead. It's
all the same thing – modernity. In properly locating Helios, and somewhat
counterintuitively, Galileo helped found an anthropocentric world, the one in
which neither God nor Nature outstrips Man – and quite the contrary. The world
is our artifactual oyster, and Reason can see us through. We own this place. Among many other things,
space and time are standardized and routinized. As Boorstin writes in The Discovers, our calendars display a
frothy, distinctly human blending of Moon and Sun. Pure hubris! Comparability
and predictability result, and when you hear all that in the present context, you should hear
"commodification", the ideal type of which is the perfectly invariant
widget, available at just the right price.
Let's
use the Circular to examine how this
plays out, in practice. I should have mentioned this when I looked at the Pollstar 1991 year-end spectacular, analyzing it as "The
Year of The Dead", but sometimes single documents contain
whole worlds. These particular ones embody the record industry, put it on
display, show its living patterns and practices. But they do so within the
industry's natural habitat, not a zoo or even a National Park – straight out
wilderness, where the viewing is best. So let's unpack what we see of this
ubiquitous creature.
The
titular article, "The Dead Deliver," offers an "official
history", which is high modernity's codification of myth. I won't go over
the details, but invite you all experts to comments on the details. There's a
new record, natch, and let us hip you to its positive attributes. But also notice Weir's
ascent to the front rank, "Handsome Bob," a strong lead singer. At
least some girls and probably more than a few boys probably bought a record to
ogle him, dreaming of holdin' Bobby's body close to theirs. Did I mention the
commodification of sex? And, a record.
The
second page finds mention of Garcia,
planned for release within next month or two (eventually released in January
1972, Warner Brothers BS 2582)
and IBM sales sheets (can I please see those?). But it's the box in the
northeast corner that really interests me: how to make a Month. "To set
all 50 of the United States ablaze with enthusiasm for the Dead's seven WB
albums, the merch/ad/promo people in Burbank have been working overtime for the
last month, in consort with the Dead's management, to come up with a campaign
known loosely as 'Fill Your Days With the Dead'". We got yer t-shirts with
in-store display apparatus; blow-ups of the band and slicks of the album
covers; patches, currently "being stitched by gnomes at an undisclosed
location" (I wonder where? Probably still domestic?); all kinds of
routinized talking points, such that "Dear Customer be aware that there is
now a Dead album for every day of the week"; and, of course, radio, with airplay,
a single, and planned ad buys. (Note they don't mention the FM broadcasts –
these must have been planned later.)
Space
makes an appearance (the 50 states), but it's time that's really being packaged
here. "What a Month is", indeed! Gods' names mask the reality that
it's Man's World – we make our own time around here, son. The Month, capital
'M', with enough records for every day of the week.
The
third and final page of the Dead feature contains no fewer than four
chronological errors – that's really odd for an official history. Two regard release dates of Live/Dead and Workingman's Dead, and two involve personnel (Hart and TC's
departures). Very strange. Notice Pigpen plans a solo album – it was right
around this time that he was advertised with a solo gig.
The intervening three pages have your usual stuff, reports
on artists, descriptions of new releases, singles, etc. It's all interesting. But
I'll just get to the back cover:
What strikes me here is the sheer genius of listing these by
space, rather than by time or by artist. Circular
would go out to record stores all over the country, and local is where it's at.
Want to sell a few more Fanny records? Tell the locals that she(?)'ll be
playing the nearby college or theater. You don't need to know Fanny's whole
itinerary, or what's happening elsewhere on any given Friday. What you need to
know is "who's coming to Nebraska this week"? And The Market, Warner
Brothers (including the winsome accountant M. Gitlin) and the intrepid Circular staff are happy to move put
those data right in front of your nose, where you can find them. We got this. It'll cost you, but we've got this.
Conclusion
Anyway, no big deal. A lot of big words to just parse out
some stuff in a document. But it's a neat document, and a deeply characteristic
one. So, who has a line on more copies of the Circular? I didn't find any at GDAO, but I'd be shocked if the
Santa Cruz archive didn't have some, somewhere. Anyone else? These would be fun
to go through en masse.
