For further investigation ….

For all the new music I listen to, for all the different genres that I know and love, when it comes down to it, I’m a classic rock kind of guy. That’s not surprising, there are numerous studies of music out there that point to reasons why the music that we grow up with is what continues to resonate with us far into our old age. There are some of those groups that I love, albums that I count among my favorites, even though I stopped following the group a long time ago.

The Allman Brothers Band – I stopped listening to them after Brothers and Sisters. After the deaths of Duane and Berry, after Gregg married Cher, I thought their music descended into triviality. Yet Live at the Fillmore East and Eat a Peach remain two all time favorite albums. The Allmans are still around and apparently they’ve managed to get at least a couple of serious players to join the modern band, in particular recreating the dual lead guitar sound of Duane Allman and Dickie Betts with Derek Trucks and Warren Haynes. They do an annual series of gigs at New York’s Beacon Theatre that are always sold out well in advance.

There’s a 2 CD set, One Way Out, drawn from their Beacon shows in 2004. And three soundboards are circulating from the 2009 shows last month. For the March 28th shows, they were joined by Bob Weir and Phil Lesh for some songs.

On the one hand, there are some great performances here. On the other, 90% of the material dates from the late 60s, early 70s. They haven’t really grown the canon.

Then there’s the Grateful Dead. I got to see some of their amazing shows at the Fillmore East, shows where they’d start playing around 8 PM and by the time they finished and you stumbled outside, it was daylight. After Pigpen died, they weren’t quite the same for me. And there was a 1972 show that I went to where my date spotted her old boyfriend there and decided to reconcile with him in the middle of the show. But in the late 80s, I worked for a start-up that was funded from the Grateful Dead Pension Fund and Bob Weir used to come around from time to time to check on their investment.

There’s this article in the NY Times over the weekend, Bring Out Your Dead, that goes into fans’ discussions of the Dead and their concerts in their prime. The group played approximately 2,350 shows and about 2,200 of them are on tape and circulating on the net.

If my Dead fandom stopped in 1972, I was surprised to find out that the concensus among fans is that the all-time single best Grateful Dead show took place on May 8, 1977 at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York. I’ve found four different audience recordings of this show (the one recorded by Stevenson sounds the best to me).

The next one cited is February 13th and 14th, 1970 at the Fillmore East in New York. (Curious how a San Francisco band’s best shows are both said to be in New York.) Can’t find full soundboards of those but highlights are collected in Dick’s Picks Volume 4. I was at the Fillmore for these shows, but can’t recall which one.

Not gonna start listening to all 2,200 shows but guess I will spend some time listening to some of these post-72 concerts. Rhino recently put out a 10 CD box of the Dead’s 1973 stand at Winterland.

I suppose the above represents geeky fanboyism to the extreme. But then again, just checked, I’ve got over 600 Springsteen concerts in my collection (focusing in on the 70s but scattered stuff up to the present day). There’s only a few that I consistently listen to (Main Point and Bottom Line 75, Palladium 76, San Francisco 78) but still I suppose it borders on the obsessive.
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There’s a new band playing at Amazonia, alternating with long time fave Icebox; last night was their first night. This band is called Cactus and it’s not the crap 70s band featuring Bogart and Appice and others, it is of course a Filipino band. They’re much better than the previous #2 band that used to play there. The male lead singer has dreadlocks down to his waist and does a decent Bob Marley imitation; the female singer is cute and has a lot of energy. The guitarist is a former student of Willie, the great lead guitarist from Icebox. There were a couple of times that I thought they were about to stray into Sandinista-era Clash dub stuff, but no, they never quite got there. Still, you could do worse than to check them out.