EVERYBODYS DOIN THAT RAG

Rob Barracco says we have not done "Doin that Rag" since 69, and I believe him. He is a walking encyclopedia of Grateful Dead music. When we are stuck in "wondering how we did it" mode, Rob just fills in the blanks. He has absorbed the inside workings of the music through recordings and I guess live shows, to where he knows the old stuff better than we do. And that is the theme of the evening for me. "Doin that Rag" is chock full of subtle tempo changes, which we never were able to pull off live in the old days. We always kind of stumbled through this song and then one day we hung it up, put it away on some sidetrack. Tonight we had it down cold. I think this song set the pace for the sensitivity factor to move way up. It is not the ability to change inner time slightly as a group that is so amazing, it is the way in which you do it. I see it a graceful move as opposed to a calculated maneuver. So it is not the songs, but the transitions from one tempo-feeling to the other. This was the heart and soul of the Grateful Dead and tonight we were back in business in this department. It seems as though each night we are working on another aspect of the "care and feeding of the beast". These maneuvers are unspoken and can’t be rehearsed as they happen only in the moment, in improvised space, in real time. Dark star tonight was loaded with these moments. Bill and I would straighten out the time in l/8 th notes then slide back gently to the swing feeling, the band one by one falling in place, or Bob and Phil would suggest a feeling and we would be on their tails like a hounddog chasing the prey. We were breathing together as an entity. The group mind was courted and realized in the music tonight.

Lovelight was the vehicle for Susan to step out a bit with a good rave at the end. She reminds me of PigPen when he would rave at the end till you just couldn’t stand it, you just had to scream out loud, yes, yes, I believe you. She and Bob had a rave moment feeding off each other’s exaltations driving this song on home.

We have rehearsed a lot of songs that we have recorded but never performed, or played once or twice and put on the back burner. Looking back we wondered why we retired songs or not played them at all. We just look blankly at each other and can’t remember why. Maybe someone had a stomach ache that day and decided to not play it, or the choruses were too hard to sing live, or whatever. But we are coming to grips with the fact that we have a lot of material that we want to play that never saw the light of day. Over the next 2 weeks we will be breaking these chestnuts out.

On to New Jersey.