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Heavy "Primal Dead" from October 12, 1968
In keeping with the Grateful Dead thread that happily resurfaces every so often here on Arthur, I’m offering up one of the heaviest bootlegs in my collection: A soundboard recording of October 12, 1968 at the Avalon Ballroom in San Francisco. It’s a show that came up in our “Listen to the Dead” story from 2005, and it’s my favorite single-disc representation of how monstrously weird this band used to be. Legendary taper Dick “Picks” Latvala is quoted on Deadlists saying that this is among his favorite performances, calling it “primal Dead.”
It’s a short show by Dead standards — just about 80 minutes — comprised entirely of CRUSHING jams. No folky “Sugar Magnolia” sing-a-long first set, not much noodly Phish bullshit and almost no sign of the gentle rainbow twirly groovin’ bear nonsense. Instead it’s near ambient passages that slowly gather speed and intensity before exploding into massive psychedelic earthquakes of rhythm that leave aftershocks of cosmic guitar lines shimmering through the air. This is the fearsome and messy STEAL YOUR FACE sound that people who compare the Dead to Royal Trux or Comets on Fire are talking about. A Dead show where you can see why Greg Ginn and the Black Flag dudes were into these guys.
Check the annotated setlist below. FYI the “>” is taper shorthand for songs joined together by “a defined jam or contiguous transition” so you get the idea how loose things get:
Set One (1) [0:23] % (2) [0:37] ; Dark Star [14:53] > Saint Stephen [4:51] > The Eleven [9:58] > Death Don’t Have No Mercy [7:#52] ; (3) [0:31]
Set Two Cryptical Envelopment [#1:28] > Drums [0:10] > The Other One [7:08] > Cryptical Envelopment [8:30] > New Potato Caboose [3:28] > Jam [3:11] > Drums (4) [1:35] > Jam (5) [7:12] > Feedback [7:15#]
A couple notes: Some Deadheads like to talk about how maybe Jimi Hendrix was hanging out in the wings during the show. As rumor has it he snubbed the band’s invite to check ’em out the night before — there was this girl and she had some acid and yadda yadda — and so they failed to invite him on to jam or something. Who knows if it’s true, but like the shows these guys played with the Allman Bros later in the ’70s, it’s fun to imagine such a ridiculous gathering of guitar avatars in one place.
People also complain about somebody who is just cold goin’ bananas with some kinda wood-stick percussion thing on “Dark Star,” all “ritzy-rit-ritzy-rit” outta rhythm with the rest of the band from time to time. Whoever it is walks up to a mic at some point and it gets really annoying in the front of your speakers for about 25 seconds but then it fades out, so just chill about that. It’s also a show where beloved keyboard slob Pigpen is not on stage — probably off getting wasted with Janis or something. Good for him!
You can stream the show over at Archive.org, or download it by clicking below.
The Grateful Dead – Avalon Ballroom, San Francisco, CA – 1968-10-12 (320kbps)
More Dead on Arthur after the jump …
600ft jellyfish crop formation (Oxfordshire)
Hakim Bey's BLACK FEZ MANIFESTO, &c., reviewed by Louise Landes Levi
BLACK FEZ MANIFESTO, &c.
by Hakim Bey
(Autonomedia & Garden of Delight, Brooklyn & Dublin, 2008)
Reviewed by Louise Landes Levi
“Come to Prayer – prayers are better than sleep” Dawn Azzah
“But the sleep of the Knowers is worth more than the prayers of the merely pious” Hadith
Most poets have secret arts and even ‘professions’ that are not part of the official biography. The author of the book I’m about to ‘review,’ to take an example, is (I have heard from a reliable source) an excellent billiards player. One wouldn’t want to encounter him casually at a pool table, no. For my part, those who know me well will, on occasion, show me their palm and ask for a reading. Apparently a line beneath my right index finger indicates a propensity of this sort, or so I was told in Bombay. And why not, a line is a line, a line of verse or a line stretched across the mortal palm.
Earth needs more parking lots
the way you need more patches of asphalt
grafted to your face & genitalia
(fr. SHOE DREAM)
Esoterically, the chakras open, it is said, intuition reads through the labyrinth (of lines). Is this so different than reading a text? And the billiard player—is his first thought best thought to be doubted? The archer and his arrow, the pool player and his cue. We take the cue from Hakim Bey, aka Peter Lamborn Wilson, a national treasure, hidden, of course, but thankfully through publications of this sort and the dedication of publishers Autonomedia and Garden of Delights, in view.
In the back room of an
occult bookstore
near the Pantheon a groupuscule called
ZARATHUSTRAS REVENGE concocted the
bomb plot but
the infernal device turned out to b
a dud but regret
is at least an emotion. I was there
& I am still there
a ghost to myself.
Personally I never go anywhere without a book by Hakim Bey, in tow. How many blessed moments reading through T.A.Z.: The Temporary Autonomous Zone, Pirate Utopias (then and now, on Isla Margarita not far from Santa Anna, a small village settled by Spanish version of same, holy drop outs, some hundreds of years ago), Avant Gardening, Millennium, Shower of Stars: The Initiatic Dream in Sufism and Taoism, such an esoteric and beautifully written book; and the poems, recent chapbooks, rain queer and The Atlantis Manifesto and those found, almost by chance in an anthology, to name one among many, Wildflowers No. 7 (Shivastan, 2007) or the recently published translation from the Persian Il divan-al-Ghalib (Longhouse, 2009).
Civilization in ruin is always a good idea.
Industrial decay has the same
beauty as Persepolis – the melancholy
of vast suffering ended & barely
remembered, like dental pain.
Dance Floor Drones: Black Meteoric Star
Russom debuts Black Meteoric Star tracks with Assume Vivid Astro Focus at Paris’ Super Festival in April, 2008 (part 2 below)
Former Arthur cover co-star Gavin Russom has new music coming out next week on DFA. He’s recording as Black Meteoric Star, and while the tunes are still rife with droning synthesizers — a la his essential Days of Mars work with Delia Gonzalez — he’s going for more of a dance floor vibe this time. Specifically, BMS is his exploration into acid house. He expands on that a bit in this 2008 interview with the UK’s Fact magazine:
“Later I became very interested in the thematic elements of early Detroit and Chicago electronic music and the cultural environments that surrounded the Warehouse. Of particular interest was the way that a piece of music technology (specifically the Roland TB-303) generated an entire musical aesthetic because of its characteristics and its limitations. The post-apocalyptic vision of a new society, armed with electronic technology, emerging from the post industrial wasteland resonated with my own political ideals, my experiences growing up in Providence and my interest in the post-WWI European avant-garde who had similar ideas.
“Of course I always come back to the fact that it’s simply interesting and powerful psychedelic music.”
The self-titled album’s out on June 9, but you can get a preview via Tim Sweeney’s “Beats In Space” radio broadcast from back in April. Russom opens with 30 minutes of BMS material, before going into a lovely DJ set including plenty of drones plus crusty voodoo folk-rock from Exuma and Archie Shepp’s “Monkey Blues.” Download the whole 90 minute podcast over at Beats In Space.
• More info on DFA’s MySpace page: http://www.myspace.com/dfarecords
• Trinie Dalton interviewed Delia & Gavin for Arthur 21/March 2006, copies of which are still available in the Arthur Store. Click here to commence browsing.
• Assume Vivid Astro Focus made a sweet video for Delia & Gavin’s “Relevee”, which we posted back in April of 2008. Check it out by clicking here.
The economy's favorite children: Simon Johnson on Wall Street's "Quiet Coup" (The Atlantic, May 2009)
Following is a distilled version of “The Quiet Coup” from the May 2009 issue of The Atlantic. The complete text is available here.
The article’s author is Simon Johnson, “a professor at MIT’s Sloan School of Management, [who] was the chief economist at the International Monetary Fund during 2007 and 2008. He blogs about the financial crisis at baselinescenario.com, along with James Kwak, who also contributed to this essay.”
“[T]he U.S. is unique. And just as we have the world’s most advanced economy, military, and technology, we also have its most advanced oligarchy. …
“[T]he American financial industry gained political power by amassing a kind of cultural capital—a belief system. Once, perhaps, what was good for General Motors was good for the country. Over the past decade, the attitude took hold that what was good for Wall Street was good for the country. The banking-and-securities industry has become one of the top contributors to political campaigns, but at the peak of its influence, it did not have to buy favors the way, for example, the tobacco companies or military contractors might have to. Instead, it benefited from the fact that Washington insiders already believed that large financial institutions and free-flowing capital markets were crucial to America’s position in the world…
“One channel of influence was, of course, the flow of individuals between Wall Street and Washington. …
“These personal connections were multiplied many times over at the lower levels of the past three presidential administrations, strengthening the ties between Washington and Wall Street. ….
“A whole generation of policy makers has been mesmerized by Wall Street, always and utterly convinced that whatever the banks said was true. …
“Of course, this was mostly an illusion. Regulators, legislators, and academics almost all assumed that the managers of these banks knew what they were doing. In retrospect, they didn’t. …
“Wall Street’s seductive power extended even (or especially) to finance and economics professors, historically confined to the cramped offices of universities and the pursuit of Nobel Prizes. As mathematical finance became more and more essential to practical finance, professors increasingly took positions as consultants or partners at financial institutions. …
“As more and more of the rich made their money in finance, the cult of finance seeped into the culture at large. … In a society that celebrates the idea of making money, it was easy to infer that the interests of the financial sector were the same as the interests of the country—and that the winners in the financial sector knew better what was good for America than did the career civil servants in Washington. Faith in free financial markets grew into conventional wisdom—trumpeted on the editorial pages of The Wall Street Journal and on the floor of Congress.
“From this confluence of campaign finance, personal connections, and ideology there flowed, in just the past decade, a river of deregulatory policies that is, in hindsight, astonishing. ….
“The mood that accompanied these measures in Washington seemed to swing between nonchalance and outright celebration: finance unleashed, it was thought, would continue to propel the economy to greater heights. …
“[M]ajor commercial and investment banks—and the hedge funds that ran alongside them—were the big beneficiaries of the twin housing and equity-market bubbles of this decade, their profits fed by an ever-increasing volume of transactions founded on a relatively small base of actual physical assets. Each time a loan was sold, packaged, securitized, and resold, banks took their transaction fees, and the hedge funds buying those securities reaped ever-larger fees as their holdings grew. ….
“By now, the princes of the financial world have of course been stripped naked as leaders and strategists—at least in the eyes of most Americans. But as the months have rolled by, financial elites have continued to assume that their position as the economy’s favored children is safe, despite the wreckage they have caused. …
Friday May 29, Santa Cruz: Arthur presents debut of SIR RICHARD BISHOP and His Freak of Araby Ensemble (all ages welcome)
FolkYeah and Arthur Magazine proudly present the debut of Sir Richard Bishop’s new band…
SIR RICHARD BISHOP AND HIS FREAK OF ARABY ENSEMBLE
AT THE HISTORIC BROOKDALE LODGE
IN THE SANTA CRUZ MOUNTAINS
* ALL AGES * FULL BAR * HAUNTED VENUE *
ALSO PERFORMING: Oaxacan and Bachelorette
Tickets available at the door
Doors 8pm
Show 9pm
Advance tickets and more info at:
folkyeah.com
Erik Davis interviewed Sir Richard Bishop in Arthur No. 26 (Dec 2007), available for $6 from the Arthur store. You can read the article online here.
FORGET WOODSTOCK, PART ONE: "ARE YOU READY, BLACK PEOPLE?"—NINA SIMONE's all-time knockout performance at the Harlem Festival, 1969
Following are five YouTube clips which appear to form the whole of NINA SIMONE’s blazing knockout masterpiece set at HARLEM FESTIVAL ’69.
Other performers at the Harlem Festival—six free weekend, outdoor concerts held at the Harlem end of Central Park in the summer of 1969—included Stevie Wonder, the Staples Singers, Sly and the Family Stone (click here to watch on YouTube), B.B. King, Mahalia Jackson, The Chambers Brothers, Dizzy Gillespie, Gladys Knight & the Pips, Max Roach…the list goes on and on. It’s a host of magnificent artists, many at the peak of their powers, playing to a predominately black audience at a super-charged, awful-yet-hopeful moment in American history.
Makes you wonder: Why do we all know about Woodstock, but not about Harlem, which took place the same year?
After all, all of the performances were filmed by a professional crew led by director Hal Tulchin. But aside from four songs from Simone’s set, released in fall 2005 on a little-noticed dual-disk entitled The Soul of Nina Simone, which Arthur’s pseudonymous reviewers C & D went apeshit for way back in Arthur No. 20, none of this footage has ever been made commercially available in the United States.
Which is sad. Watch Simone’s remarkable, incendiary heart-soul-voice performance, especially the stunning “To Be Young, Gifted and Black” and the closing “Are You Ready, Black People?” and you’ll see why…
From "The Garden of Kama" by John Byam Shaw (pub'd 1914)
Riffs on Ice: Toronto Maple Leafs' center Boyd Devereaux on adding more heaviness to the soundtrack at your local hockey rink.
Toronto Maple Leafs’ center and Elevation label honcho Boyd Devereaux talks to Jay Somerset about adding more heaviness to the soundtrack at your local hockey rink.
Professional hockey players can usually be to divided into two groups when it comes to music: There’s the good ol’ boys, usually from small-town Canada, who pump Toby Keith in their Sirius-installed Ford F150 pickups; and then there’s the classic rawkers who never tire of the arena anthems that spark to life between referee whistles—“Get Ready for This” by 2 Unlimited, Europe’s “The Final Countdown” and, unfortunately, Glenn Frey’s “The Heat is On.”
And then there’s Boyd Devereaux: “Slow-motion, epic sounds get me going—the heavier, the better,” says Devereaux, 30, a clean-cut father of two who, after 10 years in the National Hockey League, has played more than 600 games, scored 61 goals and made 107 assists for teams including the Edmonton Oilers, Phoenix Coyotes, Detroit Red Wings—where he helped win the Stanley Cup, in 2002—and, most recently, the Toronto Maple Leafs. “Last season, I was pumping Boris a lot, especially right before a game, on my way to the rink.”
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