During the very extended tag out, while singing “Love is real, not fade away” over and over, the band would pull the volume back quieter and quieter until all you could hear was the crowd’s clapping and singing. Over the course of “Not Fade Away,” the Dead effectively taught the entire crowd to clap son clave. It’s an Afro-Cuban pattern called son clave, which rock musicians know as the Bo Diddley beat. The song is a modal I7-IV groove over a distinctive beat: clap, clap, clap, clap-clap clap, clap, clap, clap-clap. The best thing the band did during the years I went to see them was to close their shows with “ Not Fade Away” by Buddy Holly. If church was more like a Dead show, I’d probably go. In interviews, Jerry frequently compared his following to a religious cult. Dead shows could be messy and lame, but they were a reliable source of tribal-feeling ecstatic experience. Those activities are essential social vitamins, and I feel the absence of them in my life. I don’t do a lot of group singing and dancing and clapping. I’m a nerdy white guy, and I spend a lot of time alone or with strangers. There was a lot of audience participation, group singing and dancing and clapping. And yet, those shows were still fairly magical experiences. Jerry was completely phoning it in at that point, and the rest of the guys performed unevenly at best. I went to see the Dead several times in high school, and a few increasingly depressing times my freshman year of college. But mostly he was devoted to trance-like grooves. Jerry also played okay country and white R&B, and he occasionally rocked. Jerry did his best playing over relaxed one-chord or two-chord Afrocentric grooves with a free jazz flavor. The biggest lesson Jerry taught me was the value of beats you can dance to, at slow to medium tempos, using minimal harmonic movement. I listened to the Grateful Dead for years before ever trying drugs of any kind. Contrary to popular stereotype, I didn’t care about him because of drugs. From the ages of fifteen to twenty, my guitar-learning years, there was no musician I cared more about in the world than Jerry. Whenever I play guitar, it comes out sounding like Jerry Garcia. See also a post about the Dead and electronic music.
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