More a state of mind than a song...

I was listening to Live/Dead by the Grateful Dead today. More specifically ‘Dark Star’ that legendary 23.18 of improvisation that is more a state of mind, rather than a song. This was the second Dead album I acquired, after Wake Of The Flood when I was 16 in 1977 when my contemporaries were listening to punk rock.
To me, a teenager in search of greater truths about existence, this seemed to offer something that was different from regular music. I was unfamiliar at the time with any altered experience that wasn’t brought on by Vaux breweries but this music gave me a sense of what it was like.
It was the only and first improvised jam music I’d heard and although you might have thought I’d find it weird, in fact, it was quite the reverse. I loved and seemed at ease with the way the main melody keeps returning and departing and that distinctive bass line backing it up.
I played it repeatedly and because the music you hear at 16 stays with you, when I play it 47 years on, I’m still intimately familiar with it. And as I listen now, I realise that the thing I love and what I’ve always loved, but didn’t articulate back then was the fact that it is this mixture of its-the-first-time improv and clearly worked out melodies played to allow leaping off points. It’s not totally free-form, though I used to think it was, there are clearly directions they frequently go in. You can hear this when you listen to other live recordings of it.
But even so, there is a freedom from the normal structures which is very liberating and obviously I love other, more tightly written music, listening today I realised all those years ago, it had given me a new language. A new way to communicate. At the time, others didn’t understand it, because it spoke another language and I think that’s still the case. There are people who get it and people who don’t.

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