History Of The Grateful Dead, Volume One (Bear's Choice)
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History Of The Grateful Dead, Volume One (Bear's Choice)
''History of the Grateful Dead, Volume One (Bear's Choice)'' is a live album by the Grateful Dead. It is their fourth live album and their ninth album overall. Released in July 1973 on Warner Bros. Records, it offers concert highlights recorded February 13 and 14, 1970 at the Fillmore East in New York City. Often known simply as ''Bear's Choice'', the title references band soundman Owsley "Bear" Stanley. It was originally intended to be the first volume of a series. The album peaked at number 60 on the ''Billboard'' 200. Recording The album was recorded during a period when the Grateful Dead were playing concerts consisting of electric sets, plus an acoustic set, revisiting their roots as a folk/jug band. Reflecting this approach (though it was ultimately released three years later), the album has an acoustic side and an electric side. As per policy at the time at promoter Bill Graham's Fillmore East, the band played both an early show and a late show. The recordings were ...
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Jam Rock
A jam band is a musical group whose concerts (and live albums) are characterized by lengthy improvisational " jams." These include extended musical improvisation over rhythmic grooves and chord patterns, and long sets of music which often cross genre boundaries. Most jam band sets will consist of variations on songs that have already been released as studio recordings. Jam bands are known for having a very fluid structure, often having one song lead into another without any interruption. The jam-band musical style, spawned from the psychedelic rock movement of the 1960s, was a feature of nationally famed groups such as the Grateful Dead and The Allman Brothers Band, whose regular touring schedules continued into the 1990s. The style influenced a new wave of jam bands who toured the United States with jam band-style concerts in the late 1980s and early '90s, such as Phish, Blues Traveler, Widespread Panic, Dave Matthews Band, The String Cheese Incident, and Col. Bruce Hampton ...
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Jug Band
A jug band is a band employing a jug player and a mix of conventional and homemade instruments. These homemade instruments are ordinary objects adapted to or modified for making sound, like the washtub bass, washboard, spoons, bones, stovepipe, jew's harp, and comb and tissue paper. The term ''jug band'' is loosely used in referring to ensembles that also incorporate homemade instruments but that are more accurately called skiffle bands, spasm bands, or juke (or jook) bands (see juke joint) because they do not include a jug player. History Early jug bands were typically made up of African-American vaudeville and medicine show musicians. Beginning in the urban South (namely, Louisville, Kentucky, and Memphis, Tennessee), they played a mixture of blues, ragtime, and jazz. The history of jug bands is related to the development of the blues. The informal and energetic music of the jug bands also contributed to the development of rock and roll. The jug sound is made by t ...
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Howlin' Wolf
Chester Arthur Burnett (June 10, 1910January 10, 1976), better known by his stage name Howlin' Wolf, was an American blues singer and guitarist. He is regarded as one of the most influential blues musicians of all time. Over a four-decade career, he recorded in genres such as blues, rhythm and blues, rock and roll, and psychedelic rock. He also helped bridge the gap between Delta blues and Chicago blues. Born into poverty in Mississippi as one of six children, he went through a rough childhood where his mother kicked him out of her house, and he moved in with his great-uncle, who was particularly abusive. He then ran away to his father's house where he finally found a happy family, and in the early 1930s became a protégé of legendary Delta blues guitarist and singer, Charley Patton. He started a solo career in the Deep South, playing with other notable blues musicians of the era, and at the end of a decade had made a name for himself in the Mississippi Delta. After going t ...
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Smokestack Lightning
"Smokestack Lightning" (also "Smoke Stack Lightning" or "Smokestack Lightnin'") is a blues song recorded by Howlin' Wolf in 1956. It became one of his most popular and influential songs. It is based on earlier blues songs, and numerous artists later interpreted it. Background Wolf had performed "Smokestack Lightning" in one form or another at least by the early 1930s, when he was performing with Charley Patton in small Delta communities. The song, described as "a hypnotic one-chord drone piece", draws on earlier blues, such as Tommy Johnson's "Big Road Blues", the Mississippi Sheiks' "Stop and Listen Blues", and Charley Patton's "Moon Going Down". Wolf said the song was inspired by watching trains in the night: "We used to sit out in the country and see the trains go by, watch the sparks come out of the smokestack. That was smokestack lightning." In 1951, he recorded the song as "Crying at Daybreak". It contains the line "O-oh smokestack lightnin', shinin', just like gold, ...
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Workingman's Dead
''Workingman's Dead'' is the fourth studio album by American rock band Grateful Dead. It was recorded in February 1970 and originally released on June 14, 1970. The album and its studio follow-up, '' American Beauty'', were recorded back-to-back using a similar style, eschewing the psychedelic experimentation of previous albums in favor of Jerry Garcia and Robert Hunter's Americana-styled songcraft. In 2003, the album was ranked number 262 on ''Rolling Stone'' magazine's list of the 500 greatest albums of all time, 264 in a 2012 revised list, and 409 in the 2020 list. It was voted number 371 in Colin Larkin's ''All Time Top 1000 Albums''. Recording The band again recorded at Pacific High Recording Studio in San Francisco, spending just nine days there. After the protracted sessions required for the previous two studio albums, Garcia suggested "Let's do it all in three weeks and get it the hell out of the way". Besides trying to avoid the debt that had accumulated while reco ...
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Country Blues
Country blues (also folk blues, rural blues, backwoods blues, or downhome blues) is one of the earliest forms of blues music. The mainly solo vocal with acoustic fingerstyle guitar accompaniment developed in the rural Southern United States in the early 20th century. History Artists such as Blind Lemon Jefferson (Texas), Charley Patton (Mississippi), Blind Willie McTell (Georgia) were among the first to record blues songs in the 1920s. Country blues ran parallel to urban blues, which was popular in cities. Folklorist Alan Lomax was one of the first to use the term and applied it to a field recording he made of Muddy Waters at the Stovall Plantation, Mississippi, in 1941. In 1959, music historian Samuel Charters wrote '' The Country Blues'', an influential scholarly work on the subject. He also produced an album, also titled '' The Country Blues'', with early recordings by Jefferson, McTell, Sleepy John Estes, Bukka White, and Robert Johnson. Charters's works helped to i ...
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Bob Weir
Robert Hall Weir ( ; né Parber, born October 16, 1947) is an American musician and songwriter best known as a founding member of the Grateful Dead. After the group disbanded in 1995, Weir performed with The Other Ones, later known as The Dead, together with other former members of the Grateful Dead. Weir also founded and played in several other bands during and after his career with the Grateful Dead, including Kingfish, the Bob Weir Band, Bobby and the Midnites, Scaring the Children, RatDog, and Furthur, which he co-led with former Grateful Dead bassist Phil Lesh. In 2015, Weir, along with former Grateful Dead members Mickey Hart and Bill Kreutzmann, joined with Grammy-winning singer/guitarist John Mayer, bassist Oteil Burbridge, and keyboardist Jeff Chimenti to form the band Dead & Company. The band remains active. During his career with the Grateful Dead, Weir played mostly rhythm guitar and sang many of the band's rock & roll and country & western songs. In 1994, he ...
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Bill Kreutzmann
William Kreutzmann Jr. ( ; born May 7, 1946) is an American drummer and founding member of the rock band Grateful Dead. He played with the band for its entire thirty-year career, usually alongside fellow drummer Mickey Hart, and has continued to perform with former members of the Grateful Dead in various lineups, and with his own bands BK3, 7 Walkers and Billy & the Kids. Early life Kreutzmann was born in Palo Alto, California, the son of Janice Beryl (née Shaughnessy) and William Kreutzmann Sr. His father was of German descent. His maternal grandfather was football coach and innovator Clark Shaughnessy. Kreutzmann started playing drums at the age of 13. At first he practiced on a Slingerland drum kit lent to him. As a teenager, he was practicing drums alone in a large building at his high school when Aldous Huxley and another man walked in. Huxley told Bill he'd never heard anything like it, and encouraged him in his drumming – despite the fact Bill had been told by h ...
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Jerry Garcia
Jerome John Garcia (August 1, 1942 – August 9, 1995) was an American musician best known for being the principal songwriter, lead guitarist, and a vocalist with the rock band Grateful Dead, which he co-founded and which came to prominence during the counterculture of the 1960s. Although he disavowed the role, Garcia was viewed by many as the leader of the band. He was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1994 as a member of the Grateful Dead. As one of its founders, Garcia performed with the Grateful Dead for the band's entire 30-year career (1965–1995). Garcia also founded and participated in a variety of side projects, including the Saunders–Garcia Band (with longtime friend Merl Saunders), the Jerry Garcia Band, Old & In the Way, the Garcia/ Grisman and Garcia/ Kahn acoustic duos, Legion of Mary, and New Riders of the Purple Sage (which he co-founded with John Dawson and David Nelson). He also released several solo albums, and contributed to a number ...
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Rock Scully
Rock Robert Scully (August 1, 1941 – December 16, 2014) was one of the managers of the rock band the Grateful Dead from 1965 to 1985. Living in Haight-Ashbury as a graduate student prior to the Summer of Love, Scully first saw the Grateful Dead play at one of Ken Kesey's Acid Tests, and signed on as the band's manager almost immediately. He started to book the band at local venues, like the Fillmore Auditorium and the Avalon Ballroom, where other bands such as Jefferson Airplane, Big Brother and the Holding Company, and Quicksilver Messenger Service got their start. Within a few years, the Dead became more successful, and Scully helped negotiate their initial contract with Warner Bros. Records. He also got them booked into larger concerts (including the Monterey Pop Festival and Woodstock) and was one of the principal organizers of the Altamont Free Concert. Although he developed an opiate addiction alongside several others in the Grateful Dead's social network in the late 1970 ...
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Blues Music
Blues is a music genre and musical form which originated in the Deep South of the United States around the 1860s. Blues incorporated spirituals, work songs, field hollers, shouts, chants, and rhymed simple narrative ballads from the African-American culture. The blues form is ubiquitous in jazz, rhythm and blues, and rock and roll, and is characterized by the call-and-response pattern (the blues scale and specific chord progressions) of which the twelve-bar blues is the most common. Blue notes (or "worried notes"), usually thirds, fifths or sevenths flattened in pitch, are also an essential part of the sound. Blues shuffles or walking bass reinforce the trance-like rhythm and form a repetitive effect known as the groove. Blues as a genre is also characterized by its lyrics, bass lines, and instrumentation. Early traditional blues verses consisted of a single line repeated four times. It was only in the first decades of the 20th century that the most common current ...
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Ron "Pigpen" McKernan
Ronald Charles McKernan (September 8, 1945 – March 8, 1973), known as Pigpen, was an American musician. He was a founding member of the San Francisco band the Grateful Dead and played in the group from 1965 to 1972. McKernan grew up heavily influenced by African-American music, particularly the blues, and enjoyed listening to his father's collection of records and taught himself how to play harmonica and piano. He began socializing around the San Francisco Bay Area, becoming friends with Jerry Garcia. After the pair had played in various folk and jug bands, McKernan suggested they form an electric group, which became the Grateful Dead. He was the band's original frontman as well as playing harmonica and electric organ, but Garcia and bassist Phil Lesh's influences on the band became increasingly stronger as they embraced psychedelic rock. McKernan struggled to keep up with the changing music, causing the group to hire keyboardist Tom Constanten, with McKernan's contribut ...
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