Dark Star crashes.........

Welcome to the eclectic analysis of Dark Star at the Closing of Winterland! What i've tried to do here is set up an eclectic analysis of the piece that is as non-linear as possible. Important names and ideas are hyper-texted within the blog, and each section of the analysis can be commented upon. To the right you'll see a video bar that enables you to play the piece while you read the analysis. Along with the video of Dark Star Part 1, there is a Terrapin Station, Ramble on Rose, and Dark Star part 2 from the same night. Relevant links are displayed on the right hand side below the album cover. They will take you to places on the web relating to the Grateful Dead, specifically this performance.

What I hope will happen is that you readers will see what I have to say and then leave your own thoughts. That way the analysis will progress and change as more people come and read it.

My method for analysis is based on the eclectic method outlined by Lawrence Ferrara in his book "Philosophy and the Analysis of Music". It is divided into sections like Formal, Historical, Phenomenological etc. Please feel free to critique each section as you see fit and, as Jerry would say, "if you get confused, listen to the music play."

Open Listening and Phenomenology

The first minute is one of the most magical parts of the song for me. We hear a booming bass, noodling around what sounds like it could be Dark Star, but not for certain. The Piano and drums check their levels and then we hear the cries, “Dark Star, Dark Star! Yeah! Yeah!” echoing throughout the ancient concert hall. When the band breaks into the song, I get this overwhelming feeling of community. Just as the audience calls for the song, the band responds with it. It is this exchange of energy through music that the bands live material is know for.

The ensuing jam is very interesting. Lesh and Garcia seem to be leading it, and their discourse is phenomenal. At first it seems like there isn’t much direction, just one stagnant texture. But, as the jam goes on, more and more melodic and rhythmic aspects are added. The group then decides on dynamic progressions, like every 8 bars falling and crescendoing into the downbeat. After barreling into the downbeat, they let the decay echo and disseminate through the hall, create a remarkable texture. Perhaps something like the feeling of being in outer space, with sound dissipating forever in all directions.

Once they dynamically peak, they fall back on the progression on the rhythm guitar, letting it set the scene for the verse. This falling back takes place over the course of a couple minutes. In a way, they give the progression some breathing room after being elaborated on for the past 6 minutes.

When the verse hits, the voice is jarring. We have been listening to instruments for the past 7 minutes, and my mind is in a “far off place” so to speak. The voice brings me back to the concert, back to earth. Garcia’s voice was never considered technically impressive, but the character inherent in it makes up for his technical shortcomings. The guitar doubling lets his voice soar over the musical foundation. When the chorus enters we are given a harmony: a female voice. This addition adds to the already complex texture of the song. The voices do not necessarily blend, but they do compliment one another.

A quick unison lick with the bass and guitars and we’re back in the jam. I feel this movement brings the listener back to “outer-space”. This jam is much less linear. Lesh begins displacing beats and Garcia explores lines outside the mixolydian mode he has been in for the whole song. Splashes of the parallel minor are thrown in and out. When Weir responds to one of these minor lines, Garcia modulates the meter and BAM! we’re into the next song, a deviant 6/8 groove that pulls us back to earth and puts us right in front of the band to receive the words of “The Other One”.

Referential Analysis

In this section I will analyze multiple aspects of the referential meaning of the song. Textual and Musical Representation, Virtual Feeling, and the Onto-Historical World of the composers. I will the Open Listening its own section.


Textual Representation
Although there are other verses to the song, we will only look at the first because this is the only one sung in this performance.

Dark Star Crashes, pouring it’s light in the ashes
Reason tatters, the forces tear loose from the axis
Searchlight casting for faults in the clouds of delusion.
Shall we go, you and I while we can
Through the transitive nightfall of diamonds?

Let us look at the first two lines together. The Dark Star crashing seems to represent some kind of cataclysmic event. Perhaps the occurrence has some deviant, negative connotations due to the face that the star is “dark”. It must be monumental because its impact forces “reason [to] tatter”.

After this “dark star” crashes, it begins its “search”. It seems as though the writer (Hunter) is running from it. He asks, “Shall we go…while we can?” There is a sense of urgency in the words. There is limited time. Perhaps we must go while the star is here, because when it leaves our chance will be gone. But where will we go once we get past “the transitive nightfall of diamonds”? Perhaps the music will tell us…


Musical Representation and Virtual Feeling
The music seems to be very closely related to the text. The text depicts a very mystical, dream-like scene and the music follows right behind. Although this opinion may be swayed by the song title, the music seems very space-like to me. Melodies weaving in and out of each other in a rhythmic vacuum. Just as there are questions posed by the ambiguity of the text, the music is constantly introducing new ideas and “questions”. Jerry’s lines pose a question, and Phil’s bass answers them. Kreutzman lays down a rhythm and Hart answers and compliments it. This constant musical exchange echoes the line, “Shall we go, you and I while we can?

I am put in a very calm place when listening to this song. It makes the outside world disappear, as Garcia’s lines soar back and forth, high and low. The fact that I don’t know exactly where it will go upon an open listening gives me great excitement as well. I feel uncertain, but comfortable in the uncertainty. The song makes me embrace chance happening, just like the Dead do when they play this song.

Onto-historical
This particular performance was on New Years Eve, 1978 at the Winterland Ballroom. The concert was dubbed, "The Closing of Winterland" as it was the last performance the Hall would ever see.

When the Grateful Dead were writing and performing this song in the 60’s and 70’s, live music was undergoing many changes. Electric instruments had taken the world by storm and loud rock n’ roll was being born. The Dead borrowed the performance styles of the contemporary jazz musicians (most notable John Coltrane) and electrified it with colossal sound systems and effected instruments.

Their music was deeply rooted in the Psychedelic movement of the 1960’s. The style of playing you hear during songs like Dark Star was developed at The Acid Tests in California, a multi-media jam session during which audience and performer would take LSD together. From there they developed a very conversational style of playing that was happening in bands around them as well, in bands such as Cream and Pink Floyd. It was in settings like these that musicians began to communicate with each other simultaneously, a scenario that lays the foundation for extended improvisations.

Formal Analysis

The recording opens with noise from the audience as the band walks out on stage to start their final set. The piano player noodles a little and the drums are checked for levels. Then the bass improvises a melodic line to which the audience responds, “Dark Star! Dark Star!” Here it comes:

Section One: Jam
The first section of the piece is Improvisatory based on a simple chord progression I ii/VII IV I (ii/VII refers to the fact that they alternate between playing it as a ii and VII). It is a 2 bar pattern in 4/4 time signature. The first bar is all a I chord. The second bar starts with the ii/VII. The IV chord comes on the “and” of 2 and sustains through the rest of the bar.

Building an on Idea:
Building on the basis of this progression, the guitar and bass begin to improvise. With the support of the other guitar (Wier) and piano (Godchaux) as a melodic foundation, the Garcia plays fast 16th note mixolydian patterns. The bass also plays melody lines, but usually keeps the movement between whole notes and eighth notes. The bass’s rhythm provides contrast to the guitar’s leads by syncopating the downbeats, oftentimes coming in on 2 instead of one. This section continues for 7 minutes, slowly building momentum and volume.

Section Two: Verse
At 7 minutes into the piece, the instruments end their improvisations and the rhythm guitar falls into original chord progression consistently. Once the rhythm guitar repeats this pattern 8 times, the vocals enter over the progression. The melody is doubled by the lead guitar. I will refer to the

I VII IV I VII IV I VII IV I
Dark Star Crashes, pouring it’s light in the ashes
v
Reason tatters, the forces tear loose from the axis.
I VII IV I VII IV I VII IV I VII IV
Searchlight casting for faults in the clouds of delusion.
I VII IV III IV V IV III IV v
Shall we go, you and I while we can
I III IV V IV III IV v
Through the transitive nightfall of diamonds?

lyrics by Robert Hunter

Section Three: Jam on...
Coming out the words “ nightfall of diamonds” and the minor five chord, another Jam ensues, over the same progression as the opening. During this section, polyrhythms are incorporated by the lead instruments (guitar and bass) to displace the beat, which leads to the eventual transition to the next song.

At 10 minutes into the piece, the major one chord modulates to a minor one through a melodic line hinted at in the lead guitar and bass; the rest of the band follows suit a couple measures later. They then suddenly land on a minor V chord (10:45) and speed up the tempo and modulate time signatures to 6/8 to prepare themselves for the next song “The Other One”. The tempo modulation comes from a signal from the lead guitar, the drums remain in 4/4 for 4 measures after the guitar shifts and then they follow after the other melodic instruments have locked in with the lead.

Recording Techniques:
The performance was originally presented as a TV and radio simulcast. The performance was mixed live first on stage by the musicians (they were using a musician-mixed PA system called “The Wall of Sound”) and then leveled out backstage, presumably by their sound man Dan Healy. For this particular recording, the analog tape of the multi-track recording was salvaged, digitized and mixed and produced by David Lemieux and Jeffery Norman for its HDCD release in 2003.

Historical Analysis

The band is made up of 7 people:
Jerry Garcia (guitar+vocals)
Bob Weir (guitar+vocals)
Phil Lesh (bass+vocals)
Bill Kreutzman (drums)
Mickey Hart (drums)
Keith Godchaux (keyboards)
Donna-Jean Godchaux (vocals)

The band itself was born in the Early 60’s (under the name The Warlocks), and solidified its lineup by about 64 calling themselves, "The Grateful Dead".


Influences:
The Grateful Dead are best known for their contributions to the Psychedelic Rock genre, which started around 1964 in San Francisco with a similar movement going on in England. Other groups that influenced or were influenced by The Grateful Dead (in some cases it was both) were:

The Jefferson Airplane, The Beatles, Pink Floyd, Quicksilver Messenger Service, The Byrds, and the Beach Boys.

The Origins of Jam Rock:
The Dead were very original in their genre because they were one of the pioneers of it, at least in America. They adopted the form of their live concerts from the Jazz musicians of the time, most notably John Coltrane. Dark Star is a prime example of this amalgamation. He did this by incorporating long improvised sections into their standard blues songs.

The Dead’s use of this style led to the creation of what we today call Jam Rock, where long sections of the concert are totally improvised with songs running into each other often without set lists.

Compositional Style in History:
The Dead utilized many different structural forms in their songs, but predominately relied on the 12 bar blues stanza form. Because Garcia’s roots lied in bluegrass, their vocal harmonies are reminiscent of the old-time country songs of the previous era. As stated before, they also incorporated jazz forms into concerts. They also drew from the classical movement of the time, incorporating lots of indeterminacy into the music. It is this amalgamation of textures that placed no limit on their stylistic possibilities.


THE META-CRITIQUE

As far as the analysis itself is concerned, I feel it was quite comprehensive. Certain sections may have been more helpful that others.

The Syntactical analysis, for example, was an awkward task. Songs like Dark Star do not translate easily to a Schenkerian Analysis. Even thought it was not necessarily a difficult task, some may feel that this mode of analysis takes something away from the piece. On the contrary, I found it to be quite beneficial as it let me see the song in a way that I had not before. If I could have I think I would have dove a little deeper into the intricacies of the harmonic progression outlined in the jams. Perhaps in time that analysis will come.

The Open Listening was harder than I thought it would be. Because i've heard the song so many times, it was hard to get rid of my preconceived notions about it. Hopefully someone who hasn't heard this version can post a comment or two on that section and give their 2 cents.

Hope you enjoyed the analysis. PLEASE leave some comments and add to the page.