Our final years with the Grateful Dead: Chapter 3

One thing that has seemed to stick in my craw around the final years of the Grateful Dead was how deadheads related to the 'compromised songbook'.  At the time, it was common to hear people complaining about the 'new songs', as opposed to complaining about GD's actual performance that night.  Even today I still encounter people taking 92-95 (268 shows) to task for the songbook rather than the performances.

I'll be the first to admit that I had some serious issues with a lot of the new songs; how they would interrupt the 'flow' of a show or detract from the evening's accumulated momentum the band had harnessed.  It that respect I considered them a liability.  Upon the first 30 seconds of a new song, it was not uncommon to see the audience lose its momentum, and any iota of psychedelic energy that had been conjured up to that point would begin to dissipate.  This was especially apparent during 1st sets where psychedelic energy was a lot more precious.  2nd sets fared only slightly better for the band, given that they had the advantage of being able to both kickstart any intermittent loss of energy via the power of playing classic 2nd set songs, as well as having gotten their ensemble's sea legs for that evening.

But in my mind the criticisms or 'write-offs' of shows due to the songbook chosen that evening only served to obfuscate the obvious; which was, namely, that the actual Grateful Dead performances were suffering.  On this very particular subject I will digress for a moment to state that I instantaneously dismiss 90% of all 'deadhead commentary' outright due to both its lack of sophistication and objectivity, but that does not change the fact that I had to listen to it in real-time.  Perhaps even worse, I now have to read this type of uninformed criticism in online comments.  Little nuggets of shit like:

"Bobby wanted to be a dick, so he forced Jerry to play Easy Answers"
"Jerry wasnt feeling Stagger Lee, so he played Lazy River Road instead"

Just for the record, anytime I ever encounter anybody who structures their GD opinion around imagined band-member feelings (how can one know what a band-member was thinking or feeling???), I immediately know that I'm dealing with somebody less intelligent.  The same also goes for anybody talking about how a show was special because it was 'their birthday show' or because 'they got miracled'.  Those little things may mean something special to that particular person, but they illustrate to me that this person will substitute meaningless anecdotes as something to be quantified in our conversation; an immature habit that I refuse to endure because I suffer no fools.  But let us return to this concept of the 'compromised songbook'...

Many folks believe it began in 1992 (55 shows that year) with the introduction of:

Long Way to Go Home
So Many Roads
Eternity
Wave to the Wind
Corinna

And then continued in 1993 (81 shows that year) with the introduction of:

The Days Between
Liberty
Easy Answers
Lazy River Road

And saw further advancement in 1994 (85 shows that year) with the introduction of:

Samba in the Rain
If the Shoe Fits
Childhood's End

I spy 12 new original songs!  A whole album's worth of material - 4 Jerry songs, 3 Bob songs, 3 Phil songs, and 2 Vince songs.  Quite an expansion of the songbook (as far as 'originals' are concerned).

To further complicate matters, there were 10 new cover songs introduced from 1992-1995 too:

Take Me to the River
Baba O Riley
Tomorrow Never Knows
Broken Arrow
I Fought the Law
That Would Be Something (yes - I realized it was debuted, and played once, in the Fall of 1991)
I Want to Tell You
Rain
Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds
Rollin' and Tumblin'

To say nothing of 11 reintroduced cover songs:

The Same Thing
I Just Want to Make Love to You
King Bee
Gloria
Satisfaction
The Race is On
Midnight Hour
Nobody's Fault But Mine
Good Morning Little Schoolgirl
Matilda
Visions of Johanna

4 bust-outs of old original songs:

Alabama Getaway
Supplication (wow- talk about an unrehearsed mess, but still so much fun at the time!)
Casey Jones
Here Comes Sunshine

And last but not least, 2 older originals that they had never played before:

Salt Lake City
Unbroken Chain

So if you add it all together there were 39 'new songs' that entered and changed the songbook during GD 92-95 (268 shows).  I'll speculate for a moment and imagine that if you were a member of the band it was likely refreshing to be playing all this new stuff.  Probably having played so many 'crowd favorites' for so many years, they became quite tired of many of these 'crowd favorites'.  Remember - a lot of the band members were at every show ever played.  If you think that your little deadhead-self grew tired of Easy Answers, perhaps a band member grated his teeth during Sugar Magnolia or Friend of the Devil.  But plainly stated, if you were in the audience, or 'on tour' for that matter, you were having to seriously accommodate the band member's indulgences with these big changes to your 'sacred set lists'.

It was as if Vatican II was happening to the Grateful Dead scene.  The Holy Mass that you attended was no longer in latin and now the priest no longer had his back to you.  25+ years of tradition were being messed with, and not by any exterior forces, but by the psychedelic apostles themselves!  However, as devout parishioners we remained steadfast in our faith.  We kept going to the shows.  And heaven forbid that we show some introspective ability and actually address the lack of holy presence during our mass!  No, we instead chose to whimper about the new brand of crackers being used when we received the Eucharist.

As pilgrims we had no choice but to endure this test of our faith.  We rationalized it by explaining how many times they played Alabama Getaway in 1980, Estimated Prophet in 1977, U.S. Blues in 1974, or Bertha in 1971.  But again, I say our eye was not on the ball!  The real issue was not a lackluster songbook (although, at times, it certainly didnt help), but rather how sloppy the GD performance was, how quiet the sound was at the shows, and how lame the scene had become.  Our time of reckoning was at hand, and the only happy trails we were going to see was the unattractive prospect of 'getting on with our lives'.