Tag Archives: writing

Sting Goes Rogue or The Audacity of Dream of the Blue Turtles

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It takes guts to walk away from the biggest band in the world. It takes defiance to then make an album that seemed designed to confuse everyone from the record company to the critics to the fans. That is exactly what Sting did in 1985. On his solo debut, “The Dream Of The Blue Turtles,” he made a statement of intent that was equal parts refusal and provocation.

Looking back it was a fascinating gamble. There was no easing into a post-Police identity, no transitional record, no pussyfooting. He followed his instinct and assembled a band of jazz assassins to make, what is at first listen, a pop record that revealed so much more just below the surface.

The opener, “If You Love Somebody Set Them Free,” is pure pop poetry, bright and bouncy, with a great hook, but listen closer. Lyrically it is a clean break from the possessive paranoia of “Every Breath You Take.” Musically, the rhythm doesn’t sit still, the groove breathes and flexes; the band orbits each other refusing to lock into place. This made the critics and record company uneasy because it was too slick for jazz and too fidgety for pop. They were all shouting, “What is this album supposed to be?”

Sting doesn’t give an easy answer, and ultimately just pushed a answer further away the deeper you get into the album.

“Russians” barely qualifies as a song in the pop sense. It is piercing, frozen in the Cold war, set to a borrowed piece of classical music and delivered with unflinching seriousness. The words pleading for common humanity, something so simple that at the time was seen as radical. The critics again were flinching at what seemed like gravitas coming from the pop reggae guy.

“Russians” is followed by “Children’s Crusade,” and the jazz ambitions are front and center. It asks a lot; dense, intricate, rich chords and an open structure. It’s heavy and doesn’t offer the listener an immediate reward, requiring instead engagement. The critics hated it because it didn’t distill it’s subject matter into a neat digestible slogan.

But it isn’t all like that, toward the end of side two we get “Moon Over Bourbon Street,” which gives us resolve and clarity for everything that came before. It is moody like a lot of the album. Narrative driven and atmospheric, the music serves the story instead of vice-a-versa. Branford Marsalis sax paints the edges, almost haunting them and you are carried away on the melody before being pulled in by the lyric. It all make sense now, Sting’s ambition coming through and the sense that he can inhabit many world’s at once.

He had built something at the intersection of rock and jazz that wasn’t quite the solo album anyone expected. In 1985 this was unheard of; jazz phrasing, pop hooks, and a political conscious with no critical framework. The critics said “Pick a lane,” Sting built an overpass.

And there is your disconnect: the record companies wanted continuity, the ‘new’ Police, critics wanted him all in or all out of the jazz tradition. What the fans embraced was an artist in transition: experimenting, overreaching, occasionally borrowing, but moving toward something new.

The fans were all that mattered in the end. The album sold millions and the songs have endured. The questions about genre and identity have been washed away. Sting could lead a virtuoso band, blur boundaries and still hit the pop charts.

We had the privilage of watching an artist morph into his next stage. That’s why “The Dream of the Blue Turtles” still holds it’s own where a Police rip off probably wouldn’t.

Watching A Panel Discussion On The Work Of Frank O’Hara

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Frank O’Hara thought he was a funny guy. He did this, then he did that, and he told you about it. Now we have panels dissecting each word as if his poems were dead; a post mortem where they declare today is devoid of such brilliance. They don’t realize poetry is not dead, it’s just not in their classrooms and textbooks.

There seems to be a disconnect and I think it starts with a faulty supposition, the notion creation of a poem is Idea> Artist> Text. Here, the artist is expressing or reproducing systems and the material text is almost a byproduct. From a small sample size of poets, me, I find this so off-base. Any idea I sit down with is quickly hi-jacked by the storm of thought and feeling that force themselves into language once I put pen to paper. The process should be framed Artist> Text> Idea. Here, meaning through making, not before, the medium – word, sound, form – shapes thought.

Frank was gay, the critics and academics make sure every word he wrote reflects that. They tell using fifty cent words that roll out like a jingle of jumble and jargon. They don’t see, poems should be, just be, fill space between the first cup of coffee and the long walk back up stairs to get dressed for another day at what you call ‘job.’ Don’t pay attention when the voices from the university shout “You missed the point” because you didn’t look at it the right way.

I like Frank, have since I first read him in the mid eighties. Today I learned he was gay. Does it change ‘having a coke with you’ if the speaker is speaking to another man? No, I still love it for the tone, the rhythm, the power of new love it captures. Do I read it differently? No, because my purpose as a reader is to allow myself to feel, to frame those words through the lens of my own experience. It teaches me I am not alone, that others have felt what I do and through image manifested in language take me back to personal experience.

Perhaps the critics and the academics need to come out of the mildewy halls of university that are draped with wrath, where whispers are overheard of the poet being dead, and step into the light. Close their eyes and listen, understanding is optional. They should get back to the basics, get lost in the image, bathe in the rhythm and and let the prosody swell in their loins. Touch that cold dark place where wonder once swelled at the word. Shot out of a cannon into the continuum. Poems live in that liminal space and let you commune with god.

Awake in the Static or The Prelude to a Renaissance

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There is an energy out there, a strange tension in the air. It’s not jubilant or even hopeful, hanging just below the surface. Think when a band is between songs, time hangs for a minute, the amps hum, the mic crackles, and no one is sure what will happen next. The one thing you are sure of, something is coming. It’s not over, there will be another song.

Culture is dead, or dying in real time, is the narrative we are being sold. It’s a TikTok take; the doom scroll version of something more nuanced. Just spend some real time with music or books, find places where people still argue about poetry like life depended on it, and you find another story. The death of culture is more a metamorphosis, unsightly and awkward but inescapable, than the end of all culture.

This is the counter rhythm to the noise, rumbling underneath the algorithm sludge, uncanny-valley AI, and endless disposable content. It is fragmented, not a movement yet. Scenes. Rouge signals.

People are reading. Not the clout seeking “I Read 50 Books This Year” you see on Facebook, something deeper, slower, stranger. People stumbling onto Dostoevsky at 2 a.m. like a secret society was hiding. People arguing about Melville like he just dropped his latest masterpiece a week ago. People digging deep into Virginia Woolf not because some institution said it was cannon, but because the words feed your soul, the sentences oxygen when you come up from your screen.

This is how culture shifts start, in bedrooms and libraries, a little unhinged, obsessive, personal.

Writing is back too; nobody is waiting for permission. There are voices speaking everywhere, on Substack, in indie ‘zines, at readings in backrooms of bars and coffee shops. You can still see the gatekeepers holding on, but their grip is tentative at best, less gods and more a final vestige of the old way.

People are defiant, creating art not because anyone asked but because they refuse to be erased. They are making messy things, uneven things, human things. They are carving a space where none was offered.

That human part matters more than it has in a long time. The AI backlash is real and growing, but unharnessed. People talk about ‘voice’ like it is something that needs to be protected at all costs. The beauty in imperfection is what we crave. Remember disco, the inhuman polish, and everyone suddenly wanting distortion again? People wanted something alive and before long there was punk and hip hop.

People want meaning. They are starved for it and they look back to the things that have stood for centuries like myth and mysticism. Anything that carries weight in a world full of pseudo profundity and off the rails conspiracy theories. It is that desire to feel awe and that the world isn’t just content, that there is depth, texture, even mystery.

Even these three hour podcasts that seem completely self indulgent or essays that find a hundred side roads before coming to something like a conclusion is a rebellion against compression. They are refusing the mantra of easily digestible, quick, and efficient; against the idea everything needs to fit in a scrollable box. Take it as a sign people are willing to try stretching their attention spans and pushing their brains toward capacity again.

All it will take to bring all these pieces together is an artistic breakthrough, a figure who steps out of the noise and pulls it all into focus; someone to make the meaning of this moment obvious. We are still compiling half-formed ideas that may never land in late night rehearsals and scattered jam sessions. It is prelude.

And that is what a renaissance looks like if you rewind to the decade before it’s start. There is no inevitability. It’s confusion, false starts, and people trying things that don’t work. They are arguing about what matters, the sense the old ways are done with only a notion of what will replace them.

You can call it collapse because we are in that murky middle between that past and future. Or you can put down your device, take a deep breath and realize there is something completely different going on. Somewhere just below the noise culture is turning up; awkwardly, imperfectly, maybe even badly, but real. When that spark finally catches fire it’s going to matter.

How Disco Stole The Soul: Disco and the End of The Sound Of Philadelphia

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There was a time when The Sound of Philadelphia ruled the airwaves with elegance; a lush soul symphony where they wore their hearts on their sleeves and in the span of one four-minute song you could go from heartbreak to hope.

They called it TSOP, the brainchild of Kenneth Gamble and Leon Huff. It was a hit factory that rivaled Detroit and Memphis. A hit factory that was a cathedral built on the tightest rhythm sections and elegant string charts. It preached the gospel of love. Love Train was a sermon. If You Don’t Know Me By Now was dressing up in your Sunday finest for emotional devastation. Their de facto theme song TSOP (The Sound of Philadelphia) offered salvation and was the blueprint for sleek instrumental glide. Philly soul was a complete package, it had something to say.

Everything was good, and Philadelphia International Records was racking up the hits, but things were quickly changing. DJs in nightclubs wanted longer grooves and started looping certain songs to keep the dance floor packed. These songs were all the same, beat forward, the kind that became the backbone for disco.

The door had been cracked opened and disco crashed the house party: the furniture got rearranged, the lights were turned up, and the band was replaced with an endless, uninterrupted beat.

Disco first showed up like the guy someone knew. Everyone said he was cool. Turns out he was the guy who was yelling “The party is just starting” at three in the morning when everyone else had gone home. All of a sudden Do It Any Way You Wanna was being looped by a DJ and the song was now serving the groove instead of vice versa.

The church had been infiltrated and corrupted by disco. There was no going back.

There is one rule in disco, keep the bodies moving. Emotional depth had no place in a cocaine fueled delirium. The message became optional and any depth was cool if you fit in with the pulse, the four-on-the-floor that flies forward with no detours allowed.

Disco had conquered the dance floor, the music had flattened, slowly at first with the stories fading into slogans. Then the transformation quickened as white people discovered disco through movies like Saturday Night Fever and groups like The Bee Gees. The people in charge over at the record companies had their blinders removed and disco became big business. The Bee Gees became the face of the genre, making disco a generic universal vibe that had grandma dancing in the kitchen with the pre-teen kids. Every song on the radio had a mirror ball makeover in the late seventies.

The vocals too, they ended up riding the groove from the backseat, barely looking at the road. In Philly you had voices like Teddy Pendergrass who could break you down in real time, the notes pouring out like a confession from the depth of your soul. With Disco it was an endless chorus that was there to echo the beat.

The record companies loved it. They always love a formula. It was efficient, predictable, a groove that never changed. It is the kind of thing you could build a bank on. The songs got longer, slicker, and interchangeable. There was no band anymore, just a DJ, and they needed continuity and an endless stream of hits.

No more messy, human emotion driving songs. That was the domain of TSOP and Philadelphia International Records. Disco didn’t breathe or hesitate or get into a slow burn, those hallmarks were now a liability to profitability.

As with anything that is co-opted by mainstream culture and can be exploited by the suits running the record labels and radio stations, disco crashed. It burned bright, but burned fast. Remember Disco Demolition Nights? That was backlash coming quick and cancelling a whole glittery jacked-up culture.

Part of the wreckage was The Sound Of Philadelphia and the idea music could be a hit and be sophisticated and deeply felt all at once. The orchestra had packed up and left by the back door. TSOP wasn’t coming back either.

Disco has been rehabilitated through the warm lens of nostalgia, forgetting that in its short life it killed the Sound Of Philadelphia. A death that was far from merciful; more like 4 shots in the stomach and being left on the side of the road. It was seductive at first, then slowly the rhythm was turned into a beat that was so loud you couldn’t hear the heart underneath.

Disco celebrated specticle. TSOP testified; about love, about struggle, about community. Then it got steamrolled into a smooth, shiny, easy to sell piece of gold.

Tedeschi Trucks Band March 18th 2026 Review and Recap

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There are bands that play songs, and then there are bands that play time. It is stretched, bent, allowed to breathe until a four minute song becomes a whole emotional weather system. Tedeschi Trucks Band are that band, the , one whose shows are like walking into a Southern soul revival where the sermon comes down in distorted guitars, screaming brass, and gritty vocals.

Last night at the Beacon in NYC, midway through their 10 show residency, this was on full display. From the opening tune Hear My Dear thru to the Space Captain encore, Derek Trucks played slide so liquid it seemed to be melting the frets. He plays like other people breathe, with an unconscious inevitability, like there is no difference between the instrument and the hands holding it.

Standing next to Derek is his partner and the true gravitational center of the band, Susan Tedeschi. When she steps up to the mic the room shifts, warming and welcoming you. She sings in that rare liminal space between gospel confession and beer soaked barroom blues, a rare combination of tenderness and grit. Even the covers feel like she owns them, they become her joys and heartbreaks.

Susan is complimented by Mike Mattison, who took the lead several times during the night including a down and dirty take on Dylan’s Down In The Flood, and keyboard wizard Gabe Dixon whose vocals add an angelic feel. And they are just two of this musical juggernaut.

Tedeschi Trucks band are different from most jam adjacent acts, both in the professionalism and huge sound with the dozen musicians on stage. Horns, back ground singers, and dual drummers, the band becomes a soul soaked mini orchestra under the influence of the Allman Brothers Band.

The night’s set list was a strong mix of covers, originals, and new tunes. Hero, with their producer Mike Dandelion on bass, was the strongest of the new material. It’s “I’m not your hero / I’m not a zero” chorus hits hard and Susan brings it home with her vocal performance.

The horns added punch comes on like the ghost of Stax records. Blind Faith’s Had To Cry Today took on a whole new life. The rhythm section churning in a patient groove, letting the moment swell and build, right before it all locks in and there is a collective exhale.

Nels Cline came out toward the end of the recently added Loving Cup and stayed through Sleepy John Estes’ Leaving Trunk and Rahsaan Roland Kirk’s Volunteered Slavery. It became an extended blues work out stretching twenty minutes. Trucks and Cline traded solos, moving deftly from quiet to a spiral of sound that sounded as if it was defying gravity, while the band raged behind them.

That is where the magic lies, whether taking disparate covers and making them feel brand new or their ever expanding catalog of originals, they take the entire history of American music and make it alive.

The band closed with Matthew Moore’s Space Captain and we all swayed as one. It burned slow in our souls, the chorus of “Learning to live together” ringing in our ears as we spilled out into the cold night, warm for the brilliance we had been bathed in.

They may play Southern rock, blues and soul, but what they really do is play the moment those sounds collide. It reminds you why live music matters when a band like Tedeschi Trucks walk on stage and make life a little bit better.

Set list: Hear My Dear, Fall In, Little by Little, Last Night in the Rain, Until You Remember, Down in the Flood, Isaac/Kebbi Jam, Let Me Get By, Hero*, Tangled Up in Blue, Had to Cry Today, Soul Sweet Song, The Sky Is Crying, Looking for Answers, Loving Cup**> Leaving Trunk**> Volunteered Slavery** E: Space Captain (* With Mike Elizondo on bass) (** With Nels Cline on guitar)

Side One, Side Two, and the Death of Discipline or How Streaming Killed The LP

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Listening to a record is ritual. You gently remove the vinyl from the sleeve, place it on the turntable and lower the tone arm. Twenty minutes later you lift it, flip the record and play side two.

Side one had the big opener, the one with the hook, and the radio single. Side two you’d get a little deeper, vulnerable or weird, and often find magic. It was a formula, one created by the constraints of the medium of the music’s reproduction, the LP, as much as the song length. The format directed decisions made by the musicians when deciding what would make the final cut.

There is beauty in this discipline. Twenty-three minutes maximum per side. You had a physical boundary, a hard stop. You had to earn each side. There were ruthless choices to be made. “Does this song deserve a larger audience?” “Does it belong on side one or is it a B-side for a single?” “Does it earn its spot or is this other one better?”

The ultimate editor was time, pitting songs against each other.

This dynamic made the greatest albums. They wouldn’t exist without it. It was a death match in the studio, every song fighting for a spot. Then came the sequencing and another fight. Track one, side one had to kick in your teeth while the side one closer had to make you want to flip the record and once you did you needed to find a warm welcome back.

Things were good, then there was something new, the compact disc, and the Pandora’s box it opened.

74 minute, pushing double LP space. All of a sudden artists had an extra 29 minutes or so. It was heralded as freedom. It was also marketed like freedom: musicians could give the fans everything.

Sadly, they did.

Editing? Optional. That tight ten song LP? Sixteen tracks of sprawl. Songs that would have been on the cutting room floor in 1979 were now Track 14, neatly sandwiched between a remix and a moody acoustic demo no one quite believed in. There was a bad case of bloat. Continuity disappeared with the death of Side One and Side Two. It was no longer a journey, it became a fall down a rabbit hole.

Then just as quickly things shifted again. Enter the internet and the emptying of Pandora’s box.

Time limits? That’s funny. No sides. No runtime. No physical format to provide some guardrail, some limit, some voice to say “Maybe cut this one.” You can upload everything now: half-baked demos, that jam that sounded good in the moment, the song you wrote taking a dump in under twelve minutes because you got to feed the algorithm. It was no longer about making an album, but producing output.

The art of keeping things locked in the vault had become extinct.

That is the problem, constraints make mediocre art great. Twenty minutes or so per side, you think like a storyteller. Every note must contribute something to the albums flow; you cut a decent song in favor of a great one. The fate of a song becomes argued like it is a life or death decision.

And it was.

There is a difference between a good album and the ones we call masterpieces and that is determined, often, by what we never heard. There are miles of tape in dusty studio storerooms holding thousands of hours of okay tracks that lost the argument. Thank God it happened and they died so the album could live.

That is the crux of the matter, there isn’t necessarily too much music, it is there is too little editing. We don’t need to hear every idea a band has, we need the ones that they fought to keep.

This is something vinyl knows.

That’s why we’re still flipping the record.

The Poetry-Industrial Complex: Who Decides What Poetry Is?

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You can hear it in barrooms and coffee shops, that old gripe that poetry is run by gatekeepers. The real stuff, the guttural, late night truth, doesn’t live in magazines of MFA workshops. It lives on the street, in the unfiltered voices whose rhythm is a jackhammer that reveals diamonds.

And they would be right.

There is a strange little ecosystem, a poetry-industrial complex so to speak. It is made of small magazines, university presses, and workshop networks. It follows fashion and rewards proximity.

The right editor at the right reading and you might get the nod. That old cliché about who you know has become the invisible submission guide. If you want recognition, and who doesn’t, this is the sanctioned road, the tried true way of carefully crafted, worked over until nothing unpredictable survives poetry forged in workshops. It can be electric, but it is more often than not so well behaved it loses its truth.

Academia asks the poet to translate them self into something publishable, full of language theory, perfect iambs and workshop norms.

But there is another side, another scene, like the pirate station you can find if you turn the dial just a little and let the static bleed. It is the poems that spill out from the feedback of an open mic night on a half broken PA. It is the words that fill the backs of junk mail and little notebooks walking home from a 10 hour shift.

These verses don’t care if they’re publishable. They stick like a song you can’t shake. Think Patti Smith with three chords and a confession that hits like a sledgehammer, or Gil Scott-Heron detonating thought bombs mid-line.

The poetry that refuses to ask permission to exist. The defiant poetry that shows up and dares you to look away.

The problem is that no one sees these poems. The system that decides who gets published also works as a system to filter voices. The record kept is incomplete, magazines are archives of what a small insulated group thinks is poetry. People who I am sure are trying to, imperfectly, make sense of what matters, but only hear echoes.

Not making this into some mustache twirling villain situation. It is just the system doing what it does, narrowing. That is where the tension swirls, somewhere between saying what matters and having the poem be something that might last.

You end up with a disconnect. Poets smoothing the edges of their voice to get in the door or refusing to compromise and risk their voice being unheard.

Poetry isn’t owned by magazines or collected anthologies of the ‘best new poets,’ but magazines do act like a style book defining what is considered a poem at the current moment. The real stuff, the messy, unrepeatable, blood and sweat poetry happens elsewhere, off the page.

If you listen close, somewhere between a whisper and a scream, you can hear it, where nobody’s asking for credentials to have your voice heard.

Review: Johnny Blue Skies Goes Rogue On Mutiny After Midnight

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The artist formerly known as Sturgill Simpson has always been an outlaw, the kind who kicks open the bar door and asks why the jukebox keeps playing the same 6 songs. With Mutiny After Midnight, released under his alter ego Johnny Blue Skies, he’s taking it a step further and kicking the whole damn jukebox down the stairs.

Luckily we get to dance on the wreckage. Dance to a record that is a horny late night groove throw down. Equal parts outlaw country, disco, and psychedelic experiment, we find an LP full of bar-band verve when the clock is calling closing time. The music you put on when the lights are dim and the conversation turns strange.

With his backing band The Dark Clouds we get a class in old school rhythm. The songs move, and make you move, but not like the suits in Nashville would like it. It is loose, hypnotic, as much a jam session as a tightly constructed studio product. The guitars scintillate while stretching grooves, the keys swell and the drums and bass are locked in with the swagger you have on a Friday night when everyone gets paid and everyone wants to get laid.

The lyrics zig zag between frustration at the political landscape in America, keeping your dark side in check, and the half horny musings of a midnight philosopher. We find a broken America, full of bruised bodies begging for freedom, recounted with Sturgill’s wry humor and biting criticism. His sincerity is that irreverent shrug, it never feels preachy and that is the magic.

This is an artist who understands absurdity, he can take topics and phrasing that make the Music Row pundits cringe and turn them into an invitation to party. It is rugged charisma, provocative but playful, that has you chuckling as you’re cutting the linoleum carpet.

Critics may call out that the album feels unfinished. Those critics don’t understand that is why it works, why it breathes. It is trying to be alive, not perfect.

Johnny Blue Skies is going up against the machine, eschewing the trap of chasing algorithms and meticulous branding to make a dystopian disco protest joint. It is a greasy, naughty, sometimes deranged manifesto about sex, drugs, and what it really means to be an American.

Not the album America asked for, but maybe the one it needs.

The Revolution Inside: Laura Nyro

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Some people sing your soul, hitting the deepest parts of you; they give you a safe place to be vulnerable. Unexpalinable without a deep listen, Laura Nyro isn’t a playlist recommendation, she is a catalyst for spiritual awakening.

You know her songs. “Stoned Soul Picnic,” “Wedding Bell Blues,” and “Sweet Blindness” became gold for the 5th Dimension. Blood, Sweat & Tears turned “And When I Die” into brass soaked timelessness. Three Dog Night taught us to hide our hearts in “Eli’s Comin’” like our lives depend on it.

But knowing the hits is only half the story.

Her own recordings eschew the pop trappings of Barbra Streisand and Linda Ronstadt’s interpretations leaving us with something rawer, truer. Choruses thunder in striking at the deepest part of you, tempos are fluid morphing mid thought, and melodies rise and fall like the tide. It is intimate, coming in flashes of calm and panic.

The streets were filled with revolution in the late sixties and rock took itself seriously, anthemic choruses and loud guitars were the order of the day. Nyro went the other way, her revolution was internal and not fueled by rocks more base instincts.

Instead she took a little from the Brill Building, gospel rapture from the Baptist church, Broadway’s penchant for drama, the sweet doo-wop from the street corners, and layered her street smart lyrics over top like steam lingering on summer asphalt. Melodrama became holy. Vulnerability became a badge of honor.

She wrote her first hit at seventeen and by the time Eli And The Thirteenth Confession came out she was already a master of pure pop goodness, invitation and incantation at once. Close your eyes as her voice goes from alluring to despair in a breath on Poverty Train. Let the title track’s chorus roll over you as she joyously shouts devotion and defiance.

It can be a shock to the system going from a whisper to a scream, following her instincts in the dark glory on New York Tendaberry. The edges weren’t smooth and that was revolutionary in an era of pop waifs and folk goddesses. This was sensual, operatic, and then abruptly funny or ferocious. The opening strains of You Don’t Love Me When I Cry sneak up you, asking you to lean in closer before knocking you back through a wall. This was a demand, to be felt, not just heard.

The list of artists who fall under her influence includes names like Elton John, Joni Mitchell, Rickie Lee Jones. Even artists who you may think sound nothing like her owe her a debt. The emotional maximalism, the touch of jazz phrasing, the narrative bravado made the pop structure stretch, morph, and land like a gut punch.

At one point she decided to stay home and just be mom, stepping back from the grind with stubborn integrity. She would come back from time to time, Smile in the mid seventies, and in the late eighties when she toured regularly and released new music. The passions may have changed, the songs found an earthier feel, but the intensity never waiver. It was almost as if she had found the peace she was seeking as a young songwriter.

1997 saw Laura leave the planet. Too young. Fuck cancer. But has she really left us? She lives in all the artists who worshiped at her alter, seeing that pop music was more than product. It was a reckoning of trembling piano and a chorus shouted from the roof tops, walking the line between restraint and abandon.

As much as the sixties were about rebellion, they may have been more about possibility. A chorus outside the rules, she heard the future and brought it into the now. She gave us hits, but also permission, when you felt too much, were too much, to look at the dark.

That is what rock and roll always wants to be.

Ripple Effect or Stop Me If You Heard This Jam Before

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You are at a show. The local Grateful Dead cover band is rocking the house. Then you notice for the last twenty minutes you hadn’t really been listening. Your brain had been vacillating between “Where is the bathroom?” and getting lost in the glow of someone waving the flashlight on their phone like it’s 1979. Both guitarists are staring down at their fingers running the fret baord like they are trying to decipher a hidden truth from the cosmos. The drummer and bassist are locked into the same mid tempo rock groove they have been playing since Clinton was in office. Someone to your right is singing off key and the wrong verse.

Then you have a revelation; ‘I’m done with this.’

Don’t misconstrue it, this isn’t anything against the sacred ground I place the Grateful Dead on. That is something that is vast as continents. There are entire emotional ecosystems that live inside songs like Terrapin Station, Let It Grow and Eyes Of The World; songs so encompassing they map large parts of your life.

The problem is trying to recreate that.

There was a time when seeing Grateful Dead cover bands filled my social calendar. It had ritual, an unpredictable predictability. Every midsize city in America had at least one Dead cover band that has been playing Wednesday nights since before we had dial-up internet. It was as dependable as the sunset when you wanted to check out for a few hours mid work week.

Then at some point gravity shifted.

The musicianship was the first crack in the facade.

Don’t twist it, there are a lot of fantastic players who work their nine to five all week and can replicate Jerry Garcia’s mystic tone. They know it like their own DNA. The runs that pierce like shards of ice. The bastardization of the Bakersfield outlaw country twang. The free jazz sprawl that sounds like a demented saxophone.

On the other side are a lot of bands that are, at best, fine.

Not terrible or mortifying on any level, just fine.

The keyboard is nailing that Brent Myland early eighties slick. The guitar player knows the runs like the back of his hand. The bassist is doing jazz runs over the drummer who does the work of two drummers without derailing the train. They play St Stephen better then the Dead did and can launch Darkstar into a solid fifteen minute voyage through outer space.

But it feels like looking at a picture that was photoshopped.

The Dead were never clean, never perfect. That was the beauty of it, the potential for degeneration into chaos at any moment. Tempos are a suggestion. Everyone solos at once. Jams turn into runaway lawn mowers.

What held it together was their sixth sense.

That is what is so sorely missing with cover bands, you get the skeleton without the flesh. They know where the heart goes in a jam, but there is no blood. It is like watching Bob Ross do paint by numbers.

The room starts to morph. It feels weird.

You go to enough Dead cover band shows and it reads like a formula for a sitcom. There are the guys who think they are still on the lot at RFK in 1989. The couple who slow dance to everything from Ripple to Truckin’. A few college kids getting beer drunk.

And then there are the characters who had run around your life at some point, in a forgotten past.

You know what I’m talking about.

People who you hung out with in high school or college. They shared the same orbit as you because you were both navigating this scene and discovering the same musical worlds. You see them once every few years at best, mostly within the gravitational pull of Dead cover band shows.

A tap on the shoulder. An awkward hug.

“Hey MAN! It’s been years!”

You pull up the card catalog of memory, try to put a face to a name. There are fragments of a conversation, but it is a time or place lost to alcohol or LSD.

Now comes the small talk.

“What are you up to?”

“You still (arbitrary activity)?”

“How is (person you think you both know)?”

The band is still chugging on, roaring through a 3rd reprise of Viola Lee Blues. You are nodding “That’s crazy” for the twelfth time and mapping out how to get to the front door so you can grab a smoke.

Small talk is the worst kind of improvisation because no one says anything. A lot of “I’ve been busy,” and “Things are good.” Maybe a mention of a job or kid or big move coming up.

Searching for some connection in the memory of a dream you once shared.

The moment you realize you are no longer part of that tribe.

At one time Dead culture was a secret handshake. You would be walking through the mall and see someone with a Steal Your Face shirt and you would knowingly nod. You knew they were your people without saying a word. It was an underground community.

But you can’t stay underground forever.

There is distance as you stand there watching the band launch into Bertha for the four millionth time. The spark you felt before is gone, recognition without joy. As if you are suddenly back in high school. The hallways are the same, the smells, the whirl of bodies in motion, but the emotional nervous system is gone. There is a void. What these walls are remembering doesn’t exist anymore.

Maybe it is recapitulation on some level.

The Grateful Dead’s catalog demands endless reexamination. They did it every night for thirty years because they always believed the magic depended on it. They could take you to the deepest reaches of the galaxy and land you gently as you please on the other side.

This is a Herculean task for any band, let alone a cover band. The unpredictable element is what suffers. The songs can feel lived in, but without being there when they were built you don’t know what is behind the walls.

You can write the set list driving to the show. A big opener, a few shorter warm ups, a big jam or two to close the first set. Second set you get the jam vehicles, a Dark Star or Playing In The Band, maybe even a Terrapin Station if they are feeling themselves.

Time is frozen. The music and the audience.

1980s Deadhead culture is in full force. People don their uniforms and the room becomes a museum full or tie dye, patchouli, and Birkenstock. If it only felt alive instead of like a historical reenactment.

Evolution is all that maters ultimately, constant mutation and bringing in new styles like the Grateful Dead did. When they failed it was still interesting because they were pushing the envelope.

A cover band by definition does the opposite, capturing a band in a place and time.

That is nostalgia impersonating investigation and as you get older nostalgia starts to seem strange. No longer does it serve as a safe corner where your memory is of consequence or searches for comfort that the music that made you still existed in the wild.

The corner becomes suffocating.

The room is full of chatter on an endless loop. “Best show ever,” “favorite Franklin’s Tower,” mushrooms or acid, who made the best grilled cheese on lot.

But you are far from that anonymous hockey arena’s parking lot.

You have found other parking lots and sometimes just silence.

You outgrow things, not because there is anything wrong with it, but because you got everything you needed from it.

Last night the band started a stirring version of Brokedown Palace late in the night. Everyone drifted side to side in unison. People whispered the lyrics in quiet reverence.

I stood there watching, an observer in a church that was no longer mine.

I love that song, it can bring a tear to my eye, but the feeling I remember sharing that deep connection with everyone in the room had quietly expired.

The music was what I loved, but here it became background noise to a social ritual that was no longer mine.

I am mourning a community that helped me become who I am, that was home, but now seemed like a place that wasn’t even comfortable to come back to. All the people I used to be fill the room, you can hear the small talk and debates echo.

And the music doesn’t stop.

The band launches into another rave up. Someone spills a drink. I go outside to grab a smoke.

It’s not that anything is inherently wrong in the moment, just my inner compass is telling me my North star is somewhere else. There is no anger at the band or judgment of the people who still find salvation here. I love that they still have that, alive inside something that meant everything to me once.

The band played one more song as the clock approached midnight. The crowd move in closer to the stage to bask in the glow one last time tonight.

And maybe that is all that matters. The music exists for the people who need it. Sometimes I am sure I still will, but for now I’ll just slip out the side door. It’s like hopping off a carousel and leaving the gold ring for the next person.

In a few weeks they will play again.

I am OK with missing it.