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Wednesday | Memphis Blues ONE OF my favorite songs in the Dylan-Grateful Dead genre is called Stuck Inside of Mobile with the Memphis Blues Again. Man, I just googled it and found out this song first came out in 1966, on the album "Blonde on Blonde" -- the last record in the early era of Dylan's career. I fell in love with it after seeing Dylan perform it with the Dead playing backup at Giants Stadium in 1987. My friend JJH gave me a tape of the show...and I was transfixed. I lost the tape, and then a couple of decades later, thanks to one of the editors I write for, a friend of a friend of somebody in San Francisco who knows, well, whatever, I was given some CDs of the Dylan set as well as two Dead sets beforehand. Great stuff. It's the Garcia guitar solos. They are these soaring intricate improvised melodies, and he plays three of them laced between the stanzas. Very difficult to describe, but...he steals the show. Not that this is new. As Mr. Leo with an Aries Moon, Garcia usually was the show, and these three melodies he basically makes up on the spot, in the middle of this long tale of Dylan's about being in the right place at the wrong time, tell the story so vividly. The Dead covered this song hundreds of times. To tell you the truth I've never been a big fan of their cover. But I have this recording called "Nightfall of Diamonds" on my iPod. It's a commercial release of the Oct. 16, 1989 show, again at Giants Stadium. This is a special show because it's one of the later shows where an old, amazing song called Dark Star was played. There are those nights when Garcia was good and nights when he was so far over the top beyond brilliant that I could barely stay in my body. I was not at this 10/16/89 show...but...taking a nap a moment ago, Stuck Inside of Mobile came up on the guitar. This was two years after the Dylan-Dead tour...they had practiced it a lot for that tour two years earlier. Bob Weir did the vocals as usual -- and his voice doesn't quite have that stinging, ironic quality that makes Dylan's so much fun. But, who cares. Garcia's solo came up and...in this state of half sleep, it just exploded into color. One of the reasons he is so amazing is how many notes he plays and how the rhythms all fit together. Another is now he just pulls these sounds you've never heard out of nowhere, out of thin air or the 19th dimension. Another is that he plays on the chromatic scale -- on a piano, that would mean the black notes and the white ones, so he can do nearly anything and still be in key, and he has that many more choices of what notes to play. But then there is the energy, the radiant, exuberant celebration, like a peak moment on an acid trip. Notes and these exotic sounds going off in every direction, but in perfect constellations, bursting into clusters...reforming into new clusters, revealing their otherwise unexpressable idea, and then disappearing. Then there's the story. Here's a little, in Dylan's words. When Ruthie says come see her Yep, right place at the wrong time. Here are the rest of the lyrics. http://www.bobdylan.com/songs/memphis.html The recording is called "Nightfall of Diamonds." Here's a link to the Grateful Dead store's page for the product. The album is amazing from the first note to the last, and has many of the Dead's best songs. http://snipurl.com/qltn | ||||||
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