Life's a long song

Some people like to hear a song that starts and ends in the space of three minutes. Short attention spans.

I certainly appreciate a concise, to-the-point tune. One of my favorites is Grace Slick's "White Rabbit," which in its Jefferson Airplane hit-single version lasts less than 2 1/2 minutes.

Then there's the other side of the equation.

I remember how excited I was to hear the full-length version of Peter Frampton's "Do You Feel Like We Do" – hey, I was 13 – when I helped propel "Frampton Comes Alive" to platinum status. Then I discovered that such songs as Iron Butterfly's "In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida" and the live version of Deep Purple's "Space Truckin'" took up entire sides of records.

And then … I was perusing albums in my favorite store when I came across one called "Live/Dead" by a group called the Grateful Dead. Although it contained two records, only half a dozen tracks were listed. To me, that meant some of those songs must have gone on forever, so I took the album to the counter.

Indeed, the first song, called "Dark Star," clocked in at 23-minutes plus. I put the disc on my turntable and started listening. It was like nothing I'd heard before, no fixed beat or chord changes, a free-flowing surge of instrumentation bookended by two brief vocal passages reciting thoroughly abstract lyrics.

Most listeners would have turned it off or left the room after a few minutes. I played it all the way through, then all the way through again.

Now that rock 'n' roll music has been around for half a century, historians can point to certain milestones, and "Dark Star" represents one of those: The Grateful Dead took the cue from John Coltrane and other masters of jazz improvisation, and adapted their methods to the rock idiom.

Critics at the time may have written off such sonic explorations as self-indulgent. But those who did apparently paid no attention to the effects of the music on the audience, particularly the Grateful Dead's audience.

I've been a big fan of "Dark Star" for more than three decades, and when I got the capability to do so, I downloaded dozens of versions of the Dead doing the song. The longest is 47-plus minutes in Rotterdam, the Netherlands, in 1972.

So my ears perked up the other night during a show by the Pittsburgh Dead-influenced band theCAUSE when bass player David Tauberg launched into the run that introduces "Dark Star." After all, I was capturing it for posterity.

To see the resulting video, click here. I added some goodies for those who appreciate the type of music being performed.

And while you're at it, check out the medley of originals that the band One Gig at a Time performed back in March. That makes for a lengthy listening experience, too.

Just the way some of us like it.