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.

View on the music

There's a great discussion taking place on my colleague Brant Newman's blog, View on the News. The topic is "Who Are Your Musical Heroes?" and people are coming out of the woodwork to express their two cents' worth.

I had to respond because Brant placed the Grateful Dead in the "overrated" category. It's not like I've never heard that before. In fact, that's one of the first things I heard about the band back in the '70s. So Brant isn't alone. But I still have to stick up for my musical heroes ...

Another of my big-time heroes is the late Frank Zappa, who, of course, is another acquired taste. Let's just say that no one has explored the genres of rock, jazz, classical, R&B, doo-wop, avant garde, electronic and even flourishes of blues and country -- not to mention humor -- the way FZ did. And I'm betting that no one ever will.

'Very first gig ever'

I posted a video of the Patti Spadaro Band performing her composition "Tonight," as I really like the song and captured decent audio of it during her show Friday night at P.D.'s Pub in Squirrel Hill.

During the set's opener, a rendition of the Grateful Dead's "Franklin's Tower," I spent most of the song fiddling with the input controls, trying to get them to record properly. As I result, I pretty much just had the camera pointed at the stage.

I had pushed the record button just as Patti was announcing, "Our very first gig ever," so I figured I might as well post "Franklin's" as a piece of history. I managed to clean up the sound by stripping off the problematic channel, which was full of static, and playing around with the other to give it a little bit of depth.

As far as editing the video, I thought I'd leave it pretty much raw, since I wasn't doing anything with varying camera angles, etc.

I'll tell you that Patti said she had a cold that night, but her guitar playing didn't suffer whatsoever!

Click here to play "Franklin's Tower"

Grateful Dead Night redux

Back in the late '80s, Peter's Pub in Pittsburgh's Oakland section used to have Grateful Dead Night, playing cassette tapes of Jerry Garcia and company.

I hadn't been there since then, but decided to pay another visit recently to see Fungus, a band that draws much of its repertoire from what the Dead used to play.


A couple of years ago, I saw Fungus at an outdoor festival in Nottingham Township, and I really enjoyed the show. So when I received an e-mail from guitarist Dave Gasbarro about the band's performance at Peter's, I decided to take along some video equipment and see what happened.

I recorded the first set with the audio patched straight into the camera from the soundboard. That sounded OK, but fortunately keyboard player Mike Tony informed me that guitarist Terry Callahan's guitar amp wasn't running through the board. So I positioned a microphone directly in front of Terry's Marshall and ended up with a nice sound mix during the second set.

Following the show, I edited three videos, and I've posted three more songs as MP3 files. Take a look to your right, and there they are, for your Sound & Vision enjoyment.