Check out the arpeggio that Jerry hits way up on the neck at 8:45 – it gets me right in the feelings. My favorite part comes about eight minutes in when the band quiets down. That D then becomes the tonic in D Mixolydian, the key of “Morning Dew.” “St Stephen” is in E Mixolydian mode, but it unexpectedly ends on D, the bVII chord. It follows immediately on the heels of “St Stephen” in a nifty harmonic pivot. The version I grew up on is the one from 5/8/77, which is less crisp, but quite a bit heavier. The version from The Grateful Dead Movie is probably the cleanest recording available, both in terms of performance and sound quality. After a few years, they started slowing it down and stretching it out, until it turned into the epic ballad that we know and love. The Dead put “Morning Dew” on their first album, where they played it too fast and not too well. You can hear her sing it over a much cooler arrangement in this duet with Robert Plant. “Morning Dew” was written by Bonnie Dobson, inspired by the movie On The Beach. This t-shirt is funny, but the song itself is pretty extraordinarily horrifying. ![]() ![]() That is not the expected way to close out a set of hedonistic hippie rock. But those missiles are all still there! The Grateful Dead ended a lot of their sets with a tune about what it would be like the day after the missiles launched. ![]() Now we worry about different things: the climate, the pandemic, the impending collapse of American democracy. Do you ever think about how there are several thousand nuclear missiles sitting in silos around the world, ready to launch at a moment’s notice? When I was a kid in the 1980s, that was the main macro-level anxiety lurking behind day-to-day life.
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