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Grateful Dead
Fillmore West 1969
(Rhino)
The Music Box's #1 specialty package for
2005
First Appeared in The Music Box, December 2005, Volume 12, #12
Written by John Metzger
To the untrained eye, 1969 may appear to have been a year of repetition for
the Grateful Dead. After all, a cursory glance at the set lists for its concerts
is apt to leave one with the impression that it tackled the same batch of
material, night after night, in more or less the same order. This, of course, is
only a small part of the story, and despite such superficial similarities, the
music dramatically was torn asunder and reconstructed at each of the ensemble’s
performances. In fact, 1969 — or, to be more specific, the four-night engagement
between February 27 and March 2 at San Francisco’s Fillmore West, which just
happens to be the subject not only of a comprehensive 10-disc box set but also
of a three-CD collection of highlights — was the culmination of a journey that
truly began with the penning of Dark Star in late 1967. Indeed, within
the song’s simplistic framework, the group’s rapidly growing eagerness to
explore collided with Robert Hunter’s lysergic poetry in an intriguing fashion.
Essentially, the tune became intertwined with the band’s DNA, thereby opening a
portal that led to a possibility-filled universe.
Although the Grateful Dead ruminated upon Dark Star (or some segment
thereof) more than 200 times over the course of its career, each interpretation
was remarkably different from the next. Sometimes, the journey was rattled by a
cataclysmic rupturing of the space-time continuum, through which leaked a
torrential downpour of planetary debris; other times, it was a breathtakingly
beautiful and utterly spiritual sightseeing sojourn across the vast terrain of
the cosmos. However, no matter which path the band opted to take through its
open-ended composition, the view consistently was strikingly scenic. It’s no
wonder, then, that in the minds of the Grateful Dead’s fanatical followers,
Dark Star was the group’s signature song.
Without a doubt, by the time that the concerts featured on Fillmore West
1969 were held, the Grateful Dead had perfected its freewheeling
improvisational approach, and nearly everything it touched dripped with the
psychedelic transcendence that was forged within the swirling vortex of Dark
Star’s revolutionary crucible. Arguably, then, the collection contains the
most primal music that the band ever unleashed. Although it remained tethered to
the R&B-flavored roots favored by harmonica and keyboard player Ron "Pigpen"
McKernan, the group had made tremendous strides in pushing the boundaries that
defined its music outward in all directions. Songs such as James Moore’s I’m
a King Bee and Sonny Boy Williamson’s Good Morning Little Schoolgirl,
for example, were given an intensely churning edge, while (Turn on Your) Lovelight was stretched exhaustively into a whirling fireball that bore
little resemblance to the tune that was popularized by Bobby "Blue" Bland.
Elsewhere, the contemporary folk of Bonnie Dobson’s Morning Dew presented
an affecting juxtaposition of the rumbling devastation and haunted mourning of
an apocalyptic future, and Rev. Gary Davis’ Death Don’t Have No Mercy
conjured a devotional fervor that tried in desperation to keep the hellhounds at
bay.
Still, it was the Grateful Dead’s original compositions that, while lacking
the structure of its later works, truly highlighted its experimental
inclinations. Blossoming out of the delicate, acoustic folk of Mountains of
the Moon, the rendition of Dark Star that appears on the second disc
of Fillmore West 1969 is utterly magnificent, and there are three other
equally astounding versions of the song on the more expansive Fillmore West
1969: The Complete Recordings. Guided by Jerry Garcia’s probing lead guitar
solo, the band proceeded to immerse itself within a burbling cauldron of
primordial ooze. Gliding past the outstretched arms of spiraling galaxies, the
ensemble took a detour to frolic in the garden with St. Stephen, careened
off the rambunctious delirium of The Eleven, and settled back into the
gravity-free overtones of Dark Star — only to become submersed within the
spiritual glow of Death Don’t Have No Mercy. Kissed by the variegated
electrical impulses of psychedelics, synapses burning on all cylinders, the
collective painted a multi-dimensional portrait of heaven and hell that
threatened to shatter the illusion of life itself.
As resplendently translucent as the Dark Star-themed segment was,
That’s It for the Other One found the Grateful Dead wrestling with a raw,
raucous, supercharged dynamo of seismic fury. Anchored by a thunderous stomp of
drums and percussion, the song exploded in a white, hot, atomic flash, its
molten melody tossed back and forth between Garcia and bass player Phil Lesh,
while Tom Constanten painted its corners with shimmering curls of cool, blue
organ. So dexterous was the band that it could stop on a dime and spin off in a
myriad of directions without ever sounding disjointed. Indeed, the nearly
30-minute jam that leaps from Alligator’s conclusion turns so many
corners that it effectively summarizes the entirety of the group’s four-concert
engagement at the Fillmore West.
Having reached its objective, the Grateful Dead soon would begin to scale
another mountain, and by the end of the year, many new ideas would be introduced
that would assume greater weight within the group’s repertoire and eventually
lead to the development of its Americana classics Workingman’s Dead and
American Beauty. Although the band never lost sight of its
improvisational disposition, it undoubtedly became more refined and mature in
its approach. After all, the unadulterated inventiveness and unbridled
exuberance of youth does not last forever, nor can it truly be manufactured.
Earlier this year, the Grateful Dead issued The Grateful Dead Movie
Soundtrack, a five-disc compilation of material from its October 1974
farewell concerts at Winterland, and while it was a superlative package that
fused together some of the finest music that the ensemble ever made, there
simply never will be another collection that is as monumentally groundbreaking
as Fillmore West 1969: The Complete Recordings. Not surprisingly, the box
set sold out two months prior to its official date of release, and as a result,
the rest of the world will have to settle for the condensed Fillmore West
1969, which, incidentally, is still a remarkable consolation prize. 
Fillmore West 1969 is available from
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Ratings
1 Star: Pitiful
2 Stars: Listenable
3 Stars: Respectable
4 Stars: Excellent
5 Stars: Can't Live Without It!!
Copyright © 2005
The Music Box
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