Save Your Face

Since we’re heading into the season of the long, slow sunset, here’s a mix I created for that scenario 35 years ago. I was a prematurely sentimental-romantic-nostalgic type of person, about the finish college in Ann Arbor. The places I lived had exceptional views of the sunset. 

Started in 1985, the mix steadily expanded from one cassette to two-and-a-half-hours, then, around 2000, I sub-curated it into a single CD that I could burn. This is that version.

I and this mix are a mutually-reinforcing seasonal loop at this point. Is there an actual, coherent vibe that could work for anyone else in 2021? I have no idea. I make no excuses or apologies for this musical message from a different time (of me and the world). 

Try this for your own golden hour on some summer evening, and then make your own mixtape and share it back.

CD-length mp3 mix here

• Spanish Moon (live): Little Feat
• Fun to Be Happy: Love Tractor
• Warm & Soothing: Kate Bush
• Lions: Dire Straits
• Orchid Girl: Aztec Camera
• Wild Kingdom: Alex Chilton
• The Ink in the Well: David Sylvian
• Prisoners: The Rain Parade
• North Star: Robert Fripp & Daryl Hall
• In Your House: The Cure
• Les Amoureux: Bill Nelson
• Horizons: Genesis
• Flesh #1: Robyn Hitchcock & The Egyptians
• Thrasher: Neil Young
• The Birth of the True: Aztec Camera
• Evaporation: Shriekback
• The Chauffeur: Duran Duran
• Follow Me Home: Dire Straits
• California: Joni Mitchell
• The Charm of Transit: Bill Nelson

Cover: John Hilgart collage for the first cassette iteration of this mix, 1985.

This mind-melting curation of early live recordings by The Dream Syndicate is testimony from a witness: Los Angeles writer Matthew Specktor. He has created three live albums that carry you from the band’s first show, through “The Days of Wine and Roses,” and into a full live preview of “The Medicine Show.”

Matthew Specktor:

If you’ve ever been to Los Angeles as a visitor you know how hard it is to estimate distances. Like any city, perhaps, LA is small only to those of us who live here, whether because we’ve hacked the shortcuts to avoid traffic or because we’ve constricted our private map of it enough to make it feel convenient, but when I was a boy, growing up in Santa Monica, Hollywood was the back of the moon. Punk rock, which happened to hit just as I reached puberty, was hardly accessible. The Starwood, the Vex, the Whisky—places where bands like X or The Germs were playing on the regular—felt far away, never mind that it was only a matter of a handful of miles, and so those bands were alive on my turntable but no more present to me as “local” than the ones I was listening to from England. 

But there was a club on Pico Boulevard called the Music Machine, which happened to be reachable by bus. It was almost in Santa Monica, in a liminal zone that bleeds closer to Westwood and Mar Vista, and if it wasn’t a punk venue exactly, it was likewise punk-adjacent. The Gun Club played there, and paisley-revivalist bands like The Three O’Clock. And also one, erroneously lumped in sometimes with a scene called the Paisley Underground (which was probably an erroneous category to begin with; the bands involved sure didn’t sound alike, and seemed to share in common only a more affectionate awareness of rock history), called The Dream Syndicate.

There’s really no way to explain what it was like to walk into the Music Machine on a fall evening in 1982 and hear the Dream Syndicate live for the first time. I’d read about them—an article in the LA Weekly had alerted me that they may have sounded a bit like the Velvet Underground—and I think I’d purchased an EP at Rhino Records in Westwood by then too, but to be confronted by the band’s full-on trebly, howling, feedbacking glory in the flesh was a whole other matter. It’s difficult to explain because it wasn’t just the music, or even the presentation (sure, they were cool as hell, and they looked it, but there was some other factor involved here, a gestalt that meant they weren’t trying to look that way at all, the way other bands did). 

It was a cohesion expressing itself as an argument: four musicians who absolutely belonged together, but who also (in musical terms, I’m talking; I have no idea what the interpersonal dynamic was like) cannot possibly agree. It gave the music a force, a vitality, a second-to-second spontaneity like nothing I’d ever then witnessed. I fell in love on the spot.

I’ve gone searching for that feeling everywhere ever since, and so I was shocked when I discovered recently that there are dozens of early Dream Syndicate shows that were recorded, whether by audience member with a Walkman or posterity-aware sound engineer or radio station, available on Archive.org. What shocked me isn’t so much that the shows were recorded—of course they were recorded; anyone who heard them for thirty seconds knew this was something to be preserved—but that the quality I describe above is absolutely legible in the recordings. 

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Throughout the Dead’s career, there are improvisations so perfect that they seem, in retrospect, to be compositions, arranged perfectly, played only once.

A subset of those are performances that exclude the drummers, allowing Weir, Lesh, and the keyboardists to spontaneously weave gorgeous textural arrangements around Garcia story arcs. 

They are tiny planets that coalesced in the vastness of space – often lasting only a minute, rarely as long as three minutes.

With shape and momentum, but no beat, these passages sometimes brush up against classical music. In October 1972, they may actually be attempting something like that, in form and bowed string-sounds, long before MIDI. (I find 10/23/72 mind-boggling in this respect.)

Later, keyboards and MIDI enabled simulated strings, brass, woodwinds, pedal steel, etc. Sometimes the band sounds like it’s scoring tender scenes in movies or playing in a Bill Frisell zone. The extended, heartbreaking melody they crafted on 10/2/94 is another of my favorite Dead passages. 

The earliest hints of such music are in the beauty-seeking drones and tones that often followed noisy Feedback in 1969. Compilation of those here. 

The mix below hints at the subsequent history of the this gentle mode with selections from just a few, far-flung periods: 1972-1973, 1981, 1993-1995.

30-minute, 12-track, mp3 mix zipped up here

This mix gathers up Easter eggs that the Dead scattered across their 1976 shows. The title and track list come from this Dead Essays/Light Into Ashes guide. 

It’s quite a trip to know you’re listening to 1976, yet all you’re hearing are big, extremely-together, nimble, out-of-nowhere jams. The fullness of the the manifestation confuses your inner-ear timeline.

The jams come in many flavors, and some taste quite quite a bit like Tighten Up, Stronger Than Dirt, and Dark Star. Fire on the Mountain makes its first live Dead appearance as Happiness is Drumming. The other passages are entirely their own trips.

This mix contains 16 tracks, including some vigorous Playin’ jams from the same shows and instrumental edits of two Wheels and a Wharf Rat that were integral to the surprise trips.

83-minute mp3 mix zipped up here

This mix compiles improvisational highlights of six different live configurations of the Dead (whole or members) and other musicians. 

All of these performances appeared on an earlier Save Your Face mix at some point. The focus of this sub-curation is to concentrate great stuff that sounds really different from “normal” Dead of the period. The stuff is that is more literally far out. Alternate universe Dead.

No aspersions are being cast on anything I didn’t include. Poke around SYF for more from nearly every configuration presented here.

In addition to choosing start- and end-points, several performances are edited: The Crosby material is presented as instrumental edits; the Elvin Bishop jam is extensively edited to isolate one theme from other stuff that happened; and the Volunteers Jam has been shortened via a couple of edits.

77-minute mp3 mix zipped up here

• Jam (8/28/69 Harbeats w/Howard Wales, organ)
• Jam (edit, 10/30/68 Hartbeats with Elvin Bishop, guitar)
• Wall Song & Laughing (instr. edits, 12/15/70 Crosby, Garcia, Lesh, Kreutzmann)
• Jam (11/20/70 Garcia, Weir, Kaukonen/Lesh/Kreutzmann, Hart)
• Volunteers Jam (edit, 9/6/69 Garcia, Hart, Jefferson Airplaine)
• Dark Star (8/3/69 w/unidentified sax and violin players)

The Save Your Face blog has gradually accumulated a pretty nice mixtape tour of the Grateful Dead’s rise to maturity - 1968-1970. The mixes start with the first recorded appearance of the big-jam-sequence in January 1968 and end with Mickey Hart's last month with the band in 1970 (until 1975).

These mixes almost entirely dodge officially-released material and only include well-recorded, exciting performances. 

The objectives are to:

• Fill in calendar gaps on your shelf of official live releases and favorite tapes
• Highlight transitional and secret-history moments in the band's musical attitude and lineup
• Draw circles around notable moments in the band's improvisational evolution
• Blow out some beguiling "lost songs" into album-length experiences
• Reveal 1968-1970 to be the most heterogeneous and routinely surprising period of the band's musical history

Below are links to all the 1968-1970 SYF mixes so far, in chronological order.

January 1968  

To the Eagle Palace: The earliest possible, most-inclusive-possible, draft of the jammy sequences that would change and mature in time for “Live Dead,” a year later. 

January 1968 - January 1969

Clementine (1968-1969): An extensive dive into the Dead’s first jazz jam, including full performances and instrumental edits.

June 1968

Live highlights from a lesser known month/moment-of-development, taken from little-known tapes.

June 1968 - November 1970

At Tens & Sevens: A compendium of The Main Ten, The Seven, and a little bit of The Eleven. 

August - December 1968

Late 1968: Live unreleased highlights from a period of intense maturation.

October - December 1968

Fate Music: The juiciest minutes from the Mickey & The Hartbeats recordings.

January - December 1969

Tones: An album’s worth of the quiet passages that often followed the noisy part of “Feedback.”

February 7-15, 1969

Do Not Step on Alligator: Alligator Jam > Caution Jam > Feedback is the earliest zone of Dead “thematic jamming,” captured here in three versions from the same week “Live Dead” was recorded – with the “Cautions” edited to instrumental jams.

Late Summer 1969 (August 2 - September 7)

Not the Wild East: Live passages, recorded mostly at The Matrix (a tiny venue), within a month of Woodstock. This mix finds the band as broadly heterogeneous as at any moment in their career, with guest musicians almost being the norm.

August 1969 - October 1971

The Tighten Up Jam

September 17, 1969 (Alembic Studios)

Single –  Sawmills b/w Seasons of My Heart: A couple of adorable studio outtakes of cover songs that slide into the nascent “Workingman’s” ethos.

Cartoon Music: Highlights of the band seriously practicing and taking taking random shots at Looney Tunes and other cartoon music.

December 1969 - January 1970

Mason’s Children Jams: A half-hour of five performances of “Mason’s Children,” edited into instrumental jams.

November 6, 1970

Instrumental Electric Set: A ripping, audience-only recording edited into an extended, vocal-free jam.

November 20, 1970

Grateful Airplane (Garcia, Lesh, Weir, Kaukonen, Kreutzmann, Hart): A unique jam-band formation that produced unique results.

December 15, 1970

Grateful Dorks (Crosby, Garcia, Lesh, Kreutzmann): The only live recording of David and the Dorks, purified into an instrumental jam. IMO, some of the most remarkable music of the Dead's recorded history.  

December 12-31, 1970

Skullf*ckery: Live highlights from the very end of the first two-drummer period, featuring songs from the 1970 albums, while also prototyping the one-drummer "Skull & Roses" recordings that would happen a few months later. This mix also provides extensive coverage of the moment's big jam, "Good Lovin'."

This mix offers an extended, instrumental excursion into a wonderful song that appeared briefly in Dead history and didn’t make the original, official records. 

“Mason’s Children” debuted in mid-December 1969 and, after fewer than 20 performances, it was last played at the end of February 1970.

A weird amalgam of psychedelic moves and the band’s new, old-timey vocal approach, Mason’s was a tough song for the vocal ensemble. The “Workingman’s Dead” studio outtake is the only version that properly represents the composition itself and reveals what the vocals/harmonies are supposed to sound like. 

Nonetheless, the live band dove into it with vigor and sometimes jammed it rather extensively. This mixtape highlights that jam by removing the vocals from five performances of the song. I looked for the longer, exploratory takes and those that found interesting little dynamic pockets.

The final version on 2/28/70 is a real outlier – slower, with a heavy Rolling Stones vibe. (It is speed/pitch-correct.) 

26-minute mp3 mix zipped up here

Instrumental Mason's Children:

• 12/28/69 (6:56)
• 12/29/69 (5:54)
• 12/31/69 (4:48)
• 2/5/70 (4:46)
• 2/28/70 (3:10)

Cover photo: John Hilgart. Detail of mural on the wall of the Kalamazoo People's Food Co-Op, after a car crashed through it, and the mural's painted bricks were reassembled randomly. 

This mix compiles the extensive jammy material from the Dead’s Spring ’81 Cole Field House show. Check out the track list and timings to get a sense of what’s special about this show. Jesse Jarnow breaks it down here.

The source is Barry Glassberg’s excellent audience tape. I have added gentle segues to connect Bird Song to Lost Sailor and Jam to Truckin’, so the only pause is between Black Peter and Deal. Songs are in as-played order, except for the placement of Deal as the big finale.

73-minute mp3 mix zipped up here

• Bird Song (17:08)
• Lost Sailor > (6:10)
• Saint of Circumstance > (9:20)
• Jam (9:27)
• Truckin’ > (11:39)
• Black Peter (9:16)
• Deal (10:04)

Try out the best seat in Pittsburgh’s Stanley Theatre with Frank Streeter’s glorious tapes of two nights in 1981.

This mix curates and edits material from the second set of each show, preserving the real segues and creating a couple of imaginary ones. (“>”in the track list, below, indicates a real one.)

My 40th anniversary, on-this-day, listening guide to 1981 is Jesse Jarnow, via his @bourgwick show-by-show histories and listening notes – for 3/5 here and for 3/6 here.

108-minute mp3 mix zipped up here

March 5th (64 minutes):

• Jam (w/o Garcia) >
• Passenger
• Scarlet Begonias Jam >
• Fire on the Mountain
• Playin’ in the Band
• Not Fade Away >
• Intro Jam > Wharf Rat

March 6th (44 minutes):

• Estimated Prophet (edit) >
• Franklin’s Tower
• Spacey Improv >
• The Other One >
• Intro Jam > Stella Blue (edit)

Here’s a 24-minute 1981 “Playin’ in the Band” jam to fight your favorite 1974 version.

I’ve edited the epic, unreleased, 3-part, 3/2/81, Cleveland performance into a continuous, instrumental event that includes the relevant passage from space. (“China Doll” and drums broke up the performance.) This was the first “Playin’” of the year.

 A longish, spicy, instrumental edit of  “Supplication” is the encore. I’d hoped to weave it into the “Playin’” sequence, but it didn’t work. Still, a logical pairing with “Playin’."

Half-hour, mp3 mix zipped up here

• Playin’ in the Band (3-parts + space instrumental edit) (23:35)
• Supplication (instrumental edit) (4:50)

Cover image: Detail of Nora Hilgart-Griff photograph