it was played at maybe every 4 shows
I suppose that my population sample may be skewed (I saw the Grateful Dead and Jerry Garcia Band perform live many, many times in the late 1980’s-early 1990’s) but I dont think I have ever met anyone who liked the studio albums but didn’t enjoy attending Dead shows or listening to live concert recordings…
Once again the SDMB continues to open my eyes to new perspectives.
I think this perspective is much more common, proportionally, than it used to be, simply because the band isn’t (really) playing any more.
The spring 2009 “The Dead” tour was surprisingly for-real, though, with Warren Haynes and Jeff Chimenti and the rhythm section. I’m not the only who felt it was not only the best post-Jerry Dead family kick, but better than the last couple years of Jerry’s tenure too.
When the band was playing, there were a few people who became intimately familiar with recordings, including concert bootlegs, before their first show, but that was a tiny minority.
Most people either heard the music first at a show, or were introduced by Deadhead friends who then quickly facilitated their going (or perhaps dragged them) to a show–and there were usually plenty of shows going on. A lot of neophytes or skeptics were converted by the animate combination of the scene, the music created on the spot, and (sometimes) the drugs. I don’t know how many stories I heard of someone who went to one concert with their Deadhead buddy, were stunned, had revelations, caught a fire, and immediately wanted to do another show. As far as I knew, people never reacted that way to other groups, even when they’d had a great time at somebody’s concert–plan on seeing them again in a year, maybe.
Once you’ve been in that cauldron, as it were, it was usually a lot easier to hear the potion working in the recordings.
Now, for the most part, the recordings are it. So again, there will be a small number of people who encounter the right Dick’s Pick, or whatever, in the right context for themselves, and somehow make the connection that most people used to find first at shows. I probably wouldn’t have been able to do that.
For most people, it seems to me, the live recordings don’t quite work if one doesn’t have the foundational experience from the band’s touring days.
I’m not totally in your camp, but I certainly understand where you’re coming from. I have a Rule of Thirds about Dead shows: one third of it is good rock-and-roll/alt-country, a third is transcendental music, and a third is excruciatingly boring jams or experiments that didn’t work. Even at a show in person, the same proportions held it’s just that the boring parts you didn’t mind nearly as much, and the trancendental parts were even better.
I enjoy live Dead so much more in the CD age, when I can make a copy without the Drum/Space jam, or even get a WAV editor and snip out the meandering and pointless 10-minute jam in the middle of “Playing in the Band”. And can hit ‘skip’ when I don’t feel like 13 minutes of “Morning Dew”.
I mean, one part of Heaven has Jerry inventing on the spot a brand-new short solo for a classic song, and one part of Hell has a scratchy, poor-quality bootleg cassette of a crappy 1982 show playing on and endless loop.
it did take a while for the new guy to get good.