Each Friday I pick a song–new, old, borrowed, blue–that’s been on my mind and in my ears, and write a short post about it.

Here’s “Black Muddy River” by Grateful Dead (song starts about a minute in):

Grateful Dead– “Black Muddy River”

Jerry Garcia died 9 August 1995, and with him, the Grateful Dead as an active band came to an end. They played their final show on 9 July 1995 at Soldier Field in Chicago, a show that I attended, and from which this recording is taken. I’m pretty sure The Band was the warmup act that night. I was never a huge Grateful Dead fan, but I did like them, though I’ve barely listened to them over the last fifteen or so years. Those long guitar solos that meander into the night are hard to listen to on a bootleg cassette, which I think is maybe part of the point: you kind of sort of really I guess had to be there; some music is only meant really to be heard live, or at least resists (in ways that other types of music don’t) the near-duplication of the recorded form. I saw the Grateful Dead a couple times, and I remember driving back to the suburbs after this one and thinking that it’d been a particularly great night of music.

For those of you who overdosed on hippiedom during that song, here’s the counterpoint, courtesy of NoFx.