Re: One-time wonders folks should know about

On Apr 4, 6:56 pm, "J.C. Martin" <avantgr...@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

You don't think Bobby is one of the best rhythm guitarists out
there???

Nope. I think he’s without question the besterest evah. As I used to
say back in the day, Weir had no peer. He’s criminally under-
appreciated in the world at large and in Dead-dom. My point is that if
you Phil solo apologists want to use all that stuff about abstract and
“out” and whatnot to paper over the fact that he can’t solo, you gotta
apply the same line of argument to Bob’s slide stuff. He’s certainly
every bit the musician Phil is, just as unorthodox, and an even more
singular voice on his instrument, so why doesn’t Bob get the same pass
that Phil gets?

Interesting thread and all. I have no time to address any of this in
detail;

Heh. I’d like to see what a detailed analysis would look like, then.
Earregardless, first rate post, JC. This gets at the heart of the
matter quite nicely.

but yeah, I still maintain that outside of Mickey, Phil had
the easiest role in the band. As a consequence, he's been capable at
times of dragging the band down IMO, particularly in the 80's and
90's. He's gotten better; although I think he was best in the late
70's in terms of groove.

I agree with the concept, if not the precise times. For me, I hear
what you are saying and agree, but for me it wasn’t across whole eras
as much as it was at different times in different shows all over the
timeline.

In contrast to Phil's role, Jerry is stuck holding down both the
melodic and rhythmic fort - Bobby's phrases tend to slice in between
the beats; Phil IMO often rides over the band's pulse rather than
drive it - which is a huge responsibility for a guitarist on stage
with five other musicians.

When he was on, it was magic, but when he wasn’t, well, there’s a
certain clunkiness that sprouts up and is hard not to notice. I don’t
go collecting these things, so I can’t point to a specific example,
but I hear it often enough to have it bug me and know exactly what you
are talking about.

But that aside; I just don't understand
all this talk of atonality. Phil's bass playing is largely of the
melodic fare; the notes he plays are scale or mode driven with maybe a
few accidentals tossed in here and there . But there's nothing atonal
or heavy going on.

Yeah, this is the one that baffled me when it started drifting into
this thread. I don’t hear anything atonal or out going on in his
solos, or in his playing. Sometimes there’s this, for want of a better
term, non-tonal stuff he gets into during some jams where he get into
this static kind of thing where he isn’t moving around much, just
centered on a note or three, but theirs nothing that “out” going on
that I can hear. I’m not complaining about it, though, because I
really like the melodic stuff. Hell, my three favorite bass players
are him, Squire, and Entwhistle, so there ya go.

Heck, if he actually infused some of his playing
with atonality, I think I'd be much more impressed by his background.
But what I hear essentially sounds like a guitarist playing whatever
note he wants to in the confines of a given mode or chord progression;

Yup. This is what I mean by easy, in the sense of the least amount of
responsibility. He’s pretty much free to do whatever he wants whenever
he wants. Of course, I don’t think this is at all a bad thing, and do
not think he should be confined to a groove lockbox like lots of bass
players are. I like what he does far, far more than I like that other
role, and the Dead certainly benefited from it as far as their sound.

Brad’s right that not a lot of bass players can do what he does, so it
wouldn’t be easy for them. But most bass players are weird in that
they grew up playing bass and getting accustomed to the traditional
role of the instrument. Phil didn’t do that and instead grew up
playing a melody instrument. That, I believe, goes a long way in
informing his style.

and outside of his tone and use of the entire fretboard, I don't hear
any bass technique that most would want to emulate.

Yes, but for the Dead it was JEP.

I find that the
evaluation of his technique by Deadheads is largely over the top. But
that's juts my opinion. If someone can point out something that's
he's doing that is musically difficult, fill me in. Cause I can't hear it.

Me, neither, so I guess it’s not just your opinion, as I share it big
time. I think a lot of it goes back to the gospel that used to be
touted way, way back in the day about Phil being a genius and all
that. Now, I fully agree that he is a talented and often supremely
inventive and original player, don’t get me wrong, but from a strict
technical standpoint, he’s nothing special. Put him in some kind of
cutting contest with a bunch of great bass technicians and he’d get
his ass handed to him right quickly. I don’t really care about that
sort of thing, but the point is that he is not some amazing technician
doing really difficult stuff. He’s an amazing musician playing really
good music a large amount of the time, which I think is the better
deal.

He’s kind of like so many excellent athletes whose game far
transcended their actual skill level, while there are myriad musicians/
athletes who have all the tools to spare, but don’t have great game.
I’ll take the Phils and Larry Birds and Moses Malones of the world
over the players with all the skills but no real game any day of the
week.

There's no argument from me that Phil brings a profound
sense of history based on the music he's playing or that he has
exceptional ears. His melodic sense is interesting, even if odd, and
it's hard to imagine anyone else playing GD music better than him.
But I think that has more to do with his development within the band,
his enthusiasm for psychedelic music and his musical ears more so than
any bass technique that he's acquired over the years.

Yup. In short, it ain’t his chops, it’s his ideas. And, while we’re on
the subject, let me just say that for all his love of improv and
freewheeling and the coolness of the jams, I really do think that he’s
at his best during more conventional tunes. I’ll be listening to a
Peggy-o or Brown-eyed Women or Eyes or Stella or Bertha or what have
you, and where another more traditional player would just be anchoring
the thing down, Phil just drops these lines in there that are so
gorgeous they make me wanna cry.

Whereas I've
heard a certain degree of progression in Bobby and Jerry's playing,
I've never heard the same out of Phil.

Without question, Bob has had the most progression over time in the
band. He just kept changing things up stylistically all the way along.
Criminally underrated, as I never get tired of saying. Jer certainly
had his ups and downs, and lots of these were health and physiological
in nature, especially the coma, as I still firmly believe that though
he did lots of cool things afterward, he never quite got the full
batch of his chops back from where they were in eighty-thour before
the slide that begins in 85.

Fred
.

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