remember being at the Oakland Auditorium outside San Francisco on New Year’s Eve 1979, seeing the Grateful Dead. The cloyingly sweet smell of marijuana was thick in the air and I had a strange hallucinogenic experience at one point during the show; it literally blew my mind.
Given that we jointly entered a new decade that night, the feeling of being in that moment was quite tangible; and the music became a ritualistic celebration of time itself.
Still, no Grateful Dead studio album has given me that same vivid felling of the here and now. For that experience in recorded form, I would instead pick the eponymous debut from a band sometimes referred to as the Grateful Dead of the old world, namely Mighty Baby.
‘Mighty Baby’ really does sound like a captured moment in time. In fact, it sounds like right here and right now even today: light-footed and genre hopping, as inclusive in its warts-and-all sound as it is insular in intent, and presciently detached.
The Beatles spoke for a whole generation and so did punk. Today, musicians tend to speak only for themselves. So did Might Baby; and in this they were fundamentally different from the Grateful Dead.
Then again, if you were to ask me what the music of the future sounds like, I would actually pick Mighty Baby’s sophomore effort, ‘Jug of Love’. On this album, they develop a sound that is as organic as it is fluid. While they obviously followed the Byrds’ lead into the country, Might Baby added a deeper jam band level that, while maybe technically comparable to what the Grateful Dead were doing, took a much more introspective musical direction.
After spending the 80s and much of the 90s with synths and machines, as we entered the new millennium, music increasingly seems to have no other way forward than to turn away from artifice and back to humans. What does it sound like when musicians understand each other? Listen to “Jug of Love” and you will know. Here is the sound of something very handmade and spontaneous, yet excitingly interdependent and complex.
Having said that, as an experiment, the album stumbles at times, in particular on the bluesy and slightly pedestrian ‘Keep on Juggin’’. Here, Mighty Baby really do become something of the Grateful Dead of the old world. (Indeed, as documented on the concert recordings, ‘Keep on Juggin’’ was a live favourite….)
Sem comentários:
Enviar um comentário