Get Shown the Light

Get Shown the Light
Author: Michael Kaler
Publsiher: Duke University Press
Total Pages: 174
Release: 2023-10-13
Genre: Music
ISBN: 9781478027324

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Of all the musical developments of rock in the 1960s, one in particular fundamentally changed the music’s structure and listening experience: the incorporation of extended improvisation into live performances. While many bands—including Cream, Pink Floyd, and the Velvet Underground—stretched out their songs with improvisations, no band was more identified with the practice than the Grateful Dead. In Get Shown the Light Michael Kaler examines how the Dead’s dedication to improvisation stemmed from their belief that playing in this manner enabled them to touch upon transcendence. Drawing on band testimonials and analyses of early recordings, Kaler traces how the Dead developed an approach to playing music that they believed would facilitate their spiritual goals. He focuses on the band’s early years, the significance of their playing Ken Kesey’s Acid Test parties, and their evolving exploration of the myriad musical and spiritual possibilities that extended improvisation afforded. Kaler demonstrates that the Grateful Dead developed a radical new way of playing rock music as a means to unleashing the spiritual and transformative potential of their music.

Cornell 77

Cornell  77
Author: Peter Conners
Publsiher: Cornell University Press
Total Pages: 276
Release: 2017-04-11
Genre: Music
ISBN: 9781501712562

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On May 8, 1977, at Barton Hall, on the Cornell University campus, in front of 8,500 eager fans, the Grateful Dead played a show so significant that the Library of Congress inducted it into the National Recording Registry. The band had just released Terrapin Station and was still finding its feet after an extended hiatus. In 1977, the Grateful Dead reached a musical peak, and their East Coast spring tour featured an exceptional string of performances, including the one at Cornell.Many Deadheads claim that the quality of the live recording of the show made by Betty Cantor-Jackson (a member of the crew) elevated its importance. Once those recordings—referred to as "Betty Boards"—began to circulate among Deadheads, the reputation of the Cornell '77 show grew exponentially.With time the show at Barton Hall acquired legendary status in the community of Deadheads and audiophiles.Rooted in dozens of interviews—including a conversation with Betty Cantor-Jackson about her recording—and accompanied by a dazzling selection of never-before-seen concert photographs, Cornell '77 is about far more than just a single Grateful Dead concert. It is a social and cultural history of one of America's most enduring and iconic musical acts, their devoted fans, and a group of Cornell students whose passion for music drove them to bring the Dead to Barton Hall. Peter Conners has intimate knowledge of the fan culture surrounding the Dead, and his expertise brings the show to life. He leads readers through a song-by-song analysis of the performance, from "New Minglewood Blues" to "One More Saturday Night," and conveys why, forty years later, Cornell '77 is still considered a touchstone in the history of the band.As Conners notes in his Prologue: "You will hear from Deadheads who went to the show. You will hear from non-Deadhead Cornell graduates who were responsible for putting on the show in the first place. You will hear from record executives, academics, scholars, Dead family members, tapers, traders, and trolls. You will hear from those who still live the Grateful Dead every day. You will hear from those who would rather keep their Grateful Dead passions private for reasons both personal and professional. You will hear stories about the early days of being a Deadhead and what it was like to attend, and perhaps record, those early shows, including Cornell '77."

Deadhead Social Science

Deadhead Social Science
Author: Rebecca G. Adams,Robert Sardiello
Publsiher: Rowman & Littlefield
Total Pages: 308
Release: 2000
Genre: Music
ISBN: 0742502511

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Deadhead Social Science is a collection of papers examining various aspects of the complex subculture surrounding the rock band, the Grateful Dead. Deadheads, as Grateful Dead fans are called, followed the band from venue to venue until the band announced their dissolution in December of 1995 and have continued to follow bands including various surviving members of the Grateful Dead since then. Deadhead Social Science addresses the questions: What is a Deadhead? How does a Deadhead identity evolve? Why would a person choose an identity that would be viewed negatively by a larger society? Why are Deadheads viewed negatively by the larger society? Is the Deadhead community a popular religion? How did a rock band develop a religious following? The book also examines the music, the role of vendors, and the reaction by "host" communities to the Grateful Dead and its following. One key theme in Deadhead Social Science is the interconnections among teaching, research, and personal interests written from a variety of social science disciplinary traditions.

All the Light We Cannot See

All the Light We Cannot See
Author: Anthony Doerr
Publsiher: Simon and Schuster
Total Pages: 560
Release: 2014-05-06
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 9781476746609

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*NOW A NETFLIX LIMITED SERIES—from producer and director Shawn Levy (Stranger Things) starring Mark Ruffalo, Hugh Laurie, and newcomer Aria Mia Loberti* Winner of the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award finalist, the beloved instant New York Times bestseller and New York Times Book Review Top 10 Book about a blind French girl and a German boy whose paths collide in occupied France as both try to survive the devastation of World War II. Marie-Laure lives with her father in Paris near the Museum of Natural History where he works as the master of its thousands of locks. When she is six, Marie-Laure goes blind and her father builds a perfect miniature of their neighborhood so she can memorize it by touch and navigate her way home. When she is twelve, the Nazis occupy Paris, and father and daughter flee to the walled citadel of Saint-Malo, where Marie-Laure’s reclusive great uncle lives in a tall house by the sea. With them they carry what might be the museum’s most valuable and dangerous jewel. In a mining town in Germany, the orphan Werner grows up with his younger sister, enchanted by a crude radio they find. Werner becomes an expert at building and fixing these crucial new instruments, a talent that wins him a place at a brutal academy for Hitler Youth, then a special assignment to track the Resistance. More and more aware of the human cost of his intelligence, Werner travels through the heart of the war and, finally, into Saint-Malo, where his story and Marie-Laure’s converge. Doerr’s “stunning sense of physical detail and gorgeous metaphors” (San Francisco Chronicle) are dazzling. Deftly interweaving the lives of Marie-Laure and Werner, he illuminates the ways, against all odds, people try to be good to one another. Ten years in the writing, All the Light We Cannot See is a magnificent, deeply moving novel from a writer “whose sentences never fail to thrill” (Los Angeles Times).

Live Dead

Live Dead
Author: John Brackett
Publsiher: Duke University Press
Total Pages: 145
Release: 2023-12-08
Genre: Music
ISBN: 9781478027614

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The Grateful Dead were one of the most successful live acts of the rock era. Performing more than 2,300 shows between 1965 and 1995, the Grateful Dead’s reputation as a “live band” was—and continues to be—sustained by thousands of live concert recordings from every era of the group’s long and colorful career. In Live Dead, musicologist John Brackett examines how live recordings—from the group’s official releases to fan-produced tapes, bootlegs to “Betty Boards,” and Dick’s Picks to From the Vault—have shaped the general history and popular mythology of the Grateful Dead for more than fifty years. Drawing on a diverse array of materials and documents contained in the Grateful Dead Archive, Live Dead details how live recordings became meaningful among the band and their fans not only as sonic souvenirs of past musical performances but also as expressions of assorted ideals, including notions of “liveness,” authenticity, and the power of recorded sound.

Experiences From the Light

Experiences From the Light
Author: Keidi Keating
Publsiher: Red Wheel/Weiser
Total Pages: 256
Release: 2015-01-19
Genre: Body, Mind & Spirit
ISBN: 9781601634337

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Experiences From the Light shares more than 50 fascinating stories of extraordinary, true-life adventures of light, including spiritual awakenings, near-death experiences, unexplainable synchronicities, and stories of love and heart. It sometimes seems that the world in which we live is falling apart. We are experiencing more turmoil than ever before and desperately seeking a light in our lives. Experiences From the Light will teach you to have faith in your life situations, warm your overwhelmed heart, remind you to look for the signs that the universe provides, and awaken you to new and bright possibilities. The stories in Experiences From the Light will astound and hearten you: An ill woman’s story of how she came close to death, and the extraordinary aftermath visitations by masters, angels, monks, and Biblical figures. How one woman found herself out of her body and walking up a staircase to a door of great light as her grandmother crossed to the other side. How a man’s distressing illness was instantly healed after he crossed into the light. Years of pain and suffering vanished in an instant, and the symptoms have not returned since.

Grateful Dead and the Art of Rock Improvisation

Grateful Dead and the Art of Rock Improvisation
Author: David Malvinni
Publsiher: Scarecrow Press
Total Pages: 297
Release: 2013-02-28
Genre: Music
ISBN: 9780810883482

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Over 15 years since the death of lead guitarist and singer Jerry Garcia, the Grateful Dead stands as a cultural symbol of the unresolved cultural clashes of 1960s. The band’s 30-year odyssey is a testament to the American imagination, with thousands of live concert recordings by fans and the band itself, preserved alongside a cultural iconography of images, artwork, and paraphernalia. Most recently, the Grateful Dead has stepped up release of its live archive of recordings, culminating in one of the largest boxed sets of live music—73 compact discs—ever released. This publicly available archive of recorded music lays the groundwork for David Malvinni’s exploration in Grateful Dead and the Art of Rock Improvisation on the band’s musical signature as the ultimate jam band. Malvinni considers a a select group of songs from the Dead’s early repertoire, from its unique covers of “Viola Lee Blues,” “Midnight Hour,” and “Love Light” to original masterpieces like “Dark Star.” Marrying basic music analysis to philosophical frames offered by improvisatory musings of Heidegger, Derrida, and Deleuze, Malvinni outlines the core aesthetic underlying the Dead’s musical styling. In tracing the evolution of the band’s unique jam style, Malvinni outlines The Dead’s gift as gatherers and collectors of old and new soundscapes in their improvisations. Like no other band, The Dead brought together a variety of styles from roots and folk to country and free jazz to postmodern European art music. Devoted Deadheads reveled in the band’s polyglot approach to playing live, its free-wheeling and often risky efforts to reach a type of cosmic ecstasy, commonly described as the “X factor.” Although fans and scholars alike recognize the Grateful Dead as icons of the psychedelic music, the band’s improvisatory approach still remains an enigma to the uninitiated. In Grateful Dead and the Art of Rock Improvisation, Malvinni unravels this mystery, walking readers through the band’s musical decision-making process. Written for rock music fans with little to no background in music theory, and scholars and students of popular music culture, the book reveal the method behind the seeming madness of America’s greatest jam band.

Studying the Dead

Studying the Dead
Author: Nicholas G. Meriwether
Publsiher: Scarecrow Press
Total Pages: 335
Release: 2013-07-11
Genre: Music
ISBN: 9780810891258

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Although academic study of the Grateful Dead began shortly after the group’s formation, the dramatic growth of scholarly literature only occurred after the band’s formal retirement of the name in 1995. One major incubator of much of this work has been the Grateful Dead area of the Southwest/Texas Popular Culture and American Culture Association. Inaugurated as a separate section in 1998 and nicknamed the Grateful Dead Scholars Caucus, it has produced almost three hundred papers over fifteen years, nearly a third of which have been revised for publication. Caucus presenters have also edited a dozen books and periodical volumes, all of which have drawn on Caucus presentations, some almost exclusively. Studying the Dead: The Grateful Dead Scholars Caucus provides an informal history of the Caucus and sketches its significance as a scholarly community, focusing on its increasing self-awareness, its ability to span diverse disciplinary and theoretical perspectives, and most of all, its contribution to our understanding of the Grateful Dead phenomenon. For the academy as a whole, the Caucus is a fascinating model for the development of discourse communities, from the role of orality to its interrogation of the texts that are derived from them. Remarkable for its interdisciplinary dialogue, the Caucus demonstrates how the nature of the art—and the phenomenon that it studies—can shape these discourses. Though ostensibly aimed at scholars of the Grateful Dead, others who will find this book of interest include students and teachers of popular culture, as well as fans of the band.