"DOES LENGTH REALLY MATTER?"

THE WONDERS OF THE INTERNET IS THAT IT NEVER STOPS GIVING(OR TAKING away, braincells and moments of your life you will never, ever get back). Every day is an anniversary of this or that. Every day marks some milestone you either never knew of or had forgotten. If you remember the game Trivial Pursuit, that's part of what the Internet, or at least social media, really is. Whether A.I. or human beings the regurgitation of trivia never stops. Unless you unplug from the Matrix.

So your sub-Reddit group informs you that 11/1/19 marks the 40th anniversary of the longest "Scarlet Begonias">"Fire on the Mountain" the Grateful Dead ever performed. Which of course means that you have to scrap everything you were planning to do(and eventually post) in order to reacquaint yourself with this fact. You listen. And you listen again. And again.

What does it mean? What does it matter? Recording the length is a trivial pursuit. It's a piece of knowledge you're probably glad you know, but it's strictly factual. No emotion is imparted within  the statement. It's a hollow notation, in and of itself. Off hand I don't know how tall the Eiffel Tower is, or the pyramids of Giza. I can have the knowledge within seconds, just a few clicks of the keyboard. But the facts aren't guaranteed to connect to my feelings about their height. The facts can aid my sense of wonder, yet I can exist without them. Perhaps they can even impede my astonishment upon the scale of the Eiffel Tower or the Egyptian pyramids. When I day dream of visiting Egypt(like the Grateful Dead once did) it's not the dimensions of the pyramids which dazzle my mind, but the totality of them, the inscrutable mystery of them.

In other words I care more about aesthetics than schematics when it comes to art. I don't need to know how tall and wide a Rothko painting is. What's relevant to me is only my reaction to it.

Initially what I read seemed to exalt more in the length of  the 11/1/79 "Scarlet/Fire" than the quality, which irritated me. Fortunately this attention served a better cause: reminding me of how good--and unique--this version of "Scarlet">"Fire" is. Not that the "Scarlet" is pedestrian, but here it's more of a launch for what is to come.

It's the jam inbetwen the two songs which gives it the "chewy" or "gooey" textures heard here. Brent Mydland had just replaced Keith Godchaux in the lineup, the start of his #-year long run with the band until his overdose death in 1990. As Deadheads will know Godchaux, a marvelous pianist, had frequently resisted the band's demands that he add other electric and electronic textures to the sound. Whether a condition of his employment or his own musical bent, Mydland wasn't at all reluctant. His use of the synthesizer and the clavinet--an electronic keyboard greatly associated with Stevie Wonder and other funk & r & b artist of the Seventies--adds a more "urban" bubbling to the section than typical Dead songs.prior to '79. He's not soloing but supporting the groove, a buttress to Garcia's burbling liquid notes, peals and peals of them before he starts invoking the iconic, beloved envelope filtered effect he used for "Fire on the Mountain."

The "Fire" section clocking in at 14 minutes alone, for those of you interested in the "saber metrics" of such matters, features more epic soloing from Garcia over a percolating rather than scorching accompaniment. 1977 seemed to have some "Fire"'s which were precisely that. Versions with so much enthusiasm they seemed unhinged. This version does not mine the same lava-like flow of that year, yet it's not laid back. It swirls like a demented calypso, connecting Barbados and Marin County, torching "authenticity" for something more interesting.

And that is more important to me than timing the longest version of this pairing at around 35 minutes.

Of course someone will also tell you that the longest version of "Dark Star" clocks in at...oh, never mind.