Big Brother and the Holding Company and the Grateful Dead – by Irving Penn, 1967

When I look at portraits from the Nineteenth Century, I’m always struck by the seeming juxtaposition of stark detail and gentle humanity in the faces.  Penn’s portraits often achieve that same balance; this one certainly does.  Replace the guitars with rifles and we might be looking at a picture of two outlaw gangs, fresh from robbing the Glendale train.

In looking at those old pictures, say like this one, I often flash on how every face I see there is now dust.  There is no sadness, just the intuition of being and non-being in infinite embrace.  But when I see Jerry above, I want to cry.  Maybe he felt the same way when he saw Janis and Pigpen in it after they died.

But, emotion passes like everything.  Most of the surviving folks in this picture are past age seventy, and before long they’ll be dust too.  Then me, and you, one way or another…

Two Grateful Dead songs get most fully at it all.  They are entirely different in tone, and so make a perfect yin and yang for our encore this week.  One is a cover and the other original.  One digs deep and the other flies high.  

“Come to your house, you know he don’t take long…”

The Reverend Gary Davis left us all a legacy of incredible music.  We look back on it, but it’s well to remember that Davis was still alive until well past the time the Dead ‘made it’.  They are best known for their cover of his version of the old spiritual “Samson and Delilah” or “If I Had My Way.”  But before “Samson”, which they started playing after his death, the Dead honored the living Davis with a cover of his “Death Don’t Have No Mercy.”

Odysseus in Front of Scylla and Charybdis – Henry Fuseli – 1794-1796

It very well could be the saddest song the Dead ever played.  Davis’s lyrics personify death, making It a thief of loved ones and a bringer of utter misery.  The Dead take it a step further it seems to me, and with their weird blend of electric instruments evoke that personification with their amplifiers.  

When the song gets moving, Phil Lesh thumps his bass like the pounding footsteps of Polyphemus as he lumbers to grab Odysseus’s terrified sailors so he might eat them whole.  Garcia attacks sharply with each note, like Scylla descending ravenously on the surviving crew.

Though the Grateful Dead did play the song a few times in 1989 and 1990, it’s their versions from the Sixties that bring chills.

The studio version on their first album isn’t definitive. The classic recording is from their first official live album, Live/Dead.

“Death Don’t Have No Mercy”  (1) Recording from Live/Dead, 3/2/69    (2)  live  8/24/68    Lyrics  

Though the instrumentation is different than what Rev. Gary Davis used, the Dead stay pretty close to his overall approach to the song.  I’ll close this section with a truly remarkable video of Davis performing it.

The faces of the people who are sitting with Davis and listening are immensely expressive.