This week, Jim’s after something from one of the Rock & Roll Hall Of Fame’s definitive list of the top 200 albums. Well, nestling there at #20 (too low, some might say) is the Grateful Dead’s 1970 masterpiece ‘American Beauty’, of which this is the opening track, here presented in an acoustic performance from 1980.…
“But I would slave to learn the way to sink your ship of fools” This week’s theme for Song Lyric Sunday is all things nautical, and my immediate first thought was this – one of my favourite Jerry ballads by the Grateful Dead. Searching my previous SLS posts I was relieved – indeed, pleasantly surprised…
There are absolutely no prizes for guessing who I was going to choose for Song Lyric Sunday this week, where Jim wants to see something from our (and his, apparently) favourite artiste(s). Choosing a particular song wasn’t quite so straightforward, although hardly difficult. After all, it’s not like the Grateful Dead don’t have an extensive…
This week’s theme is fire or something involving heat. ‘Fire On The Mountain’ is the product of a rare collaboration between drummer Micky Hart and lyricist Robert Hunter (who more usually wrote with Jerry Garcia). In concert, it was almost always paired with ‘Scarlet Begonias’ in the ‘Scarlet-Fire’ diptych, but this is an outstanding standalone…
This week’s theme for Song Lyric Sunday is children and/or families and Jim has entitled his post ‘Perks of having kids’. It’s not all good news though, and while not all families have a black sheep, this one clearly did. This is a Merle Haggard song that, not being a particular fan of Country music,…
Hang on. ‘Acoustic rock’? Isn’t that a contradiction in terms – an oxymoron, if you will. Like ‘military intelligence’? Well, apparently not. It’s rock music played on acoustic instruments, apparently. Personally, I don’t get it. I’m a simple man, and for me, it’s an either/or. However, there are, admittedly, lots of songs that in their…
“If you get confused just listen to the music play” Jim’s left it to us to choose this week. I thought of quite a few, but when I searched my back catalogue of previous contributions I discovered that I’d already used most of them. Unaccountably though, not this one, which contains probably my most favourite…
This week’s theme for Song Lyric Sunday is – perhaps a little morbidly – something that you would like to be played at your own funeral. That isn’t to say that I haven’t thought about it occasionally (who among us has not?, as Anthony Trollope might have put it.). However, it’s a bit tricky as…
This week, Jim has set us the task of featuring a song from a band you wished were still together. You ought not to be at all surprised that my choice was the Grateful Dead. If only…. I’ve featured quite a few Grateful Dead songs over the years that I’ve been contributing to Song Lyric…
There is a whole range of emotions to choose from for Song Lyric Sunday this week. Fortuitously, one of these feelings – more of an emotional response, as Jim points out – is ‘pain’, which allows me to present one of the Grateful Dead’s most consistently played (over 340 times between 1969 and 1995) slow…
