Mastodawn

jesse jarnow May 2, 2024

@InstituteJerry ...except the multiple '77-'78 versions that don't have any space, i hope? those tours where space happened some nights but not all is an important part of the evolution. i strongly believe those should be visible/searchable at a glance. likewise the random shows later when space came first.

Institute Jerry Garcia Studies May 2, 2024

@bourgwick Yes, that is the plan. During those years 77-78 when the sequence was still evolving, if there is just a drum break, those will continue to be listed as Drums as they are today.

Institute Jerry Garcia Studies May 2, 2024

@bourgwick After the sequence ossified, the song will still be listed as "Drums and Space" and diversions from the typical layout will be footnotes.

@InstituteJerry so, the more i ponder this, the more i think this is a mistake that will muddy the waters in terms of representing what happened in a way that's consistent & searchable. people say "scarlet fire" out loud, too, but that doesn't make "scarlet" & "fire" the same song. they're separate pieces with a transition, which is what the segue mark represents. what's the logic in combining "drums" & "space", except that there's an undefinable transition? the > is already an elegant solution.

@bourgwick The problem has 2 parts:

1) Whether we give a distinct name to this suite.
2) What that name should be.

I am more attached to part 1, and some of my reasoning is utilitarian. We have many, many setlists where this portion of the show is just listed as Drums > Space, and there is a bunch of variation that we are missing, which we do not want to take the time to detail and perhaps invent new terms to represent, although we admit this would be a better solution. [1/2]

@bourgwick [2/2] As well (still on part 1) we are recognizing that this entity is it's own beast. The percussion portion was NOT similar to other Drum solos listed in setlists from the early 70's, and likewise with the Space section.

On part 2, I care way less. The underlying system knows this section as song 1693. We can flip flop on the name as much as we want.

@InstituteJerry to answer this "problem" directly.
1.) the grateful dead never gave a distinct name to the suite but have *always* listed & treated them as 2 separate individual components with separate composers. "drums" is credited to kreutzmann/hart, "space" to garcia/weir/lesh/keyboardist-du-jour. assimilating them into the borg-like "song 1683" is musically incorrect & will make things more confusing for anyone interested in using jerrybase to study these aspects of the dead's music.

@bourgwick I have a feeling I am not going to convince you ;)

As far as things with ids being "borg-like", well sorry, most objects represented by software have ids. On official releases sure they've always been broken out, but the setlist community has not always done that. Deadbase handled this just as I am proposing, perhaps the name was funky, but I did not find it confusing.

On imprecision, it is already there, we are not losing resolution here, just admitting it was never there.

@InstituteJerry strongly disagree, calling it drums > space is already precise & understandable. heads break them out consistently across tapes & archive.org, too. to me, the borg-like part isn't that it's code but condensing 2 pieces into 1 container, which doesn't happen for scarlet/fire or dark star/st. stephen. (incidentally, the twitter user formerly known as on-this-day-in-space is currently on my couch & is so fired up that he might join mastodon to pop into this conversation.)

@bourgwick They should, please join the discussion! The reason I post this stuff on social media is to elicit opinions. JB exists for the community. And for the record, I am fine leaving it alone. But what we have now is also wrong, it just is. On many nights this section was not just Drums > Space, and no one is going to listen to all these to clean it up.

@InstituteJerry i just don't understand what's currently wrong. lots of other stuff happens in the transitions between other songs, too, that's why deadheads use > marks as an elegant abbreviation to mean "jams that are not quite the title on either side." (and, yes, i am going to listen to them all eventually and have been notating as i go. up to mid '84!)