Spotify: tinyurl.com/3ksc4jbb
YouTube: tinyurl.com/2zrk2ju7
It's a cross between Pure Prairie League, New Riders of the Purple Sage and the Grateful Dead.
It's really all about the first Pure Prairie League album, with Craig Fuller's vocals. At this point, "Falling In and Out of Love" and "Amie" are classics, but the album being released on RCA they didn't get the attention they deserved upon release in 1972, and it wasn't long thereafter that FM radio switched from a cornucopia of soft and loud to loud and homogenized and compromised, but you did hear these two every once in a while, and now they're staples, at least on SiriusXM, people know them, more than did back then.
I'll argue it's all about the first New Riders album, in retrospect, it's better than any Dead LP other than the "Workingman's Dead" and "American Beauty" twins, at least when the Dead dwelled in this country rock idiom.
As for that idiom, it was dominated by Jerry Garcia's laid back plaintive vocals, Jerry wasn't singing to dominate, but to get his message across, you held your hand to your ear, you wanted to listen...
And bask in the sound.
Today concerts are all about the fan experience. The music is nearly secondary. If you went with your friends and had a good time, that's what counts most. And the truth is too often the music is rote, on hard drive, and the production is nearly as important as what comes out of the speakers.
But it didn't used to be this way.
This was the San Francisco experience, the ballroom experience, getting together with like-minded people at the Fillmore and other ballrooms to immerse yourself in the sound and have the music wash over you and take you away, drifting to a place of happiness.
Like with Lord Huron's "Mine Forever."
It's important to tell you that I discovered it via Jeff Pollack's weekly e-mail, Jeff only includes five tracks, and although most I only want to hear once, if that, I check them all out, the longer playlists...it's too much work.
And when I heard "Mine Forever," I turned my head to see who it was. Lord Huron? I know the name, but the act has never done something that has stuck with me. Then again, when I went on Spotify it turned out their track "The Night We Met" had 714,393,145 streams...that's almost a BILLION! Further research told me its success was driven by its inclusion on the soundtrack of "13 Reasons Why." But, interestingly, it only has 197,238,628 views on YouTube, proving, once again, YouTube is not the home of active listeners, if you're really into music you have a streaming subscription and you listen there, and it is all about listening, what goes in the ears as opposed to what you see.
So what appealed to me about "Mine Forever"?
To tell you the truth it was halfway through the song when it went on an instrumental adventure, this was the essence of the Grateful Dead, the song was just a setup, a jumping off point, to improvisation and exploration, a trip, which you rode shotgun on. Sure, there were other people at the show but its success depended upon you linking up to the music first, and with it in your ears you looked into the eyes of others also infected and began to transcend.
And transcendence is what it's all about. Don't forget, the late sixties were not that different from today, it was an era of turmoil. Then again, a lot of this music was made in the seventies, when we were licking our wounds, which is kind of like today, we're wondering what comes next, who would have thought what came next way back when was a mercenary streak that ran throughout the boomer population, people became eager to sell out and make money, what will happen now that the Trump train has been temporarily stopped? Well, maybe first we're gonna listen to music.
You're never going to hear "Mine Forever" on Top 40 radio.
Then again, you never heard the Grateful Dead on Top 40 radio. All three bands, Pure Prairie League, the New Riders and the Dead were not made for Top 40 radio, their music wasn't even made for radio at all, they bypassed that waystation and went directly into people's hearts, if radio played 'em, great, but they depended upon the people, the culture, to spread the word.
So the truth is you want "Mine Forever" to envelop you. You want to play it on the big rig. You need the sound to penetrate every nook and cranny, squeeze out what was there before, replace it with a mood, an excursion you can only get from music.
"Mine Forever" is not a one listen smash, something you hear and believe will be ubiquitous, but you'll want to hear it again, and again, to return to that mood, that feeling. And sometime you'll be listening and someone else will feel the magic and they'll be infected and eventually the word will spread.
And the truth is music, now more than ever, is not really about recordings.
We hear too much about recordings, when the truth is there's been a sea change since Napster, music, more than ever, is live, which is kinda funny when more of the recordings have become robotic and fake, unlike life.
"Mine Forever" is made for the gig. You already know it, but you know the act will sustain it, it's just a framework for exploration, and you're eager to take the trip.
This is an alternative universe, this is the heartbeat of the music business, not what you see in the Spotify Top 50, we're returning to the sixties, when it's not about what's popular on AM radio, what's obvious, but something more underground on FM, something that demands a bit more, something that does not slide off your shoulders, but sticks with you.
Sometime this afternoon, when you've already worked long hours, when your body is tired, pull up "Mine Forever," it will rejuvenate you...
And you'll be thrilled this spirit is still alive, and it really didn't die in 1969.
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