Jerry was an accomplished musician. SO much so that his bluegrass music (incredibly complex in it's own right) is stand-alone popular.

There were once rumors of Carlos Santana stepping to the fore to take jerry's place, and I often wondered what kind of music THAT would engender.
og | Email | Homepage | 03.25.08 - 11:31 am | #

Just get another guitar, either standalone rockband guitar (if they started to sell these) or a guitar for Guitar Hero II and you will get your dedicated bass.
chokolad | Email | Homepage | 03.25.08 - 12:04 pm | #

Not to mention that Phil Lesh was an ccomplished classic composure and weird electronic musician BEFORE taking up Bass duties for the dead.

Of course, Mickey Hart literally wrote the book on drumming and percussion.

I understand the pot, it certainly slows things down, but its the psychedlics that throw me for a loop. Interestingly, they only had one raging alcoholic in the band, pigpen, and his playing suffered tremendously while he descended into alcoholic depths.

Thats consistent with my experience, that alcohol has a much more pronounced impact on motor skills than someone simply smoking pot or taking other psychedlics.
Countertop | Email | Homepage | 03.25.08 - 12:38 pm | #

All that said, I never considered Sugar Magnolia that difficult to play, especially with others. Throw something like St. Stephens, with multiple off keep change ups - or China Cat Sunflower - at me and I just fall on my face.

China Cat Sunflower into an angry I Know You Rider being about as pure a pleasing musical experience as I can think of.

Back in the day, in nilp pezdel (that was my band) we played a mean Run To The Hills, but I always enjoyed The Trooper better.
Countertop | Email | Homepage | 03.25.08 - 12:46 pm | #

Wish I had a link handy, but recent neurological studies performed on a jazz group jamming showed that parts of the brain associated with inhibition shut down while they were jamming.

From that perspective, the weed might actually have given them a bit of a leg up.
LabRat | Email | Homepage | 03.25.08 - 3:29 pm | #

I personally maintain that it's not possible for a human to play Angus Young's bit at the opening of "Thunderstruck" WITHOUT being stoked to the gills on coke. I have seen video of it where you cannot see his fingers distinctly.
Legman688 | Email | Homepage | 03.25.08 - 11:54 pm | #

We (my co-workers and I) ordered Rock Band a couple weeks ago, and it is video crack.

We all stayed up until 1 am drinking beer until 1 am on a school night and playing "just one more song".

Our situation is a little unique, since we're a bunch of mid-20s to mid-30s IT geeks living away from our families, in a villa where we're soetimes on lock-down for security reasons, and often bored without much outside interaction.

Anyway, Rock Band is karaoke on crack, with a competitive edge because of the scoring. (can't get away from the drug addiction comparisons- I'm not as addicted as most of my guys, but it's hard to stop once you start).

We got Guitar Hero III first, and it was ok, but Rock Band is WAY better because of the interactive group dynamics. We used the spare guitar from the first game as a guitar/bass controller for the band. The drums are the most "realistic" experience, followed by bass.

(I play bass, and sometimes that screws me up because the "notes" in the game are often simplified or changed from the logical pattern you would expect from listening to the music, especially if you already know the riff on guitar or bass.)
thebastidge | Email | Homepage | 03.26.08 - 1:36 am | #

God bless the Ramones!
thud | Email | Homepage | 03.26.08 - 3:16 am | #

Yeah, I find that while I'm great with the vocals, the fact that I play real guitar screws me up on the guitar for the game, because my fingers instinctively want to do something other than what the game wants.

Mel is really good at the guitar bits, but she has problems with hammer ons and pulloffs, because she plays the flute, and it just doesn't work that way. I have the opposite problem, because I know as a guitarist that it SHOULD, but it doesn't.
Chris Byrne | Email | Homepage | 03.26.08 - 4:07 am | #

Being a college kid, we play a lot of both guitar hero 3 (along with the occasional 1 and 2) and rock band.

My appreciation for music has increased soo much just from playing this games, really just by seeing the charts, that I have gotten into so many older bands that I used to hate as well as many new bands that I thought were talentless.

It really is a great thing.

China Cat Sunflower is definately the most fun Dead song to play in Rock Band though, hammer on heaven!

Anybody get the Boston pack that came out yesterday? It's amazing.
Joe | Email | Homepage | 03.26.08 - 7:15 am | #

I came to the Dead late (late 70's) through friends and expansion of my pre-existing love of blue grass. I had to learn to love 'em. One college friend considered it an unbreakable rule of etiquette that you never stopped a dead tape until a set break--many classes were missed because of that rule. Since, I've listened to literally thousands of Dead concerts, live, boots, and commercial recordings. Every one is different and I've not heard a bad one (not that recordings haven't been horrible, but even then, you could hear the genius--like listening to Bing Crosby or Louis Armstrong on an old 78 platter--you know from better recordings there's lots more there). Some are not great, like some of the later shows of Pig Pen's life, when it seems he could barely function and the whole band, I think, suffered with him. Same near the end of Keith Godchaux's time (what is it about playing keyboards with the Dead--instant alcohol/heroin addiction and death?). I don't consider the Grateful Dead to exist without Garcia, though. Don't know anyone who can hold a candle to Jerry. Recently found my disc of the Pizza Tapes, studio tapes of blue grass jam sessions with Garcia, David Grisman, and Tony Rice. Damn it's beautiful and joyous (though language warning in effect right out of starting gate). Glad to hear that some of the Dead's work is being perpetuated and propogated through this multi-media game. Hadn't heard much from Guitar Hero other than crappy heavy metal.
Ay Uaxe | Email | Homepage | 03.26.08 - 5:22 pm | #

Indeed, I find myself trying to do hammer-ons and pull-offs, but the game only has specific places where those are allowed. And it's not really disctinct enough from the "power notes" visually to make it obvious to me on the fly all the time. Especially when I hear more notes than I am playing, it makes me want to throw a bunch of shite in there, or if I know the song and the way I would play it on bass doesn't match the direction (up/down the fretboard) of Rock Band.
thebastidge | Email | Homepage | 03.27.08 - 12:33 am | #

It seems weird to me that China Cat is on a video game. Rhino, the company who manages their vault of live music now, recently made a move to shut down a Grateful Dead mp3 file sharing site... all in the name of business... so it doesn't really surprise me that they've given permission to be included in a video game. Gotta make the money. Still it's weird.

One of the beauties of their live music is you often never knew what to expect. A rather simple 6 minute song could be turned into 20 minutes of purely improvised magic ... yet somehow they maintain the finest traces of the song and at a moments notice they can bring it all back down to Earth to wrap it up in fine fashion... and you're left sitting there wondering what the hell just happened. Was that real?!? Some people just don't get it, they'd rather go to a concert and hear songs just like they are on the album only it's in person. Whoopdy-freakin'-do. But with the Dead, man ... just a bunch of unbelievable musicians!
Zooomabooma | Email | Homepage | 03.27.08 - 4:28 am | #

"How in the hell did they manage to do THAT, while they were that high, that much of the time?"

It probably was the drugs. They can be tools when used the right way.
Anonymous | Email | Homepage | 03.27.08 - 10:16 am | #

They weren't high most of the time. After the early days of Fillmore West and Ken Kesey's Acid Tests they realized that they couldn't play on stage while tripping and basically never tried again. Ref. any decent history of Dead's early days.
Yojimbo | Email | Homepage | 03.27.08 - 8:27 pm | #