Disco Biscuits and the real meaning of Dead

Got off an interview not long ago with Jon Gutwillig, guitarist for the Philly-based Disco Biscuits. They're doing an extravaganza show at Red Rocks in a couple of weeks and I interviewed him for a preview piece for next week's paper.

We touched on a great number of subjects - he's an energetic interview - but one thing stood out for me. We spent some time discussing the Dead - as a player in his early thirties, Gutwillig has a certain perception of the Grateful Dead, as the archetypal founding agent of the current jamband scene.

Which is fair, but in the context of what we were discussing, I found it an intriguingly incomplete view. True enough, the Dead went off on unashamedly self-indulgent jams, sometimes inspired and sometimes (to these ears) labored and tedious. Gutwillig credits their iconic status to this very thing, a fearlessness about treading the outer perimeter of the musical back 40 - my view is that the Dead had a solid base of songwriting, deeply rooted in folk, proto-Americana, blues and jugband, that provided a deep and detailed framework for their instrumental excursions, and for me, their jams lost usually their charm the further from the musical substance of those songs they wandered. They were a songwriter's band long before, and in some ways more profoundly, than they were a jamband.

And most of the younger jambands who followed in their footsteps in the 90's did not have that passion for songs, and thus, for old farts like me, are merely competent icing-lickers by comparison.