The very first Dead rehearsal tape we have is probably from January 1966, and they are practicing Viola Lee. (The CD East/West Live has a performance from Hollywood in early 1966.)
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(Bloomfield did not like the Dead, but Bishop sometimes joined Garcia at shows.) 'East/West' is a very successful merging of Indian, Latin, and rock musical styles in a series of guitar solos, and it's very similar to Viola Lee in its long instrumental passages in-between statements of the theme, the changing tempos, and the way the solos accelerate into increasingly wild climaxes. The Indian influence shows up more in '67 when their playing styles had matured and they were practiced enough to really venture into strange tempos and rhythm changes.Īs for Viola Lee itself, the strongest influence may have been the Butterfield Blues Band and their long raga-instrumental 'East/West' - that album came out in '66, and the Dead certainly saw them live Garcia was interested in the blues playing of Mike Bloomfield and Elvin Bishop. Lesh has also said they were listening to Indian music with its changing tempos, and this especially shows in Viola Lee with its steady, careful acceleration from a moderate pace to a racing inferno of notes.
Lesh on the other hand was much more into jazz and classical music, the jazz of the time being a particular influence on the Dead's jamming (they revered Coltrane and Miles Davis) and giving them a different vocabulary to use when 'opening up' one of their songs. Garcia's primary model as a guitarist was the bluegrass music he'd been playing, and through early '66 the banjo lingers in his style with his constant stream of fast notes, though by '67 he would shift more into "rock-guitar" mode so he was used to precise, well-practiced instrumental combos and old-time string bands with their intertwined instruments. The Dead were also influenced by a broad range of music - though initially they may have seemed like another of the early-Stones-type cover bands that littered the country, their eclecticism would take them in new directions.
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They had an opportunity to play with a free format, to a zonked-out audience, and were encouraged to play more open-ended music than in the regular pop-concert scene of the time - in short, "freakout" music could emerge. The Dead's Viola Lee barely resembles Cannon's original Kweskin was more of a traditionalist and his version is faithful to the '20s:Īs to how the Dead got the inspiration to take this song "out", it's probably no coincidence that it took shape at the time of the Acid Tests. Another popular folk group of the early '60s, Jim Kweskin's Jug Band, also did Viola Lee Blues (the Dead borrowed several other songs from them as well). (A couple other Gus Cannon songs, Minglewood Blues and Big Railroad Blues, would also become Dead staples). (The Dead's first single in '66 took both its sides from the '20s, one song from the Memphis Jug Band and one from Henry Thomas.) Hearing Viola Lee, Garcia and Weir were enticed by this antique tale of incarceration, and if they heard it early enough, they may well have played it in Mother McCree's Uptown Jug Champions. The origin of the Dead was basically as a jugband (before 'going electric') and they borrowed many songs from the folk scene, which Garcia was most familiar with.
Many years later, in the early '60s, a folk revival was booming among the coffeehouse kids, and many of the old songs of the '20s were reissued on record, to be picked up by the 'new' folk bands. The story of Viola Lee begins when Gus Cannon's Jug Band recorded it on September 20, 1928. As one writer has said, it may have been a one-dimensional song, but that happened to be the fifth dimension! The band stopped performing it in 1970, but in their early shows it appears frequently. Dating from the start of their career when they were doing mostly pop and blues songs, they designed it as a psychedelic trip: it would start as a strange old jugband tune with dark chords, a constricted groove, and wailing black-harmony vocals, but the music in-between the verses would gradually stretch out to unreasonable lengths and start accelerating until the band were playing fast, shrieking gusts of sound, tearing open the fabric of reality - then suddenly the noise stops and the song jauntily reappears again.
Viola Lee Blues was the Dead's first big jamming tune.
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