moe.
September 23, 1997
Emerald City - Santa Barbara, CA

Source:  Octava MK-012 (w/bass rolloff)>Beyer MV100 Pre>Sony SBM-1>DAT
Transfer:  DAT>Soundforge 7>CD Wave>Flac (level 6 encoding)
Taped by: Unknown

Disc 1
Set 1:
1.   Introduction
2.   Awesome Gary
3.   Sensory Deprivation Bank
4.   Stranger Than Fiction
5.   Recreational Chemstry*
6.   Salt Creek Jam (acoustic)
7.   You Shook Me All Night Long (acoustic)
8.   Blister in the Sun (acoustic)
9.   Time Again (acoustic)
10. Spine of a Dog (acoustic)
11. Queen of the Rodeo (acoustic)


Disc 2
Set 2:
1.   Tuneup/Banter
2.   Recreational Chemistry
3.   Waiting for the Punchline>
4.   Akimbo
5.   Water
6.   Head>
7.   Jam>
8.   Head

Disc 3
Set 2 (continued):
1.   Nebraska
2.   She Sends Me
3.   Rebubula
4.   Encore:  I Wanna Be Sedated

*Stops abruptly due to a regional blackout in Santa Barbara.  After a pause, the crowd gathers in a circle on the floor around the moe. for an acoustic set.  Al takes charge with a mandolin, Chuck on acoustic guitar, Rob on unamplified electric bass for the first two acoustic songs (then switches over to a battery powered amp), and Vinnie drums on a cardboard liquor box.  Power is regained for the second set, which begins where they left off at the time of the blackout - Recreational Chemistry!

Taper's Comments (from the moe-L listgroup posting, September 24, 1997:

Date:         Wed, 24 Sep 1997 04:13:07 -0700
Reply-To:     rboyle
Sender:       "moe. Mailing List" <MOE-L@NETSPACE.ORG>
From:         "(rob Boyle)"
Subject:      moe. history in Santa Barbara!!

moe. history in Santa Barbara!

There will much, much more on this later. Consider this little post the trickle before the flood. Despite the fact that it's nearly 5:00am West Coast time, I had to send this off before I went to bed.

On 9-23-97 at The Emerald City (a very small, dark and smokey club in Santa Barbara) moe. was about 30 minutes into a solid Set I when all the power went off in Santa Barbara. The bar was thrust into pitch darkness for a little while until some candles and flashlights were rounded up.

At this point, all four of the guys decided to do an unmiked, acoustic set in the middle of the crowd. Everybody formed a circle as we watched moe. play the following set by candlelight for the next forty-one minutes:

Bluegrass Jam
You Shook Me All Night Long
Blister in the Sun
Time Again
Spine of a Dog
Queen of the Rodeo

Al on mandolin, Chuck on acoustic, Rob first on electric with tiny amp then acoustic with tiny amp, Vinnie on a cardboard liquor box with his drumsticks.

It was one of those magic moments ladies and gents. I'm only really sure it happened because I listened to the audience tape we made while I was driving back to Long Beach from Santa Barbara. Then again, considering the late hour I'm writing this tonight, maybe I just woke up from some wacky moe. inspired dream.

Pure genius, I tell you. Stranger than fiction, but true enough as many people who were there will be attesting shortly.

When the power eventually came back on, moe. played a scorching 2 hour set.

There ain't nothin' like live music.

-RB "sometimes I'm sure it's all in my head"

***********************************

Additional Notes (taken from Jesse Jarnow's posting on the moe-L listgroup on October 2, 1998):


Date:         Fri, 2 Oct 1998 16:36:37 +0000
Reply-To:
Sender:       "moe. Mailing List" <MOE-L@NETSPACE.ORG>
From:         Jesse Jarnow
Subject:      notes on the 9/23/97 Head and moe.'s general jamming

Hi all.

So, I just got this really cool Space Dog tape - thanks BDAWG - of 9/23/97 at Emerald City in Santa Barbara -- the infamous power-outage/acoustic gig. The acoustic set is definitely cute and fun, but I want to focus on the very interesting electric Head from the quasi-third set.

It's far and away the most *different* Head jam I've ever heard. The jam begins like every Head does, from the Clean Slate Tour up through at least the summer. Very soon, however, it takes a quick turn. In a normal Head jam, the band slows it down to a spacey crawl before building the thing all the way up again to the ecstasy of the final chorus -- more on Space Dog than of late. In this version, however, the band completely deconstructs the tune. It stops being Head. In fact, they're almost totally silent at one point. This is the first of several "stops" in the tune (they never actually stop).

Vinnie kicks in a thumping beat that *is* the Meat intro. I actually checked the setlist when he started it to see if the band actually played the tune. They don't. Instead, they go off on a jam with that as its base. When this jam wears itself out a few minutes later they bring it down to a near-silent level again. From there, Chuck and Al begin playing harmony lines that sound *mighty* familiar. It took me a few seconds to realize it, but they're playing the little composed part from before the "down, down, down..." section of Rebubula. Momentarily, it sounds as if they're going into *that*. Of course, they don't. Off they go with that theme for another ten minutes... before grinding down again. A few more themes pick up and die -- nothing so distinct as Meat or Rebubula, though. All in all, it reminds me of a 73-74 Dead tape where the band runs through a million different ideas over the course of a jam, letting each one take its course before dying.

I remember Cory posting a while ago about a jam from somewhere during this early Space Dog period where the band does a similar thing -- from Brent Black (maybe?) they somehow end up in the middle of Head, double back and start the tune anew. It's similar in the fact that the band ended up in a song they didn't mean to be in. The key difference, of course, is that on the other tape (9/19?) they actually go into the tune, here the band denies the urge. I think Cory compared it to the jam from Dick's Picks III where the Dead accidentally end up in the ending section of the Terrapin Section Suite and through with it. It's a good comparison.

Hearing this jam got me thinking about the development of jams from tour to tour. This jam in Head could *only* have occured during the Space Dog tour. The general pattern seems to be this: a song is introduced with a short jam included. Over the course of a tour, the jam expands. By the end of the tour it flowers. The jam continues to flower for a time. Eventually, though, the band nips it in its little kind green bud. Head is an example of this -- witness the infinitely more succinct (and less interesting) versions from this spring. Ditto for Plane Crash. And She Sends Me (the jam was snipped in June '96). In other cases, the snipping won't be so extreme, but it will be confining. For example, 32 Things - when it was first introduced - often went places beyond its country-funk/mothership roots. By spring '96, though, the band held back on it.

Why? There are a whole bunch of potential reasons, I guess. The movement from freedom to structure is an eventuality in just about any set of circumstances. When the band first started playing with the Head jam, for example, they had no idea where it could go and where they wanted it to go (other than the ultimate end, of course). Gradually, as they played the tune more and more, they became aware of how to play it, where it could peak, and all those sort of things. So, they refined it. They turned the emphasis on the peaks from improvisation to composition. Why? Because the original territory bored them? Did they feel that they'd played out the original arrangement of Head and that only that a mature controlled peak was better than an unexpected one? Is that why it was stripped down?

Depressing, yeah, that the band might get bored with it. That's life, though. If history is any indication, though, the jam will begin - at some point - to expand again. Things retract and and expand. Much of moe.'s game plan of late has been to put jams where there weren't jams before. While I don't think it's true of Head, sometimes songs only *need* to be a certain length to deliver their punch. Why bother deriving one formula from another when you have both of them already written down? (Just playing devil's advocate here, folks.)

In short, I highly recommend that y'all pull out the 9-23-97 Head if you have it. If you don't have it - and you still managed to make it through this post - email me and I'll hook you up.

Jesse.



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