these days i start editing and uploading the micro stories, interviews about the history of the place, fieldrecording and sound art, etc.
there are some interesting snippets about the grateful dead and their time at the ranch back in 1967, where they wrote the song Alligator, there ‘s radio DJ and sound enthusiast Karel Sidorjak revealing his connection to radio aporee and gives us very personal insights into sound and listening. I got a little bit more that two weeks left for the project and a lot of material waiting to get edited.. I ll continue updating the sonic landscape interventions throughout november / december though….
Alligator
That’s It for the Other One
New Potato Caboose – Grateful Dead, Road Trips 2.2 (2/14/68 Carousel Ballroom, San Francisco)
Bob Weir interview 7/18/84
This interview was done before I had any idea I was going to become a radio producer. I was gathering stories for a book, Playing in the Band: An Oral and Visual Portrait of the Grateful Dead. So the audio quality isn’t as good as it ought to be, and I hadn’t yet learned to keep my yap shut while the subject it talking. But the stories are good!
Weir: While we were working up “Alligator,” a friend of ours, John Warnecke … His father had a cabin on the Russian River. It was late spring. We packed up and went to that place and worked up a few songs, among them the first few strains of “The Other One” [the “he had to die” part] and “Alligator,” and one or two others. Most particularly “The Other One” and “Alligator.” “Caution” we had been playing for a while.
We had a little sort of a stage, a platform that I guess was for a tent, on a bluff over the river. We set up all our equipment, and you couldn’t see it from down on the river, which was about 30 feet below, because of the bushes and foliage.
We’d been watching the canoers come down the river for several days. We had one of the feedback scenarios that you hear in “Caution,” mere everybody just opens fire with all the electronic weirdness that we bad at our disposal at the time. We had all our PA gear set up so it was facing down at the river.
First off … I had a bullfrog croak that I could do through a microphone that sounded fairly convincing. If you put it through the entire PA and everything we had, it sounded like a 40-foot bullfrog. So we’d wait for the canoers to get right underneath us and then I’d open up with the bullfrog. We’d have them diving out of the canoes.
Pretty soon we’d just open fire with everything. We’d wait til they got right underneath us and then, “Ready, aim, fire!” and we’d blast them with sonic weirdness of a hellacious sort.
It was about a week and a half we spent up there — after they fished me out of jail…. I was arrested for throwing a water balloon at a cop. He was conducting an illegal search on a car belonging to a friend of mine, directly below 710 Ashbury. I considered it to be an illegal search; the car had probably been parked there for quite some time, and probably was malfunctioning and he was probably trying to see if anybody really owned the car. But I thought this was an illegal search, and it incensed me. And besides, we were having a water balloon fight inside the house at the time.
I got him from the third-story window. I didn’t actually hit him; I got it right next to him in a perfect bomb-burst pattern on the pavement. It got his shoes probably full of water.
Gans: What was the charge?
Weir: Assault on an officer. He wouldn’t have busted me, but after that I had to go out in the street and just kind of sit there and look at him and grin.
Seeds and Stems – David Gans w/ Mike DiPirro 4/17/09 Camp Zoe, Salem MO
sonic landscape interventions 