Bill Kreutzmann recently wrote a memoir along with co-author Benjy Eisen documenting his long, strange trip with the Grateful Dead. In it, he discusses today’s jam band scene and the many Dead offshoots that keep the spirit of the band alive like Phish and the Disco Biscuits. Read more in this quote from Deal: My Three Decades of Drumming, Dreams, and Drugs with the Grateful Dead.
Bill Kreutzmann and Mickey Hart Join The Disco Biscuits At Red Rocks
“The Disco Biscuits were early pioneers of music known as live-tronica (or jamtronica). Whatever you want to call it, it evolved out of the jam band scene. And that brings up a really good point: People often say that the Grateful Dead started the whole jam band movement and that our music remains influential, even today. No other band has managed to sound exactly like us, although plenty have tried… to sound EXACTLY like us, I mean. There have been a plethora of tribute bands – perhaps too many – and then, too, a lion’s den of copy cat bands.
“That’s a huge compliment and I’m respectful of that aspect, but it doesn’t make me especially feel proud, because those bands don’t really honor the true spirit of the Grateful Dead. The true spirit has more to do with innovation, experimentation, risk – and whole-band improvisation – than it does with a particular guitar sound, or having two drummers and a bassist that doesn’t play a repeating pattern. It’s bands like Phish and the Disco Biscuits that really make me proud of what the Grateful Dead did, because they keep our spirit alive by taking what we created and doing their own thing with it. If people insist that we were the forefathers, well then the kids have all grown up and moved out and given birth to babies of their own. Music should never be stagnant.”
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