The Grateful Dead's performance of "Johnny B. Goode" from the Ohio Theatre on 10/31/71
- 16 hours ago
- 5 min read
Thursday 4/23/26
The "Johnny B. Goode" encore that closes the Grateful Dead's 1971 Halloween show at the Ohio Theatre will tear the flesh off of you, and you'll be glad it did and feel no pain.
Dick's Picks Volume 2 is kind of like the Dead's version of the Who's Live at Leeds. You have this big show, which you can listen to as if it were an album itself, boiled down, in the case of Leeds, to six numbers; two from the beginning of the show, and then the final four performances of the night.
With Dick's Picks, we have the Dead's second set presented as an album, minus the aforementioned encore (which is curious; the album is less than an hour in length, and "Johnny B. Goode" was a compact number).
This Dick's Picks could be the best way to introduce someone to the Dead, as, say, the Beatles' Red Album is the best way to get someone hooked on them. (You don't start with Rubber Soul, do you? That truth feels paradoxical, but I think it is a truth nonetheless. Nor would you start with Sgt. Pepper, Revolver. But A Hard Day's Night could work.)
That nascent Grateful Dead person, once hooked, is going to move on to the complete 10/31/71 show with alacrity. But in a vacuum, the Dick's Picks set could be the finest live album there was ever going to be.
You can get a sense for how great a band is by how well they cover Chuck Berry. An unlikely litmus test? Maybe. But a revealing one.
The Beatles, the Rolling Stones, the Animals--masterful handlers and interpreters of Berry's material. Listen to the Animals' "Let It Rock" from their late December 1963 Newcastle show just a few months prior to recording their first single. For the Beatles, dig into the BBC trove.
Chuck Berry is Walt Whitman with a guitar and tunes. He's a storyteller. A chronicler. His mind moves fast, his images come thick, indelible, and fast, he knows how to use a verb for maximum power ("smokin' into New Orleans"), and no one was better at taking on his material than the Grateful Dead who themselves embodied these traits and abilities, but in group form.
The Halloween 1971 version of "Johnny B. Goode" stands on the tip of a pin at the top of the pinnacle with Jimi Hendrix's version of the song from Berkeley the year before, and the Beatles' BBC effort in January 1964.
The latter gets little praise. You'll see it dismissed, too, as an unworthy attempt. I rate it as one of the Beatles' most thrilling BBC performances, and considering that I view their BBC recordings as the most Beatlesesque music they ever made, and the single most essential Beatles set there is, this isn't some lazy, contrived attempt to stir up some fuss.
The song clearly meant a lot to Lennon, as I think is evident from the vocal he delivers. And while there may be an element of vanity involved, he sings it as if self-referencing, which feels both permissible and galvanizing. A young man on the cusp--or in the middle of--his dream coming true to see his name up in lights for playing his guitar.
The Dead had some stylistic overlap with Berry. For instance, the best riffs are those that find a way to be memorable, to work their wonders on us, without us fixating on them simultaneously.
Think of Chuck Berry's "Memphis." That's an all-time riff, and someone could read what I've just written and think, "Huh...I didn't even know that song had a riff," and then go back and listen with this idea of a riff in mind and go, "Oh, wow!"
The Dead's "Bertha" is similar in this fashion. Outstanding riff. A riff for the ages. But in part because you may well not even be aware that there is a riff, which is meanwhile doing all of its riff-y stuff in helping to power the sublimely powerful number.
Berry had an unrivaled ability to blur the line between lick and riff. At certain points of the same song, the one may be the other. This is the kind of subtle musicianship that Jerry Garcia loved, because it's what resulted in the biggest payoffs for the listener. Garcia was a highly skilled listener. One of the best listeners of music the world has known. It is a skill. Of course it is. It's a huge skill. Just like reading is a skill. And watching a film is a skill.
We don't like those ideas in this world, because most of us are functionally illiterate and we want our "opinions" to count as much as anyone else's. Well, they don't. We can go out and be better, try and get better, but...ugh...we don't want to do that. We just want what we want because we want it.
But Garcia also came into this world with a gift for listening. Listen to him listen--listen to all the members of the Dead listen--during a performance of "Dark Star." What they're doing is as much about listening as it is about playing and improvising. And making sound. Because that sound can't happen without the listening. Just like you can't truly help someone who is trying to talk you without truly listening to them.
Garcia also excelled as a listener in the "It's raining outside, I think I will play a record from my collection" capacity. He spoke about the concentrated, highly focused, "clean," precision peppering of banjo notes that you'd get coming out of the speaker of a Flatt and Scruggs record.
A guitar doesn't normally function that way. That's a banjo conceit. But Garcia's listening to Flatt and Scruggs helped him fashion his own version--which was itself ultimately it's own, stand-alone thing--of this concentrated attack (I think of Robin Hood firing arrow after arrow into the dead center of the target as a displeased Sir Guy looks on) that we'll hear on a 1972 "Dark Star."
His playing during this second set on 10/31/71 is loud, aggressive, but in total control. He uses hammer-ons in the "Not Fade Away" (a rarity for Garcia) that came shortly before, and though he deployed a lot of feedback in his playing, distortion wasn't as common. On "Johnny B. Goode," though, Garcia's guitar sounds like its frying the amps which are heading for an overload. Listen to that crackle. You'd think there was a forest fire happening inside of his amp. A forest fire on fast forward.
But it's still dance music, amazingly (as much as anything else they were, the Dead were a dance band; the ultimate dance band; and this isn't to omit "Dark Star"--not in the slightest). You can slice up a rug busting your move to this number. The guitar breaks on "Johnny B. Goode" were manna to a guitar player. Listen to George Harrison trying to step up to the mark and deliver on the Beatles' BBC version. His fingers can't do what Garcia's can. And man are those fingers flying on Halloween 1971.
But if you listen carefully, the banjo is in there, too, and a trace of a "Dark Star." It's like that riff we don't "officially" here that's there all the same.
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