Seastones

For Deadheads of the open-earned persuasion (and susceptible to the greater feedback-drenched versions from the Grateful Dead’s epic “Dark Star”), Phil Lesh and Ned Lagin’s Seastones is something from the ultimate goal of Grateful Useless side tasks. Experimental music fans will find too much to like, too, though even more pop-oriented Dead supporters usually takes it as the elevation of lunacy. Bassist Lesh, a previous pupil of serialist composer Luciano Berio, and Lagin, an MIT dual main in molecular biology and music, convened a five-year relationship that led to possibly the most bizarre SAN FRANCISCO BAY AREA psychedelic super-session LP of these all, and some similarly bizarre live shows. As an MIT pupil, Lagin noticed the Deceased play in Boston in 1969, and composed guitarist Jerry Garcia a notice. When the music group played MIT in-may of 1970, they searched for Lagin, getting together with him in his dorm area before their present. The group inspired him to go western. When Lagin found its way to SAN FRANCISCO BAY AREA a couple of months afterwards via Greyhound, he instantly visited Wally Heider’s Pacific Studios, where Garcia place him to function adding piano to “Candyman” for American Beauty. More than the next season, Lagin appeared sometimes on-stage using the Deceased, and struck up a cooperation with Lesh. The initial result was an early on homemade synthesizer, applied to 1973’s “Unbroken String.” In November of this season, Lesh and Lagin performed at San Francisco’s Palace of Great Arts with Garcia and then-on-hiatus Deceased drummer Mickey Hart. The effect was something honestly avant-garde and, by adding Garcia’s often melodic improvisation, very easily conversational. Though Lesh was hesitant to execute the material before Deceased viewers, throughout 1974 he and Lagin supplied set-break bleeps, buzzes, and glitches to panic Deadheads, music that occasionally appears a forerunner towards the even more fractured abstractions music artists like Richard D. Wayne would explore in the ’90s. Joined sometimes by Garcia, the Seastones units would frequently segue seamlessly in to the Dead’s shows, resulting in a few of the most regularly out music they performed. (One particular jam could be noticed on Dick’s Picks, Vol. 13.) Through the Dead’s 1975 hiatus, Lagin and Lesh produced a Seastones recording, offering Garcia, Hart, David Crosby, the Jefferson Airplane’s Spencer Dryden and Elegance Slick, while others, and performed many even more displays. The Dead’s personal Round Information released the Seastones disk, though it got dropped in the shuffle of the brand new label’s overambitious creation schedule (after that offering Robert Hunter’s Tiger Rose, Jerry Garcia’s fabled Aged & in the manner, while others). Later on, Lagin as well as the band drifted aside.