Question about Grateful Dead.

[The Second Stone]

10. I'm tone deaf in my singing much of the time, and I cannot imagine how someone with perfect

or even good pitch could stand the GD when singing. When it is bad, it is distracting even to me. But I also get that real people don't sing perfectly, or play in perfect tuning when at a festival. Jerry Garcia, while off key as a singer much of the time, was a virtuoso on the guitar, with ever warble being quite intentional, up until the final years when he could not feel his fingertips due to diabetic neuropathy. As Garcia himself knew, he could shape the texture and color of his playing to do exactly what he wanted, and it was unique. Not to say that others were not virtuosos too, but nobody did what he did. And usually his singing hit the mark for what the band was trying to do.

The joy of a GD concert (I've only been to three) isn't really the music, which is too loud and with acoustic characteristics of the individual venue, but rather the crowd coming alive as part of the music. The many recordings available live usually have quite good sound quality from their private mixing board recordings that do capture a musical moment that is separate from the audience experience.