I like a tightly constructed pop, rock or r&b song just as much as anyone. The Who's "Can't Explain," The Soul Survivors' "Expressway To Your Heart," Swamp Dogg's "Total Destruction To Your Mind," Bubble Puppy's "Hot Smoke And Sassafras," and "Hey Bulldog" by The Beatles, for example.

Bubble Puppy, Austin, TX, 1969

But back in high school and then at Northwestern University in the mid-late-70s, where my sophomore year I lived in a room painted black, and wore odd hats, some of my favorite music was extended jams like Frank Zappa's "Illinois Enema Bandit," Jimi Hendrix's "Machine Gun," Miles Davis' "Tribute To Jack Johnson," and The Allman Brothers' "Eat A Peach."

Such performers, as much or more than the Grateful Dead, paved the way for today's popular, "jam bands" and their legions of overwhelmingly white followers.

In that same era, at Chicago's Aragon Ballroom on a dicey stretch of Lawrence Avenue right near the "El" elevated commuter train tracks, I saw Little Feat display a live improvisatory genius not evident on its albums, and became utterly convinced that hugely-Afro'd bassist Ken Gradney was locked in eye contact with me, following every jubilant twitch of my head and shoulders as he played to an uber-funky fare-thee-well. (With all the cheap folding chairs scrunched together on the Aragon's floor, dancing was ahistorically out of the question, and lacking the requisite pint of Wild Turkey needed to get me on any dance floor, stationary twitchin' was better anyway).

Just around the corner, up Broadway at The Uptown Theater, I witnessed two - not 17 - live Zappa shows where the band displayed fairly stunning instrumental virtuosity and variety. Getting opened up to what saxophones, trombones, flutes, vibraphones and keyboards could do was a big step for a young guitar-hero worshipper. Thirty years later, I'm constantly seeking out new music, from "Sacred Steel" to Latin Jazz (see second comment from bottom, here), plus sounding off on bluesfest wankery in Grand Rapids this summer; a guy who plays his face; and and a high-profile Jimi Hendrix tribute here in Seattle last year.

But I still love "Eat A Peach." And so I found this piece in today's Christian Science Monitor about the continuing popularity of today's "jam band" circuit pretty interesting. Groups such as moe, Widespread Panic, the Dave Matthews Band, and the bluegrass-flavored String Cheese Incident, like Phish and especially the Dead before them, draw legions of fans who follow them all over the country, building a like-minded "moving community" which is three-quarters tofu burrito snarfing, hash-smoking white Trustafarians and one-quarter hard-bodied guys with no hair and bewilderingly intricate tatoos.

TURIN, N.Y. - James DeVito pumps his fist and flexes a tattooed arm. Midway through an afternoon set on Day 2 of a three-day concert, his favorite band - read the tattoo - has just launched into "Buster," his favorite song. The group, moe, had "teased" the tune the night before, plucking a few echoing notes before careering into another piece. This time they run with it. Crammed close to the stage at the Snow Ridge Ski Center and spread halfway up the deep-green slope, other fans, too, erupt in cheers, a familial feedback loop that seems to lift the smiling band. Mr. DeVito, from Long Island, has seen moe 17 times in the past two years.

"Familial feedback loop" sounds a lot like the achingly liberal politics evident at many jam band fests these days, and other identity-affirming cultural productions such as Burning Man. However great moe is - and let's assume they're kickin' - maybe instead of going to see 'em for the 18th time, Mr. Devito will spend his next concert ticket on something different.

While audiences are about 99.98 percent white at jam band shows, the roots of the form go back to black Americans, namely jazz artists.

More from the Monitor:

Andy Gadiel, who runs JamBase.com, a San Francisco website, cites early improvisational jazz masters Miles Davis and John Coltrane as precursors to jam, and puts the Grateful Dead somewhere in the middle of the gnarled family tree....

Andrew Pearson, who came to Turin...on a side trip during a vacation in Burlington, Vt., all but abandoned the concert scene after following Phish between 1995 and 2000. Too many of his newer fellow travelers became focused on drugs, he says. They had no passion for the music, and served to advance a jam-music stigma: that it is just hazy background sound for hippie holdouts.

If that secret-society aura that attended the Grateful Dead has been diluted by the growth, says Mr. Gadiel, then maybe that growth will also open new doors to what he calls the "indescribable" phenomenon that tugs music fans to open fields to hear bands like moe, the Redwalls, and North Mississippi Allstars.

"Part of my crusade is to dissolve the stigma and make it less about the bands, less about any one type of fan," he says, "and more about good music."

Amen. And in that spirit, I'll close with two recommended jam band CDs - get the great music without the seitan, sludge and and sleeping bags. Old: By the Hampton Grease Band, the lost-then-found underground art-damaged masterpiece, "Music To Eat," 1971 (reputed to be the second worst-selling LP in the history of Columbia Records). New-ish: the eoponymous release by "Temporal Analogues Of Paradise," 1996, a monstrously creative power trio featuring jazz bassist Jonas Hellborg, guitarist Shawn Lane, and a drummer named Apartment Q-258.

TECHNORATI TAGS: JAM BANDS

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Posted by Matt Rosenberg at September 9, 2005 12:35 PM