guitarists..question on Help/Slip

[glocke]

Over the past 10-15 years I've played with about 4-5 different G.D. cover bands.  Out of those groups, only one was willing to tackle Help/Slip, and we managed to get through it reasonably well. 


The rest of the bands I was in never really touched it, and the ones that did attempt it, I almost immediately regretted asking to have it played as it turned out to be a train that crashed immediately after leaving the tracks. 


My question for the Dead guitarists here is, is it really that difficult of a song from a guitar standpoint?  I know I spent a fair amount of time picking it apart piece by piece, but after putting the time into it I found it to not be so terribly of a difficult tune.

[lbpesq]

I long ago came to the conclusion that, when it comes to guitar playing, (as well as many other things in life), the difference between easy and difficult is really the difference between having learned to do it vs. not having learned yet.  There have been numerous times when I thought a particular song was hard to play, took the time to work on it, and learned it.  At that point I have often found my perception changing to believe it was really a lot easier all along.  While I've never been in a band that tackled Help/Slipknot, I imagine the most difficult part is getting the arrangement right.  It certainly isn't your typical 1-4-5 tune with the same changes repeating every 12 bars.  I suspect getting everyone on the same page at the same time would take a little more work than most Dead tunes.  But it ain't rocket science.  It would certainly require everyone to do some homework though, and not everyone in an amateur or semi-pro band situation has the time or inclination to do a lot of homework between rehearsals.  That's my $.02.

Bill, tgo

[David Houck]

Never played it; but it's one of my favorites.  If I were in a Dead band, I would want it in the set list.  (And if I were to go see a Dead band, I would love to hear it - played well.)

Here's a very nice version (featuring two beautiful Alembics).  These guys all know the tune, but they blow it coming out of the jam and back into "the lick".  But to be fair, they're not a "band", but kind of a rotating collection of players who know the genre well; and the bass player tends to change the arrangements.

Despite the tricky timing on the lick, the jam may be the most difficult part to pull off well; and here they do.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o13qJXDLEPs

[StephenR]

IMO the two potential landmines in peforming Help/Slip are the rhythmic changes going into and out of Slipknot and making sure everyone in the band is referencing the same arrangement. For instance the arrangement for the later versions changed the ascending diminished runs. I prefer the original mid-70s arrangement and tempo and find that arrangement easiest to play.  Regardless of which arrangement you like it is hard to recover if one or more band members play the wrong arrangement during that section.

I would say one of the trickiest things about playing a lot of the Dead tunes, especially in a band with a rotating lineup, is making sure everyone knows and agrees on the arrangement you are going to use as a lot of the tunes were changed over the years (in some cases multiple times). I think a lot of the songs were not improved by the changes but the band got bored with playing them the same way. In the early days of the band they rehearsed quite a bit and could easily pull off the songs that had odd time signatures and changes. As they got into the 80s and beyond it seems they often took a "lowest common denominator" approach to resurrecting old material so they wouldn't have to rehearse much if it all. A couple of the worst examples of this were "Here Comes Sunshine" and "Unbroken Chain". It is such a shame that they never performed "Unbroken Chain" until the 90s and then proceeded to destroy the tune. The Phil Lesh and Friends versions in later years were far superior and honored the original essence and arrangement of the tune. "Here Comes Sunshine" is one of my all-time favorite Dead tunes (to listen to or play) and I cringe every time I hear a 90s version.

[edwin]

I'm with Stephen on the arrangements. I much prefer the 70s arrangements and no matter how much the people I play with proclaim they much prefer 70s arrangements, we somehow always default to 80s/90s.

But, I've played this song dozens of time and I don't think it's all that difficult once you get the patterns down. I don't even know that I've ever rehearsed it, but the bass part does have a lot more leeway to improvise through it. I think that there are tabs and charts out there that can get you close.

[lbpesq]

In my semi-regular Dead jam, we've been fooling around with drifting from "Here Comes Sunshine" to The Beatles'/George Harrison's "Here Comes the Sun".  Not only the titles and choruses, but even the signature riffs are similar, yet different enough to make it interesting.

Bill, tgo