VIDEO: The Dead Perform Stellar 'Lost Sailor/Saint of Circumstance'

The latest installment of the Grateful Dead’s video series, “All the Years Live,” features a five-star performance of “Lost Sailor/Saint of Circumstance” – a real treat on Halloween night, October 31, 1980 in Gotham City.

I’ve always loved the way the band sounded in 1980, and this tight, flawless performance is no exception to that good vibe. Here’s how Dead archivist David Lemieux describes it:

If you were seeing a lot of shows 1979-1982, you likely saw this Weir-Barlow combination plenty of times. This terrific rendition was a highlight of the Dead Ahead home video, the Dead’s first foray into creating a video specifically for the home viewer (as opposed to the Grateful Dead Movie in 1977, which was a theatrical project)…

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ONE OF DYLAN'S MOST POWERFUL SONGS
Ain't it just like the night?
Bob Dylan
Written by Bob Dylan

“Visions Of Johanna” is fraught with images of the drifting, unpredictable muse of the heavens, beginning with one of the most powerful lines in rock music:

The ghost of electricity
Howls in the bones of her face…

Dylan’s lyrical work – always spinning along like its own synoptic gospel, telling the same story in the same order with different words – reaches a zenith in “Johanna.”

Dylan dishes two types of muses in the song. One is earthbound, available and sexual. The other is ethereal, capricious and inspirational on a different plane. The latter is the Madonna and/or the Mona Lisa and the Johanna of “Visions Of Johanna.”

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Songs That Shape Rock-n-Roll

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Mapping The DNA of Rock-N-Roll

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Through its unique “Rock-N-Roll DNA Mapping Project” – an extensive work in progress – SongMango traces and maps out (ultimately, in 3-D double-helix fashion) the songs that have shaped, and continue to shape, the most unpredictable, most raucous musical genre on the planet. The SongMango DNA Map will serve up a detailed, song-by-song visual accounting of the evolution of Rock-N-Roll, where it came from and where it’s going, as well as where its genetic strengths and weaknesses originate.