By Ryan Demler (Dembinsky) Feb 6, 2018 • 10:16 am PST

 Photo by Philip Murphy

The 1920s were a pivotal period in American cultural history. Remarkable advances arose in every segment of the arts during the economic boom period following World War I. The decade saw the beginning of the surrealist art movement, the first films to contain voice and music, the beginnings of jazz and blues, and huge technological advancements for the exposure and accessibility of the arts. Televisions, radios, and phonographs became commonplace in households, as did the automobile. Music became a much more prominent part of life for the masses, which helped garner the term the Roaring ’20s. It became the first decade with a soundtrack, and it was a soundtrack you could dance to.

On his new solo album, Arkansas, John Oates and his Good Road Band – a who’s who of Nashville virtuosos and innovators, including Sam Bush on mandolin and Russ Paul on pedal steel – set out to record a tribute album to Mississippi John Hurt, the legendary country bluesman who made massive contribution to that golden age of music and arts in the late-1920s. Mississippi John Hurt would go on to inspire countless artists including Bob Dylan, Beck, Jerry Garcia and Doc Watson. After tackling a handful of Hurt’s songs, Oates felt such a strong spirit of collaboration with his band and fondness of this period of American music that the project evolved into a collaborative portrait of this time in American history that lasted from the boom times of the Roaring ’20s through the 1929 stock market crash and into the hard times that followed in the Great Depression.

After a storied career as one half of the highest selling duo in music history, Hall & Oates, John Oates moved to Nashville around the turn of the century, a decision that reinvigorated the dedication to his craft and he sought to improve his guitar playing across a variety of styles. Since then, he has become a musical troubadour with an encyclopedic knowledge of music history and a passion for collaboration. I caught up with Oates to discuss his love for playing with different musicians, his fondness for Mississippi John Hurt, and his pride for the great American music of the late-1920s.

JAMBASE: At this stage in your life, it seems like you have really found a nice balance of exploring new and varied styles of music and you’re getting out and playing with all sorts of musicians. When you show up to a jam or a first rehearsal with some new friends where you haven’t all played together before, what do you tend to do right off the bat? Do you dive into an actual song or just throw out a key and a chord progression or something and jam?

JOHN OATES: Every person in every collaboration is different. Every person brings a different approach and a different personal style to the table, but at the same time, a lot of it is very similar. I think musicians just like to play. [laughs] They like to try new things. In fact, pretty much all the musicians I’ve met are very open-minded and want to try things outside their comfort zones, even though some of them might be a little nervous. That’s where the role kind of transcends the musicianship and becomes almost a psychological element.

JAMBASE: How did the coloration of this group of musicians come about? Is this a new group of friends or more established relationships?

JO: On this project, I’m playing with all good friends. These are all guys I’ve known for a while who I’ve played with and recorded with in different configurations and different projects. There were no strangers involved on the record.

Sam Bush was one of my first friends in Nashville. He welcomed me with open arms when I first came here in the early 2000s. He’s just been great. I’ve played with his band at Telluride. I’ve sat-in with him. He’s sat-in with me. We have written together. We’ve recorded together. So, we go back and have great relationship. And It’s the same way with the rest of the guys.

When I did the thing with Jim James at Bonnaroo in 2013 when we did the Super Jam, he had asked me to sit-in with those guys at Red Rocks and I just sat-in as a guest. I had such a good time and felt so comfortable with the My Morning Jacket band, that when it was proposed that we do something together at Bonnaroo, we already knew each other. So, it was just a matter of sitting down together and plotting out what to play and what direction we wanted to go and who our guests were going to be. Here again, that was seamless.

JAMBASE: This is kind of a tangent, but did you get to know Carl Broemel, the other guitar player in My Morning Jacket? We’re all huge fans of him around here. We’ve done a bunch of stuff with him over the years.

JO: Oh yeah, Carl and I go way back. He’s such a nice guy. He practically lives next door to me. He lives like a quarter of a mile away right here in Nashville.

JAMBASE: Maybe talk about the guitar style on the record. This project began as a Mississippi John Hurt album and a lot of people hear that name and think of a blues guy, but it’s more country blues, Americana, almost bluegrass music. It’s kind of that fingerpicked, plucky blues-style of playing. Was that a style you were fluent in before this project or is that something you had to work at practicing to get up to speed?

JO: Not to put too many labels on this thing, but I did start out planning to just play in a traditional way with just my guitar and voice. I’m still doing Mississippi John Hurt songs but in a very casual way. After doing a few tracks, I just said, “Well, sure I can do this, but what am I doing this for? Am I doing it, just to prove to other people I can do it.?” I already know I can do it. I’ve been playing these songs for 50 years. [laughs]

I didn’t want to abandon the songs though. I love these songs so much, so I thought, “I wonder what would happen if I put a band together?” But I I didn’t want just a regular band. I wanted to have an eclectic group of musicians who are all come from slightly different places but could come together.

So, that’s what I did. I got a guy named Nat Smith playing cello but he’s not a cello player in a classical sense. He plays almost like a country fiddler. I have Russ Paul who is a groundbreaking pedal steel innovator who plays with Dan Auerbach among other people. Of course, Sam you know. Then in the rhythm section we have Guthrie Trapp – a fantastic electric guitar player, Steve Mackie on bass and Josh Day on drums and percussion. So, that is the band. I put them together and it was magic. The chemistry was there from the very beginning.

The first track we cut, my engineer looked at me and said, “Man, I don’t know what this is, but I love it.” It was done completely live in the studio with all analog gear with all vintage equipment and recorded to tape. This was designed to be on a vinyl record from the very beginning. There were considerations in the lengths of the songs, keeping it to 10 tracks, and timing it out right from the get-go. The main thing is that you have to keep it under a certain length per side on vinyl to ensure the things like fidelity and level are appropriately accounted for when you’re pumping out on a vinyl record. If it gets too long, the grooves in the physical product get too tight.

JAMBASE: In terms of the material, I recognize a couple songs as Mississippi John Hurt, and you have a rendition of “Stack-O-Lee” (“Stagger Lee”) on there. Is the rest of the material written by you, but keeping with the stylistic flow and style of the Mississippi John Hurt music?

JO: There are actually five Mississippi John Hurt songs on the record. There is “Creole Bell,” which he didn’t write, but he made it famous. Most people think he was the guy, but that song was written at the turn of the century in the early-1900s. “Stack-O-Lee” was his interpretation of a song that has been recorded by a million people. I first heard that song in 1959 by Lloyd Price, who was a singer had a rock hit with that song in 1959. So, we do our own version on that one. There is a song called “Lord Send Me,” a gospel song, that John used to like to start his shows with and then there is “Make Me a Pallet on Your Floor,” but I reworked it a little and added a refrain and named it “Pallet Soft and Low.”

The album just sounded so good and there was something going on that I wanted to keep it going, so I said, “What other songs would have been contemporary in Mississippi John Hurt’s early recording career in the late-1920s when he was recording for OKeh Records?” I read that he was a big fan of Jimmie Rodgers, so I chose “Miss the Mississippi and You”, which was a song that I played for the first time at Bristol Rhythm & Roots festival about five or six years ago. I love that song and we did a great arrangement of that.

Then I started thinking about his guitar playing, which I think a lot of people mistakenly lump into this delta blues category, but he is really more hill country. His style is more reminiscent of ragtime than it is delta blues. So, I decided to do a Blind Blake song. Anybody who knows guitar will probably agree that Blind Blake is the king of the ragtime guitar.

Then I started thinking back to this late-1920s period and how it was such an interesting time as it was essentially the beginning of radio and it was the beginning of the phonograph machine, so people could play albums. So, I started looking into what was the first hit record. What would be a record that would be played on the radio or played in people’s homes at that time? Emmett Miller’s version of “Anytime” is arguably one of the first hit records ever made in America. That was considered one of the earliest hit songs.

The album started to take on a wider scope and it started becoming a snapshot of this early American period of music in the late-1920s and early-1930s.

JAMBASE: You wrote the title track. I assume that would be the single? I like how “Arkansas” feels almost like the crescendo if you’re thinking about it in the context of the whole album.

JO: I’m a songwriter and I’m not really used to doing albums of cover versions of other people’s songs. I took a trip to Wilson, Arkansas just north of Memphis. After a show up there, I walked out into some cotton fields on the banks of the Mississippi River and moonlight was glistening and I was standing in this spot where it felt like this American music kind of came up all the way from the delta in the south through St. Louis and Chicago and it seemed to crystallize what I was doing on the record. It gave me this evocative feeling that I was standing at the epicenter of this great American musical tradition. I wrote the song on pure emotions really.

On that song, there is a blending of kind of rootsy sentiment and styles with a modern sensibility and a bit more of a pop sensibility. To me, that is who I am. I’m this blending of roots and traditional music that I grew up with as a kid and the popular music that I made through my career with Hall & Oates. In a way, that song glues the album together.

JAMBASE: Is that a guitar solo or a distorted mandolin? I couldn’t figure out what instrument that was, but I really dig how that sort of towers over the music, but the singing and the rest of the band is still up in the mix too.

JO: That’s a pedal steel guitar. He’s not like any other pedal steel guitar player. He uses effects and it’s almost like a rock slide guitar. Sam does play his slide electric mandolin on “Pallet Soft and Low” though. Russ Paul’s pedal steel playing is really amazing and unique.

JAMBASE: In a general sense, you have a ton going on right now. There is this album with all the affiliated promotion and shows supporting it, and then you have a massive Hall & Oates tour coming up beginning on May 1st. How are you feeling? Are you a person who gets a little stressed out or more just excited during times like this when you have so many big things happening?

JO: [laughs] Well, I’m trying not to be. It really is a lot of stuff going on though. First of all, this album was supposed to come out in the spring, and there wasn’t supposed to be a lot of Hall & Oates shows in 2018. I was going to work on this album and Daryl [Hall] was going to work on his TV show, but things changed when the group Train became available and it was proposed that we do this tour together.

Everything changed and I had to push my album release up to February and this giant Hall & Oates tour was quite frankly too good to turn down. So, that’s what happened and why this year might seem crazy. I didn’t intend 2018 to be quite so jammed, but my goal is to do it all and have a great time doing it.

JAMBASE: I was curious with Train, have you thought about what you are going to do with the collaborative part of the show?

JO: We’re working on a song together that is more like a single. So, we’re still working on that one, but it’s coming along nicely. We haven’t decided what else we’re going to do together, but we’ll figure it out. We definitely want to make it collaborative. I played with them at Jazz Fest and went on their cruise, and Daryl has had them on his show. So this will be a lot of fun.

JAMBASE: Alright last question. Will the mustache be ready for May 1st?

JO: [laughs] The mustache is always ready. I’ve already got a mustache goatee situation going on, so I think we’re in good shape. [laughs]

By Ryan Demler (Dembinsky) Feb 16, 2010 • 3:16 pm PST

Are people born with rhythm?

Sitting down at the kitchen table inside 88-year-old jazz legend Chico Hamilton‘s midtown Manhattan apartment, chewing the fat about jazz music and his storied career as a drummer and bandleader – a career that includes holding court for jazz royals “Duke” Ellington and “Count” Basie, playing storied musical engagements with his school kid pal Charles Mingus, receiving a living legend of jazz award from the Kennedy Center, and recording on over 60 albums – likely marks one of those stories I’ll tell my grandchildren one day. Not only did Hamilton leave a musical legacy that virtually mirrors the history of jazz since the 1940s, but in just a short visit I learned that Chico just recently suffered congestive heart failure, yet continues to play shows with guys half his age and just recently put out an incredible new album titled the Twelve Tones of Love (released last April on Joyous Shout Records).

This question of rhythm came up about midway through the chat and Chico said, “Well they all got a heart. They all feel the beat of their heart.”

From there, he ordered me, “Put you’re your hand on your heart. Now take your other hand and keep the beat. Now sing this, ‘Do Do Do Do; Doot Doot,’” as he nodded along with the four quarter notes and two subsequent half notes. “Let me hear you sing it,” he said, chuckling as I sang through the beat. “That’s the oldest beat that I know of; that’s the bottom line of jazz. That’s The Charleston.”

I think I just took a music lesson from a living jazz legend. Check that one off the bucket list.

Composer

Chico’s new album, Twelve Tones of Love, sounds at once fresh, mellow, listenable, funky, and melodic – as fresh a jazz album as I’ve heard in ages – but Hamilton downplays all of these in a charismatic, albeit humble manner.

“There’s no such thing as new music,” he says. “Somewhere, somebody played that same note. The only thing different is the rhythmic articulation. We still don’t know which came first, rhythm or movement. The freest thing that a human being can do is dance.”

In talking about his studio effort, I inquired if the title referenced the musical approach known as the twelve-tone method.

“Exactly. C, C#, and all the way up,” he says. “I do it because there ain’t no bad notes. Every note means something. It’s simple; you hear the sound, you play the note.”

If only it was so easy. Hamilton has a way of describing music where you know he feels it in a way not everybody can. “You’re playing in all the keys,” he adds. “Keys don’t mean a thing. That enables you to play what’s called a moveable ‘do’ [as in do-re-mi].”

Prodigy

In his early days, Chico made a quick study to jazz and earned himself early recognition on the West Coast.

“When I was eight-years-old, my mother took me to the Paramount to see Duke Ellington and his orchestra. Back then, the orchestra stood in a pyramid and at the top was Sonny Greer. Man, he had more drums than a drum store. People just went nuts for him. He was the first real percussionist.”

At eight years of age, Chico experienced that cathartic performance and subsequently realized he had a unique talent. “Play me anything, I can play it,” he claims. The West Coast jazz scene took to Chico like a burr on wool and before long he was playing with his idols like Lester Young, Lionel Hampton, Billie Holiday, and George Jones. “Eight years later, I was in that exact same seat, playing with Duke at 16-years-old.”

Bandleader

Having tackled the drums and percussion with Ray Lewis authority, Chico stepped out front into the limelight in 1955 as a bandleader and he never looked back. This is a curious feat given the fact that Hamilton came from a largely self-taught background. Presumably, learning the drums and keeping time comes more naturally, but Hamilton evolved into one of the finest bandleaders of the day – many days for that matter – which comes as a direct tertiary of his dedication to the craft, his understanding of space, and the piecing together of different skill sets. Asked what makes a great bandleader, Chico responded diplomatically, “A better word is ‘good.’ What makes a ‘good’ bandleader? To be a good bandleader, you have to be a great sideman first. You can’t run before you can crawl.”

The freest thing that a human being can do is dance.–Chico Hamilton

Teacher

Similarly, almost from the get-go, Hamilton established not only a reputation as a virtuoso player, but also as a launching pad for aspiring jazz musicians. In fact, the seminal jazz bible, Ted Gioia’s The History of Jazz, attributes the late legendary alto saxophonist Eric Dolphy’s earliest successes and notoriety to his association with Hamilton.

What drives Hamilton to make the effort to look out for the careers of younger musicians on the rise, while many musicians preoccupy themselves foremost with furthering their own careers?

“That’s just the way I grew up,” he says. “I got help from the pros like Lester Young and Joe Jones. Basically, I was self-taught, which is not easy. I’m still teaching myself new things. I still take lessons from time to time.”

This “what goes around comes around” attitude led Hamilton to become an original founding member of The New School for Jazz and Contemporary Music in 1987. Over 20 years later, while Chico rarely leaves the confines of his New York City apartment – equipped with a drum kit and keyboard parked in front of his living room television – he still makes the effort to teach an ensemble class at the New School. To this day, most of the players in Chico’s live band are former students from the program.

“What I stress when I teach is that it takes all kinds of music to make music,” he offers. “I don’t care if it’s country western or pop-rock, if it’s good, it deserves to be played and it deserves to be listened to.”

Film Contributor

Perhaps a tribute to the depth of Chico’s personality, which easily maneuvers a balance of quick wit, thoughtful emotion, and quirky philosophies, Hamilton has also enjoyed a long career adding his colorful contexts to the movie industry, contributing compositions, pre-recorded numbers for soundtracks, and even his well-worn face as an actor.

“There’s only been one producer/director that I actually liked and that is Roman Polanski. In the film Repulsion, we had 25 music cues and yet we only had a single discussion. For the rest, he was cool. The producers, they forget why they hired you.”

It’s funny, because you often hear how everyone in Hollywood wants a piece of the soundtrack and should have a say in the music, but Hamilton’s sentiments definitely mirror these notions.

“They ultimately become the music people. First, they want the music in a certain place, but then they take it out and put it in another place; the wrong place,” Chico states emphatically. “The interesting part about writing music for film is knowing where not to put music.”

Person

To think that a jazz legend with over 70 years in the upper crust of music’s finest still gets hurt feelings may be mind boggling, but it’s also true. As a music fan, casual listener or even critic, sometimes we forget that we’re judging somebody’s life’s work, and it may well influence them.

“Every time I play – whether I sound good, bad, or different – I’m doing the best I can. You can’t please people as far as the music’s concerned,” he says. “I want to make something clear: I don’t play music for people; I play music for music’s sake. That way you don’t get your feelings hurt. I realize that I have been blessed to the extent that music is God’s will and God’s will shall be done.”

Hamilton returned to these themes a number of times throughout the course of our short visit. While a wise musical philosopher on the outside, the fact that he’s both a deeply emotional man and musician came across as clear as highway thinking.

“You know what my name is? It’s Foreststorn. Back when I was in the service, people kept looking at my name not knowing how to say it. So, people started calling me Chico. You know what Chico means?”

Doesn’t it mean boy?

“It means ‘little boy’,” he retorts. And there must be something to that, because 88 years later, Chico Hamilton still runs with the passion of a young boy, and frankly, it’s both inspiring and entirely contagious. We should all be so lucky to achieve such broad reach and versatility in our chosen field, and keep at it with the same unbridled furor after so many years – particularly when that field is music.

By Ryan Dembinsky (Ryan Demler) Mar 28, 2016 • 9:01 am PDT

 Photo via Bill Walton Twitter

Sitting down with Bill Walton to discuss the Grateful Dead and his new book, Back From The Dead, an epiphanic generational gap between an old-school Deadhead and a 38-year old neophyte by comparison revealed itself unexpectedly. On three distinct occasions, Bill Walton busts my chops for an archetypal habit of a modern day fan. “There you go with the ranking and the rating, again,” he laughs.

First, I tried to draw out the comparison of his Trailblazers 1977 NBA championship season as the pinnacle of his NBA career which happened concurrent to the Dead’s mighty May/June 1977 run. Both of these events occurred at the exact same point in time, yet Bill couldn’t have cared less.

“I don’t think about it that way all,” he objects. “The pinnacle is today and the band is playing better today than they have ever played. Their equipment is better. They have always been out there willing to experiment on every level. What Bear [sound engineer Owsley Stanley] did and every step along the way, they were never afraid to be out in front.”

His mentality is quite the opposite of most fans today as we tear apart every detail of every show, devote entire websites to unearthing the best versions of songs, and endlessly stratify the relative value of shows and eras.

“I’m the same way in everything,” he explains in reference to not just music but also to sports. “ESPN has changed the way we look at the world. Everybody wants to know what is the best? Who is the best ever? That is not me. Today is the best. I go to shows for fun. I go because that is where you find the most interesting people in the world are and where you never know what is going to happen. It’s like opening a great book when you don’t know the story, or playing a basketball game. I love it live.”

“There you go again, ranking and rating,” he laughs again. This time I’m asking about who he considers his closest comrade within the Grateful Dead organization, pointing out that despite deep friendships with all the band members, most of whom have stayed with him at his San Diego home, he seemed particularly close with longtime crew member Lawrence “Ramrod” Shurtliff. Ramrod is referenced often in Back From The Dead and in our conversation as a particularly close friend, and he was the one who delivered the news of Jerry’s passing in 1995.

“Once I met the band in 1974,” he says, “A lot of things changed in terms of access to the music. If I was at the show, they would just hand me the tapes right as I was walking out and if I wasn’t there, Ramrod would mail me the tapes. For the home games in Portland, the son of our radio man, Bill Schonely, knew how to run the PA system in the entire arena. I think games started at 8 o’clock in those days, much later than they start now on the West Coast. So if you’re in there at 7 o’clock, yesterday’s Grateful Dead show would be playing on the PA system through the entire Portland Coliseum. I don’t think the other guys or the coaches even knew what was going on,” he jokes. “It was a completely different world back then. If you go to an NBA game today it’s so organized. It was not like that at all. The games managed to start on time though, unlike the Grateful Dead concerts.”

“Ramrod was phenomenal in that he loved sports and he loved Oregon. He was a very quiet person. He was not loquacious or boisterous. He liked to be in the back. When he did speak, it was pearls of wisdom with precise timing. When you are out there in the front and you’re racing, you need someone with that level of big picture perspective and patience. He brought that to the team. There were so many personalities in that group. All the guys like Dan Healy, Bear, Ramrod, Big Steve [Parish] and all these people at Ultrasound made this intergalactic community. Then you have [lyricists Robert] Hunter and [John Perry] Barlow telling all the stories of our lives that we can’t express ourselves. I have a house full of instruments and I have zero musical talent, so I needed these guys.”

Bill Walton has been seeing the Grateful Dead and its scions for 49 years. He counts his total dead shows at 849, which breaks down to a manageable 17 shows a year. The math is a little fuzzy though since the tally seems to include post-Jerry iterations, but regardless he’s clearly earned his title as Celebrity Deadhead Number One. “We went all the time, that’s all we did,” he explains. “They played every weekend and then you had the Jerry Garcia Band, Ace, and all the other bands I love like Neil Young, Crosby, Stills & Nash, the Eagles, The Rolling Stones and Bruce Springsteen. It was literally all the time and we still do it, and it’s not enough. If it’s Grateful Dead music or Grateful Dead players, we are there. At the end of the shows in Chicago, I just looked around and said look at how happy everyone is, look at how happy the band is, and look how much money everybody just made,” he laughs. “How could you possibly think about stopping?”

The main premise of Bill’s book is to provide a ride along view into the intense peaks and valleys of his life as he struggled both physically and emotionally with great successes cut short by never-ending injuries that derailed him at every turn. He begins the book in 2009 at his life’s nadir, lying on the ground, incapable of moving, and ready to give up due to a complete spinal failure. He considered ending his own life, but with the the help of great doctors, a solid network of emotional support, and music, he pulled through and recovered. “Don’t ever let the music stop,” he sighs. “Sadly, that’s exactly what I did, because I was so sick after my spine broke down. I’m always sick with something, or somebody. Music is one of my three medicines. The other two are athletic participation, which I couldn’t do, and then being with the guys and being on a team, which I also couldn’t do. When you have the opportunity to move and listen to music, it makes you feel better.

“Plus, I’m a really good dancer, although nobody else would be able to verify that besides me,“ he jokes. “When I started to get better and I realized that I hadn’t been listening to music, I wrote a big sign and put it right on my desk that says ‘Turn the Music On.’ It reminds me any time I’m working, that the music should always be on.”

Music is far more than a form of entertainment or escapism for Bill. It’s his north star and his religion.

“Everything changes in life every single day,” he says. “Where I am today is defined by four mantras. One: when you get confused listen to the music play. Two: we used to play for silver now we play for life. Three: once in awhile you get shown the light in the strangest of places if you look at it right. And four: it all rolls into one but nothing comes for free. The privilege that I have to be a part of this family that you, me and JamBase are all a part of, it means a lot to me.”

Throughout both his own struggles, and later in helping others through their own struggles with back pain, he often uses the lyrics from “Mission In The Rain” as a motivator to keep trying, take that extra step to get the remote, or push a little harder to get the bike up the hill.

“That song to me is about the passion and the compassion in understanding of how hard it is out there,” he explains. “One of the endless great things about the Grateful Dead is how they are able to take this sad, cruel, brutal, hard world with all this pain and isolation, and make you feel better. They are able to put a big splash of beauty on it. It’s not just the music, it’s the fans, the artwork, and the happiness of being part of the team. Whether it’s ‘Mission In The Rain,’ ‘Standing On The Moon,’ ‘Stella Blue’ or the endless other songs, I go to them for a lot of different reasons: to be educated, to be stimulated, to gather strength, to gain confidence. I go to be healed.”

“You’re getting into the ranking and the rating again,” he cuts me off laughing, busted again. I wanted to hear a favorite Jerry Garcia story. “Jerry was super fun, super nice, and super smart. I was on the inside of that scene in a sense, but I’m really just a fan. So, I used to care what they played and where they played. Now I’m only interested in how they play. Athletes, artists, writers, and musicians are the ultimate entrepreneurs. We have to create something from nothing every single day. Jerry knew that and he loved to work. He was like Larry Bird and John Wooden. He loved to come and do his thing every day. He would always have his guitar and he was always practicing. At first, I would always bug him, please play this or please play that, and he would say no every time. Maybe once in awhile he would play one.

“I stopped doing that eventually,” he says, “much to their joy and relief. I realized that it’s their show and they are trying to teach us something. The way that they work so hard at the preparation, it’s quite similar to a basketball team when you have a great team like the Warriors are now or the Celtics or the Blazers were in the past. You always have a plan in place, but it never quite goes according to plan. But they were always ready. A Larry Bird, a John Wooden, and a Jerry Garcia understood that as the leader that this is a privilege to be able to do this. Privilege comes with the burden of responsibility of getting it right. When they didn’t, they knew they had to do better. I respect that.”

A large part of what draws Walton to the Grateful Dead is the serendipitous twists of fate and the “we are everywhere” mentality.

“One of my favorite stories recently was after [Fare Thee Well] Santa Clara,” he describes. “The shows end and all we want is more. Keep playing and don’t stop. The planes and the hotels and airports are full of Deadheads and it’s going 24/7 and then at the end you’re like, it’s over. It’s always really sad when you’re in that car or on your bike and you’re leaving the tour. We were on this plane going home and it was quiet as could be and everybody is thinking ‘oh my god that was incredible and it’s over.’ So we land in San Diego and out of nowhere Southwest cranked ‘Truckin’’ on the PA. Everyone was cheering and dancing on this plane, and we were so excited to go back to Chicago for the next weekend.

“I couldn’t believe at the Fare Thee Well shows how young everybody looked. All these people who had no idea about the Grateful Dead came out,” he says, pulling a bit of rank. He has other more lasting stories of fate with the band. Bill and his wife Lori offer differing accounts of how they met. She claims they met at a Dead show, while Bill claims they met somewhere else. “We met at church,” he says. “It was a very special, personal, unique church.”

He’s not the only one either. In 1986, Bill took his Celtics teammates to see a Grateful Dead show at the Boston Garden and turned both Larry Bird and Kevin McHale onto the band. Interestingly, Rick Carlisle met his wife at the show, it was their first date.

“Rick calls me and says ‘Bill, I want to marry this girl, she’s fantastic,’” Walton recalls. “‘The Dead are playing tonight and I really want to take her.’ You couldn’t reach people easily back in those days, so I tell him just go to the show, knock on the back door, and ask for Ramrod. So he tells this girl, look we don’t have any tickets, and she thinks it’s never going to work, but they try. The guys open the door at the venue and look at him, straight laced, and think who is this guy asking for Ramrod? But he says, ‘I’m Rick Carlisle. I’m friends with Bill Walton.’ So they let them in and got them right up there right in front of Jerry, and they have been married ever since.

“That’s just the way it works with the Grateful Dead and why I live for it,” Bill describes. “These things always happen, just like the rainbow at Fare Thee Well, ‘Truckin’’ on the airplane, or when Mount St. Helens blew up while they were playing ‘Fire on the Mountain.’”

Finally, the music is a form of preparation for Walton. On the 10 year anniversary of Jerry’s passing, he found one of his longtime favorite songs at the Comes A Time tribute show at the Greek Theater in Berkeley where Trey Anastasio and Bruce Hornsby got together to play a chilling “Standing On The Moon.”

“This is an overwhelming version,” Bill recalls. “There are so many songs like this, but on this one particular day everybody is crying and the colors and sounds are better than perfect. That song carried me for a long time. I got a recording of this show and this Hornsby/Trey collaboration became my music to get in the zone. I always use music to get ready. The first one of those I ever had was Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture, but I used this Hornsby/Trey song for the longest time and I would just replay it over it over. I’d call Hornsby afterwards and start screaming ‘We’re standing on the moon, Bruce. Let’s go! We’ve got a game!’ He’d say, ‘Bill, take a deep breath.’”

Bill doesn’t look at the Grateful Dead as counter-culture. He looks at it as it as his life.

“They are the pilots of the spaceship, and you know when you’re in that moment that you are in the right place, you are going someplace that is better than where you are right now. The thing that always made me so proud is how happy everybody always was in the organization even though there was a lot of loss and sadness. They come out and they filled us all with strength. At the end of the show, you’re thinking if they can do that, we can do anything. The only time it gets sad is when they stop playing. We never thought they would stop playing. I always thought, ‘I’m with those guys.’”

Crippled by a perfect storm of new channels for film distribution, secular headwinds dissuading people away from the movie theater experience, a television renaissance, and conservative creative Hollywood decision-making where comic book movies and comic book movie sequels are about as exciting as it gets: it’s fair to generalize that Hollywood has been playing it overly safe as of late. Adventurous high-risk projects that employ unestablished plot formulas or untested screenwriters and/or directors are a rarity.

Yet a strange coincidence in 2017 may have offered up just the evidence we need to see that taking chances can pay off – even if it was a complete accident. Two movies about the exact same World War II battle told from completely different vantage points may have reinvigorated the stale as a crouton state of Hollywood film-making.

Earlier this year, Christopher Nolan released a time-skipping, all-too-real front-lines look at the Battle of Dunkirk, a critical early World War II battle, whereby the British forces backed themselves into a proverbial corner* whereby had the Germans proceeded as aggressors, the Axis forces could have won the war back in 1940. Nolan’s film, Dunkirk, focuses almost entirely on the action on the French beaches of Dunkirk via three vantage points: land, air, and sea with varying speeds and freneticism depending on the mode of transport.

The film grossed $545 million dollars, which in and of itself is a big win for movie fans desperately hoping for more risks or at the very least some headier thematic content – yes, a war movie is considered daring in today’s movie industry – but the real optimism is in the seemingly coincidental accident that later in the year, as the very same battle is told from the Halls of the British Parliament from the perspective of the British politicians making the decisions behind the scenes, via Joe Wright’s Darkest Hour.

Darkest Hour feels like a well-placed collaborative sister film that rolled out in theaters just as Dunkirk hit Cable On-Demand and Streaming sites. It’s almost like watching a different character’s interpretation of the very same events not unlike an episode of The Affair on Showtime. You’re watching the exact same time-period unfold with all the fear and intensity, but from entirely different character viewpoints.

While Dunkirk has the action of the war and Christopher Nolan’s trademark mind-bending of time and space which makes for a more accessible war film – in a brief exchange with the lead Film Editor for the San Francisco Chronicle, Mick LaSalle, he said he thought Dunkirk was the more likely of the two to take home the Oscar for Best Picture – yet Darkest Hour was his favorite. Darkest Hour is gripping in its own right despite nary a sign of a gunshot. It’s entirely focused on Winston Churchill’s blind-drunk big-hearted approach to navigating a seemingly lose-lose scenario, but by following his nationalistic gut instincts to fight for their country., the extraction of over 300,000 British soldiers from Dunkirk succeeds.

In researching the timing of the two films, there exists to my knowledge no evidence that suggests that the movies were rolled out as an intentional collaboration, but it’s this type of creative riffing that could bring a new level of excitement back to film. This was the first time I felt a complete surprise and instantly wanted more of the story upon leaving the the theater in longer than I can remember.

Mick LaSalle, the aforementioned Film Editor for the SF Chronicle offered this on the potential of an intentional collaboration, “I don’t think they were coordinated, though they may have been intentionally released in a way as to avoid each other.”

In other words, the two films were hardly an intentional cross-promotion, but rather they stayed out of each other’s way at best. Ironically, I view this as a potentially new mechanism for the safety-first Hollywood enterprise  – one that clutches on to its formulas like Shake Weights – to embark on more adventurous material in within a potentially lower risk financial framework. For instance, following the success of Dunkirk and Darkest Hour, we could theoretically now have the stage set for additional deep dives into why the US held out so long in entering the war; how did Britain rally back after Dunkirk; or dare I say, a do-over of a Pearl Harbor picture. The new formula becomes the all-in onslaught on a topic of deep cultural relevance or historic significance but told through the eye various auteurs and in a variety of styles – some accessible, some challenging – from year to year.

NPR wrote an article highlighting the strange coincidence of the two films, albeit in the context of the accident being potentially threatening to the two films. I don’t see it this way at all. They are both better because the other one exists. In fact, Dunkirk might win the Oscar for Best Picture while Gary Oldman’s Winston Churchill is a lock for best actor. This coincidence feels like a truly unique experience to be savored. Go see these movies back to back, or in consecutive days. You’ll have fun at the movie theater again.

Oldman’s Speech

Churchill’s Speech

*I figure if I’m going to lazily use the saying “backed into a proverbial corner,” I should at least pick a proverb to go with it. So, I picked two: “ Failing to plan is planning to fail” and “Eat breakfast as a king, lunch as a merchant and supper as a beggar.”