"Morning Dew" by The Grateful Dead

From time to time we will be having guest bloggers voice their songs of the day. Today's guest blogger is our good friend Jason Adler. Enjoy.

I started to listen to jam band music almost 10 years ago.  Chris Murino, writer for this very blog, introduced me to a then young, up and coming band known as Umphrey’s McGee.  My music taste was changed forever because from there I started getting into bands such as Phish, The Allman Brothers, Gov’t Mule, STS9, Soulive, Lettuce, The Meters, and more.  The one jam band that evaded me, somewhat inexplicably, was the Grateful Dead.  A combination of intimidation and embarrassment led me to never really try to get into Jerry Garcia and his band of merry men.  That is until the Summer of 2013 when I was camping in upstate New York to see Phish.  For three hot, July days, my buddy Tyler played nothing but live Grateful Dead tracks and from then I realized what I've been missing for all these years.

My first song of the day is Morning Dew by The Grateful Dead.  Throughout this Summer, I explored live Dead songs, but none have had the impact on me quite like this song.  It’s not one of the Dead’s catchiest or fun songs, but it might be their most beautiful.  One might call it the perfect jam band song.  From the first notes Jerry plays on his guitar, “Wolf”, you can tell you are in for a journey.  Morning Dew is a 12 minute epic that rises, falls, rises again, and ends with 3 minutes of the most breathtaking guitar solos I have ever heard.  Towards the end of the song, Jerry proclaims, “I guess it doesn't really matter anyway.”  However, Jerry was wrong.  It does matter, this song matters, and the Grateful Dead matter more than most bands in music history.