The band has to slip into The Other One to get things really moving. Whether because or in spite of his playing, the 11/8 Dark Star is nowhere near as mind-melting as the previous evening’s onslaught. The rest of the band is cooking, but TC sounds like he’s playing along with a record at home. During Dark Star, Constanten goes toe-to-toe with Garcia for a bit, then works some brief interplay with Lesh, all with indifferent results. A case in point: 11/8/69, at the Fillmore West. Sure, he contributed the occasional recognizable flourish, and his talent was (and is) undeniable, yet his overall impact on the music is rather like that of a hood ornament on an automobile: nice, nothing wrong with it, but ultimately dispensable. ( Live/Dead, in fact, was conceived and released in order to pay for the studio excesses involved in producing Aoxomoxoa.) TC’s contributions onstage became less and less relevant. Eventually, it dawned on the band that the album had been an expensive mistake. ![]() The bulk of the Aoxomoxoa tunes "didn’t stick" in the repertoire. ![]() They didn’t want to be "experimental" anymore-they wanted to boogie. Aoxomoxoa was his moment when that album failed to excite either the band, its record company, or a significant segment of the record-buying public, the Dead intuitively realized it was time to move on. ![]() In a way, he was locked into his avant-garde bag as much as Pigpen was locked into his blues. It’s not like TC held the band back, or anything like that.
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