NED LAGIN and SEASTONES
An Aural Journey: more than a Grateful Dead side-project
by Daniel Barbiero
(February 2025)
The 1970's was a decade when electronic music was coming of age. The ideas and methods developed during the immediate postwar period, initially restricted to a small group of composers with institutional support, were now beginning to make their way into less rarefied musical circles. As early as the 1960's, pop and rock musicians had incorporated electronic music and tape experimentation into their studio recordings, and by the early 1970's, some of these and other elements were being used in live performances as well. One of the boldest attempts to incorporate electronic new music within the rock context was the Seastones project of Ned Lagin, undertaken with the Grateful Dead between 1970 and 1975.
The Grateful Dead aren't often thought of in relation to the classical avant-garde, but they did at different points in their history in fact explore some of the territories opened up by experimental Western art music. Previous to joining the group, bassist Phil Lesh had developed an interest in contemporary composition and electronic music, and spent a brief period in the University of California at Berkeley's music program. In addition, he'd audited a course at Mills College given by composer Luciano Berio and had composed a piece for multiple orchestras playing simultaneously. Lesh was the main force behind the use of effects drawn from the classical avant-garde in the recording of the group's second album, Anthem of the Sun. For the sessions Lesh brought in his friend Tom Constanten, a composer and keyboardist whom he'd met during his time at Berkeley and who'd audited the Berio course with him. Constanten, who had spent a year in Europe studying with Berio as well as with Karlheinz Stockhausen, Pierre Boulez, and Henri Posseur, can be heard playing prepared piano on the album, during the transition between "The Other One" and "New Potato Caboose." His 1962 electronic tape composition "Study Number Three" appears during the same sequence. In a sense, Anthem of the Sun's integration of some of the sounds and techniques of avant-garde art music prefigures the Dead's involvement with Lagin's Seastones.
Lagin Meets the Grateful Dead
Lagin was a student at MIT with a molecular biology major when he first met members of the Grateful Dead. After seeing them play a concert at a club in Boston, friends of his persuaded him to send a letter to the band's guitarist Jerry Garcia, discussing his musical interests. Lagin not only was scientifically inclined, with hands-on experience in home-built electronics, but he also was an experienced pianist with a background in jazz and the American songbook. While at MIT, he played in the school's jazz quintet, doing music by Miles Davis and John Coltrane, took music courses at MIT and a jazz course at the Berklee School of Music as well. In May of 1970, he arranged to get the Grateful Dead to play at MIT and went to meet the band at their motel. Although Garcia hadn't responded to Lagin's letter, when Lagin introduced himself, Garcia recognized his name and went to get Lesh to meet him. While the Dead were at MIT, they hung out with Lagin, who played two-handed jazz and blues duets with the band's keyboardist, Pigpen, on the piano in his dorm room.
During the Dead's visit to MIT, Lagin brought Garcia, Lesh, and drummer Mickey Hart to the MIT chapel to hear an electronic music composition of his that was installed there. Lagin described the composition to an interviewer at Aquarium Drunkard as "a stratigraphic layered assemblage" - essentially an eight-track tape collage mostly composed with tape recorders. It was played through a system consisting of four tape recorders running through eight speakers arranged in a circle against the chapel walls. Prefiguring Lagin's later work, it was meant to be an immersive experience in which listeners, sitting in the middle of the circle of speakers, would hear sounds distributed spatially. In composing it, Lagin had been influenced in part by Polish composer Krzysztof Penderecki's Threnody for the Victims of Hiroshima, a work of harsh sound masses for string orchestra. The Penderecki composition's theme of war's destruction was something Lagin wanted to convey with his own work, which he saw as responding to the violence of the time - the Vietnam War, the student riots, and recent political assassinations (the Kent State shootings, in which four students were killed by National Guard (which happened the weekend the Grateful Dead were at MIT). Another source of inspiration, at a more conceptual level, was linguist Noam Chomsky's generative grammar, which served Lagin as a metaphor for generative musical algorithms. The MIT chapel composition was in a sense a proto-Seastones, which Lagin has described as having provided a "sedimented" base layer for the later developments. Garcia, Lesh, and Hart were impressed by the piece, and invited Lagin to come to California to use the 16-track recorder in the studio at Hart's ranch.
Lagin ended up graduating from MIT with a degree in molecular biology in 1971 and enrolled in Brandeis for graduate studies in composition. He eventually dropped out of the program and pursued music full-time for the next several years.
Going to California: Early Seastones Sessions
Lagin took up Garcia and Lesh's invitation in the summer of 1970, when he traveled to California for the first of what would turn out to be several trips in between academic years. Not only would he record in Hart's studio, but he also began to sit in with the Dead on gigs. In fact, during the first half of the decade Lagin was a kind of unofficial member of the group, playing electric piano, clavichord, and Farfisa organ onstage with them beginning with a 5 November 1970 show at the Capitol Theater in Port Chester, New York. Lagin was to play live with the Dead on nearly twenty occasions between 1970 and 1975.
While in California, which he visited during the summers of 1970, '71, and '72 before moving there permanently in 1973, he also participated in a number of studio sessions for the Dead and other musicians. His piano can be heard on "Candyman" from the Dead's American Beauty album, and he played the ARP Odyssey analogue synthesizer on Lesh's "Unbroken Chain" on the Mars Hotel album. In addition, during his first visit he sat in on piano for some rehearsal sessions for David Crosby's first solo album, If I Could Only Remember My Name. None of his contributions made it to the record as released, but he was to develop a deep appreciation for Crosby as both a collaborator and a friend.
Work on the Dead's and others' projects aside, Lagin was in California mainly to develop his own music, including Seastones. The first sixteen-track piece he recorded at Hart's ranch was a multitracked composition for piano inspired by Bill Evans' album Conversations With Myself. This recording, like many of the recordings Lagin did at Hart's studio, was lost, presumably taped over during subsequent sessions.
It was the second recording that marks the beginning of his work on Seastones in California. The initial material used was a set of five basic tracks Lagin had recorded in his dorm room at MIT. One of the tracks consisted of about fifteen minutes of white noise within which Lagin had embedded tonal material consisting of rhythmically free pitches and motifs. In a process analogous to a musical exquisite corpse, he, Garcia, Lesh, Crosby, and Hart improvised separately to the track, with each player being unaware of what the others had played or were about to play. He then mixed the individual recordings and found that the result was a musically coherent piece in which everything worked together. For other pieces, Lagin would give participating musicians what he described to the Aquarium Drunkard interviewer as "very abstract scores or directions" which they would then interpret and realize as they saw fit. As with the first Seastones recording, Lagin would then mix and assemble the results, giving the tracks a fixed, if provisional, form.
The electronic equipment Lagin was using in these early sessions was fairly basic. Most of it consisted of home-built circuitry. He also used voltage controlled amplifiers and a Maestro ring modulator, and a number of guitar effects pedals he'd hacked, like the then-popular wah-wah. Eventually, his stable of electronic instruments grew in size and sophistication. During his time at Brandeis, he had access to the school's electronic music studio and its Buchla box and ARP 2500 and 2600 modular synthesizers, which he put to use for Seastones. He also obtained an E-mu modular synthesizer as well as the 16-bit Interdata 7/17 computer, and in 1975 acquired the Altair 8800 microcomputer. Some of the equipment had been bought for him by the Grateful Dead.
For the Seastones recording sessions of 1970-1973, Lagin was joined by some of the top players within San Francisco's rock community. These included not only Garcia, Lesh, Crosby, and Hart, but the Jefferson Airplane's Grace Slick and Spencer Dryden, and Quicksilver Messenger Service's David Freiberg and John Cippolina. As Lagin later recalled to Aquarium Drunkard, during the first few years he was working with these musicians, San Francisco was at the center of the rock world. Lagin attributed San Francisco's musical dominance to the distinctive musical identities its leading players had developed. This situation aligned well with one of the goals Lagin had set himself with Seastones, which was to create structures through which he could intertwine the individual musical personalities of his collaborators with his own and with each other. With the group of musicians he assembled in San Francisco, he was fortunate to have suitably open-minded personalities with strong musical identities.
The sessions of 1970, 1971, and 1972 produced a partial mix of a Seastones album, completed on 13 September 1972. Garcia arranged to have the recording submitted to Clive Davis of Columbia Records, but after it had been evaluated by the label's electronic artists, Columbia turned it down. Reportedly, these artists had judged the recording as not being music. A collection of Seastones tracks was eventually released by Round Records, the Grateful Dead's label for members' solo work, in April 1975.
The Composition
The September 1972 mix of Seastones was just one iteration of the work, as was the mix that was released in 1975. In fact, Lagin conceived of the composition as being what he described as a "process work" that could be realized in many different versions. His tape piece in the MIT chapel represents the earliest version of the work - a proto-Seastones - while subsequent versions would go on to feature a variety of formal relationships, pre-recorded material, and instrumental combinations.
The basic structure of the work was modular, consisting of individual sections that Lagin called "moment forms." At least in the beginning, the compositional modules were notated, although eventually Lagin dispensed with written scores as the recordings themselves took over the function of formal documentation, rendering notation on paper superfluous. In any event, the written scores largely proved to be fugitive. Few of Lagin's scores survived theft in 1975 and flooding in 1982. Fortunately, several pages of Seastones scores weren't lost, and can be seen on Lagin's website.
Lagin composed Seastones' modules for specific instruments and instrumental combinations using an open-form, semi-graphic notation with a high degree of built-in indeterminacy. Some pitch sets are notated precisely on a staff, while others are suggested by their relative height or their place within a deliberately vague phrase shape indicated by curved lines. A score for organ, guitar, and "computer/synthesizer/keyboard complex," for example, uses graphic elements to suggest upward and downward glissandi and sustained tones. A score for "computer/synthesizer/keyboard complex" and bass notates the bass line as unspecified pitches represented as a gently undulating curve, and includes verbal directions for the music's dynamics to resemble breathing. Rather than using traditional measures and time signatures, Lagin indicates these sections' lengths by specifying their durations in minutes and seconds. In contrast to these instrumental scores' predominantly indeterminate, graphic notation, a score for voice presents its sung part on a conventional staff with words first set to specific pitches, and then to pitchless rhythms. Another score for voice also is given conventionally pitched notation along with the instruction that the vocal line is to be sung like an alap - the opening movement of a raga in which the primary musical material is introduced and developed in a slow, free-floating rhythm.
In the Aquarium Drunkard interview, Lagin described the mobility of free jazz as one of the inspirations behind Seastones. As these scores demonstrate, Seastones' mobility lay not only in the interchangeability of discrete sections inherent in its modular construction, but in the way its open forms allowed musicians the interpretive flexibility to improvise and thereby to put their musical personalities in the foreground of the work as realized. In that regard, Seastones was a truly collaborative work, even as it served as a vehicle for Lagin's own compositional intentions.
Seastones Live in 1973 and 1974
A point Lagin likes to emphasize is that Seastones wasn't meant to be experimental music, a label he has explicitly rejected. As he told interviewers Rich Mahan and Jesse Jarnow, Seastones was not supposed to be "an isolated academic experiment." Rather, it was intended to be performed. Accordingly, the piece was played live on a number of occasions with different combinations of musicians between 1973 and 1975, most famously - or notoriously, depending on who's recalling it - on the Grateful Dead's tours of America and Europe in 1974.
An early live performance of Seastones took place on 28 November 1973 in San Francisco's Palace of Fine Arts. Garcia, Hart, and Lesh joined Lagin for the event, described as "An Experiment in Quadraphonic Sound." The experiment consisted in the fact that this would be the first time a Seastones performance would include live musical accompaniment to pre-recorded material presented in quad. While Garcia and Hart played on stage, Lagin and Lesh were seated in the audience at the mixing board, with Lagin playing the ARP Odyssey analogue synthesizer and Lesh providing the live quadraphonic mix. The show also included other, non-Seastones tapes that Lagin had made.
When the Dead went on tour with their Wall of Sound amplification system in the summer of 1974, Lagin went with them. He would join the group onstage to play keyboards on a number of songs, but more important, he and Lesh would perform Seastones material between the first and second sets of most shows. Interestingly, these wouldn't be the first time Grateful Dead audiences had been exposed to Seastones material; at a 1 December 1971 show at the Boston Music Hall, an early Seastones tape of processed applause and guitar was played over the PA during the intermission between the first and second sets. On his Nedbase timeline, Lagin wryly reproduces a description of the piece by an apparently skeptical writer for the Harvard Crimson: "It featured piercing guitar feedback and cavernous waves of applause. For twenty minutes." This wouldn't be the first time a performance of Seastones was received with less than complete enthusiasm.
The Seastones performances on the 1974 tour were known as the "Ned and Phil" sets. Lagin and Lesh were the core performers, although other members of the Dead, Garcia in particular, might join in. For these sets, Lagin's complement of equipment included the Fender Rhodes 88 electric piano, organ, and clavichord; ARP Odyssey and Emu polyphonic synthesizers; the Interdata 7/16 and Altair 8800 computers; various effects including a rhythm generator; mixers; and a tape player. Against this fairly elaborate array, Lesh had the relatively simple set-up of a quadraphonic bass, ring modulator, and pedals, which were routed through to Lagin's synthesizer for processing. In a 1974 interview with Andy Childs for the British music magazine ZigZag, Lesh voiced some reservations about the imbalance between his own and Lagin's resources, telling Childs that, "[Lagin] has under his control, I should say, virtually an infinite range of sounds and music that he can play, and I've got a very limited range...there's no possible way that one guy with two pedals and a ring modulator can possibly compete with an entire computer/synthesizer system." Consequently, Lesh saw his role within the Seastones division of musical labor as setting out the sonic field against which Lagin would provide the polyphonic figures, telling Childs that "I essentially have to be the drone, relating back to Indian music, I have to be the drone, the ground, the pre-conscious state out of which the synthesiser, which [Lagin]'s playing, rings thoughts, let's say."
Along with Lagin and Lesh's equipment, the Wall of Sound amplification system also had a role to play in the Seastones sets, albeit one that could produce mixed results. It did give the music a physical heft - as Lagin recounted to David Gans in a 2001 interview on KPFA, "I had the ability to play a chord onstage and lift the entire PA as if it were a seismic event. [We] were able to play subsonics...and those could be felt...you know, the tactile part of music." At the same time though, not all of what Lagin was doing came through the system. When sent through the vocal system, Lagin's quad outputs sometimes were mixed down to two channels. As a result his live work, computer outputs, or tapes sometimes were missing from the mix.
The omission of the taped material could pose a conceptual, as well as a practical, problem. For it was the tapes that provided the backbone of the performances and made a Seastones performance a Seastones performance and not simply a free improvisation. The set of pre-recorded tapes Lagin had created for Seastones and other works served as the performances' basic scores, and it was in relation to them that the live performers would improvise. In effect, they served as compositional points of reference as well as structures the musicians' live contributions would elaborate and fill out.
What did these "Ned and Phil" sets actually sound like? A performance documented on a recording made at the 23 June 1974 show at Miami's jai alai fronton gives an idea. A rough-edged, feedback-like drone of changing frequencies provides the more-or-less continuous background against which various events surge up and vanish: a sprinkling of musical tones, sound masses filtered through a wah-wah, theremin-like glissandi. The texture is dense, the sound abstract and distorted. A five-minute segment of a Seastones set from late June in Providence, Rhode Island released on Dick's Picks Vol. 12 is similar. There's a buzz-saw drone at work, but the texture is more variable and the development includes more tonal material as well as computer-sequenced rhythms. It isn't clear if this performance includes other members of the Dead beside Lesh; some of the "Ned and Phil" sets did find others, particularly Garcia, joining in (in fact, not all of these sets were realizations of Lagin's Seastones scores as some were simply improvisations on themes set by Lagin). One particularly memorable Seastones performance featuring an enlarged cast of players took place at London's Alexandra Palace on 11 September 1974. The set began with abstract electronic sound and developed into a long, fluid improvisation for Lagin, Lesh, Garcia, Weir, and Kreutzmann. While Lagin and Lesh held down a continuo of electronic noise and sequenced rhythms, Garcia added chromatic melodies supported by Weir's counterlines and Kreutzmann's free jazz drumming. And it all segued into an exhilarating "Eyes of the World." It has to count as among the furthest-reaching and most inspired performances in the Grateful Dead's history.
And yet not all Seastones sets were such happy occasions. Just three days after the London show the group played Munich's Olympiahalle and included a Seastones performance between sets. The reception from the German audience was decidedly hostile. Speaking to Grateful Dead historians Blair Jackson and David Gans in 2014, Grateful Dead Records employee Steve Brown, who was there, recalled the set causing a near riot with upset listeners whistling, shouting, and throwing things around. Although the Munich fiasco represents an extreme reaction to Lagin's sound art, the "Ned and Phil" sets could be challenging even for the Dead's well-disposed followers. Taper Jerry Moore was at the Miami jai alai fronton show and remembered being puzzled by what Lagin and Lesh were doing. As he told Gans in a 2008 interview,
I kind of enjoyed it. I mean, whatever its purpose or why they were doing it, I don't know. I guess they were enjoying themselves. Maybe they were looking to baffle people. I guess it's music, but it doesn't partake of most of the requirements. It didn't have a melody. It didn't have a beat. It didn't have a theme of any sort. Well, maybe it had a theme, but not a very musical one.Even Lesh, in the ZigZag interview, expressed some reservations about presenting Seastones at Grateful Dead concerts. But when the band decided to take a break from touring after the autumn 1974 concerts, the question soon became moot.
The Seastones LP and the Abandonment of the Stage
Although the Dead officially went on hiatus in 1975, they did continue to play together. Early in the year, there were recording and jamming sessions at Weir's home studio, where the group worked on material that eventually was shaped into the pieces that appeared on the Blues for Allah record. Lagin participated, jamming with the band and working on Seastones material as well. Some of this music was played by a group billed as Jerry Garcia and Friends - essentially the Grateful Dead with the addition of Lagin and Merle Saunders on keyboards -- at Bill Graham's SNACK benefit concert at San Francisco's Kezar Stadium on 23 March 1975. In addition to sessions at Weir's, Lagin hosted Seastones recording and rehearsal sessions with Lesh, Garcia, and Crosby at his own home.
It was also in 1975 that Round Records, in April, released a February 1975 mix of Seastones in a small run of up to 20,000 copies. The record sold out, and then seemingly disappeared. Eventually, though, it was resurrected. After a gap of fifteen years Seastones came back in a series of new incarnations that gave it a long afterlife. In 1990, Rykodisc released a CD edition that included the original album as well as a December 1975 mix as bonus material. Lagin himself released an 83-track, two-CD set in 2018, and in 2020 Important Records issued Seastones Section 4 and Section 5 on LP.
In addition to the album release, 1975 saw several live performances of Seastones along with other Lagin compositions. For some of these concerts, Lagin and Lesh played alone; on others, they were joined by Garcia, Hart, and/or Crosby. One event featuring all five was held in June in Angelico Hall in San Rafael's Dominican College. Billed as a concert of new electronic music, the performance included Seastones as well as Lagin's composition "Lilith" and other works. A recording from the concert testifies to an otherworldly audio environment of musique concrete mixed with processed instrumental improvisation, making for a creatively paradoxical blend of harsh timbres and chromatic lyricism. Unusually, Lagin's synthesizer has a prominent role here. As he later noted, it was "one of the rare places where I play lead synthesizer."
The final live Seastones performance, done with just Lagin and Lesh, took place on 22 November 1975 at the La Palmoa Theatre in Encinitas. It was to be Lagin's final public performance. Finding that he couldn't support himself, and preferring to do art instead of performing, he stopped playing music professionally and entered the fields of computing and digital video, and later worked in biotechnology. For creative work, he turned to photography - an early interest of his - and visual arts, and didn't pick up music again until around 2005. It was at about that time that he began transferring the aging Seastones tapes to digital format in order to preserve the music they contained.
Summing things up for Aquarium Drunkard, Lagin described Seastones as, "personally, a tremendous achievement but...also a tremendous heartbreak." The first part of his statement, at least, seems undeniably true. Lagin brought advanced technologies and avant-garde processes and sound textures into a rock context, and helped introduce large audiences to a kind of music they otherwise may not have had the chance to experience. He took the classical avant-garde format of live instruments playing with fixed media and adapted it to a rock band, in the process expanding the possibilities of the former while bringing out the innate, exploratory sensibilities of the latter. If his association with the Grateful Dead afforded him the kind of mass audiences most avant-garde composers could never hope to reach, he at the same time gave the band access to tools and methods that facilitated what was arguably some of their best work - and was certainly some of their most adventurous playing. And in doing so, this visionary composer helped them reaffirm their status as a visionary band.
Sources:
The major source of information on Seastones is Ned Lagin's website, accessed at http://spiritcats.com. The Nedbase page contains a useful timeline with historical notes and anecdotes. In addition, scores to several Seastones modules can be found on a separate page.
Lagin has also been the subject of a number of illuminating interviews in recent years. I've found the following to be the most helpful:
Interview with Rich Mahan and Jesse Jarnow on the Nedcast special episode of the Good Ol' Grateful Deadcast, accessed at https://www.dead.net/deadcast/bonus-nedcast-ned-lagin
Interview with David Gans on KPFA, 3 February 2001, a transcript of which can be accessed at https://www.gdhour.com/transcripts/lagin.010203.html
Interview with Aquarium Drunkard, 25 August 2020, accessed at https://aquariumdrunkard.com/2020/08/25/ned-lagin-the-aquarium-drunkard-interview/
Excerpts of the Phil Lesh 1974 ZigZag interview as well as interviews with Lagin, Steve Brown, and Jerry Moore are in Blair Jackson and David Gans, This Is All a Dream We Dreamed: An Oral History of the Grateful Dead (New York: Flatiron Books, 2015)
A number of Seastones performances are available on YouTube, including the Miami fronton set, the Alexandra Palace set, the Munich set and the June 1975 performance at Dominican College. In addition, The Internet Archive has a set of recordings identified as being from the Palace of Fine Arts performance of November
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