I had it recently with Otis Redding's Hard to Handle; his lusty strut of manly ability. Dig them tight Stax horns, dig that diesel-powered rhythm section. Listen to Otis throwing it on you and putting down the drugstore lovin; listen to his knack for contained pop ditties. He's gotta have it.

But I had it even stronger when I heard the Grateful Dead do it in 1971. No, I wasn't there — I heard it on a Phil Lesh compilation. But I got up and strutted. I did funny moves with my arms and sock-shimmied along. Man — this track doesn't just rock, it dances! Let no-one forget the Dead began by playing in dance halls — that they were, among so many other things, a great dance band. Forget yer acid freakers — if there's no boogie in the music you wouldn't be swirling yer arms and hair anyway.

But — the track. Pigpen does his strutting, seedy best. On the source recording I'm drawing from (live audience recording, Hollywood Palladium August 6, 1971, subtitled '(yes I ram)' by Phil on Fallout From the Philzone), he sounds unusually young and lad-about-townish (usually, he sounded more seasoned than his years). Pig only had a few years left in him at this point. Looking at some YouTube videos from this era, I noticed how good he was as leery/seedy rock performer. Maybe not the best voice but certainly the swampy presence of old-school rock.

Jerry and Bobby construct an amazingly upbeat and groove-inspired interactive line over Phil's fat and meandering bass oomph (fattened either by mastering or lucky microphone placement). I still can't hold a candle to Phil — his entire approach to basslines sets me adrift, scratching my head. Bill Kreutzmann does an amazingly tight/loose drum boogie — you just know from the first opening breaks this is gonna be a hella performance. The band stretches out. Pigpen does his strut.

Mind — this is an audience recording — so every whoop and scream near the mic is captured. Near the end, the Deadheads are whooping up something specific onstage — which Phil reckons to be a weird Pig dance. But it sounds so involved — band and audience — that old reactive dynamism — of a jam band in top form, visited by the magic on an inspired night — and a loving audience there for every note. And the solos cap everything off — the cerebral buzz to the limbic boogie, the headrush on shimmying feet. It's such a 'there' moment. A dance of identification or something, purely human and organic. Sweet. The Dead and Deadheads in action.

But, let's back it up a bit. This is a pure Dead track in the way they take a rigid pop song and just open it up for miles and miles of improvised expanse. The first solo, technically, is Pig's, scatting up the strut. Then Bobby takes a choppy rhythm excursion that noodles and dribbles on itself a bit, but which sets up a Jerry solo to die for. If I had to convince someone new to electric guitar about what makes The Jerry such an amazing and atypical player, I'd point him/her to this track. Actually, if I needed a single no-argument instance of the Dead — this is the one. If you don't feel this (the Jerry solo, the dynamics, the groove), then you'll never get why the Dead are the band to be/become.

Jerry's solo has everything in place: amazing depth of tone and touch, exploration and developmental direction, tongue in groove climax and a precise return to the one with the band for the last chorus. A band is only as good as its changes (first), and its interplay (second) — and the Dead's return to the one on this track has all the cosmic precision of Indian music. It's probably my favourite Jerry moment.

Phil Lesh, in the meanwhile, it just soloing all the time. Yet never does he walk too far from the group mind. He reins it in before the climax because the band knows they're all coming back. Strong instrumentalists working in the service of the group mind, and with so much more panache than a band-of-soloists like The Who — the Dead just let the music breathe and stretch more.

OK — time for a tangent. My best experiences with music (art, and literature also) have been typified by a sense of expanding time. Of time dilating and slowing down and somehow changing my sense of immersion in it. Like when you lose track of it passing. I can stand for hours transfixed by a Vermeer or a work like Rembrandt's Jewish Bride — something about its superficial-as-illusion-of-depth just draws me into its tempered moment of humanity-in-a-gesture. Jacques Rivette's films seriously dispense with time altogether. Indian music also tampers with the old clock-sense. They draw you in, sharpen the focus and calm the attention. The jetsam of thought and perception drift away for a moment. Miles Davis in the long late night, when time's at its slowest.

Argument #2 for the non-argument superiority of Hard to Handle as played by the Grateful Dead: every time I hear Jerry's solo, it seems longer, or differently timed. Sometimes it shoots by, other times I'm hanging onto every note. Sometimes I turn it up and stand somewhere else or try the sound from a different room. Sometimes I lose track of the bass, and stick my head in the woofer. But dang it, every time the (perceived) length of Jerry's solo is different. Sometimes it feels like a full 20 minutes. Sometimes I shimmy so funky I gotta replay it before the end. Once I was regaling the track in commentary-mode to an unsuspecting car passenger while waiting for a traffic light that never seemed to change. It does things to you, if you hear it.

If music can get you high and dickie with your sense of time, is this not everything, the best that it can be?

Also, a quick note on the beauty of the Internet — like it was made for and by Deadheads — is that thousands of Dead gigs are freely available for download. The entire Aug 6 '71 concert is available from Archive.org. The show-stopping Turn on Your Lovelight from this date is well worth the bandwidth alone. Don't waste time, go there now and download it. The whole show.

The beauty of this — I now have two different audience recordings of the same gig, the same track. One has most likely been through a better mastering process (the Phil version), but the other is just about as 'there' as you could get. The Archive version is much clearer on Pig's vocal, and not as boomy on the bass and just a fraction more subdued (balance-wise, but also impact-wise) on Jerry's solo. When I find and download a third, different taper's recording of the show, from some different-sounding part of the venue, I'll be able to fully triangulate the secret* of this band's appeal in true tri-fi sound. That will be a moment in time.

And then, to compare notes with the dozens of other Hard to Handles extant in the catalogue. Compare this version from the same year. Completely different vibe and attack.

And then, get obsessed with the thousand subtle, organic and spacious variations in some other Grateful Dead track.

* The secret, if any, to my attuned ears at least, and this does not derive from any woolly drug-induced thinking or abstraction about deep and psychedelic meaningfuls, is that deep inside the Dead there's an awesome good-time band just waiting to pop out at any inspired moment. That they're worth following closely and attentively just to hear out for those moments, spread over many gigs. That a band with such phenomenal group mind also had to wait occasionally for group inspiration, but which takes them so much higher when it does.