If you know this song, from Aoxomoxoa you know that it’s this spacey almost a cappella thing over some synthy pad sounding things. There is no discernible beat. It also does not appear to match up at all with what is in the Garcia/Hunter book, which has this nice baroque sounding intro written. To me, then, this became something of a wide open challenge. Why not do whatever I want with it?
The sections seemed clear enough. The intro is in 4/4, then there is a 3/8 verse, which actually plays as if 3/4. That is, the rhythm does not change in speed from the opening section. After this ends, there is what I will call a bridge, which begins with a rather abrupt key change. The book has a couple 5/4 measures in here, and in examining the lyrics, it occurred to me (lately?) that this could be an entire 5/4 section. I therefore broke the song down into 3/4, 4/4, and 5/4 parts and did my own thing. I made a melody change to the chorus, adding a major harmony on the tritone to give haunting effect.
This uses the STAX Coffee House kit. I can’t seriously believe anyone will play it, but I wanted to do something with it for completeness sake, with respect to the Garcia/Hunter book.
What’s Become of the Baby.zip (50.3 KB)
I imagine I’ll be creating something similarly esoteric for Blues for Allah which I initially intentionally skipped.