Christmas comes early to Quigley Mansions
Posted by: Jez Quigley on 31 October 2001
aclarke@sol.co.uk
In rock’n’roll folklore, the old saying has it that “There’s nothing
like a Grateful Dead concert”. Lasting anything up to five or six hours,
these marathons could transport the band’s hugely loyal followers into
mystical, lysergic ecstacies. (Conversely, of course, they became, for
the even larger number of people who just didn’t “get it”, a byword for
endless, aimless noodling and flacid hippie excess.)
Yet the fame the Dead won as a live act on their 30-year odyssey from
Sixties cult heroes to becoming, in the Nineties, the biggest-grossing
live act of all time has eclipsed the fact that the band also made some
pretty good albums. So the release this week of a 12-disc retrospective
of the Dead’s first seven years as a recording outfit marks a major
opportunity to reconsider the output of one of the most original and
far-reaching of American bands.
*The Golden Road (1965-1973)* collects all nine of the
band’s albums recorded during their tenure with Warner Brothers, from
the eponymous first release of 1967 through to the archive recording
Bear’s Choice. While each of these albums has
previously been released on CD, this project sees them spectacularly
remastered, with previously unreleased, mainly live tracks as fill-ups
on each disc.
Not that this bonus material is a mere afterthought: with seven hours of
extra music (a little over half of the set’s total), there’s some
essential listening here, not least the all-new two-CD Birth of
the Dead , which features ultra-rare demos and studio tracks
from 1965-6 alongside blisteringly hot early live performances.
This box, with its lavish presentation and exhaustive documentation,
represents an incomparable opportunity to discover exactly what this
band was all about. Born in the psychedelic ballrooms of mid-Sixties San
Francisco, and fusing the adrenalin rush of seriously
loud rock’n’roll with elements as diverse as early folk, blues,
R&B, country, and free-form jazz, the Dead was always a collective
effort. Jerry Garcia’s endlessly inventive lead guitar and fragile
vocals may have been what grabbed the attention, but he was only one
constituent of the whole. Equally important in the initial line-up was
the way that the classically trained Phil Lesh twined his bass lines
round Garcia’s guitar as if it were a second lead instrument. Or the
swaggering, boozy blues vocalist (and organist) Ron “Pigpen” McKernan;
the unpredictable, restless playing of rhythm guitarist Bob Weir; and
the turn-on-a-dime drumming of Bill Kreutzmann, more akin to that of the
jazz drummer Elvin Jones than anything in rock. At their best, they
formed the greatest improvisatory machine in rock, an elemental force
that was blessed with a telepathic gift that could conjure from each
separate musician a level of intuitive interplay that has never been
equalled.
The first of The Golden Road’s highlights goes back
to the rough and dirty R&B of the band’s early days as darlings of
Haight-Ashbury, a solid reminder that the Dead were, before anything
else, a dance band. Then there’s Anthem of the Sun , a
reworking of live with studio recordings, odd time signatures and
striking chord progressions juxtaposed with stretches of feedback and
Stockhausen-derived musique-concrète in a fashion
that was quite astonishing for 1968. Live/Dead , from
1969, fully captures the power and visceral excitement of the band in
concert, its chief delight being a 23-minute version of their
transcendent jamming vehicle, “Dark Star”. Then it’s on to their rebirth
as spaced-out cowboys on 1970’s pair of semi-acoustic gems -
Workingman’s Dead and American Beauty .
By the time of the live Europe 72 set, they had
perfected a style that mixed poignant examinations of quasi-mythical
Americana (in tightly crafted songs that dwelt in much the same
territory as those of The Band) with free-form explorations that were as
breathtakingly inventive as they were lengthy.
Of course, I have to come clean. As a tie-dyed-in-the-wool Deadhead,
The Golden Road is like manna from heaven. I’m one
of that legion of fans, who, after a hiatus of grief in the wake of
Garcia’s death in 1995 (and subsequent disbandment of the group), have
flung ourselves back into what we do best - cherish the Dead like no
other band. Like rock’s other great obsessives, Dylan fans, we are to be
found in all walks of life, and, contrary to received wisdom, we’re not
all balding, fiftysomething hippies. True, you can
always find the latter in record shops, fondly fingering an album
half-forgotten in a fug of Afghan black. But today, Deadheads are more
likely to be glued to their computer screens, using e-mail to talk to
each other, setting up deals in which they swap copies of long
sought-after live shows.
Thanks to the internet, an incredible network of traders stretches
across the globe, and, like the audience at one of the Dead’s latter-day
concerts, the mix of people is astonishing. I have contacted Deadheads
of all shapes and sizes (many with pronounced beer bellies, it has to be
said, the result of forsaking brown acid for brown ale); nationalities
(Americans, of course, but also folk living in Israel, the Australian
outback, the war-ravaged Balkans, and even a small industrial town in
the backwoods of Sweden). And ages, too; a predictable smattering of old
hippies, but also a remarkable number of teenagers. Indeed, a couple of
years ago I was brought up short to discover that the person from whom I
was getting a tape of the one Dead show that I managed to see - as a
21-year-old in 1981 - had also been there, but as a seven-year-old taken
by his parents.
We might no longer be able to see the band, but
thanks to the regular official release of archive recordings (the
innovative Dick’s Picks series, named after the
band’s now sadly departed tape archivist, Dick Latvala) and the efforts
of fans in spreading unofficial recordings, the Deadhead community is as
much alive now as it ever was.
Indeed, it’s the widespread trading in concert tapes that marks out the
Dead diaspora from most other rock fans. Right from the start, the Dead,
ever eager to subvert the norms, and perhaps recognising that their
official releases only skimmed the surface of what they were achieving
in concert, had a famously relaxed attitude to fans taping their shows
and freely sharing them. Not only did this enhance the mythical status
of the band, but it had the twin effect of distancing the Dead from the
more pernicious commercial concerns of the record industry and pulling
the carpet from under the feet of unethical bootleggers, whose raison
d’etre was to muscle in and make money from fans. It helps explain why
the Dead could remain so hugely popular for so long on the back of
relatively few album sales. And it’s a strategy that, in the US, many of
today’s “jam bands”, such as Phish, Gov’t Mule, Widespread Panic and the
improbably named String Cheese Incident, have tapped into to great
success.
That commitment to live improvisation also lives on in surprising ways.
Virtually every Saturday night, if you live in north London, you can
truck along with a hundred or so fellow tie-dye diehards to the strains
of the intermittently brilliant Cosmic Charlies, the leaders of
Britain’s small but Deadicated group of tribute bands.
But while some Deadheads live for live music, many more are active tape
traders. The cheapness of recordable CDs has meant that most trading now
is focussed on swopping high-quality digital recordings, many of which
have been semi-officially “leaked” from the Dead’s huge Vault in
California. That may mean that, like me, many fans will already have
most of the extra material on offer in the new box set. But there’s
enough new stuff to excite even the most jaded Deadhead, much of it
showing just how vital a figure Pigpen was in the early days, a fact
that was not always apparent on the original official releases. And then
there’s the sheer excellence of the remastering, which forces previously
hidden facets of well-loved music to the fore (one example being the
true baroque richness of the instrumental backing on 1969’s
Aoxomoxoa ).
And for those intrigued by the Dead but unsure of where to start? Well,
admittedly, at about £90, The Golden Road is an
expensive way in, but it does present the Dead at their creative best,
continually evolving and re-evaluating, discovering new ground and
Dick’s Picks 23, a complete concert from September
1972, has also just been released, and is a truly outstanding example of
the jazzy realms the Dead were exploring just as they were leaving
Warner Brothers. Who knows; perhaps that will be the subject of a second
box set?
In the meantime, if you haven’t done so already, now’s the time take
that trek down the Golden Road.
‘The Golden Road (1965-1973)’ is available now on Rhino Records. ‘Dick’s
Picks 23’ is available on mail order from www.dead.net or from Spin
Compact Discs in Newcastle upon Tyne (0191-261 4741) GDM (www.dead.net) is offering a 2CD unreleased radio documentary
on the Dead as a bonus for those ordering Golden Rd through them