Читать книгу The Mojo Collection - Various Mojo Magazine - Страница 186

Record label: Warner Brothers

Produced: The Grateful Dead, Bob Matthews and Betty Cantor

Recorded: Avalon and Carousel ballrooms, San Franciso; January 26–March 2, 1969

Released: November 10, 1969

Chart peaks: None (UK) 64 (US)

Personnel: Jerry Garcia (g, v); Bob Weir (g, v); Phil Lesh (b, v); Mickey Hart (pc); Bill Kreutzmann (pc); Ron ‘Pigpen’ McKernan (o, congas, v); Tom Constanten (k)

Track listing: Dark Star; Saint Stephen; The Eleven; Turn On Your Lovelight; Death Don’t Have No Mercy; Feedback; And We Bid You Tonight

Running time: 73.05

Current CD: Rhino RHI743952

Further listening: Anthem of the Sun (1968); the 2-CD Fillmore East: 2/11/69 (1997); or the 5-CD So Many Roads (1965–95) (1999)

Further reading: There are almost literally more books, fanzines and websites than you can count. The American Book Of The Dead: The Definitive Grateful Dead Encyclopedia (Oliver Trager, 1997) is a start. Also, Dead To The Core: An Almanack Of The Grateful Dead (Eric Wybenga, 1994) and Garcia, by the editors of Rolling Stone (1999); www.dead.net

Download: iTunes

In the autumn of 1969, having spent eight months in the studio recording Aoxomoxoa, The Grateful Dead were deep in debt to Warner Brothers. No one was so stoned or unrealistic as to believe that the highly experimental Aoxomoxoa was going to recoup all that money, so someone had a bright idea: put out a live album, easily culled from the many shows the band was playing in the Bay Area. Not only would such an album finally showcase the band at its spacey, jamming best, it would be incredibly cheap to make.

The Dead took a state-of-the-art 16-track recorder to gigs at the Avalon and Carousel ballrooms, and from those shows came Live/Dead, a double album that, according to Lenny Kaye’s review in Rolling Stone, ‘explains why the Dead are one of the best performing bands in America, why their music touches on ground that most other groups don’t even know exists.’ The album kicks off with a great version of Dark Star, 23 minutes of jazzy jamming. ‘They’d usually only play Dark Star if they were pretty high,’ said Caroline ‘Mountain Girl’ Garcia. Not just high: this is music from deepest space, as if someone had recorded the sound of a star exploding then slowed it down to its dreamy, pulsing elements. The song’s great appeal was that no one – neither audience nor band – knew where it was headed.

‘People loved it for the mystery of it,’ said manager Rock Scully. Robert Hunter’s first lyrics for the Dead speak volumes about where the band were coming from at the end of the ’60s: ‘Shall we go, you and I while we can?/Through the transitive nightfall of diamonds.’ While clearly this was music for altered states, the band were always quick to point out that pulling it off required plenty of rehearsal time. Phil Lesh’s The Eleven, named for its highly unusual 11/4 time signature, was based on the rhythmic calisthenics the band performed during practice, in which part of the band played 11 beats while the rest played 33 or even 66. ‘It was really designed to be a rhythm trip,’ said Lesh. ‘It wasn’t designed to be a song.’

The Dead were genuinely experimental, following each other down strange paths and hoping they’d find their way back, as on the frenzied storm of noise that is Feedback. ‘It was like somebody tossing a bloody chicken into a school of piranhas,’ marvelled Mickey Hart. ‘For a few minutes you’d be out on the edge with the roaring animal all around you, and it was always an open question whether it was going to go back into its cage or not.’