Album Of The Week - The Grateful Dead (1971)
I don’t go *that* deep into the Dead, but I’m fully onboard with just about everything they did up until around 1974. This double (mostly) live album is the second double live album they released, and it came out only 4 years into their recording career. A good chunk of the material here hadn’t yet been released by the band, and many became standards (‘Bertha’ and ‘Playing In The Band’) and contains one of their most outstanding, compelling tracks (‘Wharf Rat’), as well as a mind melting side-long take on 1968’s ‘The Other One’. The version of ‘The Other One’ here may lack a bit of Anthem’s flat out anarchic acid madness, but this more refined version is most welcome. Even though there’s some studio sweetening here, it’s a lovely trip in what it would have been like to see the band in 1971, with unbelievably great recording quality, thanks to the Dead’s trailblazing front of house sound engineer Betty Cantor. Betty captured crystal clear stage recordings that are unparalleled to this day.
What I’ve been thinking about lately, though, is the sticker that came with this record. Featuring Mouse and Kelly’s iconic skull and rose imagery, this sticker epitomizes the then burgeoning culture of ‘Dead Freaks’ which morphed into Dead Heads.
I remember seeing these stickers all over SoCal in the early 80s (with varying stages of color fade) stuck on VW’s of all sorts (especially fastbacks and vans), vintage Mercedes and BMWs, and blue collar American iron. I hadn’t heard any of the Dead’s music at this point, but the image was so intriguing it burned into my brain. Also ubiquitous in the south bay at this time was some incredibly intimidating Black Flag graffiti (including ‘Black Flag Kills Pigs Dead’ in the tunnel heading into LaX). As a little kid transplanted from the midwest (who was also deeply into music), these images were part of a puzzle into a whole new world. Now I see the amazing coincidence of the intersection of these images, as members of Black Flag and their road crew didn’t hide the fact that they were Dead Heads.