166. The Grateful Dead - Live/Dead (November 1969)

1. Dark Star*

2. St. Stephen*

3. The Eleven

4. Turn On Your Love Light*

5. Death Don't Have No Mercy

6. Feedback

7. And We Bid You Goodnight

***1/2

Something which has never occurred since time immemorial; an acid rock band released a double album of extended jams that you could actually make it through sober. 

The Grateful Dead are a pretty easy target. People who grew up on three minute pop or hard, fast punk and hip hop may not have a great deal of time for a twenty minute jam with lyrics about stars crashing and mirrors exploding. But this is a very solid album. True, it's not entirely my thing, but I enjoyed American Beauty and I enjoy this album. Not to the extent that I particularly want to listen to the whole thing through very often, but it has a lot of merit. The Grateful Dead had a genuinely new approach to music - they didn't swipe from a bunch of genres to create a "new" sound, they twisted and warped a myriad of influences and then let them develop and expand on stage. Also they did drugs. So many drugs.

The thing that makes this album work is the sequencing. "Dark Star", the longest song, starts as a gradual mish mash of the different instruments as the musicians find their feet, and slowly coalesces into a very pretty and complicated piece of music. But I don't think most people would want a whole album of that sort of thing, and that appears to include the Grateful Dead - the next song, "St. Stephen", is an up-tempo rocker with surreal, humorous lyrics. And this continues through the ferocious workout "The Eleven", and the extremely fun extended R&B number "Turn On Your Love Light" (probably the most "normal" song here), which features exhortations to the audience and call and response vocals, and which has relatively comprehensible lyrics about love. 

After that, things cool down with the dark blues of "Death Don't Have No Mercy", then slide into the only moderately successful "Feedback". "Feedback" is probably the easiest target on an album full of easy targets, but that may just be because, post Sonic Youth, the idea of using guitar feedback as an instrument in itself can seem a little quaint. But while it takes a while to get going, by the end Jerry Garcia is coaxing a very strange and pretty melody out of his amp, creating a soundscape quite unique for its time.

The really good thing about this album is that it works so well as a live document. IIRC it was originally sequenced to be played on an auto-changer, and listening to it through one does get the sense that one is enjoying a top-notch concert performance by a bunch of extremely talented musicians. That live experience is a huge part of the album's charm, which is kind of funny when you consider that such a cohesive album was actually patched together from recordings of various different shows. I rarely go to concerts these days, but I used to go quite a lot, and Live/Dead perfectly captures the feel of being at a concert even if that causes it to suffer slightly as a album (IMO it would have made more sense to drop "Feedback" and close with a show-stopper). 

So I doubt I'll be throwing on a tie-dye t-shirt and declaring myself a Dead Head any time soon, but this is a very good album and a very important document of a band who obviously cast a very long shadow. Applying the improvisational methods of jazz to something so overtly rock, and doing  so successfully, is one hell of an achievement. But based on my experiences with the band, I think American Beauty is where I'd recommend neophytes start.