We delve into the psychedelic, mixed up world of GRATEFUL DEAD and review their recently released 50th anniversary self titled live album....

June 30, 2021 Steve Muscutt

With another 50th anniversary album just released, we thought it would be good to delve into the psychedelic, mixed up world of the band The Grateful Dead. Owing to my age, I was never exposed to the work of the band and after reading up on them, I have created 10 interesting facts which I hope you’ll enjoy reading. (This is followed by a review of the album).

1. The Grateful Dead successfully fused elements of rock, folk, country, jazz, bluegrass, blues, gospel, psychedelic rock, non-psychedlic gospel jazz rock, folkatronica, rockablues and probably many other genres, many of which haven't been discovered yet, nor ever will be.

2. Fans are known as 'Deadheads' - possibly because it’s likely that you may actually pass away from old age during one of their performances. There are certain reports that, during a concert in California in 1972, four drummers joined and left the band during a live performance, and the bass player had to leave to move house, before returning for the encore.

3. A recording of the band of their 8th May, 1977 performance at Cornell University Barton Hall was added to the National Recording Registry of the Library of Congress in 2012.

4. The band have sold over 35 million albums worldwide; possibly because many of their fans have - in a lazy stereotyping of them all being drug-wasted stoners - forgotten that they've already purchased the majority of their back catalogue, and so have bought them all over again.

5. Members of the inaugural line up of the band were formed from other bands of the time such as Mother McCree's Uptown Jug Champions, The Warlocks, Jennifer Malen's Audacious Drug Pigs, Mother Mary's Psychedelic Techno Banana Party and Hazy Shades of Kool Aid. At least two of these band names are made up.

6. Just to make things ultra-confusing, after frontman Jerry Garcia passed away in 1995, the band fragmented into spin-off bands, the likes of which made Electric Light Orchestra's dissolution seem altogether neat and tidy. Offshoot groups that fans could get stoned and stand listening to for four hours at a time included The Other Ones, Dead & Company, Furthur, The Rhythm Devils, Phil Lesh & Friends, RatDog and Billy & The Kids. Sadly, nobody has thought to form a band called The Grateful Undead, possibly featuring a holographic likeness of Jerry Garcia.

7. The band name The Grateful Dead comes from an element of folklore, which dictates that the soul of a dead person, or their angel, shows gratitude to someone who, as an act of charity, arranged their burial. And yes, the band were smoking drugs at the time. In this case, dimethyltryptamine.

8. Since the band's inception, they have released 13 studio albums, ten compilation albums, twenty-seven singles, eight box sets, and over eighty live albums (which seems rather a lot, but pales into insignificance if you believe that around 2,000 'Dead' shows have been recorded or taped since the 1960s!)

9. The mid-nineties band Kula Shaker had a song called 'Jerry Was There'. But on the whole, Kula Shaker were absolute s***, so let's gloss over that.

10. Owlsey “Bear” Stanley was a renowned chemist who synthesized a special brand of LSD that was popular amongst the band, he was also the group’s soundman in 1965 and was tasked to build a sound system that would carry their music across large open spaces. Stanley and his team went above and beyond when they created a behemoth of over 500 speakers that could carry their sound over a quarter of a mile. The result was known as “The Wall of Sound”, which Phil Lesh described as “the voice of god”.

So, back to the task in hand of telling you a bit about this 50th anniversary re-issue of a live album referred to by ‘Deadheads’ throughout the world as the ‘Skull and Roses’ album….

Grateful Dead’s 50th anniversary series keeps rolling along with the reissue of the band’s 1971 eponymous live album also known as their Skull and Roses album after the cover artwork by Alton Kelley and Stanley Mouse.

While they were still a young band at that point, Grateful Dead was their second double-LP live album following 1969’s Live/Dead. It also was one of their most successful LPs, peaking at No. 25 on the Billboard Top LPs chart and earning their first Gold sales certification. It remained their best-seller until the 1974 collection Skeletons from the Closet: The Best of Grateful Dead surpassed it.

This release marks 50 years from the date of the first show represented on the release, March 24, 1971, from San Francisco’s Winterland Ballroom. The center piece of the reissue is more than hour of previously unreleased music from another famed San Francisco venue, Bill Graham’s Fillmore West, recorded on July 2, 1971 during the Dead’s final show at the Fillmore West. Highlights include “Good Lovin’,” “Sing Me Back Home,” “Mama Tried,” and a closing medley of “Not Fade Away” and “Goin’ Down the Road Feelin’ Bad.”

Grateful Dead will arrive as a 2 CD set with the additional live tracks and a 2 LP, 180-gram black vinyl edition of the original album only (released on 16th July 21). Dead.net has a black-and-white propeller vinyl variant (limited to 5,000 copies). In any format, Grateful Dead finds Jerry Garcia, Bob Weir, Phil Lesh, Bill Kreutzmann, and Ron “Pigpen” McKernan in fine form for four sides, or 70+ minutes, of music recorded in March-April 1971 at Winterland as well as New York’s Fillmore East and Hammerstein Ballroom.

The original album released on October 24, 1971 did employ some vocal and instrumental overdubs, however, including from Garcia’s frequent collaborator Merl Saunders whose organ tends to overshadow Pigpen’s. Saunders played on the three new original songs “Bertha,” “Wharf Rat,” and “Playing in the Band.” The latter became one of the Dead’s most-played songs of all time (fourth most-played, to be exact) and was later recorded by the solo Weir on his 1972 album Ace.

The third side of Grateful Dead was an all-covers set, with John Phillips’ “Me and My Uncle,” the Luther Dixon/Al Smith-penned Jimmy Reed hit “Big Boss Man,” Kris Kristofferson and Fred Foster’s “Me and Bobby McGee,” and Chuck Berry’s “Johnny B. Goode.”

The album has been remastered from the original stereo master tapes by David Glasser using the Plangent Process, and new liner notes have been written by Gary Lambert.

GRATEFUL DEAD (SKULL & ROSES): EXPANDED EDITION

CD Track Listing

Disc One: Original Album Remastered

“Bertha”

“Mama Tried”

“Big Railroad Blues”

“Playing In The Band”

“The Other One”

“Me & My Uncle”

“Big Boss Man”

“Me & Bobby McGee”

“Johnny B. Goode”

“Wharf Rat”

“Not Fade Away/Goin’ Down The Road Feeling Bad”

Disc Two: Fillmore West, San Francisco, CA (7/2/71)

“Good Lovin’” *

“Sing Me Back Home” *

“Mama Tried” *

“Cryptical Envelopment”> *

Drums> *

“The Other One” *

“Big Boss Man” *

“Not Fade Away”> *

“Goin’ Down The Road Feeling Bad” *

“Not Fade Away” *

* previously unreleased

LP Track Listing

Side One