Re: Grateful Dead
By who? The general public? Grateful Dead fans? By people who only know the band through Workingman's Dead and American Beauty (specifically the four songs that classic rock radio repeat incessantly)? By people who are "too hip" to actually think for themselves and try something different?
At this point, there's nobody reading Spin magazine (or their website) who doesn't know how "cool" Can, Captain Beefheart, The Stooges, Velvet Underground, etc are. So why not give them a list of some of the other stuff that hasn't been heralded as "oh so important" for the last 25 years that their readers perhaps don't know that they might like. Ya know, something like, perhaps Anthem Of The Sun or Aoxomoxoa.
Or has Casey Jones and the studio versions of Truckin' and Sugar Magnolia so tarnished the band's aura, that even their supremely brilliant (and frequently very different) music is unworthy of discussion? Wouldn't that be a little bit like writing off Foxtrot and Selling England By The Pound on the basis of Follow You Follow Me, Illegal Alien and In Too Deep?
Or are the publishers of Spin worried they might lose their "street credibility" if they actually admit the Grateful Dead are worthy of something? If Bob Guccione Jr was running the show, I'd say definitely, but who knows these days?
Except those people get high praise on these kinds of lists (if not this one in particular), so they're at least getting recognition for the great music they made. By contrast, the Grateful Dead's music that isn't Wokingman's Dead or American Beauty get looked over, perhaps only because publishers are worried they'll lose their audience if they even so much as suggest that there's more to the Dead than those two studio albums or that really miserable show you saw back in 1984 or whenever it was.
Dude! In the 60's, it wasn't "alternative"! It was ALTERING-as in mind altering!
"Alienated-so alien I go!"
Again, I'll just reiterate that maybe they weren't excluded by definition, but passed over because they aren't very good. I also share the opinion that the Dead's first two albums are mediocre at best. The third is definitely better, but certainly not a required inclusion, IMO, on any "best 100 of the 60s" lists, even if the only eligible albums are lesser-known. Which is debateable in the case of Aoxomoxoa anyway, as it sold pretty well, especially by the standards of the late '60s/early '70s. But in any event, recommending a Dead studio album completely misses the point of the Dead. They weren't about the studio albums.
But maybe the Dead were considered too "known" to be included on the list that they made. I can't recall offhand if any live albums were included on the Spin list, but if they were allowed, then Live/Dead would have been a good inclusion.
In the end, The Grateful Dead are one of the best-known music brands in the history of popular music. Leaving them off this list - for whatever reason - is not a decision that requires much in the way of defense, IMO.
And the idea that the publishers would lose their audience by suggesting that there is more to the Grateful Dead than WMD and AB can't possibly be taken seriously. Not in a world where Pitchfork reviewed every Yes album.
I like most of 'Live/Dead', did come to appreciate most of 'American Beauty', even the later 'Blues For Allah' I quite enjoyed, but otherwise I'm not that into them. When it comes to the 'roots rock' side of them, I personally enjoy The Band, The Flying Burrito Brothers and CCR far more- I just find bands like that much more dynamic.
Just in case there's any misunderstanding, I love The Dead, especially the years 1967-71. I love all of the early album material when they were doing it live. I just can't imagine listening to those early albums when I want to hear those songs, or recommending them to someone new to the Dead.
There's a couple reasons why I would recommend something like Anthem Of The Sun over say Dick's Picks 23 (or whichever one it is that was recorded in February of 68):
1. If your whole point is to show there's much more to the Dead's music than the country/bluegrass/blues thing that most people know about. Yeah, the Pigpen stuff is excellent, but if the idea is to play the person something like That's It For The Other One, making them sit through a 20 minute Turn On Your Lovelight first maybe isn't the best idea.
2. The band's vocals were terrible in the early days. Maybe it's because they didn't know how to sing onstage yet, or maybe it was the bad/no monitors or whatever, but on some of those tapes, the singing really is awful.
Besides that, there was a lot of "production" that went into Anthem Of The Sun, you've got things like the bit where Jerry's singing through the Leslie on Cryptical Envelopment, the whole We Leave The Castle bit that links That's It For The Other One to New Potato Caboose, and the feedback collage at the end of side two. You don't get stuff like that on the live tapes.
And related to that matter, I always recommend American Beauty because although Sugar Magnolia and Truckin' are both relatively weak on the album, some of the other songs never sounded better than they do on this record. I don't think I've ever heard a live version of Box Of Rain, Ripple, or Attics Of My Life that even compares to how they're presented on American Beauty. Likewise, I don't think there's a live version of Unbroken Chain that's as good as the version on From The Mars Hotel (and in any case, any live recording of the Dead doing Unbroken Chain won't have Ned Lagin's synthesizers on it).
I don't think alternative is a good description for anything in the sixties either. Underground maybe but not alternative. I don't even think the term alternative was used to describe music until the nineties even though the style existed a few years before that.
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