Grateful Dead – ‘The Grateful Dead’
Before the stadiums, before the extremely dedicated fanbase, and before the gold records, the Grateful Dead only had the music. That, and an endless supply of the world’s greatest acid directly from the source. With little in the way of original songs or true musical direction, the Dead piled into RCA Studios with producer David Hassinger to record their debut album.
The fact that they got a record deal at all was a minor miracle. Even though they had only been “The Grateful Dead” for less than two years when their debut was recorded, the Dead had become one of the most formidable and infamous bands in the burgeoning San Francisco psychedelic rock scene. After playing in clubs like The Matrix (not to mention numerous free shows around in and around Golden Gate Park), the Dead came to the attention of Warner Bros, one of the most traditionally buttoned-up record labels in America.
Warner Bros was the home of Frank Sinatra and Petula Clark, but most of their rock acts had either stalled out or weren’t edgy enough. The label wanted to be cutting-edge, and no band was more cutting-edge than the Grateful Dead. What label head Joe Smith didn’t count on was a travelling acid circus and band members who would happily go into debt trying out just about every knob and button that a recording studio had to offer.
But that was still a few months away. In early 1967, the Dead weren’t the experimental behemoth that they evolved into. Mickey Hart’s exotic percussion and world music influences weren’t present, and neither was Tom Constanten’s avant-garde tendencies. The Dead were just bluegrass banjo player turned electric guitarist Jerry Garcia, blues purist and keyboardist Ron ‘Pigpen’ McKernan, manic composer/bassist Phil Lesh, R&B drummer Bill Kreutzmann, and 19-year-old folk guitarist Bobby Weir.
Los Angeles wasn’t a completely new territory for the Dead – the band briefly moved down to L.A. in 1966. But the city represented a side of music that the Dead despised: the entertainment industry and its corporate headquarters. They were too nervous as first-time studio players to fight against the hierarchy, so instead, the band took as much speed as they could and finished work on The Grateful Dead in less than a month.
“We were in Studio A at RCA Studios. We also were on a lot of Ritalin,” Kreutzmann recalled in his memoir Deal. “The album sounds like it. We played everything too fast. We were nervous. Phil was into speed – many years ago, not now, of course – and he had a stash of Ritalin. Playing music on speed sounds like you’re playing music on speed. It was our first experience with recording for the big league, and we all wanted the album to be popular. We wanted it to work.”
As such, The Grateful Dead (or San Francisco’s Grateful Dead, as both Kreutzmann and Lesh refer to the album in their respective memoirs), is a mix of psychedelia, garage rock, amphetamines, blues, and ’60s production. All of those elements can be felt in the hyperactive album opener, ‘The Golden Road (To Unlimited Devotion)’. Although the first Grateful Dead fan club would take its name from the song (one year before it actually appeared on record), ‘The Golden Road’ is one the songs that places the debut squarely in the ’60s. With frenetic plastic organ from Pigpen and some wonderfully of-its-era lyrics from Garcia, ‘The Golden Road’ is both a hidden gem and a strange relic, with the band quickly moving past its sound on subsequent releases.
By the way, you read that right: lyrics from Garcia. The Grateful Dead is the only studio album in the band’s discography not to have any contributions from in-house lyricist Robert Hunter, who would officially join the band in time to add a few lines to ‘Alligator’ on their follow-up, Anthem of the Sun. In his absence, the Dead mostly stick to covers on their debut, with ‘The Golden Road’ and ‘Cream Puff War’ being rare cases of Garcia stepping up as a lyricist.
No song better represents the souped-up speed-freak tendencies of The Grateful Dead than ‘Beat It On Down the Line’. Songwriter Jesse Fuller had penned the track only six years earlier, but it fit right into the band’s massive collection of traditional tracks and old-school folk covers. As fast-paced as anything the Dead ever recorded (with the sole exception of some coked-up ‘Eyes of the World’ performances in the late 1970s), ‘Beat It On Down the Line’ would continue to be a live favourite for the band, being played every year until their demise in 1995. Everything from the number of opening hits to the specific lyrics would get switched around in that time, but the Dead took the song’s tempo down to a more reasonable chug in subsequent live versions.
Along with album closer ‘Viola Lee Blues’, ‘Good Morning Little School Girl’ is one of the only songs that truly captures what the Dead sounded like in 1967. A straight blues cover featuring Pigpen on vocals and harmonica, ‘School Girl’ was just one of the numerous blues tracks that Pigpen led throughout the first decade of the band’s existence. Unlike later versions, which featured a showstopping reveal of the young girl’s age, the Dead turn the blues shuffle into a rock rave-up on the studio version of the track. As his only lead vocal on the album, ‘School Girl’ kickstarted the Cult of Ron McKernan as the band’s original focal point. That would change soon enough, but his confidence and mastery of the blues clearly put Pigpen in the role of the most developed band member at the time.
‘Cold Rain and Snow’ fires off like a gunshot after ‘School Girl’. Like most of the songs on the album, the Dead would slow ‘Cold Rain and Snow’ way the hell down in future live performances. But the garage rock shake appeal of the studio version is impossible to ignore: proto-punk was still a few years away, but there’s no reason why ‘Cold Rain and Snow’ couldn’t put the Dead in that same conversation.
Another old-school favourite comes next on ‘Sitting on Top of the World’. The Dead push themselves to the breaking point with the count-off, forcing Kreutzman to play like his life depends on it. There’s something charmingly naive about how cranked everyone is on ‘Sitting on Top of the World’, with flurries of notes coming from Pigpen’s organ, Lesh’s bass line, and Garcia’s frantic solo. What remains enthralling is how Kreutzmann stays in the pocket throughout the entire track, becoming one of the first true signs that his “Gang of One” style of playing was always exactly what the Dead needed.
Much like ‘The Golden Road’, ‘Cream Puff War’ has a certain push and pull to it. On the one hand, it’s a fascinating depiction of the early Grateful Dead, with Garcia trying some seriously psychedelic lyrics. On the other, ‘Cream Puff War’ is a clear sign that the Dead weren’t fully developed yet. Garcia was unhappy with the final lyrics, and the Dead only played the song 11 times before being permanently retired. The Dead would become much more ambitious, and with Hunter on hand to handle the lyrics, Garcia was able to sprawl out as a musical genius rather than being handicapped by his lyrical shortcomings.
Side two of The Grateful Dead features three thrilling looks at the band’s past, present, and future. Oddly enough, the first look is into the future with Bonnie Dobson’s ‘Morning Dew’. The Dead don’t quite have the right handle on the song’s arrangement yet, with Garcia copping a number of his own licks that he played on Jefferson Airplane’s ‘Today’, released one month before The Grateful Dead. The Dead were able to wrestle the maximum amount of emotion out of the song when they slowed it down, peaking with a startlingly brilliant version that appeared as the final track on Europe 72. Compared to future versions, the studio take of ‘Morning Dew’ is rushed and limp, although its foreboding atmosphere remains intact.
For a look into the past, Weir trots out ‘New New Minglewood Blues’. First played in 1966, the Noah Lewis composition likely dates back to the 1920s. Owing more to psychedelic pop than to blues, the studio version of the track that appears on The Grateful Dead, like the rest of the album: charming but underdeveloped. Strangely enough, the Dead would make another pass at the song a decade later on the 1978 album Shakedown Street, where it appeared as ‘All New Minglewood Blues’.
The Grateful Dead’s debut album ends with the only song that truly illustrates the 1967 Grateful Dead sound: ‘Viola Lee Blues’. Another Lewis tune (but mostly in name only), the Dead are finally able to stretch out and show off their improvisational rock skills, which were unmatched even in their earliest incarnation. After two verses, Garcia takes hold of a circular triplet riff and doesn’t let it go, with the other members filling in. Kretuzmann’s drums go double and then triple time as the Dead are off to the races. By the time the band hit the nine-minute mark, it doesn’t seem humanly possible for the band to get any faster or more chaotic. Then, the bottom drops out, and the band return to the standard form, barking out one final verse before ending The Grateful Dead on a giddily disorienting note.
On their debut, the Grateful Dead only appear by name. The band that performs the songs isn’t quite the Dead as they would be known. Instead, they’re sanitized, souped-up, and lacking confidence in their own style. The band would take the studio by force on their next album, Anthem of the Sun, indulging in their most experimental tendencies to create perhaps the most psychedelic album of all time. The Grateful Dead isn’t that: it’s a (mostly) covers album showing off a young band who are right on the verge of discovering what sets them apart from their contemporaries.
That being said, the lack of timeless qualities gives The Grateful Dead a strange allure. The music, along with the haphazard album cover collage, makes the band’s debut their most 1960s release. But there’s something wonderfully fun about the raggedness of The Grateful Dead, and for scores of non-Deadheads who find the band to be meandering and noodle-heavy, the album proves that the Grateful Dead could be as energetic and exciting as any other group. If nothing else, The Grateful Dead sets one important precedent for the band’s future: their difficulty in translating their sound in the studio and the captivating results that come from it.
