‘Steal Your Face’: why Grateful Dead released one of the worst live albums ever
Pretty much all bands tour, but the Grateful Dead toured. The most hardcore members of their fanbase have seen them live more times than some of their blood relatives, with NBA legend and die-hard fan Deadhead Bill Walton seeing them live a reported 850 times. Word is that at their prime, they were more than worth that level of dedication. A truly phenomenal live outfit where there was never a show repeated.
So, it made sense that they would commit a number of those famous live shows to record. Live albums are a classic rock mainstay. The likes of The Who’s Live at Leeds, Johnny Cash’s Live at Folsom Prison and James Brown’s Live at the Apollo are some of the best records of their whole back catalogue. The Dead do have a few classic live records to their name, but one above all came back to bite them hard.
The worst part was that it was a bad idea at the time. In the early 1970s, the band toured with an absolute monstrosity of a contraption called ‘The Wall Of Sound’ as their backline. A truly astonishing folly that, as originally envisioned, would make the band louder and clearer than any other band on the circuit. It would also do so without having to compromise with any venue’s monitoring system. Ideally, the band could turn up to any venue in the world, plug in, and play.
As you can probably tell, the word “ideally” there is doing more heavy lifting than a World’s Strongest Man contestant ever could. In reality, the whole thing was a living nightmare to set up; at its worst, it could sound genuinely atrocious during gigs and was so expensive that the band began losing money on the road. This wasn’t the end of the world for most bands of the time. The likes of Led Zeppelin and Black Sabbath lost truckloads of money on the road, but their records would sell enough to make it worth the time of everyone involved.
For touring lifers like the Dead, whose records sold decently enough but never to the level of their chart-topping peers, they needed to make money on the road. This was especially true when they were trying to make their feature film, The Grateful Dead Movie, a project that, surprise, surprise, was also losing the band money. More seriously, the band was also in a bad place personally after the tragic death of founding member Ronald ‘Pigpen’ McKernan.
Something had to be given to raise enough funds to keep them going; the band decided to rush out a live album based on the tapes that the Wall Of Sound would record of their shows. The trouble was that no matter how good their gigs could sound coming out of The Wall of Sound, the very nature of the beast meant that recordings taken from it would sound like deep-fried bollocks.
Bassist Phil Lesh wrote in his memoirs Searching For The Sound that the recordings taken from the PA system were “a glutinous mud bath of sound, through which any music was scarcely discernible”. He went to the head of their independent label Grateful Dead Records, to explain the situation, and was met with a truly damning response. As Lesh puts it, “He brushed [my] objections aside, saying, ‘They’ll buy it anyway; we need this record.'”
Arguably, they did, but it’s still uncharacteristically cut-throat behaviour from a band so associated with the Haight-Asbury hippy scene, and the fanbase responded in kind. When Steal Your Face was released, they bought the record as the band’s label had predicted. However, upon hearing the inaudible mess, they’d just been sold by a band they trusted, and it’s since gone down as one of the lowest points in the band’s history and one of the worst live albums ever made.
It’s not for nothing that the fanbase has a nickname for Steal Your Face. No matter the extenuating circumstances that forced the band’s hand in releasing such a shoddy project. No amount of context will stop the Deadheads from calling the record Steal Your Money.
