I've spent the last few summers digging deep into the Grateful Dead's vast live archive, listening to one show for every year of the band's existence—1965-1995. The project isn't wildly original, and the upcoming 80-disc (!) box set, 30 Trips Around the Sun, will officially re-create the experience for anyone with $700 burning a hole in their pocket. My personal decades of Dead trip started as a lark: could I really make it through all 30 years without throwing in the tie-dyed towel? But as has been the case with so many others, listening to live tapes of the Grateful Dead has developed into an addiction.
The enabler here is Archive.org, which hosts thousands of hours of the group onstage, from their formative fumblings in the mid-1960s to guitarist Jerry Garcia's last stand at Chicago's Soldier Field in 1995 (where the remaining living Dead will perform one last time this summer). It's the kind of collection that would've been impossible to pull together in the pre-Internet era, even for the most tireless of tape traders. Today, Dead Freak-dom is just a click away.
Of course, you have to want to make the plunge—and some otherwise open-minded music lovers will to their dying day deny the Dead. Fair enough: above all else, the Grateful Dead are a truly weird band, with a three-decade legacy of amorphous, ever-evolving (occasionally devolving) psychedelic strangeness. Brilliant? Sure. Embarrassing? Sometimes. Interesting? Always. As the constantly expanding realm of scholarship surrounding the band shows, their story refuses to be summed up easily. I’m not even going to try. But over the next few weeks, I’ll share a handful of recordings that capture the odd lure of the Grateful Dead.
Winterland Arena, San Francisco, California, March 18, 1967
Those who still think of the Dead as mellow "Touch of Grey" skeletons will be surprised by the feisty, razor sharp sound of the band’s early days. Aficionados refer to the period as "Primal Dead," and the group (a quintet at this point) definitely lives up to such a billing during this spring of '67 recording. The music here is raw, unpolished, and undeniably exciting, and it wouldn’t be out of place on a bill with such contemporaneous acid drenched R&B outfits the 13th Floor Elevators, Love, or Captain Beefheart’s Magic Band.
The opening tune, John Phillips’ "Me and My Uncle", remained a setlist perennial throughout the Dead’s career (even acquiring a disco-ish groove in the late '70s). Here, it gallops out of the gate, with Bob Weir delivering a high-strung, slightly desperate vocal that matches the graphic, Peckinpah-esque violence of the lyrics. San Francisco’s Summer of Love was just months away, but the Dead already seem like they’re looking ahead to Altamont.
In 1967, the group hadn’t solidified their relationship with lyricist Robert Hunter, and their repertoire was made up mostly of covers, including the Howlin’ Wolf chestnut "Smokestack Lightning" and the then-just-a-few-years-old Martha and the Vandellas chart-topper "Dancing in the Street". Both are given loose-limbed, extended workouts—vocally, Ron "Pigpen" McKernan isn’t Howlin’ Wolf and Weir certainly isn’t Martha Reeves (though Garcia and bassist Phil Lesh do surprisingly well as the Vandellas). But led by Garcia’s stinging leads, the Dead manage to take both songs in directions that transcend mere imitation.
They play a handful of originals, too: "Golden Road to Unlimited Devotion", and "Cream Puff War", both of which show off the band’s garage rock side. The stabbing rhythms, distorted organ, and hollered Garcia vocal of "Cream Puff War" would sound right at home on Lenny Kaye’s Nuggets compilation. There are already signs, however, that the Dead is looking beyond the garage, and towards more wide open sonic vistas. "That Same Thing", originally by Muddy Waters, starts off as a sinister blues crawl, Pigpen relishing every last syllable. But around the five-minute mark, drummer Bill Kreutzmann glides into a jazz-inflected groove that his bandmates ride into the stratosphere. The Primal Dead are moving into unexplored territory.