Last week, we took a listen to the Grateful Dead in their so-called "primal" stage. We’ll pick up the thread seven years later, to find the group climbing to an experimental, unclassifiable plateau. In 1974, the Dead were making some truly strange sounds—and stranger still, they were making them in packed stadiums full of rock'n'roll fans.
It’s an enormous understatement to say that a lot had happened to the Grateful Dead between '67 and '74. They gained and lost keyboardists, drummers, and vocalists. They started their own record label. They were ripped off by shady managers. They helped develop one of the most innovative, high tech sound systems ever created. They played hundreds upon hundreds of shows, from the ballrooms of San Francisco to fields in England. They did it all while (usually) doing copious amounts of mind-altering drugs.
Other bands might have succumbed to the chaos. The Dead seemed to thrive on it. During these hectic years, the music (especially onstage) deepened and expanded, whether the band was exploring the farthest out regions of psychedelia with "Dark Star" and "The Other One", or joyously digging into the roots of folk, blues and country on their twin studio classics, Workingman’s Dead (1970) and American Beauty (1971).
Jerry Garcia, the band’s guiding light, was an insatiable musical omnivore during this period, somehow finding the time for a dizzying array of extracurricular activities amidst the Dead’s busy touring and recording schedule. Away from the band, he played adventurous jazz-funk with Howard Wales and Merl Saunders; he picked a banjo on classic bluegrass with Old & in the Way; he contributed pedal steel to the country rockin’ New Riders of the Purple Sage. Garcia may be seen as the quintessential hippie, but more than anything else, he was an extremely ambitious musician, devoted to developing his talents and following his muse wherever it took him. After Garcia’s death in 1995, Bob Dylan wrote: "There’s a lot of spaces and advances between the Carter Family, Buddy Holly and say Ornette Coleman, a lot of universes, but he filled them all without being a member of any school."
Alexandra Palace, London, England, September 11, 1974
All of Garcia’s diverse influences (plus plenty more from other members of the band) fed back into the Dead, and by 1974, the group was swelling with ideas—and had the guts to actually test out those ideas onstage. There's no one show that's quite up to the task of encompassing everything they were up to during this era, but this recording of the band on a short European jaunt gives a good overview.
For a band that in later years would be accused (though not without justification) of being lead-footed in the rhythm department, the Dead in '74 sound positively nimble in the evening's first set as they navigate the tricky twists and turns of "Scarlet Begonias" and fan favorites like "Jack Straw" and "Brown-Eyed Women".
Things start to really stretch out on "Playing in the Band". The song, which originally appeared on guitarist Bob Weir's 1972 solo LP, Ace, begins as a choogling, CCR-esque rocker, complete with a chiming hook and a singalong chorus. But it abruptly shifts gears into a free form freak out whose closest cousin is probably Agharta-era Miles Davis. Drummer Bill Kreutzmann and bassist Phil Lesh blast away at each other while Garcia, Weir, and keyboardist Keith Godchaux dart all over the place, gleefully kicking up a cloud of atonal skree. (There’s a good reason why Sonic Youth's Lee Ranaldo was a devoted Deadhead during this period.)
After a lengthy flight of fancy like that, you’d think they’d spent their improvisational reserves, yet in true Dead form, they were just getting started. The second set includes almost a half-hour’s worth of Lesh and Ned Lagin's out-there opus, "Seastones", featuring earth shaking bass frequencies, nasty synth noise, and general cacophony. On this particular evening, Garcia and Kreutzmann come out to join the fun, helping to create what is probably the most uncompromisingly avant-garde music the Grateful Dead ever put its name to. It sounds wild 41 years later. God knows what it sounded like to the audience at the time. But they’re rewarded with a breezy and beautiful "Eyes of the World", with Lagin’s keys adding to the song’s crisp, jazzy flavor and the rest of the band sailing along in ecstatic, joyous union.