From: Jeffrey.Hale@launchpad.unc.edu (Jeffrey Hale)
Subject: gd in r.s. record gde (long)ish)
Organization: University of North Carolina Extended Bulletin Board Service
Date: Fri, 6 Nov 1992 22:58:24 GMT

From Rolling Stone Album Guide (1992 edition), completely and absolutely
sans permission . . .

"
GRATEFUL DEAD
**1/2    Grateful Dead
***      Anthem of the Sun
***      Aoxomoxoa
****     Live Dead
*****    Workingman's Dead
*****    American Beauty
***      The Grateful Dead
***      Europe '72
***      History of the Grateful Dead, Vol. 1 - Bear's Choice
***      Wake of the Flood
****     Best of the Grateful Dead - Skeletons from the Closet
***      Grateful Dead from the Mars Hotel
***      Blues for Allah
**       Steal Your Face
***1/2   Terrapin Station
****     What A Long Strange Trip It's Been
**       Shakedown Street
****     Grateful Dead Go to Heaven
***      Dead Reckoning
****     Dead Set
****     In the Dark
***      Built to Last
***1/2   Without A Net

As much a phenomenon as a band, the Grateful Dead have over the last
quarter century gathered together the far-flung members of their massive
cult for live shows that function less as musical events than love-ins. 
The group for a while toured six months a year and boasted a 23-ton sound
system, and it's never been the album, but rather the concert that forms
the essential Dead document - a fittingly momentary one for a band whose
characteristic mood is that of drifting into ether, spacing out on good
vibes.  Deadheads - ex-hippies or tie-dye wannabes - celebrate the Dead's
myth of genial counterculturalism.  The songs provide an excuse for the
revelry - and they remain songs whose appeal is all but inscrutable to
non-initiates.  
	House band for the famous acid tests that transformed San
Francisco into one large freakout, the original group was composed of
ex-jug band guitarist/singer Jerry Garcia, electronic music fancier Phil
Lesh on bass, rocker Bob Weir on rhythm guitar, keyboardist "Pigpen"
McKernan and drummer Bill Kreutzmann.  In time they'd add Mickey Hart as a
second drummer; unlike the two-kit Allman Brothers, however, the Dead's
rhythm section never sounded powerful, but instead went in for
polyrhythmic subtleties.  Recorded in three days, Grateful Dead sounds
about as carefully thought out as a scattershot jam: the ten minutes of
"Viola Lee Blues" foretold endless improvisations to come - the remainder
balanced undistinguished trad rockers ("Good Morning Little Schoolgirl")
and woolyheaded originals ("The Golden Road [to Unlimited Devotion]).
	Then taking half a year to come up with Anthem of the Sun, the
band pulled out all the stops.  A suite, "That's It for the Other One,"
featured such mystifying segements as "Cryptical Envelopment" and
"Quadriplet for Tender Feet"; "Alligator clocked in at 15 minutes, and the
musicians employed such exotica as finger cymbals, a John Cage-ish
"prepared piano," celesta and crotales in service of a puzzling
experimentalism.  Aoxomoxoa was somewhat more tuneful, but it was only
with Live Dead that the band found its style.  Lyricist Robert Hunter
provided free-form musings, and with the delicate "Saint Stephen" and the
24-minute moodiness of "Dark Star," the Dead arrived at music whose effect
was very much like jazz.  If rock and roll had been built on intensity and
concision, the Dead's new sound was the antithesis of that.  Neither
Garcia or Lesh was at all an urgent singer, and Garcia's ruminative,
single-note, discursive guitar-playing allude more to Charlie Christian
than to Chuck Berry.
	For all but fanatics, the next pair of albums, Workingman's Dead
and American Beauty, comprised the band's irrefutable high point.  Hippie
country music, complete with Jerry on pedal steel, both albums featured
carefully arranged songs and tight playing.  "Ripple," "Casey Jones,"
"Sugar Magnolia" and "Truckin'" were alternately witty or lovely, and the
Dead's signal strength - its casual, loping swing - found its best
vehicle.  Until the band switched record labels, the Dead contented itself
mainly with live albums, with Europe '72 being the standout.  Blues for
Allah found the Dead trying out jazz riffs, and with the addition of
pianist Keith Godchaux and his wife Donna on vocals, the band's late-70's
sound was fuller.  Terrapin Station and its long title track song-suite
was the last of the Dead's studio epics;  the band concentrated henceforth
on studio numbers.  Shakedown Street hinted at disco in tis drumming and
wah-wah guitar and stands as a low point.  With Go to Heaven, from 1980,
however, and a strong production by Gary Lyons, the Dead came up with its
most accessible set of songs in quite some time, and on "Alabama Getaway"
they came very close to rocking.  
	Throughout the '80s the band busied itself with massive live sets
and scanty studio ones.  Of the latter, In the Dark finally gained the
group a chart hit in the sweet "Touch of Grey."  Built to Last was also
late-model, newly accessible Dead - an aggregation of polished players
making pleasant, unthreatening music.  Much more characteristic were the
concert albums: Dead  set recycled the group's classics in standard
electric versions; Reckoning, an all-acoustic look backward proved that
the band's country and folk sides were its more effective ones.
	The Dead kicked off the '90s with - what else? - a two-CD live
extravaganza, Without a Net.  The group's obsessive reworkings of its own
history will no doubt continue - delighting its rabid following, and
puzzling the rest of the world.  The retrospective What a Long Strange
Trip It's Been isn't a bad place for the unitiated to begin.

"
The above was by reviewer Paul Evans.  It's certainly filled with stuff
that most heads would take issue with, but unlike many does note obliquely
that concerts are more important than the artifacts.  If you can't have
someone on the bus, at least it's nice to have someone who is not slashing the
tires.  The prior edition's comments (in 1983?) were overtly hostile,
penned by the vitriolic Dave Marsh (now of Playboy), who increasingly seems to
believe that if music is fun, it must not be good.  Sometime on the net
this summer there was a brief thread about how he had re-named Steal Your
Face to Steal Your Money and generally wrote that the dead were a
self-parodizing nostalgia machine, providing "facile reminiscences" for
hippies and those who wish they had been.  I don't think he gave more than
two stars to anything in the catalog, so this guy's really at the other pole.

The guide itself is a fun book, great to browse through.  It does not
purport to be comprehensive and is weak in coverage of college/alternative
stuff.  And damn it, phish isn't in it.  Nonetheless, with the Trouser
Press Record Guide, it makes a decent consumer guide and for
fascinating/infuriating reading.  Unfortunately, it is  $20.00 in
paperback.  (I work in a bookstore and got a water-damaged one for five).

btw Dylan and the Dead was listed with Dylan, and received only ** in
their not so humble opinions.  And how would you rather have Dead Set or
Dead Reckoning on a desert island?

tchuss
jeffrey
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