“Dancin’ In A Ring Around the Sun”: The Grateful Dead’s Lightning-Fast Debut Album

Hard, fast, loud and tight: four adjectives not normally associated with the Grateful Dead, but they seem appropriate terms to describe the feel of the band’s self-titled debut album from 1967. Despite its age, this is definitely not your grandfather’s Grateful Dead record.  

I bought The Grateful Dead used on CD in 1999. Though I knew a number of the tracks from the compilations Skeletons from the Closet and What a Long Strange Trip It’s Been, hearing the album in its entirety for the first time was a baffling experience because it sounds nothing like the music one usually associates with the band. The high-pitched guitars, even higher-pitched keyboards, hard-edged vocals, and short, fast songs have little resemblance to the likes of “Truckin” and “Ripple,” which the group would record three years later. I listened to the album once or twice and then didn’t give it much thought for nearly a decade.  

Two separate, and seemingly unrelated, listening experiences brought me back to the album. First, in early 2008, I listened to a box set of 1960s garage rock. The music was a blend of fast-paced psychedelic power pop that sounded like a bridge between 1950s rockabilly and punk, like this track from the Five Americans.  

About a year or so later, I heard the studio version of “Cold Rain and Snow” for the first time in years. I was struck by how similar the song was to the tracks on the garage rock set.  

So I decided to give The Grateful Dead another pass. Hearing it as a whole I realized that it wasn’t the Grateful Dead of mellow, stoner vibes fame. The group was trying to emulate the sounds swirling around them in the 1960s.  

Most of the tracks sound like a sped-up version of West Coast country music of the 1960s, such as Buck Owens and Merle Haggard, on a heavy amount of speed. Accounts of just what drugs the band members were on while recording the album differ. In a 1971 interview with Rolling Stone, Jerry Garcia said they were on a mix of Dexamyl, a “diet watchers speed,” and pot. Similarly, in his book A Long Strange Trip, long-time Dead publicist and biographer Dennis McNally stated that everyone but Bob Weir and Ron “Pigpen” McKernan were on Ritalin.

Mixed in between the piercing guitars and fast-paced vocals is Pigpen’s high-pitched psychedelic-edged keyboards, which give the whole album a 60s-counter culture vibe. What is truly striking about these songs is how fast the band plays. Also, half of the tracks were edited down to under three minutes.

Given how much the Grateful Dead is hated in the punk rock world, it’s ironic that their first album feels almost like a Ramones record. They get in, blast your ears, and then get out. In his autobiography, Phil Lesh described the record saying: “The material for the album was fairly representative of our repertoire - blues, jug-band tunes, traditional ballads and one current folk song (‘Morning Dew’) - rearranged, electrified and amped up.” Had the group not gone on to become an iconic jam band, the record would be a footnote for the era, liked by collectors, and viewed as a bridge between the hard rock of the 1960s and the punk and metal of the 1970s.

The album opens with the “The Golden Road (To Unlimited Devotion).” Several band historians have noted that with its party-themed lyrics, the song both captured the spirit of the Haight-Ashbury scene of the 1960s as well as provided a preview of the traveling carnivals that would one day accompany the band.

See that girl, barefootin' along,

Whistlin' and singin', she's a carryin' on.

There's laughing in her eyes, dancing in her feet,

She's a neon-light diamond and she can live on the street.

Oddly enough the song was included as the lead track on the compilation Skeletons from the Closet, even though according to The SetList Program, the group only performed the tune live four times during their career, all in 1967. (The reformulated version of the band dusted it off for one of the Fare Thee Well concerts in 2015, with Phish’s Trey Anastasio singing lead.)   

The band allotted one song to Pigpen on the album, a cover of Sonny Boy Williamson’s dirty blues rocker “Good Morning, Little Schoolgirl.” Normally, I find Pigpen’s live tracks unlistenable — his long rambles, combined with his bizarre, drunken, spoken-word sermons get grating real fast. But here, with a running time of just under six minutes, the song makes for an interesting change of pace and style on the album, like a good Keith Richards’ tune on a Rolling Stones record. Listening to it again as part of this project, I was struck by how much he sounds like Jim Morrison, which makes sense given that this album was recorded several weeks after the Doors self-titled debut album was released in January 1967.  Peter Richardson notes in his book No Simple Highway that promotional efforts for the album included a Pigpen lookalike contest. Thankfully I’ve never seen any shirtless Pigpen posters in anyone’s college dorm room.  

The most Dead-like track is the band’s cover of Bonnie Dobson’s post-apocalyptic “Morning Dew.” At five minutes long, the song feels much slower and darker than the rest of the album. Still they play it at a much quicker tempo than they would on later live renditions. At about 3:40, Jerry begins a guitar solo that hints at what would later become his signature sound. A concert staple, it’s arguably the most enduring track from the album. During the promotional blitz for a recently released 59-track Grateful Dead tribute album, the National performed the song on the May 9 episode of the “The Late Show with Stephen Colbert.”    

The album closes with “Viola Lee Blues” and takes the group’s hyper-speed country boogie to its logical ten-minute-long conclusion. The track features the fast-paced, country-guitar licks that dominate the shorter songs. About 4:30 in it starts to pick up speed and intensity. By eight minutes the song turns into an all-out musical assault of loud guitars, even louder keyboards and cymbals crashing in every direction. At 8:50 it all comes to a screeching halt and brings us back to the beginning. Even Phil Lesh praised the song: “To my ear, the only track on the record that sounds at all like we did at the time is ‘Viola Lee Blues.’ The record almost captures in ten minutes what used to take thirty or more - especially the last big craze-out build up to the verse recap.”  

In The American Book of the Dead, Oliver Trager calls the song a “lost classic” from the album saying: “Garcia employed Freddie King guitar stylings while leading the band on a frenetic ‘surf’ version of the song. Like their many concert versions between 1966 and 1970 of ‘Viola Lee Blues,’ the tempo of the jam increases with each measure, always on the verge of spiraling out of control. And, on more than one occasion, it did.”

The album itself didn’t do much to move the band’s career at the time. The two singles “The Golden Road” and “Cream Puff War” never even charted. Jerry Garcia was dismissive of the record in the aforementioned 1971 interview: “That’s what’s embarrassing about that record now, the tempo was way too fast.  We were all so speedy at the time. It has its sort of crude energy, but obviously it’s difficult for me to listen to it.”

But that doesn’t mean fans should discount the record. The fact that the album doesn’t show the band that the Grateful Dead ultimately became is perhaps why it’s so intriguing to listen to now.

Sources

The Editors of Rolling Stone. The Rolling Stone Interviews 1967-1980: The Classic Oral History of Rock N’ Roll. 1981.

Lesh, Phil. Searching for the Sound: My Life with the Grateful Dead. 2005.

Richardson, Peter. No Simple Highway: A Cultural History of the Grateful Dead. 2015

Trager, Oliver. The American Book of the Dead: The Definitive Grateful Dead Encyclopedia. 1997.

McNally, Dennis. A Long Strange Trip: The Inside History of the Grateful Dead. 2002.

There’s Nothing Like A Grateful Dead Album

This month, the Grateful Dead released a 12-CD set containing five complete concerts from July 1978. This isn’t really newsworthy to anyone other than a handful of collectors who can’t wait to get their hands on yet another one of the fabled “Betty Board” recordings. (If you don’t know what the “Betty Board” is, let this extensive New Yorker article enlighten you.) It is one of the many live sets the group has released in 2016 alone, and with more than 2,300 shows throughout its career, not to mention all the others from various members’ offshoot bands and solo efforts, don’t expect the deluge to stop anytime, ever.  

I’ve been a fan of the Grateful Dead for most of my life, ever since first hearing Terrapin Station on cassette during the summer of 1985. In that time, I’ve always considered myself an iconoclast among Dead fans. (I would never use the term Deadhead to describe myself, I’m probably more of a Dead Juggalo.) While I love the band’s music, I have never been a big fan of its live recordings.

Maybe it’s because I was late to the party. I did not see them live until 1991. Though I never admitted it at the time, the three shows I saw were spotty at best. I don’t have some amazing memory of catching them live at the Winterland Ballroom in 1974 or blazing a doobie at Red Rocks in 1985. I also had the misfortune of hearing a number of the live bootlegs that circulated on cassette before the Internet era. These were the awful, awful recordings that your brother taped off a friend, whose brother got it from his uncle, who swiped it from a dude, who recorded it with a guy who once met Jerry. By the time the music got to your ears it was painful to listen to. Literally. I remember my dog freaking out when I turned up the volume to better hear a static-ridden version of “Let It Grow.”  

The improved listening experience now available through both the Internet and the release of Betty Cantor-Jackson’s high quality live recordings hasn’t necessarily changed my view. Hearing the shows in a higher fidelity just reveals how subpar many of them were. There’s a lot of long plodding songs. For a band that prided itself on never playing the same show twice, its set lists followed an awfully similar format. Sure there are occasional gems like “Sugar Magnolia” from the Fillmore East in 1971, and their well-curated live album “Without a Net” is stunning. But for every great song, one has to slog through another 20-plus minute version of “Dark Star” or endless iterations “Drums” and/or “Space.”     

All that said, I love the Grateful Dead’s studio recordings. Between 1967 and 1989 the group released 13 studio albums (amidst a number of live albums, compilations and solo records) that feature an incredibly diverse batch of music from countless influences. When listening one can hear elements of psychedelic rock, hard rock, prog rock, country, bluegrass, blues, jazz, R&B, funk, disco and even elements of what would later be known as yacht rock. The albums are completely underrated and not only capture the band at its best, but seem to embody the essence of the times in which they were each recorded. Yet, unfortunately, these albums have taken a back seat to the live recordings over the years, mainly because fans and even members of the group have derided them as somehow unauthentic representations of the band’s music. As if having someone edit and think about the songs before putting them out for public consumption is a bad thing.  

I disagree. I think the restrictions of time and formatting allowed them to produce music that was more sonically diverse and experimental than what they could do in their live shows. Over the next few weeks I plan to post a few articles about some of my favorite Dead albums. My hope is that longtime fans and neophytes alike will give these albums another listen and perhaps the respect they deserve.    

“If There Was a Problem, Yo, I’ll Solve It”: In Defense of "Ice Ice Baby"

This summer Vanilla Ice is set to hit the road alongside such luminaries as Salt-N-Pepa, Tone Lōc, Color Me Badd, Coolio, Biz Markie and Kool Moe Dee, among others, for a nostalgic “I Love The ‘90s Tour.” Proving that the generation that grew up on Hammer Pants and 8-Ball jackets ain’t getting any younger.

Recently while compiling a playlist of rap music I can sing and dance to with my young daughter I decided to include “Ice Ice Baby.”  

Let me pause for a second and say that I wasn’t a fan back in the day. Though I knew who Vanilla Ice was, I didn’t listen to much pop music circa 1990, so I never heard the song in its entirety until years later. In 1999, I was cruising in the back of some freshman Aussie rules football player’s Jeep somewhere outside of Perth while studying abroad. He dropped in a mixtape and sang along to every word as we barrelled along through the night with the top down. I remember thinking, “Well this is random.”

Since I put it on my playlist -- along with such G-rated masterpieces as “Parents Just Don’t Understand,” “Bust A Move” and “Principal’s Office -- the song has stayed lodged in my head. Not just because of David Bowie/Queen’s great hook, though that helps - there’s something about the lyrics and bravado of hearing him rap about driving through the streets of Miami that’s just kind of entertaining.  

As I’ve been singing the lyrics out loud to my daughter, I’ve been thinking about Vanilla Ice’s place in music history and how it might be time to rehab his signature song’s reputation. So here goes, or as Ice would say: “Yo, VIP, Let’s Kick It.”

“Check out the hook while my DJ revolves it”

The most consistent critique I’ve heard about the song over the years is that the whole thing is a ripoff of David Bowie/Queen’s masterpiece “Under Pressure.” In his appearance on “Behind the Music” in 1999 Mr. Ice probably didn’t help his case.

But as rap music nears its fourth decade, sampling a tune and rapping or singing over it is now a fully respectable, Rock-‘N’-Roll-Hall-of-Fame-worthy artform. It’s been done not only by the likes of Vanilla Ice and M.C. Hammer, but by all the stalwarts of the genre, like Puff Daddy, Dr. Dre, Eminem, etc., etc., etc. Vanilla Ice’s tourmates certainly made use of the practice: Tone Lōc sampled Van Halen’s “Jamie’s Cryin’ ” on “Wild Thing;” Coolio sampled Stevie Wonder’s “Pastime Paradise” on “Gangsta’s Paradise;” and Biz Markie sampled Freddie Scott’s “You Got What I Need” on “Just A Friend.” This week Entertainment Weekly gave an A+ to Beyoncé for her new album “Lemonade” and highlighted the diverse set of artists from whom she sampled.  

At this point, to criticize a rapper for sampling is like saying the Monkees weren’t a real band because they used session players on their albums, when numerous other ’60s groups - from the Beach Boys to the Byrds - did too.

“Play That Funky Music White Boy”  

Now it’s time to address the real elephant on the dance floor. Vanilla Ice is white. Given the long, ugly and never-ending history of racism in America, we’re all pretty used to racial debates when it comes to music. I’ve heard them all, white people stole rock ‘n’ roll, jazz, etc’. So Vanilla Ice often gets put into the category of cheap racial imitator.  On “In Living Color,” Jim Carrey even said as much in his classic parody, “White White Baby.”

I’m white/And I’m Capitalizing/On a trend that’s currently rising

The truth is that the histories of of these genres are a little more complex.  Yes, Elvis Presley first got famous mainly off the backs of black artists whom he covered. There were plenty of other white artists who rose to prominence by ripping off black ones and playing toned down versions of their music (Ahem, Pat Boone). But that really is just an oversimplification, as rock ‘n’ roll was really created as a fusion of country western, R&B, jazz and jump blues, and grew out of the contributions from great artists on all sides of the color line.     

So while “Ice Ice Baby” may have been the first rap single to top the Billboard charts, his success was an anomaly. Unlike rock ‘n’ roll, there have only been a handful of well-regarded white rappers like the Beastie Boys, Eminem, and Macklemore.  

Vanilla Ice wasn’t the same as Elvis. He didn’t have a 20+ year run of hits and b-movies. Very few people would consider him the king of anything. If rap had fizzled out in 1991, then maybe the argument would have some weight. But at this point no one could say Vanilla Ice somehow supplanted anybody else or was a white guy capitalizing on a short term trend. He was simply a performer who hit it big at the right time playing a style of music that was popular.  He even helped broaden rap’s exposure, paving the way for artists who came after him to claim they were the ones keeping real.  

“Keep My Composure”

Perhaps the biggest detriment to “Ice Ice Baby” and Vanilla Ice’s reputation is the fact that he was so overexposed during his initial run. He was on T.V., videos and movies. He was parodied, and there were a number of fake biographies about his upbringing. He dated Madonna. He wore crazy outfits.  He had a hairstyle that would make Bobby Hurley’s barber shudder. He even appeared in his own bad movie, “Cool as Ice,” which currently gets an 8 percent rating on Rotten Tomatoes. (Though I’ve never seen the film, I have to say the trailer is phenomenal and even stars the Dad from “Family Ties.”)

He was everywhere, so much so that the backlash came quick. His live album was panned, and his next album tanked.      

In some ways that is one of the great things about listening to music on a computer (and there aren’t a lot of great things; I miss my CD and record collections.) You can just listen to the song based on its own merits, without having to buy the album, without having to listen to any of the other tracks. It can be judged on its own.     

By itself, the song is catchy, funny and the lyrics are hilarious. It is a celebration of the joys of youth, cruising the strip, listening to great music, while at the same time he has a little fun with the rhymes.

Quick to the point, to the point, no faking/Cooking MCs like a pound of bacon

“Ice Ice Baby” wasn’t high art, nor was it trying to be. So as the song reaches the good-times-and-great-oldies stage of its lifespan, it’s worth giving it a relisten, not for what it was, or what it was perceived to be, but for what it is, a great party song.

It’s the type of thing anybody, whether they’re cruising the strip in South Beach or driving through the Perth suburbs, can dig.

“Word To Your Mother.”