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.
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