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.
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