TL-DR Dept. - Pariah (Redux)

Older readers - excuse me while I savor the irony of that - may remember - who am I kidding? - have entirely forgotten - a piece what I wrote on Capitol's "Spite" Dylan album, wherein I made the bold claim that it's a perfectly swell little album that doesn't deserve to get the shit kicked out of it by sourhead Dylanophiles. Or anyone else. Leave it aloooone!

Talking of sourheads, The Grateful Dead have their share. They call themselves Deadheads, and what they know is more than we know, and gospel. Those Deadhead 101 CliffsNotes© in full:

1 "You had to be there." The Dead were only good live, especially at the gigs the Deadhead was at, wearing his vintage Dead tee, scribbling down the setlist, irritably protecting his mic tree and monitoring cassette capacity while everyone else was having a good time.

2 The Dead's studio albums mostly fail to capture the magic; they were recorded for people who couldn't get to the gigs, to fund the tours they couldn't get to, which were what the Dead were all about (see 1).

3 The Dead's live albums are mostly compromised. Preference is given to multi-disc box sets of entire concert runs you can stack on your shelf - unopened, please - to impress the Deadhead Inspector, should he drop by unexpectedly. Of all the live albums, the worst is Steal Your Face (wittily monickered Steal Your Money by Deadheads) because the Deadhead is on first-name terms with the band and privy to the behind-the-scenes back story, which you ain't.

Sourhead, elitist bullshit, all of it. But we're here to talk about Steal Your Face, which is not only a swell and easily-digestible double album but also - if you've been totally put off the band by Deadheads - a fine gateway drug to their œuvre [Fr. egg - Ed.]. To showcase a different aspect of the band than previous live albums, short songs were chosen, running from three to eight minutes. None of the lengthy jams for which the band were famous. "Indescribably poor song selection and complete lack of cohesion" froths our Allmusic nitwit, toeing the Deadhead line. Luckily, it's a line we don't have to toe. We're not sharing a camper van (or more likely a sinister man-cave) with a Deadhead and don't have to put up with this shit. We can enjoy a fine set of great songs well-played, which is what Steal Your Face is.

Today's offering is the remastered version from 2017's Grateful Dead Records Collection, which even Deadheads grumpily concede is preferable to previous digital iterations. I also have a rip of the original vinyl, if you're the kind of person who's interested in that kind of thing. I know I am.

Note: If you skipped to the end of this piece, go back and read the whole thing, dammit. You have nothing better to do right now. Admit it and be happy.