TL-DR Dept. - "Why Dead Heads Are Full Of Shit"

Dead Heads™, yestiddy

Today, Dead Heads™ fall into three basic species, as shown above [above - Ed.]. From left, the Old Hippie, Mr. Hip Businessman, and Tucker Carlson. The Old Hippie lives in a Malibu beach house which boasts a climate-controlled Dead Vault containing digitised copies of every known live recording. Mr. Hip Businessman lives in an Alpine chalet designed by Le Corbusier and keeps his extensive collection of Dead memorabilia in a Swiss bank. Tucker Carlson? Yup. He's a Dead Head™, can list his top five live versions of Althea. The Dead's broad church includes an army of shitferbrains gun-humping nutbars. Good people on both sides, right? Uh ...

They all share a belief in the core Dead Head scriptures, and the First Commandment is, Thou Hast To Have Been There. That many of them weren't, or were barely on the periphery, doesn't matter. The second, and the one that concerns us today, is Yea, The Studio Albums Kinda Suck. They're for us Walmart shoppers out here. Why? Because they don't capture their live magic, and hey! - the band hated being in the studio! And yadda yadda. It's achieved critical opinion mass - the studio albums (except for the two obvious exceptions that even twenty-somethings might have heard of) are regularly dismissed by *cough* "rock critics" and there's always some internet pencil-neck regurgitating the same old crap, etching it deeper into the public psyche as a "rock fact". They can't mention a studio album with shoe-horning in the old trope [you said trope huhuhrr - Ed.] about it not being as good as the live experience. These people are full of shit, and I'm here to tell you why.

Of course the Dead were a live band first - they lived for the stage, not the studio. That doesn't mean the albums are garbage, or even sub par. They didn't approach recording cynically or lazily, they gave it their considerable best. The studio was where they had to stop fucking about, and for a band whose holy mission was to fuck about, it was a stretch. But it was where they created their core repertoire, flexed their experimental muscle, and did their best singing - although they're never going to be thought of as a vocals band, they could sing a whole lot better than the impression given by their live performances. Nope, endless takes and retakes in a windowless room with just mics and chairs and headachy lighting was as close to back-breaking labor as these guys got, but when they finished their assignment they got to go outside and play, like good boys. And the albums reached a global audience that spread even further than their tour itineraries. The majority of Grateful Dead fans - us Walmart shoppers - never saw them in concert, and became fans through the studio recordings. To dismiss them en masse [Fr. - en bloc - Ed.] because it's not the live experience is just dumb. And lazy. And dumb. But mostly dumb.

Swell album. Bite me.

The studio albums are disconcertingly varied, reflecting the wide individual skills and tastes of the band. From the avant garde (avant everyone) cut-ups of Aoxomoxoa through the radio-friendly Go To Heaven, they're all way better than the Dead Heads™want you to know, because they believe they own the idea of the Grateful Dead. They're theirs, unnerstan'? And the fact that the Dead mostly are dead these days and therefore unavailable for concert performance doesn't seem to register. The Dead's live recordings can be fantastic, but let's face it, Dead Heads™, you're just squaring those Dave's Picks up on your custom-built Deadshelf, occasionally sampling a disc through iPods with a bag of Werthers on the couch and trying to get the rug in focus. That ain't exactly the live experience, pally - it's a near death experience. Nobody sane has the time or willpower to sit through even one multi-disc box set, leave alone dozens. The container ship volume of live recordings is too daunting for just plain folks to approach, and every year we get another essential set from the golden year of whenever to file alongside all the others. Enough awready! This is not healthy!

Not seen in studio

No one studio album defines Grateful Deadness in the public mind, acts as their Dark Side Of The Moon, or Kind Of Blue. American Beauty probably gets close, but it's a unique snapshot of them at that time, like all the others, and as soon as you say American Beauty somebody leaps down your throat with Workingman's Dead. There's no consensus as to their "best" album. There's always a shift, sometimes sideways, sometimes back, from one album to the next. A blurred zig and zag rather than a consumer-friendly straight line. So the overall narrative of the studio albums is hard to follow, because it ain't there - the chronology is irrelevant. Look at it this way - none of their albums is transitional, you can start anywhere. They never made a classic iconic rock album in the sense that, say, Led Zeppelin or The Eagles did because they were never really a "rock band" at all, in spite of appearances. A good friend of mine (hi, Stuart!) could never get over his disappointment with the music after the hard rock promise of those great psychedelic covers. He's not alone in expecting something the Dead never delivered, and unless you can take them (and the albums) on their own terms rather than yours, you'll be scratching your noggin at all those bozos on the bus letting the air out of their shoes. That's groovy, too. It's your trip, man.

Given that there is no majority-voted and definitively representative studio album, any interested music fan (as opposed to Dead Head™) has to discover their own gateway disc that will suddenly click for them. From The Mars Hotel has always been Top Five Dead for me. From the gorgeous two-for-the-price-of-one cover [above - Ed.] to the filler-free thirty-eight minutes or so of swell tunes, it delivers on every level. What other band could have made this album? None. None other band. It not only sounds like none other band, it doesn't sound much like any other Grateful Dead album. Like all the others don't. Let's take a detailed look at each track to see how the whole thing comes together! [let's not - Ed.]

Note how Ugly Rumors appear mirrored and upside down in the great tradition of oh wow man, and is a play on the "ugly roomers" at the Mars Hotel depicted on the back cover. It's this kind of attention to detail that [remaining text lost in freak internet storm - Ed.]

ADDEADUM

A small discussion in the comments about the cover to Go To Heaven cover prompted me to get my crayons out and come up with an alternative:

This post homologated by AAAAAAAAAA(AAAAAA) - Affiliated American Amalgamated Accurate Album Awareness, Assessment And Appreciation Association (Anaheim And Azusa, And Also Albuquerque)