TL-DR Dept. - Return Ticket To Terrapin Station

Cute, huh? Artwork by False Memory Foam© Department Of Art Dept.

Relax. This isn't an Albums What Never Was, although it started out that way. Terrapin Station was a more than usually problematic Dead studio album. Problematic for DeadHeads™, mainly. The rest of us don't have enough skin in the game to make a hangnail. The band didn't like it much either, and it offended lyricist Robert Hunter so much he did a massive showbiz doorslam flounce. Here's a list of the crimes the album committed:

1 Used LA producer, recorded in LA, FFS

2 Overdubbed strings, horns, choir, arranged by snaggle-toothed, whey-faced Brits in London, FFS

3 Included a schmaltzy Girl's Song, by a Girl, FFS

4 Attempted disco, FFS

It never stood a chance, right? Except that it sold pretty well, their first studio album to go gold since American Beauty. And it introduced the band to an audience who weren't DeadHeads™ but liked Abbey Road and Atom Heart Mother, both featuring a long suite on one side and a bunch of songs on the other. The format was familiar, and attractive to yer average rock fan.

It's a clumsy parade float of an album that paradoxically contains some of the loveliest music the Dead ever recorded. Of the song side only Estimated Prophet and Passenger make the grade, with deceptively complex structures, dynamic performance, and glossy studio muscle. The tepid disco-lite cover of Dancin' In The Streets and grunty fake gospel Samson And Delilah weren't high on anybody's Christmas list, but they saved the worst for last - Donna's Sunrise was the musical equivalent of a weekend at Gwyneth Paltrow's wellness spa. Seemingly flown in from another album entirely, it gave me the horse staggers.

That wasn't all - the last third of the Terrapin suite drifted off down a side track, squandering the mood so beautifully built with a long, boring, repetitive, boring, repetitive, long orchestral fade where the piece cried out for a magnificent terminus, FFS! A resolution also missing in Hunter's own Part Two, which you can struggle through on his solo album, if you hate yourself enough. It's unsurprising the Dead didn't devote an entire album to it, duh. Maybe - just maybe - this had a teentsy-weentsy influence on Hunter's decision to take his quill and parchment elsewhere, in addition to his moral high ground on the production values. A shame, as his lyrics for Terrapin are astonishing:

Inspiration move me brightly
Light the song with sense and color
Hold away despair
More than this I will not ask
Faced with mysteries dark and vast
Statements just seem vain at last
Some rise, some fall, some climb
To get to Terrapin
Counting stars by candlelight
All are dim but one is bright:
The spiral light of Venus
Rising first and shining best
From the northwest corner
Of a brand-new crescent moon
Crickets and cicadas sing
A rare and different tune

The lyrics are matched by Garcia's beautiful composition and playing in sublime synergy. Music doesn't get more musicy than this. It's an album I wanted to play more, but found myself just listening to the suite, and then wandering off before it finished, much like it did itself.

And then, for the first time in decades, I listened to Sunrise, on its own, out of context, and two thoughts occurred to me simultaneantly, rewiring my cerebral cortex and opening a Mystic Door within me. Those thoughts, Dear Reader? 1: It's actually a gorgeous song, beautifully sung, FFS. And B: it sounds like the Terrapin suite. Hmm ... textures, mood, orchestral arrangement, even lyrics - firelight, storytelling ...  wo-ah! Wait a goddamn minute here!

In the fever of divine inspiration, I labored long into the night in the False Memory Foam Island© Laboratory O' Sound® [left - Ed.], ignoring Kreemé's tearful supplications to let her make me happier than any man alive.

The result is now yours to enjoy. Not only has Sunrise been seamlessly woven into the fabric at exactly the right moment, acres of orchestral repetition have been carpet-bombed, and there's a subtle yet richly satisfying coda. Gasp at the audacity of the concept! Applaud the consummate artistry of its execution! Wonder how you ever lived without it!

What you do with that "problematic" first side is up to you - my work is done.

This old-school FMF Legacy© post funded in part by The Steve Hoffman Mullet Museum, Pork Bend OH