039: The Grateful Dead - American Beauty (1970)
“Inspiration, move me brightly/Light the song with sense and color/Hold away despair”
—Robert Hunter, “Terrapin Station”
The Grateful Dead are such a ubiquitous cultural institution that many people don’t engage with their music - it’s frequently written off as slow, lazy music for stoners. Well, Phil isn’t a stoner at all, and he’s here to tell you all about why the Grateful Dead are great. While the group is perhaps best known for their marathon live sets and endless catalog of concert recordings, Phil decided to focus on 1970’s American Beauty - the album generally considered to be the band’s best studio LP. Short on jams and long on great songs and fantastic harmony vocals, American Beauty is a folk-and-country tinged masterpiece and is a wonderful entry point for beginning your voyage into the world of the Grateful Dead.
Miscellany
The word “Beauty” on the cover of this album is written in a font that can be read ambiguously - depending on how you look at it, the title can also be read as “American Reality”.
You can hear the complete live version of “Box Of Rain” that served as the final encore of the final Dead show we mentioned at the Internet Archive here. WARNING: While historically significant, it’s a pretty bad show, so don’t start your live Dead journey here.
The final scene of Freaks and Geeks, where Lindsay sneaks off to follow the Grateful Dead on tour that makes heavy use of “Ripple,” is available on YouTube here.
At the end of the episode, Phil promised a brief rundown of getting into live Dead recordings, since they have so many that it’s nearly impossible to know where to start. Here are his recommendations for getting started started, presented chronologically by recording date (with Amazon affiliate links):
Live/Dead - The original classic 1969 live album, filled to the brim with A+ jams. Your best bet for getting into the early, psychedelic Dead.
Dick’s Picks Volume 4 - Highlights from a pair of shows from February 1970, this is a good blend of their earlier psychedelic sound with some of the more country and folk based music that would soon make up Workingman’s Dead. Plus - excellent thirty-minute versions of “Dark Star,” “That’s It For The Other One,” and “Turn On Your Lovelight.”
Europe ‘72 - A triple live recording made soon after American Beauty, this contains tons of wonderful new songs and fantastic renditions of earlier songs. If you don’t like this one, there’s a good chance that the Dead just aren’t for you.
The Grateful Dead Movie Soundtrack - A five-disc set of tracks from their final set of shows in 1974 before the band took a two-year long live performance hiatus. Gives you a really good picture of what the band sounded like at the time - jazzy and spacey, with lots of extended improvs, but grounded in country and folk.
Cornell 5/8/77 - This show is legendary amongst Deadheads (many consider it their all-time best show) and while it’s not that good, it’s very good. The band is really tight here - far tighter than they were pre-hiatus - so it’s a great way to hear the band in their element without them going too far out into extended jamming. It’s probably the best starter for getting into post-74 Dead.
If you like these shows - feel free to dig around more in the eras in which they were recorded. While they were never quite as good post-77 as they were before it (in this writer’s opinion, obviously), there’s still plenty of good stuff to be found and there’s plenty of resources on the internet that will help you explore further. Happy hunting!
Other links
Discord & Rhyme Roll Call
Phil Maddox (host)
Ben Marlin (moderator)
Mike DeFabio
Dan Watkins
American Beauty tracklist
Box of Rain
Friend of the Devil
Sugar Magnolia
Operator
Candyman
Ripple
Brokedown Palace
Till the Morning Comes
Attics of My Life
Truckin’
Other clips used
The Grateful Dead:
Jack Straw (Europe ‘72 version)
Dark Star (Live/Dead version)
Casey Jones
The Golden Road (To Unlimited Devotion)
St. Stephen
Uncle John's Band
Sugar Magnolia (Europe ‘72 version)
Truckin’->Epilogue (Europe ‘72 version)
Touch of Gray
China Cat Sunflower->I Know You Rider (Europe ‘72 version)
Others:
Genesis - Ripples
Jerry Garcia - Bird Song
Songs we mentioned but didn’t clip
The Grateful Dead:
What’s Become of the Baby
China Cat Sunflower (studio version)
(That’s It For) The Other One
Easy Wind
Others:
Pink Floyd - Echoes
Jimmy Buffett - Margaritaville
Jimmy Buffett - Fruitcakes
The Beatles - Revolution 9
Robert Johnson - Hellhound on My Trail
Crosby, Stills, Nash, & Young - Teach Your Children
Jim Croce - Operator
Midnight Star - Operator
Sammy Davis, Jr. - The Candy Man
Spacehog - Candy Man
Ricky Nelson - Lonesome Town
Talking Heads - Once in a Lifetime
John D. Loudermilk - Tobacco Road
Neil Young - Till the Morning Comes
Hall and Oates - When the Morning Comes
The Monkees - (Theme from) The Monkees
Band/album personnel
Jerry Garcia – guitar, pedal steel, piano, vocals
Mickey Hart – percussion
Robert Hunter – lyrics
Bill Kreutzmann – drums
Phil Lesh – bass guitar, guitar, piano, vocals
Pigpen (Ron McKernan) – harmonica, vocals, lyrics on "Operator"
Bob Weir – guitar, vocals
David Grisman – mandolin on "Friend of the Devil", "Ripple"
David Nelson – electric guitar on "Box of Rain"
Ned Lagin – piano on "Candyman"
Dave Torbert – bass guitar on "Box of Rain"
Howard Wales – organ on "Candyman", "Truckin'"; piano on "Brokedown Palace"
Stephen Barncard – co-producer, audio
Dave Collins – pre-mastering assistance
Credits
“Discord & Rhyme (theme),” composed by the Other Leading Brand, contains elements of:
Duran Duran - Hungry Like the Wolf
Amon Düül II - Dehypnotized Toothpaste
The Dukes of Stratosphear - What in the World?? ...
Faith No More - Midlife Crisis
Herbie Hancock - Hornets
Kraftwerk - Autobahn
Talking Heads - Seen and Not Seen
The Grateful Dead - Box of Rain (this episode only)
You can buy or stream American Beauty and other albums by the Grateful Dead at Spotify, Apple Music, YouTube, Amazon [affiliate link], and any number of other retailers. Follow Discord & Rhyme on Twitter @DiscordPod for news, updates, and other music stuff that strikes our fancy, often/usually related to the Moody Blues. Editing is by Rich Bunnell, and special thanks to Mike DeFabio for production and original music. See you next album, and be ever wonderful.