The band was writing vibrant new songs and the musicianship was at a real high. By the time Europe ’72 came out, just a couple years later, it seemed the band was in its healthiest state to date (not counting the ailing multi-instrumentalist Ron “Pigpen” McKernan, for whom the tour in Europe would be his last). I smoked my first joints over Workingman’s Dead and American Beauty, listening across many lazy afternoons in M’s backyard, leafy green, with the speakers propped up against the window screens, blasting out the tunes. My entry to the Dead coincided with many other significant events in my young teenage life - initial exposures to sex, drugs, cars, girls, music - all had, at least in part, the Grateful Dead as a soundtrack. By this point they had hit a stable stride, and many of their most enduring concert gems, as evidenced on Grateful Dead (aka Skull and Roses) )“Bertha,” “The Other One,” “Playing in the Band,” “Not Fade Away”/”Going Down the Road Feeling Bad”) and Europe ’72 (“He’s Gone,” “Jack Straw,” “One More Saturday Night,” “China Cat Sunflower”/”I Know You Rider”), came out of this period.
But the early ’70s saw the Dead consolidate what they had learned, combining their early experiences as the house band for Ken Kesey’s Acid Test freak-outs with the folk and bluegrass elements that came to the fore a few years later. I dig the early amphetamine-fueled psych-outs of the Dead’s first album, the Stockhausen/Berio collage aesthetic of Anthem of the Sun and the fantastic deep-space and feedback of the incomparable Live Dead album. I do love all the various early modes this band moved through - although I lost the thread, as did, some would argue, the Dead as well, by the mid ’80s - and this is one of my favorite periods. To start with the pertinent facts: the new concert documentary Sunshine Daydream (just out on DVD) is the early-’70s Grateful Dead as I love and remember them, in fine form musically, all three string-players singing in good voice, unhurried, digging deep into their music.
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