What were they doing? And why did they bother? We’ll never know. Same with the opening cover of Good Lovin’ a classic redundant rock’n’roll cover one of the Dead’s great staples. Here he sounds appalling on All New Minglewood Blues – but intriguingly so. And has been very good in recent years, growing into the old man role now. Both the title track and Stagger Lee are mild Hunter/Garcia gems.īob Weir was sometimes great. I’m almost in love with how shit they often were. Look, there’s some garbage on there sure. It’s been with me – here and there – ever since. So I popped it on the stereo and played it through twice. It was the only one in that person’s collection that I didn’t already know. There I was one day in Stinson Beach in a hot tub, reading Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s A Coney Island Of The Mind – very much on fucking holiday! – and I spied Shakedown in the CD rack. I guess it was a bit like being in a student flat in NZ in the 90s and finding a Mutton Birds or Exponents or Dobbyn disc eh? Simply unavoidable. What I did encounter was that in every house we visited (4 or 5) there was a rather large selection of Grateful Dead CDs. Rumour was we were staying very near Phil Lesh’s house – and that maybe Mickey Hart was astral-projecting somewhere in or near the vicinity. Every single place I went to reminded me of a film adaptation of a Stephen King novel I’d seen (after reading) some 25 years earlier.Īnd we spent some time in Stinson Beach up north of San Francisco. And though I was in blue states and even in a sort of quasi gated community with rich hippies (perfect modern-day Dead fans) it was still a case of my eyes being on stalks. In 2012 I was in America for the first time. So I’m getting keyed into the albums I’d missed on my first pass through the band’s catalogue…īut Shakedown Street arrived even later for me. (The documentary of the same name/same subjectis also really great). But what a book! One of the all-time great music books. I read that when I was working in a music store so I started importing in more albums by the Dead than I’d ever need. My absolute favourite thing about The Grateful Dead – to this day – is the book A Long Strange Trip. It’s just a weird, fascinating time for the band. But maybe the place I like to rest best is here in the mid/late 70s when there was this new version of the band (with Donna Jean and Keith Godchaux – and not because of them by the way). And then I went down to the other end, the mid-60s starting point. The late-80s/early-90s Touch of Grey-era with the big shows and guest spots by the likes of Branford Marsalis…that was a good time as far as I was concerned. I couldn’t have been more wrong – and yet it was still such a surprise when as an earnest young teen I dived right in at the wrong end of The Dead’s career and started listening to the geriatric final steps from this hippie jam-band. I mean the iconography, the name…the knowledge I had in a post-peak, pre-internet world, as a kid just interested in music, was that that the Dead was (probably) a hardcore metal band. My own path to The Grateful Dead is kinda curious – that’s it basically, I was curious. It didn’t stop these stoned buffoons from trying…
But if anything it’s the studio albums that showcase the “shit” – it’s where polish was applied. Though I can’t say I’ve heard every Grateful Dead album, I haven’t even heard every studio album – much less the loads of boxed-set reissues and bootlegged live recordings. Maybe every single album by The Grateful Deadcould be on this list – they really did make some fucking stinkers eh? But I kinda love most of the ones that people say are shit. The Grateful Dead, Shakedown Street, 1978
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