The Grateful Dead (album)

History

The album was primarily recorded at RCA's Studio A, in Los Angeles, in only four days. The band had wanted to record the tracks in their hometown of San Francisco, but no recording studios in the area had modernized equipment at the time. The group picked David Hassinger to produce because he had worked as an engineer on the Rolling Stones' "(I Can't Get No) Satisfaction" and Jefferson Airplane's Surrealistic Pillow album (the latter on which Jerry Garcia had guested and suggested the album title). Due to demands by the band's label, Warner Brothers, four of the tracks were edited for length. Phil Lesh comments in his autobiography, "to my ear, the only track that sounds at all like we did at the time is Viola Lee Blues. ...None of us had any experience with performing for recording...the whole process felt a bit rushed." Bill Kreutzmann, in his autobiography, says of the songs, "their recorded versions failed to capture the energy that we had when we performed them live. ...We weren’t that good yet. We were still learning how to be a band."

Though the album was considered "a big deal in San Francisco", it did not see much airplay on AM radio stations outside of the Bay Area. The freeform FM radio format that favored bands like the Dead was still developing. Warner Bros. held an album release party at the Fugazi Hall in North Beach. The label's A & R manager, Joe Smith, is noted for saying he "[is] proud that Warner Bros. is introducing the Grateful Dead to the world."

The band used the collective pseudonym "McGannahan Skjellyfetti" for their group-written originals and arrangements. The name was a misrendering of "Skujellifeddy", a character in Kenneth Patchen's comic novel The Memoirs of a Shy Pornographer, plus the name of then-frontman Pigpen's cat. In an era where true authorship (or public domain status) was more difficult to ascertain, "Cold Rain and Snow" and "New, New Minglewood Blues" were originally credited as band compositions, though they were adaptations of existing songs.

A remastered version with the full versions of five album tracks, plus six bonus tracks, was released by Rhino as part of the box set The Golden Road (1965–1973) in 2001, and as a separate album in 2003. Album outtake "Alice D. Millionaire" was inspired by an Autumn, 1966 newspaper headline "LSD Millionaire", about the Dead's sound engineer and benefactor Owsley Stanley.

The album was reissued for Record Store Day 2011 on 180g vinyl cut from the original analog/mono masters from 1967 - the first time in over 40 years it had been released in this form. The 2013 high definition digital, remastered release features the edited versions, as originally released, of the four tracks which were extended for the 2003 Rhino release. In 2017 this edition was given a new version for the album's 50th anniversary, including a second CD featuring live material from a pair of July 1966 concerts in Canada. The second CD will be released on vinyl as a stand-alone double LP on Record Store Day 2017.

Album cover

On the originally prepared artwork, the writing for the top of the album cover read "In the land of the dark, the ship of the sun is drawn by the Grateful Dead", a passage taken from the Egyptian Book of the Dead. As the book had become more widely read, some had mistakenly assumed that the band had taken their name from the quote: "We now return our souls to the creator, as we stand on the edge of eternal darkness. Let our chant fill the void in order that others may know. In the land of the night, the ship of the sun is drawn by the grateful dead." They hadn't, and because Garcia worried that it seemed "pretentious", and the band were uneasy about being seen as beholden to any specific philosophy or doctrine, they asked the artist, Stanley Mouse, to stylize the script so that all but the band name were illegible.

Track listing

1. "The Golden Road (To Unlimited Devotion)" (Garcia, Kreutzmann, Lesh, McKernan, Weir) – 2:09
2. "Beat It on Down the Line" (Fuller) – 2:29
3. "Good Morning Little School Girl" (Williamson) – 6:32 full-length version
4. "Cold Rain and Snow" (Obray Ramsey) – 2:26
5. "Sitting on Top of the World" (Chatmon, Vinson) – 2:43 full-length version
6. "Cream Puff War" (Garcia) – 3:18 full-length version
7. "Morning Dew" (Dobson, Rose) – 5:16
8. "New, New Minglewood Blues" (Lewis) – 2:40 full-length version
9. "Viola Lee Blues" (Lewis) – 10:09

10. "Alice D. Millionaire" (Grateful Dead) – 2:22
11. "Overseas Stomp (the Lindy)" (Jab Jones and Will Shade) – 2:24
12. "Tastebud" (Ron McKernan) – 4:18
13. "Death Don't Have No Mercy" (Reverend Gary Davis) – 5:20
14. "Viola Lee Blues" (Lewis) – 3:00 edited version
15. "Viola Lee Blues" (Lewis) [live]  – 23:13

Personnel

Charts

Billboard chart