Grateful Dead (Skull & Roses) (Remastered/Expanded) [Original recording reissued, Original recording remastered, Extra tracks]

At a mere 40, I was just a pup when I first saw the Grateful Dead in 1979 -- merely 8 years after this seminal recording. And it astounds me how little down-to-earth information about the band and its vibe has trickled down through the years. So let's shoot for some accurate accounting here in context with the time itself and, hopefully, a bit of the feeling of the band in its place. First of all, the Dead was at the high point of its American Music phase in which its members were reaching deep into the country, folk and bluegrass sources that influenced them.

They were touring in support of their breakthrough albums Workingman's Dead and American Beauty, which brought the band its first taste of Big Time success. Song selection is the clue here. Merle Haggard's "Mama Tried," John "Mama's & the Papa's" Phillips's "Me and My Uncle," and Kris Kristofferson's "Me and Bobby McGee" (Janis Joplin's radio hit was also a cover; Hee Haw's Roy Clark recorded it in 1969 by the way) were all country chart toppers within the past five years or so from the original 2-LP release of this album (which Deadheads used to call Skullf**k back in the day). Unlike cover songs like Chuck Berry's "Johnny B. Goode" and Buddy Holly's "Not Fade Away" and the extra-special bonus track "Oh Boy" plus the old-time standards "Goin Down The Road", which was a Woody Guthrie favorite and a staple of the Harry Smith Anthology of American Folk Music (a collection that served as the Rosetta Stone of American Roots music for Bob Dylan and many others), and the blues standard "Big Boss Man", the band members chose *contemporary* tunes from Nashville's hitmakers in homage to the musicians they admired most. This album is, in its own way, the Dead's "Will the Circle Be Unbroken."

Ironically, as a bunch of motley hippies making anti-establishment, anti-war, counter-cultural revolutionary mind-warping rock and roll, the GD were REVILED by the very country artists they were covering so lovingly at the time.

The peaks of what this band was doing in early 1971, contained hereon, are some classic rock and roll. Check out "Bertha", whose kinetic energy reminds me so much of the early R.E.M. who would become a college-rock sensation with this same approach to music about 12 years later. Check out the passionate "Big Railroad Blues" where the song is punctuated with the usual guitar brilliance from Garcia. Check out the catchy renditions of various other artist's songs. Most of this album rocks and swings with a lot of soul (save "The Other One", which doesn't justify inclusion in my opinion).

I remember listening to this the first time and being blown away by the entire side of an album beging taken up by The Other One. Some of the other tunes also caught my ear, and it must have caught others' ears as well, as this was the Dead's first "Gold" album. Over the years, though, the emergence of the Dick's Picks series, and the fine, fine job done on the remastering of Live/Dead and Europe '72 just tend to overshadow this CD and reveal its weaknesses. It's not a BAD two-LPs on one CD set, and the remastered version sounds good, it's just that just doesn't hold up to other material released around the same time. Dead completists are, of course, going to want this. But IMHO there are better quality live Dead releases out there, and I'd recommend this only after the other CDs have been purchased. It's funny, but that 18-minute or so The Other One that was so great 30-odd years ago now seems so incomplete, because I know it went from The Other One into something else, instead of just fading off at the end. This CD would have been fun if it had been expanded to 2 CDs and The Other One jam and the songs leading into and out of it had been included. This, along with Bear's Choice, was a hodgepodge thrown together by the band (see Steal Your Face for more on that!) to fulfill their Warner Bros. contract and go their own way. Not a horrible CD, but compared to what else is available, skip it for now...