What does it sound like?:
Perhaps the most experimental album in the Dead’s catalogue gets a 50th anniversary two disc reissue. Originally issued in 1968, this was the album where Bob Weir wanted to capture the sound of ‘thick air’, and which Jerry Garcia described as being ‘mixed for the hallucinations.’
It’s certainly quite an ear opening selection at times and, although it marks the debut of second drummer Mickey Hart, arguably the most influential person on this set is avant-garde keyboardist Tom Constanten, whose contributions push the music into some very oblique territories. The album mixes multiple live and studio recordings of each piece to produce an amalgam of the two, giving an end result which is neither a live album nor a studio one, as the band experimented to discover how a recording studio worked and what could be achieved within its limits. This musical collage brought forth pieces such as That’s It For The Other One, the frankly odd New Potato Caboose, and Alligator, one of the first co-writes with Robert Hunter.
The first cd also includes the 1971 remix of the album supervised by Phil Lesh, although the differences are subtle to the point of » Continue Reading.
