166. The Grateful Dead - Live/Dead

Artist: The Grateful Dead
Album: Live/Dead
Year: 1969

The Grateful Dead is a band I've had some exposure to growing up. For starters, my father was at least a casual fan of the band; I can recall hearing Workingman's Dead on his stereo countless times. Then, in the 80's they had a little bit of a resurgence, and I remember hearing "A Touch of Grey" all over the airwaves circa 1987. An elementary school classic for me. And then in the 90's, of course frontman Jerry Garcia died, the band broke up, and then all of a sudden EVERYONE was a Deadhead...those tie-dye shirts were ubiquitous there for awhile...and bands like Phish and Moe (and to a lesser extent, Dave Matthews) came around and started to carry on the jam band legacy that the Dead left behind.

Now here's a little disclaimer for my write-up here: I do not smoke marijuana nor take hallucinogenic drugs. If I did, I'm sure my feelings on this album, 1969's Live/Dead would be different. But I don't.

And therefore, I find this album to be wildly boring and tedious. I really just gotta say, I don't get it. I do not understand the hype here. The music is entirely made up of extended jams that meander and go nowhere. Thing is, sometimes I don't even mind music that "goes nowhere" if I'm drawn in by the atmosphere. A lot of jazz can be that way, kind of elliptical in the sense that the end feels like the beginning. Thelonious Monk's "Brilliant Corners" comes to mind: a song that more or less starts and ends with the same riff, but the process in getting from beginning to end is wildly inventive and oddly catchy.

The Grateful Dead, on this live album, just are not interesting to me. There's not a single "song" here where I said to myself, "man, I'd like to hear that again." The opening 24-minute(!) "Dark Star" is a butt-numbing, entirely hook-less endurance test, and the other songs follow suit. Oh, and then there's the song ("Feedback") that's literally just 8 minutes of guitar feedback. Is it bad that I thought that was probably the most interesting song here? Ugh.

Rating: Avoid (if not on drugs)