Tag: The Grateful Dead

As far as “perplexing things found on Tumblr” goes, this is… yeah, pretty goddamn perplexing. “Deadheads for Satan”? I know “Friend of the Devil” is a song of theirs, but even so… Long before I ever heard them as such, I read the Grateful Dead’s name in a magazine, and I always thought they should’ve been a heavy metal band rather than… well, whatever they were, but this just confuses me. Also, was whoever made this thing not a fan of the Godchaux’s or Tom Constanten? Feels weirdly pointed leaving them off…

Anthem of the Sun, then. I’ve owned this fucking album for 30 years and I’ve only just realised it’s actually Pigpen who sings “Alligator”. I should probably be ashamed of that. I’ve also been terribly confused about it for much of that time, cos I was under the impression that the CD I bought way back in early 1993 was the remixed one… in the early 70s both Anthem and Aoxomoxoa were remixed for reissue, and I’ve spent years thinking the older CD releases of both of these were those versions. Then on a music forum I used to be a member of, someone was offering a vinyl rip of original 1968/69 pressings of both, which I obtained, was duly impressed by the differences… then I recently discovered the original mix had been the one on my early 90s purchase all this time and this purported original pressing was actually the 1971 remix after all. Years of misapprehension for some reason…

Anyway, NEVER MIND THAT, but tonight I opted to give both versions a back to back listen on headphones… I remember reading somewhere the Anthem remix was undertaken to make it sound more commercial or something, as if this could made to sound like anything of the sort. Anthem was an infamous experiment in combining live and studio recordings and it really is the sound of a band that didn’t really know what they were doing and going a bit mad in the process… producer David Hassinger quit the project allegedly when Bob Weir asked him to produce the sound of “thick air”, and one Warners executive apparently called it “the most unreasonable project” the company had ever been mixed up in. And “unreasonable” is possibly the best description of the whole thing, 55 years after the fact there’s still something preposterous about it… the remix certainly has a different character to the original, maybe a bit less muddy but also the editing seems kind of cruder and blunter, and I think I like the 1968 mix better. Either way, fucking great.