The Grateful Dead - One From the Vault (1975)

Dan: 

My wife and I used to stop at an outlet mall on our trips to North Carolina, which gave me a chance to browse the CDs at Music for a Song. That's where I picked up The Grateful Dead's 2-CD set, One From the Vault, in the late 1990s. I was still new to the Dead and the price was right. Little did I know the depths to which I would later dive into their massive trove of live recordings. 

One From the Vault is one of the best live recordings of the Dead, and it signaled a change in the band's direction post-Pigpen. Blues rave-ups were replaced by more cerebral jazz-infected jams such as "Eyes of the World," "Franklin's Tower," "The Music Never Stopped," and "Help on the Way/Slipknot." I wouldn't say that they turned toward prog because the band did not follow trends. Instead, they set trends that few bands could emulate. 

However, their approach during the 1975-1978 period was genuinely progressive in the sense that they were moving forward compositionally into more complex material. For instance, the closing number on One from the Vault is the mysterious "Blues for Allah," drawn from the studio album of the same name. It's a spooky 21 minutes that is part social commentary and part pure experiment. The Dead never made anything like it afterwards. 

I ran a half marathon in 1999 and stuck One from the Vault into my fanny pack along with a portable CD player and headphones. It got me through to the finish line! I can't think of a better soundtrack for my only long-run experience. 

Steve:

I took even longer than Dan to get into the Grateful Dead. I always admired their musicianship, but I just couldn't get much of a handle on the songs. Fans always tell you that you've got to listen to them live to understand why they're so good. However, I only started to understand them once I tackled their studio albums - that way, I learned the songs, which gave me the tools to make sense of their live extrapolations. So if you've tried getting into the Dead by listening to 30-minute jams on "Truckin'/The Other One" and just didn't understand what was going on, may I suggest you try my approach instead. 

Once emboldened with a working knowledge of their songbook, particularly the Blues for Allah album (one of their best and most progressive), listening to One From the Vault achieved a whole new level of enjoyability. This concert was a great, albeit unusual choice for the inaugural "From the Vault" release in that it documents a show that I believe had never been circulated to fans prior to its release, and it is also an atypical show. The band had been off the road for quite a while prior to this show, and the Allah material was receiving its public debut. The show was not just a stop on a tour; it was a special event during a non-touring period for the band. This gave the show a "showcase" atmosphere and a sense of occasion. Indeed, the performance of "Blues for Allah" was a pretty unique event in itself. The band only performed this piece five times, all in 1975.

Apart from the Allah material, you get some great performances of recent favorites such as "Eyes of the World" and the Jerry Garcia solo number "Sugaree". The recording sounds great and the formal invitation graphics of the packaging is entirely appropriate given the special occasion documented on this CD. Again, though, I stress that if you're not already familiar with the Dead, this may not be a great place to start. It helps to digest it in context - both the band's situation at the time and its established repertoire, as documented on prior studio work. Contrary to popular belief, they were actually a pretty great studio band too.

The Grateful Dead - Live/Dead (1969)

Dan:

I discovered The Grateful Dead in my older brother's record collection. He had the first album, which I didn't really care for at the time except for the closing "Viola Lee Blues." The Grateful Dead was definitely in tune with the times, being released in 1967 just as a period of social revolution was beginning across the globe. I was busy getting married and going to graduate school, and I paid scant attention to the band's next two albums, which seemed weird to me. Of course, Anthem of the Sun and the palindromic Aoxomoxoa were weird by any standard. 

But I misunderstood that the Dead were always a band to be heard live. I discovered that by hearing the 2-LP Live/Dead, which I picked up after I left home. It was a game-changing, paradigm-shifting recording compiled from a few of the Dead's performances. My favorite tracks remain "Dark Star" and "Saint Stephen /The Eleven." It's an amazing sequence. Who else wrote rock songs in 11/8 time? Does anyone now?

As a jazz fan, I'm sure that the improvised feel of the Dead drew me to them. The term "jam band" was coined later to describe their approach, although jamming is only part of the secret sauce. (Phish is also a jam band, but totally different.) For me, the Dead combine a lot of different elements (guitar prowess, awesome lyrics, song structures, etc.) into a signature style and sound that no band has ever approached. That said, I still don't have room in my listening day for "Turn on Your Lovelight" (sorry, purists). 

Discovering the Dead at the time of their origin gives listeners of a particular generation an advantage that differs from later generations who discovered 1960s bands from reissues and Internet streaming. Boys and girls, it's just not the same. Early encounters with Live/Dead helped to solidify the growing suspicion that the world was indeed changing, not just musically but on so many other cultural levels. I was fortunate not to get swept up in the unhealthy and dangerous distractions of the late 1960s. I reasoned correctly that it was safer to listen at home than tripping acid at live shows. 

Complete and partial Dead shows always circulated on cassette tapes among dedicated "dead heads." In the mid-1990s I rediscovered the band through CD reissues: the abbreviated From-the-Vault series, Dick's Picks, Road Trips, and Dave's Picks. As a result, I now have recordings of 160 performances, including studio albums and dozens of live recordings. (I may be overcompensating for never having seen the band live.) These are limited edition sets that I subscribe to each year out of habit. I spend most of my time listening to jazz, but it's good to have the Dead on hand for moments when nothing else will do. 

Grateful Dead fans are classifiable for the period of the band's history that they dig the most. I am definitely a 1975-1978 fan, which is not to say that I don't like the earlier or later periods. I like them all, but 75-78 was their best period, IMHO. To complete the self-classification, my favorite song is "Eyes of the World," which first appeared on Wake of the Flood (1973). 

Steve:

I had mixed feelings about the Grateful Dead for much of my adult life, even after I had become a die-hard Phish fan in the 1990s. Fans always swore by their live performances, but most of them sounded so formless to me that I had nothing to grab onto. If a particular improvisation is a diversion away from Song A, then if I'm not familiar with Song A, it's hard for me to gauge its quality and understand its function with respect to the song. I finally "got" the Dead only after I committed to listen to their studio albums in their entirety, thus increasing my familiarity with the basic forms of the various songs that show up in their set lists. Advice to budding Deadheads -- learn the songs before you dive into the 20-minute jams. [Dan comment: For the most part I worked back to the studio albums after repeated hearings of the songs played live. I show no ill effects of this reversal of Steve's advice, but I'm not a real musician like he is.]

Even in this Dead-skeptic stage of my life, however, I always understood and enjoyed Live/Dead. It captures the early Grateful Dead fully in their element, and I agree with Dan that the "Dark Star > Saint Stephen > The Eleven" sequence is a highlight of the Dead's recorded catalog. I also agree that "Lovelight" is a bit of a chore to listen to, though I'm sure it was fun to dance to if you were there. So, that's sides 1-3; side 4 gets pretty creepy, much to my delight: "Death Don't Have No Mercy", a slow blues, has a suitably doomy and quiet atmosphere, and it segues into a lengthy "Feedback" section that further darkens the mood, until the a cappella "And We Bid You Goodnight" conclusion serves a dual role as End of Concert/End of Time. Pretty neat.