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Grateful Dead 101

Gregor von Kallahann | 08/18/2008

(4 out of 5 stars)

"When the vinyl version of this record was released in '74, there was almost no way I would have picked up on it. I had a fair amount of Dead albums already (although I wasn't quite the completist some of my friends were). But in principle, I objected to buying "best of" albums in general, especially of artists I basically admired. That was for dilettantes. Or for people on a very limited budget.



Of course, as a poor college student, I probably should have been on a budget and was sort of on a de facto one, always INTENDING to pick up this or that record eventually. There were any number of Dead albums I never did manage to buy. Still, I at least got to hear pretty much all the Dead I wanted in friends' apartments or dorm rooms. It was like the wallpaper. Getting a "Best Of" release seemed kinda redundant.



But a lot can change in 34 years. All these format changes (to say nothing of real life budgetary issues) have forced me to look at "best of" and "greatest hits" packages in a new light. And even if I were a much harder core Deadhead than I am, there's so much other Dead product out there now to sample (I've only heard a fraction of Dick's famous Picks, for instance) that maybe I really DON'T want to repurchase every single pre-74 release on CD quite yet.



Besides I got this one on sale for just a couple of bucks. And what a treat it is. I love the fact that it's not sequenced chronologically. It begins with "Golden Road" from the very first album but then proceeds on to "Truckin'" from AMERICAN BEAUTY. When I was a kid, I might have been upset that over six years of musical history was seemingly blithely ignored in this sequencing. Now I see it as quite canny marketing (in a good way). The entire album's strategy seems to be to wrap the more experimental stuff around the much more accessible tracks from BEAUTY and WORKINGMAN'S. That might have offended me back when I was a 22 year old purist. In my 50s, I'm a heck of a lot cooler with it.



Some might find that too much emphasis is placed on the more "commercial" early 70s Dead product. But there's live stuff too--which is important for any accurate representation of the Dead. AND bits of weirdness like "Rosemary" from AOXOMOXOA. It would have been nice to see a selection or two from MY own personal favorite Dead LP, ANTHEM OF THE SUN. But that album is pretty much all of a piece, and it'd be next to impossible to isolate a single representative track from it.



In fact, the album seems to have an almost "concert like" flow--as opposed to "historical." Whoever sequenced it seems to have been thinking, "What works best with what?" They chose well. It all keeps truckin' along rather nicely and makes for a rather nice "nostalgia trip" (for some of us--albeit a "short and not all THAT strange a one." And, of course, it could serve as an effective introductory Grateful Dead course for others, especially given since it has so much from the most "tuneful" era.



Win-win, I guess. Veterans will understand--and newbies should keep in mind--that this collection just scratches the surface. But what a surface.



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