190. The Greatful Dead - American Beauty (1970)






















Track Listing

1. Box Of Rain
2. Friend Of The Devil
3. Sugar Magnolia
4. Operator
5. Candyman
6. Ripple
7. Brokedown Palace
8. Till The Morning Comes
9. Attics Of My Life
10. Truckin'

Review

The Dead go in a completely different direction from the masturbatory Live/Dead, and a good thing it is too. Influenced by bands like the Byrds and CSNY there is a turn to folk and country style music here, and actually it's their best album because of it.

I was never a big fan of The Greatful Dead, in fact they are markedly inferior to the bands that they take their influences from, and frankly I never understood the appeal that leads to crazy fandom and Deadheads. Of course the answer I always seem to find is that they were amazing live, and altough I remember the death of Jerry Garcia, I was at the beach at the time, I was a kid and lived in Portugal, so I never saw them live and clearly never will. If Live/Dead was representative of their live shennanigans, I am happy I didn't.

This is however a good album, if you are looking for more stuff like CSN(Y) or later Byrds, this is the place to go to. But frankly none of it is very new or exciting, of course there are a couple of good tracks here, but meh. Buy it at Amazon UK or US.

Track Highlights

1. Box Of Rain
2. Ripple
3. Friend Of The Devil
4. Truckin'

Final Grade

7/10

Trivia

Clearly Being a Dead Head is the fast track into politics:


From Wikipedia:

Celebrity Heads

The following have seen many shows:

* Tony Blair
* Joseph Campbell
* Pete Carroll
* Ed Norton
* Bill Clinton
* Ann Coulter
* Owen Chamberlain
* Al and Tipper Gore
* Keith Haring
* Phil Jackson
* Patrick Leahy
* Carl and Larry Page
* Bill Walton
* Keller Williams
* Al Franken
* Nancy Pelosi
* Jerry Greenfield


Box Of Rain: