By the end of summer '67, The Dead traveled south to L.A. to
begin work on Anthem of the Sun. By this time, the effects of Sgt. Pepper had
legitimized rock 'n' roll as a serious art form. The Grateful Dead wanted to see
how far they could push it. Despite its merits, The Dead fell flat earlier that year with their highly anticipated debut album. The album's cover art was
psychedelic all right, but nothing else on the album qualified. "The next one
certainly won't be like that in any way," Garcia said.
The pressure was indeed mounting. Frisco had produced a pair of
heady psychedelic masterpieces: the Jefferson Airplane's Surrealistic Pillow (AM10), of which Garcia played a heavy hand, and Country Joe and the Fish's Electric Music for the Mind and Body. Determined to capture the essence of
their psychedelic concerts, the band returned to the studio with David
Hassinger, who produced their first album, though Hassinger quit not long after. "They didn’t know what the hell they were
looking for," the star producer grumbled. Hassinger and Warner Bros. thought the band was "just jerking off" in the studio.
Bringing
in Dan Healy as the producer, a long time Dead associate, put the gears in
motion.
Instead of making a straight-ahead studio work, they
decided to mix studio and live recordings into a collage that would sprawl
across both sides of the album. "Phil and I performed the mix as if it were an
electronic music composition," Garcia recalled, and no one from there on out would
question the band’s psychedelic credentials or their star bound status after Anthem.
“We mixed it for the hallucinations,” Garcia said. The Hindi-inspired album
cover art, done by band pal Bill Walker, became famous in its own right.
This was the catalyst for the Grateful Dead I loved: acid-drenched,
spontaneous, crazed & loopy (oh, to have been a part of the Acid Tests!). The Dead, in 1967, either gave the best
concert you had ever heard (or the worst) and Anthem of the Sun caught that concert magic. Anthem provides the essence of the psychedelic Grateful Dead when they
were really cooking. On "That's It for the Other One" you get that
rolling thunder with Garcia, Weir and Lesh twining around each other while
bouncing atop Hart & Kreutzmann's pounding rythmns, which, after a side trip of
psychedelic sound effects leads into the more melodic and lilting "New Potato
Caboonse" and "Born Cross-Eyed," with the long, looping trademark Garcia lead weaving in and over and around and under Weir and Lesh. (That’s the longest, run-on-iest sentence I’ve ever written, so I'm leaving
it.)
Side Two brings us the humorous and bluesy "Alligator" with some driving jamming
riffs trading off between Garcia and Weir and the traditional concert windup
dance and Pigpen rave-off. The Grateful Dead were a different band while Ron "Pigpen" McKernan
was alive. Cruder, bluesy, nutty and ferociously alive. When they were
"ON" they could blow anybody else playing in those days off the stage
(maybe not Hendrix). Anthem of the Sun and
a couple thousand bootlegs are as close as you can get to that experience.
