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If you know anything about The Grateful Dead, you know this:  don’t bother with the studio albums.  Live shows are where the action is.

It’s true, because missing out on the mountain of live performance would be an absolute sin.

But, with perfect Dead-like ambivalence, it’s also false.

In trying to absorb the live Dead musical canon, my efforts to date (described below in prior posts) have by necessity focused on several years at a time.  How else do you digest 30 years and 3000+shows?

I finally helped myself out by violating the above truth — I went to the studio albums as a break from a dizzying array of live shows separated mostly by city names and dates in the form 19xx-xx-xx.

By working through the Dead’s studio output, you learn some interesting things (such as when a song generally first appeared chronologically), get to see who wrote it, whether it’s an original or a cover, hear who sung on the studio version and what “voice” they used (Jerry’s singing style has varied from time to time) and finally, and most importantly, you may hear a different arrangement — usually more complex, with some instruments you won’t necessarily hear live,  and with multi-tracked guitar lines.  More Garcia is always a good thing, and the intertwined lead playing is often sublime.  And there is more acoustic playing than in the live versions, providing some differences in dynamics.

A bonus is the newer CDs contain bonus tracks, often outtakes or alternate versions, along with some seminal live versions.

The original fans of the band did not have such easy access to the recorded live shows, and they certainly listened to these LPs repeatedly to a point where track order became second-nature and the music became a soundtrack to lives.

If nothing else, you recognize that a heck of a lot changed in the world between 1968 and 1974.

These records stand up to the test of time.  Oddly, the oldest more psychedelic ones don’t sound old or dated to me at all (the 80s and 90s one do somewhat).  With the occasional use of the skip button (e.g., for What’s Become of the Baby on Aoxomoxoa), you are left with one of the most underrated career outputs of any rock band, especially among American bands.

And, by the way, Friend of the Devil, from American Beauty, ought to be shot into space to represent the first two hundred years of what we, as a society, used to be able to agree was the American spirit.