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Track Listings
| 1. Dark Star |
| 2. St. Stephen |
| 3. The Eleven |
| 4. Turn On Your Love Light |
| 5. Death Don't Have No Mercy |
| 6. Feedback |
| 7. And We Bid You Goodnight |
Product Description
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Product Description
Customer Reviews
This is music that cannot be easily categorised or imitated but for a brief shining moment the band redefined rock music, because it played as an ensemble, not as a series of soloists. It is still a rare quality for a rock band.
And Live Dead is without doubt the bands finest album.
My favourite track of all- and the most accessable to newcomers - is the dark melancholy blues "Death don't have no mercy". If you want to know what all the fuss about Garcia is about, listen to this performance.
Check out, too, the gorgeous Pigpen performance on a churning "Lovelight", the other more earthy side of the band. Pigpen was a blues man, with a gift for enticing a crowd.
Quite why this album has not achieved popular acclaim as a legend is hard to say. The Dead lost their iconic status many years ago, and time passed them largely by. But, at a time when West Coast rock music was the coolest thing on the planet, along came Live Dead. And nothing was quite the same again.
This is a must have in any CD collection.
The latest release features a two disc collection of two shows in 1969, one of which highlights the upcoming release of Aoxomoxoa whilst the other is a blistering performance of the songs they had been playing late 67 through the Live Dead period.
Live Dead captures the psychedelic Dead at their peak. Whilst listening to this album in it's most recent incarnation - that of the remixed, remastered edition as part of the massive, sprawling Rhino Records box sewt one is reminded of the scene in 2001 where the astronaut remarks ' my god, it's full of stars'. Live Dead demonstrates the sheer beauty and awesome power of a band which boasts three lead players in Garcia, Lesh and Weir with an awesome vocalist and bluesman, Pigpen, all of whom play off each other in a sometimes bewildering machiavellian jam session but what results is a magical entity which is a greater being than the total of it's constituent parts. Listen to Lesh use the bass as a lead instrument, limited as he then was by the standard equipment he was then using. Listen to Garcia and those fluid racing solos with such a distinctive sound and tone. He may have lost that capacity in later years but often he plays like a man possessed transformed into Merlin the magician or the Pied Piper destined to take us into those uncharted musical waters from which we may never return.
This album has no redundant or extra parts. The songs, such as they are, are as tight and taut as the playing. You almost want to cry out for the music to continue for ever and ever.
And you know what?
... Read more ›If you liked Hawkwind's 'Space Ritual', or the Floyd's 'Sauceful of Secrets' (the song rather than the whole album) then this is likely to appeal. If, on the other hand, you prefer something more obviously song-based without all the endless noodling, I'd look elsewhere. Like American Beauty, for starters.
What's more, the output from their mid 60's San Francisco contemporaries suggest that most of them could blow the Grateful Dead off stage. Country Joe & The Fish didn't sing too well either but their barrier bending music put them in a totally different league; Jefferson Airplane combined more complex musicianship with far more innovative songwriting; Big Brother & the Holding Company played tighter and more powerful blues and, the Steve Miller Band laid down much better R&B. Cast the net wider to include other "extended jam" exponents of the time such as Cream, Jimi Hendrix and early Pink Floyd and comparisons become ridiculous. The excuse put forward by Grateful Dead fans is that you had too see them live to appreciate their music, but... live recordings of all of the above suggest that they were more interesting, exciting & creative than the ponderous Dead! Yet their reputation remains up there with or ahead of them all... why?
Well... the answer is here. "DARK STAR"... 23 minutes of genuinely inspired guitar interaction and virtuosity, flawed only by a couple of short shots of horribly off-key vocals. Untypical, closer to free-form jazz than West Coast rock and quite breathtaking: one brilliant track on which much of a thirty-year career was based. If you, like me, are not a fan buy "Live Dead" for this alone, marvel and don't bother with any of the rest.
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