The Grateful Dead - Anthem of The Sun

The exact point in uncharted territory where you must turn back. Do not, by any means, stop on the tracks. anthem of the sun

Jerry Garcia: guitar, co-lead vocals on “That’s It For The Other One,” percussion, kazoo

Bob Weir: guitar, lead vocals, kazoo

“Pigpen” McKernan: organ, claves, lead vocals on “Alligator” and “Caution Do Not Stop On Tracks”

Phil Lesh: bass, piano, harpsichord, trumpet, timpani, kazoo

Bill Kreutzman: drums, percussion, gong

Mickey Hart: drums, percussion, bells, gong

Tom Constanten: prepared piano devices, tape effects

Produced by Dave Hassigner with the Grateful Dead, engineered by Dan Healey

art by Bill Walker

With this chaotic review, in which I mysteriously procure a purple plastic kazoo (no, really,) we revisit my favorite period in Grateful Dead history: from Anthem of The Sun to American Beauty. But our story today does not begin with the Dead. It begins with another gaggle of clinically insane motherfuckers: Ken Kesey and his band of Merry Pranksters.

Pictured: Ken Kesey (L) with Neal Cassady (R) behind the wheel of "Further" (photographed by David Gahr, 1964)

Their goal? Drive cross-country to the 1964 Worlds Fair, taking a whole lot of LSD along the way, and making it there in one piece, god willing. At the wheel: Dean Moriarty himself, Neal Cassady. “The bus came by and I got on, that's when it all began/There was cowboy Neal at the wheel of the bus to never ever land...”

The Pranksters tried to make a movie out of their journey. Paula Sundsten, AKA Gretchen Fetchen, did the best she could to put the footage in chronological order. They start hosting hangouts to show their 30-hour-long film – cue the Acid Tests. The de facto house band? None other than the freshly-formed Grateful Dead. As put by Jerry Garcia:

“The Acid Tests were one of the truly democratic art forms to appear this century...we had the luxury of being able to experiment freely in a situation which didn’t require anything of us...For a musician, that’s like carte blanche, you know? That was great fun.”

quoted from: The Grateful Dead: Classic Albums – Anthem To Beauty (dir. Jeremy Marre, 1997)

In February of 1968, never-ever land was shattered. Just before the Dead co-opened the Carousel Ballroom in San Fransisco, they got the news that Neal Cassady was found dead along the train tracks in Mexico. As described by Dead historian Dennis McNally, “...Cassady was very possibly the most highly evolved personality (the Dead) would ever meet, and was certainly among their most profound life influences other than the psychedelic experience itself.” His passing deeply affected the Dead, particularly Bob Weir; who’d literally just written “That’s It For The Other One” in part about his sometimes-roommate Neal. “He seemed to live in another dimension, and in that dimension time as we know it was transparent.”

The Carousel’s opening gig, and the emotions behind it, birthed what would become the Dead’s 2nd “studio” LP, Anthem of The Sun. From Phil Lesh: “That performance led us to settle on the particular sequence of songs that would appear on the album. I truly believe we were channeling Neal that night.”

Anthem quickly took shape from here. “The Other One,” “New Potato Caboose,” “Born Cross-Eyed,” “Caution,” and “Alice D Millionaire” were early considerations; all but the last made it onto the album. Newbies entered the fold: Jerry’s old friend Robert Hunter co-wrote “Alligator” and wrote the lyrics of “Dark Star.” By the time sessions began in September of 1967, Bill Kreutzmann found second drummer Mickey Hart. “They hadn’t particularly realized they were one piece shy, but they were certainly smart enough to know when it had arrived.”

While the basic material came together quickly and easily, literally nothing else about Anthem did. There was no way in HELL this counterculture band was going to come to the studio with material prepared, let alone play it the same way way every time. The counterculture band is always going to do counterculture shit. From Warner exec Joe Smith: “...we were dealing with, yes, a counterculture, and yes, a new method of recording, but also, there was the element of chemicals involved!” These guys were high as hell! This situation was helped – or not helped, depending on who you are in this situation – by an unprecedented stipulation for recording contracts of the time: unlimited studio time. The Dead had a lot more access to the studio and more creative control thantheir peers would’ve. See the “thick air” incident.

“Thick air. He wants the sound of thick air. Thick air. He wants the sound of thick air. Thick air. He wants the sound of thick air. Thick air. He wants the sound...”

Needless to say, Dave quit after that.

The Dead intended to learn how the studio worked by trial and error, but making it up as they went along provedspectacularly inefficient. A handful more “thick air”-equivalents put the guys, Phil especially, at odds with Joe and the rest of the Warner execs. Recording was interrupted by gigs in New York in December, followed by a two-week tour of the Northwest with “little brother band” the Quicksilver Messenger Service. After funding additional sessions in New York and California again, Warner discovered the Dead only had about 1/3 of the material needed to fill out an LP.

Tensions culminated in an infamous letter from Joe Smith to the Dead’s manager at the time, Danny Rifkin. How did they respond?

Well…

...the counterculture band is going to do counterculture shit.

So let’s recap: the guys don’t have a producer, don’t have a plan, and have lost support of our label. What do they do now? They’re the Grateful Dead, you fool, they’re gonna use their live recordings!

Blending live and studio material had never really been done before. There were fake live albums with a live track or two thrown in (see Cheap Thrills,) but nothing like this. With engineer Dan Healey, the guys played detective; hunting for fragments of recordings that went well together. From those fragments, they’d fill out their songs. Of course, this only further complicated the recording process. Tracks would be jam-packed with seven guys (oh yeah, Phil’s college buddy Tom Constanten is here too) recording their parts, plus overdubs, plus all the vocals. Then you have the issue of matching up 2-track, Franken-four track, and real 4-track; all recorded at different speeds. Dan had to transfer everything and manually sync it all. Unfortunately, this process, plus the particularly tricky mix on side two, degraded the album's fidelity. And they STILL needed to go back to the studio! To get more of an idea of how this shitshow came together in the first place, I listened to this undated Anthem rehearsal soundboard recording circa 1967 floating around on the good ol’ Internet Archive.

On paper, it seems like a no-brainer: jamming with hints of Stockhausen, complete with a chaotic backstory and psychedelic album art with a 33-page manifesto to go along with it. That’s my M.O. But Anthem intimidated me. It may sound silly, but the art genuinely freaked me out. The music was another matter entirely. It doesn’t so much flow from studio to live material as it employs musical jump-cuts, collages, and montages; not unlike a psychedelic film. Jerry would always say, “We mixed it for the hallucinations!” Anthem is aggressively visual for a piece of music.

Dan Healey was the backbone of this project. We know how the Dead are: consistently inconsistent. (And we love them for it!) There is no such thing as a flawless recording of theirs end-to-end. Dan synced the best parts of something like eighteen shows together to assemble this album. I also have to tip my hat to Jerry and Phil for the mix. Each side was performed all the way through. No breaks, no punch-ins. If someone fucked up, they hadto do the whole thing over again. In the days before digital recording technology, mixing was just as much a performance as playing. I think a lot of modern listeners forget that.

And, of course, there’s the LSD of it all. Jerry said the Acid Tests gave the Dead “glimpses into the form that follows chaos. If you throw everything out and lose all rules, and stop trying to make anything happen on any level, other stuff starts to happen.” That’s the very essence of Anthem.

The process of losing all rules and other stuff happening, is distilled on its opener: what I believe to be its crown jewel, That’s It For The Other One. Phil’s thousand-petal lotus. “The Other” into something damn near unrecognizable as it splintered off from the first movement, the Cryptical Envelopment.(Or “Cryptical Envelopement, as my album jacket calls it.) We’re dropped right into it. There’s all of one note from Pigpen on the organ before Jerry begins. There’s no time to brace ourselves. From the sounds of it, this is gonna be a head trip ritual. “The other day they waited/The sky was dark and faded/Solemnly they stated, he has to die…” “The Other One” starts out behaving like a relatively “normal” rock-and-roll song for the time. Jerry’s sweet, youthful voice sings through the aggressively-melodic Envelopment, accented by stop-times and jazzy licks. It’s a shame this part was ditched live, it’s iconic. We cut to Jerry’s voice run through a Leslie speaker; giving it that watery effect. It’s almost hymnal – again, feeling like a ritual – with the organ and acoustic guitar playing classical motifs. The chorus melody repeats. All of a sudden, it kicks in.

The Quadlibet For Tender Feet lasts all of twenty seconds, but it’s some of the most fascinating twenty seconds recorded in all of rock-and-roll.

Or assembled, rather; it was made up of four different shows at the Carousel, King’s Beach Bowl, and Shrine Auditorium, all layered on top of each other. They all start at the same point. Slowly, they diverge; one’s a little faster here, the other takes a detour there. The solos step all over each other, eight drum kits batter away in all corners. Everything’s held together by little more than a thread. Then the bloom closes, making you wonder if you ever heard anything at all. We’re brought back to the Carousel Ballroom. The Faster We Go, The Rounder We Get. It’s a front-row seat to the Beast; as album artist Bill Walker described the transcendental state that all on stage and in the audience at a Dead show reach. Jerry’s playing some great licks, I love the tone of his SG in this era. It’s the exact guitar tone I think of when I think of the Grateful Dead. I love how green and wiley Bob’s voice is, there’s something terribly exciting about him always sounding like he’s out of breath. The dark star of the show is the rhythm section. Bill and Mickey make me feel like I’m trapped in a whirlpool; pulled deeper down as I swirl. It’s clausterphobic as hell. Pigpen shocks the space between verses with energetic fills, and if you can find him in this chaos, Phil is a treat to listen to. The bass bombs haven’t been built yet, but he wore his deep knowledge of classical and free jazz on his sleeve. His playing here has a complicated relationship with the melody, but I really dig it.

They don’t sound anything alike, but this deep circle-lock “The Other One” gets into reminds me of Bitches Brew. (Ironic, considering the Dead shared a bill with Miles Davis!)

“The Other One” slides into one of those classically Dead glows of light, gone before you can grasp it. Phil plays a brief turnaround, linking with a cut back to the studio. Another clausterphobic messy collage blast follows a reprise of the Envelopment, collective bellow of “You know he had to die!” sounds like a thousand fingers pointing, condemning me to the gallows. The fourth and final movement creeps up on us. The musicfights back against it, until it’s forced to surrender to Tom Constanten’s dragons’ breath. The belly of the Beast, as Bill Walker described him.

I could never replicate how Tom speaks, it’s simply too specific and delightful. Hopefully this quote will be a good representation of him, and the thought process behind We Leave The Castle.

“After ‘The Other One,’ I was given the interesting task of whooping it up into a further and greater frenzy, ultimately causing it to explode and out of the rubble of the explosion and the smoke and the ashes and everything would come the delicious sounds of ‘New Potato Caboose.’”

quoted from: The Grateful Dead: Classic Albums – Anthem To Beauty (dir. Jeremy Marre, 1997)

Here’s how Phil described T.C. “whooping it up”:

“At just the right moment, like an axe and chainsaw combined, the most glorious glissando poured ripping and tearing out of the speakers, sounding just like a portcullis being lowered at a medieval castle. Our producer came halfway out of his chair, staring white-faced at us as we, giggling inanely, luxuriated in the sheer noise of it...He ran down to the main room, only to discover TC standing by the piano with a goofy smile on his face, holding – a top.”

quoted from: Phil Lesh, Searching For The Sound: My Life With the Grateful Dead (2006,) p126-127

Full disclosure: I welcome noise in my rock-and-roll. Tom’s scratches on the piano strings (which he admits he ripped from John Cage) blew my mind wide open. I remember feeling dread when I first heard this, thinking, “Something’s wrong! I’m lost in the woods! I want to go home!”...but it’s less frightening now that I have the mental image of Dave Hassigner bolting down the stairs in a panic because he heard Tom from two floors up and though the Dead blew something up!

“The Other One” is four different Grateful Deads at play: their pop sensibility, the psychedelic band, the jam band in a live setting, and guys who were high as hell and wanted to do odd shit. After hearing it for the first time, I felt like I’d died and come back to life. This feeling only slightly diminishing in the seven months I’ve been playing it speaks to its power.

This cacophonous symphony leads into the sweet, sweet sounds of New Potato Caboose; which cradles my mind and ears after the ultrashock to the consciousness I just received. This sequencing choice feels like waking up in a cold sweat after a dream. It’s something akin to the transition between “Revolution 9” and “Good Night" on the White Album. Everything is all better now, but something still feels wrong. “Caboose” has beautiful little touches, like the celeste, and I think harp by Pigpen, Phil’s harpsichord, and gong from either Mickey or Bill, possibly both. In the extended live section, Jerry’s “comfort lick” (every guitarist has one) glitters like a sparkler in the night. On the “Caboose,” hear the budding of the harmonies that would blossom over the next two studio albums. Their of feedback and effects lets slips of smoke rise. So much was going on in “The Other One” that we really didn’t get to hear the interplay of Jerry and Phil’s playing. We hear it on the “Caboose;” intertwined like long, thin garden snakes. This song doesn’t feel like eight minutes at ALL, my guess would’ve been five.

If there’s anything Anthem leaves me wanting, it’s gotta be “Dark Star.” It’s a top five ’60s Dead song, and maybe a top ten Dead song period.

Above: "Dark Star" single version from 1967; a Dead standard in its most basic form

But it’s great to have its B-side (and another top ten Dead song for me,) Born Cross-Eyed, on the album. Looking at the run time, it’s deceptively simple. But on “Born Cross-Eyed” alone, we have: two drum sets, lead vocals, backing vocals, guitar parts, overdubs of guitars, two organ parts, an acoustic guitar, cymbals, an extrasnare drum, and trumpet.

Oh. And Bob’s “thick air.” Can’t forget that!

I like to think they included that as a fuck-you to Dave specifically.

Like “The Other One,” we have no chance to brace ourselves. It opens with spring-tight guitar notes and bootsus right into the dizzying, manic, messy live energy. Anthem to Beauty describes this song as autobiographical; “Truckin” on mescaline. Bidding each city goodbye as you haul out to the next. To me, the lyrics also read like death with the possibility of reincarnation. Bob wonders, “Seems I have been here before...” Death was on the guys’ minds, after all, they’d just lost Neal. But it doesn’t feel heavy. “Cross-Eyed” is lively and zany, with Pigpen’s Vox Continental lighting the thing up like a switchboard and Phil’s batshit trumpet section. Phil on bass and Jerry on the vibraslap under the “Bye, by-and-by, by and by”s hit some perfectly wrong notes, buzzing in discordant tones.

Side two is filled with back-to-back Pigpen showcases, beginning with the eleven-minute Alligator. The Dead stopped playing most all of Pigpen’s songs after he passed, but not because no one could sing them. It’s true, hehad a raspy voice that came from the gut; see “Operator.” But “Alligator” was way out of his blues-man comfort zone, with Robert Hunter’s goofy lyrics about a whiskey-drinkin’, canoe-ridin’ reptile. (And the kazoo brigade!) The Dead didn’t stop playing it because they couldn’t do it. They stopped in part because people wouldn’t stop requesting it. “Alligator” was their “Free Bird!” I see why. The delightfully-unserious kazoo brigade and the dance section loaded up with claves and other wood percussion are lots of fun!

There’s no negative space with Bill and Mickey, they fill every slot. And of course, Pigpen plays circles around the thing on the Hammond. Each member rises to the challenge; Jerry’s playing bright and warm like the sun on the alligator’s back, elaborating upon the hard, spiky texture until it softens. It suddenly snaps into a jump cut – the one that was a bitch for Jerry and Phil to mix because this minute-long section was a different speed than everything else. The constant flip-flops between recording fidelity may annoy some, but considering 75% of my favorite band’s output only exists as crummy bootlegs, I don’t mind here.

“Alligator” transitions into Caution, a number bearing a history with the Dead. Back when they were still the Warlocks, they had a regular gig at a place by the train tracks. As they jammed on a Them song (because Van Morrison is infinite, apparently,) they noticed the rumble of the trains going by. Being this group of guys, they started jamming to the tune of the trains. “Caution” is a consistent, rumbling roar, just like a train chugging along. The cymbal work is reminiscent of clattering on the tracks and the bell at the crossing. This is much more a showcase for Pigpen’s bluesy sensibility: hear his distant yelps as he leans away from the mic in bliss, and his nod to “Mojo Hand.”

Of course, this being an Anthem track, there’s plenty of intentional weirdness. A brief chipmunk-speed section – a symptom of the guys’ tape dilemma – with various frenetic cuts between gigs and sections of the song. At one point, the jam completely unravels (not an uncommon occurrence for the Dead) before cutting to a different performance. The whole thing eventually devolves into four minutes of fuzzed-out feedback.

Anthem has some gravitational force that draws you in and messes with your comfort level. You’re always on the edge of surrendering yourself to dance and running screaming out of the house. This pervasive darkness was no doubt caused by its formation against a rapidly-changing cultural landscape. Political tensions heat up big-time in the US through 1968. 24,000 troops were deployed to Vietnam in response to the Tet Offensive. A waveof anti-war protests followed, including the Columbia University takeover in April of that year. (The first one, not the one the zoomers held to protest Columbia’s funding of Israel last year.) The Dead played on the green, finding their jokester vibe entirely mismatched with the severity of the situation at hand.

Pictured: Phil Lesh (L) and Bob Weir (R) performing at Columbia University with the Grateful Dead, 5/3/1968

Real life came knocking on the Dead’s door. Back in October of 1967, 710 Ashbury Street was raided. All the guys who were there were busted for possession, effectively forcing the band from San Fransisco to Hollywood. Anthem’s secret weapon, Dan Healey, jumped ship to work with the Quicksilver Messenger Service. Bear Stanley came back as the sound guy, but his lab was raided; with something to the tune of 350,000 doses of LSD. He was sentenced to three years in prison and served two. With the mythical “San Fransisco sound” entirely commodified, the Carousel soon closed. It left the Dead $12,000 in debt to Bill Graham. Outside, the hippies saw the writing on the wall. The Diggers hosted a funeral for the Summer of Love. Haight-Ashbury went from hippie haven to tourist trap.

Pictured: street theater group the Diggers holding their "funeral" procession for the Summer of Love (San Fransisco, 10/6/1967)

What goes up must come down.

Then, three weeks before Anthem of The Sun’s release, the Band dropped their musical A-bomb: Music From Big Pink. It was a watershed moment in pop music; with Gram Parson’s Byrds and the soon-to-be Crosby, Stills, and Nash (a group that would be particularly influential on the Dead’s next evolution) to follow. All of this: the culture shift, the musical shift, and just how far out Anthem had gone, made the Dead do a heel-turn. They tiedup the loose ends with Aoxoamoxoa, and blossomed on Workingman’s Dead.

According to Bill Walker, “Anthem of The Sun means Song of the Sun, and the implied reference is not only to the great solar blaze that brings light and life to a darkened world, but also the illuminating blaze of consciousness that is capable of penetrating to the very heart of darkness.” About joining the Dead, T.C. said it “wasn’t as difficult or strange coming from where I was coming from and be with the fact that everyone was making it up as they went along. It was a state of excitement, flux, chaos, even.” That word has come up a few times in this review: chaos.

I think that’s why this era of the band is so fascinating to me. It was never sustainable. It was too taxing on their label, too out-there to appeal to mainstream audiences, too temporal to ever replicate, entirely subject to the guys’ relationships with each other. It was all the chaos of following the “bus” wherever it took them, even it was sometimes driven off the road and stuck in the desert.

We seem to have heard a lot from Phil today, but I can’t help it. Vinyl Monday is firmly in the Phil Zone. “There’s one misconception about the Grateful Dead that I’d like to clear up once and for all: the legend of the master plan. When I say ‘our goal was’ or ‘we decided,’ it’s not as if I’m describing conscious decisions made in the now. From the beginning, every one of our moves was powered by deep waves in the group unconsciousness.”

The Beast. In structure, song, style...I could call this album daring but that would be an understatement. It isn’t so much once in a lifetime as it is once in a timeline. The fire in the belly, illuminating the darkness; Anthem of The Sun is the exact point in uncharted territory where you must turn back. Do not, by any means, stop on the tracks.

We leave the castle.

Personal favorites: the whole thing, but especially “That’s It For The Other One”

– AD ☆

Watch the full episode above!

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