The Scene

Tribute albums are great. I don’t know if that’s a controversial statement or not but they really, truly are. Just a bunch of great artists doing the songs of some other great artist and the proceeds usually go to charity. Or to the artist’s estate. Look, it depends on the circumstances.

This particular one is a charity affair, organised by Aaron and Bryce Dessner of The National with proceeds going to Red Hot – an HIV/AIDS awareness foundation. Top shelf cause and a top shelf inspiration as well with 59 separate tracks sourced from the best of the indie rock world all new recordings of tunes either written, associated with or covered by the Grateful Dead. Yeah, the ultimate hippie jam band. Jerry Garcia and Bob Weir with their intertwined guitar runs and dodgy harmonies. Acid trips and muddy festivals. Endless jams. Thirty minute songs. Folk tunes and psychedelia. Dead Heads and Wharf Rats. Free love. Peace. Good vibes. Love it.

The Vibe

Me, I first fell in love with the Dead during my uni years. Don’t ask me why, I can’t remember. But something about the freedom of their music and the mythology of the band really got me. I mean, they started off as a blues-based rock band and that’s the first music scene I ever really went all in for (Led Zepp, Jimi Hendrix, Cream and all that lot) and then they developed into this entity that if I’m honest here really spoke for the searching students out there with their openness and community – case and point being the final scene of Freaks and Geeks.

The Grateful Dead are a band that lasted generations in their proper incarnation and still (sort of) live on two decades after Jerry Garcia left us. For me that meant I didn’t have to go full Deadhead, all the add-ons weren’t there slapping me in the face with a rolled-up and drenched tie-die shirt. I didn’t have to start dressing like Tommy Chong to listen. You stick around as long as the Dead did and you will become uncool, a new generation will come through and suddenly you’re some emblem of their parents to rebel against. But hang around a decade or two longer and you outlive that as well and enter the mystical ‘legend’ status. The aging hippie thing isn’t such a deterrence nowadays, in fact these days that whole world speaks to something different and you could argue that a little hippie rhetoric would go down pretty well in the era of Trump. But that’s all by the by, me I just dig the tunes, man.

And I did me a fair bit of individually produced rock and roll so, as with any compilation album, the first step upon hearing about this one… well, the first step was to take in how great it’d be to hear almost 60 Grateful Dead covers all in a row. What a perfectly fitting tribute to a band notorious for pursuing the idea of quantity. But the second was to scroll down the tracklist and see which names pop out. Kurt Vile, the War on Drugs, Jenny Lewis (& friends), Phosphorescent, The National, Jim James, Courtney Barnett, Sharon Van Etten, Stephen Malkmus and the Jicks, The Walkmen… it’s a formidable list.

And then the songs that they get through. I mean, when there are 59 of them, some band tributes don’t even have that many to choose from at the start. Chances are, your favourite Dead song is here (although mine isn’t, ha!). You’ve got a number of Workingman’s Dead and American Beauty classics, some of the bluesier tunes they used to do in the 60s, the odd regular cover of theirs (though mostly the folk ones that aren’t copyrighted, of course), a few later era tunes and even one or two solo Jerry tracks as well.

Usually I’d chuck a tracklist in here but it ain’t hardly gonna fit, mate. So click here for all that.

The Music

I can guarantee that there will be songs I discover months from now that I missed the first time around or maybe didn’t even get around to hearing – hey, there are 59 tracks, buddy. Only so many hours in the day. But those little discoveries are the beauty of these things and what’s more I’ll betcha that there will be whole discographies unveiled to folks by a single song here or there and I know that for sure because it’s happened before. For every recognisable name here, there won’t be a listener among us who doesn’t know a couple of these artists very well or hasn’t gone down the rabbit hole with them yet and that’s beautiful too. Sometimes you never realise you’ll like a band until you hear their take on some familiar tune and the door is suddenly unlocked.

It won’t be Mumford and Sons, though. Typically they do their take on Friend of the Devil because of course they do. That one song foreshadowed their entire career better than they could ever write it.

Ahh, but I can’t just go through the list and give thoughts on every song. M&S do a commendable enough job with it, they’re a commendable enough band… just not a very exciting one. The National’s work on Morning Dew, though, now that’s one fine jam. They really get at the nuclear war pessimism that the song was written for. I’m quite a fan of Kurt Vile’s take on Box of Rain as well (FEATURING J.MASCIS!!!), the slightly lethargic yet profound nature of that one fits Philly’s Finest like a glove. The same goes for Angel Olsen singing Attics of My Life like it was written for her. The War on Drugs doing Touch of Grey is pretty cool too.

Those are all pretty faithful covers, albeit in those artists’ distinct voices. Some of these are not so faithful. Marijuana Deathsquads doing Truckin’, an easy-going anthem in its original incarnation, as if it’s this horrible acid trip where the walls are melting and brains are fried, for example. Kind of cool how they invert it like that. Charles Bradley gives a soulful take on Cumberland Blues, though that’s one more suited to the 1-2-1 shuffle that he grooves along.

There are a couple different takes on Dark Star, though none enter into the forty minute territory that the Dead would sometimes take it to (this of a two and a half minute long single). Cass McCombs and Joe Russo take it in fairly regular, laconic space cowboy places while the Flaming Lips give it more of a beat and stretch it out over six minutes. Interestingly, for a band as famous for their iconic and unique live shows more than anything, this collection mostly celebrates the studio Dead. Stephen Malkmus and the Jicks do a fairly spontaneous medley of China Cat Sunflower and I Know You Rider that melds smoothly together but the only other medley in there is Drums -> Space by Man Forever & So Percussion and Oneida. As you can guess, we’re talking percussionists there and their take on Mickey Hart’s shining improv moment… which to be honest was usually a skipper on the set lists for myself. I dunno, I always preferred the melodic stuff. The freak out sessions were for the freak out Deadheads at the show.

Those melodic stuffs are what get celebrated here, like I said. If this compilation does anything it’s that it shines a light on the songwriting of Jerry Garcia and Bob Weir – Bobby who shows up on two proper live tracks, one with Wilco (St. Stephen) and one with The National (I Know You Rider). Obviously tunes are drawn from their two landmark studio albums, Workingman’s Dead and American Beauty, but they’re also plucked from solo albums – though Weir’s Ace was a solo album in name only, to be fair. Casey Jones is the only Workingman’s song not touched here, while Beauty sees eight of its ten tracks tackled. Nobody was game enough to take on my favourite though, Sugar Magnolia. Any early-70s live version of that one with the Sunshine Daydream segment tacked on is stunning. Operator also overlooked, as is its writer Pigpen by far too many. Poor old Pigpen, he never could keep up once the band went Full Hippie. He had the best voice of the lot of them though.

That’s the other thing with tribute albums, right? You’re asking bands who probably drew at least partial influence from the band in question to reinterpret their songs and what you get is something of a rewriting of history. Especially when they’re all indie/alt musicians who aren’t gonna choose the hit single over a deep cut, that’d be uncool, man. So the product here is not only a legitimisation of the Grateful Dead among the current crop of taste makers but this alternate history where the Dead’s spontaneity was this finely crafted thing. An oxymoron, yeah. After all, the Dead only ever made two legit classic albums, plus a couple other early experimental ones that hold up nicely. We do get quite a few worldly takes on songs here and there, Orchestra Baobab’s take on Franklin’s Tower is a tripper. They cover plenty of sonic ground across the three discs. It would’ve been nice to see a few more of these artists really let loose and stretch their tunes out in true Deadhead fashion but then it’s already five hours long, I s’pose.

Revelations

http://www.dayofthedeadmusic.com/

Bruce Hornsby does Black Muddy River pretty sweetly. He, of course, being the one-time keyboard player for the Grateful Dead.

“Day of the Dead is an epic tribute to the music and artistry of the Grateful Dead, curated by Aaron and Bryce Dessner of The National. They have brought together some of their favourite musicians to reinterpret the songs and sounds of the Dead for a new generation. 59 tracks and over 5 hours of music makes the album a landmark to get lost in, to discover hidden treasures and to make your own playlists for whatever mood you’re in.”

By the way, the Dead’s revolutionary stance on taping shows long predated the internet in that way. In the early 70s they were already trailblazing an idea that so many seem to struggle with in 2016: that concerts and live music are transient. Trying to chuck restrictions on that probably feels self-serving and yet is really the opposite. The Grateful Dead have a legendary archive of live recordings out there because they let that stuff be freely distributed, creating a free marketplace and a community of fans. Adam Silver, commissioner of the NBA, was asked about people putting highlights of their games up on YouTube ‘illegally’ and he more or less encouraged it. As he put it: “highlights are marketing”. See, that’s the way to do it. Either that or you do like Prince and get rid of everything – anything in the middle is a double standard.

The CD edition is split into three discs: Thunder, Lightning and Sunshine.

This thing is streaming in full on Spotify, Apple Music and Tidal. Here, have a listen.

Hey, have a read of the digital booklet while you’re at it.

Finale

So what to say of these 59 tracks of Deadheadery? Not much more I can say, to be honest. This isn’t a traditional album review, as you may have guessed, even if I have managed to hear every track by now (and eyeTunes suggests I’m a few short) that isn’t really how this listening experience is supposed to work. The beauty of tribute albums is that they’re a collection. They’re a selection. You pick and choose songs from the bunch or you chuck the thing on shuffle and let it flow.

With that, there’s plenty to like here. Anyone with a Jerry Garcia leaning will certainly find more than a few things to add to the party mix and while the other members probably aren’t served as well, it’s not like they’re ignored – though, yeah, Pigpen deserved more. Day of the Dead probably won’t serve those ignorant to the Grateful Dead Experience nearly so well as it pats the fans on the back but you never know. I’d imagine more Deadheads discover Kurt Vile or Phosphorescent from this album than Kurt Vile or Phosphorescent fans discover the Grateful Dead.

Still, if a few more casual music fans are illuminated to the “music and artistry of the Grateful Dead” then the Dessner’s have done their job. If a few bucks can be salvaged for the Red Hot foundation too then even bloody better.