Album Reviews

Who knew vinyl lovers were such Deadheads? The labels doing the reissuing hope you are. There are recent studio reissues from Warner Brothers/Rhino and Analogue Productions and live recordings from Mobile Fidelity and Analogue Productions including this one from AP.

All of these releases (with the exception of AP's reissue of Terrapin Station, which is easily among the worst Dead album ever and I have no idea why they bothered) are considered prime Dead, especially this one from 1981 originally issued on Arista Records (A2L 8604) that may have been overlooked by some fans.

The Dead played a series of shows at smallish venues: Radio City Music Hall in New York and the Warfield Theater in San Francisco even though by then they were stadium sellouts literally and figuratively, in order to produce and record intimate acoustic sets featuring bare-bones acoustic instrumentation.

Jerry Garcia and Bob Weir played on acoustic guitar, Brent Mydland played piano and Bill Kreutzmann and Mickey Hart limited their set-ups to smaller drums. Phil Lesh's bass was the only heavy electric instrument so he turned down the volume.

The group played inspired sets of tightly crafted, mellow original and classic acoustic country/folk/rock that had the crowd going wild. The recording is nothing short of sensational. It's everything one could ask for in an acoustic live recording: breathtaking transparency and three-dimensionality, natural instrumental timbres and soundstaging that makes you feel as if you're sitting up there at the musicians' feet.

If the rambling, noodling Dead gives you the willies, that's your loss but this double set is then surely your gain. If I had to pick one live Dead album as an introduction to the group it would have to be this one, though the two from Mo-fi that we'll review soon are equally vital, though very different.

The original's low grade pressing and packaging have been replaced with high quality from the 200g LPs to the gatefold packaging.

Recommended without hesitation for both the musical craft and especially the recording that's nothing less than astonishing, as is the depth of the pressing blackness behind the music. There's no contest between the original pressing and this reissue cut by Kevin Gray from the original analog tapes and pressed at Quality Record Pressing.