![]() It’s a gloriously stoned goofball moment, like watching the earliest Mickey Mouse animations on acid while listening to the second album by The Band, though more playfully giddy and buoyant. Then it’s back to the old tymey tomfoolery of the prankish “Doin’ That Rag” - here a completely different take from the one used in the remix and again with loud Warlocks-styled organ, louder drums and the ridiculously loudest of all hi-hat punctuations. The brief and gently picked acoustic ode “Rosemary” switches the mood from one of lightheartedness to one as mysterious as the overgrown, enclosed garden from which its watery vocals croak of so desolately. ![]() Mining the rich vein of American folk blues, “Dupree’s Diamond Blues” gets a cheesy Warlocks-style organ workout with Jerry Garcia delivering the vocals in old-tymey conversational mode about a crime of passion with a moral ringing as true today as it did - and always will - that “jellyroll can drive you stone mad.” Or so the story archetypically goes. Stephen” here is laid bare and raw as can be. Without “The Eleven” suffixed afterwards, “St. Stephen” featured a cello arrangement, and more of it is revealed in the drumless vocal bridge and adorned with tinkling bells. A simple snare pattern tramples all over the musical place, as they will continue to do throughout the rest of the album (But come to think of it, Phil Lesh’s latticework bass fans out with an equal prominence.) An original workout of “St. The clatter of the twin drum sets of Bill Kreutzmann and Mickey Hart in particular operate in a near state of suspended animation, as though holding back because they know their kits are being recorded too loud. Everything occupies totally different positions in the sonic hierarchy, and the band is in a near state of stumbling over itself to allow things to grow between their unfamiliar 16-track sonic spaces. Stephen” begins, it’s clear that this is an album made in a different state of mind than its remix two years later. The original “Aoxomoxoa” has the same tracks in the same order but from the moment “St. Spacemen everywhere evolving into space cowboys witnessed in contemporary releases like “Music From Big Pink” and “Nashville Skyline.”) And it was during this influx of country honk in the aftermath of three years of freewheelin’ juggernauting that a similar shifting in style occurred for The Dead from psychedelic manic panic to down-home sonic tonic. ![]() ![]() “Aoxomoxoa” marked the point where The Grateful Dead’s final, faded old San Franciscan Art Nouveau touches re-arranged themselves in between country/western overtures (reflecting the then current state of Mr. ![]() Both reflective and sensitive to its own space, “Aoxomoxoa” is a kaleidoscopic shuffle of shifting tempos and textures that combines with the density of Robert Hunter’s imagery rich lyrics and whose considerable gnostic word horde trickled down to alter The Dead’s musical chemistry as both tailored themselves in a poet’s forge in turn tempered by deft arrangements of loose and yearning earth rhythms and laid to rotate slowly upon the ever-turning wheel of fortune. It’s the aural equivalent of the cluttered ‘attics of my life’ collage from the back sleeve of their later “American Beauty” LP. Which is a pity, because the original mix of “Aoxomoxoa” (only available as a long-deleted album) is immaculately imperfect in its state of EQ’ed up the wall/verging-into-red imbalance from errant mix-during-live-playback sessions and is consequently filled with all manner of organic blunders: warm ups, false starts, off-mike vocal directives and a decided lack of fade outs which leaves in each and every ragged ending. Why The Grateful Dead returned to their own Alembic Studios in September 1971 with the master tapes of “Anthem Of The Sun” and “Aoxomoxoa” for a remix and subsequent re-issuing of the two later in the year is a mystery: for they were both already perfect in their erratic, sloppy, understated and cosmic studio executions.īy some wrinkle in the fabric of decision-making that governs re-issues, the CD of “Anthem Of The Sun” boasted the original mix, while the CD version of “Aoxomoxoa” did not. ![]()
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