American Beauty | Grateful Dead

American Beauty | Grateful Dead | A genuine American classic

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American Beauty

	American Beauty Grateful Dead Rhino / Wea, 2003 average customer review:based on 179 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

Expanded & remastered (HDCD) version of the band's 1970 classic featuring many of the Dead's best-known songs plus 6 bonus tracks 'Truckin' (single version) & 5 live tracks 'Friend of the Devil', 'Candyman', 'Till The Morning Comes', 'Attics of My Life' & 'Truckin'. Digipak. Warner/Rhino. 2003.

Ripple

"American Beauty" is one of the definitive Grateful Dead albums, of that there can be no question. Following "Workingman's Dead", this album continues the direction the band took with blues, country, and folk-styled original songs. To say the album is good is to say that air is essential for life. It's a fantastic milestone in American music. Most of the album will grab you, with tracks like "Operator" and arguably "Candy Man" being the weakest. The strongest track on this album in my opinion is "Ripple", as I understand it, a song that more or less became Jerry Garcia's theme song. It's a deeply spiritual track, and one that I love dearly. You'll almost certainly have heard "Friend of the Devil", "Sugar Magnolia", and "Truckin'" on any good rock radio station, so there should be some familiar territory to cover on this album. Consider this album essential Grateful Dead.

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A genuine American classic

One of the most aptly titled recordings in the rock canon, this is the Dead's studio masterpiece. Inspired by American folk and country music and by the sophisticated vocal harmonies that Crosby, Stills and Nash were producing at the time, Garcia and company crafted 10 tracks that are polished, warmly engaging, and uniquely American. This isn't their most progressive work, or their most explosive, but it's probably their most accessible. From the exquisite melancholy of Phil Lesh's "Box of Rain", the bluegrassy "Friend of the Devil", and the exuberant "Sugar Magnolia", to the beautifully harmonized "Attics of My Life" and the traveling beat of Bob Weir's "Truckin'" the Dead staked claim to a sound that remained uniquely theirs for the rest of their career. A genuine American classic.

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Beauty Is A Real Gem

What makes this masterpiece speak for itself is the main ingredient none other than the tight harmonies flowing throughout this entire recording,infested with strong lyrics,a prime example,Attics Of My Life,flowing like a fine wine remenisant of the classic Beatles,Sun king,and classic is as classic does in Jerry Garcia's signature tune,Ripple,and other notable tunes such as,Sugar Magnolia,and Operator,the instrumentation is subdued on this album leaving the vocals standing out painting a visual in the listeners mind. This Grateful Dead remastered classic is essential,containing sixteen tracks,ten of the original 1970 album,the last six are live versions of,Truckin,Friend Of The Devil,Til The Morning Comes,also including a single version of Truckin'. An American beauty.

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American Classic

The Grateful Dead were a band in transition at the beginning of the 1970's. The San Francisco dream was pretty much dead and over with. The Summer of Love had spun into Altamont. The bikers the Dead had fashioned themselves after had turned a Stones concert into the close of an era. When the Dead released Workingman's Dead, it was a tighter album compositional than the earlier albums, and showed the band's (particularly Jerry Garcia) love for roots and bluegress. Gone were the psychedelic jams, in were discipline and a subdued recognitiion of how much was different. "Workingman's Dead" was a great album by a band that struggled to translate their ideas to tape.

But the follow-up, released the same year, was a masterstroke. Opening with Phil Lesh (and longtime Dead-writer Robert Hunter's) composition "Box of Rain" and closing with a statement of purpose "Truckin'," this was the Grateful Dead saying goodbye to California and hello to American Roots music. Augmenting the band with members of The New Riders of the Purple Sage, "American Beauty" features nary a Garcia guitar lead, but plenty of his Pedal Steel. It also contains two more Dead classics, Gracia's philosophical "Ripple" and Bob Weir's "Sugar Magnolia."

It's not just for those classic songs that "American Beauty: became a classic, but for the fact that The Dead were folding all sorts of styles into the mix. There's gospel, harmonies they'd picked up from their friends Crosby, Stills & Nash, David Grisman's mandolins, and the immortal line "What a long strange trip it's been." It helped to make the album a mixed metaphor: the trip was far from over, yet the path from 1967's Grateful Dead to now was indeed wide ranging. If one looks closely at the etched glass of the cover art, you can read it both as "American Beauty" or "American Reality." The Dead had arrived at a crossroads, and as Garcia sang on "Ripple":

"If my words did glow with the gold of sunshine
And my tunes were played on the harp unstrung,
Would you hear my voice come through the music,
Would you hold it near as it were your own?"

The band made it plain on "Workingman's Dead" and "American Beauty." They'd left the 60's behind, even if the spirit would stay with them in a beautiful reality. The music would never be as spaced as side long blues-workouts of Chuck Berry, but from this moment on, they were masters of their own reality.

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