215. Grateful Dead, "American Beauty"
Not really a studio band, the Dead are far better known for their sometimes incendiary live shows, tapes of which circulated (and may still circulate, idk) among the faithful underground for decades like ciagrettes in prison. In the pre-Internet days, knowing someone who had a Cornell 5/8/77 was like knowing someone who had an unreleased Beatles album. Now you can just buy the show or even just listen to it on Spotify. It's great if you're a fan but something's lost when you lose the cachet and the mystery of the hard-to-get.
Although they were never known for the studio albums, this one is the exception to the rule, a lovely set of stoner-country songs, obviously informed by the Flying Burrito Brothers and the burgeoning country-rock scene of the late 60s. Recorded in San Francisco at Wally Heider Studios (which eventually became Hyde Street Studios, still rocking along today), the album is a fusion of the bluegrass and early country sounds Jerry Garcia was fascinated by with the psychedelia that the band gravitated towards. The result is a gorgeous set of songs, with classics like "Sugar Magnolia" and "Attics of My Life" comfortably next to songs like "Operator," an earwormy blues track written and sung by Pigpen McKernan, who would die from complications of alcoholism a few short years later. "Ripple," a gentle, folky ballad with the kind of whoa-man-you-are-blowing-my-mind lyrics that Robert Hunter was famous for around this time, has become an iconic Dead track, probably because it was played so rarely live. "Brokedown Palace," a song of incredible yearning and sadness, is another highlight, and famously lent its name to the 1999 Claire Danes film about American drug mules in Thailand.
"Truckin'," the album closer, is famous in its own right as one of the few Dead songs that got any airplay until "Touch of Grey" in the late 80's and consequently was many people's first and only point of contact with the Dead. Stripped of all its baggage, it's a great song, a rollicking blues-rock tale of drug busts and travel and just being hassled by the Man:
Got a tip they're gonna kick the door in again
I'd like to get some sleep before I travel
But if you got a warrant, I guess you're gonna come in
Busted, down on Bourbon Street
Set up, like a bowlin' pin
Knocked down, it gets to wearin' thin
They just won't let you be
Trying to pick a "best" Grateful Dead album is a fool's game; they're all over the place, from the prog-adjacent Wake of the Flood to the disco-tinged Shakedown Street. But this one is my personal favorite, the musical equivalent of smoking a joint and drinking an ice cold beer on a dock by a mountain lake and just watching the birds fly by.
Does this album deserve to be in the Top 500? Certainly.
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