“That’s It for the Other One,” known simply as “The Other One” on most recordings, took the form of a dizzying suite divided into four separate “sub-elements.” Using a Valentine’s Day 1968 performance at San Francisco’s Carousel Ballroom as its core, the track also incorporated passages of the song recorded at shows at Lake Tahoe’s King’s Beach Bowl and the Shrine Auditorium in L.A. Opening track “That’s It for the Other One” stitched together four different live renditions of the song. On its 50th anniversary, and in the wake of a new deluxe reissue, here are 10 things you might not know about the Grateful Dead’s second album.ġ. A half-century later, it still holds up as a masterfully disorienting 35-minute trip. ” In piecing together the LP, the band would fuse different versions of the same song to suggest, as Lesh put it in his autobiography Searching for the Sound: My Life With the Grateful Dead, “a thousand-petal lotus, unfolding in constant renewal.”įrom shapeshifting suite “That’s It for the Other One” to the album’s avant–boogie-rock coda “Caution (Do Not Stop on Tracks),” the music of Anthem was like gazing deep into a cracked kaleidoscope. “We found ourselves with enough music on tape for maybe a third of an album, so we had to figure out what to do,” Lesh said of the album in Blair Jackson’s Garcia: An American Life. “But we did have a lot of live performances. Overlaying studio recordings with flashes of uncut inspiration drawn from various gigs, the established lineup of Phil Lesh, Jerry Garcia, Bob Weir, Bill Kreutzmann and Ron “Pigpen” McKernan – along with Hart, new lyricist Robert Hunter and avant-garde keyboardist Tom Constanten – realized a convention-defying patchwork of jam-band bliss and studio trial-and-error. The Dead’s 1967 self-titled debut introduced the world to a band striking an exuberant midpoint between roots, blues and psychedelic rock, but the album didn’t quite capture what set them apart from the start: their thrilling live show. “ Anthem of the Sun was our vehicle,” Grateful Dead drummer Mickey Hart said of the band’s 1968 LP.
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