Live/Dead – THE GRATEFUL DEAD**

Dark Star/Saint Stephen/The Eleven/Turn On Your Love Light/Death Don’t Have No Mercy/Feedback/And We Bid You Goodnight

A very clever title for the first live Grateful Dead album recorded at the Avalon Ballroom, San Francisco and Fillmore West in early 1969. The double LP Live/Dead gives the listener exactly what to expect from a Grateful Dead concert, and therein lies the problem. (US:64)

“Live/Dead is a brilliant album that beautifully documents The Grateful Dead at their best in the live setting during this era. The musicianship is beautiful and crisp; Jerry Garcia's voice sounds pristine and Phil Lesh's performance on bass is outstanding. As for the song selection, it showcases the band's diverse set of influences, from jazz, to free improvisations, to rock and blues.”

“This is so very typical of their output during this period, featuring their standard improvisations infinitum and endless noodling. Some of this sounds great, some, substantially less interesting.”

“A lot of people get lost on side B with the boring Death. And many people cannot handle stuff like feedback.”

“I don't like this album, after listening to Working Man's Dead and American Beauty I was expecting that crisp organic musicianship. However, all I found was a lot of time being wasted. Classic early Dead, but probably only for deadheads and the like.”

“My problems with Live/Dead are encapsulated within the first track, Dark Star. Here, the band take a good, six minute song and stretch it out to 23+ minutes without actually adding anything interesting to it. There are only a few bands talented enough to make me want to listen to 17 minutes of jamming and The Dead are nowhere near that level. St. Stephen, by contrast, is a great little song. Clocking in at six minutes, it isn’t exactly the pinnacle of precision and efficiency, but the looseness actually adds to its charms. Beyond that, the rest of the songs are nice, but they are stretched far beyond their breaking points, making the whole proposition a waste of time.”

“The music on Live Dead is powerful and throbbing, but at the same time mellow with a mystical, playful, sentimental sense that transports one to another world.”