I’m often asked (actually no, I’m not – I’m *never* asked but wish I were ’cause I’d love to have the conversation) which is the best Grateful Dead album for a beginner to listen to. And my answer is always the same – none of them.

With the Dead its kinda all or nothing, you have to immerse yourself in at least half a dozen to even begin to understand what they were about. And you can pretty much forget the ‘studio’ albums, and everything after about 1975 unless you’re totally bonkers. Which I’m not.

I have all the studio albums up to Terrapin Station and about 20 or so live albums from 67-74 but hardly anything after that. Oh, Dicks Picks 18 has nice versions of ‘Deal’, ‘Looks Like Rain’, and ‘Brown Eyed Woman’ but by 1978 Kreutzmann and Lesh have lost their fire and it’s generally pretty MOR stuff most of the way.

So give yourself a few days. Get hold of Anthem Of The Sun, Live/Dead, Europe 72, Hundred Year Hall, and the cut down 3CD version of the Fillmore 69 concerts. Add Mars Hotel (for ‘Unbroken Chain’ and the original ‘Eyes Of The World’) and American Beauty, so you get at least a sense of the studio Dead, and finally the ‘Skull And Roses’ live album because it’s probably the best of the briefer live albums and has a rudimentary ‘Other One’ and is pared down to the five essentials. Avoid anything with the awful Donna Jean Godchaux’s wailing, and Brent Mydland’s gruff and unnecessary vocals.

If you like psych music you’ll already know Live/Dead (won’t you???) And if not it probably won’t do a thing for you. But if do, and have somehow missed out, then you owe it to yourself to experience one of the most extraordinary 75 minutes ever committed to vinyl.

Otherwise, it doesn’t much matter where you start, you probably won’t be blown away by anything at first – and leave Cryptical Envelopment (from Hundred Year Hall) until your third or fourth day. But make sure you listen to at least two versions each of Dark Star, The Other One, Eyes Of The World and China Cat Sunflower/I Know You Rider. It’s almost impossible to find versions of EOTW, even in the later years, it’s such a glorious song.

In fact it’s so good, and I’m so confident that when you hear it you’ll want to hear more – and *buy* more – that I’m going to upload one of my favourite versions for you – go get it. Aren’t I nice to you? So please download this, listen to it (bear in mind it’s live and warts-and-all, and forgive the duff vocals – that’s not what GD were all about anyway), and then investigate further and buy some more GD. Your long strange trip starts here.

If you like psych music you’ll already know Live/Dead (won’t you???) And if not it probably won’t do a thing for you. But if do, and have somehow missed out, then you owe it to yourself to experience one of the most extraordinary 75 minutes ever committed to vinyl.

I was 14 when Sweet Baby James came out, and 15 when I bought it. 1970-72 was always the very best period for music, in my opinion, and I can’t help but feel a bit sorry for friends I’ve met who weren’t around at that time – I just wished happy birthday to a friend who was only just born when the first Throwing Muses album came out!

I can pretty much plot out my life in terms of the music that was around at the time – some of which I liked and bought, some of which I disliked, most of which I ignored, and some of which I discovered and bought retrospectively. And there are almost always classic albums that last forever – like Sweet Baby James. And some songs that just have to go in my Desert Island Discs list (which runs to several hundred).

Anyway, that lyric came to mind just now in a rather poignant way. A few months ago a ‘gobby, giggly alto’ bounced into Tottenham Community Choir and brightened up rehearsals (not that they weren’t already bright) – and also my Twitter feed. And now she’s leaving us to go to Australia. And I just found out I won’t see her again. And that’s sad. Just thought I’d let you know.

So this post is for Sarah.

“Happy trails to you, till we meet again
Happy trails to you, keep smiling till then”
(Roy Rogers via Quicksilver Messenger Service)

Well, nowhere. It’s always been around, just not here. I decided to move the content of my other blogs ‘Choir Wars’, ‘Stroke My Little Pony’ and ‘My High Horse Approaches’ from hosted by WordPress to hosted by me. Gives me a bit more control. The posts previous to this one have all been imported from one of those three blogs.

My other blog, ‘Good Job I Kept My Turntable’, is still there and will remain so until and unless I can find a way to import all the posts, comments and images from Blogger (hosted by Google) – and anyway Blogger blogs are useful to have for SEO purposes.

But from now on this will be my main blog. It will contain stuff imported from the now-deleted ‘Choir Wars’, ‘Stroke My Little Pony’ and ‘My High Horse Approaches’ blogs but ‘*not* the posts from ‘Good Job I Kept My Turntable’.

See you soon.

If you’ve been following me for a while on Twitter or Facebook, or before that on MySpace and one of my other blogs, you’ll know that I have a number of high horses that I leap on from time to time. So expect more of the same here – rants about stupidity (religion, homeopathy, smoking), moans about bad spelling and grammar, raves about whatever great music happens to have shuffled onto my ipod recently, comments on my choir, and so on. No apologies for that, if you don’t want to read it then why the hell should you. But because I’ve been spilling out over the Internet for several years now, and it’s hardly a novelty to me, posts here may be infrequent and unpredictable – often just me killing time on my commute.
So on we go.
I’m on one of my Grateful Dead jags at the moment, and if you’re not familiar with their music then I’m sorry for you. I’m not going to reccommend any particular album that you should listen to as an introduction but if you think Sergeant Pepper was groundbreaking in 67, just check out Anthem Of The Sun from a year earlier.
One of the things about GD is that – a bit like Pink Floyd – the studio albums are only part of the story. They state the basic song structure and allow you to get familiar with the words or the themes but they really don’t show the potential of what can be done with them in a live environment. For that you need to be at the gigs (never saw GD live but saw Floyd several times in around 70-72) or to immerse yourself in the bootlegs. Not the commercially available ‘live’ albums like Ummagumma,