Aside from all the great inspired songs and an endless odyssey of improvisational jams. I've always thought of them as a "musical gestalt". David Crosby referred to what each player does within the GD as "electronic dixieland" (e.g. great 70's Truckin' outro jams). In addition, within the second set was the drums->space section that was everything from rolling thunder to pure musical weirdness to sweet bliss and everything in between. The music is tribal and very instinctual (in the moment) for both performer and audience. Each show presented musical excursions taking it out further and further.
Futurama and Sunburst Finish. I had them on a cassette tape. I've also got Axe Victim on vinyl but don't remember playing it that day. Another album played was a Bonzo Dog Doo Dah Band compilation (I thought I was gonna die laughing). I don't remember what other music got played, it was a long time ago.
Some of it could actually be described as country music for people who like LSD, but that's only a small percentage of what they recorded.
How exactly are Grateful Dead psychedelic? Two words, plus another three in parentheses for a total of five words: Golden Road (to Unlimited Devotion).
my mom who wasn’t born in this country remarked years ago that she was surprised that I listened to country music when I had the dead playing
the GD like the Beatles they are everything! If you don't hear it then you are not aware of what you are searching for...; )
Listen to Playing in the Band here from 21:30 to 23:30: www://archive.org/details/gd1972-10-26.sbd.miller.32717.sbeok.flac16/gd72-10-26d2t04.flac
I've often pondered this question myself. I don't find their music 'out there' enough for me. I think I'd be happy by saying that the Grateful Dead are Psychedelic but their music isn't...most of the time.
I'm a casual Dead fan at best, but in the right mood I find their long jams to be quite hypnotic and very enjoyable. I'll take "Dark Star" in almost any version you can throw at me. And even from the very beginning, the studio "Viola Lee Blues" from the debut album gets into an intense zone that speaks to me. The folky/countryish Workingman's Dead/American Beauty period is cool in a completely different way, and shouldn't somehow count against their psych stuff. As for the rest, I don't care if I ever hear them do a cover song under any circumstances. I get that they were fun for them to play and that you have to pad out four-hour sets somehow, but why would I want to listen to The Dead murder Buddy Holly, The Beatles or Merle Haggard when I can listen to the originals any time I want to? More to the point of the OP's long-ago question (which I somehow missed the first time around), time to trot out a story I've told several times over the years on this forum… Sometime in the early 1990s, PBS ran a special on the Grateful Dead. They were shown in concert with one of their (at the time) state-of-the-art, pulsating light shows behind them. They were in the midst of one of their long, spacey jams when they put the light show on full-screen for a few minutes. Now I'm a drug weenie who in his lifetime has never done more than a bit of grass now and then (and hash exactly once). So you'll understand what my reaction was when PBS did this. I remember thinking to myself "Wait a minute…you mean you're supposed to listen to this music, watch this light show AND take acid???" The first two were more than sufficient for me!
The OP makes the mistake of trying to pigeonhole The Dead. They blend many styles or just go back and forth. The Skull&Roses album has an 18-minute Other One that is completely ‘out there’. It’s followed by Me & My Uncle, a country rocker. It’s maybe a sign of the times that folks want bands to do just one thing over and over. If that’s the case, the Dead will detailgate ya every time.
Never done any acid... but none is needed with this. To the OP, if the Dead aren't psychedelic, what is? I can hear it in most anything they do, at least the potential to create a riff to return to, a long jam, seems to be in every song.
Everybody has an opinion, I get that. But arguments regarding what is or what is not fill-in-the-blank-genre strike me as funny. To think that the Dead don't sound psych to you simply means that they don't fit your definition of psychedelia. If the English, whimsical Piper at the Gates of Dawn version of psych is what your gold standard is, then the San Fran version of acid jamming isn't gonna cut it. Or if the Hollywood, organ-drenched nourish Doors of 1967 (the OP mentioned "Strange Days" earlier) is closer to your mark then again - the Grateful Dead sound nothing like that. But that's the thing, psychedelia isn't one sound. The major psych bands didn't sound alike at all. If heavy guitar floats your boat, then Hendrix or Cream are going to be the real deal, and the '67 Beatles won't get you there. Doesn't mean Sgt Pepper's isn't psych though (and yes, I've read people on this very forum make that claim).
This ^. The "psychedelic" heart of their music is a genuine unique signature from Grateful Dead culture that does not require acid to appreciate. The groove is almost sinister in its flow, it is there no matter what they did, a force of nature. Maybe "psych" now means processed instruments, tripped out lyrics, halloween sound fx, funhouse gags, and electronic decorations - that's all just window dressing, playing psychedelic dressup.
