The Grateful Dead - Aoxomoxoa 50th Anniversary Details

I think I have enough Dead shirts!

 

Steve

 

I don't recall them saying one way or the other if they found the master for the box and single LP releases. The SQ reports seem to suggest that the master was still missing, and this new release may or may not resolve that. I haven't seen any word on what source was used for this impending release.

 

Regarding the recording, from Wiki:

The album was recorded twice. The initial version, with the working title "Earthquake Country" (a bay area reference), was abandoned when Ampex manufactured and released the first 16-track multitrack recording machine (model number MM-1000). ***(This must be these recordings: see below). Offering 16 discrete tracks for recording and playback, it doubled the number of tracks that had been available when they recorded Anthem of the Sun, the previous year. Consequently, the band spent eight months in the studio, off-and-on, not only recording the album but getting used to — and experimenting with — the new technology. Garcia commented, "it was our first adventure with sixteen-track and we tended to put too much on everything...A lot of the music was just lost in the mix, a lot of what was really there". Drummer Bill Kreutzmann states, "sixteen-track technology came along only after we did our initial recording using an eight-track at the end of 1968. But when the studio procured one of the first sixteen-track recorders in the world (the same one we used for Live/Dead), the decision was made to toss everything we had already done and record it all again. From scratch. This time we could go deeper and experiment with things no other band had done yet. Being able to utilize twice as many tracks essentially doubled the possibilities of what we could do with each song. The end result was dense and cumbersome in places, and all that studio time cost us a fortune, but we were experimenting on the sonic frontier, exploiting cutting-edge technology.

***OCTOBER 1968 – EARLY 1969
Aoxomoxoa Sessions
Pacific Recording Studio, San Mateo (& possibly some tracks from Pacific High Recording, San Francisco)

St. Stephen >
The Eleven
Barbed Wire Whipping Party
Doin’ That Rag
Dupree’s Diamond Blues
Instrumental (Garcia & drums)
China Cat Sunflower
Cosmic Charlie
Doin’ That Rag #2
Mountains of the Moon
What’s Become of the Baby
Rosemary
Mountains of the Moon #2

These are mostly basic tracks without overdubs, many thought to be from the 8-track recording sessions in late 1968. A couple may be alternate mixes; the first three tracks were abandoned, and St. Stephen redone.

These derive from a 3.75ips reel belonging to Sandy Troy with two additional tracks supplied by a 7.5ips reel belonging to Alan Bershaw.

 

From Grateful Dead Family Discography: Aoxomoxoa :

Aoxomoxoa was the Dead's first recording to be made without an external producer and the to be dominated by Garcia/Hunter songs. It was also the first recording by the Dead using sixteen track tape technology. Early 8-track recordings for the album were abandoned when the 16-track technology became available. Garcia commented on the use of 16-track in the first Deadheads newsletter issued in 1971;

It was our first adventure with 16-track, and we tended to put too much on everything. We tried to use up every track, and it came out mixed by committee. A lot of the music was just lost in the mix.Tom Constanten also commented on the use of 16 track technology in Skeleton Key;Mixing 16-track was another brand-new game. Even when it didn't sound loud, it sounded dense, and the VU needles were bouncing off the pins. The mixdown became a performance in it's own right, with three or more pairs of hands on the soundboard, minding their cues.The lengthy recording and mixing period and the relative lack of success of the album when released resulted in the band being in debt to Warner Brothers for nearly $200,000.
All eight tracks are written by Garcia and Hunter. Robert Hunter spoke of the period in an interview;

Garcia asked me how I'd like to be lyricist in residence for the Dead, and I thought it might be like fine. I had written lyrics on and off since I was 17, but I fancied myself as a serious writer, and rock 'n' roll wasn't exactly what I had planned for myself. But things were changing at such an intense rate, and it seemed like it would be a nice thing to do ... I went right to work, fell right into it.Garcia spoke in a later interview about the songs, and the reason for many of them subsequently being dropped from the Dead's performances;A lot of the Aoxomoxoa songs are overwritten and cumbersome to perform. They're packed with lyrics or musical chnages that aren't worth it for what finally happens with the song. But at the time , I wasn't writing songs for the band to play - I was writing songs to be writing songs. Those were the first songs Hunter and I did together, and we didn't have the craft of songwriting down.In a Rolling Stone interview Garcia described the album as;...one of my pet records, 'cause it was the first stuff that I thought was starting to sound like how I wanted to hear songs sound.Aoxomoxoa was recorded at about the same time as Live/Dead. The first Deadheads newsletter also includes a quote from Garcia about the two albums;If you take LIVE DEAD and AOXOMOXOA together, you have a picture of what we were doing then. We were playing LIVE DEAD and we were recording AOXOMOXOA.The album title came from the cover artist Rick Griffin who had been experimenting letter groupings. Griffin asked Hunter about a title for the LP and Hunter suggested that he tried out some of his palindromic lettering things such as OXO and MOM.
One working title of this album was Earthquake Country.

A number of outtakes from the Aoxomoxoa sessions circulate on tape.

Related releases

A white label promotional version of the LP was distributed.

Remixed and reissued in a slightly altered sleeve by Warner Brothers in 1972.

Released on CD in 1987 by Warner Brothers 2-1790

All CD releases have been of the remixed version.