Grateful Dead 1971 – 1973

In 1970 the Grateful Dead released two albums – Working Man’s Dead and American Beauty. In late 1973 they released the album Wake of the Flood. In between these LPs they released two live albums and three solo albums. 1972 was an especially busy and productive year in spite of the lack of new band studio albums. The live albums contained songs that became concert staples but were never recorded in the studio. What if instead of the live albums and the solo albums (which were mostly band recordings anyway) they released albums which were a mix of live and studio tracks? The premise would be that they would enhance the live tracks of new songs (the European tour was recorded on 16track) and those songs that needed more attention they would record fully in the studio.

This period is full of new songs that were scattered over those five albums (actually four, Mickey’s album was mostly instrumental and more experimental). I had recently read that there was talk at the time of a follow up to American Beauty to complete a trilogy of sorts that was centered around or named after the song Ramble on Rose. I took it upon myself to compile this album and truly fell in love with the period.

My first attempt turned into a double album. Those familiar with me might know of my disdain for double albums but this one worked. The song choice was purely my own taste. I did very little research beyond finding out which live songs were new and unrecorded. I arranged the songs to fit on four vinyl sides. It worked. It played nice. But it left me with a handful of still great songs leftover. The final tracklist was as follows:

Side A
1 Deal
2 One More Saturday Night
3 Jack Straw
4 Mr. Charlie
5 To Lay Me Down

Side B
1 Greatest Story Ever Told
2 Ramble On Rose
3 Tennessee Jed
4 Black-Throated Wind

Side C
1 Bertha
2 Sugaree
3 Looks like Rain
4 Loser

Side D
1 Cassidy
2 He's Gone
3 Playing In the Band
4 Bird Song

I posted the tracklist in a comment on soniclovenoize’s Albums That Never Were blog and somebody asked where The Wheel was. I had just come across the song They Love Each Other which sort of fit the timeline so I compiled a follow up LP with the following leftover songs.

Side A
1 Brown-Eyed Woman
2 Walk in the Sunshine
3 The stranger (Two Souls in Communion)
4 The Wheel

Side B
5 They Love Each Other
6 Chinatown Shuffle
7 Wharf Rat
8 Mexicali Blues

This is where things started to snowball. I started thinking “what if the double album was two single albums?”. I looked at the tracklists again and rearranged the disc sides of the double album. If they were to be single albums, then some songs would have to be moved.

Jack Straw was the most out of place. If the first LP would have been released late ’71 or early ’72 then we had an anomaly. Before the European tour Bob sang all the verses but by the end of the tour Bob and Jerry were trading verses. The version I used from Europe ’72 had Bob and Jerry trading verses. This meant that the side with Jack Straw (Side A) had to be moved to the second album. I swapped side A with side C which contained Bertha which was from the first live album in late ’71. I made new covers and dumped them onto my mp3 player for testing and everything seemed good.

Then I started researching and, well, then things got crazy. I had to go back to the drawing board and start over. Same song pool but now I looked into the time line of when each song was first performed or recorded. I am still discovering and finalizing things. I will post the results after the next project.