1001 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die: 197. Grateful Dead – American Beauty (1970)

 

Et tu Jerry? You may be forgiven for wondering, like I did, if you’ve accidentally put on a Crosby, Stills and Nash album because, unlike the jazz-rock jams of the previous Grateful Dead album, this is some country-rock complete with lush vocal harmonies.

But no, it is indeed the Dead, either riding the curve of the zeitgeist or jumping on the bandwagon, depending on how you’d like to pitch it. Catchy country rock tunes, complete with steel guitars (Sugar Magnolia) or banjo (Friend of the Devil). Dare I say it, they sound better than CSN(Y), perhaps because they sound like a complete band rather than individuals who happen to play songs together – the tunes are all pretty consistently good, and the harmonies nicer. Ripples is a lovely cowboy-lullaby kind of track that at times sounds a little like Any Dream Will Do from Joseph and the Technicolour Dreamcoat crossed with Louvin Brothers with a dash of mandolin.

And there is a hint of the previous Dead sound as well, sometimes in the slightly wandering melodies of, say, the slow country waltz Candyman or the boppy Box of Rain. Candyman moves into a trippy solo section, while Till The Morning Comes sounds like an early Byrds song. And, the CSN comparisons are no coincidence since the Dead knew and worked with Crosby, Stills and Nash. They even credit them with teaching them how to harmonise, to which David Crosby rather charmingly demurs. I know I complain a lot about how much he seems to dominate this list, but he got a lot of respect from me for saying that the Grateful Dead were already good and didn’t need anything from him.

The album title is quite an apt one, as it’s perhaps more Americana than full-on country; the track Brokedown Palace, a fairly slow waltz, even sounded a bit like The Band to me, the quintessential Americana band of the time. Truckin’, meanwhile, is much more a rock and roll/rockabilly kind of track, touching on Chuck Berry’s No Particular Place To Go in melody, with Bob Weir, vocalist for this track, seeing to slip into an Elvis impersonation for some of it and giving almost a proto-rap for other parts.

Although the world and his dog seem to be doing country rock at this time, I really liked the elements of this album.