Consumer Guide Album

Grateful Dead: Two from the Vault [Grateful Dead, 1992]
The preserve of a huge, insular cult accustomed to rendering its very real aesthetic discriminations within a context so uncritical no outsider need pay them the slightest mind, the Dead's music has disappeared into the mythology it engendered. They were a great band--probably still are on the right night. But trying to convince an unbeliever is like trying to tell a stranger about LSD. Recorded in August 1968, when Pigpen McKernan was still living in his body, these nine songs include all six on the classic Live/Dead; playing is comparable, audio superior. Great drummers were hard to come by in the hippie era, and the Dead were too discursive to want one anyway--Bill and Mickey rocked out by revving tempo and volume and letting Pigpen take it away. But often the Dead's ruminations have content--they listened more responsively than any other band of the era. And on solos of over a chorus or two, Jerry Garcia stands as the era's most inventive guitarist short of Hendrix and Page. God they were a trip. A−