Description
Label Review.
1969 album remastered. Both original 1969 and 1971 mixes present along with previously unreleased recordings from The Avalon Ballroom in January 1969 which ‘Live/Dead’ was partly compiled from. Also available on 2CD (digipak), & vinyl picture disc.
Our Overview.
By September 1968, when The Grateful Dead started work on their third album ‘Aoxomoxoa’, they had already cemented their reputation as one of the premier West Coast “jam” bands, spearheading a new genre of rock which many other bands were attempting to emulate. Their recently released second album ‘Anthem of The Sun’ had seen the band push the boundaries of the recording studio to the limit with painstaking overlayering of live and studio tracks. After some early work on some new material, they had the chance to use one of the first 16-track recorders ever produced (to put it in context, Abbey Road in the UK had only just switched to 8-track). During the recording of the new album, they used the new technology to record a live record at the Avalon Ballroom in San Francisco - ‘Live/Dead’ which would be the first ever such attempt to capture a concert on 16-track.
The new studio album was the groups most accessible to date with songs of a more ‘regular’ length, hummable tunes and adding acoustic guitars into their usual swirling psychedelic stew. There were two mixes of the album, both of which are featured here on this new deluxe edition. the 1969 original mix, and the 1971 remix which was overseen by Phil Lesh and Jerry Garcia. After the success of their two 1970 masterpieces, ‘Workingman’s Dead’ and ‘American Beauty’, Warner Bros. requested that ‘Aoxomoxoa’ (and its predecessor, ‘Anthem Of The Sun’) be remixed to make them more accessible. The original 1969 mix had been lost for decades before turning up in the early 2000s, and it’s here on CD for the first time, along with its more well-known 1971 remix. The differences in the mixes at times are subtle and nuanced, and at others are glaring and dramatic, and it’s incredibly fun to contrast and compare.
As for the albums cover art designed by by cover artist Rick Griffin and lyricist Robert Hunter, drummer Bill Kreutzmann said: “Aoxomoxoa...doesn’t mean anything - it’s just a cool palindrome. People have surmised over the years that you could read the Grateful Dead lettering on the front cover as We Ate the Acid which, I suppose, is true enough, if you look at it just right.”