The thirteenth and final studio album from the Grateful Dead, originally released on Halloween day of 1989, just eleven days after the final mixing session.
The LP version is missing Brent Mydland's We Can Run that appears on the CD, so if you want the full experience check out that version. The album in the picture above is a 2011 repress by Friday Music that has much better mastering for this format than the original LP pressings did.
This album was a bit unusual for the Dead at the time, in that Mydland contributed four songs to it in conjunction with lyricist John Barlow. He had taken a more prominent role in recent years, though, performing more and more vocals as they played live. Sadly, he would die of a cocaine and morphine overdose the following July after the completion of the Dead's 1990 summer tour.
Overall, this is one of the most solid studio albums produced by the band. Every song on here is worth taking the time to hear, and the whole thing stands up well with repeated listening. There are three Garcia/Hunter numbers here with Foolish Heart, Standing On The Moon, and the title track. My personal favorite cuts are the two from Bob Weir: Victim Or The Crime and Picasso Moon. The four by Mydland are all excellent, and leave me wondering what he could have done in the future. Of these songs, Just A Little Light and the elegant lullaby he wrote for his daughters I Will Take You Home are true standouts in the band's deep catalog.
Ned Lagin first came into the Grateful Dead's orbit after he saw them perform in Boston in 1969 while he was a student at MIT. Afterwards he wrote to the band and left such an impression with his letter that Jerry Garcia, Pigpen, Phil Lesh, and Mickey Hart visited him at his dorm when the Dead returned to Massachusetts in 1970 where he ended up getting into a long jam session with Pigpen. Shortly after, Garcia, Lesh, and Hart attended a concert at the university that featured an 8-track electronic composition of Lagin's. Throughout the summer of that year, Lagin spent a good deal of time at Hart's ranch in California, jamming with not only the Grateful Dead, but members of Jefferson Airplane, Crosby, Stills & Nash, Quicksilver Messenger Service, and New Riders Of The Purple Sage. He also sat in on some of the recording sessions for American Beauty, although only his piano playing on Candyman made the final album. Over the next several years, Lagin would make numerous appearances with the Dead in concert, playing electronics, piano, organ, and making early use of primitive PCs to manipulate sounds in real time. Some of the best Dark Star performances of this period involved his input.
Between 1971 and 1975, Lagin sporadically worked on the recording that would become known as Seastones. Composed with Lesh, there were several Grateful Dead shows where the two musicians would perform variations on the composition between the Dead's first and second sets, in addition to him sitting in with the full group on some of their wildest live explorations. During the band's "Wall Of Sound" era in 1974, Lagin made full use of Owlsley's massive speaker rig, creating freakish loops of electronic feedback and, on several occasions, using subsonic tones that would actually briefly lift the stage off of its moorings and set it back down again.
A version of Seastones was first offered to Clive Davis at Columbia Records in late 1972. Davis rejected the experimental album, calling it "unlistenable noise." After spending almost three more years refining the composition, the version pictured above was released on the Grateful Dead Records subsidiary imprint Round Records in a format known at the time as quadraphonic stereo (this technique is now known as 4.0 surround sound). In addition to the spacey electronics provided by Lagin, there are sections that feature heavily treated guitar from Garcia and David Crosby, with Lesh contributing some bass guitar, along with Mickey Hart and Spencer Dreyden on percussion, and vocals from Garcia, Crosby, Grace Slick, and David Freiberg. The album has a feel not entirely different from Berlin-school electronica of the 70s, but with a heavier influence from modern composers like Stockhausen and John Cage.
Ned Lagin would continue to cross paths with the Dead in the future, but he retired from publicly performing music at the end of 1975 to concentrate on his career in the sciences. He would go on to make fundamental contributions to computer, ecological, and biological sciences before embarking on a new path as a photographic artist for a number of years.
We're not done with Ned's musical story just yet, though. I'll return to him later in various places. For now, enjoy this wild ride of an album.
Mickey Hart's eighth album of material primarily recorded using only percussion instruments was originally released only on CD and cassette. The LP in the photo is the first official vinyl pressing. This double album set contains three tracks that were not available on the original release.
Hart is well known as an ethnomusicologist, traveling around the world to discover, record, and learn percussion techniques from many different cultures. In addition to being a member of the Grateful Dead for a good deal of their existence, he serves on the Library of Congress National Recorded Sound Preservation Board, is on the board of the American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress and has worked with the Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage at the Smithsonian Institution. Not too shabby for an old acid-head from the first wave of San Francisco psychedelia.
This album sees him recording with musicians from India, Nigeria, Brazil, and Puerto Rico. There are an astonishing number of percussion instruments on display here, each contributing something unique to the overall sound of this surprisingly coherent work. One track even sees a group using only their body as percussion, making rhythms from beating on their chests, abdomens, thighs, and heads. The album sat at the number one spot on Billboard's Top World Music Albums for 26 straight weeks when it was first released, and also won the first Grammy Award ever presented for Best World Music Album.
