50th Anniversary AOXOMOXOA release

mellowgerman

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From the vaults of the Dead. Has anybody else checked this out?

https://store.dead.net/aoxomoxoa-50th-anniversary-deluxe-edition-2-cd-1.html

For the 50th anniversary of the album, they have released both mixes (1969 and 1971) as well as some bonus live stuff.
I've been enjoying it quite a bit this past week. AOXOMOXOA was always one of my favorite Dead studio albums -- for me, the real magic was mostly concentrated in the first three studio albums and the live stuff from the 60's and 70's. Interestingly enough, it turns out I had never heard the 1969 mixes of the album and I'm head over heels in love. I find them to be much more fun and interesting than the 1971 version, particularly "St. Stephen", "Dupree's Diamond Blues", "Doing That Rag", and "Mountains of the Moon". I can't stop listening to them. Why would they ever take that awesome eerie background choir out of "Mountains of the Moon"?! Even "What's Become of the Baby" finally has some weight for me. On the 1971 mix they made it so buried in delay and modulation that you couldn't understand any of the lyrics... and lyrics is really 95% of what it is! The one thing that the 1971 mixes might have going for them is that they are probably a little "cleaned up" (aside from "What's Become of the Baby") but the crispy clean studio effect is never something I needed when it came to the Dead. I'd rather have the crazy raw and organic smorgasbord of creative auditory indulgence I get on the 1969 version. Lastly Phil's bass sounds much chunkier and out-front on a lot of the 1969 stuff; almost like we're sitting across the room, directly in line of fire of his amp -- listen for this at the end of the "St. Stephen" and "Doing that Rag".
The live tracks on this collection are also interesting. Not exceptional compared to some of the other live stuff from the era, but the "Death Don't Have No Mercy" that they give us is a lot more powerful and energetic than any other Dead recording I've heard of the song.
Overall, I'd say it's well worth checking out and I'd be excited to hear what you guys think of it!

Oh and Happy Father's Day, y'all!
 
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wileypickett

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Thanks for your assesment. This was the first Dead album I ever bought (and I bought as much for the cover as for the music it contained) and I bought it when it was first issued. I've never heard the 1971 remixes. (I didn't even know it had been remixed!) I'm planning to pick up this reissue too.
 

idealassets

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Bought the original when it first came out. Thought is was "very Psychedelic", no one else around here seemed to understand it, and wondered what the heck it was all about. Apparently the St. Steven/ China Cat Sunflower medley with later The Eleven added in became a popular mainstay in Dead concerts for years to come. Sources state that a 2 year old toddler named Courtney Love is the blond girl in that family portrait on the back of the original album.
 

adorshki

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Bought the original when it first came out. Thought is was "very Psychedelic", no one else around here seemed to understand it, and wondered what the heck it was all about.
Yeah Sergeant Pepper's was a nice safe 25 microgram dose,
DSC05692.jpg

compared to Aoxomoxoa which easily cleared 500, like most of Owsley's product, not too surprisingly.
LSDInPillForm.jpg

Stronger even than Baxter's
Because of these guys :
"When Scully took LSD for the first time in April 1965 he felt at one with God and all living things.
Later that year he began hanging out with the San Francisco-based Grateful Dead, helping as sound engineer for the rock band along with Owsley “Bear” Stanley, already dubbed “The King of LSD” for the purity of his product.
The late Stanley, then 30, took the 21-year-old Scully as his apprentice beginning in mid-1966 at a lab in the basement of a rented house in Point Richmond. Stanley, his girlfriend and Scully cranked out 300,000 doses of “White Lightning” LSD."
dt.common.streams.StreamServer.cls

:smile-new:
Anybody remember this? Actually my first Dead Album but having been recorded in '66, just a mild dose:
R-2288552-1293995964.jpeg.jpg

All the material was Pigpen-era rhythm'n'blues like they would have been playing in pizza parlors and at Kesey's house in the woods in La Honda, nothing like what was happening 2 years later.
Simple yeah, but HAPPY, although jamming for 18 minutes on "Midnight Hour" would have been pretty radical for any pop band in '66...
By then they'd already hooked up with Owsley not just as a supplier but as the force who enabled their passage to the next level, as outlined here:
https://relix.com/articles/detail/t...ife_and_times_of_augustus_owsley_stanley_iii/
"In Rock Scully’s words, “Owsley brought us together in a whole other way because he had a cottage in Berkeley where there were no neighbors who could complain about the noise and the place was packed full of gear. He had tape decks and really good microphones and great speakers. It was the ideal haven that was just as high-tech in fidelity terms as you could get back then. He also had these tape loops, and so for Phil and Jerry and all of us, it was just a playground where we could get something going on a tape, start a loop, and then improvise on top of that.”

Read more: https://relix.com/articles/detail/t...of_augustus_owsley_stanley_iii/#ixzz5rDq97hMp

:biggrin-new:
Apparently the St. Steven/ China Cat Sunflower medley with later The Eleven added in became a popular mainstay in Dead concerts for years to come.
Yep, although my personal favorites from that period (and probably overall for the Dead would be That's It For the Other One/ Wharf Rat/Dark Star.
Apparently the St. Steven/ China Cat Sunflower medley with later The Eleven added in became a popular mainstay in Dead concerts for years to come.
Yep, although my personal favorites from that period (and probably overall for the Dead would be That's It For the Other One/ Wharf Rat/Dark Star.
Sources state that a 2 year old toddler named Courtney Love is the blond girl in that family portrait on the back of the original album.
Yeah I've heard that one, actually first stumbled across only few years ago when doing some other background refreshing on the Dead, in the form of a debunking of the myth:
,
"As it happens, Courtney was not one of the kids included. The girl long identified as her was actually a close family member of the band – Stacy Kreutzmann, born a week apart from Courtney."
 
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adorshki

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I like this description! :encouragement:
They were already well down that road for Anthem of the Sun, too.
Here's a famous story about a session for "Born Cross-Eyed":
"OK. So, that pause you get hear and there throughout the song? One of those pauses, and I suspect it’s the one right before “My how lovely you are, my dear...” was the place where Weir famously asked for the sound of “thick air” in the silence of the pause. Or maybe it was right before the big final chord came crashing down. Either way, that was the last straw for the harried studio producer Dave Hassinger, who reportedly stormed out of the studio shouting “Thick air! He wants thick air!”"
:glee:
 

sailingshoes72

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Good story, Al. Traditional music studio producers must have found working with the San Francisco psychedelic bands quite an experience! :saturn:
 
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JF-30

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Never really dug that album. My fav's are the ones they put out on their own label. Wake and Mars, Allah was a tough listen in many parts. The ones not on their label I dug are Terrapin and Shakedown. They were a totally different band live as compared to studio recording. Saw them with Jerry about 13 times and Jerry solo once.
 

JF-30

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Thick air. I think he was on a drug that wasn't invented yet. I remember watching that in a Dead doc I watched. I was like WTF you are out of our mind. He also wanted to make the thick air into a rhythm track.
 

adorshki

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Thick air. I think he was on a drug that wasn't invented yet.
naahhhh....since he could still talk it was probably only a hundred mics or so.
:smile:
Good story, Al. Traditional music studio producers must have found working with the San Francisco psychedelic bands quite an experience! :saturn:
This reminds of me of an insight I had that finally started warming me up to Surrealistic Pillow :
I had a vison of the RCA engineers struggling to capture the band at volume in their cavernous studio; while trying not to peg the level indicators.
I actually got a lot of respect for 'em, then, thinking about these likely 40-year old dudes just doing their job with the latest pop act to come through.
And they did it very well indeed.
Later on when I went looking to learn more, I discovered that the producer, Rick Jarrard, actually had a lot to do with the echo and reverb on the album and that the band itself (except Grace) actually didn't like it because of that: it didn't reflect their live sound accurately.
"Huh".
So they took pains to ensure they got a different producer for Baxter's.
Pillow engineer David Hassinger also worked on the first 2 Dead albums, and:
"The Doors' producer Paul Rothchild described Hassinger as "a perfect example of a great engineer in a bad studio.... one of the great engineers in the world today... That Hassinger was able to go as far as he did with that studio [RCA] is a mark of his excellence as an engineer."[4] "
As kid I didn't realize how important the engineers and producers were in crafting the final sound of an album, never really realized it until I saw the "Making of Are You Experienced " docu, and how much Kramer added to the raw tracks.
Another legendary engineer was Richard Podolor, whose name I always remembered from the credits on Steppenwolf the Second which is a masterpiece of engineering and production, has probably the finest 3-d presence of any vinyl I own.
"He continued to record under his own name as well as working as a session musician. By the mid-1960s, he increasingly worked as a recording engineer as well as a musician, on recordings by the Monkees, the Turtles, the Electric Prunes, the Grateful Dead, Donovan, and others. He produced two albums for Steppenwolf, engineered all their early hits including "Born to Be Wild"...
 
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Charlie Bernstein

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Garcia had a lot to say about what he thought of Aoxomoxoa, Anthem of the Sun, and their first album in Garcia: A Signpost To New Space. To spare you his long rant, he didn't think they put out anything good until Live Dead.

Most entertaining was what he said about the skeleton album. On the one hand, he was head over heals with it - thought it really captured their sound, their best effort ever. On the other hand, he hated it - because it skipped. Which was their last straw with Warner Brothers. Since no label could put out an album without cutting corners, they decided to press, package, and distribute them themselves.

By the way, I have that skeleton album, skip and all. Wish it were collectible!
 
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Charlie Bernstein

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Never really dug that album. My fav's are the ones they put out on their own label. Wake and Mars, Allah was a tough listen in many parts. The ones not on their label I dug are Terrapin and Shakedown. They were a totally different band live as compared to studio recording. Saw them with Jerry about 13 times and Jerry solo once.
I think Jerry pretty much agreed with you about the earlier stuff. See post 13.

I love all their stuff - nothing of theirs is tough to listen to compared to the pop torture I have to endure at the store where I work! If I was full-time there I'd end it all now.

My desert island Dead albums would be Workingman's, Europe '72, and Reckoning. (Plus Jerry's first solo album. Of course.)
 

DThomasC

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Not entirely on-topic, but a friend invited me to see Dead and Company at Saratoga Springs last week. I said, "yeah, why the hell not!"

Bob Weir, Bill Kreutzmann, and Mickey Hart are older, but they still sound good. I guess after 3000+ shows it's just muscle memory. And John Meyer does a credible cover of Jerry. John's actually a monster guitar player, but he's limited in this group. Jerry brought more crunch while John's sound is clean as a whistle, but it's all good.
 

crank

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Jerry's sound/tone evolved through the years. I did not so much like his ultra processed tone and Mutron auto wha and octaver, etc. from later years. I loved the raw sound from back in the days when he played a Fender Stratocaster.

Mayer is really good but no one can take a live audience along for a ride like Garcia could. Also they seem to have slowed down a few bpms... comes with age I guess. We just saw Phil Lesh and Friends weekend before last as part of Willie Nelson's Outlaw Country Fest. They were quite good, much better than I thought they would be.

I never loved the first few albums and might never have gotten into the Dead were it not for Workingman's Dead.

I have a jam band and we call ourselves "About Half Dead" We tend to play older Dead tunes and will usually reference Europe '72 if playing something like China/Rider.
 

idealassets

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Sure do! With that goofy locked-in groove on "Know You Rider." Big fun!

And I vividly remember Ripple. Tom Robbins called it Kool-Aid with a hardon.

Wonder what a vintage bottle goes for now. . . .
You could get you wanted for $1.05 a bottle not too long ago (or was it way long ago?). Tasted like cool-aid to me.., but my girlfriend loved it.
 

idealassets

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I think Jerry pretty much agreed with you about the earlier stuff. See post 13.

I love all their stuff - nothing of theirs is tough to listen to compared to the pop torture I have to endure at the store where I work! If I was full-time there I'd end it all now.

My desert island Dead albums would be Workingman's, Europe '72, and Reckoning. (Plus Jerry's first solo album. Of course.)

Wouldn't you just throw Terrapin Station in there too? Other than that my fav's were Workingman's, American Beauty, Europe..
 
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