''The Grateful Dead'' is the debut album of the Grateful Dead. It was released by

Warner Bros. Records Warner Records Inc. (formerly Warner Bros. Records Inc.) is an American record label. A subsidiary of the Warner Music Group, it is headquartered in Los Angeles, California. It was founded on March 19, 1958, as the recorded music division of the ...

in March 1967. According to the biographies of both bassist Phil Lesh and drummer

Bill Kreutzmann William Kreutzmann Jr. ( ; born May 7, 1946) is an American drummer and founding member of the rock band Grateful Dead. He played with the band for its entire thirty-year career, usually alongside fellow drummer Mickey Hart, and has continued to ...

, the band released the album as ''San Francisco's Grateful Dead''.

History

The album was primarily recorded at RCA's Studio A, in Los Angeles, in only four days. The band had wanted to record the tracks in their hometown of

San Francisco San Francisco (; Spanish for " Saint Francis"), officially the City and County of San Francisco, is the commercial, financial, and cultural center of Northern California. The city proper is the fourth most populous in California and 17th ...

, but no recording studios in the area had modernized equipment at the time. The group picked

David Hassinger Walter David "Dave" Hassinger (March 31, 1927 – August 15, 2007) was an American Grammy award-winning recording engineer and record producer. Biography Early years Born in Los Angeles, California, he joined the U.S. Navy aged 17, and was o ...

to produce because he had worked as an engineer on

the Rolling Stones The Rolling Stones are an English Rock music, rock band formed in London in 1962. Active for six decades, they are one of the most popular and enduring bands of the album era, rock era. In the early 1960s, the Rolling Stones pioneered the g ...

' " (I Can't Get No) Satisfaction" and Jefferson Airplane's '' Surrealistic Pillow'' album (on the latter of which Jerry Garcia had guested and suggested the album title). Due to demands by the band's label, Warner Brothers, four of the tracks were edited for length. Phil Lesh comments in his autobiography, "to my ear, the only track that sounds at all like we did at the time is ''Viola Lee Blues''. ...None of us had any experience with performing for recording...the whole process felt a bit rushed." Bill Kreutzmann, in his autobiography, says of the songs, "their recorded versions failed to capture the energy that we had when we performed them live. ...We weren’t that good yet. We were still learning how to be a band." Though the album was considered "a big deal in San Francisco", it did not see much airplay on AM radio stations outside of the Bay Area. The freeform FM radio format that favored bands like the Dead was still developing. Warner Bros. held an album release party at the Fugazi Hall in North Beach. The label's A & R manager, Joe Smith, is noted for saying he " sproud that Warner Bros. is introducing the Grateful Dead to the world." The band used the collective pseudonym "McGannahan Skjellyfetti" for their group-written originals and arrangements. The name was a misrendering of "Skujellifeddy", a character in Kenneth Patchen's comic novel ''The Memoirs of a Shy Pornographer'', plus the name of then-frontman Pigpen's cat. In an era where true authorship (or public domain status) was more difficult to ascertain, "Cold Rain and Snow" and "New, New Minglewood Blues" were originally credited as band compositions, though they were adaptations of existing songs. A remastered version with the full versions of five album tracks, plus six bonus tracks, was released by

Rhino A rhinoceros (; ; ), commonly abbreviated to rhino, is a member of any of the five extant species (or numerous extinct species) of odd-toed ungulates in the family Rhinocerotidae. (It can also refer to a member of any of the extinct species o ...

as part of the box set '' The Golden Road (1965–1973)'' in 2001, and as a separate album in 2003. Album outtake "Alice D. Millionaire" was inspired by an autumn 1966 newspaper headline "LSD Millionaire", about the Dead's sound engineer and benefactor

Owsley Stanley Augustus Owsley Stanley III (January 19, 1935 – March 12, 2011) was an American-Australian audio engineer and clandestine chemist. He was a key figure in the San Francisco Bay Area hippie movement during the 1960s and played a pivotal role ...

. The album was reissued for Record Store Day 2011 on 180g vinyl cut from the original analog/mono masters from 1967 - the first time in over 40 years it had been released in this form. The 2013 high-definition digital, remastered release features the edited versions, as originally released, of the four tracks which were extended for the 2003 Rhino release. This edition was given a new version for the album's 50th anniversary in 2017, including a second CD featuring live material from a pair of July 1966 concerts in the Garden Auditorium, Vancouver, Canada. The second CD was released on vinyl as a stand-alone double LP on Record Store Day 2017.

Album cover

On the originally prepared artwork, the writing for the top of the album cover read "In the land of the dark, the ship of the sun is drawn by the Grateful Dead", a passage taken from the

Egyptian Book of the Dead Egyptian describes something of, from, or related to Egypt. Egyptian or Egyptians may refer to: Nations and ethnic groups * Egyptians, a national group in North Africa ** Egyptian culture, a complex and stable culture with thousands of years of ...

. As the book had become more widely read, some had mistakenly assumed that the band had taken their name from the quote: "We now return our souls to the creator, as we stand on the edge of eternal darkness. Let our chant fill the void in order that others may know. In the land of the night, the ship of the sun is drawn by the grateful dead." They hadn't, and because Garcia worried that it seemed "pretentious", and the band were uneasy about being seen as beholden to any specific philosophy or doctrine, they asked the artist,

Stanley Mouse Stanley George Miller (born October 10, 1940), better known as Mouse or Stanley Mouse, is an American artist who is notable for his 1960s psychedelic rock concert poster designs and album covers for the Grateful Dead, Journey, and other bands. P ...

, to stylize the script so that all but the band name were illegible. The central image depicts a 12th-century Chola sculpture of Yoga-

Narasimha Narasimha ( sa, नरसिंह, lit=man-lion, ), sometimes rendered Narasingha, is the fourth avatar of the Hindu god Vishnu. He is regarded to have incarnated in the form of a part-lion, part-man being to slay Hiranyakashipu, to end rel ...

, an avatar of

Vishnu Vishnu ( ; , ), also known as Narayana and Hari, is one of the principal deities of Hinduism. He is the supreme being within Vaishnavism, one of the major traditions within contemporary Hinduism. Vishnu is known as "The Preserver" withi ...

. The sculpture is currently housed at the

Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art is an art museum in Kansas City, Missouri, known for its encyclopedic collection of art from nearly every continent and culture, and especially for its extensive collection of Asian art. In 2007, ''Time'' magaz ...

Critical reception

Reviewing in 1967 for ''

The Village Voice ''The Village Voice'' is an American news and culture paper, known for being the country's first alternative newspaper, alternative newsweekly. Founded in 1955 by Dan Wolf (publisher), Dan Wolf, Ed Fancher, John Wilcock, and Norman Mailer, th ...

'', Richard Goldstein called the album "straight, decent rhythm and blues" and "a perfect illustration" of "a GOOD ALBUM, like those long lasting cold remedies … filled with tiny time capsules which burst open at their own speed. Cuts that astound at first fade as subtle ballads emerge. Great blasts of noise vanish as haunting melodies appear. A line suddenly hits home... a phrase... a shade of meaning, and the whole album becomes something else again." In 2007, ''The Grateful Dead'' was included on ''

Rolling Stone ''Rolling Stone'' is an American monthly magazine that focuses on music, politics, and popular culture. It was founded in San Francisco, California, in 1967 by Jann Wenner, and the music critic Ralph J. Gleason. It was first known for its ...

'' magazine's list of the 40 essential albums from 1967. In a piece accompanying the list, Robert Christgau wrote of the album:

Track listing

* Sides one and two were combined as tracks 1–9 on CD reissues. :*track 1 recorded at Coast Recorders,

, CA (January 1967) :*tracks 2 to 9 recorded at RCA Studio A,

Los Angeles Los Angeles ( ; es, Los Ángeles, link=no , ), often referred to by its initials L.A., is the List of municipalities in California, largest city in the U.S. state, state of California and the List of United States cities by population, sec ...

, CA (January 1967) :*reissued CD contains full-length versions of tracks 3, 5, 6, & 8 Discogs - ''The Grateful Dead'' images, reMastered CD 2001, Rhino (8122-74401-2-B) US
/ref> :*tracks 10 to 13 recorded at RCA Victor Studio A, Hollywood, CA (February 2, 1967) :*track 14 is an edit of track 9 :*track 15 recorded live at Dance Hall, Rio Nido, CA (September 3, 1967). Master reels are missing the beginning; track begins at the end of the second verse. Another track from this date is on ''

Fallout from the Phil Zone ''Fallout from the Phil Zone'' is a double compilation album of live recordings by the Grateful Dead handpicked by the band's bassist Phil Lesh. It contains the first Grateful Dead CD releases of "In the Midnight Hour" (clocking in at over 30 mi ...

''. 50th Anniversary Deluxe Edition – disc two

Personnel

;Grateful Dead * Bob Weir – rhythm guitar, vocals *

Ron "Pigpen" McKernan Ronald Charles McKernan (September 8, 1945 – March 8, 1973), known as Pigpen, was an American musician. He was a founding member of the San Francisco band the Grateful Dead and played in the group from 1965 to 1972. McKernan grew up he ...

– Vox Continental organ, harmonica, vocals *Bill The Drummer (

) – drums, percussion * Jerry "Captain Trips" Garcia – lead guitar, vocals, arrangement * Phil Lesh – bass guitar, vocals ;Technical personnel *Dick Bogert –

engineering Engineering is the use of scientific principles to design and build machines, structures, and other items, including bridges, tunnels, roads, vehicles, and buildings. The discipline of engineering encompasses a broad range of more speciali ...

*Betty Cantor-Jackson – engineering *Bob Cassidy – engineering *

–

production Production may refer to: Economics and business * Production (economics) * Production, the act of manufacturing goods * Production, in the outline of industrial organization, the act of making products (goods and services) * Production as a stati ...

;Reissue production credits *James Austin – reissue production *Joe Gastwirt – mastering, production consultant *Cassidy Law – project coordination, Grateful Dead Archives *Eileen Law – archival research, Grateful Dead Archives * David Lemieux – reissue production *Peter McQuaid – executive production, Grateful Dead Productions *Jeffrey Norman – additional mixing on bonus tracks *Michael Wesley Johnson – associate production, research coordination 50th Anniversary Edition production credits * Produced for release by David Lemieux * Executive Producer: Mark Pinkus * Associate Producer: Doran Tyson, Ivette Ramos * Package Design: Steve Vance * Tape Research: Michael Wesley Johnson

Charts

'' Billboard'' chart

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Grateful Dead, The 1967 debut albums Grateful Dead albums Rhino Records albums Warner Records albums Albums produced by David Hassinger