The Grateful Dead are one of my favorite bands of all time. i saw a show about the making of Anthem of the Sun/American Beauty the other day and i was geeking out intensely. and i've invested a lot of time in certain Grateful Dead albums, though this is one that i've never really gotten into thickly. i've recognized the genius of certain songs on here, but i've never really gone through it all reasonably. they were obviously still incredibly bluesy, in an almost standard way. the Hunter/Garcia relationship wasn't yet established so there are definitely some blues covers happening and even stylistically, the songs are much more based on the blues formula. It's a sound that sounds a lot more like what they probably should have sounded like; something like Jefferson Airplaine or the 13th Floor Elevators or Country Joe and the Fish or some kind of San Francisco garage band. The Golden Road (To Unlimited Devotion) is one of two songs credited only to 'Grateful Dead', and has a rather noticeable difference to the sound of the very next record that they made. the chorus is catchy and it sounds like something to surf to, and Anthem of the Sun basically lacks any kind of structure or marketable feature. The songs on this record aren't really a great representation of what this band is going to sound like for the rest of their career. but it doesn't matter at all.
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