I find it hard now to believe there was a time when I hated the Grateful Dead, and it has only been in the past decade that I have begun to appreciate them.  Before then, there were some tracks that I enjoyed to some extent, but I felt I was betraying the credo I had adopted from the title of the Primal Scream track “Kill All Hippies”.

I can’t remember which year my conversion to being a fan occurred, but it was a summer spent doing a deep dive into the band’s catalog.  Previous summers had been devoted to exploring the canons of Miles Davis and The Byrds.  When I develop an interest in an artist, I tend to go all-in.

My exploration of the Dead’s music at that time was greatly restricted to their studio fare.  The extent of their live material still intimidates me, and little of what I had heard of their concert recordings appealed to me.  I am that rarest of Dead fans, one who prefers the studio content over the live stuff.

1968’s Anthem of the Sun splits the difference by combining both sides of the equation.  And it doesn’t even divide the tracks into being one or the other.  Instead, crossfades and cuts merge studio and live material into the same tracks.  It is often difficult to tell whether what you are hearing is live or in the studio, or even a mix of the two.  This unprecedented technique results in a rather schizophrenic experience, and one that well suits the songs selected for this album.

Like much of the group’s output prior to Workingman’s Dead, there isn’t an emphasis on tunes and songcraft.  Instead, the tracks here are extended jams and experiments.  Since that is often when I find the Dead to be at their worst makes it all the more baffling this is my favorite album in their catalog.  Perhaps I’m just contrary, as has been suggested before.

Admittedly, the album starts out deceptively sounding like it will be relatively straightforward.  In fact, lead track “That’s It for the Other One” begins as rather minimalist and quite pleasant for the Dead in this phase of their career.  But a closer look at the back cover and the record label suggests things will soon become more challenging, as what is supposedly one track is actually four: “Cryptical Envelopment”, “Quadlibet for Tender Feet”, “The Faster We Go, The Rounder We Get” and “We Leave the Castle”.  Those titles do not suggest easy listening.

While the track starts entirely in the studio, it seems to shift entirely to a live performance around a minute and a half in.  After a couple of minutes of that, it seems to crossfade back entirely to the studio.  But that is only to the best I can tell, as those blends of studio and live material will become increasingly difficult to distinguish as they become increasingly intertwined over the course of the runtime.  Even more jarring than those transitions is the final couple of minutes of the track, where it becomes the kind of clutter of random noises one might have heard in the back half of Pink Floyd’s “Bike”.  True to the title of this fourth part, we have most certainly left the castle.

The next track, “New Potato Caboose”, is less experimental than the previous four-parter.  And yet, it manages to be more sprawling, if only by being roughly a minute longer.  This track is more jammy than its predecessor, but still quite enjoyable for those in the right mindset.

This goes almost directly into the most concise, but no less weird, song on the entire album.  “Born Cross-Eyed” was the only track from this set to appear on a single, being assigned as the B-side to “Dark Star” (yes, folks, that concert staple that could expand to an hour in concert was at one time truncated to one side of a 7” single).  Despite being so much shorter than the other tracks on Anthem, it is no less weird, notably featuring some wild trumpet playing from Phil Lesh. 

This is also the track with one of the first most notable differences between the 1968 original and the 1971 remix.  Though I am unclear on the reasons, Lesh remixed this album around the same time Jerry Garcia did the same for Aoxomoxoa.  Given the complex technical nature of Anthem, with its mix of studio and live recordings, it is astonishing so much of the album sounds so similar in most places.  “Born Cross-Eyed” is most obviously different in its ending, a final note extended in the remix seeming to ape the ending of the Beatles’s “A Day in the Life”.

But the next side brings the most differences within one track, and that is the magnificent “Alligator”.  This is where studio and live material are overlaid on top of each other to the best effect.  It is as energetic as it is disorienting, an experience akin to a carnival ride where you leave exhilarated and maybe even a bit relieved you’re still alive.  At more than eleven minutes in length, you definitely feel you have been on a journey.  Adding to the surreal nature of the experience is the addition of kazoos, which you get more or less of in the one mix versus the other.  This track also has the most differences I can discern between the mixes, though both fortunately preserve Wier’s order to the crowd: “Everybody get up and dance—it ain’t gonna hurt you none.”

The end of “Alligator” goes straight into a rather formless finale that is “Caution (Do Not Stop on the Tracks)”.  Supposedly, this simple, chugging jam track originated from the band improvising to the sound of trains rolling past.  Despite feeling like a seamless continuation of the previous number, this tends to be the track I am mostly likely to skip on a playthrough.  Another considerable difference between the mixes is a long series of feedback squeals and amp sounds. This is louder in the remix but longer in the original mix.

In its own time, Anthem of the Sun didn’t seem to win over any new fans and even alienated existing ones.  It almost cost them their contract with Warner Bros., with company president Joe Smith sending the band a letter expressing his dismay over the time and costs they were incurring on the project.  In typical Dead fashion, they wrote in huge letters “FUCK YOU” over the first page of that letter and sent it back to him.  Fortunately for all concerned, cooler heads prevailed and the band would take a step towards broader appeal with next album Aoxomoxoa.  Even better, they would achieve immortality with the next two albums after that, Workingman’s Dead and American Beauty.