I’d often wondered about the music of the Grateful Dead. What was it that inspired legions of Deadheads to follow a band of aging hippies on endless tours across America? They were not the sort of band who got played on the radio in the UK, so it was a long time before I actually listened to an album and then on the insistence of a friend, one of the many carefully curated bootleg concerts. It wasn’t the cosmic psychedelic space jam that I was expecting. It was … ok. Mellow blues and cozy Americana with a hint of country. It struck me listening to this album this morning that the music is really quite incidental to the experience of tripping out in a field in the California sunshine with a genuine community of like minded friends, before packing up the microbus and driving a couple of hundred miles to the next gig. This album won’t knock your socks off, but it’s not trying to. It’s the perfect expression of the hippie ethos of tuning in, turning on and dropping out, and I wish there was more of it in the world today.
