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| Artist: Grateful Dead
Label: Rhino / Wea
Category: Music
List Price: $11.98
Buy New: $7.45
You Save: $4.53 (38%)
New (37) Used (9) from $4.50
Rating:  51 reviews
Sales Rank: 11784
Format: Live, Original Recording Reissued, Original Recording Remastered
Media: Audio CD
Discs: 1
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0
Dimensions (in): 5.3 x 4.9 x 0.3
MPN: 74395
UPC: 081227439521
EAN: 0081227439521
ASIN: B00007LTIJ
Release Date: February 25, 2003
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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| Customer Reviews:
Showing reviews 6-10 of 51
 The Greatest Rock-N-Rll Album Ever? May 11, 2003
8 out of 8 found this review helpful
You could make a case this is the greatest rock-n-roll album ever recorded.
Sacrilege?
Sure, it can't complete blow for blow with the songs of Abbey Road or Let It Bleed, but this was a great band at the very high point of its powers with 3 of the 4 original "sides" recorded as one long 60 minute jam on perhaps their crispest night ever. (A 20 minute "Other One" jam from their first set that night shows up on the "So Many Roads" compilation and is almost equally as good.)
The main thing that differentiates this album from any of their other live albums (or famous live albums from others of the same period like Allmans - Fillmore East, which it blows away) is that it is incredibly tight. That may seem odd when talking about a jam band, but in the entire 23 minute Dark Star (probably the highlight) I don't believe there is one wasted note, one repititious thought that would have been worth wiping out in the studio.
It's pretty clear that the Dead conceived of this album as a "song cycle." They had tried this, less successfully, on Anthem of the Sun, but here it works great, with the album starting out almost ethereally with a jam out of a song we never hear (Mountains of the Moon) and ending almost as eerily with a spooky "Feedback" jam which becomes a one verse gospel dirge. In between, Dark Star builds in intensity brilliantly through successive jams off the same basic riff, St. Stephen moves wildly through multiple chord and rhythm changes, The Eleven (the only place where there may be a few wasted notes) is just wild and weird. The musical break between The Eleven and Turn on Your Lovight (which came at the record flip originally) is brilliant and this is the tightest version of Lovelight anywhere, which means that vocalist Pigpen leads the band through a series of increasingly soulfull raves. Catch the way they sing "inside out" at the end of Lovelight! Death Don't Have No Mercy is a wonderful gospel-blues that starts to wind the album back down to its original starting point. Check out the wonderful audience interaction nearly at its end.
In all, a briliant band, playing together, with great intensity and precision yet completely unafraid to take an idea and spin it out and see where it goes. You benefit from the fact that they had been playing these songs (differently) each night for several months so that they had both been building a library of riffs and cues and each member of the band could almost tell where the others were going. The greatest ever?
Great music, questionable remix October 13, 2005
Manuel Marley (Whitehall, PA)
8 out of 9 found this review helpful
It goes without saying that the music here is amazing. I fall into that category of being more than a casual fan but definitely not a Deadhead, but of the 25 or so Dead recordings I have(mostly Dick's Picks and other archival recordings) I can say without reservation that this is my favorite of them all. This version of Dark Star>St. Stephen>Eleven> especially should convince anyone who hates the Dead that maybe they may be good after all. Great collective improvs, churning grooves, what more could you want from a Dead show? The sound is another issue. The original vinyl issue had great spacious sound. The initial Cd reissue sounded faithful to the vinyl sound. This new version though, when played back to back with the old version, shows that there was quite a bit of studio tampering done. Not overdubs or fixing bum notes, far from it, but listening on headphones lots of stereo panning and echo and reverb was added, especially on Dark Star and Death Don't Have No Mercy. Usually this is bad but it improved the songs and was a part of the original release. The new reissue, while more faithful to the actual sound of the concerts, will sound radically different to discerning listeners. Yes its moer faithful to the way the shows went down, but it will not sound like how and older fan will have remembered it. The new version is still ok, and a new fan will probably love it and wonder what all the fuss about remixing is about. Anyway if you want a faithful concert sound then get the new version, and if you want a spacier sound then look for the vinyl version or old cd version.
 great performance, bad re-mix July 13, 2004
7 out of 7 found this review helpful
This album represents one the greatest performances of the Grateful Dead. Unfortunately, this HDCD release does not make the grade. Not only was the original re-mastered to HDCD, but also apparently, the entire album was remixed for the worst. The glowing cut of the original was "Dark Star". On "Dark Star", one could close one's eyes and imagine being in Outer Space, floating in some dark mysterious Day Glow universe. And, on this release, the effect is totally lost. Yes, the bass is more defined when this album is played on an HDCD CD player. However, the mix loses all the ambience and reverb surrounding Garcia's guitar. Garcia is just shoved flat into the left speaker. Perhaps, the mix works on "The Eleven", simply because on the original release the sound was congested, and this mix tends to separate out the instruments. On the other hand, the drums on "Turn On Your Love Light" actually sound better on the original, in spite of the increased HDCD dynamic range. Buy the original Grateful Dead approved non HDCD-version instead.
One of the seminal recordings of all time and all genres January 1, 2006
Shreddin' Mike (San Francisco, CA United States)
7 out of 9 found this review helpful
As my close friend and brother-in-law Mr. Keshavan describes, this is a truly essential piece of music. That you "don't like noodling guitar" or "jam bands" or "rock and roll" or some such nonsense is wholly irrelevant. If you have a deep and broad appreciation for music as an art form and as a potential expression of humankind's relationship with the universe (at it's best; at it's worst it is whatever you can envision as the opposite - mindless pablum, perhaps, like so much but not all pop) then this must be listened to, at length and repeatedly.
I first heard this album (it was an album...) over 30 years ago...as a young teenager with a good sense of music, it amazed me that two singers would sing different lyrics - one of them musta gotten it wrong! - and they'd still put it out there for everyone to hear! What an intro to the Grateful Dead! Well, like my pal I have listened to the Dark Star hundreds of times over many, many years. It is not mindless noodling...it is not a jam...it is not experimentation...it is an incredible instance of a complex piece of music performed live, on stage, in front of an audience by people that can seemingly read each others' minds and are tuned in to precisely the same 'wavelength'. That humans could accomplish this floors me...that it was captured on tape and made available is astonishing. The dozens (hundreds?) of other Dark Stars that have been recorded and made available simply reinforce this notion (and they are important to listen to as well, in order to understand this "song" and to put this particular version of it in to perspective).
There are few recordings in any musical genre that reach the pinnacle of musical perfection, power, beauty, and ability to transport you that this Dark Star has.
You don't have to be a "Deadhead" to get this...at this point I really can't tolerate listening to the Grateful Dead anymore in fact. But this, this is a gift.
 Pretention * March 25, 2006
Janson Kemp (Dallas, TX USA)
7 out of 39 found this review helpful
If anyone ever tells you that rock musicians aren't self-serious, self-serving, pretentious, annoying people who consider themselves gods because they can play an instrument, hand them this album and say, "Well, some do."
The music on this album is frightfully loose, often reaching the level of complete noise; non-music. Can you really listen to "Feedback" and tell me with a straight face it will "change my life?" And though "Black Star" reaches a point of being interesting at the "chorus," the point quickly passes into 15 minutes of pointless, weak, guitar noodling played as though no one was listening, which for a long time was true. The balance of material is also poor. Most of the album is a fluffy, meandering mess, rudely interrupted by annoying pop tunes; "St. Steven," for example. But we haven't even approached the best part...
If you have the new SACD version, turn the album off and take the liner notes out. (If you have an older version, just turn the album off.) Lenny Kaye writes what is perhaps the most self-praising, ornate, ostentatious review of an album and band in rock history, (and I read all 100 of Rolling Stone's "Greatest Artists of all time" pieces.) Kaye, in a few short pages, becomes the poster boy for rock's messianic complex. He goes into some detail about the show's importance and the album's relevance in rock's vast cannon, and how he, being the token, highly skilled, intelligent ROCK MAGAZINE CRITIC was able to organize the album's greatness into his highly developed brain. He "got" it, friends. He then made the brave, prophetic prediction that rock's soul-saving future would be fulfilled where the Grateful Dead's "Live Dead" left off in a mere five years. He then proclaims he was off by only one year. Through unbaised, randomized double-blind, peer reviewed clinical tests, he proves his proclamation by revealing the album that changed everything, bringing humanity everything but salvation-- "Horses." So what band created this undeniable masterpiece of the finest quality of art? Why, his own of course!!! Sorry, dude, but if you have to convince everyone of how important you are, you're probably *gasp* not all that important. By last count, there were three types of people in the entire world that still listens to "Horses;" chin-stroking critics, college burnouts, and Lenny Kaye.
Overall: ALBUM - 2 out of 10.
REVIEW IN JACKET - 5 out of 10 (for effort).
j5w2k9@hotmail.com
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