Think of the three great B-bands of the ’60s: the Beatles, the Beach Boys and the Byrds. On the other hand, there are also acts who have prospered more in the studio than on stage. Blige, Tedeschi-Trucks, Mavis Staples, the Dustbowl Revival, Fela Kuti, Alison Krauss, Santana, Old Crow Medicine Show and many more. Many artists have done better work on stage than in the studio: James Brown, Bruce Springsteen, Al Green, Jackson Browne, Aretha Franklin, the Allman Brothers, Mary J. It wasn’t just the Dead that got caught in this trap. Why was a band like the Dead forced to release their albums of new material as studio recordings when the live versions were so much better? Why did they bow to the industry’s insistence that that’s just the way things are done? Wouldn’t they have been better off if all their new songs had been first released as live recordings, as their final collection of new songs has been on Ready or Not? The stop-and-go nature of studio recording interrupted the flow they got in going from one song to the next on stage. Their interaction with a live audience inspired them to better singing and better playing than they could ever summon up in a studio with no audience around. These nine songs were cherry-picked from eight different shows, much as a producer would have chosen them from different takes in a studio.Īnd the Dead’s best live versions of songs were almost always better than their best studio versions of the same songs.
In these live versions, however, you can hear how good the songs were and how good the album might have been if a government official had banned them from the studio and thus forced them to release these stage performances. The group was unhappy with the results in the studio-just as many listeners had been with so many of their other studio sessions. It’s another live recording but one with a specific purpose: It gathers the songs the band was trying to cut in the studio in the months before Jerry Garcia died. I was reminded of my old fantasy by the recent release of a new Grateful Dead album, Ready or Not. As a White House cabinet member, the least I could do would be to make them focus on their strength and avoid their weakness. The Grateful Dead were the ultimate example of a pop-music act that made its most memorable music on stage and its most forgettable music in the studio. Not because I hated the Dead, but because I loved them. And as my first act as a cabinet member, was going to issue an executive order banning the Grateful Dead from ever entering a recording studio again. Back in the 1970s, I had this fantasy that President Jimmy Carter was going to appoint me as America’s first-ever Secretary of Culture.
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