Loaded vs. American Beauty

basically tho really I mean given how extremely passionate I was about Lou being The Greatest Ever when I was a sprout, it's unsurprising that even the stuff I praise now I couch in damning terms - my love of his stuff at the peak of my fandom was like total hero worship

whereas I didn't give American Beauty a chance until like 2005 I think, maybe 2006, and what did I find, when I finally stopped being "eww ick Deadheads"?

1. "Box of Rain" (Robert Hunter, Phil Lesh) – 5:18
2. "Friend of the Devil" (Jerry Garcia, John Dawson, Hunter) – 3:24
3. "Sugar Magnolia" (Bob Weir, Hunter) – 3:19
4. "Operator" (Ron McKernan) – 2:25
5. "Candyman" (Garcia, Hunter) – 6:14
6. "Ripple" (Garcia, Hunter) – 4:09
7. "Brokedown Palace" (Garcia, Hunter) – 4:09
8. "Till the Morning Comes" (Garcia, Hunter) – 3:08
9. "Attics of My Life" (Garcia, Hunter) – 5:12
10. "Truckin'" (Garcia, Lesh, Weir, Hunter) – 5:03

Just unbelievable. Loaded can't even suit up for this match.

here we go. loving this but more Dead vs Velvets talk pls

Legendary Hearts is the weakest of the trio, no question. My favorite of that era is New Sensations, which gets my vote for worst production of a great album.

stacking up the 10 songs on each, track by track in the order they appeared...

"Who Loves the Sun" vs "Box of Rain"
"Sweet Jane" vs. "Friend of the Devil"
"Rock & Roll" vs. "Sugar Magnolia"
"Cool It Down" vs. "Operator"
"New Age" vs. "Candyman"
"Head Held High" vs. "Ripple"
"Lonesome Cowboy Bill" vs. "Brokedown Palace"
"I Found a Reason" vs. "Till the Morning Comes"
"Train Round the Bend" vs. "Attics of My Life"
"Oh! Sweet Nuthin'" vs. "Truckin'"

round one: who loves the sun vs. box of rain -

sun song vs. rain song. hippies and their weather. both kind of annoying. draw?

the only lou albums i feel like i ALWAYS have to have on the shelf at this late date: berlin, the bells, sally can't dance, blue mask, rock & roll animal, and lou reed live. i need a copy of the first album though. i like those songs and i like the album. had one at some point. (i mean, i do like lots of other stuff too. was just listening to coney island baby a couple weeks ago. but if i really had to pick essentials, those would be mine. today, anyway.)

big xpost:

1. "Box of Rain" (Robert Hunter, Phil Lesh) – 5:18
2. "Friend of the Devil" (Jerry Garcia, John Dawson, Hunter) – 3:24
3. "Sugar Magnolia" (Bob Weir, Hunter) – 3:19

^^^ I mean as an opening salvo that is pretty unfuckwithable - "Box of Rain" is like all the Dead's best qualities of the era in one song, the navel-gazing of the lyric really gets at a pained sort of longing that's really effective; "Friend of the Devil," shit, the sheer number of bluegrass pickers who can do that one on call oughta tell you something, i.e., that it's a solid jam; and "Sugar Magnolia" is just fantastic, really the best studio realization of the Europe '72 vibe imo. "Operator" gives me the fucking creeps, the vocal just bugs me, but this is a personal reaction - the band's still playing is crackling & solid, a real joy. "Candyman" is also creepy as fuck, frankly it'd sound in place on a Velvets album only as a character study of a sleazebag. But then "Ripple"? Man, even the most ardent Dead-hater has to rep for "Ripple," that's all-time American songbook right there - just gorgeous, perfect tune. I'm not a huge fan of "Brokedown Palace," feel like it's trying too hard, but it's decent. "Attics of My Life" you can keep. "Til the Morning Comes" is a decent jam though it's a harbinger of bad stuff to come circa Shakedown Street. And "Truckin'," again, all-time classic tune.

Whereas the Velvets third has by my reckoning 3 all-time classics and a bunch of other stuff that's pleasant enough, and Lou really starting to feel like A Poet.

berlin, the bells, sally can't dance, blue mask, rock & roll animal, and lou reed live

haha wow apart from Berlin these are all the ones I DON'T want to own

Ha, as I feared, I kind of think Lou Reed is the worst thing about most of this stuff. "Berlin" and "I Love You" are really nice despite him.

(I'm not even a Dead fan, and I at least was a big VU fan, but I'd probably take "Ripple" over all of Loaded.)

xposts Ha!

if we're going track vs. track, box of rain smokes who loves the sun imo but as a Loaded hater I'm not really qualified to be a ref with Loaded vs. An Album I Consider Awesome

my favorite Lou solos are Coney Island Baby, the first album, Rock and Roll Animal, and yeah Sally Can't Dance (so marvelously weird & fucked-up)

I kind of can't believe that the Dead never covered Sweet Jane. I can totally hear Bob singing the verses and Jerry singing the chorus. I'm not saying that this would necessarily be good.

I thought it would be hard to picture the reverse but a lot of these would sound good done by the VU.

i like the ragged quality of box of rain more than the cutesiness of who loves the sun but the vocal on box bugs me

Except for "The Kids" (which in the right mood will make me cry), I can't stand Berlin, which for all its polish and expense is more cynical and "decadent" than SCD.

Coney Island Baby is the one imho

agree ripple smokes everything on loaded though

xpost to Shakey: we agree on the supremacy of Coney Island Baby!

if loaded were some unknown band's debut and nobody bought it and the band died a week after it was released then i think it would still be a big deal with nerds and people would create a church for it. it's that kind of album. i just look at it as a rilly rilly good rock record! i love the sounds and the production and the songs are way cool. its playful. god knows i listen to enough bands from the 70's that kinda sorta remind me of loaded.

but how does it stack up to American Beauty in yr books, Scott?

xpost to Shakey: we agree on the supremacy of Coney Island Baby!

lol peace bruv

I could rhapsodize endlessly about that record

for me it is the only Lou record I would call perfect. I think it was the third or fourth one I heard and it completely changed my life. I would vote for it over American Beauty & over probably most other albums - I don't keep an all-time top ten list, but it'd be on there for sure - always sounds fresh & great to me. Definitive "She's My Best Friend," I'm extremely glad that that was the first place I heard it since the VU treatment of it, to me, doesn't do it justice.

Loaded on the other hand...not even close.

"but how does it stack up to American Beauty in yr books, Scott?"

oh jeez i dunno i like them both a ton. but american beauty is kinda like the great american novel and loaded is more like a cool grove press book that you steal from your parent's shelf. they are both very american though. and cool it down fills me with joy. pure joy. as much as i love lou and vu though, man, hunter/garcia is seriously the second coming of george and ira as far as i'm concerned. their contribution to the american songbook is pretty friggin' huge for a couple of drug-addled hippies.

even the most ardent Dead-hater has to rep for "Ripple,"

Ah fuck you got me.

Really!

surprised no one's brought up workingman's dead, which came out in '70 (june i think?) before either of these other two, and is way mellower

I have no idea but you'd have to head all the way down to Shakedown Street to find a Dead album that's not as good as Loaded

@ Scott: I hear what yr saying. I will revisit the Dead LPs you mention. I'm always open to having my head turned around.

I always thought "Lonesome Cowboy Bill" always kind of sounded a bit like the Dead. I could definitely hear the Dead playing it and Garcia singing it in my mind.

One of the reasons I'm enjoying VU 1968-1969 live bootlegs so much right now is that they stretch out on almost every song, playing with its structure, adding pieces one night that they'll evidently not add again: but the songs underneath are really solid and so it's no stretch to play that way.

Someone brought up the Band earlier; I'd love to hear them play in a similarly exploratory but every live performance by them I've found has been quite lean (except for "Chest Fever" which doesn't count).

I have rarely come across with a poster whose opinions I disagree with more than in which we apologize for sobering up (underrated aerosmith albums I have loved) on this thread!

But are you having a good time? that's the important question.

Oh yes, no worries there. I've never heard "American Beauty" but then I don't think I've ever heard a Grateful Dead album.

Give it a shot! You won't wake up in a VW van in a puddle of patchouli, I swear.

'xpect I'll get round to it one day

IMHO Euler is right on re. VU bootlegs. They did stretch out the songs a great deal (Sweet) Sister Ray & What Goes On in particular could fan out way into the ozone on feedback missles. They bring me great joy.. Earlier VU boots from circa '66 are also interesting since they really focus on long free improv noise pieces.

The Sweet Jane connection has always intrigued me--the albums are only separated by two months (Loaded was released first), so I'm sure it's quite accidental...I like the Grateful Dead a lot through their first few albums, but I just don't see that anything on American Beauty comes close to "Sweet Jane," "Rock and Roll," or "Oh! Sweet Nuthin'."

my teenage self is smacking my grown self for saying that "Box of Rain," "Sugar Magnolia," and "Ripple" are all better than the Loaded versions of those three songs, but my grown self is stronger & can hit harder & besides what do teenagers know? still, this thread isn't a good way to meet American Beauty - before you can dig it you kinda gotta divest yourself of any anti-Dead baggage you're carrying. Took me years. Five years ago, even, I'd have been arguing that even weak-ass Loaded trumps the collective output of the Grateful Dead. Then one day I said "how well do you actually know this band whose work you always dismiss?" and that was kind of the end of that.

Took me years.

Life really is too short for that

I dunno my exposure to the Dead was limited almost entirely to college acquaintances forcing me to listen to endless show bootlegs and the occasional spin of Workingman's Dead and American Beauty. And then there was that Freaks and Geeks episode with Ripple and some other AB songs in it... I dunno the playing and songwriting has just always struck me as really fucking weak. their stabs at country are pathetic compared with the genuine article, which is the other thing that always put me off them.

living where I do, I can't really shed the baggage, there are so many negative associations with their stuff, and they're constantly shoved in my face on a regular basis.

They seem to be, errrrrrrr, somewhat more visible in the USA than outside the USA, like exponentially more

their stabs at country are pathetic compared with the genuine article, which is the other thing that always put me off them.

there's a whole lot of country & bluegrass pickers covering dead songs who don't really agree with you on this Q btw. obv they generally can't sing for shit, but if you rep for country pickers and not the dead, congrats, you're posing

obv they generally can't sing for shit

this is a big part of country to me

I don't know shit about bluegrass

Some formerly anti-Dead people have opened up enough in the past 5 years to at least check out American Beauty. It's kind of a hippy/jammy/psychedelic/beardo-friendly era right now, at least among the people I know. My mom was really into American Beauty, Workingman's Dead, the first Dead album, and that first New Riders of The Purple Sage record. I grew up hearing those records a lot so I knew it wasn't all tubby noodle-fests. if I'd had to hear endless bootlegs at college first, woulda been much harder to dig em.

I was actually hoping this thread might help divest some folks of baggage, but mostly it's been about Steve Howe. Never a great aid in the divesting of baggage, Steve Howe.

I will also slag off Sweetheart of the Rodeo for similar reasons, if you like

xp

Life really is too short for that

not sure really what you mean - my Dead baggage is essentially the same as Shakey Mo's - I'd hear them and go "oh, Christ, not the fucking Dead." turned out having spent years basically cultivating a reaction-formation based on bullshit social cues was a colossal waste of time & that I'd been missing out on music that I'd really have enjoyed.

I will also slag off Sweetheart of the Rodeo for similar reasons, if you like

lol the singing on that record bugs the shit out of me

http://farm1.static.flickr.com/53/139143421_e433ad8375_o.jpg
this guy was always trouble.

a couple weeks ago as I was moving into a new rehearsal studio I had to pass by not one but TWO different groups of aging fucks with their tie-dyed t-shirts tucked into their dockers arguing about the Dead ("no dude what you gotta hear is that set with just Mickey, Bob, and Jerry kicking it in Marin in '91, so laid back" = ugh I stab you)

not sure really what you mean

I thought you meant you'd spent a few years learning to love them, having to work at it a bit.