Week 5: Grateful Dead

This week I have listened to the 1960's psychedelic rock band Grateful Dead. Psychedelic rock music intrigues me as I really enjoy listen to music that creates an atmospheric feel and "overloads the senses". Grateful Dead's songs mostly consist of acoustic guitars, drums, bass, organs, and a heavy amount of electric guitar overdubs. The lyrics of the songs are mostly about psychedelic subjects such as drugs and imaginative imagery, such as in "Casey Jones", "If I Had The World To Give" and "Box of Rain". I enjoyed the song "Touch of Grey" which contains a very simple melody with acoustic guitar rhythms in the forefront and the catchy sing-a-long of "We will get by" at the end. The song "Friend Of The Devil" is also very similar song that uses the acoustic guitar to create the main melody with vocals. I like how the song stops without an ending to provide an artistic insight to the lyrics. Some songs, such as "Truckin" and "Caution" sounded influenced from blues music through the playing style of singing and guitar and walking bass guitar. I found the song "Caution" to be interesting as it portrayed the sensory overload of instrumentation that psychedelic music conveys. Throughout the ending, Grateful Dead manipulates the distortion of the guitar to overdub a variety of different sounds. In "That's It For The Other One" the band does the same thing at the end of the song, but also uses random piano, keyboard, and percussion sounds to create the psychedelic effect. "Serengetti" was a favorite of mine and it only contained a stylistic overdubbing of different drum sounds and xylophones. Grateful Dead was a very creative band and set the foundation as one of the greatest psychedelic rock bands.

Song List

Casey Jones
Touch Of Grey
Friend Of A Devil
Truckin'
Uncle John's Band
Box Of Rain
Ripple
Sugar Magnolia
Caution
That's It For The Other One
Serengetti
If I Had The World To Give