Tom Constanten, a friend of Lesh and Garcia, joined the band in the studio while on leave from the United States Air Force to provide piano, prepared piano, and electronic tape effects influenced by John Cage and Stockhausen. It was easily our most experimental record, it was groundbreaking in its time, and it remains a psychedelic listening experience to this day." Jerry and Phil went into the studio with Healy and, like mad scientists, they started splicing all the versions together, creating hybrids that contained the studio tracks and various live parts, stitched together from different shows, all in the same song - one rendition would dissolve into another and sometimes they were even stacked on top of each other. Drummer Bill Kreutzmann's description of the production process describes the listening experience of the album as well: We decided that Anthem of the Sun was going to be our statement on the matter". Most rock bands, however, tended to head in an opposite direction, afraid of the uncertainty of improvisation. Jazz artists knew all about the balance between freedom and structure, but a few rock bands were now catching on. It's the old paradox of 'improvisational compositions'. Kreutzmann explained, "Phil and Jerry were the ones who figured out that we could exploit studio technology to demonstrate how these songs were mirrors of infinity, even when they adhered to their established arrangements. Garcia called this "mix it for the hallucinations". Lesh commented that this was in part because the songs were not "road tested." Healy, Garcia, and Lesh then took these concert tapes (encompassing two Los Angeles shows from November 1967, a tour of the Pacific Northwest in January and early February 1968, and a California tour from mid-February to mid-March 1968) and began interlacing them with existing studio tracks. In between studio sessions, the band also began recording their live dates. Returning to San Francisco's Coast Recorders, the band recruited their soundman, Dan Healy, to help produce. They didn't know what the hell they were looking for." Garcia noted that "we want to learn how the studio work. Hassinger commented that "Nobody could sing, and at that point they were experimenting too much in my opinion. It has been reported that he left after guitarist Bob Weir requested creating the illusion of "thick air" in the studio by mixing recordings of silence taken in the desert and the city. Įventually, Hassinger grew frustrated with the group's slow recording pace and quit the project entirely while the band was at Century Sound, with only a third of the album completed. By December they had gone through two other studios, Century Sound and Olmstead Studios (both "highly regarded eight-track studios"). However, determined to make a more complicated recorded work than their debut release, as well as attempt to translate their live sound into the studio, the band and Hassinger changed locations to New York City. The band entered American Studios in Los Angeles in November 1967 with David Hassinger, the producer of their eponymous debut album. It was voted number 376 in Colin Larkin's All Time Top 1000 Albums. The album was ranked number 288 on Rolling Stone magazine's list of the 500 greatest albums of all time, in both the 20 iterations of the list. A 2018 reissue on Rhino Records collects both the 19 mixes. In 1972, a more commercial alternate mix of the album was officially released to capitalize on the band's recent success. The result is an experimental amalgam that is neither a studio album nor a live album, but both at the same time. The band also supplemented their performances with instruments such as prepared piano, kazoo, harpsichord, timpani, trumpet, and güiro. The album was assembled through a collage-like editing approach helmed by members Jerry Garcia and Phil Lesh (along with soundman Dan Healy), in which disparate studio and live performance tapes were spliced together to create new hybrid recordings. The band was also joined by Tom Constanten, who contributed avant-garde instrumental and studio techniques influenced by composers John Cage and Karlheinz Stockhausen. It is the first album to feature second drummer Mickey Hart. Anthem of the Sun is the second album by rock band the Grateful Dead, released in 1968 on Warner Bros/Seven Arts.
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