Anthem of the Sun [IMPORT]

Grateful Dead

Product Details

• Audio CD (October 25, 1990)
• Original Release Date: July 18, 1968
• Number of Discs: 1
• Format: Import
• Label: Warner Bros UK
• ASIN: B000002KAN
• Also Available in: Audio Cassette  |  Vinyl
• Average Customer Review: 4.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (29 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #103,997 in Music (See Bestsellers in Music)

Track Listings

1. That's It for the Other One

2. New Potato Caboose

3. Born Cross-Eyed

4. Alligator

5. Caution (Do Not Stop on Tracks)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

14 of 14 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Anthem: a psychedelic time capsule, December 7, 1998

By A Customer

"Anthem of the Sun" is as psychedelic as Bach music is baroque - it just epitomizes the period, and although some feel it sounds dated - hey, who cares ? I'm not so old as to have witnessed the rise and fall of the psychedelic era (I was born in 1966) but I love it more than any other period in rock history, and somehow "Anthem" captures the best bits of it.

Anthem shows an uninhibited originality and a sense of total freedom. The song names are sometimes a bit too far out, but unlike the "sound" names like "Alligator" and "The other one" they mercifully didn't survive.

I love all of the record. Side one starts off with "Cryptical envelopment" segueing into "The other one" and back to "Cryptical" again. These songs hardly need any explanation, as there are many concert versions. The sections that follow are a bit obscure, but beautiful, while the last song on side one, "Born Cross-eyed", should have been performed more often, I think. Curiously enough, the cd ending differs from the lp ending, and I don't think it's an improvement (and where are the liner notes to explain the changes ?). As side one can be dubbed the "studio side", side two is the "live side". Two great songs, "Alligator" and "Caution", really evoke a concert experience, and although the recording is arguably poor, the atmosphere and quality of the playing more than compensate for this flaw.

"Anthem" always seems to be standing in the shadows of its younger brothers (like "Live Dead" and "American Beauty"), which is in itself no shame. But unlike any other Dead album its impact resembles that of witnessing a rare and beautiful flower, sweeping one into a lost and magical world.

Hans Wigman.

14 of 16 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars "Bus came by & I got on...that's when it all began....", August 31, 2001

By	Archmaker (California) - See all my reviews (TOP 1000 REVIEWER)

Amazon Verified Purchase

For Jerry Garcia it was Ken Kesey's Merry Pranksters Bus and the Electric Koolaid Acid Test...but we all got on one kind of bus or another back then.

This is the Grateful Dead I loved: acid-drenched, spontaneous, crazed & loopy. The Dead, then, either gave the best concert you had ever heard or the worst. In 3 straight nights at El Monte Legion Stadium, with no-seat stand-up concerts, the first night they were terrible, disjointed, off-tempo...lousy. Then the 2nd night "the magic" happened and the music came rolling out of the huge banks of Marshalls like waves and thunder, building & ebbing and flowing and crescendoing and washing over you like nothing you had ever heard before. Everybody on the same page and seemingly inventing and improvising as one person. The next night...so-so again. It was really hit or miss with them every time out, probably depending on if their highs coincided.

Anthem of the Sun catches some of that concert magic. Never mind that they blended studio and differing concert recordings...this album gives the feeling of the Psychedelic Grateful Dead when they were really cooking. On "That's It For the Other One" you get that rolling thunder with Garcia, Weir and Lesh twining around each other while bouncing atop Hart & Kreutzmann's pounding rythmns that after a sidetrip of psychedelic sound effects leads into the more melodic and lilting New Potato Caboonse & Born Cross-Eyed, with the long looping trademark Garcia bouncing lead weaving in and over and around and under Weir & Lesh. Remarkably beautiful stuff.

Side Two brings us the humorous and bluesy Alligator with some driving jamming riffs trading off between Garcia & Weir and the traditional concert windup dance and Pigpen rave-off.

The Grateful Dead were a different band while Ron "Pigpen" McKernan was alive. Cruder, bluesy, nutty and ferociously alive. When they were "ON" they could blow anybody else playing in those days off the stage (with the possible exception of Hendrix). Anthem of the Sun & Live Dead and a couple of bootlegs are as close as you can get to that experience.

I imagine the hit & miss quality became difficult for them too, because the concerts eventually became more conservative & set, with more traditional, structured songs that began with Workingman's Dead. I found their later concerts more structured too and, by and large, without the energy & risk of the earlier days, but I didn't go to a lot of them and I lost touch with the later incarnations of the group, except for the occasional song or two, so who knows?

What the heck, we all got more structured and less risky. But, I can tell you in 1968 and for a few years after, the Grateful Dead in concert were Hell on Wheels. Crank the volume up and get on the bus!

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The first Dead album I fell in love with, September 12, 2002

By	Michael J Edelman (Huntington Woods, MI USA) - See all my reviews (TOP 500 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

I was a 14 year old hippie back in 1968, and this was the first Grateful Dead album I'd ever heard. It was at one of those parties that lasted for days, people coming and going, and one record playing over and over on the stereo... The next day I sat down at my guitar and picked out "That's It For the Other One". The melody is still indelibly stuck in my mind.

This is the early dead at its finest- soaring melodies, extended compositions and solos, music you could just close your eyes and get inside. It still takes me back.