Grateful Dead - The Grateful Dead (1967)
Tracklist front / back album covers
Side one
1. "The Golden Road (To Unlimited Devotion)" 2:07
2. "Beat It On Down the Line" 2:27
3. "Good Morning, Little School Girl" 5:56
4. "Cold Rain and Snow" 2:25
5. "Sitting on Top of the World" 2:01
6. "Cream Puff War" 2:25
Side two
1. "Morning Dew" 5:00
2. "New, New Minglewood Blues" 2:31
3. "Viola Lee Blues" 10:01
The Grateful Dead is the debut album of the Grateful Dead. It was released by Warner Bros. Records in March 1967. According to the biographies of both bassist Phil Lesh and drummer Bill Kreutzmann, the band released the album as San Francisco's Grateful Dead.
The album was primarily recorded at RCA's Studio A, in Los Angeles, in only four days. The band had wanted to record the tracks in their hometown of San Francisco, but no recording studios in the area had modernized equipment at the time. The group picked David Hassinger to produce because he had worked as an engineer on the Rolling Stones' "(I Can't Get No) Satisfaction" and Jefferson Airplane's Surrealistic Pillow album (the latter on which Jerry Garcia had guested and suggested the album title). Due to demands by the band's label, Warner Brothers, four of the tracks were edited for length. Phil Lesh comments in his autobiography, "to my ear, the only track that sounds at all like we did at the time is Viola Lee Blues. ...None of us had any experience with performing for recording...the whole process felt a bit rushed." Bill Kreutzmann, in his autobiography, says of the songs, "their recorded versions failed to capture the energy that we had when we performed them live. ...We weren’t that good yet. We were still learning how to be a band."
