Grateful Dead: American Beauty (1970)

 One of the greatest examples of a band immediately building on momentum, the Dead’s fifth studio album came only four and a half months after the already-iconic Workingman’s Dead. This wasn’t simply next-level - this went through the fucking roof, and kept on going. 

As with its predecessor, this is an album that zeroes in on the song, and it features the band mostly in an acoustic-driven setting, with very little of the jams for which they are known. Also, as before, they were working with a batch of songs that not only were the best they had to offer, but some of the best that have ever been written, period. 

For the first time, the Dead boasted four lead singers on an album, as Phil Lesh chose this time to bless the world with “Box Of Rain”, perhaps the Dead’s greatest song. Bob Weir brings the classic “Sugar Magnolia”, and Pigpen offers his first original song (the upbeat, criminally under-performed “Operator”).  The Garcia/Hunter partnership delivered yet another crop of classics, including “Friend Of The Devil”, “Ripple”, “Candyman”, and “Brokedown Palace”, each drawn from a different facet of the American folk tradition. 

One of the major focal points of these two albums were the vocals, specifically the harmonies. They worked closely with Crosby Stills & Nash, who taught them vocal arrangements and how to layer harmonies. This new skill was played to great effect on the slow, pensive “Attics Of My Life” as well as the rockin’ “Til The Morning Comes” (sadly, performed only five times ever). 

Everyone throws their hats in the ring on the album-closing, autobiographical “Truckin’”, which not only went on to become one of the songs most identified with the band (and one whose lyric appears in more yearbook quotes than any other) but a song that was recognized by the Library of Congress as a national treasure. And for damn good reason. If ya know, ya know, y’know?

There are a lot of pinnacle albums by iconic artists that are perhaps a bit overrated, for one reason or another. This is not one of them. American Beauty is just that. It is a treasure.

Edit (12 hours later):

As I spun this album last night, it occurred to me that my copy is far too beat up for such an important album in my collection, so I nipped over to Target and snagged this exclusive edition just now. Aside from feeling a bit gross about buying a Dead album at Target, this is a beautiful pressing and it sounds phenomenal.