Grateful Dead: Blues For Allah (1975)

 

In October 1974, after a decade on the road, the Dead went on hiatus. The months passed and it wasn’t long before the band starting convening at Weir’s home studio, jamming and slowly working on new material, created in the most organic way. 

Before long an album started to take shape but this was not like any ordinary Dead album. There were song ideas that came around the old fashioned way, but most of this was created by the band as a unit. And this is among their most intricate, clever, and honest work ever. 

Kicking off with the trifecta of “Help On The Way”, “Slipknot”, and “Franklin’s Tower”, the Dead announce that not only are they back, but they mean business. This is some of the proggiest stuff this band ever did and it was the version of this that kicks off the 8/13/75 show (One From The Vault) that finally convinced me that this is the best band ever. 

Elsewhere, Jerry gives us the dreamy, reggae-tinged “Crazy Fingers”, which is one of those songs that you can spend decades unpacking, and Weir gives us “The Music Never Stopped”, which is one of my all time favorites of his. 

That song was actually first recorded as “Hollywood Cantata”, with lyrics by Robert Hunter, but the two of them fell out over it so Weir took that music and set John Barlow to work. Fortunately it paid off. 

The album’s best bits are the instrumental bits, all the weird jazzy, proggy shit. “Slipknot”, “King Solomon’s Marbles”. “Stronger Than Dirt or Milkin’ The Turkey”. 

Weir offers up the gorgeous acoustic instrumental, “Sage And Spirit”, based on one of his guitar warmups. 

And, of course there’s the title suite, which closes the album. “Blues For Allah”, “Sand Castles & Glass Camels”, and “Unusual Occurrences In The Desert” all stand among the most unique music the Dead ever created. This was only performed live three times, all in 1975, and only the 8/13 version was complete. It’s a shame this did not stick around. It could have been the new ”Dark Star”. 

The thing I love so much about this album is how much of a collaborative effort this is. The expanded CD release features further insight to this process, with several jams, instrumentals, and alternate versions of songs. And then the more obsessive collectors (ahem) have several hours of session tapes that reveal the origins and mutations of this material. 

After this, the Dead would return to the road, close up their label, sign with Arista, and never really collaborate like this again. That is a big bummer but fortunately they left us this banger.