Grateful Dead - American Beauty (Reality)

Speaking of rainbow bears, i bought arguably the most well known Grateful Dead album, American Beauty. Fun facts, Touch of Grey was the only radio hit they ever had, and this is way before that and before they adopted the marching bears design. Unfun fact, people call them "dancing bears," but the band was like "are you daft? These bears are clearly marching." 

Regardless, they changed their name to Grateful Dead because there were way too many other bands also called The Warlocks and everyone agreed it sounded cool. Wide array of drug embellished versions of the choosing ceremony in the Dead mythos, but the core fact is Jerry Garcia got it from some book. 

The Grateful Dead are benevolent ghosts/angels who are eternally thankful to the person who buried them rather than leaving their dead carcass by the side of the road. Again, i personally prefer the metaphor of existence being an elaborate but ultimately temporary electro-chemical tire fire, but i freely admit that is definitely not a mindset that will work for everyone. American Beauty has probably the majority of Grateful Dead songs you could name off the top of your head, and it's actually their 2nd album from 1970 because the writing session that produced both Workingman's Dead and American Beauty was surprisingly productive. Never before or after did they create that much music that quickly. They aren't songs about monkeys or roller coasters or reworkings of older songs either, they're just really good. 

Not surprisingly, even an unquestionable masterpiece of an album like this one has a modern day made up controversy surrounding it, and that's Country Music vs Americana. Grateful Dead is neither, but people keep bringing up this period of the Dead involving Country, and "Country musicians" really don't like the term Americana or mixing their beloved self-pity party with any other ideas/cultures. Nope, the wife, dog, and cattle unfairly ran off on the long suffering he-man provider that is you, and if it weren't for those meddling kids and their IRS agents taxing all your no profits away like they aren't at all doing everything would be just jim dandy like honey on cornbread. 

Another fun fact, Truckin', the autobiographical story of an actual drug raid on their hotel room in New Orleans, is an honest to goodness Library of Congress designated National Treasure. Confusing i know, but follow along with me. Country is a mythological telling of American History from within the perennial loser's little bubble of cosmic irony. It's dramatic irony for us the listeners, but the protagonist in Country is Alanis Morrisette. Americana, on the other hand, is the recognizing of these kinds of mythologies in the people and places around you right now. The Gratedul Dead were a legitimate cult of hippies who actually lived the Americana mythos as real life. Think of it this way, the Grateful Dead are like if John Lee Pettimore were an actual person from an actual moonshining family who brought marijuana seeds back from Vietnam and actually started growing acres of weed way back down Copperhead Road. Or if Willie Nelson had actually shot his wife after she cheated on him and became a real outlaw with his face on wanted posters. Granted, in this case it was LSD, but Owlsley Stanley only had 2 ambitions in life. Actually manufacturing LSD in (contextually) huge amounts, and building the largest and loudest possible sound system for the Grateful Dead. Other bands too, but the Grateful Dead was his actual "laboratory." 

But what makes this specific album listicle worthy? Why's it so special? Well, the stylized title is an ambigram that can be read as both American Beauty and American Reality if you squint just right. The whole band contributes in the songwriting department, so you get a much greater sense of the ensemble of characters and personalities, not merely a singular artistic rendering of a story from a narrator of dubious or questionable reliability. Blending Country, Folk, and Rock together was still a thing few bands had ever done, and i totally believe that even though the guy who loaned them $20 wasn't actually the Devil, he certainly wasn't a nice guy and most assuredly expected an exhorbitant interest rate in return. I don't know, can't we just accept the magical conjoining of coincidences and say it happened to turn out really great? No rhyme or reason or intent, the band just found out that Micky's dad renewed their contract with Warner Bros. without their consent and ran off with most of their money in his back pocket, so the band went "well crap, it's a good thing we already wrote enough songs for the next album, guess we won't be joining our road crew on tour after all, somebody please press 'record.'" That somebody was Stephen Barncard, and he was pleasantly surprised at how untrue the stories of Grateful Dead being "difficult" turned out to be. My theory is Grateful Dead were secretly insanely lucrative, Lenny ran off with pocket change, and Warner didn't want anyone to find out, especially the band who didn't really care anyway. 

Psssst. Hey, you gals and dolls wanna hear a real non-sequitur? The Mandela Effect is literally reverse gas lighting for fun and profit, albeit in an annoyingly passive-aggressive way. See, you read a buffoonish statement about some misleading semantic argument about a pop-culture thing you vaguely remember, and you freakin' click on it. Doesn't matter if you read it or don't read it, it's the click that matters. You're a full click in somebody's ad revenue viewer statistics. Letting that stupid video play on mute for more than a second as you scroll by counts too. If it can be recorded, somebody gets to claim a revenue pip for it. Buuuuuut, even though it does correct misinformation once you add all the pieces together, all those pieces are bullshit in their own right. It's the two wrongs look suspiciously like a right, but actually just normalize the wrongs and make the world altogether more horrible. You don't need to go through the process of tentatively picking at the band aid until the pain gets too unbearable and you finally resort to ripping it off every single time like it's some sacred ancient ancestral ritual, you just rip off the bandaid in the knowledge that the pain will go away fairly quick and get on with your day. 

You know who actually suffers for it? Honest people whose money comes solely from tips. Bands whose money comes from concert tickets and merch rather than royalties and licensing fees. Don't hear many stories about ludicrously successful bands stealing most of a record label's money and bankrupting them, do you? Wasting all the advance money on drugs and unnecessary overdubs doesn't count, that's a legit risk of intentionally trying to skim from the bottom of the barrel. That's the classic "this biker gang will make great crowd control" fallacy rearing its ugly head. 

You know me, pointing out what s long strange trip it's been is kind of my schtick. Well, we've just listened to the same album in 3 completely different forms. After all, we're only ordinary people who are just so overwhelmingly tired of bashing out foreheads against the walls of reality and picking the sandblaster grit out of our teeth. Some of us mythologize the rogues and scamps who keep on truckin' like Grateful Dead, some of us get real philosophically contemplative like Pink Floyd, and some of us just go numb and succumb to the insanity of it all like Wetware. And then there's me, Bottle. I say buggerit, i'm just gonna uncork all of 'em to release the pressure and/or see how they're fermenting. I wouldn't necessarily recommend you turn their bottoms up and take a full swig like i do, take my tasting notes with a grain of salt and a lime wedge for the more esoteric excursions, but regardless, cheers.