Grateful Dead - American Beauty (w/ guest Tom O'Leary)

The Great Albums

Bill Lambusta

Albums, Music Commentary, Criticism, Billlambusta, Brianerickson, Music

4.3 • 749 Ratings

🗓️ 19 September 2016

⏱️ 124 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Bill and Brian welcome guitarist Tom O'Leary (whose band, Small Planet Radio, just put out an excellent album* that can be heard at smallplanetradio.com) to talk about the Grateful Dead's American Beauty (1970, Warner Bros.). Known for their live jam sessions that have helped created a devoted following, the Dead sometimes struggled to translate that to their studio work. But with the release of this album (and Working Man's Dead) earlier in that same year, the band gave the world a lasting work of art. Tom talks about discovering the band through his older siblings playing the records, and then really discovering them when he befriended some nice hippies at college. Brian, Bill, and Tom discuss the influence of CSNY, how the band got tricked into having to write pop songs, a deep dive into Robert Hunter's lyrics, how honest moments between parents and children as depicted in media makes Bill cry, hippie culture, Brian sliding into people's DMs, weird chords, what timbre is and how "tambre" is not a thing, and much more as we make our way through the album track by track! *note: Host Bill Lambusta is also in Small Planet Radio and wrote this description, so feel free to take it with a grain of salt.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Look out of any window, any morning, any evening, any day.
0:29.9	Hello, and welcome to the great albums podcast. I'm Bill.
0:33.7	And I'm Brian.
0:34.6	What we just listening to right there, Brian?
0:36.6	That was Boxer Rain by the
0:38.0	Grateful Dead from November 1st, 1970s American Beauty album. So if you never listen to the podcast,
0:45.8	what we do here every week is take a different album of music and talk about what makes it great.
0:50.5	We're going to try and have kind of a conversation that happens around the fandom of a
0:55.1	band. So we're going to do kind of just a little bit of talk about what we like about the music,
1:00.2	what makes it cool. We're going to do a little bit of the background on the band so that everybody
1:03.9	has a context for what's going on. And then later on we're going to get to a track by track review.
1:09.2	Oh, sign me up for that.
1:11.5	Hmm.
1:12.3	That sounds nice.
1:14.1	So obviously we're doing the Grateful Dead today.
1:16.6	And Brian, I think I can speak for both of us where it's the Grateful Dead
1:20.6	they're everywhere.
1:21.6	We know who the Grateful Dead are.
1:23.6	Yeah.
1:23.7	But at the same time, I said it before we went on.
1:27.1	Like the Grateful Dead is probably only second to, if not more, you know, commented on.
1:35.0	The only other band that, like, would equal that as, like, the Beatles.
	...

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