The Grateful Dead’s Blues for Allah Gets 50th Anniversary Expansion
Digging into their most experimental studio album
Many fans of The Grateful Dead will be quick to tell you about their preference for live bootlegs over the group’s studio albums.
But if there’s one LP both tapers and crate diggers can agree on, it’s 1975’s Blues for Allah, considered by many to be one of their finest non-concert LPs. It was recorded at Bob Weir’s home studio following a prolonged hiatus from touring — so long that some fans believed they were done after a decade in action.
Yet the desire to end Dead activity wasn’t in the cards at all. In fact, the reprieve from the road helped give the group a newfound desire to expand their own sonic trajectory to create arguably the most experimental studio album in the GD canon, released on their own imprint to boot. Well that, and the freedom to do as they please from the comfort of their comrade’s cozy studio tucked away in the redwoods.
“We made a ground rule for that record,” Jerry Garcia once explained in regards to Blues for Allah. “Let’s make a record where we get together every day and we don’t bring anything in. The whole idea was to get back to that band thing, where the band makes the main contribution to the evolution of the material.”
Lyrically, the material created in part by longtime Dead lyricist Robert Hunter, fresh from returning to the fold following his own solo excursion with 1974’s underrated Tales of the Great Rum Runners, was centered around a weighty topic of the time. On March 26, 1975, Saudi Arabia’s progressive King Faisal was shot and killed by the son of his half-brother during a majlis event in the King’s home, where he was receiving guests looking to petition him on various issues. The assassination of this forward-looking ruler striving to make a more hopeful future for his region deeply resonated with the band, and it’s no doubt reflected through the Arabian vibes of the title track (subtitled “Sand Castles and Glass Camels”), which is possibly the closest the Dead had come to prog rock.
There’s also some bona fide concert staples featured as well: “Help On The Way/Slipknot!,” “Franklin’s Tower” and “The Music Never Stopped.” Not to mention “Crazy Fingers,” one of the best Garcia-Hunter team-ups in the group’s songbook with its mountain reggae groove and high harmonies.
The pair of instrumentals in the guitar workout “King Solomon’s Marbles” and the chamber-like Bob Weir composition “Sage & Spirit” complete the LP.
This 50th Anniversary Edition of Blues for Allah, like its predecessors, comes packed with two discs of rare material supplementing the original tracklist. There’s almost two hours of previously unreleased recordings highlighted by rehearsals from the band’s Aug. 12, 1975, soundcheck at San Francisco’s Great American Music Hall, as well as performances from the June 21, 1976, show at the Tower Theatre in Pennsylvania, spotlighting five Blues for Allah songs alongside favorites like “Eyes Of The World.”
Rounding out the set are selections from Bill Graham’s SNACK (Students Need Athletics, Culture and Kicks) Benefit at Kezar Stadium on March 23, 1975. These were only previously available on the 2004 Beyond Description box set’s bonus disc, and includes one of only three known performances of “King Solomon’s Marbles.”
“Blues for Allah is the Dead’s unique vision, a deeply humane parable that framed their own artistic renewal in the most inclusive, expansive terms,” writes Nicholas G. Meriwether, Executive Director of the Grateful Dead Studies Association and author of the set’s liner notes. “Fifty years later, it remains one of their most musically successful and resolutely experimental albums.”
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Masterpiece. My favorite GD album, which is saying something when the catalog also includes Anthem of the Sun, Workingman’s, American Beauty, Wake of the Flood, and In the Dark (Not to mention Garcia and Ace).