Last Updated on 27 January 2026 by Massimo M.

Released in the middle of the Summer of Love period, Anthem Of The Sun is the second release by the Grateful Dead and sees multiple differences compared to the homonymous debut.

Within the Californian and more generally American psychedelic scene of the 60s, the Grateful Dead certainly occupy a place of honour, together with Jefferson Airplane, if not primary because they embodied more than anyone else the spirit, the very essence of that musical and cultural movement. Far from the revolutionary, social or political instances of many of the groups of the time, the Grateful Dead coined, at least at the beginning, a style totally focused on the lysergic “trip” expressed above all through long, chaotic and exhausting collective jams that soon ended to represent an entire ideology not only of freedom of expression but more generally of escape from the System. An aesthetic, this, which could only be fully expressed in the live dimension, difficult to contain in the classic format of the album.

The first album, “Grateful Dead”, for commercial reasons imposed by the record company, was in practice a mere collection of short songs of the American country-blues tradition arranged in a rock key according to conventional methods. This album, which was still quite successful, left all the elements of the group dissatisfied, who saw their music completely distorted. In particular, and it could not be otherwise, the record failed to capture that particular atmosphere that the band managed to create during live performances.

Anthem of the sun is also the first Grateful dead album composed entirely of original songs.

To achieve it, unlike what had happened for the debut album, the group took several months. The pieces are long, the sound decidedly psychedelic and experimental. The Grateful dead in fact put on track a nice amalgam of genres made of rock, bluegrass, folk, blues, country and even jazz all accompanied by the use of sounds such as ringtones, bells and various noises and non-sense lyrics.

All this material is mostly produced under the influence of acids because the band, in full harmony with the psychedelic feeling, intended to transcribe into music what they saw during the trips provoked by taking this type of drug. The recordings were very tiring and expensive for the record company, above all because of the absurd requests of the band members, and also because the Dead had too ambitious a project in mind for their real abilities. The difficulties were so many that producer Dave Hassinger was forced to abandon the project due to the total unreliability and incompetence of the band members.

Warner Bros, the label that had signed Garcia’s band, decided at this point to leave total independence in finishing the recordings of the album to the Grateful Dead who took a completely unusual and innovative path to conclude the album. Using an approach closer to electronic music than to rock, they assembled several parts recorded in the studio by superimposing them on other tracks recorded during some live performances of the same songs in the same period.

Precisely for this reason the tracks of Anthem of the sun are characterized by a certain jam-style set up to try to artificially recreate the typical atmospheres of the Grateful Dead’s live performances.

Successful experiment? Not entirely because if you look closely, the idea of merging live recordings with the parts played in the studio, even due to the limits imposed by the technology of the time, smacks of an artifact.

In any case, this aspect does not diminish the merits of this first true test of the Grateful Dead’s personality, if anything, the difficulty of transferring the typical characteristics of the Grateful Dead’s sound into a recording studio is even more precisely highlighted, not surprisingly, always identified as a live band (see the amazing live dead) .

Let’s get to the disc.

The opening piece is called That’s It For The Other One and is a suite divided into four movements which occupies almost half of the first side and which represents the maximum expressive vertex of the entire album as it successfully blends the different styles of group. the first movement, Cryptical Envelopment, begins with Garcia singing accompanied by Pigpen”>Pigpen organ. The song has subdued and delicate tones as if to accompany the listener to the threshold of a dream. But it is an illusion because with a neurotic crescendo of percussion the second part of the song, Quadlibet For Tender Feet, is introduced, which is a sort of blues rock jam session, rather chaotic, which will be remembered by fans as The Other One.

This piece will be used by Garcia’s band for over thirty years as a starting point for improvisations during concerts together with the subsequent choral part of The Faster We Go The Rounder We Get. The lyrics of this song are, in practice, a continuous reference to the Merry Pranksters’ magic bus, which was the first name of the complex, the real physical vehicle of the group during their performances in Ken Kesey’s acid tests.

In this section we note the experimental part we talked about a little while ago. Here, clips recorded during live performances in different cities and parts recorded in the studio are merged together.

Resuming the initial theme, the piece fades into the final section, the decidedly experimental piece We Leaved The Castle, entrusted to the keyboards and electronic effects of Constantein who takes the previously only intuited lysergic atmospheres to the extreme.

Side A concludes with two pieces. New Potato Caboose and Born Cross Eyed. The first part with ethereal atmospheres created through the use of vibraphones, harpsichords, 12-string guitars and gongs and carried forward by the guitars of Garcia and Weir which in turn merge into a long jam in which again parts recorded in studio with live parts. Born Cross Eyed, is probably the most bizarre piece of the disc characterized by arrangements with irregular tempos, by a somewhat elusive singing part and by the intensive use of overdubs (even a couple of seconds of “dense air” recorded by mixing recordings of air in the desert California and in Los Angeles).

The second side of the album is less varied. In fact, it is entirely occupied by a very long medley of two songs, the first of which, Alligator, marks the beginning of the fruitful collaboration of the group with the lyricist Robert Hunter. The light-hearted tone of the first minutes of the song quickly transforms into a rhythmic kind of tribal dance dominated by the percussions of Hart and Kreutzmann which lead to a sort of state of collective hypnosis and delirium on which the excruciating sounds of the guitars and the organ are grafted . In live performances this piece even reached the 20-minute duration, with results on the public that are not difficult to imagine.

Anthem Of The Sun’s trip ends and culminates with Caution (Do Not Stop On Tracks), another experimental song, characterized by the fact that the music is continuously subjected to speed changes while feedback, noises, hisses and silences are inserted into the “melody “. The effect, certainly intended, is disorienting. Worthy conclusion of a decidedly original album, certainly not the band’s masterpiece, the best will come with the following Aoxomoxoa o Workingman’s Dead, but to listen carefully to fully understand what was the psychedelic movement of the late sixties

Track list

Side a

That’s It For The Other One
I Cryptical Envelopement
II Quadlibet For Tender Feet
III The Faster We Go, The Rounder We Get
IV We Leave The Castle
New Potato Caboose
Born Cross-Eyed

Side B

Alligator
Caution (Do Not Stop On Tracks)