Grateful Dead – Hometown Blues (12-Inch Double-LP)

This double album captures the Grateful Dead’s concert at the Winterland Arena, in San Francisco, on 22 October 1967, during the Grateful Dead Tour.

The show starts off on such a high with a haunting, milky, completely psychedelic Morning Dew. Pig’s organ and Jerry’s rounded guitar licks will send shivers up your spine. They might have done this song better in later years, but there is nothing like hearing this elemental version.

After Morning Dew, New Potato Caboose spills forth with Bobby’s vocals sounding rich and verdant and the boys putting in an incredible ensemble performance. It just transcendentally flows and the entire band is in full-on mind-meld form.

You don’t think of the Dead in 1967 as tight, but, in their own loose and psychedelic manner, that is exactly what they are. And just as suddenly, the band is in full-on blues mode for It Hurts Me Too with Pig showing himself to be a blues frontman extraordinaire, and just listen to that sweet guitar work from Jerry.

Cold Rain and Snow comes out next, and it has hints of Sixties pop with a certain effervescence as Jerry pulls a bit of his Dick Dale-like guitar sound that he was wont to do in ’66 and ’67. But there is also a heavier, more acid-laced edge to the tune lurking just below the surface.

Then we get Turn On Your Lovelight, which is, musically, every bit as in your face as the monster versions of coming years, but all packed into only twelve minutes. It flat out rocks through the middle portion.

Next, twelve beats brings on Beat It On Down the Line, which is as polished as anything the Dead will ever play, sounding readymade for a two-minute hit on the radio.

The crowning moment of the show is the first known performance of That’s It for the Other One. It shows just where the Dead were heading over the next two years, into their own brand of psychedelia that would become the basis for the Grateful Dead we all know and love.

Track Listing

Side One

1. Morning Dew

Side Two

1. New Potato Caboose
2. It Hurts Me Too

Side Three

1. Cold Rain and Snow
2. Turn On Your Lovelight

Side Four

1. Beat It On Down the Line
2. That’s It for the Other One

Format: Vinyl / 12” Album

No of Discs: 2

Label: Parachute

Catalogue No: PARA546LP

Barcode: 0803341550520