Content
While mainly a live album, there were a few overdubs including the doctoring of lead and background vocals. For the three new band originals "Bertha", "Playing in the Band", and "Wharf Rat", the band invited Jerry Garcia associate Merl Saunders to overdub an organ part. This made the organ playing of Saunders more prominent than that of Pigpen, whose organ contributions tend to be buried in the mix.
"Playing in the Band" received a good amount of airplay, and became one of the Dead's most played songs in concerts. The closing segue of "Not Fade Away" into "Goin' Down The Road Feeling Bad" also received airplay and became a fan favorite.
The album's cover art, composed by Alton Kelly and Stanley Mouse, is based on an illustration by Edmund Joseph Sullivan for an old edition of the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam. In its original issue on vinyl, this album also has the first acknowledgment by the band for its legion of fans, referred to as "Dead Heads" within an invitation to contact the band.
Read more about this topic: Grateful Dead (album)
Famous quotes containing the word content:
“Our frigate takes fire,
The other asks if we demand quarter?
If our colors are struck and the fighting done?
Now I laugh content for I hear the voice of my little captain,
We have not struck, he composedly cries, we have just begun our part of the fighting.”
—Walt Whitman (1819–1892)
“In most modern instances, interpretation amounts to the philistine refusal to leave the work of art alone. Real art has the capacity to make us nervous. By reducing the work of art to its content and then interpreting that, one tames the work of art. Interpretation makes art manageable, conformable.”
—Susan Sontag (b. 1933)
“The root of the discontent in American women is that they are too well educated.... There will be no real content among American women unless they are made and kept more ignorant or unless they are given equal opportunity with men to use what they have been taught. And American men will not be really happy until their women are.”
—Pearl S. Buck (1892–1973)