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On their very first studio album, the Grateful Dead are caught at a time before they had developed into A full-blown psychedelic jam unit. On this eponymous debut, the band touches on many bases, sounding mostly like a well-informed garage punk band. The album combines elements of Yardbirds-style rave-ups (“Beat It On Down the Line,” the instrumental portion of “Viola Lee Blues”), blues (“Good Morning Little School Girl”) and some extended jamming (“Viola Lee Blues”), but little that would suggest the elemental sound ahead of them. For those who love the Dead for what they would become, this album stands out as an aberration, sort of like a prototype version of what was to come. For those who dread the Dead, though, this album might provide an alternative means of understanding their methodology.
The original songs (as opposed to the covers that constitute most of the album) “Cream Puff War” and “The Golden Road (To Unlimited Devotion)” sound more like the pop/psychedelia of their San Francisco-based competition Love or Jefferson Airplane than latter-day Dead. What’s interesting here, though, is that although it is only their first album, they sound more focused and sure of themselves than either of these bands. Both of these songs would fit more comfortably on a ‘Nuggets’-style collection of sixties garage rock than they would on a Grateful Dead compilation CD, but they stand on their own merit. The blues tracks are straight ahead and hard hitting in a manner that the band would soon abandon. “New, New Minglewood Blues” and “Sitting On Top of the World” betray a raw energy level that is almost auspicious, especially in the context of the Grateful Dead catalog. It appears that this album catches the band at a crossroads where they are performing a high-wire balancing act, still attempting to please the crowd with uptempo arrangements, while simultaneously applying themselves to a more experimental means of expression. In a very short while, they would find themselves in the enviable position of pleasing the crowd because of that experimentation. Meanwhile, this album offers a unique glimpse of a time before such heady ambition would become a way of life.
Grade: 
 
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