Anthem of the Sun is the second album by American rock band the Grateful Dead, released on July 18, 1968, by Warner Bros-Seven Arts. The album was assembled through a collage-like editing approach helmed by members Jerry Garcia and Phil Lesh (along with soundman Dan Healy), in which disparate studio and live performance tapes were blended together to create new hybrid recordings. The band supplemented their performances with instruments such as prepared piano, kazoo, harpsichord, timpani, trumpet, and güiro. The result was an experimental amalgam that is neither a pure studio album nor a live album. The band was joined by Tom Constanten, who contributed avant-garde instrumental and studio techniques influenced by composers John Cage and Karlheinz Stockhausen. It is the first album to feature second drummer Mickey Hart.
In 1972, an alternate mix of the album was released to capitalize on the band's recent success. A 2018 reissue on Rhino Records collects both the 1968 and 1972 mixes. The album was ranked number 288 on Rolling Stone magazine's list of the 500 greatest albums of all time, in both the 2003 and 2012 iterations of the list."500 Greatest Albums: Anthem of the Sun" at RollingStone.com It was voted number 376 in Colin Larkin's All Time Top 1000 Albums.
Recording The band entered American Studios in Los Angeles in November 1967 with David Hassinger, the producer of their eponymous debut album.Garcia: An American Life by Blair Jackson, Penguin Books, 1999, pg. 144. However, determined to make a more complicated recorded work than their debut release, as well as attempt to translate their live sound into the studio, the band and Hassinger changed locations to New York City. By December they had gone through two other studios, Century Sound and Olmstead Studios (both "highly regarded eight-track studios").
Eventually, Hassinger grew frustrated with the group's slow recording pace and quit the project entirely while the band was at Century Sound, with only a third of the album completed. It has been reported that he left after guitarist Bob Weir requested creating the illusion of "thick air" in the studio by mixing recordings of silence taken in the desert and the city.Grateful Dead: The Illustrated Trip . Jake Woodward, et al. Dorling Kindersley Limited, 2003, pg. 83.Phil Lesh: Searching for the Sound by Phil Lesh, Little, Brown and Company, 2005, pg. 125. Hassinger commented that "Nobody could sing [the new tracks recorded in NYC], and at that point they were experimenting too much in my opinion. They didn't know what the hell they were looking for." Garcia noted that "we want[ed] to learn how the studio work[ed]. We [didn't] want somebody else doing it. It's our music, we want[ed] to do it."
Returning to San Francisco's Coast Recorders, the band recruited their soundman, Dan Healy, to help produce. In between studio sessions, the band also began recording their live dates. Lesh commented that this was in part because the songs were not "road tested." Healy, Garcia, and Lesh then took these concert tapes (encompassing two Los Angeles shows from November 1967, a tour of the Pacific Northwest in January and early February 1968, and a California tour from mid-February to mid-March 1968) and began interlacing them with existing studio tracks. Garcia called this "mix[ing] it for the hallucinations". Kreutzmann explained, "Phil and Jerry were the ones who figured out that we could exploit studio technology to demonstrate how these songs were mirrors of infinity, even when they adhered to their established arrangements. It's the old paradox of 'improvisational compositions'. Jazz artists knew all about the balance between freedom and structure, but a few rock bands were now catching on. Most rock bands, however, tended to head in an opposite direction, afraid of the uncertainty of improvisation. We decided that Anthem of the Sun was going to be our statement on the matter". Drummer Bill Kreutzmann's description of the production process describes the listening experience of the album as well: ...Jerry [Garcia] and Phil [Lesh] went into the studio with [Dan] Healy and, like mad scientists, they started splicing all the versions together, creating hybrids that contained the studio tracks and various live parts, stitched together from different shows, all in the same song — one rendition would dissolve into another and sometimes they were even stacked on top of each other... It was easily our most experimental record, it was groundbreaking in its time, and it remains a psychedelic listening experience to this day."
Tom Constanten, a friend of Lesh and Garcia, joined the band in the studio while on leave from the United States Air Force to provide piano, prepared piano, and electronic tape effects influenced by John Cage and Stockhausen. Constanten would formally join the band following his discharge in November 1968; however, his contributions to the band's sound were more evident in the studio than in live shows, and Anthem of the Sun was no exception. Constanten developed piano pieces that sounded like three gamelan orchestras playing at once and created effects by setting a spinning gyroscope on the piano soundboard. Likewise, the rest of the band used a large assortment of instruments in the studio to augment the live tracks that were the base of each song, including kazoos, crotales, harpsichord, timpani, trumpet, and a güiro. Garcia commented that parts of the album were "far out, even too far out... We weren't making a record in the normal sense; we were making a collage." He also acknowledged the influence of Lesh's study of Stockhausen and other avant-gardists. Warner Bros. executive Joe Smith was noted as characterizing Anthem of the Sun as "the most unreasonable project with which we have ever involved ourselves."
Jerry Garcia's longtime friend and songwriting partner, Robert Hunter, had made his first lyrical contributions to the band the previous year for "Dark Star". He added words to the Lesh/Pigpen composition "Alligator" on this album.
Locations While no certain date for the beginning of recording is known, it is unlikely that any material was recorded before September 19, 1967, the date when Mickey Hart first played with the band. The melange of the final product makes it difficult to tell where many of the live excerpts listed in the credits were used. However, significant fragments of "Alligator" (e.g. the post-vocals "jam section") are known to come from the February 14, 1968, show at San Francisco's Carousel Ballroom (the venue that later became the Fillmore West). The "Alligator" vocal reprise is taken from November 10, 1967, at the Shrine Exposition Hall in Los Angeles. Similarly, the skeletal framework of "Caution (Do Not Stop on Tracks)" dates from the Shrine Auditorium on November 10, 1967, and the Carousel Ballroom on March 31, 1968. Excerpts from two shows at Kings Beach Bowl in Kings Beach, California, on February 23–24, 1968, that were used — most notably the car horn heard at the end of "Caution (Do Not Stop on Tracks)" — were later released on Dick's Picks Volume 22. Another show known to be sourced, from March 17, 1968, was released as Download Series Volume 6. Used from that performance were the verse(s) section of "The Faster We Go" portion of "That's It for the Other One", and the first half of the "New Potato Caboose" jam (after the vocals).
Studios used: RCA Victor Studio A, Los Angeles, California, September 1967 American Recording Company, Los Angeles, California, October 1967 Century Sound Studio, New York City, New York December 1967 Olmstead Sound Studios, New York City, New York, December 1967 Criteria Recording Studios, Miami, Florida, April 1968
Live tracks recorded at (according to liner notes): Shrine Exposition Hall, Los Angeles, California, November 10–11, 1967 (see also 30 Trips Around the Sun & the vinyl-only breakout release) Eureka Municipal Auditorium, Eureka, California, January 20, 1968 (see also Road Trips Volume 2 Number 2) Eagles Auditorium, Seattle, Washington, January 26–27, 1968 Crystal Ballroom, Portland, Oregon, February 2–3, 1968 (see also Road Trips Volume 2 Number 2) Carousel Ballroom, San Francisco, California, February 14, March 15–17, March 29–31, 1968 (see also Download Series Volume 6) Kings Beach Bowl, Kings Beach, California, February 22–24, 1968 (see also Dick's Picks Volume 22)
The February 14, 1968, recording at Carousel Ballroom has been used to create sound patches for Moog Music's award-winning Animoog app.
Bonus tracks on the 2001/2003 reissue recorded at: Shrine Exposition, Los Angeles, California, August 23, 1968 (see also Two from the Vault)
Composition In the description of Hal Horowitz of American Songwriter, Anthem of the Sun is an "oblique sound collage" which Garcia said was "mixed... for hallucinations", resulting in a less commercial album than the group's debut record. Similarly, Michael Gallucci of Ultimate Classic Rock writes that the record is notable for the band's "earliest exploration of longer songs on record, as well as the combination of both live and studio recordings that were pieced together in a sort of sound collage that infuriated label bosses and opened the group to more experimental paths. Band biographer Joe S. Harrington also describes it as a sound collage of mixed live and studio performances which "sounded unlike anything else at the time."
Gene Santoro writes that the album took the Grateful Dead into "conceptual-art music, sonic collage, tape manipulations, lapping overdubs, and endless splices, parts inchoate and other parts brilliant as they learned the latest technology, the eight-track recording studio." He also comments that the band's jugband roots occasionally surface, such as with the intro of "Alligator", which features kazoos performed like a horn section. Q writer Johnny Black considers it to be one of numerous 1968 concept albums that applied different approaches to the use of "conceptuality" popularised by the Beatles' Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band (1967), deeming it to be a "non-stop sound collage" that weaves the live and studio tracks with "sound effects and disjointed electronic compositions". Horowitz also comments that the album's original concept – to splice live and studio work together – was partly inspired by Sgt. Pepper and was "to push the confines of the album" further.
Rough Guides writer Ken Hunt credits Garcia for the project's direction, "deploying live and studio performances collage-fashion". He also highlighted Constanten's keyboardist work, saying that as the musician studied under the tuition of Stockhausen, Luciano Berio, Pierre Boulez and Henri Pousseur, he was "well versed in the piano's alternative voices – as Anthems prepared piano and gyroscope-on-piano-strings death rattle remind." David Gans of Musician considers Anthem of the Sun to be the best example of Lesh's resurfaced pre-Grateful Dead influences, due to the "passages of musique concrète directly traceable to Berio's electronic music". One contemporary reviewer wrote: "It's continuous, with no bands between tracks. More a movement, even hymn — yes, anthem if you like." Simon Reynolds of The Wire describes both Anthem of the Sun and its follow-up Aoxomoxoa (1969) as containing "weird studio-as-instrument stuff".