Anthem of the Sun is the second album by American rock band the Grateful Dead, released on July 16, 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. 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. 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"). 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."</blockquote>
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. 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."
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.
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".
Side one of the album comprises a suite to the author Neal Cassady, and features psychedelic lyrics, jazz-style musical motifs and frantic jamming, with sporadic touches of electronic music reminiscent of Edgard Varèse. This passage of musique concrète segues into "New Potato Caboose".
A reviewer for Disc and Music Echo wrote that Anthem of the Sun lived up to the hype around the band, calling it "so completely unlike anything you ever heard before that it's practically a new concept in music. It's haunting, it's pretty, it's infinite — and then zap and it's explosive and a complete mind-blower." They added that the group had grown beyond the ordinary blues of their debut album to the "very front rank" of progressive bands, concluding that "Anthem of the Sun is undoubtedly one of the five great albums of 1968." Victoria Daily Times writer Russell Freethy grouped Anthem of the Sun alongside The Collectors' eponymous album and Jefferson Airplane's Crown of Creation for containing "[t]he best in electronic rock".
Abilene Reporter-News reviewer Lynn Taylor believes that despite the excitement around the group, the appeal wears off quickly as it "takes a special sort of appetite" to play the entire album, adding: "It takes considerable thought to understand what the Dead are trying to say, and mostly it isn't worth the trouble." James Belsey of Bristol's Evening Post panned the record, saying that compared to Jimi Hendrix, the Grateful Dead sound like "amateurs set loose in the world of weird music". Although believing much of the record to be poor, he enjoyed the "one semi-subtle moment of electronic music" during "That's It for the Other One". In his review, Barry Miles of International Times wrote that the group were so submerged in the underground and "community concept" that "individual virtuosity is sacrificed to group sound." He believed that Anthem of the Sun resembled "background music to a revolution. Cool in a detached way, emotionless, dealing in psychic head energy flows," with imprints of the band's performances at the Acid Tests in their sound. He nonetheless said: "The music is from an extreme position, difficult to listen to with sympathy as 'revolution music' is now the thing and psychedelic music is 'out'." It ranked at joint 35th place in The Chicago Tribunes poll of the top 50 albums of 1968.