The Grateful Dead - Bird Song - Non-Album Tracks (1970-1971)

Robert Hunter, who wrote most of the lyrics for the Grateful Dead, died last week. In tribute to his legacy, I'm posting more from the Dead.

From about 1970 to 1972, the Grateful Dead had a tremendous burst of creativity. Yet the band only released two studio albums during that time, both in 1970: "Workingman's Dead" and "American Beauty." They should have put out a lot more. Instead, the band's two main singer-songwriters, Jerry Garcia and Bob Weir, each put out solo albums in 1971 that were filled with songs that would become standards for the band. Plus, a lot of new songs were put on live albums, especially "Skulls and Roses" and "Europe '72."

I've given myself the goal of compiling all those original songs onto studio albums in a similar vein to "Workingman's Dead" and "American Beauty." Like those albums, I've tried to create albums that are about 40 minutes long each, with short versions of songs compared to the band's usual live standards.

On the downside, there are very few publicly available studio outtakes. Also, I've avoided using the recordings from the two solo albums unless there's no other option, because I figure most Dead fans should have those albums already. But on the upside, there are mountains of officially released live recordings from that time in pristine sound quality. They can easily be made to sound like studio takes by removing the crowd noise. Besides, the Dead were played better live anyway, which is why they favored live albums at the time.

I've come up with so much original material from 1970 to 1972 that I was able to make four stray tracks albums! This is the first one. Well, almost all original material. For each of those four albums, I've allowed myself to include one cover song, if it's a song so closely identified with the band that many people assume they wrote it. In this case, it's "Goin' Down the Road Feelin' Bad."

Note that in addition to all those new originals, the band also played a ton of cover songs in those years. I plan to do something with the best of those later. Furthermore, the band played even more interesting songs in an acoustic format, mostly in 1970. I have plans for that too. But I want to deal with the original stray tracks first.

In order to figure out which songs to put on which of these four albums I'm making from that era, I consulted a list detailing the exact dates each song was played live for the first time. Then I divided those into four groups, one for each album. However, in some cases I moved a song from one group to another in order to have a good balance of songs sung by Jerry Garcia, Bob Weir, and Ron 'Pigpen' McKennan.

Note that two of the recordings - "Deal" and "Greatest Story Ever Told" - date from 1972. But that's just a matter of finding the best live recordings. Both songs had their debuts in February 1971.

By the way, "Tastebud" is a very little known and rarely played original song by McKennan. It was first done in 1966, and I had a version of it on a stray tracks album covering that time period. But it was only played live a few times, and no version of it was released at the time. The band then brought it out of mothballs and tried it again in the studio in early 1970 with the idea of putting it on "Workingman's Dead," only to leave it unreleased again. I've included that version.

01 Bird Song (Grateful Dead)
02 Mason's Children (Grateful Dead)
03 Tastebud (Grateful Dead)
04 To Lay Me Down (Grateful Dead)
05 Greatest Story Ever Told (Grateful Dead)
06 Deal (Grateful Dead)
07 Goin' Down the Road Feelin' Bad (Grateful Dead)
08 Playing in the Band (Grateful Dead)

https://www.upload.ee/files/15379267/TGratefulD_1970-1971_BrdSong_atse.zip.html

For the cover art, I used some nice fan art. Unfortunately, it's been a while since I found it, and I don't remember who did it or where it came from. I do remember that I added the wood in the background, in imitation of the look of the "American Beauty" cover.