Quite possibly the worst album by either Bob Dylan or the Grateful Dead

January 8, 2023 11:17 AM

And here is the quite promising start to what led to "Quite possibly the worst album by either Bob Dylan or the Grateful Dead"

Bob Dylan and Grateful Dead Complete Studio Rehearsals June '87

See also

Dylan & the Dead
Unreleased Live Album
(Jerry Garcia's tape)

Bob Dylan/Greatful Dead: Dylan And The Dead, Considered (1989): He's got a lotta nerve . . .

"...By some accounts bootlegs of the tour were better but even Jerry Garcia was immediately dismissive of what was happening: ''He's not really a musician, he's a performer,'' he said of Dylan, who he admired.

And ''he doesn't have a conception about two things that are very important in music: starting and ending a song. Really. The middle of the song is great; the beginning and the ending are nowhere''

Review: Albums That Never Were: Dylan & The Dead (Jerry Garcia's original mix)

Dylan & The Dead' Revisited
1987-07-12, Giants Stadium, East Rutherford, NJ

The Greatful Dead
(Set One) 04/07/1987
Sullivan Stadium
Foxboro MA

The Greatful Dead with Bob Dylan
(Set Two) 04/07/1987
Sullivan Stadium
Foxboro MA

Dylan & Dead Eugene OR 1987

The rehearsals, the six city tour, the live recordings, alternative mixes and the tortured tale of the final cut are both a Russian novel and a Classical Greek tragicomedy. A book could be written about it. In fact, one has. because why not?

The twisted tale of Bob Dylan and the Grateful Dead

And, too...

Archive 07/27/1987 New Yorker: The Dead and Dylan (????)

Talk story about attending a concert of The Grateful Dead with Bob Dylan at Giants Stadium, in the Meadowlands. Writer got a call at the last minute from his old friend the Music Maven inviting him, pleading with him because no one else would go and he had an extra ticket. His friend explained that The Grateful Dead, the veteran psychedelic rock band from the San Francisco Bay Area, was teaming up with Bob Dylan for a limited-engagement tour and would be appearing within the hour at Giants Stadium. Writer saw thousands of people filling the parking lots including more young people with wild hair, and wearing tie-dyed shirts and ripped jeans, and in many cases, going without shoes, that he's seen since the Central Park Be-In over 20 years ago.

and, then as a lagniappe...

Greatful Dead England 1970 (The Lost Film) Oh, the days of yore. I remember that band.

posted by y2karl (31 comments total)

I saw them in Berkeley or some damn place, when they toured around this time. They sounded good neither together nor separately; it was a big letdown.
posted by Sing Or Swim at 11:31 AM on January 8, 2023 [1 favorite]

I went to the Giant's staium and JFK shows during that tour and don't remember being let down, you see enough Dead shows and you realize there will be good ones and not so good ones, but hey, is there someplace you'd rather be?
Dylan's voice though -- it was as if he were trying on a parody of himself. The tunes we all so familiar, and the lyrics, well, we all had 'em, but they didn't seem to fit was was coming from the stage, so that was weird.
I just remember thinking that the Dead played these songs so well on their own that it was odd not having Bobby sing on Desolation Row, or Jerry on Simple Twist of Fate. but hey, next show or next tour, right?
posted by OHenryPacey at 11:47 AM on January 8, 2023 [1 favorite]

I saw this show at the Minneapolis Metrodome. The sound was bouncing all over the arena. Nothing but garble. A complete waste of acid.
posted by LindsayIrene at 11:47 AM on January 8, 2023 [11 favorites]

I've recently become quite taken with finding the worst albums by (typically) good artists. Most recently I managed to find a CD copy of The Doctor by Cheap Trick.

Next on my list, Black Sabbath's Born Again. That's a bit of a rarity.
posted by Jessica Savitch's Coke Spoon at 11:47 AM on January 8, 2023 [4 favorites]

It's neither of their worst albums (I'm going with Go to Heaven and Dylan, but it is definitely a... letdown's a good choice.

Whoever decided to leave e.g. 'Chimes of Freedom' off the album should've been fired.
posted by box at 11:52 AM on January 8, 2023 [1 favorite]

MetaFilter: A complete waste of acid.
posted by loquacious at 12:48 PM on January 8, 2023 [24 favorites]

Not the worst thing I've ever heard from either of them, but a combination like this really does get your expectations up for something with more verve. Also, their set lists seem to mostly touch on some of my less favourite Dylan songs, and mostly evade my preferred Dylan songs.
posted by ovvl at 12:51 PM on January 8, 2023

>Dylan's voice though -- it was as if he were trying on a parody of himself.

That's how I remember it. It seemed like he had abandoned the idea of singing and was doing some kind of highly stylized croak-shouting which he presumably felt was his Brand. Mick Jagger started doing this at some point too, I think. Not at the same concert, I mean, just in general.
posted by Sing Or Swim at 12:54 PM on January 8, 2023 [2 favorites]

They sounded good neither together nor separately; it was a big letdown.

I went to the Giant's staium and JFK shows during that tour and don't remember being let down, you see enough Dead shows and you realize there will be good ones and not so good ones, but hey, is there someplace you'd rather be?

The thing is, with Bob Dylan, in my experience, that you have about a 50/50 chance of getting a good -- or shitty -- show.
posted by mikelieman at 12:59 PM on January 8, 2023 [2 favorites]

So if the Dead and Dylan were both a 50/50 split between good and shitty, and if the two are uncorrelated, and if a good band can be ruined by one shitty musician, then it follows from the laws of statistics that when you put them both on stage at the same time the odds of a good show go down to 25%.
posted by nebulawindphone at 2:16 PM on January 8, 2023 [8 favorites]

I was at this show: Oakland Coliseum, 1987. I had seen the Dead before, with my back turned ("ask me about my summer as a security guard") and wasn't much of a fan; liked Dylan a lot. But in the end there was no Reese's Peanut Butter Cup moment.
posted by chavenet at 2:37 PM on January 8, 2023

I think in 1987 nebulawindphone, the Dead were batting better than 50/50 on their shows.

I was at the Eugene show. Didn’t seem as bad as it sounds on the YouTube linked above. I had a good time. And I can say I saw Bob Dylan live. And it blows my mind that it was 35 years ago…

Ah well, a touch of grey kinda suits me anyway I guess.
posted by Windopaene at 3:38 PM on January 8, 2023 [5 favorites]

Good to know there was a precedent for audioslave.
posted by MisantropicPainforest at 4:15 PM on January 8, 2023 [1 favorite]

Good to know there was a precedent for audioslave.

And Loutallica.
posted by Jessica Savitch's Coke Spoon at 4:20 PM on January 8, 2023 [4 favorites]

Great post, hippybear y2karl!
posted by alex_skazat at 4:20 PM on January 8, 2023 [3 favorites]

Wow, what a terrible era for both bands!
posted by Liquidwolf at 6:33 PM on January 8, 2023

I was at that Oakland Coliseum show and I remember it being hot as fuck and painfully crowded and the whole show being godawful. And oh gee look, there’s a video and it was godawful.
posted by Conrad-Casserole at 6:51 PM on January 8, 2023 [5 favorites]

The Greatful Dead
04/07/1987
Sullivan Stadium
Foxboro MA

I was there. Now I know they did rehearse, because I had the distinct impression at the time they hadn't. I mostly remember this friend on acid I was looking after being freaked out by all the fireworks in the parking lot after. He said it felt like being in a war (so we went somewhere else and he was fine).
posted by hypnogogue at 7:12 PM on January 8, 2023 [1 favorite]

So if the Dead and Dylan were both a 50/50 split between good and shitty, and if the two are uncorrelated, and if a good band can be ruined by one shitty musician, then it follows from the laws of statistics that when you put them both on stage at the same time the odds of a good show go down to 25%.

But then you add Kurt Angle to the mix, your chances of a good show drastic go down!
posted by delfin at 7:45 PM on January 8, 2023 [1 favorite]

I just had a memory emerge from the Dylan/Dead concert. We were all smooshed in the entryway waiting to get admitted and as someone squeezed past me, their glasses (which must have been in a shirt pocket) caught on the strap of my bag. I held them up so whoever lost them could find them, but, as I was starting to trip, I soon got bored with that. I asked my husband if he wanted a pair of glasses and that was when a furious man snatched them from my hand. Angry glasses man, if you're out there, I swear I did not purposely steal them. Other than that, it was a pretty uneventful night.
posted by LindsayIrene at 10:05 PM on January 8, 2023 [7 favorites]

I think it was Bill Kreutzman’s book that described this month: Dylan seemed lost and wanted to join the band as a member and stop being Bob Dylan. Rehearsals were half efforts but they thought it would come together onstage. Then Dylan hit the stage and called audibles of songs they hadn’t rehearsed the week before, confusing everybody.
That’s their version of what happened.
posted by richeditor at 2:05 AM on January 9, 2023 [1 favorite]

With another big band a decade earlier:
Bob Dylan, the last five nights in Paris 1978.
posted by y2karl at 2:59 AM on January 9, 2023 [1 favorite]

Can't be worse that Dylan's Live Aid performance, surely?
posted by Paul Slade at 3:32 AM on January 9, 2023

I wish it had been Dylan and the Plugz as the opener to put a little fire underneath them.

That said it’s easy to forget that musicians are just people and can get really thrown off, or lost, or whatever. Especially musicians like these who have never had any interest in being entertainers.
posted by Conrad-Casserole at 5:52 AM on January 9, 2023

''he doesn't have a conception about two things that are very important in music: starting and ending a song. Really. The middle of the song is great; the beginning and the ending are nowhere''

Jerry Garcia of the Grateful Dead giving Bob Dylan shit about not being able to start or end a song is pretty rich.
posted by goatdog at 7:13 AM on January 9, 2023 [10 favorites]

Then Dylan hit the stage and called audibles of songs they hadn’t rehearsed the week before, confusing everybody.

Yeah. That totally sounds like something that Dylan would do. And explains kinda why things sounded like that.
posted by ovvl at 9:30 AM on January 9, 2023 [1 favorite]

"Dylan hatches a plan to stop being Dylan, then fucks it up by being unable to stop being Dylan" is basically the whole Bob Dylan story.
posted by nebulawindphone at 10:24 AM on January 9, 2023 [7 favorites]

"Grateful Dead bring in new collaborator, continue to sound like the Grateful Dead."
posted by box at 10:40 AM on January 9, 2023 [2 favorites]

"Fans can't stop ragging on them, also can't stop listening"
posted by nebulawindphone at 10:55 AM on January 9, 2023 [2 favorites]

I picked up this album only because of a Rolling Stone review at the time giving it one star and declaring it the worst album of the year (with a note that it was only February). I was never a big fan of post-American-Beauty Dead or post-Rolling-Thunder Bob, but didn't find the album that horrible. I rarely went back to it, and lost it somewhere during my travels, but it was more listenable than Dylan's own "Down in the Groove", also released in '88.

I did catch a Bob show in, I think, '91, where he was the headliner of one of those 5-hour stadium shows. It looked like a Dead-type band, with two drummers, two guitarists, a bass player, maybe a keyboardist, and Bob there, taking us on his usual unpredictable tour of classic 60s hits and those post-Christian-era songs hardly anyone would discover until they got a napster account and discovered that they really weren't worth paying good money for. The only thing I remember from the show is catching actual spinners in the field, those late-80s hippie-girls just twirling around and around to the music.
posted by morspin at 4:40 PM on January 9, 2023

The only thing I remember from the show is catching actual spinners in the field, those late-80s hippie-girls just twirling around and around to the music.
posted by morspin at 4:40 PM on January 9

Eponysterical !
posted by OHenryPacey at 10:04 PM on January 9, 2023 [1 favorite]