Song of the Week: "Passenger"

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"Passenger"

Grateful Dead

from Terrapin Station

1977

Nothing like a good rock doc to reinvigorate your interest in a band, is there? I spent a couple weeks midway through this summer fitting in episodes of Long Strange Trip, a multi-part documentary about the Grateful Dead. I'll say this as many times as I need to—if a movie is about music, even tangentially, I'll probably enjoy at least a little bit of it.

There are definitely days that I don't give a fuck about the Grateful Dead—most days, maybe—but watching Long Strange Trip, they were all I cared about. That's the sign of a good documentary, that it makes you care, temporarily or perhaps even permanently, about something you wouldn't normally care about at all.

But having your mind blown by a documentary and its beautiful moments of quiet truth is one thing; does the music hold up? I was interested to find out. Traditionally, I've held onto Workingman's Dead and American Beauty as two Dead albums that work as studio albums, and just kind of assumed that everything else is fodder for their immortal live shows.

The Grateful Dead's discography page on Wikipedia is peculiar in that it combines studio albums and live albums into one chart, so I was forced to refrain from being lazy about it, and click on each one, trying to figure out which studio album would be worth a try. I landed on 1977's Terrapin Station.

I don't know that I'm blown away by this album (and it certainly doesn't make me feel those same incredible feelings that Long Strange Trip made me feel at its best), but I think I'm interested in enough of what's going on here to talk about it.

The biggest thing to note about Terrapin Station, especially if you're jumping here from American Beauty, is that the sound is about ten times bigger and more polished than their older, folky works of art. At times, the Dead sound like a rollicking country-blues bar band, stomping out their old standards in some honky-tonk down the road.

The sound is crisper and cleaner, more vibrant than stoned, so there's that. There's also the colossal presence of Donna Godchaux, who brings a Joplin-like energy to the band. I only knew that the Dead had a female presence because of the doc (her and her husband were basically like, "Hey, that band is pretty good... let's go join them), but even having watched them, I was kind of shocked how different the energy is on Terrapin Station than on any pre-Godchaux release. And, honestly, I fucking love it.

(There's also the 16-minute title track that really doesn't sound like what I just described, or anything else really, but that song can speak for itself.)

Ya know, you grow up hearing about the Deadheads grooving along to some psychedelic party shit, and then only being sonically familiar with mostly stuff like "Attics of My Life," the two ideas seemed antithetical to each other. But with Terrapin Station—for me, anyway—those two ideas about the Grateful Dead finally come together for me.

While I will still maintain that I love the Grateful Dead more in theory than in practice, my experiences with Long Strange Trip and Terrapin Station have me excited to dig just a little deeper (but not too much).