GRATEFUL DEAD — Built To Last (review)

GRATEFUL DEAD — Built To Last album cover

Album · 1989 · Jazz Related Rock

3/5 · 2024-09-22
vmagistr

When you say Grateful Dead, most music fans associate psychedelia and country with the band's name, but the group around guitarists Jerry Garcia and Bob Weir also more or less dabbled in funk, jazz rock, and, in the late 1980s, produced pop rock-tinged music during their thirty-year career. Of the two albums of original material they released at that time, I like 1989's Build to Last a little better. Sadly, by the time it was released, the line-up that had spent the whole of the eighties together was slowly sounding its death knell, as keyboardist Brent Mydland involuntarily ended his earthly journey the following July after overdosing on cocaine. Thus fueling rumors that the position of keyboard player was cursed with the Grateful Dead - over the years, four of their five players have passed from this world by other than natural causes (the fifth, Tom Konstanten, is still alive).

So what does the record with which the Grateful Dead closed out their studio career have to offer? First and foremost, it's the tinkling tones of electric guitars, which accompany the listener through pretty much the entire album. They are followed by variously shaped synth tracks, which don't stand out from the band's sound, but rather complement it naturally. The nine included tracks build on a pleasantly brooding melody: occasionally a more expressive chorus flashes through, but for the most part it's a fairly civil performance. The tracks are enlivened by guitar solos, which feature a lot of unusual harmonic runs and harmonies. As usual, the lyrics, written for the band by renowned songwriters Robert Hunter and John Perry Barlow, feature plenty of cultural references, from the Gospel of Matthew to writer Norman Mailer and the first astronauts on the moon to computer slang.

Of the included tracks I personally like two-thirds of the trio contributed by frontman Jerry Garcia: the title track Built to Last, with its imagery reflecting on impermanence and permanence, as well as the opening track Foolish Heart, about not starting anything with a this kind of heart. From the pen of keyboardist Mydland comes perhaps the most hit song on the record, the ecologically themed We Can Run, as well as the slightly more sombre Just a Little Light. The third of the band's prolific writers, guitarist Bob Weir, contributed, for example, with my other favourite track Victim or the Crime, whose lyrics ponder the issues of justice and truth. Perhaps the only thing I perceive as weaker is Mydland's final piece I Will Take You Home, which contains too much pathos for my taste.

On Built to Last, the Grateful Dead are by no means presenting themselves in their typical position - on the contrary, for a band that was famous for sprawling instrumental jams and songs that usually functioned as a soundtrack to a good trip at concerts, there is quite a bit of "smoothness" here. Still, the album offers a decent helping of melodies and imaginative songwriting that I find a joy to sink my teeth into every time. The 60's and 70's Grateful Dead sounded a lot different, but I think that position suits the band as well. I really like this record quite a bit.