Grateful Dead
Aoxomoxoa

THE REVIEW

After establishing their headquarters in San Francisco at 710 Ashbury Street, the Grateful Dead gradually established themselves as the main flag bearer of the Summer of Love, the hippie counterculture, and the Californian psychedelic scene.
This happened primarily due to their legendary live performances: however, it was with "Aoxomoxoa" in 1969 that Jerry Garcia's band's fortunes also began to recover in the studio, after a disappointing first album and a second, "Anthem of the Sun", a bit too forced in its multifaceted eclecticism. In the eight compositions of "Aoxomoxoa", the band's sophisticated alchemy finally reached commendable results, furthermore keeping on tracks that favor conciseness over the sprawling sound journeys like "Dark Star", the most celebrated episode of their vast catalog. Among lysergic fragments, folk echoes, bluegrass scores, acidic guitar surges, free jazz specters, and iridescent organ textures, the definitive matrix of the Grateful Dead sound is created here, which will then be further refined in subsequent works, particularly "Workingman's Dead" and "American Beauty".

The album starts with a bang with one of the band's classics: "St. Stephen", 4 syncopated and fabulous minutes, where gospel hints coexist with sinuous organ reverberations, "Captain" Jerry's boogie strums, and dreamy vocal interplay.
One of the keys to the group's success was the sumptuous synchrony between the numerous band members, which notably included two drummers and two keyboardists: this resulted in a capacity to seamlessly transition from the acid experiments of "China Cat Sunflower" and "Cosmic Charlie" (Garcia's fantastic blues riffs and guitar excursions) to the sweet lysergy of a ballad like "Rosemary". Anthological is the expertise with which "Dupree's Diamond Blues" traverses the most inspired rock-blues trails (putting them on the same level as The Band), while in "Doin' that rag", the exuberant jazz-psychedelic framework presented is nothing short of captivating.
The Grateful Dead's forte, however, was certainly their ability to expand atmospheres and transport the listener into uncanny and ecstatic sonic universes. If the long Tibetan mantra of "What's become of the baby" - contemporary with the famous lysergic-transcendental experiment of "Mind gardens" by the Byrds - sounds somewhat pretentious and cloying in this sense, the shamanic "Mountains of the Moon" is instead heartwrenching: country echoes and incredible organ touches paint vast psychedelic undulations, in search of the dark stars of our universe, in a reverie sculpted by verses like "Gone is the far and lonely time, the fairy tale sibyl flies along all the mountains of the moon".

The Grateful Dead's adventure continued even after the era of acid visions had been consumed, ultimately ending when Garcia died in 1995. But somewhere, good Jerry, like Coleridge's Ancient Mariner, is surely at the helm of his vessel, navigating stormy sonic galaxies.