Grateful Dead

★★★ Grateful Dead RHINO. CD/DL/LP 1971 live set – AKA Skull & Roses – gets the 50th anniversary upgrade.

“We’re a regular shoot-’em-up saloon band,” Jerry Garcia explained in 1971 and, if 1969’s

Live Dead presented the Grateful Dead as psychedelic explorers, Skull & Roses

(working title: Skull Fuck) is mostly a rowdy, hard-partying affair, drawn from spring ’71 shows. Great fun, as ever, and a clutch of then-new songs – especially a chiming, transcendent Wharf Rat – capture the band’s intense creativity at the time. But even the addition of a July ’71 gig, their last at the Fillmore West, can’t detract from the feeling that Skull & Roses is ostensibly a trial run for the following year’s magisterial Europe ’72. There’s always more Dead, of course, and heads are encouraged to pick up the excellent, if smaller-scale, reissue of Road Trips Vol. 2 No. 3

– Wall Of Sound from 1974, with Garcia at the top of his jazz game. John Mulvey