The record
At a glance
- Artist
- Grateful Dead
- Released
- 18 July 1968
- Album
- Second album
- Original tracks
- Five indexed works
- Label
- Warner Bros.-Seven Arts
- Production
- Grateful Dead and David Hassinger
Why it matters
The recording becomes an invented performance
Anthem of the Sun does not choose between the Grateful Dead as a studio group and the Grateful Dead as a live group. It constructs a third entity by placing recordings from both environments inside the same musical passages.
The album treats editing as ensemble performance. Changes of room, date and recording texture can arrive mid-phrase, yet recurring riffs and rhythmic memory make the resulting collage feel directed rather than random.
Mickey Hart's arrival creates a two-drummer system, while Tom Constanten's piano, prepared-piano and tape work expands the palette beyond a six-piece rock band. Those additions alter the possible shape of every transition.
Authorship remains distributed. Garcia, Weir, Lesh, Pigpen, Robert Hunter, Robert Petersen and group combinations all occupy different parts of a five-track programme.
Its importance is technological and musical, but not merely technical. The dense montage captures a band learning that a record can represent the instability of a concert without pretending to reproduce one night.
1967-1968
Seven months of studios, stages and reconstruction
The Grateful Dead's 1967 debut had been recorded quickly under David Hassinger. For the second album, the band pursued a process whose scale and working method were fundamentally different.
Recording began in September 1967 and continued through March 1968. Studio work took place in Los Angeles, New York, San Francisco and Miami, while performance tapes came from multiple West Coast venues.
Concert sources include the Shrine Exposition Hall, Eureka, Eagles Auditorium, Crystal Ballroom, Kings Beach and the Carousel Ballroom. The album does not label each audible change as a new take.
Hassinger began the project as producer, while the Grateful Dead assumed increasing control. Dan Healy received an executive-engineer credit and Bob Matthews an assistant-engineer credit.
Tom Constanten contributed piano, prepared piano and electronic-tape work before his later full-time stage period with the band. Mickey Hart's percussion joined Bill Kreutzmann's drums.
The final mix process crossed further studios, including Olmstead in New York and Criteria in Miami, before Warner Bros.-Seven Arts released the LP on 18 July 1968.
Band and engineers
A new seven-person language and an engineering circle
Garcia's guitar often acts as a continuity signal. A recognisable phrase can survive a change of source tape and persuade the ear that several performances belong to one unfolding gesture.
Weir supplies both written architecture and rhythmic interruption. The Other One and Born Cross-Eyed use his sense of displaced accent to make composed passages feel unstable.
Lesh is unusually prominent as composer, orchestrator and instrumental colourist. New Potato Caboose depends on his long-form design, while bass movement helps multiple recorded spaces connect.
Pigpen pulls the second side toward blues and dance-floor immediacy. Alligator and Caution gain identity from his direct vocal presence before the ensemble exceeds their song frames.
Kreutzmann and Hart create overlapping time rather than simple extra weight. Two percussionists allow one pulse to continue while another texture prepares a transition.
Constanten extends rhythm and harmony beyond ordinary keyboards. Prepared-piano attacks and tape events can behave like percussion, atmosphere or structural punctuation.
Montage construction
Montage, doubled time and overloaded colour
The original 1968 mix makes source changes part of the foreground. Room tone, instrumental distance and stereo position can shift suddenly, revealing construction without collapsing musical continuity.
Studio overdubs do not merely polish live foundations. Trumpet, harpsichord, prepared piano, bells, chimes, gongs and tape alter the perceived scale of the ensemble.
The first side is tightly articulated despite its complexity: suite, long Lesh composition and short Weir miniature. The second side behaves more like one expanding performance split into two indexed titles.
Voices function differently from track to track. Garcia and Weir carry composed narratives, ensemble parts thicken transitions and Pigpen uses repetition to drive physical momentum.
Metre is a dramatic resource. The Other One's cycling force, New Potato Caboose's sectional movement and Caution's acceleration turn rhythmic identity into a map through changing recordings.
The 1971 remix is a genuine alternate presentation, not a remaster. Comparing it with the 1968 version reveals decisions about balance, edits and density rather than simple improvements in fidelity.
Track guide
Five titles containing many internal worlds
That's It for the Other One
Four printed sections form the opening suite. Garcia's Cryptical Envelopment begins with recognisable song architecture before percussion, source changes and Weir's The Other One redirect the centre. Bass and two drummers create a circular propulsion that can survive abrupt differences in ambience and texture. Quadlibet for Tender Feet and the closing transitions make montage audible as movement rather than interruption. The work introduces Anthem's governing idea: a composition can contain several performances, and their contradictions can reveal more than one polished master take.
New Potato Caboose
Phil Lesh's music and Robert Petersen's words produce the album's most elaborate standalone design. Sections open and close around mobile bass, guitar counterlines, keyboard colour and changing vocal density. The piece advances less like a verse song than a series of connected rooms, each retaining traces of the last. Its length allows the group to shift from delicate, almost chamber-like balance toward heavier ensemble motion. After the opener's obvious montage, New Potato Caboose shows that complexity can also arise from composed sectional proportion.
Born Cross-Eyed
Weir's short composition closes side one by concentrating instability into little more than two minutes. Vocal phrases, guitar accents and studio treatment collide without the extended release available to the preceding works. The compression makes it neither a conventional single nor a minor interlude. It behaves like a sharp edit in album scale, taking the rhythmic dislocation heard inside The Other One and turning it into a self-contained song. Its abruptness clears the side while refusing the comfort of a settled cadence.
Alligator
Pigpen and Hunter's words, with music credited to Pigpen and Lesh, begin side two in a deliberately earthier register. The sung section establishes a repeated, physical groove before percussion and guitars widen the frame. Kazoos and layered rhythmic colour keep humour inside the intensity. As the track develops, the distinction between song, jam and studio assembly becomes increasingly porous. Pigpen's direct address is essential because it gives the long instrumental departure a social point of origin rather than presenting abstraction for its own sake.
Caution (Do Not Stop on Tracks)
The group-credited closer emerges from Alligator's momentum instead of beginning as an isolated composition. A repeated riff and Pigpen's vocal pressure provide the initial engine, but ensemble accumulation gradually overwhelms the familiar blues-rock frame. Guitar, bass, organ and doubled percussion drive toward a boundary where distortion, tape and performance energy become difficult to separate. Caution completes the second side by refusing a clean distinction between concert climax and studio construction. The warning in the title becomes formal: stopping would destroy the movement that defines the piece.
No single plot
Motion, fracture and communal transformation
Anthem of the Sun has no continuous lyrical story. Its unity is procedural: separate times, places and written identities are transformed into one album-scale experience.
Motion recurs through vehicles, wheels, tracks, roundness and journeys, but those images belong to different writers and situations rather than one plot. The first side privileges unstable perception and sectional composition; the second brings animal humour, blues language and gathering rhythmic force.
Community is heard as coordination under pressure. Seven musicians and multiple technicians preserve collective direction even when the recording itself changes beneath them.
The title suggests proclamation, yet the music offers no single doctrine. Its anthem is the act of assembling difference without erasing it.
Warner WS 1749
Bill Walker's expanding human mandala
Bill Walker created the cover illustration, Ed Thrasher handled art direction and Tom Weir contributed photography to the original package. The central form combines faces, limbs and radiating colour into an image whose individual figures are difficult to separate from the whole. That visual compression parallels the audio montage: distinct bodies and gestures remain present while participating in one larger organism. The densely illustrated sleeve prepares the listener for an album that cannot be understood from a quick glance at five track titles.
July 1968
A second album without a stable category
Warner Bros.-Seven Arts released Anthem of the Sun on 18 July 1968 as the Grateful Dead's second album. The original LP contains five indexed tracks and runs approximately thirty-nine minutes. Its mixture of studio composition, concert performance and tape montage resisted a simple live- or studio-album category, though it belongs to the studio-album catalogue.
The record's production history also marks the band's move toward control over how its music would be recorded and assembled. Later editions and the 1971 remix have changed which version many listeners first encountered, making mix identification part of responsible discussion.
Psychedelic studio form
The studio-live problem turned into method
Anthem of the Sun remains the clearest studio document of the Grateful Dead treating performance tapes as compositional raw material.
Live/Dead would soon represent the stage more directly, while Aoxomoxoa pursued sixteen-track studio layering. Anthem occupies the unstable ground between those solutions.
The Other One, New Potato Caboose, Alligator and Caution continued to develop in concert, proving that their album forms were interventions rather than final definitions. Its wide instrumental palette anticipates later studio experimentation, but the montage method itself remained unusually specific to this record. The album is best valued not as chaotic excess or technical novelty, but as a disciplined attempt to make recorded time behave like group improvisation.
Which mix?
The 1968 mix beside its 1971 revision
Begin with the original 1968 mix before comparing the 1971 revision. Treat the five titles as the complete original album; later live material is contextual archive content. Use gapless playback because the side-two transition from Alligator into Caution is structural.
A revealing mastering should preserve sudden spatial changes rather than smoothing them into one uniform soundstage. The Winterland concert on the 2018 edition predates the final album and should not be described as the direct unedited performance behind all five tracks.
A listening path
Follow joins, timbres and changing authorship
- First follow changes in room sound and stereo position inside That's It for the Other One.
- Map New Potato Caboose by section, noting when Lesh's bass signals a new area.
- Hear Born Cross-Eyed as compressed dislocation rather than a conventional pause.
- Play Alligator and Caution without interruption, tracking the point at which song roles dissolve.
- Finally compare the two official mixes and name specific balance or edit differences instead of ranking them abstractly.
Research trail
Sources and further reading
- Anthem of the Sun release group — MusicBrainz institutional database
- Anthem of the Sun original release — MusicBrainz institutional database
- Anthem of the Sun session and credit record — MusicBrainz institutional database
- Anthem of the Sun tracks and credits — AllMusic
- Dan Healy and the Anthem tapes — Official Grateful Dead history
- Anthem of the Sun 50th Anniversary — Rhino Media