the book of the dead, 3

Aoxomoxoa is my favorite GD record. It’s still a product of the San Francisco psychedelic scene, though it was recorded and released well after said scene had crashed and burned, and so the album has a certain messy and menacing feel. The heaviness of its vibe sticks with you long after you’ve cranked down that ‘ol Victrola and put the wax back into its freaky sleeve. And that’s the thing about the Dead. They have an unmistakable dark side. One might even say that the band’s darkness is their dominant aspect. The most emotionally moving songs tend to be the ones about blind hobos, doomed coal miners, gamblers, ramblers, drifters, grafters... Garcia and Hunter had a gift for capturing the untidy ambiguities of the American experiment and were far too intellectually sophisticated to thoughtlessly bask in the utopian good vibes of the hippie scene. There’s always an added level of seriousness with the Dead, even when they’re being mischievous and playful. I don’t often like explicitly serious music, but the Dead make me think and inspire my imagination, never more so then on Aoxomoxoa.

I think of Cosmic Charlie as being like the Watcher in the Marvel Universe, able to apprehend the full panoramic scope of the 60s, with all their built-in counterfactuals: What if JFK had not been assassinated? What if RFK had not been assassinated? Forks in the road like this are all extremely suggestive, each one heightening the sense that the 60s were one big missed opportunity, but Charlie views them with a kind of fatalistic stoner wisdom, one that expresses itself in elusive riddles. Calliope wail like a seaside zoo / The very last lately inquired about you / It's really very one or two / The first you wanted, the last I knew...

Be warned: This is one of the strangest songs you'll ever hear.  Play it under the wrong conditions or in the wrong frame of mind and you're likely to fall to the floor and curl up into a fetal position, the song's final repeated refrain ringing in your ears. Go on home your mama's calling you...