By: Martyn Coppack
Various Artists |
In its battle to raise awareness of HIV and AIDS the Red Hot charity has now been releasing music over the last 25 years with this tribute to the Grateful Dead being their 20th release. That’s no mean feat in itself but when you see just exactly what this Day Of The Dead box-set actually entails you may get a whole new perspective on that.
Perspective is a key word in this project and Aaron and Bryce Dressner of The National have taken time from their main band to pull together what amounts to one of the single most impressive roll calls in cosmic, weird and just straight up Americana. Their aim…to create a tribute to one of the most iconic bands of American popular culture, Grateful Dead.
For a band who are perhaps more known for their strung out jams and skull imagery, the casual music observer would maybe struggle to name more than one or two Dead songs. A band who were much happier on the road than in a studio, they grew from the beating heart of the San Francisco acid scene to encompass all that is good in the American Dream. Ideas of freedom, love and peace built upon an understanding of exactly where they came from (a trait drawn into the music, particularly on the rootsy Workingmans Dead and American Beauty), their philosophy was one of community. It seems almost a direct conflict to dark fear brought on by the HIV/AIDS epidemic but that is the key to Red Hot. They want you to see from another angle and that behind these diseases are very human stories. The Dead were a very human band as are The National now so we must salute this piece of work for that.
If that alone was not enough the remarkable music contained within starts with War On Drugs (covering ‘Touch Of Grey’) and ends with aptly The National with Bob Weir (The Dead’s long time frontman and guitarist alongside Jerry Garcia) doing staple Dead set song ‘I Know You Rider’. In between you get artists as diverse as Kurt Vile and J.Mascis, Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy, Flaming Lips, Wilco and even Mumford and Sons rear their head. That barely scratches the surface though and in between is a veritable feats of artists and surprises.
This is less about the artists and more about the songs though and for a band who are known more for their meandering jams, it is the songs that really stand out. The music of Garcia and the lyrics of Robert Hunter are a perfect match for the counter-culture side of America and each song tells a story about not just the country itself but us as a human being. From the grief of ‘Box Of Rain’ to the elliptical ‘Dark Star’, these songs possess the artists and rage to life.
Sprawled over 5 CD’s this really is a tremendous treat for both Dead fans and music fans in general. Although the music in the main stays close to the cosmic Americana spirit there are moments, much like The Dead did, when it branches off into unexpected territory. Marijuana Deathsquad’s cover of ‘Truckin’ being a prime example of doing something new with an old classic and whilst it may not quite work, it is the belief in the power of this music that carries it through. That belief is what carried The Dead along for all those years and it is a belief which we should lend to Red Hot in their fight against HIV and AIDS. Hats off to The National for pulling this off. A superb one off treat.
