From theafterword.co.uk on Ready or Not:
Twenty years ago, the Grateful Dead’s ”So Many Roads (1965-1995)” box was released. On disc 5 of that set, an early attempt was made to show what a final GD studio album might’ve looked like, if it had been released in, say, 1994. It presented six tracks premiered by the band in live shows in the early 90s which never made it onto an album before Jerry Garcia’s death in 1995.
In many ways, this new set, “Ready or Not” expands on that remit. It has live versions of the six tracks included on So Many Roads, plus a further three live songs from the Vince Welnick era. Unusually, this is a single CD set. One disc. Just one. In GD world, that’s not at all common. Grateful Dead albums are always at least 3CDs, and of course, a couple of the monster sets have been over seventy CDs each. And the cover art of “Ready or Not” does not bode well, showing a couple of obligatory skeletons in silly clothes and shades. There are scores of GD albums with appalling covers, but I reckon this one just about takes the biscuit.
On the Afterword, I have the reputation of being a diehard deadhead, but I’m not sure that’s entirely true. I’m a huge fan of the band’s music from, say, early 1968 until late 1980. After that, Garcia’s drug and health problems meant that he wrote fewer and fewer songs, and the band played the old songs far less well. If you want to hear Jerry at his best in the 1980s and 90s, listen to the Jerry Garcia Band and – even more so – his acoustic work as part of a guitar/mandolin duo with David Grisman. In the final 15 years of their existence, the Dead became a huge, stadium-filling rock band, but, with the exception of a temporary creative reignition around late 89/early 90, the music was less inspiring. Or so I’ve always felt. Above all, this was the era which saw two new keyboard players/vocalists add self-penned songs to the band’s repertoire: Brent Mydland in the 1980s, and Vince Welnick in the 1990s. I’ll say this straight out: I don’t like their songs, and never have done. They sound like something drawn from the catalogues of Styx or Journey or Kansas or some similar band. Above all, they don’t sound like the Dead that I know and love, a band dipping freely into a range of American musics and using them as a springboard for their warm, searching improvisations.
So let’s start with the good stuff: “Lazy River Road” is one of the very best latter-period Garcia/Hunter songs – a concise, jaunty little piece. “Days Between” was, famously, the last song that Jerry and Robert ever wrote. An ultra-slow, stately ballad, it’s sung by Garcia in a sort of mournful croak. “So Many Roads” is fine, even though it doesn’t quite have the emotional power of that performance from the last-ever Dead show in Chicago in July ’95. “Liberty” and “Eternity” are okay-ish songs, but no more than that.
On GD chat forums, Bob Weir’s “Corinna” is one of those songs – like “Day Job” – that deadheads love to hate. And not wonder. It’s dreadful. I must admit, my heart sank when I saw that this live version was 17:20 long. Luckily, though, the ‘song’ as such fades out after about seven minutes, giving way to 10 minutes of harmless noodling. Vince Welnick’s “Way to Go Home” and “Samba in the Rain” are both embarrassingly poor, musically and lyrically. Worst of all is “Easy Answers”, a facile dirge so utterly lacking in merit that I had to rush to my record collection, and whip out a 1970s show to remind myself why I love this band. It’s a shame to see lyricist Robert Hunter’s name on the credits of these banal numbers – hard to believe this was the guy who co-wrote “Ripple” and “Box of Rain”.
A lot of people loathe and ridicule the Grateful Dead. I know that. But when I read people knocking classic-era Dead material like “Dark Star” or “Terrapin Station” or “Scarlet Begonias”, I feel like saying “You think that’s crap? Come and listen to this 1995 gig, and I’ll show you some REAL crap!” People often say “no one in the Grateful Dead could sing”, but I assure you that the Jerry Garcia of 1970-71 was like Placido Domingo compared to the vocals on display in this collection.
Through all the years that the Word and Afterword sites have been going, there have been countless archival Grateful Dead releases that I’ve loved and raved about. So it’s rather ironic that when Bargepole finally asks me to review a GD album, it’s one that I can’t honestly endorse. If you’re a fan of 1990s Dead, and you’re interested in hearing what the final, “unfinished album” might’ve sounded like, then by all means get this. But personally, I’ll pass.
If you’re new to the band, and fancy dipping your toe into the vast ocean of Grateful Dead material, I’d recommend a release from last year, actually. “Believe It if You Need It” is a 3CD summary of highlights from the Pacific Northwest tours of 1973 and 1974: uniformly strong material, brilliantly played in a spirit of restless improvisation. And the best cover art in the band’s entire history. So start there, or with any of the full shows now available, stretching from the white hot Valentine’s Day 1968 gig at the Carousel, San Francisco (Road Trips 2.2), right up to the epic show at the Fox Theatre, Atlanta on 30 November 1980 (Dave’s Picks vol. 8). Those twelve years are crammed full of goodies. “Ready or Not” … is not.