The Grateful Dead

An unlikely proto-punk classic.

- Rob Mitchum

The late ’60s are littered with lost proto-punk classics, bands who accidentally bashed their way into time travel through a combination of blues simplicity and amateur talent. Since Lenny Kaye’s seminal Nuggets in 1972, excavating these unsung heroes of the garage has been a favourite pursuit of rock’n’roll paleontologists, fuelling many a compilation and deluxe reissue. But one of these early transitional species might just have been hiding in plain sight all these years, on Warner Brothers, under the nameplate of a band that ended up about as far from punk rock as possible.

The first of the Grateful Dead’s studio album reissue series – the extension of the band’s unending 50th anniversary self commemoration – is possibly the most surprising of their discography. Here, what would become the flagship band of long, psychedelic improvisation sounds urgent, direct, pithy, and a variety of other adjectives you’d never use to describe their later career. Packaged with similarly frenzied live material from the 1966 Vancouver Trips Festival, the reissue argues the case that the Dead initially had the fuzz-and-Farfisa sound that would still get them on the hippest garage-rock compilations today.