Once that was done, the Dead could have just stopped recording their shows - but they found it useful, or Bear insisted, so they started massing up piles of tapes. Cream's Wheels of Fire comes to mind, there are probably others, but it was a new field - and the idea of releasing new songs only on live albums would be quite novel! Live/Dead was probably seen as an extravagant step at the time.I don't think by '69 there were a whole lot of live rock albums (let alone double-albums) that showed a whole different band than the studio records. At that time, the Dead were evolving so quickly, Garcia said, "When Live/Dead came out, it was about a year out of date." (And that was only nine months after being recorded!) In the sense of it being a serious, long composition, it's our music at one of its really good moments." But Live/Dead was the last time they would fill an album with jams! So while it remains perhaps the finest introduction to the Dead for psychedelia-lovers, it may have also misled many people who thought the Dead would always be like this. Garcia said, "We were after a certain sequence to the music. So on Live/Dead they emphasized the longer jam pieces (most of which they'd been doing for a year), and mostly omitted the new Aoxomoxoa songs that were in their setlists. A live record seemed the easiest way to record cheaply and make some money back to pay for Aoxomoxoa, and they had a long suite of music that was just right, as well as being totally different from their studio experiments. But it seems releasing a live-album didn't occur to them until they noticed how in-debt they were to the Warners label, thanks to all that studio time. They had recorded some '68 shows to use in Anthem of the Sun as a sonic experiment, which then took them months to combine & mix with the studio tracks. The live experience rarely came out well in their releases, though - even though they put out so many live records through their career, I think their choices were often strange. We think of the Dead as being reluctant to record in the studio, feeling that they were much better live.
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