But they're arranged in an interesting way: Weir sings (or tries to), and it's a lot like one of his later songs in being rhythmically odd and having unexpected changes in meter. The lyrics offer a strange, awkward poetry that Robert Hunter was also exploring in his early Dead songs. But it has its points and I think that's one direction that we'll be able to move successfully in.' As it is, it's a little stilted, cause it's all so utterly odd. Making it so that it happens without anybody losing their minds when it happens.

They're not the kind of thing that flows at all, but we're trying to make this happen by taking something that's jarring and making it unjarring. And there are transitions that musically are real awkward. There's lots of surprises in it, a lot of fast, difficult transitions. It has two or three recurring elements, but it doesn't have a recurring pattern it just changes continually, off of itself and through itself in lots of different ways - rhythmically, the tonality of it, and the chord relationships. 'It's a very long thing and it doesn't have a form, in that it doesn't have a verse-chorus form. The Anthem of the Sun album has Lesh's fingerprints all over it, more so than any other Dead album.Īs for New Potato, Garcia talked about it in an interview: I think in late '67 Lesh took a big creative role in the Dead's music with his background in classical, jazz, and electronic music, he had the strongest impulse to push the music into a more avant-garde direction and create more difficult, challenging pieces to play. It's unusual for a Dead-song in being a collaboration between Lesh and his beat-poet friend Bobby Petersen (their only one until Mars Hotel), and they seem to have taken pains to make it as weird as they could. New Potato is one of the more mellow pieces they did that year, with its wandering pace, the melodic opening guitar riff (only used as the intro), Garcia's sweet fills, Weir's spacy vocals, and the meditative jam.

As a result 1967 saw a huge burst of creativity within the Dead: within a seven-month period they started playing Alligator, Lovelight, the Other One suite, Dark Star, China Cat Sunflower, The Eleven, the 'Spanish jam'.and New Potato Caboose. With constant practice they were getting musically tighter all the time and were eager to try material that was stranger, more complex, more 'psychedelic', and gave more room for jamming. But by the time their album was released, they were already unhappy with it as being out-of-date (as Garcia and Lesh said on an April '67 radio show, 'it was something we did, it's all over with, the next one certainly won't be like that in any way', and they were already talking about spending much longer in the studio to get well-engineered sounds as well as recording live sets at the Fillmore to capture the live sound they couldn't get in the studio). Through 1966 they'd focused mostly on doing covers, and I think Cream Puff War was the only original song they used to take off into a long Garcia solo. By the time they recorded their first album, the Dead had few 'jam-songs' of the kind they would become known for, and all those were covers - Viola Lee, Dancing in the Streets, Midnight Hour, Same Thing.

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