A pal o/mine was ragging on the Dead albums Terrapin and Shakedown. While I like a lot of those songs, especially in their live incarnations, I understood his point - these were a massive change and to many of us a drop in quality, featuring sounds and songs that seemed mighty un-Deadlike.
I was looking at the reviews of them in Allmusic today and noticed that those 2 were listed as being on Arista, the first 2 on Arista after the classic albums all being on WB or Grateful Dead Records.
is this true? is the "Arista effect" that gave us Brothers of the Road & Reach for the Sky the same one that made the Dead sound cheesy?!
Probably less to do with the label than the fact that by the late 70s their studio work was pretty much eclipsed by their constant live effort.
For sure a steady decline after Blues For Allah, with the exception of some stunning tracks, the epic and original Terrapin, Estimated Prophet, title track of Shakedown was really smooth, Fire On the Mountain . . . then onward into why bother even thinking about their records, the shows and bootlegs were the attraction for me.
Yeah, I remember when Shakedown came out we were calling it "Fleetwood Dead". Rock RIP 1978.
