Grateful Dead
American Beauty

Vintage covers for this album are very hard to find in exceptionally clean shape. Most of them have some amount of ringwear, seam wear and edge wear, and this one is no exception. If you’re picky about your covers, this is probably not the best copy for you.

This is an amazingly well-recorded album -- and a member of our Top 100, of course -- but it takes a special copy to let the recording's qualities shine.

I understand if you want to write the Dead off based on their later output, but you just can't deny the power of this classic album.

What The Best Sides Of American Beauty Have To Offer Is Not Hard To Hear

• The biggest, most immediate staging in the largest acoustic space
• The most Tubey Magic, without which you have almost nothing. CDs give you clean and clear. Only the best vintage vinyl pressings offer the kind of Tubey Magic that was on the tapes in 1970
• Tight, note-like, rich, full-bodied bass, with the correct amount of weight down low
• Natural tonality in the midrange -- with all the instruments having the correct timbre
• Transparency and resolution, critical to hearing into the three-dimensional studio space

No doubt there's more but we hope that should do for now. Playing the record is the only way to hear all of the qualities we discuss above, and playing the best pressings against a pile of other copies under rigorously controlled conditions is the only way to find a pressing that sounds as good as this one does.

The Dead At Their Best

The crowning glory of the Grateful Dead, their masterpiece. Albums like this come along once in a band's life -- if they're lucky. This is the zenith of the Grateful Dead. Workingman's Dead is a good album. American Beauty is a great one.

Stephen Barncard is the recording engineer responsible for this album, Deja Vu, Brewer, and Shipley's Tarkio, and a host of other amazingly rich, sweet and natural, mostly acoustic recordings that stand head and shoulders above the bulk of their contemporaries. American Beauty is one of them.

What We're Listening For On American Beauty

• Energy for starters. What could be more important than the life of the music?
• Then: presence and immediacy. The vocals aren't "back there" somewhere, lost in the mix. They're front and center where any recording engineer worth his salt -- Steven Barncard in this case -- would put them.
• The Big Sound comes next -- wall to wall, lots of depth, huge space, three-dimensionality, all that sort of thing.
• Then transient information -- fast, clear, sharp attacks, not the smear and thickness so common to these LPs.
• Tight punchy bass -- which ties in with good transient information, also the issue of frequency extension further down.
• Next: transparency -- the quality that allows you to hear deep into the soundfield, showing you the space and air around all the instruments.
• Extend the top and bottom and voila, you have The Real Thing -- an honest to goodness Hot Stamper.

Vinyl Condition

Mint Minus Minus is about as quiet as any vintage pressing will play, and since only the right vintage pressings have any hope of sounding good on this album, that will most often be the playing condition of the copies we sell. (The copies that are even a bit noisier get listed on the site are seriously reduced prices or traded back in to the local record stores we shop at.)

Those of you looking for quiet vinyl will have to settle for the sound of other pressings and Heavy Vinyl reissues, purchased elsewhere of course as we have no interest in selling records that don't have the vintage analog magic of these wonderful recordings.

If you want to make the trade-off between bad sound and quiet surfaces with whatever Heavy Vinyl pressing might be available, well, that's certainly your prerogative, but we can't imagine losing what's good about this music -- the size, the energy, the presence, the clarity, the weight -- just to hear it with less background noise.

A Must Own Rock Recording

We consider this Grateful Dead album a masterpiece. It's a recording that should be part of any serious Rock Music Collection.

Others that belong in that category can be found here.

Side One

• Box of Rain
• Friend of the Devil

On the better copies, you'll hear wonderfully deep bass, and plenty of it, as well as rich ambience around the guitars and extended harmonics from the strings

• Sugar Magnolia
• Operator
• Candy Man

Side Two

• Ripple
• Brokedown Palace
• Till the Morning Comes
• Attics of My Life

This track, with its lovely vocal harmonies, is one of the best sounding songs on the album. When you find a good copy, the vocals should be sweet and completely free from strain.

• Truckin'

AMG 5 Star Rave Review

A companion piece to the luminous Workingman's Dead, American Beauty is an even stronger document of the Grateful Dead's return to their musical roots. Sporting a more full-bodied and intricate sound than its predecessor thanks to the addition of subtle electric textures, the record is also more representative of the group as a collective unit... American Beauty remains the Dead's studio masterpiece.