Artist:     Live Dead ‘69

Album:     Phantom Ships with Phantom Sails

Label:     Sunset Blvd Records

Release Date:     11.22.19

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At first glance, you might understandably think this is yet another one from the vault. The Grateful Dead churned out enough tapes in their time to produce a library bigger than some entire genres, after all, and that’s without including the vast heaps of other Dead-adjacent music its members have been involved with. To be clear, though, this is one of the offshoots. Live Dead ‘69 is actually the name of the group (a reference to the band’s iconic first live album on its golden anniversary). It’s led by founding keyboardist Tom Constanten, with members of Bob Weir’s Ratdog and the Jerry Garcia Band among others, who were clearly having a grand time on the US and UK tours represented here.

If this release won’t change the mind of anyone in the enough-is-enough-already camp, then it still honors that legacy as well as any other branch of the Dead’s family tree. The song selections come from their earliest few years, though these renditions are well removed from those heady days of trippy psychedelia. Constanten sticks to acoustic piano here, and while the guitarists twiddle some knobs to produce sweet sweeping tones, it’s still a basically effects-free performance rather than a weird head trip. The famously obtuse “Dark Star” becomes a surprisingly warm give-and-take jam in this context, and even “The Other One” sticks closer to low-country Earth than outer space (though they still can’t help a sprinkling of atonal weirdness along the way).

Each well-traveled chestnut proves fresh and ready for another new spin, from the fun folkgrass of “Mama Tried” to the bouncy singalongs “Mr. Charlie” and “Playing in the Band,” to the beautiful simplicity of the closing “Morning Dew.” A couple tracks cross the line from leisurely to sluggish, though there are several sharp-cooking moments to balance them out, especially the leader’s wild cascading keys all over the Reverend Gary Davis tune “Death Don’t Have No Mercy.” As with any recording based on this repertoire, Phantom Ships with Phantom Sails is one to approach both knowing and not knowing what to expect. To longtime listeners it should go down like another helping of comfort food, both familiar and never quite the same each time.

—Geno Thackara