American Beauty: Limeade Vinyl LP

Label: Rhino
Release Date: 3rd March

There are two people in this world, my friends who love The Dead and those who don't realise they love The Dead, yet. They're a band where one can't go half-measures, not a fence-sitting band, once you're in - YOU'RE IN. But with every uber-cult band, it's sometimes hard to find your entrance point, luckily there's 'American Beauty', a mellow-country-rock-folk-jamming masterpiece. Every song is iconic, every line is something to hold onto and the melodies on this record are just so sticky-icky. 
One listen to this and you're a Deadhead 4LYF.

140-Gram, “Limeade” colour vinyl variant, direct to board Jacket. Features the original album track list using the (2020) 50th Anniversary remastered audio.

In 1970, the Grateful Dead pulled off a feat that that few bands ever achieve, and incredibly, they did it twice. After June 1970's release of Workingman's Dead, the Dead had arrived. An album that would remain in the upper echelon of Rolling Stone’s "best albums of all-time" lists for the next 50 years, the world now knew about the Dead. And remarkably, the Dead not only did it again less than six months later, by many accounts they outdid themselves with the follow-up release in November 1970 of American Beauty.

The album's 10 tracks include many of the Dead's best-known, most-loved, and most popular songs both on record and in concert for the next 25 years. An album that includes Box Of Rain, Friend Of The Devil, Sugar Magnolia, Candyman, Ripple, Brokedown Palace, Attics Of My Life, and Truckin' looks more like a greatest-hits compilation than a second album of 1970, and yet American Beauty demonstrates a band unable to slow down in terms of the quality of its writing, recording, and performing.