Live version china cat sunflower3/3/2023 We were a group of altruistic troubadours, a traveling psychedelic circus." Īlong with help from guest musicians such as John "Marmaduke" Dawson and David Nelson, Lesh played acoustic bass for the first time. Kreutzmann later commented, "Sometime in 1969, when we realized the colossal debt we got ourselves into with the decidedly indulgent making of Aoxomoxoa, we realized that we needed to get a handle on our finances. It was their most ambitious and costly venture to date and the last time the band would ever run up such high studio bills. Records - specifically, a total cost of $180,000 (US$1,330,073 in 2021 dollars ) for Aoxomoxoa. Indeed, the lengthy sessions for the album would put the band deeper into debt with Warner Bros. The end result was dense and cumbersome in places, and all that studio time cost us a fortune, but we were experimenting on the sonic frontier, exploiting cutting-edge technology." Being able to utilize twice as many tracks essentially doubled the possibilities of what we could do with each song. This time we could go deeper and experiment with things no other band had done yet. But when the studio procured one of the first sixteen-track recorders in the world (the same one we used for Live/Dead), the decision was made to toss everything we had already done and record it all again. Drummer Bill Kreutzmann states, "sixteen-track technology came along only after we did our initial recording using an eight-track at the end of 1968. Garcia commented, "it was our first adventure with sixteen-track and we tended to put too much on everything.A lot of the music was just lost in the mix, a lot of what was really there". Consequently, the band spent eight months in the studio, off-and-on, not only recording the album but getting used to - and experimenting with - the new technology. Offering 16 discrete tracks for recording and playback, it doubled the number of tracks that had been available when they recorded Anthem of the Sun, the previous year. The initial version, with the working title Earthquake Country (a Bay Area reference), was abandoned when Ampex manufactured and released the first 16-track multitrack recording machine (model number MM-1000). Likewise, "Cosmic Charlie" was played a few times again in 1976. Stephen" was played until 1971, revived in 19 and played a handful of times after that. Only "China Cat Sunflower" became a set staple through the band's career, with "Dupree's Diamond Blues" somewhat less so. Some of the songs on Aoxomoxoa were played live briefly and then dropped. It was also the first time the band would showcase acoustic arrangements (as on "Mountains of the Moon", "Rosemary", and "Dupree's Diamond Blues"), which would become the focus of the next two studio albums. It was also the first to have lyricist Robert Hunter as a full-time contributor to the band, thus cementing the Jerry Garcia/Robert Hunter songwriting partnership that endured for the rest of the band's existence. It is the only studio release to include pianist Tom Constanten as an official member (he had contributed to the previous album and played live with the band from November 1968 to January 1970). It is the first album the band recorded entirely in or near their original hometown of San Francisco (at Pacific Recording Studio in nearby San Mateo, and at the similarly named Pacific High Recording Studio in San Francisco proper). The album was a series of firsts for the band. ( October 2018) ( Learn how and when to remove this template message) Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. Please help improve this section by adding citations to reliable sources.
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