"When you're producing a group, you're dealing with the interior dynamics of the group. That's a level of production that you can do really well," Garcia added. "If a producer is working with a solo artist, then he's designing the album from top to bottom he has control of the musicians who are playing.
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That seemed to provide clear evidence that Olsen knew how to navigate a complex group dynamic. One of the producers Davis suggested for the album that would become Terrapin Station was Keith Olsen, who had recently helmed Fleetwood Mac's immensely successful 1975 self-titled album. So, fundamentally, we were in the space of, 'Let's just make music, and let's go into it as far as we can.' So the idea of having a producer was tied into that same idea." "When we started working with Arista, we did it thinking, 'What the fuck, it'll be nice to be involved with a record company, and not have to be doing the marketing ourselves, not have to do distribution' - just getting that held off. He wouldn't ever insist on handling us in any way," Garcia told BAM. Listen to Grateful Dead's 'Terrapin Part 1'ĭavis, as Garcia recalled, was not trying to overstep. Except for Stephen Barncard, who co-produced 1970's American Beauty, the band had not worked with an outside producer since 1968's Anthem of the Sun. Grateful Dead signed a deal in 1976 with Arista Records' Clive Davis, who had one stipulation: They needed to bring in an outside producer. They'd released three studio albums (1973's Wake of the Flood, 1974's From the Mars Hotel and 1975's Blues for Allah), plus a live double album (1976's Steal Your Face), and the pressure to maintain both a functional touring group and a cohesive business enterprise was too much. When they resumed in 1976, the Grateful Dead entered a new label contract: Their in-house label, Grateful Dead Records, had finally folded.
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They'd played a series of shows in October 1974 at San Francisco's Winterland Ballroom which was filmed and released as The Grateful Dead Movie, and then began a two-year hiatus from touring. This abundance of material could probably be attributed to the fact that the Grateful Dead suddenly had a fair amount of time on their hands - something they were not necessarily used to. "There were two or three tunes that didn't make it onto the album." "'Terrapin,' even from the inception, was clearly a side, and orchestrated," Garcia told BAM magazine in 1977. Fleshed out, the seven-section song reached 16 minutes in length. "We had a lot of material," Garcia added. For Garcia, it was immediately clear that the tune would need room to breathe.