In celebration of the 50th anniversary of the Grateful Dead’s 2nd album (1967) Rolling Stone published an article called:

‘Anthem of the Sun:’10 things you didn’t know by Brian Coney

An excerpt from the article: ‘Anthem of the Sun was our vehicle,’ Grateful Dead drummer Mickey Hart said of the band’s 1968 LP. ‘It was our springboard into weirdness.’ The Dead’s 1967 self-titled debut introduced the world to a band striking an exuberant midpoint between roots, blues and psychedelic rock, but the album didn’t quite capture what set them apart from the start: their thrilling live show. Anthem of the Sun came much closer. Overlaying studio recordings with flashes of uncut inspiration drawn from various gigs, the(y)…realised a convention-defying patchwork of jam-band bliss and studio trial-and-error.

For Garcia, Anthem was an open invitation for the listener to drop out simply by dropping the needle. ‘Anthem of the Sun was like a chance for us to try a lot of things, to see what things might work and might not,’ he said in Jeremy Marre’s 1988 documentary Anthem to Beauty. ‘When we mixed it, we mixed it for the hallucinations.’

Perhaps not unsurprisingly, the artistic epiphany [Bill Walker’s Anthem of the Sun painting] stemmed from a psychedelic experience. ‘I began the painting a month or so after a particularly memorable experience after ingesting YAGE (Banisteriopsis caapi and Psychotria viridis) and 250mcg of LSD,’ Walker told Rolling Stone over email. Speaking to the Grateful Dead historian Blair Jackson in the Spring 1986 issue of the Golden Road zine, Walker noted how he incorporated the likenesses of the band into the artwork: ‘I tried to perceive each person’s subtle energy patterns. I didn’t contrive it. I painted what I saw.”

 Read the full Rolling Stones article here.