Many deadheads consider Workingman's Dead and American Beauty (both released in 1970) to be the band's finest studio albums. Every deadhead agrees that these two albums contain more excellent songs than any other two albums. The songs reflect their acoustic jug-band days of the mid '60s more than their electric freak-out days of the late '60s. Thanks to intensive coaching by David Crosby, American Beauty contains many fine harmonies. With Jerry Garcia on the bottom and Bob Weir on the top, the vocals sound great even when bassist Phil Lesh takes the lead, as he does on the first track, an oddly structured elegy for his father with words by Robert Hunter, who co-wrote every track on the album except the Pig Pen song Operator. Besides the actual harmonies, it's Hunter's lyrics which are responsible for this album's classic status. Along with Truckin (a true story of life on the road with the Dead in early 1970) Friend of the Devil, Brokedown Palace and Attics of My Life contain some of Hunter's least obscure and most compelling verses. The best song on the album is Ripple, a series of metaphysical haikus set to a sing-along melody in G. Strangely, the band released Sugar Magnolia as a single. This rock & roll number is the only under-developed track on the album.