the album but getting used to — and experimenting with — the new technology. 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". 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. 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. From scratch. This time we could go deeper and experiment with things no other band had done yet. Being able to utilize twice as many tracks essentially doubled the possibilities of what we could do with each song. 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." Indeed, the lengthy sessions for the album would put the band deeper into debt with Warner Bros. Records — specifically, a total cost of $180,000 (US$ in dollars) for Aoxomoxoa. It was their most ambitious and costly venture to date and the last time the band would ever run up such high studio bills. 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. We were a group of altruistic troubadours, a traveling psychedelic circus." Along with help from guest musicians such as John "Marmaduke" Dawson and David Nelson, Lesh played acoustic bass for the first time. He later commented, "the fun part of that was trying to play in tune with no frets to guide my fingers, just like a violin." Unlike the band's other studio albums, Garcia sang lead on every track. Title and cover art The title of the album is a palindrome created by cover artist Rick Griffin and lyricist Robert Hunter. According to Living with the Dead, the audio memoir of band manager Rock Scully, the title is pronounced "ox-oh-mox-oh-ah". One fan legend considers the words "Grateful Dead" on the front of the album, written in large, flowing capital letters, to be an ambigram