Workingman's Dead

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With the release of Workingman's Dead in late 1970, the group made a sharp stylistic shift. Produced by Bob Matthews, Betty Cantor and the band, the album features eight original songs written by Garcia and lyricist Rober The final burst of new Workingman’s Dead songs arrived in November and December 1969, ironically, right after the release of Live Dead, which had virtually no overt country and folk textures. Musically, Garcia described the spry and speedy “Cumberland Blues” (which he co-wrote with Phil Lesh) as a blend of Bakersfield country and up-tempo bluegrass. Colin Larkin, ed. (2000). All Time Top 1000 Albums (3rded.). Virgin Books. p.143. ISBN 0-7535-0493-6. Announcing Workingman's Dead 50th Anniversary Deluxe Edition". dead.net. May 6, 2020 . Retrieved May 28, 2020.

When the Grateful Dead convened to record Workingman’s Dead in February 1970, they were intent on change. They wanted something lighter, simpler; something closer to a folk or country record than a psychedelic one. Conveniently, they were also deep in debt to their record company and trying to extract themselves from a recent—and costly—drug bust. Their previous album, Aoxomoxoa, took nearly six months at the cost of more than a million dollars in today’s money; Workingman’s Dead was done in nine days. Lesh, Phil (2005). Searching for the Sound. Little, Brown & Co., New York, NY. Chapter 11. ISBN 978-0-316-00998-0. By February 1969, Garcia and Weir occasionally broke out acoustic guitars onstage to perform “Dupree’s,” followed by another Aoxomoxoa tune based around acoustic guitar, “Mountain of the Moon.” But leave it to Garcia and the Dead to then figure a way to segue that second acoustic number right into the trans-galactic flow of that era’s grandest improvisational piece, “Dark Star.” Workingman's Dead (Warner Bros., 1970), The Angel's Share of over two-and-a-half hours of unreleased studio outtakes and fly-on-the wall conversations from the recording sessions somewhat give the lie to the expeditious cost-effective time the Grateful Dead spent recording their landmark album. But it's a profound paradox that the delicious simplicity the likes of which permeates the iconic band's fourth studio effort is usually the result of meticulous attention to detail and careful craft. The Dead never stopped playing long, jamming tunes, even as they continued to carve out one slice of distinctive Americana after another through the early Seventies.The album title came about when Jerry Garcia commented to lyricist Robert Hunter that the album was "turning into the 'workingman's Dead' version of the band". [19] Having both worked on all of the album's songs and gone out on the road with the band, Hunter appears as a seventh member on the front cover photograph. Workingman's Dead is the fourth studio album by the Grateful Dead. It was recorded in February 1970 and originally released on June 14, 1970. Garcia has commented that much of the sound of the album comes both from his pairing with Hunter as well as the band's friendship with Crosby, Stills and Nash. "Hearing those guys sing and how nice they sounded together, we thought, 'We can try that. Let's work on it a little,'" commented Garcia.

Uncle John's Band" (recorded at Winterland on 10/04/1970, incorrectly listed in sleevenotes as recorded at Winterland, 12/23/70) – 7:57 Greatest Albums of All Time Rolling Stone's definitive list of the 500 greatest albums of all time". Rolling Stone. 2012 . Retrieved September 10, 2019. Mason's Children" (recorded at the Civic Auditorium in Honolulu on 1/24/1970) (Garcia, Hunter, Lesh, Weir) – 6:32 Beviglia, Jim (January–February 2014). "The Grateful Dead: Workingman's Dead". American Songwriter. ForASong Media, LLC. 29 (2): 55. ISSN 0896-8993 . Retrieved December 27, 2013. The noted San Francisco poster artist Stanley Mouse and his partner Alton Kelley conceived of the now-iconic front cover: the band and Hunter in workingman’s duds standing on a nondescript street corner.

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What came easily to CSN was work for the Dead. Garcia’s partner Mountain Girl—aka Carolyn Adams, a former Merry Prankster who wound up marrying the guitarist in 1981—laughed about the process to band biographer David Browne, claiming in his 2015 book So Many Roads: The Life And Times Of The Grateful Dead, “They were expected to sing all those parts, and it didn’t go well. It sounded like cats howling.” It’s possible to hear that howl echoing through Workingman’s Dead. The trio’s voices don’t quite mesh, sometimes hitting a dissonant chord, sometimes scrambling for the same note; their effort isn’t merely heard, it’s felt. All that fumbling winds up as an asset on Workingman’s Dead, adding a bit of messiness to the tight performances. In 2003, the album was ranked number 262 on Rolling Stone magazine's list of the 500 greatest albums of all time, 264 in a 2012 revised list, [7] and 409 in the 2020 list. [8] It was voted number 371 in Colin Larkin's All Time Top 1000 Albums. [9] Recording [ edit ] Lyricist Robert Hunter had joined the band on the road for the first time, resulting in a period of faster song development. Unlike the psychedelic, electrified music for which the band had become known, the new songs took a new direction, reviving their folk-band roots. Bassist Phil Lesh stated "The song lyrics reflected an 'old, weird' America that perhaps never was ... The almost miraculous appearance of these new songs would also generate a massive paradigm shift in our group mind: from the mind-munching frenzy of a seven-headed fire-breathing dragon to the warmth and serenity of a choir of chanting cherubim. Even the album cover reflects this new direction: The cover for Aoxomoxoa is colorful and psychedelic, and that of Workingman’s Dead is monochromatic and sepia." [12] In recent years, a search revealed that the photograph was taken at 1199 Evans Avenue in San Francisco. [13]

The main rhythm has an almost Motown feel to it (think “I Second That Emotion”), and there are a couple of fairly lengthy guitar extrapolations. It wouldn’t be too long, however, before the song found its finished form. A day after the debut of “Casey Jones” came “High Time,” a gorgeous bittersweet ballad that easily could have come from George Jones, Merle Haggard or any number of other country greats. Garcia once complained that he felt could never quite do the song justice as a singer, but from mid 1969 through mid 1970, it became an important cornerstone of the band’s repertoire, often serving as a nice, grounding contrast to spacey songs such “Dark Star” and “That’s It for the Other One,” or the spunky combo of “China Cat Sunflower” and “I Know You Rider.” That being said however, I did get to listen to the rest of Workingmans in Atmos and it was like a dream. I love this mix Everything just plays together nicely and you get swept away by all the nuances in Workingman's Dead. A great new way to hear the old classic So many great versions of this LP now. The album’s closer and other hit, Casey Jones, showed a different side to the Dead. Robert Hunter repurposed the folk tale of the titular locomotive engineer who died in a train crash in 1900 with one hand on the train’s whistle and the other hand on its brake. Here the story is set to a radio-friendly boogie, Casey Jones is “high on cocaine” and the narrator is issuing a warning for the engineer to “watch his speed”. Garcia spoke about the song in an interview with Flash magazine in 1971: “It’s partly a way of redeveloping what’s been put into us, and it’s partly my way of expressing thanks to the whole tradition: to try and add a good song to it.”You know, the thing was selling good,” Hunter said. “I got 90 grand. I had never seen money like that in my whole life. Never even hoped to. The phone never stopped ringing with people wanting loans.” With equal doses of humor and disgruntlement, he added, “The beginning of being a rich man.” I said that on a panel later,” Hunter continued, “and the other guy on the panel just laughed at me and thought I was saying something that wasn’t true. As though I was saying the reason we didn’t have hits was because of Nixon. Well, you know, it’s true! And I felt real miffed. If Nixon hadn’t done that, I think the Grateful Dead would’ve been rich and famous looong before they were. Because those are two mighty big songs.” And yet even this very format, lauded for its agility by rhythm guitarist/vocalist composer Bob Weir over the years, carries further preeminence in the lore of the Dead: the group is effectively an instrumental quartet, sans the keyboardists that would rotate in and out of prominence within the group in decades to come (as Tom Constanten already had). It's a lean, sparse instrumental mix without precedent and gave rise to the commonly applied 'turn on a dime' description of the period (courtesy Weir), a dynamic further reaffirmed through the inclusion of material such as "Playing in the Band," "Bertha" and "Wharf Rat" that would become integral to the Grateful Dead repertoire and gain widespread fame through the inclusion on the live set titled simply Grateful Dead (Warner Bros., 1971), released later that same year adorned with the famous skull and roses graphic.