It’s melody and lush vocals harmonies are too far too pretty for Workingman’s Dead, although its opening lines, “Well the first days are the hardest days, don’t you worry any more/’Cause when life looks like Easy Street, there is danger at your door” fit the darker mood of the latter LP well enough. As for their unwavering allegiance to a band that went so precipitously downhill within the space of a few short years-by 1977 the GD were reduced to recording the dreadful “France” and “Dancing in the Streets,” that song musicians turn to (just ask Mick Jagger and David Bowie) when they’ve completely run out of ideas-what can one say except that love is blind, and all that extended staring into the sun they did while tripping couldn’t have helped.Īnyway, Workingman’s Dead opens with “Uncle John’s Band,” a song I always felt belonged on American Beauty. I know guys who can tell you precisely which of 986 soundboard recordings of “China Cat Sunflower/I Know You Rider” they like most, and that is both stark raving madness and true love. The murder of Meredith Hunter at the debacle that was Altamont and the Tate-LaBianca murders of the Manson Family-those twin stabs of the knife that put paid to the Age of Aquarius-were still fresh in everybody’s minds, and it couldn’t have lightened the band’s mood that Ron “Pigpen” McKernan, the Dead’s biker-looking blues belter and keyboardist, was drinking himself to death before their eyes.īefore I go on to review the album, I would just like to say I love Deadheads. Workingman’s Blues has the whiff of the grave about it, as personified by the Dire Wolf-“six hundred pounds of sin”-and “Black Peter,” and death was definitely in the air when the band recorded it. Workingman’s Blues-with its sepia-tinted cover of the band standing on the curb, presumably waiting for day work-also has a much darker vibe than American Beauty, and I could relate to that too. I bought it when I was working at the Littlestown foundry operating a jackhammer-usually with a living death of a hangover-and I could relate to its songs about killing labor, such as “Easy Wind” and “Cumberland Blues,” more than I could to the prettier tunes like “Sugar Magnolia” and “Attics of My Life” off American Beauty. That said, my favorite of the pair is Workingman’s Dead. Workingman’s Dead and American Beauty are both American classics and fecund miracles of concision and profundity, and so much better than what came before and after them that I’m still not convinced they weren’t recorded by aliens who just happened to sound like Jerry Garcia, Bob Weir, and Company. I love large chunks of 1969’s live Grateful Dead (which the band wanted to call Skull Fuck) and Europe ’72, but my favorite Grateful Dead albums were both released in 1970-namely, those two studio masterpieces, Workingman’s Dead and American Beauty.ĭuring that brief Golden Age the Grateful Dead stopped noodling and wrote some real songs-country-flavored tunes with great pedal steel guitar, crisp melodies, tight playing, and evocative lyrics-and without a single 19-minute noodle-fest between them. The early Dead played a psychedelic soup of the blues and acid-trip-length explorations of inner space, but by the late sixties had tightened things up to become a stellar, if notoriously erratic and self-indulgent, live act. The Grateful Dead began their career playing Ken Kesey’s Acid Tests, and through their connection with Merry Prankster Neil Cassady bridged the Beat Movement of the Fifties and the Hippie Culture of the Sixties. Even their famed live shows went downhill-Donna Godchaux, anyone?-as they cycled through keyboardists the way Spın̈al Tap went through drummers and Jerry Garcia gradually dedicated more and more time to his various pharmaceutical side projects. Because it’s a cold hard fact that the Dead were a spent force in the studio by the mid-70s, and definitely dead in the water by the time they released those twin abominations, 1977’s Terrapin Station and 1978’s Shakedown Street. Truth is, I saw the Grateful Dead decades too late. I’d have asked for my money back if I hadn’t seen, with my own eyes, an acid casualty try to snort a Birkenstock. There simply aren’t enough narcotics in the world to make “Drums and Space” anything but torture. One critic wrote of the show I attended, “Pity anyone who actually sat through … with a clear head.” Well, my head was about as clear as stained glass, and it didn’t much matter. They were renowned for their shambolic jams, lethargic grooves, and endless noodling-when I saw them I saw ‘em with Bob Dylan in 1987, they played a version of “Joey” that lasted longer than The War of Jenkin’s Ear. The Grateful Dead: God invented ‘em at the same time he invented the sloth.
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