Workingman's Dead

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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.

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.” We were into a much more relaxed thing about that time,” Garcia told Rolling Stone in 1972, reflecting on the origins of Workingman’s Dead. “And we were also out of our pretentious thing. We weren’t feeling so much like an experimental group, but were feeling more like a good old band.” The complete takes show the development,” says Dead legacy manager David Lemieux, who oversees the band’s archiving. “The Dead had been playing these songs for so long, in some cases nine months, so they had them down. But this is where the nuances developed.”

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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. That’s kind of the idea behind Workingman’s Dead, although, really — and also the next record, Workingman’s Dead and American Beauty, they’re both kind of one record, really, and that worked out beautifully,” Garcia added. “It really did, it worked out great.” Jerry Garcia– lead guitar, pedal steel guitar, banjo, vocals, lead vocals on all songs except where noted Uncle John's Band" (recorded at Winterland on 10/04/1970, incorrectly listed in sleevenotes as recorded at Winterland, 12/23/70) – 7:57

Mason's Children" (recorded at the Civic Auditorium in Honolulu on 1/24/1970) (Garcia, Hunter, Lesh, Weir) – 6:32 Given that the only Workingman’s Dead leftovers that had surfaced before had been various takes of “Dire Wolf,” Lemieux wasn’t sure what to think. “We’ve been burned before,” he says. “We’ve designed an album cover for a great live show and then the tapes showed up and we couldn’t use them. But here Brian and Mike had a feeling it was something Workingman’s Dead–related.” Given that most of what Lemieux has overseen was live material, he “freaked out,” he says, when he realized what those tape boxes contained. Announcing Workingman's Dead 50th Anniversary Deluxe Edition". dead.net. May 6, 2020 . Retrieved May 28, 2020.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. 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.” This was, sort of, stepping out of our spacesuit and coming down to Earth and putting on a pair of Osh Kosh and digging the furrows ... we would have to bring the music in, to support the texts: Hunter's Holy Grail" I found this mix way better than the American Beauty Atmos with Beauty's vocals being way too overwhelmingly up front.

The Dead had further honed their chops by playing a series of acoustic sets during the winter of 1969–1970, mixing versions of their new songs among folk and country covers. The entire album was recorded and mixed in about 10 days. Overdubs included Garcia’s pedal-steel parts, Pigpen’s harmonica, various acoustic and electric guitar parts and, of course, the vocals, which were certainly at a level the Dead had never achieved before.

Then there’s the matter of the sniff heard ’round the world. On the original Workingman’s Dead, “Casey Jones”— about that conductor “high on cocaine”— is preceded by the sound of a loud inhale. According to Matthews, Garcia would often prepare to sing in the studio by gulping a half shot of Drambuie liqueur, then washing it down with a half shot of pure lemon juice. “The Drambuie would collect all the viscous material and the lemon juice would drain it,” Matthews recalls. Colin Larkin, ed. (2000). All Time Top 1000 Albums (3rded.). Virgin Books. p.143. ISBN 0-7535-0493-6. The fall of 1968 through the spring of 1969 marks the Dead’s fiercest, most confident and accomplished psychedelic playing, reaching its apex around the time that Live Dead was recorded at the Avalon Ballroom and the Fillmore West. But changes were on the way. Perhaps the harbinger of the future direction was a song on Aoxomoxoa called “Dupree’s Diamond Blues,” Hunter and Garcia’s clever recasting of a popular story-song that originated in the early Twenties. On that late-winter-1970 day at Pacific High recording studio in San Francisco, Jerry Garcia wasn’t happy with what he was hearing. The Grateful Dead were trying to finish “New Speedway Boogie,” a song they’d played live only three times, and they were having trouble finding a groove.

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.” Top 200 Albums - week of June 27, 1970". Billboard. Scroll down to Workingman's Dead and hover . Retrieved 3 December 2016. a b Grateful Dead: The Illustrated Trip. Jake Woodward, et al. Dorling Kindersley Limited, 2003, p. 108. Still, Warner Bros. was ready to promote the album. “An album of country-flavored tunes by the Grateful Dead — an album different from anything they ever did before,” went one of its radio ads, which cheekily added, “Steal it.” But at the time, no one worried about record-store theft. In spite of that ad and problems with radio play, Workingman’s Dead became the band’s most popular record to that point, breaking into the Top 30 on the Billboard album chart. To this day, Matthews says he still receives royalties for his work on it.

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The title of the album comes from a comment from Jerry Garcia to lyricist Robert Hunter about how "this album was turning into the Workingman's Dead version of the band," a play on the fact the band had recently been covering Merle Haggard's song "Workingman's Blues" in concert. 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. Grateful Dead: The Illustrated Trip. Jake Woodward, et al. Dorling Kindersley Limited, 2003, p. 119. 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 ]