To celebrate the recent 50th anniversary of 'Workingman's Dead,' the Grateful Dead are now streaming more than two hours' worth of unheard takes from the original sessions
“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.”is a digital-only release, with no physical offering currently planned. The album title stems from a term in the whiskey industry.
had begun writing. The various members of the Dead — Garcia, Hunter, Weir, and McKernan, especially — had been immersed in folk, blues, jug-band music, and bluegrass, and that side of the group’s music reemerged in the new material. In line with the unplugged early-Americana trend that had sprung up in rock by the end of the Sixties, the songs included the campfire singalong “Uncle John’s Band,” the swampy sway of the mysterious “Black Peter,” and the country chug “Cumberland Blues.
Between the sensitivity of the subject matter and the fact that the Dead hadn’t fully worked out the song onstage yet, the band grappled with the appropriate arrangement of it. “It’s hard for me to sing and maintain a groove,” Garcia says at one point in the tapes, before instructing Matthews and Cantor-Jackson to “slam the fucker” out of his guitar sound. “The charm is that when a song falls apart, we get to hear that — and we get to hear them bring that tempo back up,” Lemieux says.
When it was decided that “Uncle John’s Band” would be a single, Matthews was asked to splice the word “goddamn” out of the finished version to ensure pop radio stations would play it. “I hated doing that,” Matthews says. “But [Dead manager] Rock Scully said it had to be done, and he told Jerry and Hunter, and they told me to cut it.”
The reason that concert recordings have dominated in the post-Garcia world is simple: Studio outtakes of the Dead are as rare as Lesh lead vocals. In terms of other vault tape boxes, “some clearly say,” says Lemieux. “There might be 15 or 20 multitrack reels, some with many takes of ‘Alabama Getaway.’”
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