The Grateful Dead

JUST A Box Of Rain. That song, from the album American Beauty, for me epitomises the Grateful Dead sound. West Coast folk rock with a touch of whimsical psychedelia thrown in, the key factor which gives it its “Dead” sound is Jerry Garcia’s voice.

We were not great Deadheads initially. But as the Seventies got into full swing, we picked up on several of their albums, which became firm favourites, though I don’t recall us actually ever having them until a lot later. Yet they were always there, and Garcia, for me, was the driving and creative force behind the band. This is a very superficial recollection of those days, so let’s see what the gurus have to say.

According to Wikipedia their music covered virtually the entire music spectrum of genres, including folk rock, bluegrass, blues rock, rock and roll and psychedelic rock. Be that as it may, like all those supergroups dealt with before, the bottom line is that they produced a unique genre that couldn’t be easily pigeonholed. There was the world of music before they came along, then they added an entire layer of sound and experience and the world was a different place. And that process, like so many others dealt with here, naturally began in the 1960s. Another quick observation, having quickly perused the list of Grateful Dead band members is that, well, many, many, of them are dead: Garcia, Brent Mydland, Vince Welnick, Ron “Pigpen” McKernan and Keith Godchaux. How many of those, apart from Garcia, were pivotal players in the band at its peak will be discovered shortly, but isn’t it bizarre how that band name, Grateful Dead, somehow courted disaster.

In its usual general overview, Wikipedia says the band was formed in San Francisco in 1965. The link with drug experimentation is cited, with the band becoming “the de facto resident band of Ken Kesey’s Merry Pranksters, with the early sound heavily influenced by LSD-soaked Acid Tests”. Various influences were “distilled into a diverse and psychedelic whole that made the Grateful Dead ‘the pioneering Godfathers of the jam band world’ ”.

Ah, so my intuition was correct. Wikipedia says lead guitarist Garcia “was often seen both by the public and the media as the leader or primary spokesperson for the Grateful Dead, but was reluctant to be seen that way, especially since Garcia and the other group members saw themselves as equal participants and contributors to their collective musical and creative output”. This makes sense, given that the whole hippie movement discouraged, or disavowed, the concept of leaders and followers. Leaders were politicians and they ended up sending young men to fight wars. The communist concept of a “collective leadership” sounded far more appealing, even if in practice Garcia was no doubt the band leader, and – as I’m sure we’ll see – principal song-writer and lead singer, along with being the lead guitarist.

The folk/bluegrass influence I discerned seems to emanate from Garcia, who grew up in San Francisco, where bluegrass, says Wikipedia, was “one of his main influences”. He also performed on banjo, which with the pedal steel guitar was a favourite instrument, in a bluegrass band, Old And In The Way, which included mandolin-player David Grisman (who never played for the Dead). The other band members were Phil Lesh, a classically trained trumpeter who played bass guitar; Bob Weir, the youngest band member, who played rhythm guitar; and Ron “Pigpen” McKernan who played keyboards, harmonica and was a vocalist until his early death in 1973, aged 27 (THAT age, again!). Wikipedia says all the other members shared in the vocals. Bill Kreutzmann played drums and, in 1967, was joined by a second drummer, Mickey Hart of New York, who also played other percussion instruments (though he quit in 1971). His departure was precipitated by his father and Dead money manager Lenny Hart’s “financial misdealings”. Wikipedia says one of the band’s concert staples became He’s Gone, about the dishonest Lenny Hart. However, Hart jnr was to rejoin the band in 1975. This seemed to be a big band, with people coming and going. Tom “TC” Constanten became a second keyboardist from 1968 to 1970. Keith Godchaux replaced him as a second keyboardist in late 1971, playing grand piano next to Pigpen’s Hammond B-3 organ. And the family grew when his wife, Donna Godchaux, joined as a backing vocalist. Sorry to bore with all this stuff, but it gets worse. Pigpen left the band due to ill health after a 1972 tour of Europe, and the Godchauxs quit in 1979. The following year, Keith Godchaux died in a car crash. Brent Mydland, who joined as keyboardist and vocalist in 1979 survived until he died in 1990, the third dead Dead keyboardist. And so on and so forth until former The Tubes keyboardist Vince Welnick, who joined in 1990, died, apparently a suicide, in June, 2006, becoming the fourth dead Dead keyboardist.

Here, finally, a bit of relevant information. It seems that Robert Hunter and John Perry Barlow “were the band’s primary lyricists”. All 11 Grateful Dead band members were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1994.

The band shared a communal home, naturally, in the Haight-Ashbury district of San Francisco in the late 1960s. From this base they toured almost constantly, promoting “a sense of community among their fans, who became known as Deadheads, many of whom followed their tours for months or years on end”. And it seems they really did live out the hippie ideal. Wikpedia says they “made available free food, lodging, music and health care to all comers”, and “performed more free concerts than any band in the history of music”.

Wikipedia says the band toured regularly around the US from 1965 till 1995. They appeared at the famous Monterey Pop Festival in 1967 and at Woodstock in 1969 – some footage of which I have on a director’s cut DVD version of the event. Their largest concert was with the Allman Brothers Band and The Band, before some 600 000 people at the Summer Jam at Watkins Glen in 1973.

And, finally, we get to the music. Wikepedia says their “numerous studio albums were generally collections of new songs that they had first played in concert”. They were famous for their “extended jams”. This included improvisations by individual group members not only within the form of the song, but they also “improvised with the form”, resulting in “free form”. Concerts often “blended songs, one into the next (a seque)”. Wikipedia says the Grateful Dead “pioneered this technique several years before The Beatles and The Moody Blues introduced it to a broader audience”.

Wall of Sound

Another pioneering step, given that they were primarily a concert band, was the Wall of Sound, “an enormous sound system designed specifically for the Grateful Dead”. This was designed by soundman Owsley “Bear” Stanley, and proved finicky, often breaking down during concerts. When Stanley was jailed for manufacturing LSD in 1970, they reverted to house Pas, which proved even less reliable. Alembic Inc Studios then sold them a “solid sound system” in 1971, with the company going on to play a key role in producing the Wall of Sound.

So much, one hopes, for the technicalities. But no, there’s more. It seems this is important stuff. Wikipedia tells us that when Stanley was released in late 1972 he and two other sound crew members plus Alembic “combined eleven separate sound systems to deliver high-quality sound to audiences”. With vocals, lead guitair, rhythm guitar and piano each having its own channel and set of speakers, Lesh’s bass went one further. It was piped through a “quadraphonic encoder that sent signals from each of the four strings to its own channel and set of speakers”. Similarly with the drums. One channel amplified the bass drum and two more carried the snares, tom-toms and cymbals. “Because each speaker carried just one instrument or vocalist, the sound was exceptionally clear and free of intramodular distortion,” says Wikipedia. What this says to me is that California, the great computer pioneering state, was even back then a leader when it came to providing the people with what they wanted, even if in this case it was just giving the Dead’s live sound a pristine quality. When it comes to music, as the Beatles had discovered on their massive stadium concerts earlier in the decade, sound quality is massively important. This, it seems, the Dead realised, and they did something about it. But there’s more, I tell you. Because the Wall of Sound “acted as its own monitor system”. It was assembled behind the band “so the members could hear exactly what their audience was hearing”, with a special microphone system having been designed by the technical gurus to prevent feedback. Of course this meant that the band were right up against this incredibly loud wall of sound, blasting through their eardrums, while the audience were at a relatively “safe” distance from this aural assault.

Yet there’s still more techno stuff. This really is for techno junkies. Because you see this Wall of Sound thing is important. I won’t give you all the wattage and vacuum-tube amplifier details, but suffice to say that “this system projected high-quality playback at six hundred feet with an acceptable sound projected for a quarter mile, at which point wind interference degraded it”. As I said earlier, remember how close the band were to this decibel barrage. Said to be the “largest portable sound system ever built”, the group used two sets of equipment, each weighing 75 tons and needing 21 crew members to set it up, with one leapfrogging the other as the tours progressed.

You’d think Wikipedia, by now, would focus on the band’s music. But not a bit of it. Because we need to know, I suppose, that the Dead started touring with this full system in 1974. But, we discover, that the Wall’s format did not record well. Bizarrely, just as they set up the Wall, it collapsed. It seems that rising fuel and personnel costs, “as well as friction among many of the new crew members, contributed to the band’s 1974 ‘retirement’. The Wall of Sound was disassembled, and when the Dead began touring again in 1976, it was with a more logistically practical sound system.” Phew, all that just to discover that it was a bit of a flop.

Dead Heads

I suppose it makes sense that a Grateful Dead encyclopaedia essay should be somewhat back to front. But since we started with touring, we should perhaps continue in similar vein and look at the Dead Heads phenomenon, before finally finding out something about the band itself. While the mellow Heads followed the band around like an extended family, it seems they had a culture shock in the 1980s, especially since for the first time, in 1987, the Deads scored a Top 10 hit with Touch Of Grey, from the album In the Dark. This “garnered a new set of fans from the mainstream rock audience”. Suddenly the “peaceful hippie counterculture met the boisterous ’80s rockers many of whom were attracted to the drugs that were usually available outside the shows”. There was another Deads phenomenon: the tapers. Wikipedia says the Deads allowed their fans to tape their shows, as many other bands did at the time. A forest of microphones became a problem for the sound crew, so a special dedicated taping section was located behind the soundboard, requiring a special “taper’s ticket”. The only proviso was that no profits were made from the sale of these tapes, though the opportunity for bootlegging seems immense.

Finally. Finally. A bit of history. Wikipedia says the band began as The Warlocks, but because another band had already recorded under that name, they had to find a new name in order to get a recording contract. They moved into Haight-Ashbury which, I learn, was also home to Jefferson Airplane, Big Brother & the Holding Company (ie Janis Joplin) and Santana. Not for nothing was San Francisco considered the centre of the hippie counter-culture era. And the Grateful Dead would come to lead the presentation of that culture to the rest of the country, and the world. But what, after the Warlocks was kyboshed, to call themselves? Wikpedia says the name, Grateful Dead, was “chosen from a dictionary”. Phil Lesh in his autobiography, said Garcia picked up a dictionary and “in that silvery elf-voice he said to me, ‘Hey, man, how about the Grateful Dead?”. The definition in the Britannica World Language Dictionary he had consulted was “a song meant to show a lost soul to the other side”. A Garcia biography, by Sandy Troy, says “the band was smoking the psychedelic DMT at the time”. I’m mystified. Surely no dictionary has “grateful dead” listed…

Garcia and Bob Weir had been “immersed in the American folk music revival of the late 1950s and early 1960s”, but after hearing New York folk-rock band The Lovin’ Spoonful, and with various other bands, including Bob Dylan “going electric”, they were happy to do the same. The Dead included classically trained Lesh who had an electronic music background, a deep blues lover in Pigpen and a drummer in Kreutzmann with a jazz and R&B background. Also, notes Wikipedia, their debut album, Grateful Dead (1967) came on the heels of the big “surfing music” craze popularised by the Beachboys, and some of that California rock-music sound “seeped in, to some degree, as well”.

As mentioned earlier, the Dead’s music was difficult to pigeonhole. Wikipedia says in the mid-1960s they were part of a process of establishing the nature of psychedelic music, but theirs was “essentially a ‘street party’ form of it.” Their music “drew on all genres”, often melding several. Their early albums reflected their live sound, including long instrumental jams and improvisation. These did not sell well, but the 1969 live album, Live/Dead, while again not a commercial success, best reflected their early live sound. However, it was the two 1970 albums, Workingman’s Dead, which I’ve only recently discovered to my delight, and of course, American Beauty, that brought commercial success. “These records largely featured the band’s laid-back acoustic musicianship and more traditional song structure.”

In the course of three decades of touring and recording, the individual contribution of each musician became well defined. Things to look out for, says Wikipedia, are Lesh’s use of the bass almost as a second lead guitar, Weir’s rhythm guitar playing “jazz-influenced, unique inversions at the upper end of the Dead’s sound”, and the interplay between the two drummers, Hart and Kreutzman. Garcia’s lead guitar was “fluid, supple and spare, owing a great deal of their character to his training in fingerpicking and banjo”. “The overall effect was of an extraordinarily complex, interlocked group of individual instruments, which, at its best, had three or four simultaneous melodies rather than one.”

Jerry Garcia

While Garcia eschewed the leadership role, he was, says Wikipedia, the band’s “de facto musical leader and the source of its identity”. He was “a charismatic, complex figure, simultaneously writing and playing music of enormous emotional resonance and insight while leading a personal life that often consisted of various forms of self-destructive excess, including well-known drug addictions, obesity, tremendous financial recklessness, and three complex, volatile, often unhappy marriages”. While Wikipedia qualifies these statements by saying a “citation (is) needed”, the description seems to fit the list of requirements for most creative geniuses from this era, as we’ve already seen all too clearly.

For Garcia, like Jim Morrison, it seems a tragic childhood affected his sensitive soul profoundly. This, says Wikipedia, occurred when, as a small boy, he witnessed his father’s death by drowning in a freak accident while fishing. Later, the middle finger of his right hand was “accidentally amputated by his brother while the two boys were splitting kindling”. Then, as a young man, he was involved in a horror car crash which resulted in the death of a close friend, while Garcia himself was lucky to survive. Add the impact of psychedelic drugs and sudden fame, and Garcia’s personality was always going to battle. The upshot, though, was that he was keen to experiment musically and “that led to an improvisational style and an emotional perspective that made his music both wildly inventive melodically and brutally insightful lyrically”.

Later, however, “the emotional pain of these early experiences propelled him into cathartic, self-destructive behaviour that ultimately contributed to his untimely death”.

But this wasn’t one of those great “died at 27” tragedies like we’ve already encountered. Curiously, Wikipedia makes no reference to how Garcia died in 1995, although I see there is a long piece on him as an individual, so let’s check it out.

Jerome John Garcia was born on August 1, 1942. Apart from serving with the Dead for 30 years, he released several solo albums and worked as a session musician on other artists’ albums. A surprise accolade is that his “highly distinctive guitar playing” saw him ranked 13^th in Rolling Stone’s 100 greatest guitarists of all time. Due to his weight gain, he suffered a diabetic coma that nearly cost him his life in 1986. He struggled, says Wikipeida, with “chronic heroin addiction” and was “residing in a drug rehabilitation facility when he died of a heart attack in August of 1995”. A native of San Francisco, Garcia’s father Jose ran a bar in the city after being “blackballed from a musicians’ union for moonlighting”.

Music was in his blood, with his father having been a professional musician and his mother playing the piano. His father’s extended family – who had emigrated from Spain in 1919 – often sang together at reunions.

The essay on Garcia says he did not, in fact, witness his father’s fly-fishing death in 1947, but “formed the memory from hearing the story repeated many times”.

A great fan of Chuck Berry, Buddy Holly and Eddie Cochran, he was desperate for an electric guitar, but instead was given an accordion by his mother on his 15^th birthday. She eventually agreed to exchange it for a Danelectro guitar with a small amplifier.

And where did Garcia go to study after school? Art school, naturally – the San Francisco Art Institute. Fellow student Wally Hedrick, a “seminal artist and California counterculture figure”, served as a role model for Garcia and introduced him to the Beat community. It was him that “turned the young Jerry on to acoustic blues”, as well as the writing of Jack Kerouac, whose book, On the Road, “changed Garcia’s life forever”. Garcia kept drawing and painting throughout his musical career. He recalls smoking marijuana for the first time in 1958, and getting “so high” and doing “funny things and just having a helluva time”. Having already started performing at 710 Ashbury Street, he met Phil Lesh in 1962, who’d later become the Dead bassist. And, echoing Jimi Hendrix, we discover that after dropping out of high school, Garcia enlisted in the US Army, where he trained as an auto maintenance helper. He was stationed in San Francisco though. Naturally, he was given a dishonourable discharge on December 14, 1960, “after accruing two courts martial and eight AWOLs”. While “citation” is again needed for this Wikipedia information, it has to make sense. What on earth would Garcia have wanted with the army?

He then decided to let his fine art take a back role and focus on playing the guitar in earnest. He teamed up with Robert Hunter, with whom he played his first concert, each earning five dollars. It was another friend of that time, Paul Speegle, who died in that car crash in 1960, while Garcia broke a collarbone. “That was the slingshot for the rest of my life,” he is quoted as saying. “It was like a second chance. Then I got serious.”

Not surprisingly, given the folk revolution that was sweeping the Western world, when Phil Lesh approached Garcia about recording some songs for KPFA radio, they recorded two traditional folk songs, Matty Groves and The Long Black Veil, among others. This landed Garcia a special 90-minute radio special, “The Long Black Veil and Other Ballads: An Evening with Jerry Garcia”. While teaching guitar and banjo, one of his students, Bob Matthews – later to engineer many Dead albums – introduced him to Bob Weir. Also not surprisingly, I see Garcia performed with a bluegrass band, the Sleepy Hollow Hog Stompers, and another folk band which included Ron “Pigpen” McKernan. In 1964, he first experimented with LSD. He said it “changed everything”, and he felt “immensely relieved” that he had discovered that “my little attempt at having a straight life … was really a fiction”. And so in 1965 the Warlocks was formed, with Lesh and Bill Kreutzmann joining up. Then, as noted earlier, the name was changed to the Grateful Dead. None of them liked it. Apparently the definition was “a dead person, or his angel, showing gratitude to someone who, as an act of charity, arranged their burial”. While there was general disapproval, the name “quickly spread by word of moth, and soon became their official title”.

Once the band was up and running, Garcia became famous for his song-writing, vocals and lead guitar work, including “soulful extended guitar improvisations”, though he freely admitted that he was taking his solo cues from rhythm guitarist Bob Weir.

Aside from the Dead, Garcia played with several other acoustic and bluegrass bands. In all, he played on over 50 studio albums, ranging across the board from bluegrass, folk, rock, blues, country and jazz to gospel, funk and reggae. Among those he teamed up with were Jefferson Airplane, Tom Fogerty, Crosby Stills Nash and Young, Dave Bromberg, Warren Zevon, Country Joe McDonald and Bob Dylan.

The Garcia story is replete with drug busts and the death of his mother in a car crash in 1970, while he was working on American Beauty. He started using cocaine while creating The Grateful Dead Movie in 1977, later moving to smokeable heroin. But in 1981 the band started to fragment. Garcia’s heroin use increased over the next seven years. The band issued an ultimatum and Garcia entered a rehab centre in 1984, but was again arrested for possession the next year and had to attend further therapy. I discover that he was unconscious for five days when he collapsed into that diabetic coma in 1986. He said the period was surreal. He had to relearn how to play the guitar, as well as other more basic skills. But within months he was back with the band.

After another relapse in 1989, he again attended a clinic, but having returned from the band’s 1992 summer tour, he fell extremely ill. He tried to lose weight after recovering, but his personal life continued to suffer as he separated from yet another girlfriend, only to marry another woman soon afterwards. But by early 1995, he was again physically and mentally in decline. He entered the Betty Ford Centre in July of 1995, before switching to the Serenity Knolls centre. On August 9, 1995, at 4.35am, his body was discovered in his room at the centre. Bob Dylan was among those at his funeral. A further 25 000 people attended a memorial on August 13.

After that digression, I’m finally back to the rest of the band, who decided to, well, disband. They pursued solo careers or formed new bands during the 1990s and 2000s. And then, inevitably, in February 2003, The Other Ones renamed themselves The Dead, keeping the word Grateful out as a sign of respect for Garcia. But, as with The Doors, the band without its main man would surely be a shadow of its former self. A shadow of the band from the 1960s and early 1970s who Rolling Stone in 2004 ranked No 55 on its list of the 100 greatest artists of all time. As remaining members made plans for the latter half of the decade, in February of 2007 the Grateful Dead received a Grammy Lifetime Achievement Ward.

The Grateful Dead

Classic rock or garage rock I see is the genre they classify the band’s eponymously titled debut album from March 1967. They chose David Hassinger as a producer because he had worked on Jefferson Airplane’s Surrealistic Pillow album, on which Garcia guested as a session musician, and, according to Wikipeida, donated the album title. It was recorded in just four days. “Free-form FM radio stations” only took shape some months after its release, so it initially did not receive much air play on AM stations outside San Fancisco. We, I am sure, never encountered this album, which I see from Wikipedia, was made of thick vinyl similar to the old 78 rpm records.

Anthem of the Sun

Their second album, Anthem of the Sun, was released in July 1968, and was now officially “psychedelic rock”, according to Wikipedia. This, too, is not familiar. It is the first album to boast a circular design on the cover – this time a figure that looks like a Hindu deity. And it was ranked No 287 on Rolling Stone’s famous greatest albums list. They fell out with Hassinger while seeking “their own sound” in a New York studio. Dan Healy replaced him. More recording was done back in San Francisco. They also recorded some live music from gigs they were doing, and these were “interlaced” with studio tracks, what Garcia called “mix(ing) it for the hallucinations”. Tom Constanten joined the band and brought new psychedelic ideas using the piano. A vast range of instruments were used, including kazoos, crotales, a harpsichord, timpani, guiro and a trumpet. Garcia said it was not a record in the normal sense – “we were making a collage”. The president of Warner Bros at the time, Joe Smith, called the album “the most unreasonable project with which we have ever involved ourselves”. And if you have one of the early pressings it might be valuable. Evidently these included the phrase “The faster we go, the rounder we get” inscribed on the vinyl around the label. Like its predecessor, this is an album I’d love to hear. I notice that Side 2 contains just two long tracks. The album reach No 87 on the Billboard charts.

Aoxomoxoa

The third album, Aoxomoxoa, which I see is a palindrome, was released in June 1969, and for the first time features a skull and cross bones on the cover – signifying that the Dead were serious about their name, with all the attendant claims of Satanism and the like that this must have engendered. Again classified by Wikipedia as psychedelic rock, this album certainly seems familiar, but I’ll have to check out the song titles. I see from Wikipedia that the album was originally titled Earthquake Country, and that Deadheads rank this era as the experimental apex of the band’s endeavours. As observed earlier, the title is a palindrome which, I see, was created by cover artist Rick Griffin and lyricist Robert Hunter. What it means, it seems, is irrelevant, but it must apparently be pronounded ox-oh-mox-oh-ah. In 1991, Rolling Stone declared its cover the eighth best of all time. While they were recording, new 16-track technology became available, which led, Garcia later conceded, to them swamping the music with too much sound. A remix in 1971 by Garcia and Lesh restored the balance, and this is the version now available on CD. Which, I suppose, makes those early albums collectors’ pieces, too. A key facet of this album, says Wikipedia, is that it cemented the Garcia, Robert Hunter songwriting team, which was to last for nearly 30 years. It was also the first time the emphasis was placed on acoustic songs, like Mountains Of The Moon, on which Lesh played a fretless acoustic bass for the first time on an album. Because they “overdid” their time in the studio, they ran up a huge debt with Warner Bros Records. While a “creatively unique” album, Wikipeida says it was also “commercially inaccessible”. Again, it is an album I’d love to hear, or possibly hear again, since somewhere in my subconscious, the album seems to lurk.

Live Dead

The cover of Live Dead doesn’t ring a bell – and it would had I seen it, because it is unmistakable. The word LIVE is painted in large red-pink letters, with a blue and green-clad woman rising from a white coffin. Their first live album, this time it is classified as rock and roll as well as psychedelic- and folk-rock. It was released in November 1969, having been recorded at a series of live concerts earlier that year. It is said to contain “the finest rock improvisation ever recorded”, according to Robert Christgau. Constanten’s last album with the Dead, in 2003 it was ranked No 244 on that Rolling Stone list of the 500 greatest albums. The relative success of the album – it reached No 64 on the Billboard charts – also helped placate Warner Bros.

Workingman’s Dead

All this time, as the Dead were starting to make a big impact in the US, down in South Africa in the late 1960s, I don’t think many people were aware of their existence. Workingman’s Dead, their fourth studio album, was released in June 1970, and again pretty well passed me by. This time deemed country rock, folk rock and rock, the album hit No 262 on that Rolling Stone list. The album’s title, says Wikipedia, derives from a comment Garcia made to Hunter about the album becoming a “Workingman’s Dead version of the band” after they had been covering a Merle Haggard song, Workingman’s Blues, in concert. It was recorded in just 10 days, while the consequences of a recent drug bust loomed. And, as I noted to myself while listening to their next album, American Beauty, Garcia has ascribed the sound achieved here as being much influenced by the band’s friendship with Crosby Stills and Nash and “how nice they sounded (singing) together”. This sound was to be the hallmark of American Beauty, and obviously this earlier album, too. Two tracks were even released as a single, and achieved limited airplay. The album was voted by Rolling Stone as the best album of 1970, eclipsing Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young’s Déjà Vu and Van Morrison’s Moondance. Now we are talking about real competition! This, clearly, is another album I need to get into sometime. And it became popular, peaking at No 27 in the US album charts. I know this album was not part of my upbringing, but have only now, in recent months, realised that some of the songs are indeed very familiar. And that is thanks to a tape my late brother, Alistair, made in about 1990 and posted to Robyn and me while we were living in London. He marked the tape American Beauty, but in fact, as I have just recently discovered on giving it a fresh listen, it includes his selection of the best off that album, and then five songs off other albums, including this one, Workingman’s Dead. And these are surely among the finest Dead songs of all, although American Beauty was the one that defined my closest and most intimate experience of the group.

But, driving back from work one Friday, I had this tape running, and suddenly it was Uncle John’s Band coming through the speakers. This is the opening track on Side One of Workingman’s Dead, and is an absolute classic. Take this first verse: “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. / Think this through with me, let me know your mind. / Woh - oh, what I want to know, is are you kind?” This country-based song rollicks along, with this verse leading into that time-honoured chorus: “I live in a silver mine and I call it Beggar’s Tomb; / I got me a violin and I beg you call the tune / Anybody’s choice, I can hear your voice. / Woh - oh, what I want to know, how does the song go?” Then, the guys harmonising superbly, they take it away with: “Come hear Uncle John’s Band by the riverside / Got some things to talk about, here beside the risin’ tide / Come hear Uncle John’s Band playing to the tide, / Come on along, or go alone, / He’s come to take his children home. / Woh - oh, what I want to know, how does the song go?”

Alistair included two other gems from this album on that tape. Hard to believe that 1990 is now almost in the distant past. Alistair died too young, about the age that Lennon was, in 1996. He was just 41, and suffered heart failure while playing action cricket with his work colleagues. A sad, tragic loss. But what a wonderful reminder of his generous soul is this tape. His selections are spot-on. Because Dire Wolfe and Casey Jones are also top-order Grateful Dead tracks off this album. On Dire Wolfe, indeed, there is some slide guitar very reminiscent of the opening track on CSN&Y’s Déjà Vu album where, as already noted, Garcia was a guest artist. That chorus line seems, like so many other Dead songs, to have embedded itself in my soul. It goes: “Don’t murder me, I beg of you, / Don’t murder me. / Please don’t murder me.” The chorus for the more bluesy Casey Jones is equally familiar: “Driving that train, high on cocaine / Casey Jones you better watch your speed.” There is a lovely Beatles-like bassline running through this song and some punchy lead guitar.

Then, in a real act of brilliance, Alistair tagged on one final track, St Stephen, which from the title I wouldn’t have thought I knew – until I listened to this tape. Indeed, I have failed to track down the origins of this most, most beautiful of Grateful Dead songs on the Net, though it must be off one of the live albums. But just look at these lyrics and you’ll see what an irresistible piece it is. The words alone have a flowing motion which, when put placed within its folk-rock context, become truly sublime. After a long introduction featuring brilliant lead guitar, the harmonising voices launch into: “Saint Stephen with a rose, / in and out of the garden he goes, / country garland in the wind and the rain, / wherever he goes the people all complain. / Stephen prospered in his time, / well he may and he may decline. / Did it matter, does it now?” And so on for verse after beautiful verse, with many wonderful variations of meter and melody along the way.

American Beauty

And so to the album that for me encapsulated the Grateful Dead sound. American Beauty, classified as country and folk, was released in September 1970. Their fifth studio album, it is ranked No 258 on that Rolling Stone list, with its cover ranked 57^th best of all time. As noted earlier, Steve Barncard replaced regular sound man Rob Matthews as producer as the latter was on the road. Clearly, the timing was serendipitous. Wikipedia says both Workingman’s Dead and American Beauty were “extremely innovative at the time for their fusion of bluegrass, rock and roll, folk music and especially country music”. And a key contributor to this sound was mandolinist David Grisman, who I noted earlier was a friend of Garcia’s. Clearly it was songs like Truckin’, Ripple, Sugar Magnolia and Friend Of The Devil which saw the album gain global attention. All were “instant radio favourites” in the US. The album, however, only reached No 30 on the US charts, with Truckin’ hitting No 64 on the singles charts. Clearly the competition was immense. And I see the album cover, by Kelley-Mouse Studios, can also read American Reality.

I attempted to listen to the album objectively, and found the quality truly superb. The harmonising and gentle, understated rock backing is so laid back it is small wonder this album became such an institution in our lives – even though I don’t recall us actually owning it – at least not initially. The mood is set from the opening track and those immortal opening lyrics: “Look out of any window, any morning, any evening, any day. / Maybe the sun is shining, birds are winging, / No rain is falling from a heavy sky. / What do you want me to do, to do for you to see you through? / For this is all a dream we dreamed one afternoon, long ago.” A Hunter/Lesh composition, this just goes to show that Garcia was right to insist that the Dead was very much a team effort. And of course this song, like most of the others, is not a vocal solo effort, because often alternate lines are sung in harmony by several voices – arguably even more beautifully than CSN&Y achieved. “Walk out of any doorway, feel your way, feel your way like the day before. / Maybe you’ll find direction, / Around some corner where it’s been waiting to meet you. / What do you want me to do, to watch for you while you are sleeping? / Then please don’t be surprised when you find me dreaming too.” This certainly is a laid-back song, but it is no easy task to achieve that sense of being replete within yourself. “Look into any eyes you find by you, you can see clear to another day, / Maybe been seen before, through other eyes on other days while going home. / What do you want me to do, to do for you to see you through? / It’s all a dream we dreamed one afternoon, long ago.” There is definite poetic beauty here: “Walk into splintered sunlight, / Inch your way through dead dreams to another land. / Maybe you’re tired and broken, / Your tongue is twisted with words half spoken and thoughts unclear.” Then, finally, we come to the title of the song: “What do you want me to do, to do for you to see you through? / A box of rain will ease the pain, and love will see you through.” The vocals are so soothing, it makes you wonder how the band could ever have been considered “underground” or “heavy”. “Just a box of rain, wind and water, / believe it if you need it, if you don’t just pass it on / Sun and shower, wind and rain, / In and out the window like a moth before a flame.” Then, with the group’s harmonising reaching great heights: “And it’s just a box of rain, I don’t know who put it there, / Believe it if you need it, or leave it if you dare.” Finally: “And it’s just a box of rain, or a ribbon for your hair; / Such a long long time to be gone, and a short time to be there.” Great poetry. Great song. But only the beginning of one of the defining albums of a generation.

Because next up, Friend Of The Devil starts with two acoustic guitars and some big, seductive notes from a bass guitar. I don’t know who sings the opening lines, because this really is a team effort, vocally. But again, this is a timeless song, beautifully arranged and executed. It also marks the first introduction of that Grisman mandolin. Those opening lines are, again, immortal: “I lit out from Reno, I was trailed by twenty hounds / Didn’t get to sleep last night ’till the morning came around.” Then that incredible chorus, whose actual lyrics I’m reading now for the first time, ever: “Set out runnin’ but I take my time / A friend of the devil is a friend of mine / I get home before daylight, I just might get some sleep tonight.” And so the story unfolds: “Ran into the devil, babe, he loaned me twenty bills / I spent the night in Utah in a cave up in the hills. / Set out runnin’ but I take my time, a friend of the devil is a friend of mine, / If I get home before daylight, I just might get some sleep tonight.” But the devil was on his trail, man: “I ran down to the levee but the devil caught me there / He took my twenty dollar bill and vanished in the air. / Set out runnin’ but I take my time / A friend of the devil is a friend of mine / If I get home before daylight, I just might get some sleep tonight.” As the mandolin and acoustic guitar lead subtly interpose, the song takes on an almost Magna Carta quality: “Got two reasons why I cry away each lonely night, / The first one’s named sweet Anne Marie, and she’s my heart’s delight. / The second one is prison, babe, the sheriff’s on my trail, / And if he catches up with me, I’ll spend my life in jail.” How many, like me, never really heard these words before? “Got a wife in Chino, babe, and one in Cherokee / The first one says she’s got my child, but it don’t look like me. / Set out runnin’ but I take my time, / A friend of the devil is a friend of mine, / If I get home before daylight, I just might get some sleep tonight.”

Then, ineluctably, the album leads into the looping bass and rhythm guitar, the drowsy mood which is Sugar Magnolia, where the pedal steel guitar gives it an especially country feel. Again, this is a song I’ve heard all my life, in a sense, but only now do I see these lyrics in full: “Sugar magnolia, blossoms blooming, heads all empty and I don’t care, / Saw my baby down by the river, knew she’d have to come up soon for air.” Saw my baby, down by the river … one sort of heard these words subliminally. They were such an integral part of the whole that I, for one, never felt the need to try to decipher or analyse what precisely was being sung. The whole sufficed. “Sweet blossom come on, under the willow, we can have high times if you’ll abide / We can discover the wonders of nature, rolling in the rushes down by the riverside.” Now that’s the kind of nature study I guess most young people understand! Indeed, the chorus seems to celebrate that fact: “She’s got everything delightful, she’s got everything I need, / Takes the wheel when I’m seeing double, pays my ticket when I speed.” Though, I see, the narrator seems more concerned about his own well-being than what his babe might have to offer while “rolling in the rushes”. “She comes skimmin’ through rays of violet, she can wade in a drop of dew, / She don’t come and I don’t follow, waits backstage while I sing to you. / Well, she can dance a Cajun rhythm, jump like a Willys in four wheel drive. / She’s a summer love for spring, fall and winter. / She can make happy any man alive.” It’s good song-writing, and for the next few verses, in the hands of this group, it became another piece of magic.

Ron McKernan wrote the next song, Operator, which is a chirpy country song simply backed on acoustic guitar, with the melody gently picked out on electric guitar. The links with blues, however, come through on a lovely harmonica solo. This is another of those legendary Dead songs that, well, will never die: “Operator, can you help me, help me if you please. / Give me the right area code and the number that I need. / My rider left upon the midnight flyer, / Singin’ like a summer breeze.” For those, like myself, who have never set foot in the United States of America, there is something exotically evocative about its place names: “I think she’s somewhere down South, down about Baton Rouge, / But I just can’t remember no number, a number I can use. / Directory don’t have it, central done forgot it, / I’ve gotta find a number to use.” The singer’s desperation to speak to her grows, as the elements conspire against him: “Trying to check out her number, trying to run down her line. / Operator said that’s priv’ledged information, / And it ain’t no business of mine. / It’s floodin’ down in Texas, poles are out in Utah, / Gotta find a private line.” Eventually he seems to accept defeat: “She could be hangin’ ’round the steel mill, / Working in a house of blue lights. / Riding a getaway bus out of Portland, talking to the night. / I don’t know where she’s going, I don’t care where she’s been, / Long as she’s doin’ it right. / Long as she’s doin’ it right.”

If you said Candyman to me, I wouldn’t know how the song went. But of course it is another Garcia/Hunter classic off this album. That mellow voice, backed by lead and acoustic guitar, starts off slowly: “Come on all you pretty women, with your hair a hanging down, / Open up your windows cuz the candyman’s in town. / Come on boys and gamble, roll those laughing bones, / Seven come eleven, boys I’ll take your money home.” Then that unmistakable chorus, several full male voices: “Look out, look out the candyman, / Here he comes and he’s gone again. / Pretty lady ain’t got no friend till, / The candyman comes around again, around again.” If this has any links to Donovan’s Candyman then this is all about a drug dealer. There seems to be some serious violence threatened, too: “I come from Memphis where I learned to talk the jive, / When I get back to Memphis be one less man alive. /Good morning Mr Benson, I see you’re doing well, / If I had me a shotgun I’d blow you straight to hell.” Even though I’ve heard that chorus umpteen times before, it is only now, upon reading it, that I can say I’ve actually taken it in. The final verse reads: “Come on boys and wager if you have got the mind, / If you’ve got a dollar boys, lay it on the line, / Hand me my old guitar, pass the whiskey round, / Won’t you tell everybody you meet that the candyman’s in town.” There is some wonderful organ near the end, as the song fades.

Side 2 of the album starts with another Garcia/Hunter classic, Ripple, which again features that brilliant David Grisman mandolin. One of the hallmarks of these songs’ success is that they have good, listenable melodies. And of course the arrangements are superb, with the band harmonising like seasoned experts. But do you remember how this song goes? An acoustic guitar is again to the fore, giving the song its bluegrass texture. But what is ripple? As soon as the first line is sung, this beautiful song about nature asserts itself as one of the great Dead works of all time: “If my words did glow with the gold of sunshine / And my tunes were played on the harp unstrung, / Would you hear my voice come thru the music, / Would you hold it near as it were your own?” Hell, but doesn’t this song just rock so gently along! “It’s a hand-me-down, the thoughts are broken, / Perhaps they’re better left unsung. / I don’t know, don’t really care / Let there be songs to fill the air.” Then that enchanting chorus: “Ripple in still water, / When there is no pebble tossed, / Nor wind to blow.” Then the next verse: “Reach out your hand if your cup be empty, / If your cup is full may it be again, / Let it be known there is a fountain, / That was not made by the hands of men.” It’s profound philosophy, if you think about it. A bit like one of those Irish blessings. Let’s see where else the song takes us: “There is a road, no simple highway, / Between the dawn and the dark of night, / And if you go no one may follow, / That path is for your steps alone.” Then to the final chorus and verse: “Ripple in still water, / When there is no pebble tossed, / Nor wind to blow.” Realise that all this beautiful writing and singing is backed by sublime music, with that mandolin, sometimes picked sometimes strummed, always in evidence. “You who choose to lead must follow, / But if you fall you fall alone, / If you should stand then who’s to guide you? / If I knew the way I would take you home.” Ever wondered how the song would sound in la dee da’s? The lyrics website has the concluding lines as: “La dee da da da, la da da da da, da da da, da da, da da da da da / La da da da, la da da, da da, la da da da, la da, da da.”

As so often is achieved in the best of albums, the next track, Brokedown Palace, another Garcia/Hunter composition, emerges seamlessly from the tail-end of Ripple. Slow guitar backs those gentle vocals which build through rich vocal harmonies. Steel guitar and piano make a powerful impact on a song which has echoes of the famous Californian surfing sound, particularly in that “doo-da-too” harmonising section: “Fare you well, my honey, fare you well my only true one. / All the birds that were singing are flown, except you alone.” Lyrics and melody roll along luxuriously: “Going to leave this brokedown palace, / On my hand and knees, I will roll, roll, roll. / Make myself a bed in the waterside, / In my time, I will roll, roll roll.” Then that famous chorus: “In a bed, in a bed, by the waterside I will lay my head. / Listen to the river sing sweet songs, to rock my soul.” This song surely owes something to the early English folk songs. It has that lovely sense of being locked into the environment; a time when people were able to live in far closer harmony with nature: “River going to take me, sing sweet and sleepy, / Sing me sweet and sleepy all the way back home. / It’s a far gone lullaby, sung many years ago. / Mama, mama many worlds I’ve come since I first left home.” There’s a soothing nostalgia about these reminiscences: “Goin’ home, goin’ home, by the riverside I will rest my bones, / Listen to the river sing sweet songs, to rock my soul.” That was what was so great about this album. You felt calmed by its presence: “Going to plant a weeping willow, / On the bank’s green edge it will grow, grow, grow. / Sing a lullaby beside the water, / Lovers come and go, the river roll, roll, roll.” Then those voices in harmony lift the song to close with that chanting chorus: “Fare you well, fare you well, I love you more than words can tell, / Listen to the river sing sweet songs, to rock my soul.”

Just when you think the album cannot get any better, it does. Or if not, then it stays at the same stellar level. It’s that Garcia/Hunter team again responsible for yet another classic, Till The Morning Comes. Quick, bass-led with some tight rhythm guitar, the song uses a device I’ve detected among several of the greatest songwriters covered thus far. They build the thing up, then create this short pause, before launching into the lyrics: “Till the morning comes, it’ll do you fine./ Till the morning comes, like a highway sign, / Showing you the way, leaving no doubt, / Of the way on in or the way back out.” Then, a change in mood for the chorus: “Tell you what I’ll do, I’ll watch out for you / You’re my woman now, make yourself easy, make yourself easy / Make yourself eeeeeeasy.” The song picks itself up again for the next verse: “Till we all fall down, it’ll do you fine, / Don’t think about what you left behind / The way you came or the way you go / Let your tracks be lost in the dark and snow.” Then that iconic chorus leads one into the next verse: “When the shadows grow, it’ll do you fine / When the cold winds blow, it’ll ease your mind / The shape it takes could be yours to choose, / What you may win, what you may lose.” The final singing of the chorus ends with the repeating of that final line: “You’re my woman now, make yourself easy. / You’re my woman now, make yourself easy ...” Don’t men just love an easy woman – unless it’s their wife!

The next track’s title, Attics Of My Life, was not familiar when I gave this album a fresh listen, and even when I heard it, it had something which set it apart from the rest of the album. And that was probably the fact that it is the least commercial of all the tracks – yet it is incredibly beautiful. Indeed, I’d stick my neck out and say this is the finest track on the album. There is harmonising here that would make the Beatles jealous. There is bass playing that sounds, indeed, a lot like Paul McCartney at his best. It is a brave, spiritual song, sung in tight harmony by several voices throughout. It is an intense piece of choral perfection – and, of course, another Garcia/Hunter product: “In the attics of my life, full of cloudy dreams unreal. / Full of tastes no tongue can know, and lights no eyes can see. / When there was no ear to hear, you sang to me.” It is the kind of song where the melody is so pleasant you hardly think about the lyrics at all, while listening to it. You just know they sound good. But reading this, I realist they are good. Very good. “I have spent my life seeking all that’s still unsung. / Bent my ear to hear the tune, and closed my eyes to see. / When there was no strings to play, you played to me.” I like these three long lines per verse, each filled with great images, some enticingly paradoxical. “In the book of love’s own dream, where all the print is blood. / Where all the pages are my days, and all the lights grow old. / When I had no wings to fly, you flew to me, you flew to me.” The song ends suitably beautifully: “In the secret space of dreams, where I dreaming lay amazed. / When the secrets all are told, and the petals all unfold. / When there was no dream of mine, you dreamed of me.”

I was given a songbook with the chords and lyrics of some of the great musicians from this era sometime in the 1970s. Truckin’ is the Grateful Dead song featured, and it has to be the definitive commercial track on this album. The fast-paced introduction is even beefed up with some edgy lead guitar. Indeed, with the addition of organ, this becomes a powerful rock track. A joint composition by most of the band, it again features some lovely harmonies. Indeed, you haven’t yet lived if this song has escaped your attention. It opens with the chorus: “Truckin’ got my chips cashed in. / Keep truckin’, like the do-dah man / Together, more or less in line, just keep truckin’ on.” Then the first of those quicker, image-packed, intensely wordy verses: “Arrows of neon and flashing marquees out on main street. / Chicago, New York, Detroit and it’s all on the same street. / Your typical city involved in a typical daydream / Hang it up and see what tomorrow brings.” Then back to that laid-back, lead guitar-laced, trucking sound. “Dallas, got a soft machine; Houston, too close to New Orleans; / New York’s got the ways and means; but just won’t let you be, oh no.” Then another quick-fire verse: “Most of the cast that you meet on the streets speak of true love, / Most of the time they’re sittin’ and cryin’ at home. / One of these days they know they better get goin’ / Out of the door and down on the streets all alone.” After the “Truckin’” chorus, the song changes its mood: “Sometimes the light’s all shinin’ on me; / Other times I can barely see. / Lately it occurs to me what a long, strange trip it’s been.” Then, remembering of course this is all beautifully sung, it’s back to the next quick-fire verse: “What in the world ever became of sweet Jane? / She lost her sparkle, you know she isn’t the same / Livin’ on reds, vitamin C, and cocaine, / All a friend can say is ‘ain’t it a shame?’” The song just continues, full of inventive lyrics and lovely harmonies. I like these lines particularly: “Busted, down on Bourbon Street, set up, like a bowlin’ pin. / Knocked down, it gets to wearin’ thin. / They just won’t let you be, oh no.” Ah the hassles of the authorities as they try to protect you from yourself.

Surely one of the greatest albums of all time, American Beauty could not have been more aptly titled. It offers the best in beautifully American music which draws from that rich heritage of folk music brought over by British and Irish settlers hundreds of years earlier. And I see Wikipedia endorse this view in a summary of each of the songs. Here, for instance, I learnt that the House of Blue Lights, from Operator, is a famous nightclub in Chicago, Illinois. Candyman’s opening line, “Come all you”, echoes the “come all ye” introduction often used in traditional English folk songs. But it seems the Candyman was not, originally, a drug dealer. It was, in early 20^th century African-American slang, “a man who is lusty, and has ‘got a stick of candy nine inches long’. Many old blues songs refer to the candyman carrying a candy bar, which is a double entendre. However, as noted above, “in the 1960s, the term also frequently applied to drug dealers”. Ripple, like most folk songs, “is about itself as a song and an instrument of the performers’ emotional expression”. As I alluded to earlier, the three-line chorus “is distinct from the verses, especially in its form – it is a haiku, a type of Japanese poetry”. And, I see, several lines in the song “echo the 23^rd Psalm of the Bible”. Robert Hunter wrote the song in London in 1970 in the same afternoon, says Wikipedia, that he wrote Brokedown Palace and To Lay Me Down while reputedly drinking an entire bottle of retsina. Wikipedia says Ripple “is often cited as one of the most beautiful and poetic songs in popular music”. So it’s not just me. Hunter was clearly a gifted lyricist. It seems Brokedown Palace comes from John Steinbeck’s Cannery Row (1945) which refers to an abandoned warehouse where vagrants slept. Another allusion is apparently to the Norse folklore use of the weeping willow as a symbol of mourning for lost love. Like Dylan and Paul Simon, the song also apparently adapts lyrics from the folk song, Fare Thee Well. Even a song like Till The Morning Comes has some old folksy references, with the line “till we all fall down” coming from the children’s nursery rhyme, Ring-a-ring a-rosies”. And what of that beautiful choral piece, Attics Of My Life? Wikipedia says its lyrics are “structured like a prayer, and it is usually sung with harmonic, slow and reverent vocals”. Indeed, indeed. And then, of course, there’s Truckin’. While nothing about the song itself is provided, it did reach No 64 on the Pop Singles charts in the US, and went gold in 1974 and multi-platinum in 2001.

Grateful Dead (Skull and Roses)

But the band was only getting into its rhythm. Being an intrepid live act, it is no surprise that one of their most famous albums is a collection of tracks recorded at their concerts. Grateful Dead is an eponymous live album, released in 1971. It’s cover features a full torso of a skeleton from the waist up, with a garland of roses around the skull. This led to the album acquiring the informal title, Skull and Roses. It also, curiously, became known as Skullfuck. This was what the band wanted to call it, but for some reason the record company rejected the idea. Categorised as rock, folk-rock and country rock, this is a live album that I probably only heard once or twice. It seems the actual cover art is taken from an illustration in an old edition of the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam. Interesting tracks include covers of Kris Kristofferson’s Me & Bobby McGee and Chuck Berry’s Johnny B Goode. The album was a commercial success, reaching No 25 among the pop albums that year.

Garcia

There was a curious incident that happened in the mid- to late-1980s. I was working as a reporter on the Evening Post in Port Elizabeth. The country was in upheaval. Resistance was met with repression. A state of emergency was in place. Then one of our sub-editors had a Demascene conversion, married a Christian, and sold off all his old “corrupting” albums. At least that’s how I interpreted his decision to bring in this pile of old albums and sell them for a song. I think this when I picked up Garcia, Jerry Garcia’s debut solo album, from 1972. And until now I have hardly listened to it. But, giving it a spin after listening to American Beauty, I found it contained much of the magical Dead sound, but not the same harmonising. It is more blues and rock oriented, while retaining that laid-back Garcia stamp. It also contains some classic Garcia compositions, like the opening track, Deal. While ostensibly a solo album, there was still a lot of cross-pollination with other members of the group, although Garcia played “almost all the instrumental parts”, according to Wikipedia. And the Garcia/Hunter team was responsible for most of the songwriting. One disturbing aspect I’ve noticed, and it’s so symptomatic of the sort of country South Africa was, is that the cover image for the local pressing was censored. I notice on the Net that the original design, comprising a naked female torso, her right hand raised through the centre of a kind of wheel cog, and thence into a blue sky, has been doctored. Artone Press, who released the album locally, would either have voluntarily censored this innocuous image, which reveals a painting of naked breasts and a pubic-hair-free pelvis, or this would have been a condition for the album’s release. I won’t go into this album in detail, except to say that the song, To Lay Me Down, is for me one of the finest in the Dead lexicon. Robert Hunter is one of the great lyricists of our time, and with Garcia was astute at putting those words to music. This song starts with a beautiful piano melody. It is slow, folksy, laid-back, with a pedal steel guitar adding a country feel. “To lay me down once more, to lay me down / With my head in sparkling clover / Let the world go by, all lost in dreaming / To lay me down one last time, to lay me down.” This song, lost in love, is almost soporific. But then again, that is what the Dead did best, soothe the soul. “To be with you once more, to be with you / With our bodies close together / Let the world go by, like clouds a-streaming / To lay me down one last time, to lay me down.” Then, emphasising that sense of release, the chorus: “To lay me down, to lay me down / To lay me down one last time, to lay me down.” The use of the infinitive gives the song a sense of a lack of urgency, of just allowing things to happen, your heart to be moved. I think John Lennon would have enjoyed this song. “To lie with you once more, to lie with you / With our dreams entwined together / To wake beside you, my love still sleeping / To tell sweet lies one last time and say goodnight.”

Terrapin Station

Look there were Dead albums in the early 1970s that we missed out on, most of it very good stuff, no doubt. My eldest brother, Ian, I know, had their ninth studio album, Terrapin Station, which was released in 1977, while I was at art school, with the threat of the army looming ever closer. The cover, of terrapins dancing and performing on a station platform in a rural setting, captures the album’s feel-good country-rock sound. I’ve just perused the lyrics of the title track and, while very beautiful, they are not immediately recognisable. Yet the album was very much part of the jol in the late 1970s, before we, as a group of brothers, started going our separate ways in life. Wikipedia says the album “incorporates a more symphonic sound bordering on progressive rock styles that were expressed earlier by progressive rock groups like Yes and Genesis. This was a change from their jazz-blues and folk, country, bluegrass roots. Indeed, the title track – which takes up an entire side and comprises eight parts – “seems more like a symphony than anything else, using strings and a choir to evoke a tighter and more complex structure as opposed to their looser improvisational works”. This is yet another of those legendary works I’d love the lay my ears on, as it were. It is still vintage Dead.

What we missed out on, or I did at least, were half a dozen other Dead albums, many of them live, which are no doubt packed with great songs. These include Europe ’72, a live album, which reached No 20 on the US charts. Then there was History of the Grateful Dead, Volume One (Bear’s Choice), another live album from 1973, but recorded in 1970, which went to No 60. Wake of the Flood (1973) reached No 18, Grateful Dead from the Mars Hotel (1974) reached No 17, Blues for Allah (1975) reached No 12, and Steal Your Face (live, 1976) reached No 56. After Terrapin Station (1977), there was Shakedown Street (1978) which reached No 41, Go to Heaven (1980) which reached No 23, and Reckoning (live, 1981) which hit No 43 and Dead Set (live, 1981) which hit No 29. Those are all major, major achievements, and I’m ignorant, sadly, of them all.

In the Dark

However, it was a privilege to be in the game of listening to great music when the Dead were producing arguably their greatest sounds. I’ve caught up belatedly with at least one of those many albums. I picked up a tape of In the Dark, from 1987, at a second hand shop a few years ago. Despite the long lapse, this was still vintage Dead, with that Garcia/Hunter team still working their magic. And I see it peaked at No 6 on the Billboard 200, which makes it their most commercially successful album. The cover is unimpressive, especially on the small scale of tape or CD case. It is an image of the guys’ faces in deep shadow – or, well, in the dark, I suppose. It was their 12^th studio album, and again is a mix of rock, country rock and folk rock. Their first album in six years, Wikipedia says it became “unexpectedly popular”. I have to admit that in the heady political cauldron that was South Africa at the time, it escaped me completely. It seems that Touch Of Grey (a Hunter/Garcia composition) became a Top 10 hit in the US, the highest ranking the band would ever achieve.

As the 1980s wore down, I see the group even performed with the great Bob Dylan, with Dylan & The Dead, a live album recorded in 1987, being released in 1989 and reaching No 27 on the Billboard 200 in 1990. Another live album, Without a Net, from 1990, again fared well, peaking at No 29.

The thing with this band is that they were, first and foremost, consummate musicians. They were in the game primarily to make good music, with a minimum of the sort of hype which turned great musicians into parodies of themselves when they went on stage. Here were guys who knew, from the outset, that most people “use” music as a form of relaxation. It is a socially acceptable kind of drug. And the best way to administer that drug is as unobtrusively as possibly. Let the music do the talking. That is what the Grateful Dead did for 30 years – yet another of the musical phenomena to emerge, bright and creative, from the effervescent cauldron that was the 1960s.