The Grateful Dead were known for their extended medleys. In the early ‘70s they had large jam suites which would be the centerpiece of their sets, but by the late ‘70s they had developed so that often the entire second set would be one long medley. At each show, fans would wait for the moment when the Dead would start to play and….not stop. Song would segue to song, jams would unfold, drum solos and spacy weirdness would be thrown in, until finally it all wound up with some rock tune. Sometimes the transitions between songs would be the most prized moments of the show.
But the Dead didn’t start out that way. The early Dead, like most bands, stopped after every song. Indeed, it took them two years before they started playing regular medleys, or any transitions to speak of. When, in early ’68, they started linking most of their songs into long improvisational suites, it was quite a turning point. How did it happen?
We’ll take a look from the beginning...
1966
The first thing to note about the Dead’s few 1966 medleys is that all of them are based around blues songs. Of course, blues songs composed a large part of the Dead’s repertoire that year, but I think there’s more to it than that. There may be a couple reasons – one, the Dead may have seen blues or r&b acts linking songs in medleys at live shows. More importantly, blues songs in particular may have been easy to play together, linking one riff in E to another, without throwing off confused bandmembers.
The other thing to note is that there are no real transition jams – it’s just a matter of the band latching onto a new riff once Garcia starts it. (And Garcia typically seems to be the bandleader in these links.) While the band did expand their improvisational jams in ’66, those were always within their blues and r&b songs, and not between songs.
The earliest Dead ‘sandwich’ is from sometime in early 1966, a blues medley of Schoolgirl>You Don’t Love Me>Schoolgirl. Both these songs were taken off Junior Wells’ Hoodoo Man Blues album, which had been released a few months earlier. The Dead admired it, though they were barely capable imitators at this point – their sound is too thin, prickly, rhythmically stiff & lacking in nuance to be very bluesy. (Kreutzmann & Pigpen are musically far ahead of the others, actually; Lesh is almost adequate plunking away on bass, while Weir is all but inaudible. Yet it must be said, they did sound much better playing the blues songs earlier on 1/8/66, perhaps because they’d been playing those songs much longer, and were aided by the deep boomy sound of the Fillmore.)
After a couple verses of Schoolgirl, they vamp on the riff for a while, til Garcia switches to the You Don’t Love Me riff within the same rhythm. The band adjusts smoothly & Pigpen switches to organ so Garcia can sing. At the end of You Don’t Love Me, they move into a preplanned segue back to Schoolgirl, Garcia simply switching riffs again – Kreutzmann is driving them here, as the rest of the band seems uncertain about how to accomplish it! In all, pretty awkward and rudimentary, and it may not be surprising that we don’t hear anything like this for the rest of 1966. (In fact, there are no more Dead ‘sandwiches’ like this until 1969!)
1/8/66 Caution>Death Don't – As Caution comes loose, Garcia abruptly brings it to a halt and with a few runs, leads the band into Death Don’t, with no real transition.
http://archive.org/details/gd1966-01-08.sbd.bershaw.5410.shnf
3/12/66 King Bee>Caution – This is a neat segue, with the band picking up Caution’s surfer intro straight from the end of King Bee, and the two tunes match very well.
http://archive.org/details/gd1966-02-25.sbd.unknown.20346.sbeok.shnf (also includes the Schoolgirl medley)
11/19/66 Smokestack Lightning>King Bee – The band plays with MUCH more authority by the end of the year (something miraculous happened between July & November, though it’s also possible that this tape is actually from 3/17/67). As Smokestack winds down, Garcia & Lesh start strongly teasing King Bee til the band yanks itself into the right tempo.
http://archive.org/details/gd1966-11-19.sbd.miller.94106.sbeok.flac16
1967
This was a crucial year for the Dead’s songwriting, as they started creating open-ended jam songs with the potential to segue into other songs. This potential wasn’t quite achieved in ’67; instead, they focused on two composed medleys, each made of two songs designed to be linked together.
In May ’67, they wrote Alligator, and our first performance of it is from the Monterey Festival in June. The song leads into a long, wild jam – here, it’s similar enough to earlier tunes like Viola Lee or others which would “open up,” but then return to a reprise of the song at the end. That’s also how Alligator proceeds on several occasions in ’67 – on “5/5,” 8/5, and 9/3, the jam leads to the band shouting “Alligator!” and ending the song with a crash.
But Alligator was the first instance where the Dead gave themselves the choice of also extending the jam into a new song. And here, they resurrected Caution for the purpose – not heard since March ’66, it resurfaces at the Monterey show, now attached to Alligator by Garcia’s buzzsaw flurries. It was probably no great stroke of genius to connect Caution to Alligator – the Alligator jam seems to naturally have Caution tendencies, and lends itself to chaotic speeding-up and further Pigpen antics. After they shout “Alligator!” the crashing end segues seamlessly into the Caution bassline intro.
http://archive.org/details/gd1967-06-18.115858.sbd.kaplan.flac16
By the last taped Alligator of the year, the jam has developed a bit, but the segue to Caution is similar – now tougher & faster, and more indivisible.
http://archive.org/details/gd67-11-10.sbd.sacks.1612.sbeok.shnf
In the meantime, the Dead were also working on another new suite, and our first performance of that comes from 10/22/67. For the Other One, they took the unusual Lennon/McCartney-type step of wrapping together separate Garcia & Weir songs – Weir’s song as the hard-edged center, and Garcia’s as the lyrical bookends. The transition point from Garcia’s intro into the Other One is both natural and abrupt, as the music suddenly turns darker (the drum break would not come til later in ’68, probably to emphasize the transition), but the Dead had to compose a little musical bridge to get from the final “coming around” back to the Cryptical reprise.
I don’t know how these two came to be inseparably joined, since each presumably could have been played separately – perhaps neither felt complete on its own, or the band felt they were rhythmically complementary. In the event, Garcia’s Cryptical tune started out as the longer, dominating final section, but over time dwindled and died; while Weir’s Other One took on a life of its own, and came to be played on its own in other medleys.
In its first performance, the Cryptical reprise is not as differentiated in style from the Other One section as it would become, having the same rhythmic focus. Note that the two sections also have the same ending (which was later dropped from the Cryptical reprise, as it became a segue-point).
http://archive.org/details/gd1967-10-22.sbd.yerys.1525.shnf
The performance from the next month is pretty similar – Weir’s verses are just a small fraction of the suite, as they jam for over ten minutes on the Cryptical reprise, which is more like a long extension of the Other One. (Later in ’68 they would vary the style of the reprise, giving it a wider dynamic range from gentle to explosive.)
http://archive.org/details/gd1967-11-11.116172.sbd.motb-0173.flac16
There is also one segue between unrelated songs in 1967:
“5/5/67” Golden Road>New Potato Caboose – This fragment is misdated and comes from a few months later than May; but it shows a new step in the Dead’s thinking, or at least, an odd moment in a very high show. Out of the last chord of a quick Golden Road, Garcia starts the intro to New Potato under Pigpen’s organ & Kreutzmann’s rattling; and the band quickly joins him. It may have been preplanned, it may have been a ‘groupmind’ moment, or it may have been Garcia in a hurry.
It also foreshadows New Potato’s later fate – in ’68, the Dead started consistently segueing into New Potato from the Cryptical reprise, liking the way the two songs worked together. (They didn’t do it in ’67, where New Potato usually starts cold and Cryptical stops with a flourish.) So the segue here is similar to their later practice.
http://archive.org/details/gd67-05-05.sbs.yerys.1595.sbeok.shnf
That takes us up to November ’67 – and still the Dead are only doing occasional two-song medleys, without significant transitional jams; and the only extended combos in the repertoire are Alligator>Caution and the Other One suite. They can jam out Midnight Hour for a half-hour, but they’re not linking many songs.
The next month is silent on the tape front, but when more live tapes emerge in January ’68, the Dead are quite a different band. Now they can play practically their entire set as one long uninterrupted medley, one song jamming into another for 45 minutes or more, til no one in the audience could have told where one ended or another began.
So what happened between November ’67 and January ’68?
ANTHEM OF THE SUN
The Dead started studio sessions for Anthem of the Sun in September/October, working on recording the Other One suite, Alligator>Caution, and Lovelight:
http://www.archive.org/details/gd1967-xx-xx.sbd.studio.81259.flac16 (sometimes dated 10/20/67)
Things went slowly, though, and in November they tried out two new, shorter songs, Dark Star and Born Cross-Eyed. In December they headed to New York for more recording and a few live shows; and there the fed-up producer abandoned them, leaving the album unfinished. The Dead weren’t short on ideas, though – now they could command the studio themselves, and record their album without any interference from the suits!
At some point between late December and early January, they decided to record the rest of the album at live shows on their next tour, and mix that together with the fragmentary studio material. The result on Anthem of the Sun, we can all hear today. But it’s not often noted that this decision also affected the live shows – the Dead now had a conceptual “album” approach to their live material, and how it could be played.
Lesh is usually credited with the idea of merging live and studio Grateful Deads into “a hybrid...thousand-petal lotus.” But there was a correlated idea as well, which is that each side of the album would be a continuous medley of linked songs, with no track breaks. And from there (especially since they were going to record it live) it wasn't a big jump to think, why don't we start linking all the songs live?
The Other One and Alligator suites, of course, would compose the bulk of the album; but there were a number of other new songs as well – in fact, new material was now spilling out of the Dead – and those, too, would be played in long medleys on the next tour.
The new songs encouraged this type of linking – the Dead must have been pleased with how the Other One and Alligator suites had turned out, and tried for more extended pieces. The China Cat>Eleven suite is naturally open-ended (how often have you ever heard a China Cat or Eleven end, full stop?). Dark Star also begs for a segue; Clementine opens up and links easily; the Spanish jam is hardly going to be played as a standalone tune; Feedback was growing into a whole piece by itself; and Caution, by its nature, can also serve as a transition jam anywhere in a medley rather than being stuck after Alligator. In short, the new material being written at the end of '67 was designed to be jammed out and linked to other songs.
The Dead were not entirely alone. Even in the rock world, where the Dead’s type of improvisation was rare, 1967 was the breakthrough year for joining songs together on album. The Beatles were the most influential with Sgt Pepper, where several songs are notoriously linked together in clever segues, and gaps between songs are kept to a minimum. (Brian Wilson may have had the same idea with SMILE back in late '66, but since he didn't finish or release it, it would've had no effect on the Dead or anyone else, except possibly the Beatles...)
There was also Frank Zappa, who linked all his songs into nonstop side-long suites on Absolutely Free, released even before Pepper in May ’67 – although there, the songs are simply stuck together rather than having transitions between. And I don’t know whether the Dead listened to Zappa! There was definitely no social connection, especially considering the unfriendly rivalry between the L.A. and San Francisco scenes, and Zappa’s anti-drug, anti-hippie stance. For instance, in one interview from mid-’67, Zappa ridicules the “San Francisco bullshit scene,” and when asked about the Airplane & Dead, simply replies, “All I can say is that people who like the Jefferson Airplane like ‘em, and people who like the Grateful Dead, they like ‘em. People have different tastes.”
http://www.science.uva.nl/~robbert/zappa/interviews/Kofsky.html
The Dead did at least see him in June ’67, when he was playing upstairs from them at the CafĂ© a Go Go; Lesh described this in his book with semi-admiration, calling Zappa a “true composer”: “Zappa’s music is brilliantly composed and precisely played – hey, he won’t let his band smoke pot – but short on any kind of improvised epiphanies.” (The only shows the Dead and the Mothers played together were back in June ’66 at the Fillmore. There was also a later show scheduled for 6/21/68 in San Jose with the Mothers and the Dead, but it was canceled.)
http://archive.org/post/349194/zappa-and-the-dead
The Dead paid close attention to Jefferson Airplane, though, and in November ’67 After Bathing At Baxter’s came out. This was considerably more surreal than Surrealistic Pillow had been, and several songs on that album are arranged into suites, folding into each other. There are a few different types of segue used: a comedic avant-garde collage as an interlude, a direct cut, a smooth switch from an outro into a jam, and the blending of two songs into one with the two parts alternating. This seems to have been mostly studio experimentation – in contrast, the Airplane usually did not play medleys live. Though starting in late ’68 they ran their two Pooneil songs together, and there are some other instances, in general their songs stayed discrete.
The same, I think, was also true of other San Francisco groups. For instance, Quicksilver – though they had several extended pieces that went through different instrumental progressions, they seem to have done just one medley. At the start of ‘68, Maiden of the Cancer Moon was an instrumental extension of Mona, but by late in the year, they’d developed the Mona>Maiden>Calvary medley, possibly under the influence of the Dead. (Note the resemblance of Calvary, in its Happy Trails version, to a Spanish jam>Feedback! And also note the division of the side-long Who Do You Love into multiple tracks, just as the Dead had done with the Other One suite on Anthem… There were many cross-pollinizations between Quicksilver and the Dead as the two bands responded to each other, but that’s a subject for another day.)
MILES DAVIS
The Dead may have heard jazz bands doing medleys live as well, though I’m not sure whom. They definitely listened to Miles Davis (Weir even based the Spanish Jam on a snatch from the Sketches of Spain album), and in his live shows he made the jump from single tunes to extended medleys just a few months before they did.
When Davis played Berkeley in April ’67, his band still left brief pauses between the tunes. But by the European tour in October/November, most of the tunes in the shows were all linked in one long medley, without pause. As wikipedia puts it: “the group began to play their live concerts in continuous sets, each tune flowing into the next, with only the melody indicating any sort of demarcation.” Or the All-Music Guide: “There are no breaks between tunes; rather, they simply segue seamlessly, one into another, until ‘The Theme’ signals a gig’s end.” (Some shows from this European tour were released on his Bootleg Series vol. 1.)
His studio albums were not like that at the time, though, so it’s questionable whether the Dead were influenced by this new pattern. I don’t know if Davis was playing in New York City in December ’67, when the Dead were there, so they may not have seen one of his shows until the April ’70 run. (On the other hand, they could possibly have seen reviews of his shows in a jazz magazine, or otherwise heard about what he was doing.) It does seem more than coincidental that Clementine and the Spanish Jam both surfaced in January ‘68, as the Dead suddenly got more jazzy – then again, they could’ve just been playing old jazz records at the time!
It seems to have been Miles’ later fusion period that really grabbed the Dead, but they might not have really ‘followed’ him before then. (Lesh does quote “Footprints” off the ‘67 Miles Smiles album in early ‘70s jams, though.) In all their comments, John Coltrane is unanimously named as the biggest jazz influence, and the early Dead closely studied the playing on his albums, such as Africa/Brass. When Garcia & Lesh appeared on an FM radio show in April ’67 to play some favorite tracks, the jazz tracks chosen were Charles Lloyd’s “Dream Weaver” and Charles Mingus’ “Wednesday Night Prayer Meeting.” They had just played a run with Lloyd, and hoped to work more with him (he sometimes guested in their shows) – and little did Lesh know that in the upcoming trip to New York, Mingus would watch one of their park shows! Lesh has never really mentioned Mingus as an influence, but I have to think he’d feel an affinity for Mingus as a band composer, especially the big-band extended suites in different movements, such as the Black Saint & the Sinner Lady album.
http://archive.org/details/gd67-04-xx.prefm.vernon.9261.sbeok.shnf
It might be interesting to compare the two bands at this point, the Davis Quintet of Europe ’67, and the Grateful Dead of the Northwest Tour ’68. (Here I’m using Davis as an example; you could probably substitute many jazz bands of the time.) Aside from the style of music, there are a number of differences:
The Miles Davis band takes turns trading solos (trumpet, saxophone, then piano, and sometimes drums or bass) – whereas in the Dead, Garcia is always in the lead. (Weir is hardly about to take a solo in ’68, Pigpen certainly won’t, and Lesh rarely will either.) It’s rare enough for them to break into the pairs or trios you commonly hear in a Davis show. One result is that the band as a collective unit is more important than the solo; members of the band hardly ever take breaks, or stand out from the group (aside from the traditionally dominating role of Garcia). Here other collective-improv jazz groups would be more similar to the Dead than Davis’ band of soloists.
The role of rhythm is extremely different – in the Davis band, it’s very loose and fluid, traded between drums, bass, and piano (often not all together), so the tempo of a tune can be very elastic. The Dead, as a rock band, are a more driving force with a hard guitar/drums rhythm that often emphasizes a rigid beat. The point is not so much that the Dead are more limited as individual players (though two Dead drummers still can’t equal a Tony Williams), but that they so often choose not to follow the rhythm section/soloist format so typical of either jazz or rock groups, instead combining the whole band into a rhythmic unity in which each part enhances the others. (For instance, think of an Other One or Eleven from this time, where Garcia’s lead “solos” are at the same time emphasizing the rhythm, and Pigpen’s organ acts as a percussion instrument, while Weir & Lesh blend into one breathing organism… This is quite foreign to the more individualistic approach of the Davis band.)
Many live Miles Davis tunes also follow a typical structure: the ‘head,’ or announcement of the theme, then a series of solos or improvisational duets/trios, then a brief return to the main theme at the end. (So the band as a whole will only play composed, unified parts at the beginning and end.) The Dead’s songs were more flexible – some were traditionally structured like that (such as Dark Star), but most songs in the medleys opened up & never returned to the theme, instead jamming straight into a new song. The catch was, since the whole band played through the full jams and needed to follow each other round each tricky curve, they probably needed to rehearse even the ‘improvisational’ sections much more thoroughly than Davis’ band of seasoned pros. (I’m not sure there’s any equivalent in a Miles Davis show to, say, an Eleven gone wrong, or one of the live trainwrecks where the Dead just lose each other.)
Also, Davis was doing ‘standards,’ or at least tunes the audience was familiar with from albums (however rapidly & differently they were now done), and people would applaud when they recognized a familiar tune. Whereas in a ‘68 Dead show, most everything in the medleys was unknown new material (Lovelight excepted). At that point, with almost nothing on album, only the most dedicated Dead followers would have realized how much the Dead’s jammed material was changing & growing from month to month; but the Dead themselves would have been keenly aware of it.
The Dead had a slightly larger typical repertoire than Davis did at this time – most of his Europe ’67 shows focus on nearly-identical setlists of about 8 or 9 songs (with a couple others added on occasion), mostly played in the same order at each show. So the Dead were able to mix things up more, though as we’ll see, they also had ‘groups’ of songs that were usually played as a unit, and made up the bulk of the show.
I don’t know whether Davis pre-planned his transitions (likely enough when they’re repeated from show to show), or whether the band was just tight enough they could jump into any new tune the moment it started. With the Dead, this is also often an unknown! Many of their suites are of course the same from show to show, so everyone knows where they’re going, but sometimes an unexpected song will be thrown in, and sometimes you even get the feeling the band is making it up as it goes, catching up to whomever starts a song first. (I think this is more prevalent from ’69 onwards.)
Also note that Davis does not emphasize the transitions at all – the jams are usually within the tunes, not between them. In general the shifts are sudden, as Davis will just announce the new melody and there we are, hardly knowing just when the new tune started (and anyone not knowing them in advance will have no idea there even is a new tune).
In early ’68, the Dead didn’t play the transitions as expansively as they would later (or even by the end of the year), but several jams were designed as bridges between one song and the next. I feel even this early on, the Dead do signal the shift in mood from one song to the next (most markedly in, say, the Dark Star>China Cat segue, more subtly in other cases). However, due to my overfamiliarity with the material, it’s hard for me to say whether or not someone new to the Dead would be able to tell where most of the transitions & song changes were, or if it’s all just a blur!
WINTER 1968
And so, in the first show of 1968, we find the Dead trying out their new material. After an opening Lovelight on 1/17/68, the rest of the first set is two medleys: Dark Star>China Cat>the Eleven, then New Potato>Born Cross-Eyed>Spanish Jam. The second set has the inevitable Other One suite, which runs straight into Schoolgirl (Lesh starts the bass riff in the Cryptical reprise).
http://archive.org/details/gd1968-01-17.sbd.cotsman.11795.shnf
Our next show, on 1/20, is incomplete but has a couple other tunes added to the mix, so our tape is an unbroken Clementine>New Potato>Born Cross-Eyed>Spanish Jam>Caution jam>Dark Star:
http://archive.org/details/gd1968-01-20.sbd.miller.97340.sbeok.flac16
(My theory is that the Other One suite preceded Clementine, and Dark Star was most likely followed by the usual China Cat>Eleven. It sounds like Garcia stumbles on Dark Star in the Caution jam, then insists on the opening lick til the others give way – it was unusual for Caution to be used just as a transitional riff like this.)
And the next show, 1/26 (aka “1/22”), tops even that in that the entire show (except the opening Alligator) is one long medley: Other One suite>New Potato>Born Cross-Eyed>Feedback>Spanish Jam>Dark Star>China Cat>Eleven>Caution (where the tape cuts off, but must have been near the end of the set):
http://archive.org/details/gd1968-01-22.sbd.miller.97342.sbeok.flac16 [this source mistakenly adds an ending from the 3/31 show]
Once again, Dark Star emerges from a jam – the Spanish Jam almost trickles out, but Garcia links it to Dark Star, keeping the music going.
1/27 is a show we have in fragments (and labeled as “1/23”), but the Dead continue their medley craze with an Other One suite>Clementine>New Potato>Born Cross-Eyed>Spanish Jam, and another Dark Star>China Cat>Eleven elsewhere in the show.
http://archive.org/details/gd1968-01-23.sbd.miller.97343.sbeok.flac16
I don’t mean to go closely through the setlists of the whole tour, since as you can see, most of the basic medleys are the same – the Dead were generally not leaping with abandon from tune to tune with no preparation. Each night, the medleys contain more or less the same songs in the same order. There were two main groups of songs:
Dark Star>China Cat>the Eleven
New Potato>Born Cross-Eyed>Spanish Jam
When the tour started, most songs’ places in the medleys were settled, but Clementine had an uneasy spot. It fit easily into the set after the Cryptical reprise, so Cryptical>Clementine started out as a common pairing – on “1/23” and 2/2, Lesh starts it out of Cryptical, and on 1/20 and “1/23” Garcia segues from Clementine to New Potato; evidently its planned slot was between those two. (In fact, Clementine still came out of Cryptical when it was last played a year later, on 1/26/69.) But, despite its delights, the Dead seem to have tired of Clementine after just a few shows, so Cryptical>New Potato became the new pairing, and would stay that way for almost another year. You can see the transition here:
http://archive.org/details/gd1968-02-02.sbd.miller.97345.sbeok.flac16 (Cryptical>Clementine>Schoolgirl)
http://archive.org/details/gd1968-02-03.sbd.miller.97346.sbeok.flac16 (Cryptical>New Potato)
This 2/3 tape is unusual because Born Cross-Eyed is separated from New Potato (a very rare occurrence in this tour), and the space afterwards trickles out without turning into a full-fledged Spanish Jam. In other copies of this show, Born Cross-Eyed does follow New Potato immediately, so I am not sure which order is accurate.
On 2/2, Lesh & Garcia take Clementine into Schoolgirl (strongly teasing the opening first, so the others can follow). As on 1/17, Schoolgirl has to be signaled – Pigpen songs, you’ll note, were not core parts of the medleys, but (like Lovelight and Alligator) stood off on their own. Schoolgirl was used to close the medley only once more on our tapes, on 3/16 – this time Garcia signals it, as the Eleven winds down. The Dead would come to use it more often as a regular opener.
http://archive.org/details/gd1968-03-16.sbd.miller.109944.flac16
The Dead realized that some of Pigpen’s songs worked well in ending a medley, and started to use them more frequently as closers. Caution was one obvious choice, as on “1/22,” 2/22, and 3/17, where each time it comes out of the China Cat>Eleven medleys, continuing the momentum. The Eleven jam turns easily into a Caution jam, as the bassline follows naturally, so Lesh can flip it right around.
http://www.dead.net/features/tapers-section/february-12-february-18-2007 (includes 2/22/68 excerpt)
They also started putting Lovelight in the post-Eleven slot – as on 2/14, 2/23, and 3/30. As with Caution, it was a good choice to keep building on the high energy of the Eleven, and this was a placement they’d return to later in ‘68. Garcia shoves the band abruptly into Lovelight on 2/14, playing the riff until they follow; and the transition is a bit awkward on 2/23 as the band gradually shifts gears to Lovelight, but better on 3/30 – the Dead were not as adept at this switch as they would be later in the year. (Lovelight also evidently comes out of another tune on 3/17, but fades in on the Download Series release, so we can’t tell what tune – it wasn’t the Eleven, though.)
At this point Lovelight was still just as often played as a standalone tune. One strange placement is when, out of the raveup end of Lovelight on 3/29, Garcia segues to the Cryptical suite (which, as usual, then leads to a New Potato>Born Cross-Eyed). It would be April ‘69 before Lovelight was used again to start off a medley.
http://archive.org/details/gd1968-03-29.sbd.miller.108993.flac16
Surprisingly, Alligator>Caution is rare from our tapes of early ‘68 – it was played on 2/14 and 3/16. There is also a uniquely expanded version from 2/24: Alligator>China Cat>Eleven>drums>Alligator>Caution. China Cat fits so perfectly after Alligator, and the transition is so smooth, it seems to have been planned – the Eleven returns to the Alligator jam not directly, but via the drum break.
China Cat & the Eleven were, at this point, considered one indivisible tune. It’s rare to find China Cat>Eleven separated from Dark Star, but it also happens on 3/17, when the show-closer is China Cat>Eleven>Caution. (Dark Star seems to have been played in the first set.)
It’s even more rare to have the Eleven come to a stop and end with no transition, but it seems to on “1/23” (as heard on the Road Trips ’68 bonus CD). This sounds very awkward, as they actually never worked out an ending for the Eleven, so it always needs to segue. (On 1/17 and 2/3 they get around the problem by segueing into feedback!) On “1/22” the Eleven peters out almost to a halt, until Garcia & Lesh revive the music with Caution.
A couple times early in the tour, Dark Star comes out of a jam, on 1/20 and “1/22,” but the Dead may have had a little trouble coordinating the intro on the fly, so later on it’s always used as the first song in the medley. (3/30 being an exception.) Dark Star was very rarely played on its own, as it was on 2/2 and 3/29.
New Potato is also mostly inseparable from the Other One suite after the Northwest tour, so we get more Cryptical>New Potato medleys on 2/14, 2/24, 3/17, and 3/29. One surprising exception is on 3/30, when Garcia starts Dark Star out of the Cryptical reprise instead! (This catches the others off-guard.)
http://archive.org/details/gd1968-03-30.sbd.miller.108994.flac16
Born Cross-Eyed follows New Potato on 2/14 and 3/29, but not on 2/24 or 3/17, where New Potato just ends. (On 2/24 this is because Kreutzmann was sitting out, so they probably decided not to do Born Cross-Eyed without him. On the 3/17 Download Series CD, New Potato seems to go right into China Cat, but since that’s an edited official release – and is surprisingly smooth for a one-time transition – I suspect there may have been a break or another song in between; only the master tape can tell. The 1/30 New Potato included on the Road Trips ‘68 CD also seems to be a standalone, but may have been edited from a medley.)
Very occasionally, Born Cross-Eyed could be separated from New Potato and played on its own – for instance, possibly on 2/3; in the standalone Born Cross-Eyed>Spanish Jam on 2/23; or on 3/30, where Garcia segues from the Spanish Jam to Death Don’t Have No Mercy, an unusual twist. There’s also a report that on 3/17, Dark Star>Born Cross-Eyed was possibly played in the (missing) first set, which must have been quite a strange segue!
Born Cross-Eyeds without even an attempt at a following Spanish Jam seem to have been nonexistent (2/3 being the closest) – so far as we know, those two were an inseparable pair in ‘68, never played apart. One thing about the Spanish Jam is that it almost always ends the set, the exceptions being early on (1/20 and “1/22,” where it goes into Dark Star), and late (3/30, going into Death Don’t). Strictly speaking, 2/14 is another exception, but in that case following a giant Spanish Jam with another giant Alligator>Caution>Feedback is the height of extravagance!
There are a couple other brief observations to make about these sets.
The Dead’s playing is extremely jazzy, particularly in the earlier shows – I don’t think they would sound this jazzy again until 1973. For all the differences I listed between the Dead & Miles Davis, still, musically they are exploring very similar ground. Part of it’s the loose swing feel they get sometimes; partly in the drumming patterns, Garcia’s horn-like lines, and the light blend Weir & Lesh have; partly in the variety of tunes with odd time signatures. There’s a strong sense of the band pushing each other to keep up, and trying to play just outside their abilities. (Pigpen never played this well again!)
The Dead use a few different strategies for transitions between songs. Sometimes there are direct jump-cuts (Dark Star>China Cat, or New Potato>Born Cross-Eyed) – gentle intros out of decaying jams (Cryptical>New Potato, or Spanish Jam>Dark Star) – switching from one jam to a related jam (China Cat>the Eleven, or Eleven>Caution) – and forced starts, as a player signals a song in a jam and the others follow. (This is always Garcia or Lesh, who were acting as bandleaders.) Feedback is also often used – either as a dramatic ending to a set (the music dissolves in a primordial howl), or as a transitional “glue” between tunes (Born Cross-Eyed>Spanish Jam).
Most of the medleys were set in advance, but sometimes there were changes. After Clementine was tried out as a medley element at the start of the tour, the band dropped it and were much happier with the resulting Cryptical>New Potato segue. Songs could sometimes be separated from their usual companions, as I’ve outlined. The band was free to depart from the script when they chose – so we get some surprising instances like the mashup of Alligator>Caution and China>Eleven on 2/24, or Dark Star following Cryptical on 3/30. And on 1/20, we see a tease of the future when Caution is played as a short transitional passage rather than as a full-length statement. The Spanish Jam was usually a set-closer, but not always; there were sometimes further segues. There was also an open slot – out of the Eleven, any number of things could happen.
The Dead put some thought into the transitional jams before the tour, and we see that several songs were designed to be links. The hard-stop ending to the Cryptical reprise that was played in 1967 was dropped by ’68, so that it could segue more easily to other songs. Dark Star was made to segue, but was attached to China Cat before the tour started, so we don’t get to hear what the other possibilities could have been. The Eleven, as we saw, had no ending, nor did the Dead ever bother providing one, but left it up to the moment what the segue would be. (This was still true in ’69.) The Spanish Jam was open-ended by its nature, but the Dead apparently didn’t feel the combination of drawn-out spacy feedback and acid flamenco worked too well as a link to other songs.
Music students with more knowledge would have to report on whether certain songs were always paired together because they were in related keys. It’s worthwhile mentioning what we DON’T hear – they never play Dark Star>Spanish Jam, for instance, or Dark Star>Cryptical (which could’ve been a natural, but we don’t hear one til later in ‘68). New Potato never goes into anything other than Born Cross-Eyed; other possibilities are also left unexplored. The Dead must have had a sense before the tour of which songs should go together, and which shouldn’t – some juxtapositions must not have sounded right, or were difficult to play.
We can also see some changes in the music just in this two-month period – there’s a definite break between the February and March shows. Dark Star slowly expands of course, but the Elevens are also generally longer in March. (New Potato stays the same size, making me wonder if they were intentionally keeping it contained in length for the album.) Clementine vanishes from the tape record, though the Dead kept tinkering with it through ’68. Death Don’t Have No Mercy returns to the setlists, and is added to a medley for the first time. The Dead also start singing And We Bid You Goodnight at the ends of shows.
The Other One suite doesn’t change much in size in this period, but the Dead make some small & significant changes. The little drum break is added to the Other One in March, with far-reaching results. On the winter tour, the Dead were not always certain about how to segue out of the Cryptical reprise, but by March they have the transition to New Potato down, and the ending to the Cryptical reprise becomes more delicate, amorphous, and prolonged (and will keep expanding over the next months).
As an aside, the 3/3/68 Haight Street show offers quite a contrast to these Anthem-taped shows. When playing to the hometown crowd, and not recording for the album, the Dead seem to have set aside the medleys of new material and mostly played just old favorites: Viola Lee, Lovelight, Smokestack, Dancing in the Streets. (These last two are quite rare in this period; in fact we have only one version of each from ’68 on tape.) The mood was celebratory and the show unusual, but it shows that when the tapes weren’t rolling, the Dead could revert back to 1967 mode and roll out the crowd-pleasers.
SPRING/SUMMER 1968
Sadly, from April to August ’68 we enter a little black hole of Dead shows, from which only a few particles have escaped. But some fragments from the May/June period do reveal the Dead in the process of radically rearranging their sets, and seeing what new combinations might work.
The Anthem album is now finished, and the medleys that comprised the core of the winter shows have been dissolved. China Cat and the Born Cross-Eyed>Spanish Jam combo have disappeared since the March shows, and a brand-new song, St Stephen, has just been added. With China Cat gone, Dark Star and the Eleven now float freely from each other; and the Cryptical>New Potato suite is the only regular medley still remaining.
So the Dead have a new freedom in their arrangements, and it’s interesting to see what they do with it. The idea of the continuous medley still remains, but now that the preplanned segues have been dismissed, the band needs to decide at the end of each number what song to go into next. Sometimes (as on 6/14) you can tell the set was planned out ahead of time, but in general there is now more spontaneity in song choices, the band trusting each other to make the leaps.
The band’s style hasn’t changed that much since the March shows. Garcia’s using a slightly different guitar tone, a bit cleaner and less distorted, and his playing often has a more intimate feel now. Pigpen is still very prominent on organ in the May show, perhaps his last high-point on the instrument – he’s harder to hear in the June shows, and his tone and place in the music have diminished somewhat by August.
http://archive.org/details/gd68-xx-xx.sbd.vernon.9426.sbeok.shnf
Our mid-‘68 fragments are mostly found in these “mystery reels”:
May (excerpt 1, tracks 1-11) - St Stephen>Other One suite>New Potato>Alligator>drums>Caution
First June show (excerpt 6, tracks 31-35) - St Stephen>Other One suite>Lovelight
Second June show (excerpt 7, tracks 36-41) - Dark Star>St Stephen>Lovelight
6/14/68 - Feedback>Eleven>St Stephen; Alligator>Lovelight>Caution
(We don’t know the dates of these particular reels, and can only approximate by comparing the Stephens – the last three Stephens are almost identical – but I’ve labeled them for convenience.)
In the May show, almost all of St Stephen is lost, but there’s an interesting, loose little transition jam after the last verse, in which the Cryptical intro is constantly teased. No surprise, Cryptical comes next. We’ll hear the same outro jam in the next two Stephens – after “answer man,” these early Stephens delve into a reprise jam that works its way into the next song. (It reminds me of the early Casey Jones intro jams in 1969!) This first one definitely sounds earlier, less worked-out & more tentative to me – though it has the same basic structure as the next two versions, many parts are lacking (for instance, the constant Stephen riff isn’t played, and Garcia doesn’t reprise the “answer man” riff). It’s also unique in its sweet, gentle feel, and in that Pigpen is as much in the lead as Garcia.
What’s notable here is that Stephen was originally designed to be open-ended and part of a medley – they could easily have given it an ending and played it as a solitary tune, like some of their ’67 songs, but instead it was meant from the start to be tossed into the medley stew. Here we see a particular emphasis on the transition jam, which is done at length and almost has its own identity. (The Stephen transition jams would soon be dropped, but they’d pick up the idea again the next year when China Cat was revived.)
The Cryptical reprise segue to New Potato is much more developed and melodic now. New Potato has also grown, with a new bass jam – when it ends, instead of a sudden segue to Born Cross-Eyed, there’s now a sudden segue to Alligator. (The Dead apparently felt Born Cross-Eyed was a song of limited possibilities, and only played it a few months; indeed it’s such a rigid and complex song, it’s hard to imagine it growing over time.)
In the first June show, St Stephen has a similar but longer & more developed outro jam. At the end of the jam, you can hear the Dead in a rare moment of decision-making, as Lesh & Garcia start to go into Dark Star but then pull up short, change their minds, and choose Cryptical instead. The segue out of Cryptical is also different: Garcia decides not to do the usual New Potato, so he skips the graceful Cryptical outro, and instead starts playing the Lovelight intro until the rest of the band (slowly) catches on.
The second June show has our first Dark Star>St Stephen, a historic moment – it seems like an obvious pairing, and must have shortly followed Stephen’s debut. Stephen has the same outro jam again, now even more extended & fiery; at the end there is another open moment of hesitancy where no one knows what to play next, and we hear Garcia in pause mode until Lesh starts the Lovelight riff.
All three Stephens have uncertain transitions at the end – the song was supposed to segue and link up to something else, but they didn’t know what yet, so they’re trying out different options. We rarely heard these little moments of uncertainty back in the winter shows – they could cover up times when they dropped the thread – but now they’ll start a song, not knowing how it will end. (This indeterminacy is actually more typical of the later Dead than of the ’68 band, which was trying to be tighter.)
Unfortunately, both of the earlier Stephens are cut, so there’s no telling what song they came out of. (Although in the first June one, I’m pretty sure it wasn’t Dark Star.) The Dark Star>St Stephen linking sounds like it was meant to be, and yet our next show has a quite different entry into Stephen.
http://archive.org/details/gd68-06-14.aud.cotsman.16532.sbeok.shnf
6/14 is quite radical, as our tape opens with Feedback bursting into life from a dead start. After a few minutes of the din, Lesh starts the ominous Eleven bass pattern, moving from formless noise to structure. The band dives into the Eleven – and in another remarkable moment, at the end Garcia & Lesh transition naturally & seamlessly from the Eleven into St Stephen. (Clearly they had done this more than once; it might even have been common that month.) After a fierce rendition of St Stephen, the band ends it with the ‘can you answer’ riff and a perfectly placed chord; no transition. (Again, I think they must have ended it like that at other times, to do it so neatly. Whether this date comes before or after the last two tapes, I can’t tell.)
Alligator follows after a tape pause, and it’s also unusual: after the verses, instead of the drum break, Lesh launches Lovelight, and after a full version of that, Garcia rushes straight into Caution, bypassing the Alligator jam altogether. Clearly the Dead were aiming for maximum excitement in this show (and it’s a far superior show, ironically, to these other clear SBD tapes).
One thing to note is that in all these shows, the medley ends with a Pigpen song – either Lovelight or Caution (or both).
After a couple more months of darkness, Dead tapes start emerging again in August ’68; and the band sounds closer to the “familiar” Dead sound – their playing is heavier, more forceful, confident, and densely textured. After a few more months playing their new songs, they’re getting deeper into the material, bringing out more nuances, and jamming more at length. The segueing exuberance from earlier in the year has diminished, and the Dead have now narrowed their possibilities to just a couple set medleys that they perform nearly the same way at every show.
From 8/21/68, we have our first Dark Star>St Stephen>Eleven>Death Don’t medley. (Closely followed by Lovelight, to uplift the audience from the death vibe.)
http://archive.org/details/gd68-08-21.sbd.cotsman.17355.sbeok.shnf
I’m not sure how much thought went into the ordering of the medleys in the early ’68 shows, whether certain songs just fell together. But now, the Dark Star medley is a planned progression of moods, from introspective exploration to catchy rock to thrilling metrical jams to slow blues. St Stephen now takes the place of China Cat between Dark Star & the Eleven, as the Dead return to the framework of the original medley.
Just two months after the last tapes, St Stephen is rapidly maturing. The Dead still take it at the same fast pace, but have added some new touches – Weir now co-sings the song with Garcia, the verse-endings are a cappella & there’s a little break after “another man spills;” and in general the rhythm’s a bit looser and the song breathes a little more. The song has also been radically shortened – the middle jam has now been cut out (though it’ll be restored later in ’69), so the last verse isn’t reprised anymore.
Stephen now ends differently as well – after “answer man,” the outro jam has been replaced by the vocal “high green chilly” bridge to the Eleven (this is our first performance of that). It would have been nice to hear the earlier Stephen outro jams go right into the Eleven, but this new section brilliantly builds up the tension before the Eleven explodes.
The Eleven’s transition to Death is not as smooth as it would be later on, as the Eleven almost trickles to a halt before Garcia ushers in Death, and the band has to roughly adjust their tempo. (Later they’d gradually slow down the end of the Eleven for a smoother transition.) After Death ends, the Dead then hop into Lovelight to close the set – Pigpen was usually the show-closer, but sometimes the Dead would just stop and leave the stage after Death Don’t, leaving the audience on a chilly note. (As Garcia later said to Blair Jackson, “We used to end with real dire things in the old days.”)
The Cryptical reprise has expanded quite a lot, but doesn’t segue into anything on 8/21, probably because the guitars are out of tune & they have to stop. (The audience is left uncertain as to when it actually ends! You can hear some confused clapping start during the tuning…)
They do play the full Cryptical>New Potato medley the next night (and the rest of the fall), though. The bridge to New Potato is now quite a luscious piece of music in itself, having grown immensely from early ‘68. (This is a good instance of the Dead expanding a specific transition over time.)
One notable medley change on 8/22 is that Dark Star is played separately from Stephen>Eleven>Death – it’s a standalone version, since there’s a pause before they start Cryptical. We seem to be missing the start of the first set; the intro of Stephen is cut, but it’s unlikely to have segued from some other song. (9/20 is the only other known instance from ‘68 where Stephen had a cold start, and that was a strange show.)
http://archive.org/details/gd68-08-22.sbd.cotsman.14915.sbeok.shnf
Pigpen sounds a bit more out of place now, as his Vox Continental sound doesn’t mesh too well with the guitars. One of the problems was that earlier in ’68, he was apparently playing the Hammond B-3 at shows, which had a much better sound, and he was able to swirl round the guitars more effectively. Now he seems to concentrate more on fills and percussive emphasis. (Constanten would also later complain that the Vox had a tinny sound next to the guitars, and bewailed not being able to play the Hammond more often. The rest of the Dead didn’t seem to care, or just couldn’t afford to keep a Hammond.)
One reason we have these August shows is that the Dead recorded them on 8-track; and this also explains why the Dead were now playing the same medley at every show. Even having just released a partially-live album, the Dead were already keen to record another live album with the new material. As Garcia later said, “We were after a certain sequence to the music - a serious, long composition, musically, and then a recording of it.” Hence, the Dark Star>St Stephen>Eleven medley remained the centerpiece of their shows for months to come, as they finetuned and perfected it. Not only was it “a serious, long composition” they were proud of and enjoyed playing, they also wanted to get it just right for the next live album, so few shows went without it.
As it turned out, Live/Dead ended up being recorded in early ’69, not in August ’68. In fact, the Dead were so disappointed with the tapes of these August shows, not only did they not release any of them, they decided to get rid of Pigpen & Weir! It was even announced that the 9/2/68 festival show would be Weir & Pigpen’s last show with the Dead. But over the next month, things were worked out and the Dead remained intact. It must have been sometime in September or October that they decided to have Constanten come join the band once he got out of the Air Force in November; and I suspect there was a deliberate choice to wait til he had settled in the band before they attempted to record shows for the live album again, at the end of December.
The Dead, by the way, were not alone in being keen to make a live album at that time. I don’t think it’s coincidental that Jefferson Airplane taped Bless Its Pointed Little Head during shows in October/November ’68, and Quicksilver also taped most of Happy Trails live in November. There seems to have been a hidden competition between bands here! Then again, Cream’s Wheels of Fire had come out that summer, and was such a huge success, record companies were probably begging for more live rock albums...
The different albums show different approaches – the Airplane were perhaps the most accessible and pop-friendly, with some well-known songs on their album and just one long jam. Quicksilver decided not to take that route, and instead took two Bo Diddley tunes and transformed them each into side-long jams (with a nod to the Dead). The Dead went even further and put out a double album of long jams – although in the future, they’d devote their live albums more to songs.
Live/Dead is also, of course, mostly one long medley, with the only break coming between Lovelight and Death Don’t. The effect was diminished a bit by the original LP format (having to flip the record at the end of each side), but the Dead definitely wanted it to be taken as a suite of connected songs, even editing together a Stephen>Eleven from two different shows to recreate the live flow. Coming after Anthem of the Sun, this was a statement that the extended medley was the Live Dead Format, and audiences would come to expect it at every show. (Sometimes to be disappointed – by the time the album actually came out in November ’69, the Dead were playing the full Dark Star medley much less often.)
FALL 1968
In late ’68, though, the Dead’s medleys were quite rigid from show to show, and there are only a few variations to report:
On 10/12 and 10/13/68, the Dead were faced with playing the shows without Pigpen (who was staying at the hospital with his girlfriend, who’d had a stroke). This resulted in two shows with identical setlists, but also required some problem-solving: the first set ended with Death Don’t, but how to end the second without a big Pigpen raveup? On each night, they segue from New Potato into drums>jam>feedback – sort of a brief Caution jam without the Caution. (This is much more abbreviated on 10/13; in fact the Dead were in such a hurry that night they seem to have skipped the New Potato jam altogether.)
http://archive.org/details/gd1968-10-13.sbd.miller.86761.sbeok.flac16
(New Potato was apparently a difficult song to segue from, with its complicated ending. Back in early ’68, Born Cross-Eyed was pretty much the only song to follow New Potato; otherwise the song just ended without a segue. The same held true in late ’68 – other than these October transitions into drum-breaks, the only other instance of a segue is on 8/24, into Lovelight, which is more of a stop & quick start. There was possibly a segue to Alligator on 11/1/68, as in the May show, but due to the tapecut there’s no way to know. 3/1/69 is the only later instance where New Potato occupies the middle of a medley, rather than the end.)
On 10/20/68, with Pigpen back, the Eleven segues into Caution to close the medley, instead of Death Don’t.
http://archive.org/details/gd1968-10-20.sbd.miller.9071.shnf
(They’d done this a few times in early ’68, and once again, this is such a natural transition, it’s strange they didn’t do it more often later; but there are only a few known instances of Eleven>Caution in ’69-70, like 2/5/69, 11/8/69, and 2/5/70.)
On 11/1/68, Dark Star is again separated from Stephen>Eleven, this time segueing into the Cryptical suite for the first time.
http://archive.org/details/gd68-11-01.sbd.cotsman.18100.sbeok.shnf
(The Dark Star>Cryptical segue is quite rare, the only later times on tape being on 2/22/69, 11/7/69, and 2/13/70. There were a few other times in ’69 Dark Star went into the Other One directly, bypassing the Cryptical intro: 6/22, 7/12, and 11/8/69, and 3/24/70. The reverse segue of Cryptical>Dark Star was also uncommon – after 3/30/68, we only have it on 2/28, 4/15, and 8/21/69, and 1/23/70. As for the Other One>Dark Star, aside from the unusual 11/8/69, it was practically a nonexistent transition, 11/5/70 being the only one I recall; and that had a full stop after the Other One so it barely qualifies.)
On 11/22/68, for the first time Death Don’t is left out of the Dark Star medley, and the Eleven segues into Lovelight instead. (Through early ’69, Lovelight and Death Don’t would trade places at the end of the Dark Star medley, with Death Don’t finally being phased out in the spring.)
http://archive.org/details/gd68-11-22.aud.cotsman.10088.sbeok.shnf
On 12/21/68, there’s a surprise segue from the Cryptical reprise to It Hurts Me Too. This is unusual, even unique for ’68, but the band seems prepared for it. (This kind of sudden segue to the blues would become more common in April ’69, when the Dead started putting It’s A Sin into their medleys.)
There is a tapecut in the Alligator, and it’s been speculated that the Dead may have played Alligator>drums>Eleven>Alligator, with the tape cutting in drums and only catching the end of the Eleven jam. It’s hard to tell, but this would be quite novel for ’68 – it happened a couple times later in ’69 though, on 4/23 and 12/30.
http://archive.org/details/gd1968-12-21.sbd.miller.89718.sbeok.flac16
And finally on 12/29/68, the Dead return for once to the nonstop method of early ’68 with a massive medley of Dark Star>St Stephen>Eleven>drums>Other One>Cryptical>short feedback>Goodnight. This was a festival show, and as we often see in those settings, the Dead are in a hurry, stuffing as much as they can into an hour-long set, and concentrating on audience favorites.
http://archive.org/details/gd1968-12-29.sbd.miller.80197.sbeok.flac16
The Dead actually have some interesting strategies in this show – note how they start off with Lovelight, the catchiest number they had. At the moment, that crosses off Lovelight from the Dark Star medley (though later in spring ’69, they’d experiment with reprising Lovelight at the beginning AND end of the show). Time is short and momentum a priority, so instead of slowing the pace for Death Don’t, the Eleven segues breathlessly into a drum break, out of which they burst explosively into the Other One, skipping the Cryptical intro.
(This is the first time the Cryptical intro was dropped – the Dead would start doing that again sometimes in late ’69, using drum breaks to start the Other One directly rather than playing the full suite: 6/21, 9/30, and 12/21/69. By that time, the Other One was gradually being divorced from its Cryptical bookends, the reprise in particular shrinking and being played less often; while the drum break, in contrast, was ever-growing.)
I might also mention unfinished segues, where the Dead have to stop before finishing a medley. This is actually pretty rare in ’68, it seems. 8/21 was one example, where the Dead stopped to tune up in the Cryptical reprise. (It’s amazing there wasn’t more tuning in ’68, actually, given the Dead’s later habits.) But the Eleven is the principal culprit – on both 12/7 and 12/20, the Eleven ends awkwardly, sort of fading out due to problems onstage. On 9/20, it also abruptly stops midway, giving way to a long drum solo. (That, at least, seems to have been preplanned for the guest drummers.) This would also happen a couple times in ’69 – the Eleven stops early on 2/11 and 8/30/69 for a drum break (and on 6/27 for a deliberate country segue), though those medleys continue afterwards.
I won’t be looking at the Hartbeats sets, since the situation was different at those Matrix shows. But with the band pared down to a few key members, playing all instrumentals, the medley possibilities were greatly increased. The Hartbeats could spend long evenings segueing madly from one theme to the next, trying out pieces that were rarely touched in Dead shows. Instrumental versions of Lovelight, Dark Star, the Other One, the Eleven, the Seven, and Clementine might all mingle in rambling medleys, but without the sense of structure or variety you’d get in a Dead show – in fact there’s no direction in a ‘68 Hartbeats set at all, just a few members of the Dead practicing their improv themes.
I’ll have to stop here at the end of 1968, for now. The Dead would make a few refinements to the familiar medleys in January ’69, when some new Aoxomoxoa songs were introduced to the sets: Mountains of the Moon becomes an acoustic prelude to the Dark Star medley – Doin’ That Rag starts turning up at various points in the medleys – the Cryptical suite goes into Cosmic Charlie for the first time on 1/17/69, and then commonly starts segueing to Death Don’t as well.
April ’69 would be another turning point for the Dead’s medleys – after nine months of setlist stagnancy, the Dead finally decided, ‘we're not going to do the same old segues every single night!’ Then we start to see more odd combos being played. The Dead became much freer with their medleys, adding more new songs, splitting up or rearranging the old suites, trying out new adventurous combinations, and linking the most incongruous tunes they could think of. In fact, many of the elements of the Dead’s more spontaneous or free-flowing medleys and ‘sandwiches’ of later years would be born in their innovations of mid-’69, as they left the confines of the pre-composed medleys of ’68. But that’s a story for another day...
An ongoing series of articles on songs & performances of the early Grateful Dead.
January 8, 2013
November 6, 2012
The Grateful Dead and Trains (Guest Post)
by Ben Miller
As a lifelong Grateful Dead fan, and someone who grew up enthralled by all things train and railroad related (as many boys do), I've often been fascinated by the amount of references to trains and railroads that appear in Grateful Dead songs, both original and cover. To illustrate this connection between trains and the Grateful Dead, I have compiled a list of (hopefully) every song that contains a reference to trains or the railroad in some way. Please let me know if there are any that I have missed. The list is split into three parts: originals, common covers, and rare covers/guest songs. Some songs have multiple train references, but I have included one lyric line (or the reason for making this list) in parentheses.
ORIGINALS:
Casey Jones ("Driving that train, high on cocaine")
Caution (Do Not Stop On Tracks) (song title)
Childhood's End ("When I was hoppin' freights")
China Cat Sunflower ("double-E waterfall" - as in "flaggin' down the double-E")
He's Gone ("Like a steam locomotive rolling down the track")
Jack Straw ("Gotta go to Tulsa, first train we can ride")
Lazy River Road ("Bright blue box cars, train by train")
Might As Well ("Long train running from coast to coast")
New Potato Caboose (song title)
New Speedway Boogie ("This train's got to run today")
Operator ("My rider left upon the Midnight Flyer")
So Many Roads ("Thought I heard that KC whistle moaning sweet and low")
Tennessee Jed ("Listen to the whistle of the evening train")
Terrapin Station ("But the train's put its brakes on and the whistle is screaming")
They Love Each Other ("It's nothing they explain, it's like a diesel train")
Tons Of Steel ("She's more a roller-coaster than the train I used to know")
Unbroken Chain ("Ride you out on a cold railroad and nail you to a cross")
COMMON COVERS:
Beat It On Down The Line ("I'll be waiting at the station, Lord, when that train pulls on by")
Big Railroad Blues ("Well that train's rolling down, she's rolling down the line")
Dark Hollow ("So blow your whistle freight train, take me far on down the track")
I Know You Rider ("I wish I was a headlight on a northbound train")
Johnny B. Goode ("Go sit beneath the tree by the railroad track")
Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds ("Picture yourself on a train in a station")
Mama Tried ("On a freight train leaving town, not knowing where I'm bound")
Me And Bobby McGee ("Busted flat in Baton Rouge and waiting for a train")
Monkey And The Engineer ("Big locomotive right on time")
Promised Land ("Straight up I bought me a through train ticket")
Smokestack Lightnin' ("Whoa-oh, stop your train, let a hobo ride")
Stuck Inside Of Mobile With The Memphis Blues Again ("Stay away from the railroad line")
The Weight ("Catch a Cannonball now to take me down the line")
Walkin' Blues ("Leavin' in the morning if I have to ride the blinds")
When I Paint My Masterpiece ("Train wheels running through the back of my memory")
RARE COVERS/GUEST SONGS:
Are You Lonely For Me ("It's the last train to Jacksonville")
Ballad Of Casey Jones ("Around the bend came a passenger train")
California Earthquake (Whole Lotta Shakin' Goin' On) ("Lord it sounded like a thousand trains were screaming underground")
Early Morning Rain ("You can't jump a jet plane like you can a railroad train")
Green Green Grass Of Home ("The old home town looks the same as I step down from the train")
How Long Blues ("Hate that train, train that carried my baby away")
In The Pines ("The longest train I ever saw was down that northern line")
It Takes A Lot To Laugh, It Takes A Train To Cry ("Don't say I didn't warn you when your train gets lost")
Kansas City ("Well I might take a plane, might take a train")
K.C. Moan ("Well I thought I heard that K.C. whistle moan")
Let It Rock ("Can't stop the train, we got to let it roll on")
Little Sadie ("Put me on the train and sent me back")
Mystery Train ("Train I ride, fifteen coaches long")
Slow Train ("There's a slow, slow train comin' up around the bend")
Two Trains Running ("Well there's two trains a-coming")
Visions Of Johanna ("They whisper of escapades out on the "D" train")
[The Dead also played Wabash Cannonball and Railroading on the Great Divide on 6/11/69, but no tape survives. The Garcia Band also played a number of other train songs, not listed here.]
A FEW SONG NOTES
This page looks at the railroad theme in Grateful Dead songs:
http://www.univie.ac.at/Anglistik/easyrider/data/DEDTRAIN.HTM
Phil Lesh wrote of the Festival Express, "All of the artists involved were of that generation that still considered trains as magnets of adventure and romance, much of our music celebrating the 'high lonesome sound' of train whistles in the night. Riding the rails, like running away with the circus, was a reasonable alternative to the nine-to-five gray-flannel treadmill that had consumed the majority of our contemporaries. The train spoke of freedom, of mythical journeys and heroic quests..."
He talked about one adventure he had in 1960:
"I persuaded my parents to let me try a pretty wild thing for a 20-year-old in those days: hitchhiking to Calgary to try and find work in the oil fields. That's what we were trying to do - got as far as Spokane... That led to one of the great experiences of my life, which was riding the rails - a boxcar, from Spokane back to Seattle. What an experience!...you can't get away with that anymore. The trains are fucked up... It only took like 36 hours, maybe less. I remember sneaking on in the early hours of the morning, and - coming out of Spokane on the railroad - Spokane is on a big bluff, and there's this river at the bottom. The train goes across the river on the other side from Spokane, and there you are looking at this incredible panorama. I'm sure it's changed since... We played there once, but it wasn't the same - we flew in." [interview with David Gans '81]
CASEY JONES
http://www.taco.com/roots/caseyjones.html
(a 1928 article on the original Casey Jones)
http://intranet.library.arizona.edu/users/rmitchel/caseyjones.html
(a history of Casey Jones recordings)
CAUTION
Lesh wrote in his book:
"We received an offer to play three days of a 'Trips Festival' in Vancouver, British Columbia. It seemed like a good opportunity to bring our music to a new audience... Since we couldn't afford to fly, the band took the train, leaving Oakland one morning and arriving the next day, while the gear drove up in a truck. While on the train, we took smoke breaks in the only place where we could have a little privacy: the open vestibule between the cars. At one point, we were standing out there entranced by the rhythm of the wheels clickety-clacking over the welds in the rails; Billy and I looked at each other and just knew - we simultaneously burst out, 'We can play this!' This later turned into Caution (Do Not Stop On Tracks)... Based on the train rhythm, it had only one chord and was played at blistering tempo...
At the next moment, the train lurched, and Jerry, who was standing near the exit, lost his footing and started to fall! Outward! Quick as a mongoose, Bobby reached out and grabbed his shirt, pulling him back into the car just as another train roared past in the opposite direction at a closing speed of what seemed like 200 miles per hour. Whew!"
[Alas, Caution was actually written the year before this train ride, but it's a good story...]
MIGHT AS WELL
Garcia on the Festival Express:
"That was the best time I've had in rock and roll. It was our train, it was the musicians' train. There were no straight people. There wasn't any show biz bullshit. There weren't any fans, there were nothing but musicians on the train. So immediately we started pulling furniture out of the two club cars and putting amplifiers and drums in. Jam sessions all the way across Canada, man. Played music all the way across Canada, and we juiced. Everybody juiced because nobody brought dope into Canada, everybody was chickenshit. [It lasted] about five days, six days maybe, but it was really fucking fun. Everybody got to be such good friends in that little world. It was like a musicians' convention with no public allowed... You name it, we did it. We had every conceivable kind of configuration that you could imagine, man. We had singers, lots of singers on the train, all kinds of trips. The most incredible combination of voices, like Delaney and Bonnie and Janis with Buddy Guy singing together, or Bonnie and Buddy Guy, or... Oh hey, man, there was one jam session with Ian and Sylvia and the Great Speckled Bird, me and Weir from our band, Rick Danko, Delaney and Bonnie and Eric Andersen... They got it all down on film. It'll really be far out." (from the Jazz&Pop interview, Feb '71)
As a lifelong Grateful Dead fan, and someone who grew up enthralled by all things train and railroad related (as many boys do), I've often been fascinated by the amount of references to trains and railroads that appear in Grateful Dead songs, both original and cover. To illustrate this connection between trains and the Grateful Dead, I have compiled a list of (hopefully) every song that contains a reference to trains or the railroad in some way. Please let me know if there are any that I have missed. The list is split into three parts: originals, common covers, and rare covers/guest songs. Some songs have multiple train references, but I have included one lyric line (or the reason for making this list) in parentheses.
ORIGINALS:
Casey Jones ("Driving that train, high on cocaine")
Caution (Do Not Stop On Tracks) (song title)
Childhood's End ("When I was hoppin' freights")
China Cat Sunflower ("double-E waterfall" - as in "flaggin' down the double-E")
He's Gone ("Like a steam locomotive rolling down the track")
Jack Straw ("Gotta go to Tulsa, first train we can ride")
Lazy River Road ("Bright blue box cars, train by train")
Might As Well ("Long train running from coast to coast")
New Potato Caboose (song title)
New Speedway Boogie ("This train's got to run today")
Operator ("My rider left upon the Midnight Flyer")
So Many Roads ("Thought I heard that KC whistle moaning sweet and low")
Tennessee Jed ("Listen to the whistle of the evening train")
Terrapin Station ("But the train's put its brakes on and the whistle is screaming")
They Love Each Other ("It's nothing they explain, it's like a diesel train")
Tons Of Steel ("She's more a roller-coaster than the train I used to know")
Unbroken Chain ("Ride you out on a cold railroad and nail you to a cross")
COMMON COVERS:
Beat It On Down The Line ("I'll be waiting at the station, Lord, when that train pulls on by")
Big Railroad Blues ("Well that train's rolling down, she's rolling down the line")
Dark Hollow ("So blow your whistle freight train, take me far on down the track")
I Know You Rider ("I wish I was a headlight on a northbound train")
Johnny B. Goode ("Go sit beneath the tree by the railroad track")
Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds ("Picture yourself on a train in a station")
Mama Tried ("On a freight train leaving town, not knowing where I'm bound")
Me And Bobby McGee ("Busted flat in Baton Rouge and waiting for a train")
Monkey And The Engineer ("Big locomotive right on time")
Promised Land ("Straight up I bought me a through train ticket")
Smokestack Lightnin' ("Whoa-oh, stop your train, let a hobo ride")
Stuck Inside Of Mobile With The Memphis Blues Again ("Stay away from the railroad line")
The Weight ("Catch a Cannonball now to take me down the line")
Walkin' Blues ("Leavin' in the morning if I have to ride the blinds")
When I Paint My Masterpiece ("Train wheels running through the back of my memory")
RARE COVERS/GUEST SONGS:
Are You Lonely For Me ("It's the last train to Jacksonville")
Ballad Of Casey Jones ("Around the bend came a passenger train")
California Earthquake (Whole Lotta Shakin' Goin' On) ("Lord it sounded like a thousand trains were screaming underground")
Early Morning Rain ("You can't jump a jet plane like you can a railroad train")
Green Green Grass Of Home ("The old home town looks the same as I step down from the train")
How Long Blues ("Hate that train, train that carried my baby away")
In The Pines ("The longest train I ever saw was down that northern line")
It Takes A Lot To Laugh, It Takes A Train To Cry ("Don't say I didn't warn you when your train gets lost")
Kansas City ("Well I might take a plane, might take a train")
K.C. Moan ("Well I thought I heard that K.C. whistle moan")
Let It Rock ("Can't stop the train, we got to let it roll on")
Little Sadie ("Put me on the train and sent me back")
Mystery Train ("Train I ride, fifteen coaches long")
Slow Train ("There's a slow, slow train comin' up around the bend")
Two Trains Running ("Well there's two trains a-coming")
Visions Of Johanna ("They whisper of escapades out on the "D" train")
[The Dead also played Wabash Cannonball and Railroading on the Great Divide on 6/11/69, but no tape survives. The Garcia Band also played a number of other train songs, not listed here.]
A FEW SONG NOTES
This page looks at the railroad theme in Grateful Dead songs:
http://www.univie.ac.at/Anglistik/easyrider/data/DEDTRAIN.HTM
Phil Lesh wrote of the Festival Express, "All of the artists involved were of that generation that still considered trains as magnets of adventure and romance, much of our music celebrating the 'high lonesome sound' of train whistles in the night. Riding the rails, like running away with the circus, was a reasonable alternative to the nine-to-five gray-flannel treadmill that had consumed the majority of our contemporaries. The train spoke of freedom, of mythical journeys and heroic quests..."
He talked about one adventure he had in 1960:
"I persuaded my parents to let me try a pretty wild thing for a 20-year-old in those days: hitchhiking to Calgary to try and find work in the oil fields. That's what we were trying to do - got as far as Spokane... That led to one of the great experiences of my life, which was riding the rails - a boxcar, from Spokane back to Seattle. What an experience!...you can't get away with that anymore. The trains are fucked up... It only took like 36 hours, maybe less. I remember sneaking on in the early hours of the morning, and - coming out of Spokane on the railroad - Spokane is on a big bluff, and there's this river at the bottom. The train goes across the river on the other side from Spokane, and there you are looking at this incredible panorama. I'm sure it's changed since... We played there once, but it wasn't the same - we flew in." [interview with David Gans '81]
CASEY JONES
http://www.taco.com/roots/caseyjones.html
(a 1928 article on the original Casey Jones)
http://intranet.library.arizona.edu/users/rmitchel/caseyjones.html
(a history of Casey Jones recordings)
CAUTION
Lesh wrote in his book:
"We received an offer to play three days of a 'Trips Festival' in Vancouver, British Columbia. It seemed like a good opportunity to bring our music to a new audience... Since we couldn't afford to fly, the band took the train, leaving Oakland one morning and arriving the next day, while the gear drove up in a truck. While on the train, we took smoke breaks in the only place where we could have a little privacy: the open vestibule between the cars. At one point, we were standing out there entranced by the rhythm of the wheels clickety-clacking over the welds in the rails; Billy and I looked at each other and just knew - we simultaneously burst out, 'We can play this!' This later turned into Caution (Do Not Stop On Tracks)... Based on the train rhythm, it had only one chord and was played at blistering tempo...
At the next moment, the train lurched, and Jerry, who was standing near the exit, lost his footing and started to fall! Outward! Quick as a mongoose, Bobby reached out and grabbed his shirt, pulling him back into the car just as another train roared past in the opposite direction at a closing speed of what seemed like 200 miles per hour. Whew!"
[Alas, Caution was actually written the year before this train ride, but it's a good story...]
MIGHT AS WELL
Garcia on the Festival Express:
"That was the best time I've had in rock and roll. It was our train, it was the musicians' train. There were no straight people. There wasn't any show biz bullshit. There weren't any fans, there were nothing but musicians on the train. So immediately we started pulling furniture out of the two club cars and putting amplifiers and drums in. Jam sessions all the way across Canada, man. Played music all the way across Canada, and we juiced. Everybody juiced because nobody brought dope into Canada, everybody was chickenshit. [It lasted] about five days, six days maybe, but it was really fucking fun. Everybody got to be such good friends in that little world. It was like a musicians' convention with no public allowed... You name it, we did it. We had every conceivable kind of configuration that you could imagine, man. We had singers, lots of singers on the train, all kinds of trips. The most incredible combination of voices, like Delaney and Bonnie and Janis with Buddy Guy singing together, or Bonnie and Buddy Guy, or... Oh hey, man, there was one jam session with Ian and Sylvia and the Great Speckled Bird, me and Weir from our band, Rick Danko, Delaney and Bonnie and Eric Andersen... They got it all down on film. It'll really be far out." (from the Jazz&Pop interview, Feb '71)
October 2, 2012
Dire Wolf 1969
Dire Wolf was a turning point in the Dead’s songs – the point where the Dead turned from weirdness to accessibility. For a group of former folkies like Garcia, Weir, and Hunter, they had done their best to shed any folk influences since the first album, in favor of experimentation and strangeness. Even when writing a bunch of more conventional rock songs for Aoxomoxoa, Hunter & Garcia’s tunes bore little relation to the world at large, tending to withdraw into a more private, esoteric language. While a couple songs like Mountains of the Moon had roots in old English poetry, Dupree’s Diamond Blues had been the only Dead song based on American folk tradition, and it seemed to be a cartoonish one-off. As Aoxomoxoa was finished in the spring of 1969, there was little indication of what kind of songs would come next…
In 1969 Hunter was living with Garcia in a house on Madrone Canyon Road in Larkspur. Dire Wolf’s reference to “the timbers of Fennario” was not so far-removed from their actual situation: the house was in a redwood grove. As Blair Jackson describes it, the house “sat on an acre of land, had a creek running behind it, tall trees surrounding it, and morning light that came through the branches in great golden shafts.”
Hunter wrote, “We were living on Madrone because tunes had been emerging and it seemed sensible to help the process along and incidentally feed me since I had no income source at all.”
Garcia: “We had a nice big house that we could afford to live in together, but probably couldn’t have afforded separately at that point. It was a nice place to be, and Hunter was kind of floatin’ at the time.”
Hunter: “That’s right. I was sleepin’ on floors and stuff and he took me in.”
Hunter didn’t even have his own record player (or, presumably, collection), so the music that came to him was filtered by his environment: “whatever was on KSAN and whatever guitarists, pedal steelers, and country Jerry was playing. I had no sound system of my own…
“There were certain songs more or less universally present on the radios and jukeboxes. It was more a matter of trying to resist rather than succumbing to those influences that sent my lyric writing for the Grateful Dead careening into as many forsaken and out of the way spaces as it did. [Later] I had to go all the way to Terrapin, via a probably post-Elizabethan folk song, to avoid the traffic!”
But one contemporary group did strike him – the Band. Hunter later said, “I was so impressed by the songwriting of Robbie Robertson. I just said, ‘Oh yeah, this is the direction. This is the way for us, with all our folk roots, our country and bluegrass roots.’” He was taken with their second album, and the historical consciousness in the songs, especially The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down – “a real formative moment in directions in American music… Some of those songs are probably the father of Jack Straw and things like that.”
“First heard Big Pink sometime after having written Alligator, China Cat, St. Stephen and Dark Star. [David] Nelson played it for me . . . Big Pink wasn't an immediate ‘take’ with me. Took hearing Dixie Down the next year on the radio to make me aware of what they were up to with any kind of impact.”
Hunter said Robertson “uncovered some germinally great ideas. The direction he went with the Band earlier was one of the things that made me think of conceiving Workingman’s Dead. I was very much impressed with the area Robertson was working in. I took it and moved it to the West, which is the area I’m familiar with, and thought, ‘Okay, how about modern ethnic?’ Regional, but not the South…”
(Dire Wolf is set not specifically in the West, though, but in the no-man’s-land of Fennario, which Hunter probably lifted from the English ballad Peggy-o. Other Workingman’s Dead songs refer more to eastern America, like the Cumberland mines, or the bayou in Easy Wind. Hunter did do some Western songs later, but mostly – with some notable Southern exceptions – his songs would remain placeless.)
In their spare time at home, Garcia would practice scales in front of the TV (with the sound turned off), while Hunter would write songs in his room upstairs.
Hunter: “I wrote endlessly.”
Garcia: “He never stopped… The amount we set was nothing compared to the amount we didn’t set. There are a lot of songs that still deserve to be set…”
Hunter has given a couple accounts of these sessions:
“I’d be sitting upstairs banging on my typewriter, picking up my guitar, singin’ something, then going back to the typewriter. Jerry would be downstairs practicing guitar, working things out. You could hear fine through the floors there, and by the time I’d come down with a sheet and slap it down in front of him, Jerry already knew how they should go! He probably had to suffer through my incorrect way of doing them.”
“When we lived together in Larkspur, the way we’d write a song was I’d sit upstairs banging away at my three chords for days and days working something out. By the time I had it worked out, you know, through the thin walls he’d heard everything I was doing. I’d come down and hand him this sheet of paper, and he’d say, ‘Oh, that’s interesting,’ and he’d play the whole arrangement of it right away, because he’d heard what I was doing and heard where it was going off.”
Mountain Girl adds, “Hunter was up 24 hours a day, chain-smoking, and he’d come down in the morning and he’d have a stack of songs. ‘Wow, Hunter, these are fantastic.’ ‘Do you really think so?’ And he’d challenge Jerry to sit down right then and write a tune for it; or he might have already worked out some chord changes for it and Jerry would say, ‘Oh no, man, that’s not the way it should be; it should be like this.’ But to see Hunter walk out of his room in the morning with a stack of freshly minted tunes was pretty exciting. It was just incredible how fast those tunes fell together once they got on them.”
Garcia said of Hunter’s song ideas, “Things come to him, you know. An idea comes by, or a picture, an image, sort of floats by, it’s all in the air... It’s a matter of being able to tune into it.”
Dire Wolf was written one night in May 1969. Hunter later wrote:
“The song Dire Wolf was inspired, at least in name, by watching The Hound of the Baskervilles on TV with Garcia. We were speculating on what the ghostly hound might turn out to be, and somehow the idea that maybe it was a Dire Wolf came up. Maybe it was even suggested in the story, I don't remember. We thought Dire Wolves were great big beasts. Extinct now, it turns out they were quite small and ran in packs. But the idea of a great big wolf named Dire was enough to trigger a lyric. As I remember, I wrote the words quickly the next morning upon waking, in that hypnogogic state where deep-rooted associations meld together with no effort. Garcia set it later that afternoon.”
Hunter’s also said, “The imagery occurred to me in a dream. I woke up and grabbed a pencil before I was entirely awake and wrote the whole song down. I think I managed to capture the quality of the dream by writing it down before I was wide awake.”
According to McNally, Hunter had been up late watching The Hound of the Baskervilles with Mountain Girl, and she’d referred to the “dire wolf” – and the phrase stuck in his dreams.
“I remember giving Jerry the lyrics for "Dire Wolf" while he was noodling on guitar watching television. He took them and placed them aside without looking at them, continued watching TV. I said ‘I don't live here because of your sweet temper, it's to write songs!’ Somewhat startled at the vehemence of the statement, he picked up the page and got right to work setting it. The old boy often needed jump-starting.”
The song tells a dire story. As Hunter said, the narrator “is the shadow of the man in the song who is dead at this point. It’s a song by a ghost.”
The song tells us right off, “That’s the last they saw of me.” In this land, though, “the black and bloody mire,” people seem to have enough troubles without looking after each other: “the wolves are running round / the winter was so hard and cold,” and in this frozen environment, “the boys sing round the fire / don’t murder me.” Our narrator is on his own, has whiskey for supper, and prays before bed, only to find the Dire Wolf “grinning at my window.” Once the Wolf arrives, there are no more choices to make: “all I said was come on in … but the cards were all the same.” And the scene pulls back – all across Fennario, “the Dire Wolf collects his due,” as the others wait their turn.
Hunter once explained, “The situation that's basically happening in 'Dire Wolf' is it's the middle of winter, and there's nothing to eat for anybody, and this guy's got a little place. Suddenly there's this monster, the dire wolf, and the guy is saying, 'Well, obviously you're going to come in, and why don't you pull up a chair and play some cards?' But the cards are cut to the queen of spades, which is the card of death, and all the cards are death at this point. The situation is the same as when a street dude, an up-against-the- Establishment guy, approaches the Establishment and says, 'We can coexist.' Also, 'Dire Wolf' is Behemoth; that monster, the Id; the subconscious--it's that, too. Out there in a barren setting, stripped; there's no setting really, just blank white, and these characters in the middle of it.”
As Garcia soon discovered, the song also tapped a deep vein of American paranoia:
“I wrote that song when the Zodiac Killer was out murdering in San Francisco. Every night I was coming home from the studio, and I’d stop at an intersection and look around, and if a car pulled up, it was like, ‘This is it. I’m gonna die now.’ It became a game. Every night I was conscious of that thing, and the refrain got to be so real to me: ‘Please don’t murder me…’ It was a coincidence in a way, but it was also the truth at the moment.”
The Zodiac Killer became known in August ’69 after sending messages to the newspapers about his killings; he became even more well-known in October after another letter to the Chronicle proving he’d killed someone in a car one recent night in San Francisco, and threatening to kill more. He continued to send letters with more threats over the next year, though his actual victims seem to have been few, and he eventually vanished.
So the Zodiac actually emerged some months after the song was finished – but, as we’ll see, Garcia immediately made the connection between the killer and the song in live shows that October, when Zodiac frenzy gripped San Francisco. (He was recording pedal steel in the studio for CS&N on October 24; and on October 26 he mentions the Zodiac and “paranoid fantasies” onstage; so his memory of driving home in fear seems to be quite literal.)
Whether Hunter had a melody of his own in mind, Garcia promptly gave Dire Wolf a cheerful, perky folk-song setting, much simpler than the usual Dead song. (It’s unusual for the music to be in such ironic contrast to the lyrics in a Dead tune.) He thought of it from the start as an acoustic tune, and as early performances would show, may have had trouble thinking of a band arrangement for it. How could the Dead play this little song? – with two guitars? with pedal steel? with bass or organ? who would even sing it? And how could such a short ditty fit into Dead shows without disappearing?
The Dead tried out a number of different answers in the first few months of the song’s history, before it finally settled into its final shape. But one surprising development became clear in those months: it wasn’t the song that would change to fit the Dead; it was the Dead who would change to fit the song.
The early Dead took pride in their dense, unapproachable songs like Caution or New Potato Caboose that no one could sing along to. Mickey Hart boasted, “We were improvisationalists. We’d play for two or three hours, sing for 45 seconds off-key, and play for another hour. We were not one of your better vocal groups… In the old days, we used to play all this really strange stuff hour after hour, and we’d leave the Fillmore laughing, ‘I wonder if they can whistle any of those songs? Nooooo!’ Well, with Workingman’s Dead that changed. You could whistle our songs.”
The sudden change came as a welcome surprise to Hart. “I remember how warm and fuzzy it made me feel. The electric side was so fun and so stimulating and so rewarding and so energetic, and then all of a sudden we were starting to explore the soft side of the GD. And I thought, what a beautiful thing – acoustic guitars. It was cold out there in the electric, feedback GD world. It was a great cold, a wonderful freeze, full of exploratory moments and great vision, but here we were exploring the soft side…”
Garcia was equally pleased by Hunter’s progression in songwriting. In later years he wasn’t thrilled by the songs he and Hunter had put together in 1968:
“All those Aoxomoxoa songs, a lot of them are cumbersome to perform, overwritten… A lot of tunes on there are just packed with lyrics, or packed with musical changes that aren’t worth it… There isn’t a graceful way to perform them… Those were the first songs me and Hunter did together, and we didn’t have the craft of songwriting down. We did things that in retrospect turned out to be unwise, just from the point of view of playing songs that people enjoy…”
Garcia said in ’71, “When Hunter first started writing words for us originally, he was on his own trip and he was a poet. He was into the magical thing of words, definitely far out, definitely amazing. The early stuff he wrote that we tried to set to music was stiff becase it wasn’t really meant to be sung. After he got further and further into it, his craft improved… He’s gotten to be really a craftsman at it lately. In the last year or so, he’s gotten to really understand what it is to sing words… Certain things you can sing real gracefully.”
Garcia felt there was a big advantage to now having songs that could be sung gracefully – on Workingman’s Dead, “I liked all those tunes… I felt that they were all good songs. They were successful in the sense you could sing ‘em, and get off and enjoy singing ‘em.”
In fact, Garcia was so proud of now having a singable song, in fall ’69 he would make a point of repeatedly asking audiences to sing along to Dire Wolf!
Dire Wolf came when it was needed. Garcia’s interest in country & folk music had lain dormant during the early years of the Dead. But in the spring of ’69, the Dead started reintroducing a lot of old covers to their sets that they hadn’t done in a long time – mostly a mix of blues, R&B, folk, and country tunes. (There’s a list in my acoustic-sets post.)
Clearly the Dead were itching for new material. Most of the Aoxomoxoa songs were being played live, but they still sought some more diversity in the sets, more traditional-sounding tunes. Possibly the extended stay in the studio working on Aoxomoxoa limited Garcia’s songwriting time; but after the recording wrapped up around March/April ‘69, he started turning out new songs with Hunter.
More than that, Garcia started immersing himself in country music styles. In May 1969, Garcia started playing pedal steel with John Dawson.
Dawson recalled, “Garcia had stopped in Denver at a music store that had a bunch of pedal steels in it. So he bought one and brought it back. I bumped into him at the Dead’s practice place in Novato near Hamilton Air Force Base. I asked Jerry if I could come over to his house and listen to the steel guitar… I brought my guitar when I showed up so he would have something to accompany. I showed him a couple of tunes that I had been working on… Jerry set his steel up and accompanied what I was doing, building up his chops. It sounded good.”
“I had a gig at this coffeehouse in Menlo Park called the Underground, playing Wednesday evenings, and I invited Jerry to come down and join me. It was just the two of us – me on guitar and Jerry on pedal steel. I would play my own songs and I was also doing covers – Dylan stuff like I Shall Be Released, and Merle Haggard’s Mama Tried, and Del Reeves’ Diesel On My Tail.”
Around this duo, the New Riders would coalesce in June; by that time Garcia had taken to playing pedal steel occasionally in Dead shows as well, and debuted Dire Wolf. It was the start of a turn that would take the Dead deeper into country music over the next few years.
Years later, Garcia talked about the Dead’s entry into country music:
“We're kind of on the far fringe of it, but we're part of that California Bakersfield school of country and western rock 'n' roll – Buck Owens, Merle Haggard. We used to go see those bands and think, "Gee, those guys are great." [Buck Owens' guitarist] Don Rich was one of my favorites, I learned a lot of stuff from him.
So we took kind of the Buck Owens approach on Workingman's Dead. Some of the songs in there are direct tributes to that style of music, although they're not real obvious... But certainly there was a conscious decision. And then that, of course, led Hunter and me into the gradual discovery process of crafting a song, putting a song together that is singable, that has the thing of being able to communicate at once at several levels, and that you can feel good about singing…
Some songs wear well and some don't. You perform them a few times, their time is over, that's it. Others, the more you perform them the richer they get, the more resonant, until finally it doesn't matter what the words are about anymore… Country and western songs are so directly narrative, if you don't get the point the first time you play it, it's a failure.”
Immediately after Dire Wolf, Hunter & Garcia realized they were onto something, and continued the roll of folk & country-based songs.
Casey Jones, like Dupree, was an actual character transformed into folk legend in the early 20th century. Casey had been the subject of numerous old folk songs (including one, the ‘Ballad of Casey Jones,’ that Garcia later performed acoustically), but Hunter & Garcia decided to put their own slant on it. Garcia later said, “There’s a whole tradition of cocaine songs…then there’s a whole group of Casey Jones songs; so we thought it would be fun to combine these two traditional ideas and put them into one song.”
Hunter said the song was born when “I wrote the words ‘drivin’ that train high on cocaine, Casey Jones you better watch your speed’ on a sheet of paper in a notebook. Just an observation. Chanced on it sometime later and thought it'd make a great hook to a song, which I then wrote.”
Garcia recalled, “He had the words, and the words were just so exquisite, they were just so perfect that I just sat down with the words, picked up a guitar, and played the song. It just came out… I always thought it’s a pretty good picture of what cocaine is like: a little bit evil, and hard-edged, and also that sing-songy thing…”
Casey Jones started out live in June with a long, rambling jam intro, which took a couple months to be dropped entirely. The song became more hard-edged & driving as the year went on, losing its initial bounce - it took a while for Garcia to streamline his aimless solo. Versions of Casey Jones from this year tend to sound lumbering, with Constanten’s jaunty organ rather incongruous – it picked up a lot of steam once he left.
http://archive.org/details/gd69-06-22.sbd.kaplan.17892.sbeok.shnf
Hunter & Garcia then tried their hands at an old-style country ballad, High Time. Hunter said, “For High Time, I wanted a song like the kind of stuff I heard rolling out of the jukeboxes of bars my father frequented when I was a kid. Probably a subliminal Hank Williams influence…a late-‘40s sad feel.”
But later Garcia said that High Time was “the song that I think failed on that record… It’s a beautiful song, but I was just not able to sing it worth a shit.”
(McNally suggests that Hunter wrote it so Garcia could play pedal steel on it. Live, that wasn’t possible; but Garcia does add some pedal licks to the album cut.)
At any rate, High Time also went through some changes – live in ’69, it was very quiet, skeletal & wispy with a long instrumental intro, but was condensed to a more straightforward, poppy version for the album.
http://archive.org/details/gd1969-06-21.sbd-late.bove.2195.sbeok.shnf
Garcia soon went into the studio for a demo session of these three songs:
http://archive.org/details/gd1970-01-01.studio.smith.91324.sbeok.flac16 (Though dated 1970, I think this session is from May or June ’69 – the way Garcia is performing these songs sounds like it’s before he started playing them with the Dead.)
There are several versions of Dire Wolf – the session starts with an extended instrumental intro & false starts. Garcia uses the studio opportunity to overdub himself with a snappy second guitar accompaniment, to see how it sounds. (I’m pretty sure the second guitar is also Garcia, and it’s definitely an overdub.) He starts off the session with a 5-minute version where he runs through the verses twice, but this pales next to track 11, where he repeats all the verses five times in a mammoth 11-minute rendition!
Dire Wolf was first played live on June 7; High Time on June 21, and Casey Jones on June 22. As the new songs entered the setlists, some Aoxomoxoa songs left – the Dead stopped playing Dupree’s Diamond Blues and Mountains of the Moon in July, and Doin’ That Rag in September. (Cosmic Charlie hung on mainly as an epilogue to the Cryptical suite; and it’s hard to say whether China Cat would’ve survived if Rider had not been attached to it.)
It was a couple months later, in August, before the next new song emerged – this one a blues song written for Pigpen. Hunter recalled, “How I wrote Easy Wind was, I’d been listening to Robert Johnson and liking Delta blues an awful lot. So I sat down to write a blues a la Robert Johnson. I played it for Pigpen and he dug it, so he did it. My arrangement was a little bit closer to one of those slippin’ and slidin’ Robert Johnson-type songs because it was just me and a guitar. Then when the whole band got a hold of it, it changed a bit, as they always do. Still, a lot of that original style crept over into the band’s version.”
Even so, Hunter felt that “I wanted it to have the spark and forward drive of one of [Johnson’s] tunes. I failed, but I got another kind of song.”
http://archive.org/details/gd69-08-21.sbd.cotsman.13850.sbeok.shnf
The next batch of Workingman’s Dead songs didn’t arrive until November/December. By then, a new element was in play: the Dead had started hanging out with Crosby, Stills & Nash, and listening to their singing. As a result, some of these late-fall songs feature lots of trio singing. That’s another story; but note that the spring ’69 songs feature mainly just Garcia singing with some key Weir harmonies in the choruses.
It’s also worth mentioning that in spring ’69, as he’d done for most of Aoxomoxoa, Garcia had arranged the songs and brought them complete to the Dead, as finished products; he’d even recorded solo demos. For some of the fall songs, the procedure seems to have been much more elaborate as the whole band was involved in the song compositions – Lesh gets a songwriting credit on Cumberland Blues; Lesh and Weir on Mason’s Children. Garcia mentioned that “Uncle John’s Band was a major effort, as a musical piece. It’s one we worked on for a really long time, to get it working right. Cumberland Blues was also difficult in that sense… [A few months later] Truckin’ is a song that we assembled; it wasn’t natural and it didn’t flow and it wasn’t easy and we really labored over the bastard, all of us together.”
Hunter described the process: “One of the reasons Workingman’s Dead had such a nice, close sound to it is that we all met every day and worked on the material with acoustic guitars, just sat around and sang the songs. Phil would say, ‘Why don’t we use a G minor there instead of a C?’ that sort of thing, and a song would pop a little more into perspective. That’s a good band way of working a song out.”
Here is a brief history of how Dire Wolf progressed through 1969:
http://archive.org/details/gd69-06-07.sbd.kaplan.9074.sbeok.shnf - Garcia starts the show by playing it on acoustic, mostly solo. (Did the others even know the song yet?)
At the Bobby Ace show on 6/11/69, Dire Wolf was the only new song played among a bunch of country & Everlys covers. Alas, there’s no tape!
http://archive.org/details/gd69-06-14.sbd.skinner.5182.sbeok.shnf – closer to the later Dead versions, with Garcia on electric (turned down); Garcia still sings it by himself, and is accompanied only by Lesh and some light drums. Some moments of awkwardness when Garcia attempts to solo.
http://archive.org/details/gd1969-06-21.sbd-late.bove.2195.sbeok.shnf - a rethink! Now Weir plays acoustic and sings, while Garcia plays pedal steel.
http://archive.org/details/gd69-06-27.sbd.samaritano.20547.sbeok.shnf - the same, but jauntier. (Released on the Workingman’s Dead CD reissue.)
Dire Wolf was done the same way on 7/4; but by 7/11 they’d reverted back to Garcia on lead, and he even gives the song an intro: “This is a song about the dire wolf.”
http://archive.org/details/gd69-07-11.sbd.hanno.4644.sbeok.shnf - very energetic; also notable for Constanten playing in Dire Wolf for the first time. (Garcia still sings solo.)
We’re then missing a few weeks of Dire Wolves; the next one on 8/29 is much more subdued & sloppy, as the other players slowly join in. It’s also notable since Garcia sings the whole song twice in a row, which he’d do a few times.
http://archive.org/details/gd69-08-29.sbd.cotsman.8996.sbeok.shnf
Our next surviving Dire Wolf, from 9/27, is a poor audience recording, but is notable since it’s the first one where Weir sings harmony. (And Garcia sings the song twice through again.) Garcia’s guitar breaks are starting to get snappier.
http://archive.org/details/gd1969-09-27.early.aud.warner-jupillej.12064.sbeok.shnf
A month later, on 10/24, Dire Wolf has slowed down, and Constanten gives it a tootling organ intro, which makes the audience clap along. The song is much stronger now.
http://archive.org/details/gd69-10-24.aud.jools.19527.sbeok.shnf
On 10/26, in the wake of the Zodiac killer revelations hitting the newspapers, Garcia makes his first reference to that. It’s also his first request for the audience to sing along: “This song is dedicated to the Zodiac, and also to paranoid fantasies everywhere. And everybody can sing along if they feel up to it. It’s real easy to sing.”
http://archive.org/details/gd69-10-26.sbd.fink.9509.sbeok.shnf (The song drags - either the tape’s slow or the Dead were really tired that night. The next version on 10/31 is better.)
On 11/1 Garcia gives an unusual double intro to the song: “This is a song about the wolf’s at the door and what you do when the wolf comes to the door.” After singing the song once through, he adds, “It’s an easy song - you can all sing along really easy, man, it’s super easy – fun.” Then he sings it all again!
http://archive.org/details/gd69-11-01.sbd.cotsman.6298.sbeok.shnf
We’ll pass over the rather lethargic versions of the next month, to note Garcia’s various introductions. Generally at this time the Dead would vamp a long, bouncy two-chord intro to the song, encouraging people to clap along, and sometimes Garcia would ask them to sing as well. For instance –
12/5: “This is a song you can all sing along on.”
http://archive.org/details/gd69-12-05.sbd.cotsman.11256.sbeok.shnf
12/11: “You can sing along if you like; a little paranoid fantasy tune.”
http://archive.org/details/gd1969-12-11.fob.brady.motb.91109.sbeok.flac16
1/2/70: “This is a song with an easy chorus, and you can even sing with it – it’s fun!” (This version is much chirpier than the December renditions.)
http://archive.org/details/gd70-01-02.early-late.sbd.cotsman.18120.sbeok.shnf
1/16: “This is a song you can sing along with, a little paranoid fantasy song.”
http://archive.org/details/gd70-01-16.sbd.popi.7111.sbeok.shnf
1/23 has an amusing bit where, over the intro, Pigpen sings “gonna find her” a la Searchin’, and Garcia says, “This is 1970, Jack, not ’56!”
http://archive.org/details/gd70-01-23.sbd.fixed.connor.18153.sbeok.shnf
1/31: “Gonna do a little paranoid fantasy song for ya, which you can sing along with if you can pick up on the chorus; the chorus is real easy.”
http://archive.org/details/gd70-01-31.sbd.cotsman.7045.sbefail.shnf
2/1: “It’s a simple little song and I oughtta teach you the chorus to it… This is a little song you sing when you’re walking home alone and it’s dark, and there’s phantom figures stirring in the background. (Weir: “Things that go scrape in the night.”) The chorus goes like this…” Then he starts with the chorus.
http://archive.org/details/gd70-02-01.sbd.kaplan.9629.sbeok.shnf
After this, Garcia stops introducing the song pretty much, with perhaps some isolated exceptions like 5/7/70 – “Here’s a song you can all sing along with us. This is a little paranoid in the streets mantra - if you want to think of it that way.”
The song was tightened up a bit in 1970, as they stopped doing the long intros in March. (Perhaps an example of studio discipline rubbing off on the live shows.) A couple times it segued out of the Cryptical reprise: 2/11/70 and 4/15/70. Dire Wolf would also migrate between the acoustic & electric sets that year. Most of the acoustic examples on the Archive are in audience copies, but here’s one good SBD:
http://archive.org/details/gd70-07-14.sbd.cotsman.17815.sbeok.shnf
According to the Workingman’s CD liner notes, Dire Wolf was recorded on February 16, 1970. By this time they’d played it at least 40 times live, so it would not have been a hard song to do. (Apparently the album mixing wasn’t finished until April, though, even if the actual recording went quickly.) Garcia adds a chirpy pedal steel part to give it a country feel – actually a little reminiscent of his Teach Your Children licks (which had been recorded in October ’69). I wonder if, ever since June, Garcia had intended to record Dire Wolf with pedal steel?
The Rolling Stone review of the album noted that Dire Wolf “is a country song. Garcia’s steel guitar work is just right, and everyone sings along to the ‘Don’t murder me’ chorus. The country feeling of this album just adds to the warmth of it.”
Dire Wolf made an instant impression with audiences and reviewers, even when they hadn’t heard it before. Before the album release in June 1970, it was known as ‘Don’t Murder Me,’ and you see it referred to that way sometimes in show reviews. (Casey Jones was known as “the Train Song.”) The Cash Box review of the 9/27/69 show singled out one song from the Dead’s show: “Don't Murder Me, surely one of the finer blues renditions to be heard around these parts in some time.” Robert Christgau in his review of the 6/20/69 show called it “a brilliant original.”
Aside from a few lapses in the ‘70s, Dire Wolf remained in the Dead’s sets up to 1995. It’s probably a song that will never grow old, one that will always be accessible even to people who dislike or have never heard of the Dead. Its role as a turning-point in the Dead’s songwriting has not often been remarked – but after some earlier false starts, this is when the new, catchy campfire-song band emerged, and when they learned how to use traditional Americana in their songs.
Hunter said of this time, “It was pretty much a start in writing a narrative based lyric whose antecedents were folk, country and old timey – definitely not pop-based… Dire Wolf is probably as close to a definitive ‘Hunter’ lyric as you're gonna find. I believe it to be sui generis, opening up a field of personal mythos that proved fruitful over the years.”
See also:
http://artsites.ucsc.edu/GDead/agdl/direwolf.html (annotations)
ftp://gdead.berkeley.edu/pub/gdead/interviews/Hunter-SilbermanGoldenRoadInterview-2001.txt (I used many Hunter quotes from this interview)
In 1969 Hunter was living with Garcia in a house on Madrone Canyon Road in Larkspur. Dire Wolf’s reference to “the timbers of Fennario” was not so far-removed from their actual situation: the house was in a redwood grove. As Blair Jackson describes it, the house “sat on an acre of land, had a creek running behind it, tall trees surrounding it, and morning light that came through the branches in great golden shafts.”
Hunter wrote, “We were living on Madrone because tunes had been emerging and it seemed sensible to help the process along and incidentally feed me since I had no income source at all.”
Garcia: “We had a nice big house that we could afford to live in together, but probably couldn’t have afforded separately at that point. It was a nice place to be, and Hunter was kind of floatin’ at the time.”
Hunter: “That’s right. I was sleepin’ on floors and stuff and he took me in.”
Hunter didn’t even have his own record player (or, presumably, collection), so the music that came to him was filtered by his environment: “whatever was on KSAN and whatever guitarists, pedal steelers, and country Jerry was playing. I had no sound system of my own…
“There were certain songs more or less universally present on the radios and jukeboxes. It was more a matter of trying to resist rather than succumbing to those influences that sent my lyric writing for the Grateful Dead careening into as many forsaken and out of the way spaces as it did. [Later] I had to go all the way to Terrapin, via a probably post-Elizabethan folk song, to avoid the traffic!”
But one contemporary group did strike him – the Band. Hunter later said, “I was so impressed by the songwriting of Robbie Robertson. I just said, ‘Oh yeah, this is the direction. This is the way for us, with all our folk roots, our country and bluegrass roots.’” He was taken with their second album, and the historical consciousness in the songs, especially The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down – “a real formative moment in directions in American music… Some of those songs are probably the father of Jack Straw and things like that.”
“First heard Big Pink sometime after having written Alligator, China Cat, St. Stephen and Dark Star. [David] Nelson played it for me . . . Big Pink wasn't an immediate ‘take’ with me. Took hearing Dixie Down the next year on the radio to make me aware of what they were up to with any kind of impact.”
Hunter said Robertson “uncovered some germinally great ideas. The direction he went with the Band earlier was one of the things that made me think of conceiving Workingman’s Dead. I was very much impressed with the area Robertson was working in. I took it and moved it to the West, which is the area I’m familiar with, and thought, ‘Okay, how about modern ethnic?’ Regional, but not the South…”
(Dire Wolf is set not specifically in the West, though, but in the no-man’s-land of Fennario, which Hunter probably lifted from the English ballad Peggy-o. Other Workingman’s Dead songs refer more to eastern America, like the Cumberland mines, or the bayou in Easy Wind. Hunter did do some Western songs later, but mostly – with some notable Southern exceptions – his songs would remain placeless.)
In their spare time at home, Garcia would practice scales in front of the TV (with the sound turned off), while Hunter would write songs in his room upstairs.
Hunter: “I wrote endlessly.”
Garcia: “He never stopped… The amount we set was nothing compared to the amount we didn’t set. There are a lot of songs that still deserve to be set…”
Hunter has given a couple accounts of these sessions:
“I’d be sitting upstairs banging on my typewriter, picking up my guitar, singin’ something, then going back to the typewriter. Jerry would be downstairs practicing guitar, working things out. You could hear fine through the floors there, and by the time I’d come down with a sheet and slap it down in front of him, Jerry already knew how they should go! He probably had to suffer through my incorrect way of doing them.”
“When we lived together in Larkspur, the way we’d write a song was I’d sit upstairs banging away at my three chords for days and days working something out. By the time I had it worked out, you know, through the thin walls he’d heard everything I was doing. I’d come down and hand him this sheet of paper, and he’d say, ‘Oh, that’s interesting,’ and he’d play the whole arrangement of it right away, because he’d heard what I was doing and heard where it was going off.”
Mountain Girl adds, “Hunter was up 24 hours a day, chain-smoking, and he’d come down in the morning and he’d have a stack of songs. ‘Wow, Hunter, these are fantastic.’ ‘Do you really think so?’ And he’d challenge Jerry to sit down right then and write a tune for it; or he might have already worked out some chord changes for it and Jerry would say, ‘Oh no, man, that’s not the way it should be; it should be like this.’ But to see Hunter walk out of his room in the morning with a stack of freshly minted tunes was pretty exciting. It was just incredible how fast those tunes fell together once they got on them.”
Garcia said of Hunter’s song ideas, “Things come to him, you know. An idea comes by, or a picture, an image, sort of floats by, it’s all in the air... It’s a matter of being able to tune into it.”
Dire Wolf was written one night in May 1969. Hunter later wrote:
“The song Dire Wolf was inspired, at least in name, by watching The Hound of the Baskervilles on TV with Garcia. We were speculating on what the ghostly hound might turn out to be, and somehow the idea that maybe it was a Dire Wolf came up. Maybe it was even suggested in the story, I don't remember. We thought Dire Wolves were great big beasts. Extinct now, it turns out they were quite small and ran in packs. But the idea of a great big wolf named Dire was enough to trigger a lyric. As I remember, I wrote the words quickly the next morning upon waking, in that hypnogogic state where deep-rooted associations meld together with no effort. Garcia set it later that afternoon.”
Hunter’s also said, “The imagery occurred to me in a dream. I woke up and grabbed a pencil before I was entirely awake and wrote the whole song down. I think I managed to capture the quality of the dream by writing it down before I was wide awake.”
According to McNally, Hunter had been up late watching The Hound of the Baskervilles with Mountain Girl, and she’d referred to the “dire wolf” – and the phrase stuck in his dreams.
“I remember giving Jerry the lyrics for "Dire Wolf" while he was noodling on guitar watching television. He took them and placed them aside without looking at them, continued watching TV. I said ‘I don't live here because of your sweet temper, it's to write songs!’ Somewhat startled at the vehemence of the statement, he picked up the page and got right to work setting it. The old boy often needed jump-starting.”
The song tells a dire story. As Hunter said, the narrator “is the shadow of the man in the song who is dead at this point. It’s a song by a ghost.”
The song tells us right off, “That’s the last they saw of me.” In this land, though, “the black and bloody mire,” people seem to have enough troubles without looking after each other: “the wolves are running round / the winter was so hard and cold,” and in this frozen environment, “the boys sing round the fire / don’t murder me.” Our narrator is on his own, has whiskey for supper, and prays before bed, only to find the Dire Wolf “grinning at my window.” Once the Wolf arrives, there are no more choices to make: “all I said was come on in … but the cards were all the same.” And the scene pulls back – all across Fennario, “the Dire Wolf collects his due,” as the others wait their turn.
Hunter once explained, “The situation that's basically happening in 'Dire Wolf' is it's the middle of winter, and there's nothing to eat for anybody, and this guy's got a little place. Suddenly there's this monster, the dire wolf, and the guy is saying, 'Well, obviously you're going to come in, and why don't you pull up a chair and play some cards?' But the cards are cut to the queen of spades, which is the card of death, and all the cards are death at this point. The situation is the same as when a street dude, an up-against-the- Establishment guy, approaches the Establishment and says, 'We can coexist.' Also, 'Dire Wolf' is Behemoth; that monster, the Id; the subconscious--it's that, too. Out there in a barren setting, stripped; there's no setting really, just blank white, and these characters in the middle of it.”
As Garcia soon discovered, the song also tapped a deep vein of American paranoia:
“I wrote that song when the Zodiac Killer was out murdering in San Francisco. Every night I was coming home from the studio, and I’d stop at an intersection and look around, and if a car pulled up, it was like, ‘This is it. I’m gonna die now.’ It became a game. Every night I was conscious of that thing, and the refrain got to be so real to me: ‘Please don’t murder me…’ It was a coincidence in a way, but it was also the truth at the moment.”
The Zodiac Killer became known in August ’69 after sending messages to the newspapers about his killings; he became even more well-known in October after another letter to the Chronicle proving he’d killed someone in a car one recent night in San Francisco, and threatening to kill more. He continued to send letters with more threats over the next year, though his actual victims seem to have been few, and he eventually vanished.
So the Zodiac actually emerged some months after the song was finished – but, as we’ll see, Garcia immediately made the connection between the killer and the song in live shows that October, when Zodiac frenzy gripped San Francisco. (He was recording pedal steel in the studio for CS&N on October 24; and on October 26 he mentions the Zodiac and “paranoid fantasies” onstage; so his memory of driving home in fear seems to be quite literal.)
Whether Hunter had a melody of his own in mind, Garcia promptly gave Dire Wolf a cheerful, perky folk-song setting, much simpler than the usual Dead song. (It’s unusual for the music to be in such ironic contrast to the lyrics in a Dead tune.) He thought of it from the start as an acoustic tune, and as early performances would show, may have had trouble thinking of a band arrangement for it. How could the Dead play this little song? – with two guitars? with pedal steel? with bass or organ? who would even sing it? And how could such a short ditty fit into Dead shows without disappearing?
The Dead tried out a number of different answers in the first few months of the song’s history, before it finally settled into its final shape. But one surprising development became clear in those months: it wasn’t the song that would change to fit the Dead; it was the Dead who would change to fit the song.
The early Dead took pride in their dense, unapproachable songs like Caution or New Potato Caboose that no one could sing along to. Mickey Hart boasted, “We were improvisationalists. We’d play for two or three hours, sing for 45 seconds off-key, and play for another hour. We were not one of your better vocal groups… In the old days, we used to play all this really strange stuff hour after hour, and we’d leave the Fillmore laughing, ‘I wonder if they can whistle any of those songs? Nooooo!’ Well, with Workingman’s Dead that changed. You could whistle our songs.”
The sudden change came as a welcome surprise to Hart. “I remember how warm and fuzzy it made me feel. The electric side was so fun and so stimulating and so rewarding and so energetic, and then all of a sudden we were starting to explore the soft side of the GD. And I thought, what a beautiful thing – acoustic guitars. It was cold out there in the electric, feedback GD world. It was a great cold, a wonderful freeze, full of exploratory moments and great vision, but here we were exploring the soft side…”
Garcia was equally pleased by Hunter’s progression in songwriting. In later years he wasn’t thrilled by the songs he and Hunter had put together in 1968:
“All those Aoxomoxoa songs, a lot of them are cumbersome to perform, overwritten… A lot of tunes on there are just packed with lyrics, or packed with musical changes that aren’t worth it… There isn’t a graceful way to perform them… Those were the first songs me and Hunter did together, and we didn’t have the craft of songwriting down. We did things that in retrospect turned out to be unwise, just from the point of view of playing songs that people enjoy…”
Garcia said in ’71, “When Hunter first started writing words for us originally, he was on his own trip and he was a poet. He was into the magical thing of words, definitely far out, definitely amazing. The early stuff he wrote that we tried to set to music was stiff becase it wasn’t really meant to be sung. After he got further and further into it, his craft improved… He’s gotten to be really a craftsman at it lately. In the last year or so, he’s gotten to really understand what it is to sing words… Certain things you can sing real gracefully.”
Garcia felt there was a big advantage to now having songs that could be sung gracefully – on Workingman’s Dead, “I liked all those tunes… I felt that they were all good songs. They were successful in the sense you could sing ‘em, and get off and enjoy singing ‘em.”
In fact, Garcia was so proud of now having a singable song, in fall ’69 he would make a point of repeatedly asking audiences to sing along to Dire Wolf!
Dire Wolf came when it was needed. Garcia’s interest in country & folk music had lain dormant during the early years of the Dead. But in the spring of ’69, the Dead started reintroducing a lot of old covers to their sets that they hadn’t done in a long time – mostly a mix of blues, R&B, folk, and country tunes. (There’s a list in my acoustic-sets post.)
Clearly the Dead were itching for new material. Most of the Aoxomoxoa songs were being played live, but they still sought some more diversity in the sets, more traditional-sounding tunes. Possibly the extended stay in the studio working on Aoxomoxoa limited Garcia’s songwriting time; but after the recording wrapped up around March/April ‘69, he started turning out new songs with Hunter.
More than that, Garcia started immersing himself in country music styles. In May 1969, Garcia started playing pedal steel with John Dawson.
Dawson recalled, “Garcia had stopped in Denver at a music store that had a bunch of pedal steels in it. So he bought one and brought it back. I bumped into him at the Dead’s practice place in Novato near Hamilton Air Force Base. I asked Jerry if I could come over to his house and listen to the steel guitar… I brought my guitar when I showed up so he would have something to accompany. I showed him a couple of tunes that I had been working on… Jerry set his steel up and accompanied what I was doing, building up his chops. It sounded good.”
“I had a gig at this coffeehouse in Menlo Park called the Underground, playing Wednesday evenings, and I invited Jerry to come down and join me. It was just the two of us – me on guitar and Jerry on pedal steel. I would play my own songs and I was also doing covers – Dylan stuff like I Shall Be Released, and Merle Haggard’s Mama Tried, and Del Reeves’ Diesel On My Tail.”
Around this duo, the New Riders would coalesce in June; by that time Garcia had taken to playing pedal steel occasionally in Dead shows as well, and debuted Dire Wolf. It was the start of a turn that would take the Dead deeper into country music over the next few years.
Years later, Garcia talked about the Dead’s entry into country music:
“We're kind of on the far fringe of it, but we're part of that California Bakersfield school of country and western rock 'n' roll – Buck Owens, Merle Haggard. We used to go see those bands and think, "Gee, those guys are great." [Buck Owens' guitarist] Don Rich was one of my favorites, I learned a lot of stuff from him.
So we took kind of the Buck Owens approach on Workingman's Dead. Some of the songs in there are direct tributes to that style of music, although they're not real obvious... But certainly there was a conscious decision. And then that, of course, led Hunter and me into the gradual discovery process of crafting a song, putting a song together that is singable, that has the thing of being able to communicate at once at several levels, and that you can feel good about singing…
Some songs wear well and some don't. You perform them a few times, their time is over, that's it. Others, the more you perform them the richer they get, the more resonant, until finally it doesn't matter what the words are about anymore… Country and western songs are so directly narrative, if you don't get the point the first time you play it, it's a failure.”
Immediately after Dire Wolf, Hunter & Garcia realized they were onto something, and continued the roll of folk & country-based songs.
Casey Jones, like Dupree, was an actual character transformed into folk legend in the early 20th century. Casey had been the subject of numerous old folk songs (including one, the ‘Ballad of Casey Jones,’ that Garcia later performed acoustically), but Hunter & Garcia decided to put their own slant on it. Garcia later said, “There’s a whole tradition of cocaine songs…then there’s a whole group of Casey Jones songs; so we thought it would be fun to combine these two traditional ideas and put them into one song.”
Hunter said the song was born when “I wrote the words ‘drivin’ that train high on cocaine, Casey Jones you better watch your speed’ on a sheet of paper in a notebook. Just an observation. Chanced on it sometime later and thought it'd make a great hook to a song, which I then wrote.”
Garcia recalled, “He had the words, and the words were just so exquisite, they were just so perfect that I just sat down with the words, picked up a guitar, and played the song. It just came out… I always thought it’s a pretty good picture of what cocaine is like: a little bit evil, and hard-edged, and also that sing-songy thing…”
Casey Jones started out live in June with a long, rambling jam intro, which took a couple months to be dropped entirely. The song became more hard-edged & driving as the year went on, losing its initial bounce - it took a while for Garcia to streamline his aimless solo. Versions of Casey Jones from this year tend to sound lumbering, with Constanten’s jaunty organ rather incongruous – it picked up a lot of steam once he left.
http://archive.org/details/gd69-06-22.sbd.kaplan.17892.sbeok.shnf
Hunter & Garcia then tried their hands at an old-style country ballad, High Time. Hunter said, “For High Time, I wanted a song like the kind of stuff I heard rolling out of the jukeboxes of bars my father frequented when I was a kid. Probably a subliminal Hank Williams influence…a late-‘40s sad feel.”
But later Garcia said that High Time was “the song that I think failed on that record… It’s a beautiful song, but I was just not able to sing it worth a shit.”
(McNally suggests that Hunter wrote it so Garcia could play pedal steel on it. Live, that wasn’t possible; but Garcia does add some pedal licks to the album cut.)
At any rate, High Time also went through some changes – live in ’69, it was very quiet, skeletal & wispy with a long instrumental intro, but was condensed to a more straightforward, poppy version for the album.
http://archive.org/details/gd1969-06-21.sbd-late.bove.2195.sbeok.shnf
Garcia soon went into the studio for a demo session of these three songs:
http://archive.org/details/gd1970-01-01.studio.smith.91324.sbeok.flac16 (Though dated 1970, I think this session is from May or June ’69 – the way Garcia is performing these songs sounds like it’s before he started playing them with the Dead.)
There are several versions of Dire Wolf – the session starts with an extended instrumental intro & false starts. Garcia uses the studio opportunity to overdub himself with a snappy second guitar accompaniment, to see how it sounds. (I’m pretty sure the second guitar is also Garcia, and it’s definitely an overdub.) He starts off the session with a 5-minute version where he runs through the verses twice, but this pales next to track 11, where he repeats all the verses five times in a mammoth 11-minute rendition!
Dire Wolf was first played live on June 7; High Time on June 21, and Casey Jones on June 22. As the new songs entered the setlists, some Aoxomoxoa songs left – the Dead stopped playing Dupree’s Diamond Blues and Mountains of the Moon in July, and Doin’ That Rag in September. (Cosmic Charlie hung on mainly as an epilogue to the Cryptical suite; and it’s hard to say whether China Cat would’ve survived if Rider had not been attached to it.)
It was a couple months later, in August, before the next new song emerged – this one a blues song written for Pigpen. Hunter recalled, “How I wrote Easy Wind was, I’d been listening to Robert Johnson and liking Delta blues an awful lot. So I sat down to write a blues a la Robert Johnson. I played it for Pigpen and he dug it, so he did it. My arrangement was a little bit closer to one of those slippin’ and slidin’ Robert Johnson-type songs because it was just me and a guitar. Then when the whole band got a hold of it, it changed a bit, as they always do. Still, a lot of that original style crept over into the band’s version.”
Even so, Hunter felt that “I wanted it to have the spark and forward drive of one of [Johnson’s] tunes. I failed, but I got another kind of song.”
http://archive.org/details/gd69-08-21.sbd.cotsman.13850.sbeok.shnf
The next batch of Workingman’s Dead songs didn’t arrive until November/December. By then, a new element was in play: the Dead had started hanging out with Crosby, Stills & Nash, and listening to their singing. As a result, some of these late-fall songs feature lots of trio singing. That’s another story; but note that the spring ’69 songs feature mainly just Garcia singing with some key Weir harmonies in the choruses.
It’s also worth mentioning that in spring ’69, as he’d done for most of Aoxomoxoa, Garcia had arranged the songs and brought them complete to the Dead, as finished products; he’d even recorded solo demos. For some of the fall songs, the procedure seems to have been much more elaborate as the whole band was involved in the song compositions – Lesh gets a songwriting credit on Cumberland Blues; Lesh and Weir on Mason’s Children. Garcia mentioned that “Uncle John’s Band was a major effort, as a musical piece. It’s one we worked on for a really long time, to get it working right. Cumberland Blues was also difficult in that sense… [A few months later] Truckin’ is a song that we assembled; it wasn’t natural and it didn’t flow and it wasn’t easy and we really labored over the bastard, all of us together.”
Hunter described the process: “One of the reasons Workingman’s Dead had such a nice, close sound to it is that we all met every day and worked on the material with acoustic guitars, just sat around and sang the songs. Phil would say, ‘Why don’t we use a G minor there instead of a C?’ that sort of thing, and a song would pop a little more into perspective. That’s a good band way of working a song out.”
Here is a brief history of how Dire Wolf progressed through 1969:
http://archive.org/details/gd69-06-07.sbd.kaplan.9074.sbeok.shnf - Garcia starts the show by playing it on acoustic, mostly solo. (Did the others even know the song yet?)
At the Bobby Ace show on 6/11/69, Dire Wolf was the only new song played among a bunch of country & Everlys covers. Alas, there’s no tape!
http://archive.org/details/gd69-06-14.sbd.skinner.5182.sbeok.shnf – closer to the later Dead versions, with Garcia on electric (turned down); Garcia still sings it by himself, and is accompanied only by Lesh and some light drums. Some moments of awkwardness when Garcia attempts to solo.
http://archive.org/details/gd1969-06-21.sbd-late.bove.2195.sbeok.shnf - a rethink! Now Weir plays acoustic and sings, while Garcia plays pedal steel.
http://archive.org/details/gd69-06-27.sbd.samaritano.20547.sbeok.shnf - the same, but jauntier. (Released on the Workingman’s Dead CD reissue.)
Dire Wolf was done the same way on 7/4; but by 7/11 they’d reverted back to Garcia on lead, and he even gives the song an intro: “This is a song about the dire wolf.”
http://archive.org/details/gd69-07-11.sbd.hanno.4644.sbeok.shnf - very energetic; also notable for Constanten playing in Dire Wolf for the first time. (Garcia still sings solo.)
We’re then missing a few weeks of Dire Wolves; the next one on 8/29 is much more subdued & sloppy, as the other players slowly join in. It’s also notable since Garcia sings the whole song twice in a row, which he’d do a few times.
http://archive.org/details/gd69-08-29.sbd.cotsman.8996.sbeok.shnf
Our next surviving Dire Wolf, from 9/27, is a poor audience recording, but is notable since it’s the first one where Weir sings harmony. (And Garcia sings the song twice through again.) Garcia’s guitar breaks are starting to get snappier.
http://archive.org/details/gd1969-09-27.early.aud.warner-jupillej.12064.sbeok.shnf
A month later, on 10/24, Dire Wolf has slowed down, and Constanten gives it a tootling organ intro, which makes the audience clap along. The song is much stronger now.
http://archive.org/details/gd69-10-24.aud.jools.19527.sbeok.shnf
On 10/26, in the wake of the Zodiac killer revelations hitting the newspapers, Garcia makes his first reference to that. It’s also his first request for the audience to sing along: “This song is dedicated to the Zodiac, and also to paranoid fantasies everywhere. And everybody can sing along if they feel up to it. It’s real easy to sing.”
http://archive.org/details/gd69-10-26.sbd.fink.9509.sbeok.shnf (The song drags - either the tape’s slow or the Dead were really tired that night. The next version on 10/31 is better.)
On 11/1 Garcia gives an unusual double intro to the song: “This is a song about the wolf’s at the door and what you do when the wolf comes to the door.” After singing the song once through, he adds, “It’s an easy song - you can all sing along really easy, man, it’s super easy – fun.” Then he sings it all again!
http://archive.org/details/gd69-11-01.sbd.cotsman.6298.sbeok.shnf
We’ll pass over the rather lethargic versions of the next month, to note Garcia’s various introductions. Generally at this time the Dead would vamp a long, bouncy two-chord intro to the song, encouraging people to clap along, and sometimes Garcia would ask them to sing as well. For instance –
12/5: “This is a song you can all sing along on.”
http://archive.org/details/gd69-12-05.sbd.cotsman.11256.sbeok.shnf
12/11: “You can sing along if you like; a little paranoid fantasy tune.”
http://archive.org/details/gd1969-12-11.fob.brady.motb.91109.sbeok.flac16
1/2/70: “This is a song with an easy chorus, and you can even sing with it – it’s fun!” (This version is much chirpier than the December renditions.)
http://archive.org/details/gd70-01-02.early-late.sbd.cotsman.18120.sbeok.shnf
1/16: “This is a song you can sing along with, a little paranoid fantasy song.”
http://archive.org/details/gd70-01-16.sbd.popi.7111.sbeok.shnf
1/23 has an amusing bit where, over the intro, Pigpen sings “gonna find her” a la Searchin’, and Garcia says, “This is 1970, Jack, not ’56!”
http://archive.org/details/gd70-01-23.sbd.fixed.connor.18153.sbeok.shnf
1/31: “Gonna do a little paranoid fantasy song for ya, which you can sing along with if you can pick up on the chorus; the chorus is real easy.”
http://archive.org/details/gd70-01-31.sbd.cotsman.7045.sbefail.shnf
2/1: “It’s a simple little song and I oughtta teach you the chorus to it… This is a little song you sing when you’re walking home alone and it’s dark, and there’s phantom figures stirring in the background. (Weir: “Things that go scrape in the night.”) The chorus goes like this…” Then he starts with the chorus.
http://archive.org/details/gd70-02-01.sbd.kaplan.9629.sbeok.shnf
After this, Garcia stops introducing the song pretty much, with perhaps some isolated exceptions like 5/7/70 – “Here’s a song you can all sing along with us. This is a little paranoid in the streets mantra - if you want to think of it that way.”
The song was tightened up a bit in 1970, as they stopped doing the long intros in March. (Perhaps an example of studio discipline rubbing off on the live shows.) A couple times it segued out of the Cryptical reprise: 2/11/70 and 4/15/70. Dire Wolf would also migrate between the acoustic & electric sets that year. Most of the acoustic examples on the Archive are in audience copies, but here’s one good SBD:
http://archive.org/details/gd70-07-14.sbd.cotsman.17815.sbeok.shnf
According to the Workingman’s CD liner notes, Dire Wolf was recorded on February 16, 1970. By this time they’d played it at least 40 times live, so it would not have been a hard song to do. (Apparently the album mixing wasn’t finished until April, though, even if the actual recording went quickly.) Garcia adds a chirpy pedal steel part to give it a country feel – actually a little reminiscent of his Teach Your Children licks (which had been recorded in October ’69). I wonder if, ever since June, Garcia had intended to record Dire Wolf with pedal steel?
The Rolling Stone review of the album noted that Dire Wolf “is a country song. Garcia’s steel guitar work is just right, and everyone sings along to the ‘Don’t murder me’ chorus. The country feeling of this album just adds to the warmth of it.”
Dire Wolf made an instant impression with audiences and reviewers, even when they hadn’t heard it before. Before the album release in June 1970, it was known as ‘Don’t Murder Me,’ and you see it referred to that way sometimes in show reviews. (Casey Jones was known as “the Train Song.”) The Cash Box review of the 9/27/69 show singled out one song from the Dead’s show: “Don't Murder Me, surely one of the finer blues renditions to be heard around these parts in some time.” Robert Christgau in his review of the 6/20/69 show called it “a brilliant original.”
Aside from a few lapses in the ‘70s, Dire Wolf remained in the Dead’s sets up to 1995. It’s probably a song that will never grow old, one that will always be accessible even to people who dislike or have never heard of the Dead. Its role as a turning-point in the Dead’s songwriting has not often been remarked – but after some earlier false starts, this is when the new, catchy campfire-song band emerged, and when they learned how to use traditional Americana in their songs.
Hunter said of this time, “It was pretty much a start in writing a narrative based lyric whose antecedents were folk, country and old timey – definitely not pop-based… Dire Wolf is probably as close to a definitive ‘Hunter’ lyric as you're gonna find. I believe it to be sui generis, opening up a field of personal mythos that proved fruitful over the years.”
See also:
http://artsites.ucsc.edu/GDead/agdl/direwolf.html (annotations)
ftp://gdead.berkeley.edu/pub/gdead/interviews/Hunter-SilbermanGoldenRoadInterview-2001.txt (I used many Hunter quotes from this interview)
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