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Announcing Dogfish Head Grateful Dead Juicy Pale Ale Collaborating for over a decade now, Dogfish Head and Grateful Dead have crafted a light bodied pale ale brewed with sustainable kerns of grains, granola and heaps of good karma for a refreshing brew that's music to your taste buds. Check out dogfish.com for more details and to find some Grateful Dead Juicy Pale Ale in your neck of the woods. Dogfish Headcraft Brewery is located in Milton, Delaware. Please drink responsibly the Good Old Grateful Dead Cast the Official Podcast of the Grateful Dead I'm Rich Mahan with Jesse Jarno exploring the music and legacy of the Grateful Dead for the committed and the curious. Welcome back to the Good Old Grateful Dead cast. Last week we kicked off Season two and by now I'm sure you've noticed our focus is American Beauty this time around and what a wealth of material we have to explore. If this is your first time joining us, we invite you to also check out the 10 episodes from season one, which dove headfirst into the eight songs on Working Man's Dead and also serves up two really fun bonus episodes. Both albums are celebrating their 50th anniversaries this year and we're so glad you could attend the party. You can always get the latest episodes and link to your favorite listening platforms@dead.net deadcast. Our website also features companion materials for each episode so you can fall down even deeper into the rabbit hole. Please help this podcast by subscribing hitting that like button and if the spirit moves you, leave us a review. Very kind of you. Thank you very much. It is the 50th anniversary of American Beauty and the Grateful Dead have prepared a three CD set reissue of this classic album. The second classic album they did in one year, 1970, which includes a pristine remastering of the album's ten tracks, as well as an unreleased live from February 18, 1971 at the Capitol Theater. Along with this impeccably remastered three disc set, we also offer you a new batch of Angel Share Audio out now are the full band demos for American Beauty, and you can hear how together the boys had these songs and arrangements as they went into Wally Hiders in San Francisco to cut the follow up to Working Man's Dead. Be sure to check out the American Beauty Angel. Share Audio at your favorite streaming service or download provider. Well, this is episode two of Season two and the focus of this episode is one of the most beloved songs in the Grateful Dead's repertoire, Friend of the Devil. Friend of the Devil is quite possibly the closest thing the Dead have to a standard. It's been covered by so many other artists. Jesse has uncovered some great info on this sonic gem, and we have some very special guests to help shine a light on its history and what makes it so special. So without further ado, let me hand this off to Mr. Jarno.
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Friend of the devil take one.
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Friend.
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Of the Devil is one of the Grateful Dead's most famous and recognizable songs, the first to become a standard outside their own repertoire, played by bluegrass musicians, folkies and pop singers alike. It's the most covered Grateful Dead song. Jerry Garcia loved it, too, playing it with the Dead and without in multiple solo projects, both acoustic and electric. Friend of the Devil was also the first song written for the album that became American Beauty. Working Man's Dead wasn't even totally finished when the Dead started playing Friend of the Devil live in the spring of 1970, and it would be the first song they recorded when they hit the studio that summer to make an unexpected new album. Friend of the Devil helps uncover the secret history of American Beauty. Shakedown Stream co host Gary Lambert the first documented 1 was March 20th of 70 at the Capitol Theater, the one night I missed the Grateful Dead at the Capitol Theater, the only of the nights they played there, the one blot on my attendance record. So I heard my first Friend of the Devil the next night. You know, it caught my ear right away, and how could it not? The first few seconds of Friend of the Devil is the Grateful Dead's cosmic country breakthrough, boiled down to a single moment, an easy descending lick with a conversational bass counterpoint by Phil Lesh. It wasn't far out. It wasn't complex, it wasn't clever. It was just the sound of two acoustic guitars and a bass interacting in real time. On American Beauty especially, it's not only a classic song, but just as much a showcase for the band's telepathic ensemble Weave. It's perhaps the classic Grateful Dead song, Grateful Dead archivist and legacy manager David.
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Lemieux I recently heard that it is on YouTube, the most played song. And that's, I guess people when they go to YouTube, they listen to a version that Ryano's uploaded. You know, you think automatically Touch of Grey or Truckin or maybe Sugar Mag or something. And it came as a bit of a surprise, but it also didn't. And I think that this is a song that was always loved by Deadheads. It really has been forever. But it's, I think, grown in such stature over the years that it is one of the most widely recognized songs. When you hear it, I mean, I've heard it in malls and stuff, you know, on the PA system in a mall.
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But Friend of the Devil wasn't originally supposed to be a Grateful Dead song. That was the New Riders of The Purple Sage, October 14, 1969 in Berkeley from the Owsley Stanley Foundation's great Dawn of the New Riders of the Purple Sage box set. Formed as an outlet for Jerry Garcia to play pedal steel, the band featured John Marmaduke Dawson and David Nelson, two of the dad's oldest friends from their days around Palo Alto. You can hear a lot more about the New Riders in last season's episode about Direwolf. Like a lot of bands, the New Riders had a hard time holding down a bassist at first. Unlike most bands, though, this resulted in the band coming up with one of the era's great songs. Here's New Riders of the Purple Sage guitarist David Nelson.
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The first bass player was Bob Matthews, the engineer. And then Hunter would come down every once in a while and play bass, and Phil played bass a couple times. Everybody was maybe going to be the bassist in the New Riders Before I wound up finding where Torbert was. Torbit was my old friend from the New Delhi River Band. He had gone to Hawaii. We didn't know exactly where he went.
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By the spring of 1970, bassist Dave Torbert brought the New Riders one step closer to their classic lineup. But there was a little window just before he arrived. Here's Robert Hunter on WLIR in 1978.
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I was playing bass for the new writers for a while. We sat down to write a song, and I came up with that.
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Friend of the Devil, the dead lyricist showed up at the New Rider's house with a loose song worked out on bass.
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D
Hunter came over to our place where we were living, me and John and some other friends. And just beside my room, I had a little place set up with reel to reel tape recorders. And I would do, you know, recordings of stuff and copies of tapes and different things. He came over and he said, I got a song for the new writers, you know. And we said, oh, good. Oh, boy. And they started singing. I said, just a minute, Let me get the tape recorders started, you know, And I reel to reel tape, and I put a tape on. And by that time they were already playing. We recorded it, just their version of it. And then Hunter says, okay, that's great, you know, and me and John are saying, that's great. What a song, you know. And we listen to it.
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There was one other verse too, that didn't make the final cut.
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You can borrow from the devil, you can borrow from a friend. The devil give you 20 when your friend got only 10.
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And the chorus was slightly different. It went, I set out running, but I take my time. It looks like water but it tastes like wine. If I get home before daylight I just might get some sleep tonight. Hunter wrote that after they'd tinkered with the song, we all went down to the kitchen to have espresso made in Dawson's new machine. We got to talking about the tune and John said the verses were nifty, except for, it looks like water but it tastes like wine, which I had to admit, fell flat. Suddenly Dawson's eyes lit up and he crowed, how about A friend of the devil is a friend of mine. Bingo. Not only the right line, but a memorable title as well. We ran back upstairs to Nelson's room and recorded the tune. If you poke around the musty corners of the tape trading world, a lo fi recording of this original can be found. Here's Marmaduke breaking it down. In 1985, I helped write this one. Hunter wrote the first part, this part, and then I wrote this part. And then Garcia came along and wrote the bridge. When new writer songwriter John Marmaduke Dawson suggested the phrase friend of the devil, he chose a combination of words that, like the phrase Grateful Dead, had a long existence in the English language. It can be found in the 308th section of Roger Lestrange 1692 translation of Aesop's Fables. A notorious malefactor that had committed I know not how many villainies and run through the discipline of as many Gauls made a friend of the devil to help him out in all his distresses.
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Hunter goes back, and he was living with Garcia at the time on Magnolia in Larkspur. And so the story I heard is when he got home, Garcia was looking out the window saying, where have you been? And Hunter says, I was just at the new writers. I was showing him a new song I wrote called Friend of the Devil. And Garcia goes, got a tape on it? And he says, yeah, sure, here, give me the tape. Give me, give me, give me it. And Garcia went up into the room and wrote the bridge. When Hunter brought the song over, it was just the, you know, I let out from Reno those kind of verses. And what Garcia had added was, got three reasons why I cry way slow in the night, you know, the bridge. And then I heard that, I swear. Oh, man, that's yours, you guys. You got it. That's just perfect. That's beautiful, you know. So it became one of their big songs.
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Hunter's memory is that Garcia had been at work playing a show with the Dead and found the tape on the kitchen table when he got home, wrote Hunter, next morning I heard Early Bird. Garcia, who hadn't been at the rehearsal, had a gig, you know, whanging away. Something familiar sounding on the pedal steel, danged. If it wasn't Friend of the Devil with a dandy bridge on the Sweet Anne Marie verse, he was not in the least apologetic about it. He'd played the tape, liked it, and faster than you can say Dog my Cats, it was in the Grateful Dead repertoire. If the incident happened the night of a Bay Area Dead show that didn't include the New Riders of the Purple Sage, that means Friend of the Devil was either written in the first or, more likely last week of February 1970, when the dead had jobs at the Fillmore west and Family Dog on the Great Highway. And in the case of the last week, we're getting ready to head into Pacific High to record Working Man's Dead, here's a little bit of an early Friend of the Devil, the section that was originally another verse but which Jerry Garcia turned into the song's bridge, recorded April 18, 1970, at the family Dog in San Francisco and released on LP by Rhino for Record Store Day a few years back.
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Got two reasons why I cry away each lonely night. First one's name is Anne Marie and she's my heart's delight. Second one is Prison Babe the sheriff's on my trail and if he catches up with me I'll spend my life in jail.
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Robert Hunter posted an original draft of the Friend of the Devil lyrics on deadnet back when he was the site's webmaster, and which you can now see@dead.net deadcast if you're interested in the process by which the song tightened into the version the Dead performed, check out the page for Friend of the Devil on Alex Allen's great site WhiteGum.com where he compares and annotates Robert Hunter's various edits and alterations. One early verse is pretty I snuck back into reno baby parlayed 50 cents, made it to 5,000, babe and paid back what was lent. Now compare that to a story Robert Hunter told about how he came to join the Grateful Dead as their lyricist. He was leaving in New Mexico in 1967 and received a letter from Jerry Garcia asking him to return to California and promptly hit the Road, he recalled. By the time I hit Nevada, I had a dime in my pocket, which I put in a slot machine and parlayed into enough to make a phone call and tell the guys I was on my way. Not long after Friend of the Devil was written, Robert Hunter would make his first real money from songwriting. He would soon receive a handsome advance for his lyric writing services. Whatever deal had gone down in Rito was now coming up. His last dime had made it to $5,000 and beyond. Friend of the Devil is a fable of underworld faith and signaling. To be a friend of the devil is a code to translate however you want. It had a history in blues folktales and the band's own mythos. It's also relentlessly cheerful. When it came time for the Grateful Dead to begin work on their next album over the summer, Friend of the Devil is where they started.
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I set out from Reno I was trailed by £20 I didn't get to sleep that night Till the morning came around I sat out running but to take my time My friend Friend of the devil Is a friend of mine I get home before daylight I just might get some sleep tonight.
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That was Friend of the Devil from the new edition of recordings called the Angel Share American Beauty, available on streaming services now. It begins with a pretty amazing, never before heard demo recording made in the summer of 1970, found deep in the Grateful Dead's tape vault and lovingly restored for many years when Dick Lotfila served as the Grateful Dead's vault keeper, the band's mini tapes lived at their Front street warehouse in San Rafael. When the band moved out in 1995, so did the tapes. And they now live in a massive storage facility. Rest assured, they're being deeply cared for. Imagine the front cover from the Mars Hotel. Mentally replace the hotel with a large storage facility, but leave all the craters and vibrating rock formations in multiple moons and strange colors. And that's pretty accurate. Here to tell us what it's like inside the Grateful Deads tape vault and how these never heard American Beauty tapes surfaced are RHINO archivist Mike Johnson and engineer Brian Kehue. Here's Mike.
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I mean, you wouldn't even know it was there. So it's a very, very large, nondescript building, loading docks, and it looks very, very blue collar, like anything could happen there. It's environmentally controlled. Inside we have different levels of environmental control, but you just walk in and it does. It just looks like a gigantic airplane hangar. I believe that they're 12ft tall, shelves very, very industrial, bolted to the concrete floor. And it just goes and goes and goes and goes. Some of our former employees and even our manager, we would all ride bikes. One of our guys, Ted, bought one of those three wheel adult tricycles with a basket on it. We would ride around the vault and get the tapes.
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Brian Kehute the assets they contain there range from Madonna to Green Day to Hendrix, the Commodores. Just anything related to the Warner, Electra, Asylum and other associated labels ends up in that building. So you've got the history of music. I mean, this is absolutely one of the greatest archives in music. But regardless of the Madonna and the Green Day and Commodores, there's the Grateful Dead section, which is completely different than anything else. It's very significant that in this room full of incredibly priceless things, that the Dead has their own secure section that no one else has, and they really protect those tapes. It's a large, you know, fenced off section that you just can't get into unless you're the right person. So it seems very special just to have someone go in there and get a tape.
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Out at the front of the cage, a Deadhead might see a familiar face. Late Dead vault keeper Dick Lotvila.
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I actually have a photograph of Dick in the cage. It's eight and a half by 11 framed. It's right at the very beginning at the gate. So it's at a place of honor. So we had the owner of the company come by for a deluxe tour at the beginning of the year. It was a big deal to have this guy come by. So I gave the nickel tour of the cage. And he actually asked me, who is that? And then I said, you know, that's the first librarian, you know.
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When the tapes arrived, it was Mike Johnson's job to organize them in their new home. And as he did, he kept an eye on what he was doing.
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We had three semi trucks come to us with moving carts. Real professional moving carts. I've always thought of these two projects as Grateful Dead 70, you know, because to me, you know, without knowing the actual songwriting history, they're bread and butter. They go together.
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And that's true of the tape the band was using, too.
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F
They look identical. They're multi tracks, 2 inch multitracks, and that have very, very little annotation. One of the things that I'd been doing after they arrived were just kind of putting them back. You put all the live seven inches together. You put all the, you know, the Europe 72s together, things like that. So one of the things I found was this little tiny 7 inch reel. It's gold colored and a golden color. It's a very, very strange box. It must be a really super cheapo tape because it's got no brand on it whatsoever, just a golden box. The seven inch reel inside is full, but it's really beat up. It's been used a lot. The pack was just crazy all over the place. The reel itself was pretty mangled, but you could just make out on the back on this white label some of the song titles for American Beauty.
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Inside was a degraded reel that contained demos for every song on American Beauty besides Box of Rain not yet written, this is the music that makes up the demo portion of the new recordings of the Angels Share. What listeners are hearing though, is an even newer copy of the tape.
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F
I didn't find this one until last year. The two quarter inch reels that turned out to be at least generations better. So I mean, I hate to call that the source tape, but it's all we have short of the 7 inch gold reel and it's annotated so it's definitely many generations better on tape.
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This is where the story of American Beauty truly begins. We don't know for sure what date the demo was recorded, but we can make an educated guess, which is probably August 6, 1970, back at Pacific High on Brady street, around the corner from the Fillmore west where they'd made Working Man's Dead in the spring. While this version of the demo transferred for the angel share is undated, Grateful dead biographer Dennis McNally observed a reel with the August 6 date while researching his official history of the band. Long Strange Trip. It was likely the master for this recording. As we heard in the last episode, the Medicine Ball Caravan departed without the Grateful Dead on August 4th, and the band quickly decided to make a new album. And based on a few dated tracking sheets, we know that by later in the week they were already deep into the full album making process, assuming they would want a few days to assimilate what they demoed. August 6th seems exactly right. Call it or date it, whatever you want. The first part of the Angels Share, American Beauty constitutes a never heard studio quality 42 minute acoustic Grateful Dead performance from August 1970. Where I come from, that's headline news. If August 6th is the correct date for the Grateful Dead American Beauty demo, then after the Dead were finished with perhaps a short break for dinner, Jerry Garcia headed from Pacific High over to Wally Heiders. When he was done there, he joined a session led by David Crosby along with guitarist Jorma Kaukonen and bassist Jack Cassidy of the Jefferson Airplane and Hot Tuna, plus Greg Raleigh on piano, then of Santana. They recorded what became known as Song with no Words, Tree with no Leaves, which would end up on David Crosby's if I Could Only Remember My Name. But the demo for American Beauty isn't the only missing piece of the the story that Mike Johnson found in the cage. He also uncovered a small pile of multi track reels with tracking sheets for five songs. The usual story of American Beauty is that the grateful that bailed on the Medicine Ball Caravan and went into Wally Hider recording with Steven Barncard and made a spectacular new album. What Mike Johnson found reveals a whole lot more. Here's what he and Brian Kehoe heard when they threaded up the tape number two. What's that? What's that noises? Hey, I don't have any ears left. Do that one again. Are we rolling or what?
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Is the microphone fixed and roaming?
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Fixed and rolling.
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You know the female tsetse fly won't have.
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Or fruit flies don't touch fruit fly unless he buzzes at her at 12580 and no less.
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Pardon me. Pardon me, boys. I just lapsed off into utter weirdness.
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It was one of the first things that we had found and was transferred and that we heard. I mean, it was like, holy cow, this. If we could continue this for both albums, we're gonna fucking rule the world. So yeah, that was a big win for me.
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What Mike and Brian Heard was 42 minutes of lost sessions for Friend of the Devil, recorded August 12, 1970 at Pacific High Recording in San Francisco.
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It could have gone for another 40 minutes. I mean, it was amazing to me. When have you ever been that close to Jerry Garcia?
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I fucked up in that too, but it really felt good. 7. It felt good at. To feel really good at the end. So watch, Bob. Huh? Watch the bridges in your guitar. Yeah. Let's try and start out from silence too.
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I can fully understand how some people prefer takes with just singing on them. And that's understandable. It is a complete song. When somebody sings, even if it's just an acoustic guitar and a vocal, you.
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Have a complete track.
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But many of us who are musicians or even people that like to hear how things develop, it's like building a castle. Brick by brick, we're seeing the foundation laid and even some of the simple bricks being put together to make this song grow. But also more than that, as we keep talking about that fly on the wall situation of. I really feel the band dynamic, the.
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Story, the tracking sheets tell is that the Grateful Dead began to record their new album at Pacific High, got halfway through and scrapped the sessions entirely. These constitute the other chunk of recordings on the angel share five songs in various states of completion, all of which would end up on American Beauty. When re recorded at Heider's, it's hard to know what happened exactly. On the surviving tracking sheets, the engineers are listed as Sawyer and Weston and the producers as Dead, Sawyer and Weston. Weston was Peter Weston, the founder and owner of Pacific High. Sawyer was Phil Sawyer. Two L's a scene bred San Francisco engineer who often worked with the Jefferson Airplane branch of the Bay Area music family. He'd contributed to Paul Kantner's Blows against the Empire earlier that summer and would receive a co writing credit along with Kantner Garcia and Mickey Hart for the noise poem xm. Phil Sawyer was a Planet Earth Rock and Roll Orchestra member in good standing, but for whatever reasons the sessions with the Dead didn't work. It might not have had anything to do with the chemistry between the Dead and Pacific High engineers either. In Rolling Stone the next year, Garcia told Charles Reich and Jan Wenner that we work at Wally Hydra's now because the PHR room has some oddly accented frequencies. It's very difficult for us to record the bass and any other instrument at the same time at phr. It's a very big sort of clumsily shaped cloverleaf shaped room. It makes a great soundstage, but it's not very good as a studio. It was good enough with Working Man's Dead because the whole tone of the album was quiet, so we didn't play too loud on that album. On the Angel Share Recordings from Pacific High Occasionally there does seem to be something just slightly off, but even the articulate Jerry Garcia can't quite put his finger on it. What's weird?
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What's going on?
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I don't know. 1012? Oh fuck. It's hard to know specifically when the Dead were in Pacific High, but it was probably from around August 9 through August 13. On at least two of those dates, Jerry Garcia likely worked with the Grateful Vet at Pacific High in the afternoon and then headed over to Hyders in the evening, bringing Mickey Hart with him. One night about 10 minutes from Pacific High, they would join Paul Kantner and company for the Blows against the Empire sessions, working on songs including Starship. The Dead had a three night weekend the Fillmore west where they would debut some of their new album in progress, but probably after those shows sometime in the last week of August, the album in Progress shifted over to Wally Heiders. Heiders engineer Steven Barnard would become the co producer of American Beauty.
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H
Phil Sawyer had basically done the record before we did the record. I had no idea. Nobody told me. Poor Phil. I mean, he missed out on a big record. And I think Phil's really. He was instrumental, no pun intended. He was a big deal at Pacific High, I believe. And he did a lot of stuff with the Airplane. And he never did the major records with the guys that he probably came up with. And he was a San Francisco dude from the beginning.
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C
The Grateful dad arrived polished and ready to go.
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H
But the thing is, it wasn't necessarily about me. The choice wasn't about me. It was fortunate for the record, I guess, for it to be a single channel of decisions. And I think that's a thing that enabled the record to be so good. Was that there wasn't a lot of voices heard from. There was a single point of reference. There was a single technical voice that was there. And they like working like that. That's what made it easy to record because they knew what they wanted to do. And they performed was, for the most part, live. The acoustics were live. The acoustics, drums and bass were live on every track. And it was just the five guys. It was just Phil and Bobby and Jerry and Bill. You know, it was like, wow, you know, a really tight rhythm section. I set them up all together in a room. No ISO. I don't think I remember using gobos or anything. And they were playing acoustics. And I used this Little lipstick condenser, AKG C 60s tube condensers that I found very, very nice. And I would. I had gotten into this thing recording acoustic guitars. I would crouch down and plug up one ear and put my ear around the guitar. And while they were playing and look for the sweet spot, the places where it sounded good. Find that node and then put the microphone there. And. And if I had the fortune of recording in stereo, I would do that in two places. And then I'd have a backup, you know, and I would do the same with the other, you know. So, of course, with Jerry, Bobby, you know, I had two of them, and that was fine. It also cut down on the number of tracks. And that gave me five tracks. For drums, which was before that, I'd been working with Glenn Johns. And he used three. And he thought that was excessive. Kick, snare, two overheads. And it's basically a jazz setup. I can't say more about these guys, about how producible they were. I Had been reading articles in rolling stone about the thick air incident with Dave hassinger walking out after he heard that. And I had a little bit of fear, like, is this going to be a thing where they're going to be telling me everything to do and you know, which microphone to use and, you know, because I really hate that. You know, it's not fun when you have to like, basically second guessed. And they trusted me. They trust from the very get go.
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C
On Cumberland blues, released earlier in 1970 on Working Man's dead, the dead showed off their bluegrass roots and friend of the devil brought them into focus. The finishing touch during the overdub sessions was mandolinist David grisman. He'd met Jerry Garcia in the summer of 1964 when both were wandering the country in search of the deepest bluegrass music they could find. We're honored to welcome to the good old Grateful Dead cast David Grisman.
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They didn't have festivals in 1964. It was a country music park called sunset park and west grove, Pennsylvania. And every Sunday afternoon in the summer they had shows and a lot of more bluegrass shows. So, you know, that's how I got to hear bluegrass. And Jerry, too, He was on a little pilgrimage across the country that summer, and he showed up there at a Bill Monroe show.
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C
Jerry Garcia and Sandy Rothbin were on a cross country bluegrass odyssey to see, play, and collect as much live music as possible. It was an obsession. Sound familiar? They recorded shows on their wallen sacks and they camped out in the basement of one friend's house copying reels. David Grisman was a tape collector, too.
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I
We all traded tapes. You know, that's how we. One of the ways we interconnected. I made tapes myself and I would ask them permission. Yeah, back Sonny Osborne. I went down to a place called the Coral bar in West Patterson, New Jersey, in 1963, and I brought. I was 18 years old and I brought my wallen sack tape machine and a microphone, and I went up to the dressing room where the Osborne brothers were, and I asked him if I could record their show. And Sonny osborne said, you can record the show, but if that ever comes out on a record, I'll find you and I'll kill you.
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C
After meeting on the bluegrass circuit, Garcia and grisman stayed in touch. When he saw Jerry Garcia again, though, Jerry had a new band and they were electric. They weren't the grateful dead just yet, though.
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I
I met those guys in the summer of 65. First time I went out to California. In fact, I drove out there with David Cohn, who Later became a member of Country Joe and the Fish and Sandy Rothman. And so I came out to check out the circle of music fanatics, folk music, bluegrass fanatics that live in the Bay Area. Are you familiar with Rick Shub's map of the world?
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In fact, I have a copy hanging on my wall. Humbeed's revised map of the World was created by Earl Crabb and rick Shub in 1968. An intricate map of an alternate United States reduced to a small island continent that includes San Francisco, Berkeley, New York, Cambridge, and a few other cities. Surrounding it is a list of names of musicians and other friends, including David Grisman, members of the Dead, and virtually every other name mentioned by David. Here. The artist was Rick Shubb, who would go on to invent Shub guitar capos. If you play guitar, you probably have one. If you're curious. I wrote extensively about Humbeed's revised map of the world in my book, A Biography of Psychedelic America. The map was a visualized version of the social network that spawned the Grateful Dead and the world around them.
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I
Anyhow, that's the way it was. You know, that was like our world. It was Berkeley and Philadelphia and New York and Cambridge. I already had become friends with Eric Thompson because he came out the previous year 64, and crashed at my apartment in Greenwich Village. I was a student at nyu. Eric was living in a house in Palo Alto, sharing it with, I think Rick Shove might have been there. David Nelson, Phil Lesh, they're all living in this house. And Jerry, he was already married and had a kid. He lived nearby. And so we hung out. When I came back, I was working at the time for Israel G. Young, who was the proprietor of the Folklore center in Greenwich Village, also known as the Mayor of Greenwich Village. He had a column in Sing out magazine called Frets and Frails. And I told him about this band. They were called the Warlocks. Then I told him about this band, and he wrote something about it in his column. Yeah, so I can claim that I got those boys their first national press.
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C
David Grisman found the Warlocks to be the best rock and roll group he heard in California. He especially liked a tune written by their lead guitarist, Jerry Garcia, titled Bending youg Mind.
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E
You Dare to Bring Me Down Some More and Bend My Mind.
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C
That was Mindbender Confusion's Prince, released on the Birth of the Dead, recorded in 1966.
- [37:09]
I
We made a good connection and they would come to New York and I, we'd hang out. I can remember hanging out in his hotel Room for some gig they were playing, some club.
- [37:23]
C
Yeah.
- [37:24]
I
We stayed in touch and became friends.
- [37:27]
C
In the summer of 1970, David Grisman ran into his old friend Jerry, a story we'll save for a future dead cast. And he was promptly drafted into service for a pair of American Beauty overdubs. On Friend of the Devil and Ripple.
- [37:39]
I
It went pretty quick, you know. I was already used to doing session work and overdubs. And it was an overdub. And it was mostly Jerry saying what he liked and or perhaps didn't like, you know. I don't remember all that much about it, you know.
- [37:56]
C
But we do.
- [38:20]
E
Got two reasons why I cry away each lonely night here's.
- [38:26]
C
Archival engineer Brian Kehue to break down just what's happening on Friend of the Devil.
- [38:30]
G
We can now go through Friend of the Devil track by track. It's actually a very simple recording, but there are some tracks that confuse things a bit. And we have to put on our detective hats to figure out what they did. Here's a listen to the first take. We can hear Bob and Jerry on their respective microphones and acoustic guitars. They're about to begin and Bob wants to stop and take a drink of something before they record.
- [38:53]
C
Next one.
- [38:54]
I
Wait a minute, wait a minute.
- [38:55]
C
I gotta get.
- [39:10]
G
Listening carefully to the very beginning. Jerry's guitar on the left starts as normal with the descending riff. But if we listen closely to the track on the right, which is Bob's guitar, there's actually a leakage from Jerry playing a walking up part before the descending riff that is no longer there. Which means that Jerry had actually gone back and erased his original performance. The only remnant of it we have here is the leakage at the beginning of Bob's guitar track. Putting on our detective caps when we hear this leakage from Jerry's unused guitar part that's also not on the record. So what it tells us is this original guitar track from Bob is not used on the album either. It's still retained on the tape. But he went back on another track and replaced it with a better played guitar. And you'll hear that here. At this point, we don't hear any leakage from the room. So he must be wearing headphones and playing along to the pre recorded track that they did before. We have a vocal track recorded from Jerry that was done live when the two initial guitars were done.
- [40:35]
E
I lit out from Reno I was trailed by 20 hounds didn't get to sleep that night Till the morning came around Set out running but to take my time A friend of the devil is a friend of mine I get home before daylight Just might get some sleep tonight.
- [40:58]
G
However, this vocal track was not kept. It was good, and it's almost identical to the one from the record. But they decided to go back and replace it with a final vocal we'll hear later. When they finished this take, the two original guitar tracks kept rolling. And we captured a little comet at the end before they began the overdubs.
- [41:19]
C
I liked it.
- [41:21]
G
And there is one more acoustic guitar track. It's another take from Bob, very much towards the end of the song. He added another guitar part, but it's a duplicate of what he'd already been playing, probably trying to improve upon it, but was not used. And then on to the rest of the Basics, recorded live with the rest of the group. We have Bill's drums. We have a kick drum track. And then we have several other tracks. Mics over the drums, some marked overhead, some snare drum tracks they call it, but they all have a lot of kick drums because he's playing a very soft snare drum. And a little bit of cymbal work you hear here as well, too. This is the complete drum track, all four tracks mixed together. And then we have Phil's bass. As we heard on last week's podcast, there's a microphone in the room. This is a brighter sound, and it really cuts through it. And then we have a direct bass sound where they plug the bass direct into the console at the same time, and that captures a more mellow bass sound. With the Basics covered, Jerry added a vocal, replacing the one from before. It's a little bit better sounding, and he's a little bit more articulate in how he sang it. So this is the final vocal from the record.
- [43:49]
E
I lit up from Reno I was trailed by 20 hounds didn't get to see Sleep that night Till the morning came around Set out running But I take my time A friend of the devil is a friend of mine I get home before daylight Just might get some sleep tonight there's also a low.
- [44:11]
G
Piano part that comes in low in register and low in the mix. It's basically playing a kind of a simple bass line. It's a very rudimentary part, but it works. And then the special feature that really gives the song its flavor is David Grisman's mandolin part. You can hear David here. He's actually playing along as an overdub after the song is finished. And here's the solo section that adds a lot of flavor. A real interplay with the guitarist that are playing. And there we have it, the complete track set for Friend of the Devil. There are two acoustic guitars, two tracks of bass, four tracks for the drums, one piano, one vocal and one mandolin.
- [45:56]
C
On the lp, Phil Lesch gets a credit for playing piano. That could be him playing that part. Rolling Stone's Andy Zwerling called Friend of the Devil a snappy little country number with some extremely fine bass and acoustic guitar interplay. Jerry Garcia's voice now makes him a perfect wobbly cowboy. It was the first Grateful Dead song to leap into the repertoire of other musicians. Jerry spoke about it on the syndicated radio Show Rockstars in 1988. He said, that's a song that's been absorbed into the bluegrass mainstream. It's gotten to be a kind of bluegrass standard, which is very flattering. It's neat that the song has become a kind of modern folk song. And I mean, all kinds of bluegrass bands do it unselfconsciously. You know, that's one of the things I really like about that tune. Friend of the Devil was the first commercially released Grateful Dead cover recorded by Chris smither on his 1972 sophomore album, Don't Drag It On.
- [46:51]
E
I took off beano chased by £20 they ran me all night away Till the morning came around I thought I'd run it take my time When Friend of the devil is a friend of mine if I get home before daylight I just might get some sleep tonight.
- [47:13]
C
In 1975, with the grateful Dead on an extended touring hiatus, Jerry Garcia began to play Friend of the Devil with the newly formed Jerry Garcia Band, then featuring legendary pianist Nicky Hopkins and Elvis's TCB drummer Ron Tuttle. But it sounded a little bit different. Here it is in November 75, recorded at Keystone, Berkeley. On the release Let It Rock.
- [47:36]
E
I lit out from Reno I was trained by £20 didn't get to sleep that night Till the morning came around Said I'd run it but I take my time Friend of the devil is a friend of mine Just might get some sleep tonight.
- [48:04]
C
When the dead return in 76 Friend of the Devil got even slower.
- [48:21]
E
In a Keeble in the hills Sit down running might I take my time Friend of the devil is.
- [48:32]
C
A friend of Mine that was recorded at Boston Garden on May 7, 1977. On the Get Shown the Light box set in 1981, our intrepid reporter friends Blair Jackson and David Ganz asked Garcia what inspired him to slow down Friend of the Devil. Thanks for digging this out and digitizing it, David. What really happened with that Was I heard a tape of somebody else doing the tune.
- [48:57]
D
Who the hell was it?
- [48:58]
C
Chris Smither? No, it was Kenny Loggins. Kenny Loggins, A Friend of the Devil? Yeah, he used to do it as a solo acoustic tune with the Loggins and scenes. That's right. I heard him do that. He did it as a ballad instead of as an up tempo, bluegrassy feeling to it. And I heard a tape of that and it sort of stuck in my head. I thought, wow, that's a nice way for that song to go. That's an interesting. I mean, I thought, yeah, that song really is a nice ballad. It was. All of a sudden it was somebody else's version of the song, which exposed a sense of a character thing to it that I had never seen before. I had never noticed before.
- [49:44]
E
I ran down from Reno I was trailed by twins didn't get to bed last night Till the morning came round Said I rumbled take my time A friend of the devil is a friend of mine if I die before daylight I just might get some sleep tonight.
- [50:09]
C
That was Kenny Loggins. Yes, Kenny Loggins to In Front of The Devil on June 30, 1972, in Kansas City. Why and how would Jerry Garcia be listening to a Kenny Loggins live tape from Kansas City? 72? That's an easier question to answer. Loggins and Messina were sharing a bill with the New Riders of the Purple Sage recorded by none other than Betty Cantor, one of the Dead's in house sound engineers. And that's how the arrangement stayed more or less for the rest of the Dead's career. Grateful Dead archivist David Lemieux.
- [50:41]
B
It became such a dramatically different song. The first time I heard it on Dead set and, you know, I knew Friend of the Devil. I knew it from this album. I knew it like the back of my hand, as I know the. The whole album. But then to hear the new arrangement from 1980, and that was before I started trading tapes, I got such a big batch of Dead albums, probably like six in that first month or two of hardcore listening. And it wasn't until months later that I got some live tapes from the later 70s, the early 80s, where I realized this was the new arrangement, as I later learned, you know, Kenny Loggins and that arrangement that Jerry liked. To me, it became two very distinct songs. But then, now that I think about it, I mean, it isn't at all. It's one very much the same song, just changed a little bit. Friend of the Devil was a song that I saw played live by the Dead many times. And I kind of said, oh, cool. Friend of the Devil is played quite often. And then when I listen back now, 20, 30, 35 years later to these shows, I am amazed at how great it was and how again, I don't want to say I took it for granted, but I sort of did. I was just like, oh, it's another friend of the Devil. Cool. I was, I wasn't. I wasn't bored by it by any means, but it would just. I took it for granted and now I've learned to really appreciate it.
- [51:50]
C
Though the band never returned the song to its zippier origins, the tempo did vary a bit in the later 80s, regaining some of its bounce. Here's a bit of a version recorded on July 2, 1989 in Foxborough, Massachusetts, released as a bonus track on the all the Years combined DVD collection.
- [52:19]
E
Get Some Sleep Tonight.
- [52:23]
C
And that's more or less how the song sounded when Jerry Garcia reconnected with David Grisman and began to make music again together in 1990 for the first time since they played in Olden in the Way and the Great American String band in the mid-1970s.
- [52:36]
I
I invited Jerry over to play some music that we hadn't played in like 13 years. He showed up at my doorstep and he walked in and immediately said, you know, what we should do is make a record because that'll give us an excuse to get together. That's before we even played a note. And I said, wow, I just built a studio in my basement and I just started a record company. Said, great, we'll do it for you. Most fortuitous record business deal that was ever, that I ever involved with. So we just went downstairs and I set up the microphones and I recorded the first thing, which was just kind of a freeform jam.
- [53:20]
C
The label was and is acoustic disc, 100% handmade music, as their motto goes. Still quite active with an enormous catalog of acoustic sounds. Nowhere was that range more reflected than in Grisman's sessions with Garcia, recording jazz, folk, pop, reggae, bluegrass and more. Here they are inventing a new genre of their own. Ungrateful dog from their 1991 album, Garcia Grisman.
- [54:13]
I
We both, like, drank from a lot of traditional wells, you know, in our formative years, you know, old time music, jazz, all kinds of stuff. And invariably we have very similar tastes in terms of repertoire and just approaches. And so if Jerry thought of a tune, I pretty much knew it. And if I thought of a tune, he pretty much knew it. And we just started, you know, it was very informal, but you know, it clicked. You know, everything sounded pretty much like that when we, as we started playing it, you know, and we get together. It was no formal structure to it. It's not. It wasn't like, well, we have to finish this record, we have four sessions allowed. Or I just realized that it was worth the tape, you know, which was expensive. I had a multi track, eight track, one inch tape machine, a 3M M23, which Les Paul told me was the best multi track machine that 3M ever made anyhow. So I just invested in a lot of tape. And Jerry would, out of the blue, he'd call me up and say, what are you doing? And he'd come over and I'd get Dave Dennison. And about the first five or six sessions was just the two of us. In fact, there's a lot of material that's never been released of just the two of us playing a lot of those tunes.
- [55:47]
C
Friend of the Devil was among these.
- [55:49]
I
There's a really nice duet version of that the first time we played it. Yeah, I mean, that's a great tune. And it was, you know, he just come up with let's play this and we play it, you know, he probably had been playing it slower with the Dead too.
- [56:06]
C
The duo version hasn't been released yet, but Acoustic Disc has put out several great takes of the song. In 2012, the label put out a completely alternate version of the duo's first album, available via acousticoasis downloads.com Here's a bit of the wonderful version of Friend of the Devil from the first Garcia Grisman album.
- [56:25]
E
Got a wife and chino baby and one in Cherokee first one says she got my child but it don't look like me Set out the running But I take my time. Friend of the devil is a friend of mine. I get home for delight Just might get some sleep tonight.
- [56:55]
C
You can keep up with all the latest releases from acoustic disc@acousticdisc.com we have much more to share from our conversation with David on future Deadcasts. Friend of the Devil has been covered by an extraordinary range of artists. Lyle Lovett on 1991's dedicated Hollied out.
- [57:12]
E
From Reno, I was.
- [57:17]
C
Ministry live at the 1994 Bridge School benefit. Bob Dylan from 1999 Stolen Roses compilation and John Darniel of the Mountain Goats here with megaphon and Bon Iver's Justin Vernon, recorded at the Pinhook in Durham, North Carolina on May Day 2014, of the Devil has become a true folk and rock Standard. In the 80s, the Grateful Dead would occasionally be implicated in the great Satanic panic that linked heavy metal to backwards messages on LPs and other bad influences. Strangely, of all the moral crusaders to accuse the Dead of bad things, I can't find any that cite the Dead's greatest ode to Satanism, Friend of the Devil Once again, we'll leave you with Robert Hunter's version of the song from his 1980 album Jack O Roses. Here's the verse he wrote that Jerry Garcia never sang, the one Hunter said quote ties the bow on that song in a certain direction.
- [58:37]
E
You can borrow from the devil, you can borrow from a friend the devil will give you 20 when your friend got only 10 said I run about to take my time A friend of the devil is a friend of mine Might get home before daylight I might get some sleep tonight.
- [58:57]
A
I love the way Friend of the Devil's arrangement changed for the Dead through the years. I think that a great song lends itself to a wide variety of interpretations. It can be played at a faster or slower tempo, both electrically or acoustically. The vocal phrasing can be modified, and it works in every iteration. This is one of the Dead songs that everyone can sing along with, and it always leaves you with a smile on your face. Thanks very much for tuning in. Visit us over@dead.net deadcast furthering the friend theme of this episode, why don't you share this podcast with one of yours today? See you next time. Executive producers for the good old Grateful Dead cast Mark Pincus and Dorin Tyson. Produced for Rhino Entertainment by Rich Mahan Productions and Jesse Jarno. Special thanks to David Lemieux. All rights reserved.