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- [00:00]
Rich Mahan
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.
- [00:44]
Jesse Jarno
The Grateful Dead for the committed and the curious.
- [00:47]
Rich Mahan
Ladies and gentlemen, fellow Deadheads, welcome to season 12 of the Good Old Grateful Dead Cast. I'm your co host Rich Mahan. Thank you so much for tuning in. In this episode of the Good Old Grateful Dead Cast, we peel off the cellophane on the Grateful Dead's 1975 studio masterpiece Blues For Allah and we drop the needle on side one Track one. Help on the Way Announcing the Grateful Dead Blues for all, a 50th anniversary deluxe edition. Arriving September 12, this 3 CD set features the newly remastered album with unreleased sound check and concert recordings. Check this out. The set features almost two hours of unreleased recordings. Among the highlights are rehearsals from the band's August 12, 1975 soundcheck at San Francisco's Great American Music hall, including the album track Sage and Spirit, Help on the Way, Slipknot and Franklin's Tower. The collection continues with performances from the June 21, 1976 show at the Tower Theater in Pennsylvania, spotlighting Five Blues for All songs alongside favorites like Eyes of the World and rounding out the are selections from Bill Graham's Snack Students Need, Athletics, Culture and Kicks benefit at kesar Stadium on March 23, 1975. There are also vinyl variants of the original album available, including a picture disc and a Midnight Fire red vinyl edition and a 180 gram black vinyl edition. Very cool looking Blues for all of 50th anniversary merch is also now available. All of these can be checked out@dead.net and over@rhino.com you can pre order the Dolby Atmos mixes on Blu Ray disc. They were mixed by Steven Wilson and are ready to blow your mind. All of these fine releases will be out on September 12th via dead.net and rhino.com head on over to dead.net deadcast check out all of our past episodes there, including the complete seasons 1 through 11. You you can link from there to your favorite podcasting platform so you can listen how you like to listen. Please help this podcast by subscribing sharing us with your friends on social media. Hit that like button and leave us a review. Thank you very much. Do you have a great story about any of the songs on Blues for Allah? Were you lucky enough to catch the band at one of their two shows in San Francisco in 75? Then we need to hear from you. Head on over to stories.dead.net and record yourself telling us all about it. You may just hear yourself on a future episode of the Deadcast and we do have transcripts for many of your favorite Dead cast episodes available for your reading and research pleasure. Head on over to dead.netdeadcast index and check them out. Friends the 2025 meetup at the Movies featuring the Grateful Dead movie is happening Thursday, August 14th in theaters across the country. The There are extra dates before and after, so make sure to check out meetup@themovies.com to find a showing near you this time. It has been remastered in 4K and will be available at IMAX theaters for the first time. Make sure to grab your friends and grab tickets at meetup@themovies.com and make sure to stay until the very end to catch a special performance from those Winterland shows that did not make the original movie. Help on the Way Is there a better musical opening to a song in the Grateful Dead's catalog? Personally, I don't think so. Of course, that's subjective, but damn if it doesn't grab you by the boo boo every time it hits, and it's unrelenting in its twists and turns along the way, the way the song develops. What a way to kick off the start of Blues for Allah, an album written and recorded differently than any Grateful Dead album before it, or any after it for that matter. You've come to the right place to hear all about it, and we've got the right guy to tell you all about it. Here's Jesse Giorno.
- [04:47]
Jesse Jarno
The album the Grateful Dead have always had in them is out Blues For Allah. It's new, it's here now. It's the Grateful Dead on Grateful Dead Records and Tapes.
- [05:10]
David Lemieux
This season on the good old Grateful Dead cast, we reach a truly singular grateful dead album, 1975's Blues for Allah. Please welcome back Grateful Dead archivist and legacy manager David Lemieux.
- [05:23]
Donna Jean Gottschall McKay
I love everything about this record. I cannot say enough good things about it. I love all the Dead's records start to finish, from the first one to Built to Last and without a net. But this one is certainly up there as a top one for me.
- [05:38]
Jerry Garcia
Paradise waves on the crest of a wave her age is flame she has no pain Like a child she is here she is not to blame.
- [05:58]
David Lemieux
The only Grateful Dead album to be built from the ground up in the recording studio, Blues for Allah was written and recorded over roughly seven months at Bob Weir's new home studio in Mill Valley and released in late August of 1975. Beginning with the triptych of Help on the Way, Slipknot and Franklin's Tower.
- [06:17]
Jerry Garcia
Roll Away the Dew Roll away the.
- [06:24]
David Lemieux
Dew.
- [06:26]
Jerry Garcia
Roll away Roll Away.
- [06:35]
Donna Jean Gottschall McKay
I find it almost like structured like a Dead show. And the interesting thing about it is I've kind of side A and side B are sort of structured like a Dead show. So you get help Slip Franklin's as an opener, which the Dead did quite often. The first set ends with Music Never Stopped, which I think is pretty cool.
- [06:54]
David Lemieux
There's a band and it's a rainbow full of sound.
- [07:13]
Donna Jean Gottschall McKay
And then you get the second set where they get into some jamming music, some crazy fingers, some instrumentals like Sage and Spirit. You get the going way out there, drums and spacey blues, Ferala, Sandcastles, Glass Camels. And then it ends with like the Return, like the playing in the band reprise, you get the Blues for Allah Return.
- [08:19]
David Lemieux
As always, David has stocked the new reissue with goodies.
- [08:22]
Donna Jean Gottschall McKay
Disc one is the album and disc two is the Great American Music hall rehearsal, and keys are that is the.
- [08:29]
David Lemieux
Complete performance from the Jerry Garcia and Friends snack benefit set at keysar Stadium on March 23, 1975. Previously on the Beyond Description bonus disc, as well as excerpts from the extended sound check for their album release party at the Great American Music hall in August 1975, which you may know as one from the vault, the band's first ever complete show archival release. But the soundtrack rehearsal from the day before has never been heard.
- [09:10]
Donna Jean Gottschall McKay
And disc three is an hour and change of live material from the June 76 comeback tour.
- [09:22]
Jerry Garcia
Just one more deep shovel away your pleasure.
- [09:33]
David Lemieux
Along with those recordings, we'll be telling the story of Blues for Allah with the album's multi tracks and many hours of raw session tapes. If you like the Beatles Get Back documentary, this season of the Dead cast is about as close as we're going to get to recreating that vibe. Except instead of a band breaking up after a 10 year career, it's a band coming back together for the next 20. Plus, there's some guest appearances by Bob Weir's German Shepherd Otis.
- [10:00]
Jesse Jarno
I just taught Otis to answer the phone.
- [10:02]
David Lemieux
Oh, yeah?
- [10:03]
Jesse Jarno
What does he say?
- [10:06]
David Lemieux
That's great. Here's how Jerry Garcia described Blues for Allah to NBC in 1981. A half dozen years later, the year.
- [10:14]
Robert Hunter
We knocked off, we decided, why don't we just let a record grow? Let's not even worry about having the material together or anything. Let's just start going to Weird. And we made it at Weird's house, at his studio, at his house. And so we just started going there every day. And everything on that album sort of grew out of just hanging out together. We had a lot of fun, got real crazy making that record.
- [10:32]
David Lemieux
And please welcome back on the vocals, Mrs. Donna Jean Gotchau McKay. It was Bobby's house, and then you took like 10 steps and you were in the studio. That was a unique situation to where we had, you know, the combination of the house and the studio right there, except they were separate enough to where you knew that when you were in the house, you were in the house. When you were in the studio, it was music. So that was a fun time doing Blues for Allah. Just as a pronunciation note, everybody in the Grateful Dead world seems to have pronounced and for that matter, sung the album's name as Blues for Allah instead of, you know, Blues for Allah. And one could perhaps spend some time unpacking that Americanization, and perhaps we will, but that's probably how we're going to pronounce it, too. And now over to Jerry Garcia giving a progress report to photographer and journalist Peter Simon in late March 1975, after about a month and a half of writing sessions.
- [11:33]
Robert Hunter
Well, it's going pretty well. I would say that it was the most musically adventurous album we've done in a pretty long time. It's just that we're doing things that are really unconventional for us musically. We're approaching ideas, we're evolving. Our own development is what we're doing.
- [11:52]
David Lemieux
It's not much of a stretch to call Blues for Allah the most ambitious Grateful Dead album since Anthem of the sun and Oxah Maxo in the late 1960s. Blues for Allah finds the Grateful Dead nearing the end of what kids these days call an imperial period. Operating at the expansive peak of their powers, musical and otherwise, in 1973 and 1974. In addition to introducing a number of classic new songs and recording two albums, they'd thrown all in on forming their own record companies, Grateful Dead Records and Round Records, and building their own distribution network, playing custom built instruments through their own groundbreaking self invented speaker system, now known as The Wall of Sound. But that was just the beginning.
- [12:35]
Robert Hunter
We're consciously guiding it through a certain stream of possibilities, mostly having to do with new and unusual harmonic relationships that may. Well, I don't know, quite frankly. It might. Some people might not like what we're doing, but we're. But it's another try. It's another thing.
- [12:58]
David Lemieux
And so in 1975, they would do everything up to and including a reconsideration of contemporary tonality in order to build a new musical language from the ground up, then write new songs in it. And in keeping with that theme, before they did so, they also built a new studio in which to record it all. But all that took a few long steps. So before we tell the story of Blues for Allah, we'll invoke the wisdom of the late cosmic superhero Carl Sagan.
- [13:26]
Jesse Jarno
If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe.
- [13:34]
David Lemieux
Let's step back before we leap forward. We've used this piece of rewinding tape before, but it comes from the blues for a la sessions. In October 1974, the band stepped back from touring from following five nights at Winterland in San Francisco, retiring the Wall of Sound and filming what became the Grateful Dead movie. Storylines we explored in our Ship of Fools episode at the end of our season about 1974. And from the Mars Hotel, here's how Jerry Garcia described the reasons for the band's touring hiatus to Peter Simon in late March 1975.
- [14:35]
Robert Hunter
There were kind of two levels or maybe three levels of reasons. One of them has to do with just the economics of moving around. The amount of stuff we have, that the amount of money that we would make at the gigs basically wasn't able to pay for moving us around and being able to develop everything and also to pay everybody. We had a huge organization with a colossal overhead on a weekly basis. And so past a certain point, we were really working to keep the thing going, rather than working to improve it or working because it was joyful.
- [15:11]
David Lemieux
Bob Weir kept busy by joining Kingfish, recently founded by his old friend Matt Kelly and New Riders of the Purple stage. Bassist Dave Torbert playing his first gig with them a few weeks after the Dead's last show at Winterland. By the end of 1975, they'd record an album together. Here's how Weir described the hiatus in early 1976 to WMMR in Philadelphia.
- [15:34]
Jesse Jarno
The biggest reason that we took off was our equipment situation. We had this monster, enormous PA situation that we put together, and there was no way of Taking it on the road and even breaking even. So that made touring difficult to begin with. It had to be supported by our record company.
- [15:54]
Robert Hunter
Playing large venues and feeling that remoteness. And feeling as though we're creating an unpleasant situation for the audience to come into. Which is not what we want to do. And we don't want people to be busted at our concerts. We don't want them to be uncomfortable or any of those things. And that's been more the standard way they've been.
- [16:19]
Jesse Jarno
One of the big reasons that we decided to knock off. Was because it was eating us out of house and home. It was real expensive. It was 70 times 7 0. Took four semi rig trailers to carry around the country. And it precluded any possibility of our playing two nights in a row anywhere. And so the reason we couldn't make money without it. Was because we couldn't play smaller halls. Because we would have trouble outside.
- [16:44]
Robert Hunter
Where we've been having to play because of audience demand has been these intense control situations. Big stadiums and stuff like that. Where there's millions of cops and all that.
- [16:55]
David Lemieux
The band sent out a newsletter in February 1975. Just as they were starting work on what became Blues for Allah. We've linked to it@dead.net deadcast. It observes, the megagig form is sort of bankrupt. Devoid of dignity. For either the listener or the player. There are three plans under study which could make it possible for the band to perform. The fact is, the Dead won't go out again unless the situation is groovy.
- [17:20]
Robert Hunter
The next level is that we are interested in doing stuff that's joyful or that's fun, you know. But then how do we reconcile that with economic survival? You know, how can we work and have a good time and also pay the bills? We don't have that together. We don't understand how to do that so far. And what we were doing was not it.
- [17:46]
David Lemieux
As an ongoing creative organization. There are several things we should be doing. Number one, expand the quality in all areas. In which we interface with our own means of expression. A Films B Records C. Musical performance D Life. Jerry Garcia had taken charge of the documentary film project.
- [18:08]
Robert Hunter
The idea of doing this film in the first place was we've been trying to develop alternatives to performing live. Because of the logistical difficulty. And the economical difficulty involved in touring nowadays. The way we do it, it's really a trip. So this represents one possibility. You know, the idea of filming a concert. And seeing whether any of the feeling or the good moments or the highness or whatever Is able to be translated to this medium.
- [18:39]
David Lemieux
And please welcome back Ron Rakow, president of Grateful Dead Records and partners with Jerry Garcia in both Round Records and their newest venture, Round Reels. This is one of my favorite rack bits of wisdom.
- [18:51]
Jesse Jarno
Nothing burns up money like movies. I mean, cocaine habits don't burn up money like movies.
- [18:56]
David Lemieux
While every member of the Dead had individual projects to keep them occupied, Rakow's job was to keep the bigger ship in the air.
- [19:03]
Jesse Jarno
Everybody in the Grateful Dead had to get paid because they weren't let go. We were just not active and the movie was being made.
- [19:12]
David Lemieux
It's like having two holes in your.
- [19:15]
Jesse Jarno
Bucket instead of just one hole in your bucket. It was.
- [19:18]
David Lemieux
It was hairy and I did a.
- [19:20]
Jesse Jarno
Lot of dancing to come up with the money. There was only one person coming up.
- [19:24]
David Lemieux
With money during that time.
- [19:27]
Jesse Jarno
That was me. And I had nothing to sell except clever bullshit.
- [19:31]
David Lemieux
The band had their own record company and were self sufficient up to a point.
- [19:36]
Jesse Jarno
Being on the road solved the liquidity problem. Not being on the road, nothing changes.
- [19:42]
David Lemieux
I mean, if there are 20 families.
- [19:44]
Jesse Jarno
Or 25 families that draw sustenance from this thing, nothing changed. They still have rent to pay. They still have to feed their families. So there was a lot of pressure for money.
- [19:56]
David Lemieux
Not only having the record company and having.
- [20:01]
Jesse Jarno
Making two movies actually, and keeping that scene going and then having no money come in, having this incredible earning resource not functioning.
- [20:14]
David Lemieux
In later years, many of the band members would say they overextended themselves in trying to start a record company. And probably this is true. But what was the point of being the Grateful Dead if not to ambitiously overextend themselves? Here's Bob Weir, Phil Lesh and Mickey Hart being interviewed together on the release of the arista years in 1996.
- [20:34]
Jesse Jarno
We were all carrying briefcases and. Bob, you never carried a briefcase. Yeah, I did. When I started carrying a real briefcase. The real thing. It was leather and everything. Well, he certainly doesn't anymore, folks.
- [20:48]
Robert Hunter
Yeah, but what was inside of it?
- [20:51]
Jesse Jarno
Papers and stuff. Oh, that's the worst kind.
- [20:54]
David Lemieux
Sorry, Weir, you totally walked smack into that one.
- [20:58]
Jesse Jarno
My briefcase. In the briefcase. Papers. Just papers. You know, my papers. Business papers. We didn't have the leverage that it takes to be a record company. If you're a record company, basically people don't pay you for the last record you sold until you come up with a new one. And we. We make records, you know, at a.
- [21:29]
David Lemieux
When we're really.
- [21:30]
Jesse Jarno
When we're really punching them out at a good clip every couple, three years. And it was impossible for us to get paid for the records we made.
- [21:39]
David Lemieux
That's true, though. In early 1975, as the band started blues for a la, they had a bunch of records racked up that would keep the Round release schedule rolling at least through 1976. Following Hot on the heels of the February newsletter was a dispatch from Round Records, featuring a new series of 7 inch samplers with bits of forthcoming releases. In early January, Garcia and friends had finished Robert Hunter's Tiger Rose, which we devoted an episode to earlier this year.
- [22:08]
Jerry Garcia
Tiger T, Tiger T you my jingle O Gently roll me honey while I sing your song on the bank where the children playing a lyo Come on.
- [22:22]
David Lemieux
And show me something I don't know finally out in February was Old and in the Way, the self titled live debut by the bluegrass supergroup recorded by Owsley Stanley. Dig into our Garcia 73 episode for more on them.
- [22:50]
Jerry Garcia
They'Ll never care about.
- [22:56]
David Lemieux
Also on the immediate schedule was the self titled debut by Keith and Donna. Donna Jean if you notice on the Keith and Donna album it was recorded at, let's see, what's it Studio R and Studio R was our living room. It had that grand 9 foot Steinway in it and it was a big living room overlooking Simpson Beach. Oh my gosh, it was fantastic.
- [23:33]
Jerry Garcia
And I love you baby Like a.
- [23:36]
David Lemieux
Schoolboy loves his pie and I love you baby.
- [23:48]
Jesse Jarno
Keith and I had written some of.
- [23:50]
David Lemieux
The songs even before we were in the Grateful Dead and so we just wanted to do an album of our of our own that just was natural for us to do something while we weren't touring. Our living room became the studio, strictly a studio. And then Zion would sleep in the very, very back of our of our house while we recorded. So that worked out really well. I had the best of both worlds right there.
- [24:22]
Jesse Jarno
Sweet Baby.
- [24:28]
David Lemieux
Sweet Baby recorded in late 1974. Their Stinson beach neighbor Jerry Garcia contributed guitar and helped with the album art. I just remember having the photo there and Garcia leaning on our kitchen island there. You know, with doing those doodles. I remember it very clearly that watching him do that and doodling to all the songs that were on the album. If you notice, what he drew was basically the lyrics to the songs. We got a bit more into the Keith and Donna LP in our Donna Jean episode a few years back in 1975. They'd form a live band that featured at various points both Jerry Garcia and Billy Kreutzman. And beyond that, the newsletter reported, there were albums to follow by Ned Lagin with Phil Lesh and Later in the year, a Jerry Garcia solo joint, though at the moment he was touring with Legion of Mary, his then new band with John Khan, Merle Saunders and drummer Ron Tutt. They never make it into the studio, but the Jerry Garcia estate has put out several discs of live material from late 1974 and the first half of 1975. In early 1975, work was beginning to ramp up on the Grateful Dead movie as well. It was probably in January or February that Round Reels rented a house in Mill Valley, a short drive from Bobby Weir's new studio. When he wasn't on tour with Legion of Mary, Garcia would often shuttle between Weirs and the film house. Here's a progress report to Peter Simon in March 1975.
- [26:23]
Robert Hunter
Well, we hope to have it done and maybe out by around October, but it could go longer than that. It's comparatively difficult to deal with it. There's a lot of film and it's gonna take a long time. The big thing is it's gonna take a long time making it be anything besides a 10 hour movie.
- [26:41]
David Lemieux
We'll check back in on that projected date later this season.
- [26:44]
Robert Hunter
The idea of having four hours of just concert is gonna be hopeless in a movie. So we have to make some concessions about that. But we might end up not doing that. It really has a lot with what we decide to do in terms of exhibiting it and the whole. Right now we're finding out about distribution and all the rest of that kind of stuff, which turns out to be just like in records, turns out to be the main bummer in film.
- [27:09]
David Lemieux
Just like the delivery of the band's records and live performances, the Grateful Dead movie was intended to rethink the concept of content distribution from the ground up.
- [27:18]
Robert Hunter
Part of this is to develop a way to distribute it that makes us feel that we haven't been just building another brick in the wall that's always part of it. But this particularly since it's a new field really for us to be involved in and we're into sort of approaching it with whatever purity we can muster initially, rather than having to do it later like we did with records.
- [27:43]
David Lemieux
The beginning of 1975 found Jerry Garcia at Mickey Hart's Barnes studio in Nevada several times, finishing up Tiger Rose and working on other projects. Though Mickey Hart had joined the band on stage at their final retirement show at Winterland, he wasn't yet back in the Grateful Dead. Please welcome back from Grateful Dead and Round Records, Steve Brown.
- [28:04]
Steve Brown
When Jerry wanted to do stuff and when Hunter wanted to do stuff, they Would go up in there and use that because it was, you know, Mickey's place and it was easy to get into and do. The one thing that I still think was my favorite, though, of all the ones that were done at the barn, was Jerry's little dream project, which was the Pistol Pack and Mama. Good Old Boys. Yeah, that was like, you know, Jerry's just dream come true.
- [28:42]
Jerry Garcia
Anxious of love, Cold as ice. You made the Dead and I made.
- [28:48]
David Lemieux
The prize power.
- [28:57]
Steve Brown
To have Frank Wakefield and Chubby Wise and on Reno and all these guys that I'd heard of, too, and had heard their music before, they're actually working with Jerry Garcia. It's like, How Cool Is this?
- [29:12]
David Lemieux
Recorded in January 1975, but not released until 1976, Pistol Pack and Mama would be Jerry Garcia's last real foray into acoustic music until the Dead resumed acoustic sets in 1980.
- [29:25]
Steve Brown
If you go back to the bluegrass realm of Jerry's life, see that he brought in these guys who were here as heroes and got to produce them. I mean, that was just really fun.
- [29:34]
David Lemieux
Garcia even joined the Good Old Boys playing banjo for a short tour in February, some of which has been released by Rockbeat Records as Drink up and go home in 2018.
- [30:07]
Jerry Garcia
All the time.
- [30:14]
David Lemieux
Though Kingfish would keep Bobby Weir busy throughout the Dead's road hiatus, it was another project that fed more directly into the Dead's world. Grateful Dead archivist David Lemieux.
- [30:23]
Donna Jean Gottschall McKay
Bobby's house had a little garage, a little outbuilding that they converted into the studio. Steve Barnard, I'm sure people are familiar with him. He produced American Beauty. He was around the Dead scene for a lot of years, and he helped build Bobby's studio. Aces hasn't changed much. I first went there in 1999, went there a few times, and it's a tiny little place, like the isolation booth. I think you have to duck down to get in there.
- [30:51]
David Lemieux
Aces was named after its proprietor. This is famous Bobby Ace.
- [30:56]
Jesse Jarno
You heard of him?
- [30:57]
David Lemieux
Formerly of Bobby Ace and the Cards off the bottom, of course. But there are several studio documents that list the name of the studio as Aces High, which really works on several levels. Gary Lambert had just relocated to the Bay Area in time to catch the band's retirement shows at Winterland. I got to visit with Bobby not that long after the final Winterland show as part of some interviews I was doing with him. I went to his home, and I'm thinking this must have been November or early December of 74, and he was already talking pretty optimistically about the band's future. The first plan being first of all aces. His studio was in the early stages of construction. I didn't get to go inside. He sort of pointed up the hill.
- [31:44]
Jesse Jarno
And said, yeah, we're building the studio up there.
- [31:46]
Donna Jean Gottschall McKay
There's some great pictures in the CD booklet that Steve Barnard card took that really show how small that studio space was.
- [31:55]
David Lemieux
Please welcome back to the Grateful Dead cast Steven Barnard.
- [31:59]
Jesse Jarno
Before anybody else, he was the guy that had the really cool house in Mill Valley. And it was designed and built from the ground up. As a designer, a frame incredible Marin county palace, basically. But it was kind of. It was truly a. All the way down to the ground. There was point where you couldn't put furniture in places or you'd hit your head, you know. It was. It was an incredibly strange and awkward and wonderful place. They had a paper mache model of the truckin guy R. Crumb, that paper mache.
- [32:31]
David Lemieux
Mr. Natural did some time at Rainbow Arbor as well. The briefly lived Dead family boutique in Mill Valley. Gary Lambert. It struck me as a singularly unpretentious, successful guy's home, but it was also very casual. Like I remember there were gold records that hadn't been hung up yet. They were just on the floor, propped up against a wall, that kind of thing. While I was in Bobby's home, he picked up his acoustic guitar from the couch and played a very rudimentary fragment of what turned out to be Sage and Spirit. You know, just jaw droppingly beautiful. And he said, something I'm working on.
- [33:09]
Jesse Jarno
I can't play it.
- [33:10]
David Lemieux
Of course. Yes. That was the isolated guitar from Sage and Spirit. More from that in another few episodes. Weir moved into his beautiful Mill Valley a frame in late 1972 or early 1973, cohabitating with his partner. Though they weren't married. We still remember her as Frankie Weir. Stephen Barnard.
- [33:51]
Jesse Jarno
Frankie. Sugar magnolia she's got everything we like.
- [33:57]
Jerry Garcia
Oh, she's got everything I need Takes the wheel when I'm seeing double Taste my chicken when I speak.
- [34:08]
Jesse Jarno
Bob was building his very minimal studio. Bob was a very shy person and at least discussing something like building a studio. And so Frankie had conversations with me and then. And then he put Bob and I together. And then Bob had some ideas and he had already had the architect build the room before, you know, it was already under construction. So he had no idea, and the architect had no idea about acoustical spaces or floating floors or anything and or what size of control room would need to be. So we had a triangular shaped control room space and it was not what I would have designed, but it was supposed to be a rehearsal place. Anyway, I arranged to get an eight track machine from Muscle Shoals. It actually had a pedigree. Percy Sledge recorded his hit When a Man Loves a Woman on it.
- [35:11]
Jerry Garcia
When a man loves a woman can't keep his mind on nothing else he changed the world For a good thing.
- [35:23]
David Lemieux
He'S found which is to say Donna Jean and the tape machine were already acquainted.
- [35:29]
Jesse Jarno
I bought it from a studio there called Quinvy, another one of the Muscle Shoal Studios and a very hardy, wonderful machine. I love that Scully. It was built like a tank, very heavy.
- [35:46]
David Lemieux
Quinn V was owned by Quinn Ivy, the studio where teenage Donna Thatcher got her start in the music business. We talked about that more in our Donna Jean episode a few years ago.
- [35:57]
Jerry Garcia
Brother man love.
- [36:04]
David Lemieux
I give you everything.
- [36:07]
Jerry Garcia
I am trying to hold on to your My grandfather Baby please don't treat me better.
- [36:24]
Jesse Jarno
Piece by piece we put this thing together and got it to like There's. We had 12, 10 inputs and you know, it would be useful for eight track demos. I had rotary faders. I needed a console cabinet that had to fit this room because you couldn't get anything. It was triangular shaped. It was crazy. So we get to the stage and he's ready to do demos and we're about to bring the eight track up there and I think we did and we didn't. I think we rolled tape on some band that Frankie was in.
- [37:01]
David Lemieux
That'd be James and the Mercedes, founded by James Aykroyd of James and the Good Brothers. There don't seem to be any circulating tapes, but we've posted a link@dead.net deadcast to Michael Parish's scene report and photos from seeing them at the Chateau Liberte in the Santa Cruz Mountains.
- [37:17]
Jesse Jarno
It was really gorgeous. It was really tastefully appointed and carpet everywhere and it sounded pretty good. I mean it was very dead. It was more like the Record Plant than it was Haider's. But it wasn't built with any kind of sound isolation whatsoever. You know, no double walls, no isolated floor, no hanging chads, nothing. You know, just a room, an A frame and a too small control room and a lot of things. And I remember Phil coming in and looking at my console with these rca, this big RCA knob, which I basically was influenced by cbs. And they're cool old school looking stuff. You see them on old limiters sometimes. And Phil walks in and says it looks kind of Buck Rogers. I never forgot that.
- [38:09]
David Lemieux
Buck rogers in the 25th century.
- [38:20]
Jesse Jarno
I don't remember who came in and talked to Bobby, but the next thing I know, suddenly it says, well, can you make this thing a 16 track console? Well, yeah, if I start over. Okay, do it. And then they started getting more money. There was this guy that I had hired on the second phase, Robbie Taylor, who was a jeweler. He was. He worked with silver. And he turned out he'd be an excellent solderer. He'd never worked in electronics, he knew nothing about electronics. But I would make him these diagrams and show them where to put stuff. And he made these beautiful. He was the best wiring guy I ever knew. He just made these beautiful assemblies. And I could then design conceptually things and build prototypes. And then he could go off and build multiples of the thing. And we got the thing done, just the two of them. You know, as far as the electric, as the wiring, it was wonderful. He was great. And then he stayed on to be the assistant on Blues for Allah and eventually became road manager and everything else.
- [39:24]
David Lemieux
Robbie Taylor would hit the road with the Dead in 1976 and stage manage the Grateful Dead all the way to the end of their career in 1995, as well as various projects after Jerry Garcia's death.
- [39:35]
Jesse Jarno
I got some input from Dan Healy. Dan Healy turned me on to one important thing. He didn't really hang out much, but he came over and he was very nice to me. And one thing he wanted to do was put in LED metering, vertical scale. And so he built all that. And then we just worked it into the design. But little did I know he was working his way into wanting to do the record, which I thought I was. My entitlement for building the being there for a year and a half, building there, or maybe longer than that. But I never had an agreement. I never brought it up. I just assumed almost that they'd want me to do another record.
- [40:22]
David Lemieux
I thought.
- [40:25]
Jerry Garcia
I met a man.
- [40:28]
Jesse Jarno
Who.
- [40:29]
David Lemieux
Said barn card had worked with them on American Beauty as well as David Crosby's era defining if I could only remember my name and stayed a part of their extended family, showing up for softball games and the occasional live show, not to mention briefly living in the house at 5th and Lincoln in San Rafael during a brief window when the band and or record companies weren't occupying it.
- [41:03]
Jesse Jarno
So I build all this stuff and. And we get the Stevens machine in there and.
- [41:07]
Robert Hunter
And.
- [41:07]
Jesse Jarno
And it's. And it's time to like, okay, I think I'm supposed to be doing this. And then they said. And then. And then Healy's you know, thinking he's going to do it. And I said. And so I. I addressed the band directly. I already was standing there. And I said, well, why am I not doing this? And so then he said, well, why don't you both do it? I'm going, oh, no, I was mistaken. Only another.
- [41:43]
Jerry Garcia
Stranger.
- [41:55]
David Lemieux
In the Grateful dead archives at UC Santa Cruz, there's a paper titled Production Plan for GD103. That is the third official release from Grateful dead Records after 101, which was Wake of the Flood and Mars Hotel 102. 103 would become blues for Allah. No part of this plan would prove to be accurate. From the name of the studio to the five deadlines it listed. Originally, the band had been planning to track at his master's Wheels in San Francisco, the familiar studio once known as Pacific High, where they'd made Working man's dead in 1970, and where they mixed Europe 72 and other projects after their comrades took over and renamed it Alembic. Originally, they were supposed to start recording on January 3rd, begin mixing on March 3rd, and mastering on March 15th, releasing the album on April 30th. At least on the timeline that we and our current 1975 Grateful Dead Occupy, they wouldn't make their first proper multi tracks for final album takes until June. The session started out very chill.
- [42:59]
Jesse Jarno
It sure is good, that band.
- [43:01]
Robert Hunter
I hear their latest record is a killer.
- [43:03]
Jesse Jarno
Their first one was Dying.
- [43:05]
David Lemieux
That was Billy Kreutzman recommending the Meters to his bandmates. You can hear him and Garcia messing around with the song Jungle man on the February 28 session at ACES.
- [43:16]
Donna Jean Gottschall McKay
They're slow triplet syncopations, man.
- [43:18]
Jesse Jarno
That's all it is.
- [43:19]
David Lemieux
It's not.
- [43:20]
Jesse Jarno
You.
- [43:34]
David Lemieux
Want to. Bobby Weir had some new responsibilities as a studio owner. I love this little interaction with Dan Healy. I think.
- [43:45]
Jesse Jarno
I gotta get some of those stale cigarettes more dirty.
- [43:47]
Robert Hunter
Oh, yes, replace it with some fresh cigarettes.
- [43:52]
David Lemieux
With their studio in the trees and no road dates pressing, the Grateful Dead were very briefly suspended entirely in a special magical bubble of their own creation, keeping the outside world completely at bay in a way they never achieved while writing or recording music. And unlike the other studios they'd worked in, the proprietor didn't mind if they lit up the occasional or frequent herbal jazz cigarette or any Bulgarian. Steve Brown was in charge of coordinating the sessions.
- [44:19]
Steve Brown
Bill had to come all the way down from way up north and come there and stay overnight somewhere. So he was up there a bunch and coming down early in the morning so we'd be there by Midday, so we could get going.
- [44:32]
David Lemieux
Billy Kreutzman and his family had moved a few hours north to Kamchi in Mendocino County.
- [44:37]
Steve Brown
It was mainly making sure that once everybody was there, that everybody had what they needed and wanted to have to be comfortable. And then bringing them in stuff that they needed or wanted. Or could you go move my car down there so we can get this other car to come in and stuff? So I'm having to drive. And who's got this fancy car down here? He says, oh, just use that to go to the market. Okay. All right, here's the key.
- [45:02]
David Lemieux
The first four months of the Blues for Allah sessions were devoted to developing the new songs. The assigned co producing team of Steven Barncard and Dan Healy didn't quite gel.
- [45:13]
Jesse Jarno
I spent about a couple of weeks and it was all Dan pretty much at the controls. We didn't. He didn't really. He was just basically just kind of pushing me aside, actually. I probably should have stayed around and just produced and stayed on the Talk back and, you know, just let it roll off my back or something. But I had become pretty fried about the whole San Francisco Grateful Dead scene. And at the same time, Crosby and Nash were kind of calling. And I actually had arranged to get a job down at the Village Recorder in Los Angeles. So I had made friends down there. And so one day I just. I just said, I'll see you. And I took the eight track and I moved it down with me and I took it for payment, basically, of the project. I didn't even ask and I didn't get any complaints.
- [46:02]
David Lemieux
And Steven Barnard exited the Grateful Dead scene stage left or right, even. But while the Dead didn't start taping final takes until June, there are plenty of cassettes from the Blues for Allah sessions to dig into. Steve Brown.
- [46:28]
Steve Brown
I recorded all the rehearsal stuff while we were developing, from the first days all the way to the end. So those are kind of interesting. The sound that came out of the soundboard and went all the way down, almost kind of a bridge, really, into his living room. I had two machines. I ran the studio line out to Weir's living room and then had the one machine that I would give Jerry a copy from if he was the one that really wanted it to take home and play in his car and stuff when he went. And I'd keep one from the other machine.
- [47:03]
David Lemieux
And in the tiny triangular control room at Aces, there was a chance that either Dan Healy or Robbie Taylor were making their own cassettes or even multi tracks. Lot of tape sources out There, this is labeled as the show tune jam from February 28th. Can anybody identify? Here's how Garcia described the vibe to Peter Simon in 1975.
- [48:00]
Robert Hunter
The studio, in terms of just energy, is more relaxed, quiet sort of scene. It's not like a concert. And we're not into being artificially energetic, you know, we're not into just getting ourselves excited in the studio and trying to perform live in the studio, essentially. We have never tried. Tried to do that. So it's been appropriate in our case to do a lot of live records just because that's what we do.
- [48:28]
David Lemieux
Blair Jackson spoke with Garcia about blues for ALA in 1988, and Garcia told him, we kind of made a ground rule for that record. Let's make a record where we get together every day and we don't bring anything in. The whole idea was to get back to that band thing where the band makes the main contribution to the evolution of the material. So we'd go into the studio, we'd jam for a while, and then if something nice turned up, we'd say, well, let's preserve this little hunk and work with it, see if we can't do something with it. And that's how we did most of that album. What became Crazy Fingers originally had a hard rock and roll feel. It was completely different. That was the track known as Distorto from pretty early in the sessions, which would eventually morph into Crazy Fingers, which we'll talk about in due time.
- [49:27]
Robert Hunter
We're developing those ideas en masse. You know, we're not. I'm not, for example, doing like I normally do, which is run off for a week or so. And Hunter and I, you know, knock out nine or ten songs a year. You know, there they are. And those are songs, and we learn them and. And the arrangement grows depending on everybody's contribution. We're not doing that. What we're doing instead is just developing ideas, musical ideas, everyone, more or less participating.
- [49:54]
David Lemieux
Keyboardist Ned Lagin was around for a number of the early sessions. All through the spring of 75, I.
- [50:01]
Jesse Jarno
Was at Weir's studio every day that was a session. So we were jamming every day, and Blues for Allah came out of that. Tunes evolved out of jams or very rough ideas, or just a chord or a harmony or a feel in a way.
- [50:20]
Robert Hunter
Our development has been to synthesize various kinds of forms, like playing jazz, playing country and western, rhythm and blues and all that sort of thing, and then forming combinations of all these various genres and styles within what we're doing, within our Instrumentation. And now we're. We're sort of working on creating styles, you know what I mean, Rather than just being eclectic or just synthesizing other styles.
- [50:52]
Jesse Jarno
If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe.
- [51:00]
David Lemieux
Please welcome back musicologist Sean o', Donnell, professor and Deputy Dean of the Arts and Humanities at the City College of New York.
- [51:07]
Sean O'Donnell
If Working man is their Bakersfield album, this is their fusion album. They've always been synthesizing styles, but this kind of hits a fusion along the lines to me of Return to Forever, maybe Weather Report, a kind of groove based fusion, rather than the sort of learned camp that I would probably put Frank Zappa in or Mahavishnu. I'm sure they were listening to, to all of it. But Al Dimiola arrives in. In. In return to forever, like in 74 and where have I Known you before the album. But then it's got the Dead groove, so it's still this groove based fusion.
- [52:03]
David Lemieux
Help on the Way was the first public product of the new language leading off Blues for Allah, Grateful that archivist David Lemieux.
- [52:20]
Donna Jean Gottschall McKay
It's a bold opening of an album. It's like, you know, the Dead have been away for a year, away from studio recording since Mars Hotel. They haven't been on the road for a year. And then they open with this. It's like, I don't want to say a punch in the face that sounds violent. It's like a wake up call. It's like, hey, we're back and we mean business.
- [52:41]
Jerry Garcia
Paradise wa. On the crest of a waver angel flame she has no pain Like a child she is here she is not to blame.
- [53:00]
Donna Jean Gottschall McKay
I find it a powerful song. I find it a very quotable song. It's one of those things where, you know, I think in day to day life we all in. In whatever circumstances we're in, there's always a Dead lyric for something, for whatever situation you're in, good or bad, happy or sad, stressful or not.
- [53:32]
David Lemieux
It had taken the Dead a few months to get to Help on the Way. Though the album sessions were undoubtedly collaborative, ultimately, Help on the Way bore the familiar songwriting stamp of Jerry Garcia and Robert Hunter. But it first shows up on the tapes probably before Hunter heard it, and it was pretty fully formed on some levels. That's from the April 2, 1975 writing session at ACES, the One Drummer Quintet, Dead. One thing is clear, the instrumental piece Slipknot was already in some amount of shape by then. In fact, Slipknot is probably the earliest seat of Blues For a La as a whole, with the riff turning up a full year before the sessions, with some inklings even before that. As you may have noticed, we're like an hour into the episode, and we're only just digging in to help on the Way itself. So we're gonna save Slipknot for the next episode. But I'd suggest that Slipknot fed into the song that came before it with Help on the Way, perhaps even reverse engineered as a way to get to the Slipknot riff. It's perhaps a bit like if Jerry Garcia had written the great final rhyme to a verse, but then needed to construct a series of couplets to set it up. As a reminder, here's what the Slipknot riff sounds like as recorded on the album. By the time the band hits Slipknot, the melody has already been foreshadowed. Please welcome musicologist Chadwick Jenkins, an assistant professor at the City College of New York. As a listener, it clearly comes from that riff in Help on the Way. It's that little riff that then they elaborate it and it becomes longer. What I think is so interesting as chronologically, as a listener, is that what you hear first as is just a connector riff. It's not even the main riff at the beginning, right. Because the bass is really focused on the beginning. It's just a connector to get you into the singing, but right. And then you're in and then it connects those things. So at first it's just this kind of functional thing, but then it shows up in his guitar solo. If we're comfortable with the conclusion that Jerry Garcia had the Slipknot riff first and worked backwards, I think maybe the bulk of Help on the Way was written over the course of March, turning up in early April, just before the sessions took an extended pause for Jerry Garcia's east coast tour with Legion of Mary. At least in terms of the tapes that survive, there's not much by way of its development. And by the June rehearsals, the song was done besides the words. The band debuted it as an instrumental during the June 17th Bob Freed Memorial Boogie at Winterland, a show we'll get into later this season. On July 3, the band recorded the basic instrumental track in one continuous performance of Help on the Way and Slipknot, choosing Take five.
- [58:51]
Sean O'Donnell
Sean o' Donnell to my mind, it might be some of Jerry's best rhythmic playing, and I kind of mean that in a micro timing sense, where the placement of everything is just so perfectly in the pocket and so you get those blasting chords, the f Minor chords that sort of announced in this very syncopated way.
- [59:10]
Jesse Jarno
Yet we're here.
- [59:11]
Sean O'Donnell
And this is like the opening of the. The album. And it's really attention grabbing. And then Jerry just plays this super hip in the pocket little arpeggio thing. It's clever. It's just an arpeggio of the quarter you're playing. And then he does another arpeggio. There'll be the. The whole step under to land back on the same chord. But then when he does the next time, that that whole step under feeds right into the next chord, the C minor. It's almost like it's nothing, but it's just perfect. The sort of composed riffing, the sort of Help on the Way riffs, they're. They're not jazz, they're just sort of triadic arpeggios. And it's a language he's been using in single chord jams like Darkstar or Birdsong for a long time, but now it's written and they fall in a very specific pocket.
- [60:17]
David Lemieux
And there's also a musical logic behind the riff that would recur in other places on the album, specifically tonal ambiguity.
- [60:24]
Sean O'Donnell
The Help on the Way little arpeggio riff. The one little riff has six notes of the key and leaves out the one that would define your actual musical space. So it's like F minor, but it doesn't have the sixth note of the scale where you'd be like, oh, this is natural minor, or this is Dorian mode, or what. And so he holds it until you get to the next bit of the verse and the vocal lines, and then he nails the D natural. The chords hit it and the vocal line hits it, and it's a thing, even though it's by omission. The drama of it's created by, like, using a smaller set of notes and then reserving the last piece of information for a dramatic moment. So that would be like on Poised for Flight, that section, and then suddenly it's okay.
- [61:18]
David Lemieux
Unlike lots of Dead songs, Help on the Way has a definitive answer to the question of which came first, the music or the words. In this case, the music. And with the music done, it was time for the words.
- [61:29]
Jerry Garcia
Paradise waits on the crest of a wave her angels inflame she has no pain Like a child she is pure she is not to blame More than.
- [61:48]
David Lemieux
Past Dead albums, Grateful Dead lyricist Robert Hunter was an elusive figure around the sessions. It seems like he showed up in early March, around the time they were originally supposed to have finished Basic tracks. Here's how Hunter remembered His work on Blues For a la to WLIR in 1978, and I'm pretty sure he's thinking of his contributions to the album's first and last songs.
- [62:09]
Jesse Jarno
Here I was living in England while we were laying down tracks. This is the first time I ever worked this way, where they put down all the tracks. And so I came in with pretty complete basics to work with and wrote the lyrics to an album that was Ira de Vere, and I'm not certain that I do my best work that way.
- [62:34]
David Lemieux
It's not quite as cut and dry as that. Hunter was in and out of the sessions as the band worked on the music. Thanks to Steve Brown, we can see the progression of how Help on the way evolved@dead.net deadcast we've posted images from a few different versions of the Help on the Way lyric drafts that Steve saved. In its earliest iteration, there were 10 different verses with only a few phrases that made it into the final song.
- [62:57]
Steve Brown
And Jerry would go through. Oh, I like this one. Well, what if I put in this? Yeah, it's like a menu, you know, you pick this, pick this.
- [63:05]
David Lemieux
The first verse originally went like, Help on the way Will. I know. Yeah, I know. It's a foretold thing. Help on the way. Well, a bird who can fly is worth many that just sing do today on a long shot did you say make a quick stop? Love, love, love may be today what can I say with that love Day to day insanity's king and I worked.
- [63:30]
Jesse Jarno
Very, very hard on this. I wrote most of these songs over 20, 30 times, trying to get them just right. And I believe that my lyric work. My lyrics are overworked on this. It was not just that tendency. You start. You start being a professional artist and take a great deal of pride in what you do and. And you sort of start slipping away from your inspiration in a right. And you start getting. Bearing down too hard on it. Trying to perfect each line, trying to.
- [64:02]
David Lemieux
Make each one a jewel Solomon says life is short, make it sweet, get right back on your feet it's all just a guess Right or wrong, you belong in your own driver's seat you can steer, ain't much to it change the gear, double clutch it Drive, drive, drive, do retreat what else is true but your love and the blues that you learned on the street.
- [64:26]
Jesse Jarno
I'm not for working that way anymore because I don't think it's what it is that I can do with a lyric. Doesn't really come out at its best that way because I can make something overlooked I can tool until it's a glittering jewel but nobody can see in me and if nobody likes it then I don't like it either because they are supposed to communicate There are supposed.
- [64:47]
Jerry Garcia
To be moving for pause for flight Wings spread bright spring from night into the sun.
- [65:00]
David Lemieux
I think Hunter's thinking mainly of Help on the Way and the album's title track. As we'll get to, his other lyrical contributions to the album were written mostly in advance of the music.
- [65:09]
Jerry Garcia
Don't stop to run she can fly like a lie she can't be outdone.
- [65:18]
David Lemieux
We beg to differ, frankly. The second lyric sheet we have for Help on the Way has the lyrics almost in their final form, but then at the bottom, just for good measure, apparently, is another set of lyrics, some of which seem to go with the Help on the Way rhyme scheme and some don't, but really tie the room together almost literally. Beautiful lie you can pray, you can pay till you're buried alive Blackmail or blues Everyone in the room around a part of the noose Slipknot jig, slipknot jig, slipknot jig did someone say help on the way? Well I know yeah I do that there's help on the way I'm going to guess that this bit of writing gave a name to the Slipknot instrumental, which always did sound a bit like a musical slipknot to me, a tight riff that ends up where it starts. Once they pull on it, though, we'll get to that next time. Or maybe the music came first and Hunter rationalized it the same way I just did. It also explains maybe the name of the song on the studio tracking sheet. Slip Jig. One word, but it's hard to know for sure in which order things occurred. The vocals were recorded five days after the instrumental tracks on July 8, meaning it was probably sometime between June 17 and July 8 that Robert Hunter finished off the lyrics, maybe even after the basic track had been recorded, as he recalled. It makes me think that Hunter was back and forth between the UK and the state several times through 1975, at least once in early March, returning by early July.
- [66:55]
Jerry Garcia
Help on the way well I know only this I got you today don't fly away Cause I love what I love and I want it that way.
- [67:14]
David Lemieux
While Hunter might not have been fond of the Help on the Way lyrics, I think they open his work into a new space. Well, wake of the Flood and from the Mars Hotel we're filled with earthy imagery like the lazy summer home of Eyes of the world the Rio Grandio of Mississippi Half step the ship of fools on the cruel sea the lyrics to Help on the Way are plenty celestial but carry a harder edge. An angel in flames flying like a lie Being trapped and pleading to be let go Hoping love is not lost. It's a song perched on the edge of darkness and light with a palpable tension at the border Tell me the.
- [67:48]
Jerry Garcia
Cost I can pay Let me go tell me love is not lost Sell everything without love day to day Insanity's.
- [68:04]
David Lemieux
King Robert Hunter, as always, was a specialist in ambiguity, as David the Mute pointed out. Matt Campbell left us this thought about the Help on the way lyrics@stories.dead.net if you ever want to feel like you are the main character in your own little movie or vignette, something like that, put that song on while you're on your way to work or boarding an airplane or something like that. You will feel as though you are on a mission that you will not come back from, like some super cool secret sand spy. It just invokes this sense of adventure and danger in such a cool, funky and eerie way.
- [68:46]
Jerry Garcia
I will pay day by day anyway Locked bolt and key Crippled but free I was blind all the time I was learning to see.
- [69:08]
David Lemieux
If you have thoughts or tales to tell about any of the songs on Blues For Allah, well, besides Help on the Way, please don't hesitate to record us a message@stories.dead.net there aren't too many surprises on the Help on the Way studio tracks. What's perhaps more of a surprise is what's not on them. On the previous two Dead studio albums in 1973 and 1974, as well as Robert Hunter's Tiger Rose, Jerry Garcia and Keith Godschow had both added synth overdubs, but on Blues For Alla, the only keyboards are acoustic piano and Fender rhodes. The rhodes here was recorded onto three through two microphones and a direct line, then bounced down to one and the piano overdub the same day as the vocals. For the only place on the album, at least as listed on the tracking sheets, Phil Lesh is deploying the quad pickups on his bass. Here's one of the tracks and the other. During the very particular window when these tracks were recorded, Round Records had just released its one and only Quad lp. Ned Legend Seastones Blues For Alla did not make it to Quad. Bob Weir's guitar was originally also recorded on three tracks. Here's the part direct into the console.
- [71:02]
Sean O'Donnell
Sean o' Donnell here, he's playing in what I think is like the start of his next phase style, where he's playing a lot more small chords, if you will, or hinting at the chords would be adjacent to a more traditional rhythm guitar player, but not, you know, it's still Bob.
- [71:20]
David Lemieux
But it was also recorded through a microphone as well as through a Leslie rotating cabinet. And those two tracks were bounced down onto a single track to make room for the combined electric Rhodes track. So those three tracks could be used for additional overdubs. Efficient mixing. Here's Weir's entwined Leslie and clean guitar. With the room cleared by bouncing down the electric piano tracks. Weir and Donna Jean also had room for two different unison background vocal parts on the master tracks. There's a cute moment of Weir warming up and Donna giggling quietly. But here's what the vocal part sounds like. There are some subtle answer vocals and I can never figure out who is singing them. Here's what they sound like in the final mix. Turns out it was a team effort.
- [73:05]
Jesse Jarno
Hush.
- [73:08]
Jerry Garcia
Dia hush.
- [73:12]
David Lemieux
Jerry Garcia takes up the least amount of track space here. Just one track of vocals and one track of guitar. Garcia is playing his Doug Irwin Wolf guitar on the whole album, by the way, only switching over to the Travis Bean guitars. Near the end of the summer, Matt Campbell left us this observation about the help on the Way solo. It's like the first concrete example, in my opinion, that we have of what we now consider to be the Jerry tone, that very plinky, cutting, super direct guitar tone that has kind of defined Garcia as a guitarist for a lot of heads and keepers of the faith of that style of playing when they wanted to. As on the album, the song had a definitive beginning.
- [74:43]
Jerry Garcia
Paradise Wave on the crest of a wave her angels in flame she has no pain Like a child she is new she is not to blame.
- [75:02]
David Lemieux
But live it seems like Jerry Garcia liked to get everybody on the same groove page before committing. Most versions start with the distinctive Prelude gallop, including the debut with vocals, August 13, 1975, at the Great American Music Hall, a show we'll have much more to say about later this year. For now, we'll just note that it was a perfect framework for the band members to come in one by one.
- [75:25]
Jesse Jarno
On the piano we have Mr. Keith Gottschau. On the drums. On stage left, Mr. Mickey Hart. On bass and vocals, Mr. Philip Lesh. On rhythm guitar and vocals, Mr. Bob Weir. On the drums. On stage right, Mr. Bill Kreutzman. On the vocals, Mrs. Donna Jean Gotcho. Our lead guitar and vocalist, Mr. Jerry Garcia. Will you welcome, please, the grateful Pitch.
- [76:26]
David Lemieux
It never happened like that again. And like pretty much everything played that night. It may have been the tightest version of Help on the Way the Dead would ever perform. They opened with it again in Golden Gate park in September. You can hear Jerry Garcia set the tempo and then they all find the groove together. Help on the Way In Slipknot had three different phases in the Dead's repertoire. It was a centerpiece when they returned to the Road in 1976. Opening sets about half the time. The June 1976 shows get a spotlight on the blues for Olive 50th as well. Archivist David Lemieux.
- [77:30]
Donna Jean Gottschall McKay
Disc three, what We've Done. We went to the Tower Theater in Upper Darby in Philadelphia and we included well over an hour of material from the June 76 comeback tour specifically focusing on. Plus some other stuff, but specifically focusing on songs that were on Blues For Allah that they were playing at the time. So we've got from the June 21 show. Music never stopped. And Help Slip Franklin's all live versions.
- [78:28]
David Lemieux
Help on the Way itself wasn't a song that jammed much. That's what Slipknot was for and that's what the next episode is for. But there were some great solos.
- [78:43]
Jerry Garcia
Sam, help us.
- [79:15]
David Lemieux
The song disappeared in the fall of 1977, returning around five years later in the spring of 1983. Here it is on the in and out of the garden box from October 12, 1983, where it was greeted as a liberator whenever it was played. Pretty crisp beginning in the early 1980s. The whole song felt like a throwback to the Dead's earlier selves. Not an era of many bass solos nor fusion E guitar.
- [80:08]
Donna Jean Gottschall McKay
It was in the repertoire 75 to 77 and then 83 to 85. And then it came back at Hampton in 89 through right to 95.
- [80:19]
David Lemieux
It stuck around the full Help on the Way. Slipknot Franklin's Tower Suite made a dramatic return in October 1989 alongside Darkstar and Addicts of My Life at the Hampton Coliseum. It's been released as a beautiful soundboard on formerly the Warlocks. But we're going to go with the audience tape of October 8th here for maximum Spine tingling and hair raising. The first edition of Dead Bass hit the lot in 1987, and by 1989 there was a more unified knowledge of what constituted a bust out. I love the second wave of Cheers when Garcia starts singing.
- [81:20]
Donna Jean Gottschall McKay
I didn't see any shows on the fall of 89. It was the first tour since the first time I saw the dead 2 1/2 years earlier that I didn't see any shows on a given tour. I thought, fall of 89, it's my last year of high school, I've got to focus. What a mistake that was.
- [81:36]
David Lemieux
Always with a good advice. David.
- [81:37]
Donna Jean Gottschall McKay
I got the call after the first night in Hampton that they had brought out Help Slip and I couldn't believe it. That's something amongst many others that I never thought the Dead would play again.
- [81:50]
David Lemieux
This is the soundboard version. The cheers keep going. When the band debuted or revived a song, the tapes didn't make it around instantaneously. So it sometimes took Deadheads time to catch up and gave fans something to chase. To channel this excitement, we're gonna mix together two versions of a similar story, which I imagine happened for lots of heads in 1989 and 1990. Keith Eaton left us this story@stories.dead.net around 1977, maybe 78, my brother was heading.
- [82:54]
Rich Mahan
Off to boarding school and he said, don't touch my records.
- [83:01]
David Lemieux
Of course, for me, as a 11.
- [83:05]
Rich Mahan
Or 12 year old or whatever, I couldn't resist Stones, Tull, Zeppelin, all that stuff.
- [83:14]
David Lemieux
But one thing that really intrigued me was the album Blues For Allah. I could not wrap my head around it. But the one thing that stuck with me was that opening sequence of Help Slip Franklins.
- [83:30]
Rich Mahan
I couldn't get it out of me.
- [83:33]
David Lemieux
And it was something that for me.
- [83:36]
Rich Mahan
As a young deadhead in the 80s.
- [83:38]
David Lemieux
And 90s, I just thought, I'll never.
- [83:40]
Rich Mahan
See that, you know, that's not the.
- [83:42]
David Lemieux
Kind of music that the Dead play anymore. It's not something that I'll ever experience.
- [83:49]
Donna Jean Gottschall McKay
First night of the first ever Dead show at the Knickerbocker on March 24 of 90. They opened the show with Let the Good Times Roll. And Let the Good Times Roll was an interesting opener because they always followed it up with a traditional opener. They didn't do Let the Good Times Roll, Little Red Rooster, Let the Good Times Roll. You know, me and Michael, they would always follow it with Touch of Gray, Hell in a Bucket, Shakedown Street, Jack Straw, it was Bertha. It was always followed by a proper show puter. So during Let the Good Times Roll, I'm thinking, what's it going to be? And oh, and they hadn't yet done a first set. I think they'd ended a first set with one, but they hadn't opened a first set yet since they brought it back with help Slip Franklin. So that wasn't even on the bingo card. And I remember Let the Good Times Roll End and I'm waiting. Oh, what's going on? What's the opener going to be? What are they going to do as the. The actual proper opener? And then you just heard Jerry strum it. Da da da da. The kind of intro to it. And I just. I was in the taper section, losing my mind.
- [84:56]
David Lemieux
I missed the first night of the Warlocks, saw the second night and felt as though I'd missed something. And I got shut out of the.
- [85:08]
Rich Mahan
Third night of Nassau in spring.
- [85:10]
David Lemieux
90 missed help slip. And it wasn't until Deer Creek that summer when I finally got it. And there it was, live. And I can't explain how it felt when I heard that first blast into Help on the Way. Unbelievable.
- [85:51]
Donna Jean Gottschall McKay
That thing Phil does on the intro to Help Slip. Franklin's is one of my favorite things in Grateful Dead music. That kind of chord progression he does, I just absolutely love it. And he did that perfectly.
- [86:06]
David Lemieux
Whenever Phil dropped those particular bombs, use your third ear to imagine them in their full quadraphonic glory. It's a story that repeated itself whenever they played the song. With new fans constantly getting on the bus or old fans finally catching the right night, an opening blast I will never, ever get sick of. But let's return to 1975 before we depart for the day. Fans at Winterland and the Great American Music hall might have been the first heads to hear the Dead play Help on the Way live, but they might not have been the first to get a sneak preview. Our friend Steve Brown had a healthy commute each morning when I was driving.
- [86:47]
Steve Brown
To Marin because I lived in Pacifica, and I would go up that one long ride before you get on the bridge.
- [86:54]
David Lemieux
If you were hitching a ride north from Pacifica in the spring of 1975, you'd be psyched if Steve pulled over in his comfy van with the shag carpeting.
- [87:02]
Steve Brown
And here's these kids, a gal and a guy. And anyway, I would take them up to Marin County.
- [87:08]
David Lemieux
As the person responsible for making safety tapes at the Dead album sessions in progress, Steve had some very fresh recordings at hand.
- [87:16]
Steve Brown
I would be playing what I just got the night before, the day before.
- [87:20]
David Lemieux
So let's imagine ourselves there until we return. Cruising across the Golden Gate Bridge in the spring of 1975 with the windows down and the newest Grateful Dead blaring. This supercut of the studio tracks of Help on the Way isn't how any of Steve's hitchhikers heard the tapes. But who knows how time and space might have warped in the confines of Steve's Econoline. See you next time.
- [87:52]
Jerry Garcia
Paradise way Lights on the crest of a wave? Her angels in flame? Don't stop to run? She can fly like a lie? She can't be outdone? I will pay?
- [89:01]
David Lemieux
Hush, dear.
- [89:07]
Jerry Garcia
Hush? Here.
- [89:38]
David Lemieux
Sam.
- [90:09]
Jerry Garcia
Help on the way? Well, I know only this? I got you today? Don't fly away? Cause I love what I love? And I want it that way.
- [90:28]
Rich Mahan
Thanks very much for tuning in to the good old Grateful Dead cast. Friends. We'd like to thank our special guests in this episode. David Lemieux, Donna Jean, Gottscho McKay, Ron Rakow, Stephen Barnard, Ned Lagin, Steve Brown, Gary Lambert, Keith Eaton, Sean o', Donnell, Chadwick Jenkins and Matt Campbell. Extra special thanks to friend of the Dead cast David Ganz for his ongoing contributions of audio from his interview archive. Executive producer for the good Oliver Grateful Dead cast Mark Pincus, produced for Rhino Entertainment by Rich Mahan Promotions and Jesse Jarno. Special thanks to David Lemieux, Brian Dodd and Doran Tyson. All rights reserved.