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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. Ladies and gentlemen, fellow Deadheads, welcome to Season eight of the Good Old Grateful Dead Cast. I'm your co host Rich Mahan. Thank you very much for tuning in. We're glad you're here. In this episode of the Good Old Grateful Dead Cast, we dive into side one, track one on the Grateful Dead's 1973 studio album Wake of the Flood. That's right, get ready for a deep dive Into Half Step, Mississippi Uptown Toodaloo. It is the 50th anniversary of the Grateful Dead's wake of the Flood and to celebrate this, rhino has a grand 50th anniversary release which includes the original album, remastered, some really cool early demos of the songs from the album, and six songs from a live show at Magaw Memorial hall at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois on November 1, 1973. There will be special vinyl as well as standard black vinyl CDs and digital versions available. More info and pre orders are happening now over@dead.net hey, while you're over at dead.net, go to dead.net deadcast check out all of our past episodes. You can catch up on all the ones you've missed. We have the complete seasons one through seven and 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 Hit that like button. Leave a review and share it on social media with your friends. You have no idea how much it helps. Thank you very much. We have transcripts for many of your favorite Dadcast episodes available for your reading pleasure. Recently uploaded. Season 1 is there now too, so hop on over to dead.netdeadcast index and check them out. Hey, thanks to everybody who has recorded their stories over@stories.dead.net well now we're asking you to tell your stories about Wake of the Flood or any of the Songs from Wake of the Flood have a tale about the first time you heard Eyes of the World, or a wild tour yarn about that one version of Let it grow. No story too big or too small. Record yours over@stories.dead.net and you may just hear yourself on a future Dead cast. There is an option to write your story there, but if possible, please record yourself telling the story. If you need longer than the time allotted, leave a second one or a third. Thank you very much. Half Step, Mississippi Uptown Toodaloo it's more than just a mouthful of a song title. It's the album opener on what many heads consider to be their favorite studio excursion by the Dead. Wake of the Flood. Both Jesse and I were just saying how fun it is to get back to a track by track investigation of another album. And we think you'll feel the same way after experiencing this episode and peeling back the rapper on this classic Grateful Dead song, here's Jesse Jarno.
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In October 1973, the Grateful Dead released Wake of the Flood, their sixth proper studio album and first since American Beauty, almost exactly three years earlier.
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On the day when I was born Daddy sat down and cried I had the mark just as plain as day could not be.
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Grateful Dead archivist and legacy manager David Lemieux, Wake of the.
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Flood I will go on record here saying it is one of my favorite Grateful Dead studio records. Wake of the Flood is up there for me, definitely in the top five world. Up there with American Beauty and Working Man's Dead, of course.
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And from the Grateful dead Once again, Ms. Donna Jean Godshow McKay.
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Wake of the Flood was kind of a real departure. It was like a new era in the Grateful Dead. It started something different. And part of that difference was Keith, definitely, you know, the writing of the songs to be geared towards Keith. All the years combined.
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They melt into a dream A broken angel Sing from a guitar.
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There's some of the most classic Grateful Dead songs in the world came with Wake of the Flood.
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So what's on the album? After it was recorded but before it came out, Waer interviewed Bob Weir and other band members.
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Oh, wait a minute, let me see if I can remember. The first side starts off as Steptown Toodaloo. And then the second song is Keith's new song, Singer Blues Away. And the third song is Row Jimmy Row. The fourth song is Stella Blue. Then song one, side two is Here Comes Sunshine, the Eyes of the World and Then and then Minus we the Weather Report. Sweet parody bars one and two.
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Thank you, Weir. That's very impressive.
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What's not to love about singing those songs? They are just classic, classic. Mwah. Grateful Dead.
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Wake up to find out that you are the eyes of the world.
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The.
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Heart has its each is its homeland and thoughts of its own Wake now discover that you are the song that the morning bring the heart has its seasons, its demons and songs of its.
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Own There was so much on there that was different than what I was used to hearing. A lot of horns and other vocalists aside from from Donna and the Elect piano sounds. Vassar Clemens.
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That was the great Vassar Clements on fiddle. Part of a pretty rich guest list that reflected some of the dad's musical network in 1973.
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They enhance the album completely. I don't want to hear a stripped down version of this album. I don't want to hear a naked version of it without all these great horns and extra vocals and fiddle and all sorts of great stuff.
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Wake of the Flood is an album with thick arrangements and deep songs. In Circus Magazine, Jerry Garcia told Cameron Crowe about the songs on the album. They're a little more sophisticated in terms of structure than our other ones, the new tunes, but they're Grateful dad all the way. I mean, they sound like the Grateful Dead. I can't really look at them objectively, but I feel that they're better. It's hard to tell what direction they're moving in. They're really sort of dispersed in that they're widely patterned. All the songs are very different from each other and the ones that preceded them as well. One of the Deadhead hosts at WAER asked Weir about where he thought the Dead's music was headed.
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This may be sort of an elusive answer, but I really have little or no idea which way it's going now. But I imagine it'll probably keep doing a lot of it.
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As Marge Simpson once said, whatever it does, it's doing it now.
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Wait till you hear our next record before you try to form any concept of what dictionary music's hitting. Because this next record that's coming up is as marking a departure, I feel, at least, is as marked a departure from what we've been doing in the past, recording wise, as has any other recording we've ever put out.
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Fifty years later, both Weir and Garcia's assessments of Wake of the Flood seem pretty accurate. If you have a Dead cast bingo card, these next few establishing sentences will tick off a bunch of truisms about the Grateful Dead that we feel worth reiterating whenever we're starting to focus in on a new period of the band's. History. By 1973, both fans and the general public had known to expect constant change from the Dead. If they'd been seeing the Dead for any amount of time, they knew that the band were liable to show up the next time with a whole new set of songs that weren't on their albums, maybe even a whole new vibe with a whole new set of facial hair. They'd flowered from a psychedelic blues dance band to modal space jazz improvisers and studio experimenters before becoming the roots driven Bakersfield Dead of American Beauty, Working Man's Dead and Europe. 72 but in 1973, the dead were ready for their next evolution.
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Sunshine.
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Last season we talked about the music on the Here Comes Sunshine box set six shows from the spring of 1973. While the dead were playing some of the biggest shows of their career in the background, they were organizing something audacious. In the fall, the Grateful Dead showed up with not only a new record of their own, but a new record company of their own. That spring, at least in the Dead's business papers, it was still known as so what Records. By the time Wake of the Flood came out, it was Grateful Dead Records. We talked a bunch about the formation of the label in our Grateful Dead and company episode last season, speaking with the great Alan Trist of Ice 9 Publishing about how the idea of questing was literally written into the band's business papers.
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The term questing, I mean the idea of a group vision questing is kind of what we were going on, is normally associated with an individual vision quest. But there's no reason why a group can't have a vision quest too. And we did.
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This season we have a new perspective on Grateful Dead records, which the band co founded with a friend they'd met after he'd moved from New York to San Francisco in 1966 to tell his own story. Please welcome to the Deadcast president and co founder of Grateful Dead and Round Records, Ron Rakow.
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I was a young Wall street person and when I wasn't around, they called me moneybags. I found that out later. It's hilarious. I didn't have any money. I mean, I had some money, but not like money, you know. I mean, it was like a little money.
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Over the next half dozen years, Ron Rakow was a trusted member of the band's inner circle, from the hate to Europe. 72 he helped in the management of the Carousel Ballroom, took photographs, and served in a variety of roles.
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I brought people down from bad acid trips. I developed a way to do that. And it's infallible.
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Oh, yeah. Do tell.
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Well, I mean, the equipment guys would dose the audience every Saturday night. So it happened. A lot of people got two stones. I would be looking out for them. But yes. Otherwise, they were directed to me. And I had the secret stuff that brought them down. Gum. Doing gum. That was hilarious. How do I discover it? Having gotten myself very fucked up more than once. You got to have a lot of it because he's giving up sticky gum. But it's a long, thin thing. And they chew it and they. Then they say, oh, I'm better. Oh, good, now enjoy yourself, okay? Or they say, hey, I'm chewing the gum and I'm still fucked up. Oh, sorry. And I give them another one. I said, I didn't give you enough gum. And they chew that one. And then if they're still fucked up, I give them a third one. The most I ever had to give anybody is four. And then when they could hardly close their mouth, they were so concentrating on closing their mouth, they forgot they were stoned.
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Hey, it works. Ron had many adventures around the Dead world during the band's first half dozen years. We're going to save most of those for another time. And jump right to his gig in 1973 as new record company president.
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I never had any other job in the music business except with the dad.
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So how'd you end up organizing their record company?
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I had a background in organizing businesses and doing that. You know, I worked on Wall street and I went to college and I specialized in that sort of thing. And I actually was an A to a professor whose name is John R. Shubin. S H U B I N who wrote a book on how to effectively study an industry and or a company within an industry. And it was a big fat book. My wife typed it for him as a volunteer. Anyway, so I knew a lot about how to go about it just to sort of do it. And I wanted to create a situation where the Grateful Dead did something else unique. So that's what happened. I did what I always do. I told Jerry. Jerry said, take it away. And I did.
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Ron wrote up a set of fairly radical proposals called the so what? Papers, presenting alternatives to signing with a regular, already existing record label, Robert Hunter's copies in the Dead's archive at UC Santa Cruz for scholars to check out.
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I presented the so what papers to the band and the whole family July 4, 1972, at the home of Bill Kreutzman. And the whole Richeldead family was invited at that meeting I presented these volumes that you've seen, which we made by hand. We made about, I think, 30 of them and they got sucked up in a second.
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Independence Day 1972 seemed like a powerful time to start talking about an independent record company. There's lots more in this meeting from some other perspectives in our Grateful Dead and Co episode last season. But I wanted to ask Ron about a few of the more absurd but forward thinking ideas he had. One was to distribute the Dead's records via ice cream trucks.
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I was thinking about Good Humor Ice Cream ice cream trucks repurposed and reconfigured and redesigned by Kelly and Mouse. So there would be these little psychedelic trucks all around.
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These days those would be called pop up shops. Jack White's Third Man Records sells albums in a setup pretty close to this, for example. At its core, Grateful Dead Records was an attempt to rethink selling records from the ground up. A genuinely independent label, not just a subsidiary of an existing operation.
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Everybody's saying how we're going to be able to afford this. Everybody said that sooner or later. I mean, you would have said it sooner or later. How did you think you were going to pay for it? So that was the first thing I dealt with. I went to forget the name of the guy, but he was the congressman from the district that I lived in and went to his office and told his staff that they have a lot of hippies in their constituency and the hippies are a separate form and we should be designated as such. And that started a whole process. And in three months we got part of the United States government to declare hippies a separate minority. The reason I did that was so that I could get MESBIC money Minority Enterprise Small Business Investment Company money. Sbic. So I made a deal with them that if we put up 1500 bucks, they would give us some money that would chip off more money. That would chip off more money. P.S. $1500 would turn into 350,000. So that was my plan for how to finance it. And that was going to start us with a quantity of ice cream trucks. But I had to submit to answering questions by the sbic, which was the government agency that ran this money program for the government. So I made that all on a big chart, a big oak tag chart that was, I think, 3ft by 4ft. Hung it up in the front of the thing and up on top on the right hand corner, it talked about the sbic. And Bonnie Parker listened to the whole presentation. And then she went and walked around and looked at this thing and she sees Spic up in the corner of this chart and she goes into an anxiety fit. I don't know what to call it. She has an anxiety attack. And, you know, I mean, she's an important person in this organization as well. She was very effective at the time as being the comptroller, I guess you'd call her. Her husband was the CFO and she'd be the controller.
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Bonnie and David Parker were some of the band's oldest friends. David played in Mother McCree's Uptown Jug Champions and contributed lyrics to the Warlocks era song the only time is Now.
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So come walking in the sun with me, my little ones and remember that's the only time it comes.
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When Lenny Hart ran away with the band's money in 1970, the Parkers became part of a new three pronged management system. Sam Cutler looked after road business, John McIntyre handled industry business and the Parkers handled the business of the business.
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She just couldn't catch her breath. She worked at a company that had an SBIC loan and they couldn't pay it. And the SBIC sent monitors to stay inside the company. And every time a check came in or money came in of any kind, they took it. And it got everybody crazy that worked at the company and Bonnie was the bookkeeper and she remembered how up it made her. And she had a anxiety attack right then and there. I pulled out my pocket knife and cut that section of the chart off right there. I just cut it off and I said, I'll find another way to raise the money. Don't worry about it. But I did. I found another way to raise the.
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Money, but that was still a little ways off. The meeting was in early July 1972. With the ideas circulating around the band for a while. Imagine this conversation going on in the background of the Springfield Creamery benefit the next month or the Fox Theater shows from the fall on the Listen to the river box.
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I wrote the so what papers. And then it took those guys six, seven months to agree. Jerry agreed that we should do it in six or seven hours. Big Pen agreed in about a week. And everybody else just danced around. And I remember saying, well, what the fuck? I could wait forever for this. So just to keep myself cool, I got a job on the equipment crew because they really worked hard. So I worked on this equipment crew for six months or so. Seven months. That was a trip.
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But there was one more record industry boss that Rakow had to defeat.
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When we decided to go into the record business alone, it was a very Unpopular idea with everybody in the record industry. Just imagine what it would be like if the best bands that people had on the label went into business for themselves like we did. The labels, how would they do was a dangerous thing for them. So Clive Davis called up John McIntyre. He asked to meet the band at a meeting with me so that he could debate me in front of the band. Clive Davis is a big name, you know, he didn't become a big name last Thursday. He's been a big name for a very long time. So I was very anxious to do that because anything that sped the process up I was for. And I knew my shit.
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Clive Davis had become president of Columbia Records in 1966 and added many illustrious artists to their roster, infamously plundering acts from the Monterey Pop Festival the next year. He'd wanted the Dead for years and signed the New Riders of the Purple Sage in an effort to woo Jerry Garcia. For when the Dead got out of their own contract in the summer of 1972, as the band were pondering the so what papers, Davis was busy signing Aerosmith and Earth, Wind and Fire.
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So anyway, we set it up. Dan Cutler had a booking agency down the street from the Grateful Dead office. And he had the most stunning gothic dining room table you ever saw. It was a big table with 12 thrones around it, hand carved gothic chairs. And anyway, so they're around the table and Clive Davis comes in and all the important guys are there. Let's see, there was the band and Hunter, Owsley, Ramrod and maybe Canelario, somebody like that. Anyway, so we're sitting around and we're starting to talk and Owsley comes in. Owsley goes right for Clive Davis, moves a little folding chair right next to Clive Davis arm and starts to talk in his ear. Clive is trying to have this incredible debate that these guys, me and Owsley, in his monotone voice, is whispering into his ear. We can all hear him, of course.
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One of Clive Davis early signings to Columbia was Janis Joplin, a close friend to the Dead, and especially Owsley Stanley, who'd of course become a huge star. Her relationship with Clive Davis in Columbia was complicated both before and after her death in 1970. There are those who might describe that relationship as exploitative, to use a fairly mild synonym.
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He's saying, sir, you're putting out press about a woman who's very, very important in our lifestyle. Her name is Janis Joplin and you're making it look like she's a tramp. And we find it really offensive and It's. It's not good for you, it's not good for her, it's not good for us. We'd like you to change that. And he goes on and on and on. That's the way Owley was. He was amazing. Anyway, so we're sitting there and we're choking back laughter because Owsley's doing what he does with us. He's doing it with Clive Davis. And it's hard for us not to be rolling on the floor. So Clive is, like, looking, you know, like. It was really funny. He was so uncomfortable. He didn't know how to get rid of Owsley. He didn't know what to do.
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Hell, yeah, Bear. That'd be dead one. Clive Nail.
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All of a sudden, Hunter, who's sitting there, boy to tears from this whole process, writes a name. Classy. L I V. Clive Davis on a piece of paper. He bends over and writes it and then he takes the name and he writes, Teva Devil D. Siva Devil C. That's Clive Davis spelled backwards. Look at it.
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Amazing. It's true. Clive Davis's name backwards is.
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So he takes this piece of paper and passes it around the table and all of us look at it and it goes up to where Clive is and it goes back the other way and then goes down the other side. Diva Devil C. Dead two.
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Clive Nil.
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There's no way that a guy with a name like Siva Devil C is going to make a deal with the Grateful Dead if Robert Hunter is in the room. No fucking way. Period.
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If a friend of the devil is a friend of mine, then a friend of obviously isn't. By 1973, the band committed to the project of starting their own label. Ron Rako just needed some startup money.
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I raised the money by selling the foreign rights to Atlantic. I made the deal for the foreign rights to Atlantic at Jerry Wexler. Remember him? Jerry Wexler. He was one of the founders. Anyway, he lived in the Hampshire House. I was staying at the Navarro, 112 Central Park South. The Hampshire house is 150 Central Park South. I walked over to Jerry's house and went up in the elevator, and we sat in his kitchen and made the deal. And we used it to get the label up and running. It was $300,000.
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The formation of Grateful Dead records wouldn't be announced until the end of the summer of 1973, but probably everything was in place by August. Here's Bob Weir and Donna Jean God show on Waer in September 1973, just after finishing the Album.
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We took the entire month of August off and went in there every day. Started the day we got back from Watkins Glen. Yeah. Started recording the day we got back from Watkins Glen and finished recording the.
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Day before we left. The Record Plant in Sausalito had been open for less than a year when the Dead rented Studio A for the entirety of August, shifting their dates slightly to accommodate getting back from their August 1 gig at Roosevelt Stadium. The original Record Plant had opened in New York in 1967 with an LA studio following in 1969. The Sausalito Record Plant officially began operations on October 29, 1972. It would become as storied as the others. Brian Kehue is the engineer responsible for mixing the new batch of Angel Share recordings.
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Slystone had its own room there. There's the Fleetwood Mac history in very light years, like Metallica took it on. So it's got these multi generational recordings, roots spreading out into the soil there that depending on what you like and what you appreciate, it was all done there.
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But before all that, for a moment in 1973, it was the Dead's turf. Besides side sessions at Mickey Hart's Rolling Thunder Barn in Nevada, it was the first real studio the Dead could work in, safe in the confines of Marin County. K San DJ Tom Donohue had purportedly encouraged the owners to open a Bay Area outpost, in part by promising that he would host live broadcasts. Four months later, Jerry Garcia's brand new bluegrass band, Olden in the Way, made their world debut from the Record Plant, Garcia's first public appearance on banjo in years. Garcia was through a few times throughout early 1973 for more broadcasts with Oldman the Way, as well as his group with Merle Saunders. Just a few weeks before the Dead were to take up residency, this version of Georgia on My Mind is now on Keepers.
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Sam.
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And sometime that summer too, the New Riders of the Purple Sage were through the Record Plant to make the Adventures of Panama Red, with a title track written by Olden and the Way's Peter Rowan. A few songs feature Donna Jean Gotcho.
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He got a nose for the business it won't go wrong he's very glad to meet you he can't stay alone. Okay, so Sam important, important man.
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He'S okay.
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Sam important export.
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Grateful Dead archivist David Lemieux.
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It was a hometown studio right there in Marin County. Great studio. I've been there a whole lot. It was still open when I lived in Marin. And there were a few times when Jeffrey was so busy in the Dead studio That we had to with Tom Fly, with Mickey's longtime engineer. We'd have to go and do projects at the plant. And I loved going there. It was so great. You just come off the causeway there off of In Sausalito. There's a place there called the Bay Model too. I used to love going down to the plant and then going into the Bay Model. Great part of Sausalito. But the studio was amazing. A lot of hallways that were very dark and then these incredible recording rooms and got to see where they recorded this album and wonderful place.
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The Studio closed in 2008, but earlier this year, engineer Brian Kehue got a surprise.
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Four months ago, I walked up to the door and knocked on it. My brother lives up in the northern part of California. We were in Sausalito and I said, hey, this building over here is highly significant to me. I work for Warner Brothers. I've done a lot of the projects that were recorded here. I'm an engineer by trade. And he said, come on in. We have bought the building. Ken Calais and Richard Dash it, who did rumors for Fleetwood Mac, have bought the building and are restoring it to a studio. And I said, that's great news. And he said, more than that. You'd be surprised at how much is left. So we went through the room and old tape machines, old compressors, old mics, they're still there. And the hippie, psychedelic Y, wooden, painted, carved, and my friend calls them cocaine pirates. But it's probably before the cocaine days kicked in. Those things are still all over the building. And I just love being in that room.
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One long standing rumor about the Record Plant is that they had nitrous tanks delivered on the regular. It was a substance with which the Dead collectively had a long standing relationship. For more on the Dead's relationship with Nitrus and the story of that tape, check out our episode closing of the Fillmore West. Steve Brown of Grateful Dead Records.
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The Record Plant was new. Oh, it's right close to home.
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Yeah, how convenient.
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And there's a restaurant right down the street. Oh, I can't think of a name right now. Look at the phone book. It's probably still there.
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Steve had been hired for his long experience being ahead in the record industry.
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We were still trying to set up the record company stuff, you know, and happen. And so I'm kind of in and out of the door a lot of.
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Time without an album out yet. Steve served as production coordinator.
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It was part of one of the hats I wore, kind of making sure the scenes that Were going to go down to get everybody in there at the right time and that we had all the equipment and stuff ready for everybody. So it was kind of being in charge of checking off stuff. And it was kind of easy because I'd been doing a lot of that in my world, you know, that had to do with record companies and stuff that I worked with. It was talking about what the next sessions would be and what we were trying to timewise, work with these studios, where we're going to be going and what time we can be there with everybody. And I can make sure that we've made contact with everybody and that with any kind of food, things that might be needed, if it's an evening thing and stuff like that.
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Naturally, when the Dead arrived, they brought plenty of gear.
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We kind of filled up the hallway sometimes there with a lot of our equipment and stuff. And they wound up complaining, oh, the guys in the other side of the studio here, they want to get in. They can't get in. You got to move those things.
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There'd been some pre production work on the album. Jerry Garcia brought a large batch of songs with him, all of which the Dead had been performing since at least the beginning of 1973, if not earlier. He'd even made some demos for the band to learn them.
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Wake up to find out that you are the eyes of the world the heart has its speeches, its homeland Thoughts of its own Wa not discover that you are the song that the morning brings but the heart has its seasons, its evenings and songs of its own.
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We'Ll have more on Garcia's exciting never heard home demos in upcoming episodes. To my ears, one of the most enthralling finds in recent years. The Dead finished their east coast shows on August 1st, Jerry Garcia's 31st birthday. And the sessions at the Record plant began on August 4th. David Lemieux.
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It didn't run long, certainly done before the 18th or so. And then they mixed it really quickly. And then they hit the road on September 6 for the September 7 show at Nassau. And then presumably mastered in that time too. Our lead times now on vinyl are 10 to 12 months. This was finished mastered six weeks before the album came out. October 15th. It came out. They recorded it quickly.
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The first day in the studio seems to have been devoted to demo songs for a few new tunes the band hadn't yet performed live. One was Bob Weir's involved weather report suite.
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We'll not speak but stand inside the rain Listen to the thunder shout I am, I am, I am, I am.
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The demo can be heard on the expanded 2006 edition of Wake of the Flood. We'll revisit it in a few episodes. The other demo on August 4th was by Phil Lesh Whoa, I'm Pride of.
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Cucamonga Whoa, Little olives in the sun Whoa, I had me some loving and I done some time.
- [36:51]
B
Pride of Cucamonga wouldn't find a home on Wake of the Flood, but that demo can be heard on the 2006 edition of from the Mars Hotel. August 4th was a Saturday. On August 5th, they took advantage of the fact that they booked the studio for an entire month, according to paperwork discovered by Joe Jupiel of Jerry Bass. Jerry Garcia spent his Sunday helping Robert Hunter mix some tracks that would end up on Hunter's solo debut the next year, Tales of the Great Rum Runners, including Arizona Lightning featuring Keith Godshow on Rhodes.
- [37:29]
C
Arizona Lightning cut out like a thundershot his voice rang clear across the USA where other men had tried and failed Ended up their days in jail this man always knew the horse to.
- [37:44]
B
Play when they returned to the Record Plant on Monday, the Grateful Dead began their album sessions with the song that would eventually lead off Wake of the Flood. It was one they didn't need to.
- [37:54]
C
Demo Half still, this has hit me up the tone hello baby, I'm gone Goodbye, have a cup of rock and I Farewell to you all Southern skies I'm on my way on my way.
- [38:19]
B
Properly, the name of the song is Mississippi Half Step Uptown Toodaloo, but I'm not sure I've ever heard anyone use the full name on tapes. It was always just Mississippi Half Step, which is what we're gonna call it, and save those five extra syllables. Sometimes six is enough.
- [38:35]
D
David Lemieux I think of a straightforward Grateful Dead song. If there is such a thing as maybe Bertha or something like that, this is not that. This is a song that has multiple parts that are very distinct.
- [38:47]
C
Hello Baby, I'm gonna.
- [39:00]
B
From Its very introduction, Ms. half step signaled something new, but not new in the Dead's music. Though its title hinted at a continuation of the americana themes of Europe 72 and the albums that preceded it, the music began to lean somewhere different, with Mississippi Half Step acting as a good transition. Please welcome back musicologist Sean o', Donnell, deputy dean of the Humanities and Arts at the City College of New York.
- [39:24]
D
It's coming out of their Bakersfield plus zone. Coming post 72 tours, they shift gears a little bit more and there's more synthesis like so the opening of the verse has got moves that are sort of out of the bluegrass vocabulary. Like Old Home Place has sort of same opening move in the verse and then there's a whole bunch of 25 type progressions in here that would be out of any sort of standard jazz tune. It just doesn't feel like that. The feel isn't jazz, it's still closer to honky tonk or Dixieland western swing.
- [40:06]
B
Ish Mississippi Half Step Uptown Toodaloo was one of the first songs the Dead debuted after returning from the Europe 72 tour before the album had even been finished. Here's an early version from Baltimore, September 17, 1972, two months and one day after its debut now Dick's picks 23 compared to the simple and easy to figure out descending intro like to direwolf, Mississippi Half Step begins with a somewhat involved melodic loop de loop that sets up the whole song for this episode of the Dead Cast, we're pleased to have access to the multi tracks for the studio recording of Mississippi Half Step, so we'll get to illustrate some of Shawn's points with isolated parts.
- [41:05]
D
You're coming down with the A, the G sharp, G F sharp that's motivic to the song. But before he does that, you get a little G G sharp A into it so you feel like you're going in reverse and that creates the little loop for you.
- [41:30]
B
It was pretty much done by the time it hit the stage in 72, especially with that toodaloo in the chorus and title, making it clear that it's a goodbye song of sorts. I personally hear Mississippi Half Step as another in a line of Garcia Hunter songs about down on their Luck Southerners, perhaps sung by a friend of Tennessee Jed. That first lyric, mixing the biblical brothers Cain and Abel with loaded dice and card games is classic Hunter to my ears. And then there's this Robert Hunter loved his card games and they play into a number of his Dead tunes. Pun half intended, but the invocation of Cain catching Abel cheating was getting near the end of the line for Hunter's poker period. At least with the Dead themselves. Thanks to the great Alex Allen of WhiteGum.com for pointing these out. There's the Queen of Spades in Direwolf, the Queen of Diamonds in Loser, and a jack of Diamonds, a popular card in folk music in China Cat Sunflower. But to rewind and get slightly geekier about that lyric, the title might also be heard as a multi leveled musical joke.
- [42:46]
D
There's a bunch of half steps because the chromatic riff at the opening is a half step, and that's also the basis of the solo. And then the turnaround's like a tritone substitution where you would be getting a, like a B7 to an E7 to go into the A minor, but it's a tritone sub of an F chord there. So you get the half step F to E. And Jerry even sings at the end of each verse, he's singing the D sharp over the F. That makes it a real traditional tritone substitution.
- [43:24]
B
And unlike Ramble On Rose, which references but contains no actual ragtime, half step switches to halftime at the beginning of the chorus. The song might not sound like what we think of as progressive rock, but there was lots of movement inside it.
- [43:43]
D
It's in the smaller bits that happens. So we think big sections is a verse and a chorus and, you know, the sort of outro. And the solos are over a different progression, but it feels familiar structurally. But when you take the four bar units that are internal, there's like way more variation than I was going say normal. Maybe not normal for a Dead song, but for looping song. So there's something about the feel of the four bar chunks even in the verse that starts to vary and the way the two halves of the verse cadence differently because the second chunk of four bars has to turn around to start back on the C again in major. But then the last four bars, the turnaround is rewritten so it gets to the chorus in A minor convincingly. And that's where you get the very cool F to E half step progression.
- [44:39]
C
Hello baby, I've gone Goodbye Africa Rock and rye melt you all Southern skies, I'm on my way.
- [44:54]
B
Rock and Rye is a classic Southern drink, mixing rye whiskey with sweet rock candy. But as others have astutely pointed out, rye might be heard as a stand in for the original source material of lsd, making Rock and Rye, in turn, a stand in for the Dead themselves. Many thanks to Alex Allen of WhiteGum.com, and David Dodd and the OG users at the annotated Grateful Dead lyrics site we've linked to both@dead.net deadcast and they're filled with pointers towards the various delusions in the lyrics. Though Jerry Garcia wasn't a lyricist, this verse has an antecedent in his and Robert Hunter's lives and the collective lives of the Dead as a social group.
- [45:32]
C
Lost my boots in transit Babe pile of smoking leather I nailed a retread to my feet and prayed for better weather.
- [45:47]
B
In early 1961, when he was 18, not long after Jerry Garcia moved to Palo Alto, he was involved in an auto accident that left Paul Spiegel Jr. One of his newest closest friends, dead. Here's how he described it to biographer Dennis McNally, now available in Jerry on Jerry, available as an audiobook from Hachette.
- [46:07]
E
Well, I mean, at 90 miles an hour, things happen fast. It was. He was. I mean it was like that deal going that fast. Oh yeah, we were hauling, we were going fast. It was a Studebaker Golden Hawk, you know, with a blower in it.
- [46:18]
B
But the driver lost control.
- [46:19]
E
I went through the windshield. It was so violent, so furious that I don't even know. I have no nothing, you know, for me it was. There was an unbroken moment between being in the car and being in a field. I was literally thrown out of my shoes. That was what the force of it was like. It was a sobering sensation.
- [46:39]
B
Understandably. It was a powerful and transformative moment in Jerry Garcia's life.
- [46:44]
E
My life started there. I was fucking around in there. Really. I was a moment. I was just a hum kid. I mean I had a few half horned I, but my life, that is the slingshot boom. That's what got me going. That's what made life gave life that urgency.
- [47:08]
B
We explored this moment of Jerry Garcia's life more in our American Folkie episode in the first season of the Dead Cast. I'm not sure of the deepest origins of how the phrase when your ship comes in came to be synonymous with striking at wretch. But I also hear Hunter's usage here as presaging Ship of Fools, written the next year.
- [47:27]
C
They say that when your ship comes in, first man takes the sails, second takes the after deck, the third the planks and rails.
- [47:40]
B
The last verse of Half Step contains a small insight into Hunter's writing.
- [47:44]
C
What's the point of calling shots? This cue ain't straight in line. Cue balls made of styrofoam and no one's got the time.
- [47:59]
B
In 2015, Hunter told the author David Brown, Jerry took objection to the word styrofoam. He said, this is so uncharacteristic of your work to put something as time dated or whatever that word would be, as Styrofoam into it. I've never sung that song without regretting I put that line in. It's one of the few Post World War II Brands to Appear in Hunter's lyrics for the Dead, though I can appreciate the way it pulls the narrator from some idyllic pre war period into something closer to modernity. Hunter had his own similar objection to using quasar in Greatest Story Ever Told. After this comes the part perhaps most difficult to catch in a recording studio. This is from take nine of the new batch of Angel Share outtakes.
- [48:41]
C
On My Way, On My Way.
- [49:04]
B
Mississippi. Half Step's final verse ends with a big dynamic peak. A drop into a quiet guitar solo resolves into a quiet coda, which in turn builds back to another peak.
- [49:13]
D
You have the sort of My Funny Valentine solo section. So it's the descending motion over the single chord.
- [49:51]
B
A fascinating side note is that while Half Step debuted in the summer of 72, in the summer of 73, just before the Wake of the Flood sessions, Garcia began playing My Funny Valentine in his band with Merle Saunders recording it for their Live at Keystone album.
- [50:24]
D
It's even possible that he played that song and someone said, oh yeah, that's the lick from My Funny Valentine. And then he started playing My Funny Valentine. The solos have that sort of My Funny Valentine chromatic minor descent. And then you release on a major for that coda. And so it's got this sort of big gospel esque release feel. And the discussion of the river.
- [50:50]
B
And that last section hints maybe at where the narrator might be headed.
- [50:54]
C
Across the Rio Grande.
- [51:01]
E
Across.
- [51:04]
C
The LA river across the Rio Grande.
- [51:17]
E
Across.
- [51:19]
C
The lazy river.
- [51:23]
B
That's from take one on the new Angel Share release. You'll notice that the band is singing live in the studio, but those were only scratch vocals intended to probably be overdubbed on top of later, though they're all singing with a lot of intention. If you're a fan of Donna Jean Godscho's voice, or even if you're not, these sessions are a treat.
- [51:42]
C
Dan, can I have a little more of me in the earphones?
- [51:46]
B
Donna Jean could hear herself loud and clear.
- [51:48]
E
My wheelhouse was the studio because I was like an earphone rat, you know, a headphone studio rat. So it was just so much fun. It was such a pleasant thing for me to be able to be in the studio because that was my stomping grounds was the studios, you know, here in Muscle Shoals and Memphis and whatnot. And so it was just like riding the bike to me, getting back in the studio.
- [52:18]
B
Thanks enormously to Brian Kehue for his loving audio restoration on the Angel Share.
- [52:22]
E
We just dried it up making it sound like people in the room. I'm pleased with that version of just the band. Unfiltered, no overdubs, very pure in the room, which is oftentimes the most pure representation of a group that's captured. And you can kind of Hear the goodness that's going on the tape. You've got a very basic two dimensional version of the band. And then it's all these things that we're missing from the released record are the same way people, when they hear the Angel Share, will notice. Oh, wow, that's different. We're missing that harmony, we're missing that steel guitar, the fiddle, you know, they.
- [52:59]
B
Played the song live. But Garcia still needed to clarify some details.
- [53:07]
C
Now you guys should pick it up on. Okay, one more.
- [53:14]
E
And in these days, whether you're the who or the Beatles or wherever, you're really a live band who happens to go in the studio once in a while to cut a record. So we're at the other end of the telescope. And so every track here is everyone in the room talking to each other. Leakage, even bleed from the bass is on the drum tracks, the drums are on the vocal tracks. And they're consistently able to do that without problems and then add to it to make it sound more like a record that has a little bit of polish and a little bit of gloss beyond the live show.
- [53:47]
B
But it meant they had to get the takes just exactly. What's the word? And so we leave the shadow as he. And.
- [54:18]
E
Let'S see. Just a toota league along. Things were looser in those days, less serious. And, you know, this band is a part of that factor. But they also wanted to get work done. And I. I do think that the tapes also represent that, that they're very focused and they're still working hard to get good feel, get good takes. They're not slacking at all. People often use drugs as a subtext of things. And honestly, it's not really the truth. Even in the Dead world, people are focused, people are working hard, and people are concentrating on. They may have been a little lit up, they may have been a little warm on some wine, but it wasn't like anybody was tripping out when this stuff was happening. Hey, it sure is neat to play this way, ain't it, fellas? Yeah, it's a kick. It's a kick. It's a kick. It's a kick.
- [55:29]
B
It's a kick.
- [55:31]
C
Say it's a kick.
- [55:32]
E
I like it.
- [55:33]
C
It's fun, baby.
- [55:34]
E
Hey, let's get one of these, huh? All right. All right. It was a really relaxed atmosphere in the studio during Wake of the Flood, and I think it shows up on that record. It was not only a departure from previous Grateful Deadville, but just the solid beginnings of another one. And it was just very solid very sure of itself, and I just love that about it.
- [56:02]
B
Most of the work wasn't so much about getting the right chords, but the right feel.
- [56:06]
E
Why don't slow it down a little? I thought it was.
- [56:10]
C
It was a little fast, and it did.
- [56:11]
E
Rush, can we hear it for the sound of the instruments?
- [56:13]
C
Yeah, let's go back and listen.
- [56:15]
E
Go in and let's do it.
- [56:15]
B
Though there are 16 marked takes of Mississippi Half Step, only five of those were complete performances, the fourth of which was the keeper take for the album. Take 15 technically snipped off the reels and not heard on the angel share. But with the basic tracks as our guide, let's run down exactly what created the intended feel of the song. Note first, that Jerry Garcia sets the tempo with his intro lick. Drummer Bill Croight's been coming in after him, so here's a little composite of the song's component instrumental parts. Garcia begins, phil Lesh would play some fairly obtuse bass parts in his day, but here he just dances along with the melody. It's pretty much always recognizable where in the song they are.
- [58:34]
E
One of the noticeable differences here from American Beauty, Working Man's Dead especially, is that they were so vocally oriented and layered and working hard on that, whereas this didn't do as much of that. They were more into instrumental things being layered.
- [58:50]
B
The most prominent overdub on Mississippi Half Step is Vassar Clement's fiddle.
- [58:54]
C
They say that Cain Caught Abel rolling loaded die Ace of Spades behind his ear and him not thinking twice.
- [59:11]
B
Vassar Clemons had come into Jerry Garcia's musical world roughly two months earlier when the bluegrass legend signed on to play an east coast tour with Olden and the Way in early June, the week before the Washington D.C. shows on the Here Comes Sunshine box set, we plunged deep into Olden and the way in our Garcia 73 episode. That was Kissimmee Kid, one of Clement's signature instrumentals, as performed by Olden and the Way. A young phenom who'd played with Bill Monroe in the 50s, Vassar Clements was in and out of the bluegrass world through the 60s and in the early 70s was poised for his own revival. Besides working with the Dead, he appeared on Will the Circle Be Unbroken, the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band's generation spanning bestseller. It began a new phase of Clement's career at the wide open space between bluegrass, rock and jazz that he helped pioneer with his contribution to Mississippi Half Step. It no longer sounds quite like any of those we're going to Cram the next chunk of Deadcast with lots of Vassar Clements isolated fiddle part, which stands up as a wonderful piece of music on its own, where you can hear the innovations of Stephane Grappelli filtered through a distinct bluegrass sensibility. The Grateful Dead loved their custom gear, a point you may be sick of hearing on the Dead cast, but we do feel obligated to point out that Vassar was playing his beautiful violin that was built sometime in the 16th century by the renowned violin maker Gaspar Dufio Prokar, possibly for the Russian Prince Yusupov. We've posted a link to more info@dead.net deadcast thanks to Mr.
- [61:25]
C
Completely for the Heads up Sam.
- [62:01]
B
We don't have dates for the Overdub sessions, but can pretty much infer that they occur during the third week of August 1973 August 20th 24th with Vassar playing a gig in Oakland midweek. I love the way Vassar is just blended in with the ban in the last verse, another part of the conversational weave, even though he was overdubbed later. Kind of too bad he never played with them live.
- [62:22]
C
They say that when your ship comes in first man takes the sails second takes the after deck third the planks and rails what's the point of calling shots? It's queuing straight in line Cue balls made up Styrofoam and got the time.
- [62:53]
E
They had all kinds of flavors in their music, like a soup there's all kinds of mixtures of things and that's a great example of it. It definitely has a different flavor than almost any other track in their catal.
- [63:11]
C
Sam.
- [63:42]
E
Before, the New Orleans sound had infected a lot of people with the Meters and the Neville Brothers and things, but the word Mississippi leans me that way too, that there's kind of that swing, but I feel also as that Southern looseness that is almost perfect for the vibe that the Dead has when they play. It's very not controlled, it's very about feeling, and that's a kind of music approach that is not common in those days.
- [64:20]
B
And there's one little Southern flavored mystery to go along with the Wake of the Flood version of Mississippi Half Step. Listening to the isolated vocal tracks, there's a harmony part in the mix that's not by a member of the Grateful Dead.
- [64:32]
C
Hello baby, I'm gone Goodbye Half a cup of rock and rye Farewell to you all Southern skies My first thought.
- [64:44]
B
Is that it might be Sir Douglas Somm, who's credited on the album, though not for his vocals on My Way. Feel free to get in touch with us@dead.net deadcast with other candidates, though that harmony part is pretty buried in the final mix. It might not even be there at all.
- [65:02]
C
Hello baby, I'm gone Goodbye Half a cup of rock and I Farewell to you all Southern skies I'm on my way, on my way.
- [65:18]
B
Mississippi Half Step would open Wake of the Flood. When the album came out that fall, it was by no means a failure, but nor was it as successful as expected or hoped. We'll get into some of that later down the line. In an interview with WLIR in 1978, Robert Hunter wasn't totally sold on the wisdom of beginning the album with it. This audio is a bit hard to hear. Sorry, I'll try to translate afterwards.
- [65:42]
E
I think has some excellent songs on them, or didn't grab the public the way the other ones did. They're exceedingly laid back, for one thing. And Flip Half Stiff Uptown Tulu is also, I think, one that suffers for tempo. Not to us, but the public at large. And that song is a bit snappier.
- [66:01]
B
Maybe it wasn't the most upbeat toe tap and album opener of all time, but I can understand why it fit there. It has a certain gravity to it. Though the song didn't have an open jam, Jerry Garcia often saved it for meaningful slots in the show, sometimes deep in the second set. This is where it appears on the bonus disc to the new Wake of the flood 50th anniversary release. Recorded November 1, 1973 at Northwestern University in Illinois. Similar to Ramble On Rose in its early days.
- [66:40]
E
Oh.
- [67:01]
B
David Lemire.
- [67:02]
D
They came back on after the Buffalo September 26th show, and then they hit the road again on October 19th, four days after the album came out, which I think must have been great for fans to go see that tour in October, presuming that they just bought the album and then listened to it a dozen times and gone to see the Dead and got to see great versions of all these new songs, which, in typical Dead fashion, weren't all that new. A couple of them go back to.
- [67:26]
B
The summer of 72, throughout late 1973. In 1974, the dead placed Half Step in various dramatic situations, sometimes in their jam suites, and in 1974, often leading into the new song, it must have been the Roses.
- [67:41]
D
I've always found it interesting when the Dead took their hiatus In October of 74, the last song they played as an encore, which they'd never done. I mean, we bid you goodnight also as the last one. But the last song was half Step. And I always figured it was, you know, it's the farewell to you and I'm on my way. And I get it. It was a perfect choice. So that's always struck me as an important version of it.
- [68:05]
C
All you've got to slip on is what you left behind get yourself a powder charge and seal that silver well.
- [68:19]
B
It is Mississippi Half Step Uptown Toodaloo.
- [68:24]
C
Mississippi Uptown Toodaloo hello, baby, I'm going Goodbye Half a cup of rock and ride Farewell to you all Southern skies I'm on my way on my way on my way.
- [68:56]
B
As we know, the Dead have never been great about saying goodbye.
- [68:59]
D
I'm very partial to those later 77 and 1978 versions that have those peaks that just. It becomes a song in those versions of them. And those ones, to me, I think, are some of my favorite versions. I feel the inspiration where they just. They don't want it to end and they blow the roof off the place.
- [69:40]
B
This is Dave's picks 25, recorded in Binghamton, November 6, 1977.
- [69:45]
D
It's similar to those versions of Warfrat, where Warfrat's Always again, one of my favorite songs, but there's just something where they just. They turn it into something that, you know, Half Step is a. It's a wonderful Americana song. It's a wonderful hunter song, but they've turned it into this thing that now has the power to blow the roof off the place, as they did with Warfrat, which ostensibly, in my mind, is kind of a ballad song.
- [70:16]
E
Sam.
- [70:43]
B
Oftentimes in the later 70s and early 80s, Mississippi half step was paired with Franklin's Tower, making a mini suite of its own, not infrequently used as a set opener. There wasn't really a jam between the two so much as a musical intentionality that turned Franklin's Tower into the exuberant release on the other side of the Rio Grandio. Here's how the Transition sounded on September 3, 1980, in Springfield, Massachusetts. Now the Download Series, Volume 7. Grateful Dead songs continue to make new meanings far from their original intents and even their original performances. Please welcome back New Yorker staff writer Nick Palmgarten, who made his connection to Mississippi Half step in the mid-1980s.
- [71:47]
E
I was in boarding school, so we were not so much trading tapes. You were just recording other people's tapes and listening to other people's tapes. Some guys had the double tape deck and started making tapes. You know, you go to the bookstore and use all your. All your book money on 10 packs of Max Sells and then you would like to steal school books or something. When I first saw them in 1984, I probably had a half a dozen tapes and so didn't really know much. I mean, some spotty different eras. I mean, that's the amazing thing is even if you had one from every year to say you had 20 tapes, it still would give you just a tiny glimpse of what this band was all about. To have 20 tapes from 20 years in any other. Any other band would be considered kind of strange. But that's just scratching the surface. The indoctrination was gradual in those days. So for whatever reason, none of the tapes or live albums I've been exposed to in like that first year of, you know, getting interested in the Grateful Dead had a half step on it. As far as I can remember. None of those EPIC 1977 or 1978 versions had reached me yet.
- [72:56]
B
Nick also happened to start seeing the Dead during one of the only periods in which Mississippi Half Step went briefly toodaloo from the band. Set lists getting rarer in the early 1980s and disappearing in 1982.
- [73:07]
E
In the spring of 1985, I went to see the Dead at Nassau Coliseum. The friend I just turned 16 took the train out to Nassau Coliseum. They opened with this song. I'd never heard it before, and it was Mississippi Half Step.
- [73:21]
B
Brace for a tempo shift, friends. The March 27, 1985 version was the first since the fall of 1982. The song's longest break from the Dead's repertoire.
- [73:51]
E
These little scraps of words come to you. This is a picture of a. Of a scoundrel in a kind of cockeyed world. The part that stuck with me, the part that I noticed was the coda part, the flight across the Rio Grande. And that stuck. That seemed that. I mean, it instantly occurred to me that this is an important song. This is a big song. And I'm sort of side staged. My memory of it is them sort of the ensemble singing, them sort of stepping to the mic together. I think Phil had a mic. It has this, like, sass to it that I love, but it also has like this kind of grandiosity which they could bring to things. Even like the Rio Grande stuff. It. Like, I hadn't read Cormac McCarthy yet, but I think maybe that's like that sort of fleeing for Mexico idea was just kind of. It's in the bones, all of those different parts. This old weird America outlaw culture. It slowly begins to seep in. And it's not really until you see for Me, until I saw the man Garcia, like, performing these songs. He was just the boss. The way he would present the material, like these stories, it wasn't like he was embodying them or, you know, it wasn't like he was a great actor necessarily, but it just kind of flowed through him, like Hunter's voice, you know, Hunter's version of this alternate universe. And that really. That really hit me when I went to see them. And certainly Half Step was one of those songs that really got that across to me very early in my years of seeing. Seeing the Dead.
- [75:56]
B
It was an alternate universe that you could literally get swept into, as Nick learned that fall.
- [76:01]
E
I went in November to see them at Brendan Byrne. November 85. Took a long weekend from boarding school. Flew down to New York with a friend, went to the show, didn't have tickets. The whole plan was to go see this show. Walked around a lot, got increasingly desperate, assumed that we'd be able to get some. Because I've been to concerts before, there was always people selling tickets, couldn't get tickets. And then all of a sudden, we found ourselves part of this mass of people that were pouring toward the gates. This was an infamous gate crashing. Someone threw a smoke bomb. Everybody ran in after it. Charge, take that hill. And I'm just in this group and I'm not proud of this. And I never did this again. I know gate crashing was one of the many things that sunk the scene. This incident is one of the things that made the infamous Yellowjackets, the heinous metal insecurity, so horrible in the years to come, maybe. I mean, they killed a kid, Adam Katz. And it was always a bad scene in there. And I think that that incident probably contributed to that. But I was in a sort of, you know, I was in a feral stage. I had a bit of a punk spirit, despite the affinity for hippie music. And so it was kind of like, let's go. And we joined this heavy, heaving crowd, you know, overrunning the turnstiles like Knocks. Blew right to the turnstiles. These guys, the security guys, are like, beating people up. And I was 16 live. Sprung out of the way, disappeared in the crowd, took a tab and had to head. One of the great nights of my life.
- [77:39]
B
Nick got another memorable half step that night.
- [77:42]
C
What's the point of calling shots? It's you ain't straight in line, you've all made up Styrofoam, no one's got the time Mississippi Old Town hello, baby, I'm going to die Half a cup of rock and ride Farewell to you all sun and skies I'm on my.
- [78:16]
E
Way Something went a little stark in that period. I think it was probably something in the American psyche. I think it was like a whole new crop of kids. Like Gen X was sort of catching on on Mass. It was a pushback against Reagan energy. The whole thing got a little. Got a little crazy. And I think obviously that then metastasized later in the decade into the. Into the 90s. But, yeah, this was like that first taste of that.
- [78:44]
B
That night. Half Step found someplace different on the other side of the river. A nice little variation going into I know you, rider for the one and only time. Even Garcia sounds a little surprised to be playing it. But it marked the song for Nick, who in turn became marked.
- [79:45]
E
There was some karmic blowback to all this. So the end of the story is after the show, you know, we took the bus back to the Port Authority terminal in New York. There were just couple skinny little kids dressed like bumpkins out on 8th Avenue. These four shady dudes surround us, mug us. My friend actually punched one of them and we ran. Grabbed a cab. I remember grabbing it, jumping into a cab in front of the Milford Plaza later that night. I'd been sick. I'd had a fever. I had taken something called leopard skins, these tabs. And that night I looked in the mirror and I had chicken pox all over my face. And I had gotten chicken pox. And it was a pox on me.
- [80:28]
C
I had the mark just as plain as day. Could not be denied.
- [80:34]
E
It just all fit. Still had the boots on, but felt like I'd lost them in transit kind of feeling. Half Step is, in a way, it's like this outlaw who's a schlamazzle. It has this, like, celebratory air, and yet everything's all cracked, right? Like bent pool cubes, Styrofoam balls loaded dice retreads. The image even of tearing apart a ship. Everything's falling apart. And then there's this, like, spirited, see ya sucker outro.
- [81:30]
A
Thanks very much for tuning in to the good old Grateful Dead cast, friends. We'd like to thank our guests in this episode. Donna Jean GodShow McKay, Ron Racow, Alan Trist, Steve Brown, David Lemieux, Brian Kehue, Nick Palmgarden, and Sean o'.
- [81:46]
E
Donnell.
- [81:47]
A
Extra special thanks to friend of the Dead cast, David Ganz, for contributing audio from his interview archive. Thank you, David, and thanks very much to you for tuning in. Don't forget to, like, subscribe and share an episode on your social media and give us your Wake of the Flood related stories by recording yours over@stories.dead.net executive producers for the good old Grateful Dead cast, Mark Pincus and Doron Tyson, produced for Rhino Entertainment by Rich Mahan Productions and Jesse Jarno. Special thanks to David Lemieux. All rights reserved.