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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, welcome back to the Good old Grateful Dead cast. Hope you enjoyed the Bear Drop episode about Owlsley Stanley. If you haven't listened yet, I implore you to do so. He's a fascinating part of Grateful Dead history and we look forward to setting more Bear Drops in your pathway. Many thanks to all of you out there who have liked, left a rating and subscribed. It really helps us spread the word about the good old Grateful Dead cast. There's a lot of great music from the Grateful Dead that's been recently released, including the Angel Share, which are the studio outtakes from the Working Man's Dead recording sessions, and of course the newly released Working Man's 50th Anniversary Deluxe Edition, which includes a show from February 21, 1971 from the Capitol Theater in Port Chester. And it's a good un mixed by Jeffrey Norman from the original 16 track tapes over at Bob Weir's Tri Studios. It sounds fantastic. Speaking of working man's dead, with this episode we get back to covering the album track by track, and we're dropping the needle on the second song on side one. High Time Jesse, come hear Uncle John's.
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Band by the Riverside got some things.
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As the glorious stacked harmonies of Uncle John's Band end, High Time starts with no preamble. It seems like another simple song.
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You told me goodbye. How was that? To know you didn't mean goodbye? Yeah, man, please.
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Don'T let High Time conjures a feeling instantly. Here's Grateful Dead archivist and legacy manager David Lemieux.
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High Time is to me a song that just is. You know, I'm a canoer and it's canoeing down a little creek, maybe watching, you know, beavers build their lodge or something. And it's just a song that is just summer drifting along in a canoe and it's just a beautiful, like I say it's an ethereal song.
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Radio host and extra hardcore longtime Deadhead Gary Lambert was there at the Fillmore east the the first weekend the band played the song publicly in June of 1969.
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That was the one that utterly stunned me when I first heard it, because nothing in their previous history could have prepared you for such a heartbreaking, beautiful melodic ballad as that. And so beautifully sung, so beautifully played some of Hutter's most extraordinary lyrics. And that, to me, signaled the maturation of that songwriting duo as well as anything.
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The Grateful Dead were different from most other bands, and in perhaps the most quietly radical way, High Time is one of the first places where that difference became audible. 8 track and 16 track. Recording technology had transformed studios into instruments that could make whole new kinds of sounds and in turn transformed popular music. And on Anthem of the sun and Oxamoxoa, the Dead were right there, along with the Beatles, the Beach Boys and other bands in pushing the wondrous excesses and money sucking possibilities of the studio. Here's Sam Cutler, who became the band's Tour manager in 1970 during the same months they were making Working Man's Dead.
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F
Before Working Man's Dead, the Grateful Dead, of course, had spent an awful lot of money on making records. And I think, like virtually every other band in the world, the Grateful Dead suddenly realized that in this glorious place where you could twiddle knobs and see what this did and see what that did and get the sound of thick air or whatever it was that you were trying to achieve, that actually you were paying for the privilege of being there through the not very subtle reality that the record company was paying for you to record. But that was an advance. It was your money, actually, that was paying for recording. So it was all very well to spend, you know, months in the studio recording an album, but there's nothing that focuses a band's minds collectively than poverty. So the band wanted to survive, you know, And Jerry and I were having a conversation, I remember, and we were talking about this very thing of, yeah, it's wonderful being in the studio and, you know, messing about and discovering all the wonderful things that you can do with the sounds and da da da.
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G
Da da da da da da.
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F
But actually you're paying for that. So I think that the band entered into Working Man's Dead with a completely other mindset, a completely other kind of consciousness going on, one of which was that they didn't write anything in the studio. It was all written beforehand. Not only that, they played it before they went in the Studio Together wasn't necessarily completely, you know, totally rehearsed, as it were, down to the last kind of digit, but it was nonetheless. Everybody knew where they were going. Everybody was on the same page. I think Working Man's Dead was a wonderful classical example of the Grateful Dead getting their fingers out and getting down to it. Just remaining radically focused, if you like, and doing something really quite amazing. The album itself was recording in double quick time. I can't remember exactly, but like three weeks, something like that, which is pretty fast. We should remember that that was a magic year when they were recording that. That time period was a special time period in American music. And so many great bands of that period went back, re examined and reinterpreted their roots in American music and kind of re established what it was to be an American band.
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For the Grateful Dead, that meant leaning in hard to what they'd always been since virtually the moment they took up their first residency as the Warlocks, a working rock band. Even as they were racking up enormous studio bills, they remained first and foremost a live act with a repertoire that evolved on a nightly basis. And thanks to the keen work of generations of tape traders and Deadologists who've reconstructed the band's history in massive projects like Dead Bass, it's possible to observe how the Grateful Dead's reinvention happened almost in real time. Working Man's Dead required. The album began to take shape. Eight months, two albums and one side project before the Dead entered San Francisco's Pacific high recording in February 1970. Here's David Lemieux.
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D
A law was going on for the grateful dead in mid-1969. That would kind of be the definition of what the Dead would sound like in 1970, where really, in June of 69, you can almost pinpoint it. Where if you listen to the Dead in, well, obviously Live Dead in January, February, March of 69, we call that the Primal Dead, which really kept going through March, April, May. And then in June, a few things changed. One, they started bringing in the Working Man's Dead songs. Casey Jones and Direwolf and High Time. Those songs started creeping into the set list a full year before the album came out. In addition to that, Jerry started playing pedal steel. I don't know how long he'd been playing it for, but he practiced a lot. So much that he could play it on stage with the Grateful Dead in June of 69, and then shortly after that, when he started playing with Marmaduke, which would, of course, become the New Riders. And in addition to that, Bob started bringing in more country songs, but songs like Mama Tried and Me and My uncle came in and became a big part of the repertoire and Slew Foot and Silver Threads and Golden Needles. All these songs, they started showing up again. And so the Grateful Dead were really shifting from that primal Dead. Now, I've said this before, and when I do, I don't want anybody to take exception with it, thinking that it was a hard turn because there were still some incredibly deep, psychedelic, primal Dead performances throughout the rest of 1969 into 1970.
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That was the Grateful Dead on February 14, 1970 at the Fillmore east in New York. From Dick's Picks Volume 4, only hours before heading back to California to set up shop for Working Man's Dead a little closer to home in downtown San Francisco. Around the corner from the Fillmore west, there was a warehouse with a purple door and behind that purple door was Pacific High recording where the Grateful Dead demoed and then made working man's dead in the early part of 1970. Located at 60 Brady street just off Market, Pacific High was one of the first independent head owned and head run studios in the Bay Area during its roughly decade of existence under three different names, it would be home to sessions for numerous classics as well as live performances on KSAN. After relocating from downtown Sausalito in 1969, Pacific High quickly became a favorite of local artists. Richard Olson, bassist for original San Francisco psychedelic band the Charlatans and a familiar face to many local musicians, was studio manager during its first year in operation. Sly and the Family Stone recorded Stan there, and the Grateful Dead logged many, many hours working on oxamoxoa, mixing live Dead and adding to their deep debt to Warner Bros. A former plastics factory, Pacific High was a large warehouse subdivided into an enormous 50 by 60 foot live space and slightly less enormous control room for the recording of Working Man's Dead. The band took advantage of the acreage. Jerry Garcia and Bob Weir brought nearly every instrument they owned, spreading them out across the studio. Though many of the songs would feature acoustic guitars, more songs than not featured electric too, with Garcia playing through his Stratocaster, SG and Les Paul at various points, working on both sides of the glass. Co producers Bob Matthews and Betty Kanter were responsible for capturing the sounds from the band. The run through the custom Pacific High console designed by studio owner Peter Weston and into the Ampex MM1016 track recorder that Bob and Betty brought with them from Alembic, the Dead sound technology offshoot. Here's Gary Lambert Bob and Betty were.
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Terrific recording Engineers, you know, they were really very good at catching the characteristics of any given instrument. They were pretty new at it. You know, they were not old studio pros that the Grateful Dead had worked with on their early albums. You know, they recorded their first album in LA at RCA with, you know, some of the best engineers in the business. But Bob and Betty really had an innate understanding of the sound of the Grateful Dead. That might not have served them well producing anyone else, but it worked with those guys. It was like kind of an ongoing university. You know, they were all getting better at what they did. You know, the fact that people who had no experience as recording engineers were tasked with recording the band's live shows and got incredible sounding, you know, straight into the board recordings, which we are being blessed with to this very day, is kind of miraculous in a way. There was no school for that stuff back then.
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The Dead and their engineers had spent Oxa moxoa learning how to use the 16 track, and now we're ready to put those skills to good use. Produced by the Grateful Dead with Bob and Betty is what the inset sticker on Live dead read in 1969, and they would be credited similarly this time. Here's Bob Matthews.
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Betty took care of the fine placement of the input sources, that is the microphones. Betty was fantastic at micing the drums. And this was not only in the studio, but it was one of the things that made our live recordings so crystal clear. In addition to the technical approaches that have been described of singularities, of not combining things, that was her speciality. She delivered to me at the board, at the recorder, the quality. I was more the technical engineer suggesting how we went about making that happen. But it took both of us, and I have to say, she was pretty amazing. I have really good ears. She has fantastic ears.
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And here's how tour manager Sam Cutler remembered the team of Bob Matthews and Betty Cantor.
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Matthews used to be their tour manager. He'd been around them a long time. They go back a long way. And he was a muso and all that, you know, he knew for many years, and he kind of morphed into sound man, recording engineer, all that stuff, you know what I mean? There was a certain kind of flexibility about people around the Grateful Dead. Matthews may have had the brain and he's a smart cookie, but Betty had the ears, you know, and everybody loved Betty. She was very beautiful, you know, beautiful woman. And she was partners with Matthews. Yeah, she was very special. She had the ears. And to this day, Betty's live recordings easily way ahead of anybody else's. It's a certain kind of magic. I'm not capable of talking about it technologically as to why her things are so good, but they are. She somehow catches the live sound miraculously, in a way. She hears like a musician's ears. You know, recording is technology, but it's also kind of aesthetics. And she, you know, she captured things wonderfully. I loved her. I mean, I loved her as a person.
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Kantor's work was vital in the studio, helping to translate the Grateful Dead onto vinyl. Her first engineering credit appeared on Oxamoxoa, released In June of 1969, the same month Working Man's Dead began to publicly take shape. Fans seeing the Dead that June in New York were shocked to find Jerry Garcia playing a pedal steel guitar, to hear Bob Weir singing country songs, and to be the first audience for the original material that would become the Dead's next studio album. If Dead fans were surprised by High Time, arguably the Dead's first original love song, it's possible that lyricist Robert Hunter was equally surprised by it. After Axumak, SOA and Live Dead, Robert Hunter had his own plans. He'd penned an elaborate suite of lyrics called the Eagle Mall. It was a song cycle that, in Hunter's words, recounts the trials of a nomadic people and embraces the notion of eternal recurrence, as the lyricist told it later. When he presented the pile of new song ideas to Garcia, the guitarist told him, look, Hunter, we're a goddamn dance band, for Christ's sake. At least write something with a beat. Hunter admitted, the direction we took with Working Man's Dead was more to the point. That wasn't it for the Eagle Mall, though. Hunter would write his own music for the songs when he began his solo career later in the 70s and in the 80s and 90s, he even wrote a complete novel that connected the world of the Eagle Mall to the expanded universe of Terrapin. He posted the whole novel online for free. It's called the Giant's Harp. It's still out there. We can only imagine what a 1970 Grateful Dead concept suite would sound like. Almost certainly nothing like the new songs they actually began to write. Another factor is that Jerry Garcia and Robert Hunter were housemates again. In the spring of 69, Hunter and his girlfriend moved in with Jerry Garcia, Mountain Girl and their family in Larkspur in Marin County. As Hunter told Steve Silberman In 2001, Toons had been emerging and it seemed sensible to help the process along. And incidentally, feed me, since I had no income source. At all. In Larkspur, Garcia and Hunter began the most prolific period of their three decade collaboration. Between mid 1969 and mid 1971. When the Garcias bought a home in Stinson beach, the pair churned out some two dozen songs that the Dead would play, nearly all becoming enduring parts of their repertoire. Here's Gary Lambert.
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E
Garcia had known Hunter for, I think, close to 10 years by that time, by the time of working Mansion and they'd hung out a lot and had very deep conversations and talked philosophy and, you know, also had a lot of fun and smoked a lot of weed and all that other stuff. But they were real soulmates in terms of their commitment to the art and their commitment to sort of that folkloric sensibility. So I think Hunter didn't really need a great head start once he had that opportunity to write. It just came out of him and obviously he tapped that in Jerry as well.
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Also in Larkspur, Robert Hunter began a new writing routine that would result in some of his and Garcia's most timeless work. Drawing from a vast well of American musical and literary traditions, here's David Nelson of the New Riders of the Purple Sage and an occasional couch dweller with his old friends.
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Hunter always had some odd instrument around. He would try stuff, you know, even back in the Palo Alto days, I mean, it seemed like he'd play bass or guitar, not banjo, but mandolin.
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Yeah, it just seemed like he was versatile.
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He would just try things a little bit, you know, try a little bit of trumpet, try a little bit of this and that. I always admired him for that.
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Picture a lush canyon in Marin county, the sun dappling the greenery, the air sweet with California spring. A creek burbling just past the backyard, and the poet going to work. It's a quiet, beautiful day. Probably there's some cute hippie babies crawling around somewhere. As Hunter told Blair Jackson about his time in Larkspur. I remember I'd practice my trumpet out there in the shed all the time, blow my brains, half hour until I got psychedelic, and then I'd go, right. I finally had to quit it. I was afraid I'd blow a blood vessel in my brain if I didn't give it up. As Mountain Girl remembered to Blair Jackson, hunter was up 24 hours a day chain smoking, and he'd come down in the morning and he'd have a stack of songs. Sometime soon after Robert Hunter took up residence with the Garcias in Larkspur, the Grateful Dead debuted High Time in June of 1969. Truly unlike any other song they'd written or performed up until then. But in their transition from psychedelia to songcraft, High Time found a surprisingly comfortable place in the band's live sets. Not long after the song's debut, High Time briefly served as the epilogue in an early alternate draft of one of the band's most famous song China Cat Sunflower into I Know youw Rider into High Time for much of 1969 and through the spring of 1970, even after the recording of Working Man's Dead. That's how the Dead most often presented High Time, with more than a half year's performances under their collective belts. Before they got to the studio to record working man's dead in February 1970, high time developed its own live arrangement with organist Tom Constantin, who performed with the band from late 1968 until a few weeks before the first Working man sessions. The song had a slightly different set of Dynamics with TC. Here's how it sounded on January 3, 1970 at the Fillmore east, about five months after the song's debut, a few weeks before Constantin's departure, and about a month and change before the Working Man's Dead sessions. This was released on Dave's Picks 30. That's from Dave's Picks 30, where high time featured a not inelegant Hammond organ part among other features that would be stripped back from the version released on Working Man's Dead.
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Jerry had this great quote about the studio and live contrasting them. He said making a studio record is like building a miniature ship in a bottle, and playing live is like being in a rowboat on the open ocean, which I I've always loved. My metaphor has always been that playing live is like or recording live is like a cinema verite documentary, and recording in the studio is like making a fictional film, a scripted film, and you resort to a certain amount of artifice. And when it really works, the audience doesn't hear the artifice as they don't see it in a film. That's not really Eva Marie Saint hanging off a cliff in north by Northwest. It's her lying on some fake rocks with a beautiful matte painting of the valley below Mount Rushmore. But the way it works, with camera work and editing and all that, the illusion is just incredible and exhilarating. And that's true in the studio too.
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What the Angel Share Recordings make clear is that while Working Man's Dead might have sounded like a verite recording of the Grateful Dead au natural, there was a lot of very subtle miniature ship building occurring. Here's what the very beginning of High Time sounded like when the Dead were laying down basic tracks. They've removed the few bars of instrumental introduction played during all live versions of the song before and after. But that's not the only difference.
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Sam.
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Not heard on the Working Man's Dead version of High Time are the drums that Bill Kreutzman is playing under the first verse during the basic takes faded up not when the dramatic chorus hits where at least I might expect, but entering even more surprisingly with the song's second verse. And for that matter, Jerry Garcia is playing an electric guitar in the basic take, later swapped for an acoustic, most likely during the overdub process, with the original guitar track scrubbed almost entirely. Here's how the very beginning of High Time sounds on the album.
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You told me goodbye how was that to know you didn't mean goodbye yeah man, please don't let me One of.
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My very favorite parts of the Working Man's Dead version of High Time is Jerry Garcia's pedal steel heard an extra sparkling form on the new 50th anniversary remaster, playing much the same sonic role that Tom Constantin played in the earlier arrangement.
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I'm having a hard time living the.
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Good life I.
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Well, I know.
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But for me, one of the little surprises of the new stash of the Angel Share outtakes from Workingman's Dead is that a part of High Time I always thought was pedal steel isn't pedal steel at all. It's Bob Weir playing really beautiful quasi lead figures on an electric six string guitar played through a rotating Leslie speaker cabinet. It makes sense. Jerry Garcia was already holding down the rhythm and as we learned from the Angel Share, it's definitely a Leslie.
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There's no Leslie speaker in the headphones.
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It all makes sense now. Thanks for the clarification, Phil. There's some grousing in the band about how complicated Weir's part is, but it's beautiful. It rings through loud and clear on this instrumental take. Let that go by. Don't get start getting too elaborate. Right? That was.
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That was the mistake I was making.
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Right off.
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The There was a little bit of conversation about the tempo.
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Why don't we do it a little slower?
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It's already five and a half minutes long. That's true. But in the Grateful Dead, it was ever thus. As Bob Matthews explained in the last episode, the band had spent time earlier recording demos and making a game plan, and even Weir's elaborate part for High Time was worked out in advance.
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That's where the two weeks that they went off and practiced woodsheded, as we called it. That's where that came. That's where Gary would decide that, yeah, I want to play pedal steel on this. And they would rehearse it or not. All ideas were good, but that was the opportunity for them to try it out rather than taking it into the studio and wasting artistic time to see if something worked or didn't work.
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While the Beatles would inspire mini bands to turn the studio into a forum for experimentation, Bob Matthews took a different lesson to plan.
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Sergeant Pepper was our generation's masterpiece. Sergeant Pepper started. It had a song one, it had a song two, it had different parts, it told different stories. There was a particular sequence, there was a particular artistic evolution. And to this day we still have a feeling for what tunes came before and after. She's leaving Home when I'm six. All of that has a sequence to it.
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Here's David Lemieux.
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I've seen other bands sequence things and it's usually an after the recording process. And to know that, you know, this was all a vision. This is a flawless album in terms of the songs, in terms of everything. But that certainly goes in terms of the sequence too. You know, there's other albums that, even though you've heard them a thousand times, there's a lot of albums you couldn't resequence, but a lot of albums you could, you couldn't resequence them. This album is perfect the way it is in terms of that sequence as well. And it's amazing that was part of their vision.
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The Lessons of Aksum Oxoa would have an influence not just on the Grateful Dead and Bob Matthews, but the bands he worked with later.
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G
Now this was not something I did with the Grateful Dead. The problem was, okay, you'd go in, you were spending $100 an hour. And that was a trick I used once in recording. It's a band that tended to just waste time. I started sessions with a pile of hundred dollar bills on the board and every hour that would go by I would take $100 bill off the pile and within two or three days their observation of those that piles of $100 bills going down to zero and their realization of what they got done or didn't get done seemed to have an impression upon. We learned that one as a result of a waxamoxoa. So when we went in to do wmd, we were. We were already in that mode and used it well to our advantage. That whole thing of making the two track cassettes and then going and rehearsing exactly as side one and side two of that album. And that's how we were able to retain true magic of the music.
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On Anthem of the sun and Axum Oxoa, the band and their engineers had wrestled with grandsonic realizations and chomped through technical problems as a result. Working Man's Dead is a nearly flawless record. But there are two wee moments in High Time that I've noticed after many years of headphone listening. Here's one now.
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Don't think too hard, baby.
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Here's the other.
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B
Come in when it's raining.
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We had to ask Bob about them. I'd long assumed they were vocal punch ins, a normal trick of the recording studio, with Jerry Garcia making a second attempt at hitting notes. He'd missed the first take, but Bob Matthews clarified the technique.
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G
Not a punch in. It was a crossover track. There were two performances and this was a tune that I mixed. But my good friend John Dawson, who I played in the New Writers with, came in one afternoon and I had him be an extra hand on the board while we mixed the two track for that line. That was the best that we could do. And Jerry tried to do it himself. When he came in and redid some of my mixes, it was not a punch in. It was an attempt to do a track crossover from one performance to another. The line about we'll fix it in the mix is tantamount to being an amateur who is not worthy of being in a professional studio. You do not fix it in the mix because you don't allow it to need to be fixed. The examples that I've given you, the High Time crossover track, it was a unique solution to a problem that nobody had ever tried to approach before.
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C
Matthew's crossover tracks and other in the moment solutions were as much a part of Working Man's Dead as the music and the tapes themselves leave behind their own clues and mysteries. When engineer Brian Kehue and archivist Mike Johnson examined the tape for High Time, they found something surprising. Here's Brian.
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I
We have two master reels, and so those are the finished record with all the overdubs and the percussion and the extra keyboards and so forth that were used to make the album. But on those tapes, which are clearly the masters, they actually, in between them or around them, had left on other material. And that's how we found some of this lost or unknown material was we have a session tape for High Time, but then there's a master take and sometimes there's snippets or even a pretty significant chunk right next to it where they had been keeping that, and they moved that over too, for known reason. Usually you just move the one part you want, but they might cut out a little more tape and bring it over. So we found extra bits on the reels where you think they would just be working on one take. We found an alternate take.
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J
So that's why the forensic got to keep going in and listening and listening and going in deeper and, you know, all the way to listening to it backwards in some places. I mean, we can't stop finding things.
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That was Mike Johnson, Warner music archivist, and he's not kidding about listening to tapes backwards. The bad news is that there were no hidden messages. But the good news was even better. Brian explains how the tape ended up backwards to begin with.
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I
It was an accident when they were moving old tape around and they have a piece they want to cut somewhere and let's say it's leftover on another tape. Where do we put this? Splice it onto the end of that reel where we took a song off. There's some room there. We have five minutes of tape, stick it on there. And tape, when you look at it, has no visual orientation of this is forward, this is backwards. If people remember a cassette tape, you can't really tell just by looking at it. So they would splice it on because they really didn't intend to hear it or use it. So they didn't care if it was forwards or backwards. If I'm in the studio and we have a tape like that, you can hear it. You hear the backwards effect of things zipping backwards. You've heard a backwards record or backward recording, so the sound is there. And the obviousness, oh, something's playing backwards. And, oh, I hear a mandolin or I hear an organ or something. You can guess what song it is, but you really have to deal with flipping the tape over. Or in my case, we can just use it in the computer, flip all the digital files around and reverse it and say, oh, it's an outtake from this song.
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F
Cool.
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J
It took 50 years for us to discover that. I wish you all could have been in the studio because it was amazing. You know, Brian's at the board and this is bug out time. So we both got masks on. I'm sitting, you know, eight feet behind him on a sofa. I've got this beautiful vision of the back of his head all day long. It's just, hey, I wonder what this is? And then he plays it and it's another section of something we'd never heard before. Imagine Any Deadhead. And, you know, being there, we were panning for gold and we came up with a giant strike. That's why we're so enthusiastic about sharing this.
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C
Those are just two small examples of the delicious things that Brian Kehue and Mike Johnson found hiding between tape splices in the literal cracks of the Working Man's Dead tapes. But let's take a step back and take another step back. David Lemieux is the Grateful Dead's longtime archivist, but the tapes themselves live in a secure facility in California. For the past decade and change, Mike Johnson has tended to the tapes themselves, keeping them in good order and retrieving masked reels as needed for the Dead's many live archival releases. But he's also been an enormous Dead fan since the moment Working Man's Dead was released in 1970. And it was his curiosity and enthusiasm that helped manifest the restoration of the session tapes, along with the help of expert engineer Brian Kehue, who some listeners may know from his work on the legendary 38 CD Grammy nominated complete Woodstock box set that he and Andy Zaks put together in 2019. But finding session tracks hidden on the master reels or pieces of backwards outtakes holding other tapes together are only two smaller parts of an enormous question mark that hovers around the Working Man's Dead recordings. Here's Mike Johnson to explain why it's such a compelling puzzle.
- [37:07]
J
This is where the mystery starts, and that is that they came to us on these carts from San Francisco in the same sequence that they were stored at the Grateful Dead vault. We segregated a section of the tape vault. This section is actually fenced off with a chain link fence, hence the term the cage, as I refer to it, because you have to open this gate that we have padlocked. The Grateful Dead is interesting in that, you know, they're primarily known by their core records and then by their live shows. So I've put the live shows as well as I can over these 13 years in a chronological sequence, so that when David says, you know, I need February 1971, and it's going to be a seven inch reel, I pretty much can find that in about five minutes. But there are a great deal of tape that have zero annotation. It's just a raw tape box with nothing in it. And then there are tapes that have very little written on it. When it comes to these two records, Working Men and American Beauty, very, very few of these have any song titles written on them or tracking sheets inside. I would put together sections in the cage. It's just like, these are potential. These could have tracks that we're looking for. And so they gave us a budget, and we went up to Brian's and he transferred the targeted reels. As it turns out, it was about only one third of the stuff we targeted turned out to be sessions for these two records. The rest were writers of the Purple Sage or any number of other things than these two records. As a matter of fact, Brian and I had discovered that the Dead would reuse tape. That if they found, you know, some session tapes from 1970, and in 1974, they're in the studio and they needed some tape, they would just grab an old one and reuse it.
- [39:05]
I
What made you think that These tapes were 1970? Grateful Dead? And the way we can tell is by the type of box. Some boxes are from the 80s, those don't count. Some boxes are from the later 70s, some boxes are a different size. So they would be 60s tapes. And so this is how, given that there's a number of tapes that are not labeled, these ones seem likely to be 1970 tapes.
- [39:31]
J
Here is the only clue. It says GD number five.
- [39:36]
C
That's it.
- [39:37]
J
That's absolutely all we know about this tape. Multi track, 16 track. Genius. There's nothing on it that says real five right there. It turned out to be a session reel for Working Man's Dead. No one would know. And it just took me. I went through and assembled everything that looked like this that could possibly be.
- [40:01]
C
Brian especially loved the new perspective that the angel share brought to High Time.
- [40:06]
I
And oddly enough, one of the least busy ones is High Time, a piece that we have many, many takes of. But I love hearing Bob's guitar. He's very elegant and doing these cool, beautiful pieces that are, you know, they're there on the record, but you get to hear him working it out and doing parts. And he's doing all these beautiful guitar runs and things as they just play through the easy feeling, easy listening track. It's not much going on, really, but you can actually hear what they're all doing, which is cool.
- [40:32]
C
High Time isn't a busy song, nor is it a song packed with allusions to folk music in American culture. Like many other tunes on Working Man's Dead, in David Dodd's amazing book, the Complete Annotated Grateful Dead lyrics, High Time receives the unusual distinction of having no annotation whatsoever. Working Man's Dead was different. And there was maybe no song more different than High Time. Here's David Lemieux.
- [40:56]
D
There was no St. Stephen on here there was no Cosmic Charlie, there was no China Cat Sunflower, which to me, those songs really, they lent themselves to the sonic experimentations that they used on Oxamoxoa. Whereas Working Man's Dead were, I don't want to say much more straightforward songs, but they were storytelling songs.
- [41:14]
C
But what kind of story was Robert Hunter telling with High Time? Here's Gary Lambert.
- [41:19]
E
Here was this guy with this amazingly deep mind who found this medium for his work. You know, I think he would have tried to be a serious poet or novelist or whatever, but suddenly here was a rock band that was perfectly suited to his particular sensibility. And that lyric is so enigmatic. You know, first it seems to be about lovers at a crossroads, but then there's that whole the wheel's all muddy, got a ton of hay, you know. And it's quintessential Hunter in that he doesn't explicitly tell you anything, he just conjures up this imagery for you. One critic, and I'm not sure if the critic meant it as a compliment or a bit of a jab, but he called what Hunter wrote blank check aphorisms, which is a great phrase because he would lay out these words that could mean vastly different things to different people.
- [42:12]
C
Buzz Poole is the author of an excellent book dedicated to Working Man's Dead, part of the 33 and a third pocket sized collection on classic albums. He has a broader view of the lyrics to High Time in the book.
- [42:24]
H
As I kind of define it, the high time started in 65, and by 69, you know, they're coming to an end. And the Dead and certainly Hunter are becoming more and more self aware that their commitment to ditching the straight life, having a good time, being completely committed to and servants to the music, is something that they have to start working a little harder to maintain. And the way they do that is by becoming even more interior. Because by June of 69, when high time is debuted in New York at the Fillmore east, by that time the dead are not living in San Francisco anymore. You know, the summer of love is two years past and it's become this kind of tourist trap thing. With High Time, the conditional nature of the song, it recognizes that they have had something and now they don't have it, or it's harder to maintain and you know, we could have it, but you know, that's the open ended question. And that is true of any relationship. And it's a romantic relationship and it's a professional relationship, it's a creative relationship. I hear all that and read into the lyrics.
- [43:33]
C
In that sense, it was a decidedly more mature usage of high than most probably expected from the one time house band of the Acid Tests. The song disappeared from the Dead sets during the summer of 1970, barely a month after Working Man's Dead came out. It would surface on and off for a few years at a time, all the way up through 1995. One arrangement that's particularly lovely is when the song resurfaced later in the 70s after the band returned from their 19 month hiatus from the road. This version from May 19, 1977 is from several lineup changes after Working Man's Dead, with a new voice in the harmonies on the vocals Mrs. Donna Jean.
- [44:11]
B
God show I was heaven a heart Living the good Life.
- [44:39]
A
Harmony vocals by Donna on that version of High Time. If you haven't already, please Visit us@dead.net deadcast where you can read about all the episodes we've released. Listen to any you like and a very cool feature we want to turn you on to. You can now submit your story for the Dead cast. Enter your info, click Start recording and talk story about that show you caught in San Francisco, an epic road trip, or the bad sprouts you got in that lot Burrito. Your story could end up in a future episode of the Deadcast. And before you log off, please mash that like button and subscribe at your podcast delivery service of choice. It really helps. Thank you 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.