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A
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. We love getting the feedback that you're giving us. We're really happy you're all enjoying the podcast. Very gratifying. Thank you. If you haven't already, please subscribe, give us a like and leave a rating wherever you listen. It helps spread the show to those who haven't been turned on to it yet, and we appreciate your help doing so. Have you checked out the new Working Man's 50th Anniversary Deluxe Edition? Besides the original album being expertly remastered and sounding better than ever, the set includes a show from February 21, 1971 from the Capitol Theater in Port Chester, mixed by Jeffrey Norman from the original 16 track analog reel to reel tapes over at Bob Weir's Tri Studios. And it really sounds great. Make sure to check that one out and you can do so@dead.net we are working our way through working man's dead track by track, and this episode is devoted to one of my favorite tracks on the album, Direwolf. Of course it's a great song, as all the songs on this album are, but it's the high water mark for Jerry Garcia's pedal steel playing in the studio. And and wait till you hear what we uncovered about the genesis of this Grateful Dead favorite. Time to go back down the rabbit hole with Jesse Jarno.
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Working Man's Dead is organic and warm sounding, a familiar and reassuring musical feeling that sustains itself with seeming effortlessness from the first drop of the needle to the run out groove. That apparent effortlessness perhaps blurs over not only the song's musical complexities and idiosyncrasies, but also how genuinely different the eight songs are from one another. Following the invocatory call to Joy of Uncle John's Band with its stacked vocal harmonies comes the hushed pleading of High Time, featuring Bob Weir's Spidery guitar counterpoint and Robert Hunter's most naked lyrics to date. And then Direwolf.
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In the timbers up in a walls are running round the winter was so hot and cold froze 10ft beneath the ground don't murder Grateful.
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B
Dead archivist and legacy manager David Lemieux.
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D
It is a very visual song, and it's things that we can all. I'm not going to necessarily say relate to, but it's things that we can all envision, and I find it such a vivid image. Again, it's one of these songs that when I first put the record on, first time I heard it and I heard Uncle John's Band, I said, wow, this one is knocking me out. And then we kind of dip things down with High Time, and you get this unbelievable, beautiful ballad. And then you get the. This incredibly bouncy, beautiful, incredibly happy song. But then you dig into the lyrics and you realize, you know, boy, there's some danger happening here.
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B
Shakedown Stream co host and Life or Deadhead Gary Lambert Direwolf may be the.
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E
Peppiest murder ballad ever written.
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B
You know, I mean, it's like, if you listen to the lyrics, this is scary, ominous stuff.
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E
But it's delivered with such good cheer and such wit.
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B
And that was a favorite of mine.
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E
From the first times I heard it. I think I did get to hear one of those versions that Bobby sang.
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B
I'd have to look at the dead.
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E
Bass, make sure of that. But it was a great vehicle for Jerry's pedal steel.
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B
And when he stopped playing pedal steel.
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E
And just made it an electric guitar song or worked it into the acoustic sets on acoustic, it worked just fine that way, too.
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B
Yeah, I'm a big fan of that song. Guitarist and more recently, minted dead freak Billy Strings.
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F
Recently, I got asked to do these liner notes for the Jerry and John Kahn, the latest pieces. So that got me digging into all these tunes that was on the set list. And I listened to that live, you know, recording a bunch. The direwolf on there, it's just, you know, Jerry and John. It's so cool because you can really hear Jerry's flat picking guitar. You can hear the bluegrass influence in there. He's playing like, some almost Doc Watson licks and stuff. It's really cool. You know, I've always heard this song as, you know. Yeah, I love that song. You know, Direwolf. Yeah, Don't Murder Me. It's a great tune. But for some reason, when I was doing this project, it just took on a whole new weight for me. I think I was listening to the chorus all the time and not the verses. And this time I really dug into the verses and it's like, holy shit. I mean, this song is. It's got layers and it's deep, man. It's really deep. First of all, like, finer IO, that's just like this fictional place. And I just love that, you know. I love the almost childish characteristics and ancient folk wisdom, you know, that Robert Hunter had. It's kind of weird that Jerry was into that kind of shit, too. Like, you know, Frankenstein and the Wolfman and the Mummy. And when I was a little kid, my dad showed me those movies, and I loved them. The Wolfman was my favorite one. I got him tattooed on my side, you know, And I got the Creature from the Black Lagoon, too. And, yeah, I mean, I really loved those movies. And so the wolf part already sticks out to me because I'm such a freak. For the Wolfman. When I was little, I knew he was real, you know, it was nuts. I wouldn't even go out when it was a full moon. It's just this amazing, like, little tale, you know. You got that part where the wolf is outside his window grinning, and he just says, come on in. That's such a huge image. Like, everything is so vague. And it's all up for interpretation, for personal interpretation. It's up to you to decide what's really going on. And this one, it could be a lot of different shit, you know, like, what's going on? Is the wolf the devil? Is this guy who invited him in to play cards, is he now a part of the wolf pack? In the last verse in the backwash, you know, is he one of the wolves that are running around? And is he the one that is getting the dues collected from him?
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B
Let's let Jerry Garcia introduce Direwolf February 1, 1970, at the Warehouse in New Orleans, two days after getting busted down on Bourbon Street.
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It's a little simple little song, and.
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B
I gotta teach you the chorus to it.
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D
So we're gonna play the chorus.
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C
This is a little song you sing.
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B
When you're walking home alone and it's dark and there's phantom figures scurrying in the background.
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D
Things that goes scraping tonight.
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B
And this is from Winterland in San Francisco, October 26, 1969.
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C
This song is dedicated to the Zodiac.
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B
Cat and also to paranoid fantasies everywhere.
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D
And everybody can sing along if they.
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B
Feel up to it. It's real easy to sing. The Zodiac cat in question was the still unidentified zodiac killer then on the loose in San Francisco, who'd begun sending cryptic notes to local newspapers during the summer of 69. That's some dark energy to affix to a song. But Direwolf was a timely song for a grisly era in American culture and remains timely today. Its original impetus, though, came from a slightly more classical source, Sherlock Holmes. It all started one evening when Robert Hunter and Jerry Garcia were home watching television.
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G
Some revolting sacrificial writer has been performed. What depth a human being can sink to. What human being could have done this? That is precisely what I intend to find out. Take heed and beware the more in those dark hours when evil is exalted, else you will surely meet the hound of hell, the hound of the basket.
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B
Peter Cushing, later known for playing Grand Moff Tarkin in Star wars, among many, many other roles, was Sherlock Holmes, recalled Robert Hunter in his online journal in 1996. We were speculating on what the ghostly hound might turn out to be. Somebody, possibly Mountain Girl, suggested that it might be a dire wolf, hunter wrote. We thought dire wolves were great big beasts extinct now. It turns out they were quite small and ran in packs. But the idea of a great big wolf named Dyer was enough to trigger a lyric. Then Hunter dreamt the song. The next morning he told Steve Silberman, I woke up and grabbed a pencil before I was entirely awake and wrote the whole song down. I think I managed to capture the quality of the dream by writing it down before I was wide awake. He continued, I remember giving Jerry the lyrics to Direwolf while he was noodling on guitar watching television. He took them and placed them aside without looking at them, continued watching tv. I said, I don't live here because of your sweet temper. It's to write songs. Somewhat startled at the vehemence of the statement, he picked up the page and got right to work setting it. The old boy often needed jump starting. The song was done by that afternoon and debuted on stage by the grateful dead on June 7, 1969 at the Fillmore West. According to the San Francisco examiner archives, the Hound of the Baskervilles aired on Bay Area television exactly twice in the spring of 1969, May 25th and May 31st. On the 31st the dead were in the northwest playing MacArthur Court and Eugene. Which means that it might well have been on Sunday evening, May 25, 1969, that Garcia, Hunter and Mountain Girl found themselves watching the 9:30 showing of the Hound of the Baskervilles on Channel 2. And on Monday, May 26, when Hunter woke up with words and Garcia wrote some music and direwolf came into existence.
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G
The only thing I didn't like about.
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B
It is it seemed like it started at one tempo and crept up too much on my guitar.
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C
In the timbers at the nario the wolves are running round the winter was so hot and cold froze 10ft leave the ground Been around this whole country.
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B
But I never yet found funereal.
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E
Well.
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C
As we march down as we march, march down but as we march down.
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B
T for Nario that's Bob Dylan's version of Pretty Peggio from his 1962 self titled debut, making too many myths to unpack at once and singing a Scottish ballad that migrated across the Atlantic to the southern Appalachians. It first appeared in print in the United States in 1890. In that version, Peggio could be found down by the banks of the Ivyo, most likely a mutation of the Bonnie Lass of 5io Fernerio itself seems to be an American invention, first appearing in a version sung by Mrs. Margaret Combs Green of Knotts County, Kentucky, and transcribed in 1908 by Catherine Jackson French, the pioneering song collector. Finerio is a place of the imagination, not Robert Hunter's imagination, or maybe even Margaret Greene's imagination, but perhaps some shared imagination in the Kentucky mountains, dreaming far and lonesome. Not that a listener needs or is expected to know any of that, nor to imply that Jerry Garcia and Robert Hunter were familiar with every nuance and variant of the Peggy O ballad. But that's not to say that they weren't.
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Our captain fell in love with a lady like a dove and he called her by name pretty Peggy.
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B
That version of Peggy o was from May 22, 1977, on the working man's dead recording of Direwolf. Alongside those cursed lyrics about the wolf at the door is a voice that's neither from the Appalachians nor even ancient at all. The pedal steel guitar. Jerry Garcia owned a pedal steel when he lived in the Haight, but divested of it because he couldn't figure out how to play it. But a few years later, after finding a Zane back custom double 10 set up and ready to go at a Denver music store, he took the plunge again. Here's how Jerry put it on stage a few months later, on August 1, 1969, his 27th birthday. This is from the amazing recent box set dawn of the New Riders of the Purple Sage, put up by our friends at the Owsley Stanley Foundation. Of course, sociologically, you know, this all represents a big switch in the whole.
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E
Rock and roll trip.
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G
You know.
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B
If you really want to get into it. The Grateful Dead's embrace of country music in 1969 and 1970, first manifesting on working Man's Dead, was part of a larger shift in American music and American culture at large. From the wilds of the first psychedelic era to whatever was to come, the pedal steel might have represented a sociological switch, but practically speaking, first Jerry Garcia had to learn how to play it. The pedal steel is insanely complicated. It can bend notes in multiple directions at once. To play it requires both hands, both feet, and both knees. Many players practice for years before performing in public. Garcia was on stage within a matter of weeks, joining his old friend John Marmaduke Dawson at a Hofbrau in Menlo Park. They soon drafted guitarist David Nelson, a partner of Garcia in numerous projects in the acoustic days before the Dead, and the three began to practice in Garcia and Hunter's living room in Larkspur, joined soon by Bob Matthews on bass. David Nelson would contribute to both Working Man's Dead and American Beauty and join the Dead on stage virtually every night in 1970. Here's what he remembered about Jerry and the pedal steel.
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G
The complicated thing about it was the way the pedal mechanisms works just under the guitar. And so Garcia would get under there, and there would be whole 20 minutes of the practice with Garcia under that guitar going, motherfucker, Fucking cock sucker. You know, we'd sit there and be polite, you know, And I tried to help one time. He said, no, you really can't. You gotta have one guy do this. This is one of those things, you know? But those practices were held at Garcia's house. The first new writers things were at Garcia's house. So I didn't really have a place. I was still in Palo Alto. So I'd drive up there and think, do I have to drive back every day? And they said, no, you can stay here. You can sleep here. So I slept on the floor. They made a little pallet for me on the floor. Well, they were sharing the house. Mountain Girl was there, and Hunter's girlfriend Christy was there for a while and stuff like that. It was a nice place. Yeah, it was just amazing, these songs coming out. We were going, whoa, wow. It was one of those periods of time when it was just in the air, writing songs. John Dawson was coming out with all these incredible songs too, just tons of them. You know, there'd be like, every week there'd be five new songs or something, you know, at least a couple, three. That was just great. This just went on and on almost.
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B
Instantly, starting in mid-1969, the new writers became part of the Dead stage shows, with David Nelson and John Dawson appearing on stage to add harmonies and additional guitar.
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G
Yeah, there were the Chet Helms gigs and the Family Dog. And we would go sit in just for a song or two, and then a Bill Graham gig maybe at Winterland or something, and we'd go just sit in for a song or two, and we got to go backstage and hang out behind the amps and stuff like that. Yeah, I remember those were really fun, you know, playing one song or two or just singing harmony on a couple songs. At that time, we were still Jerry Garcia and friends, and Garcia hated that. He just went, no, no. And so Newspaper or somebody said, well, you got a name? And he said, how about the Murdering Punks? You know, and that's really a bad idea, because it was. It happened to be 68 or 69, and that was the Manson. Charles Manson murders and all that shit, you know, so that was not a good idea. And so we have this list. I probably still got it buried somewhere, but we had this incredible list of names, because whenever a band starts to think of names, the first two or three are serious, the next are just laughable. Having fun, you know, and everybody laughing about a name, you know, like the Murdering Punks, you know. And one night, Hunter was living at that house also. And Hunter comes down the stairs and says, I think I got a name idea for your band. And we said, what? And he said, the writers of the Purple Sage. And I said, oh, there already was a writers of the Purple Sage Foy willing and the writers of the Purple stage. And so I said, how about new writers of the Purple Sage? And they said, that's it.
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B
It's true that Charles Manson and his followers went on their murder spree in August 1969, the same month New the Purple Sage debuted under that name. But the new writers actually came first. And more likely, it was the Zodiac Killer that dissuaded the new country rock band from calling themselves the Murdering Punks. The serial killer's first letter to the press appeared on August 1, 1969, just exactly as the band was looking for a name. They played their first official billing as the New Riders of the Purple Sage just a week later at the Matrix, which happened to be the same night that the Manson killings began. So to add a footnote to a footnote, the Zodiac Killer might not have influenced the writing of Direwolf, but did have a hand in the naming of the New Riders of The Purple Sage over the next year, as the New Riders of the Purple Sage solidified into a band, they would become a forum for both Jerry Garcia's pedal steel as well as Bob Weir's developing cowboy Persona. This is also from the dawn of the New Riders of the Purple Sage.
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C
BOX the seasons come, seasons go. We get a little sunshine, raining snow just the way that it was planned to be.
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B
That was Seasons of my heart, recorded August 28, 1969 at the family Dog on the Great highway in San Francisco. We'll meet up with the new writers again further down the trail. Jerry Garcia's pedal steel debuted with the Grateful Dead in June 1969, showing up on tape for the first time over the summer solstice at the Fillmore East. And one of the numbers Garcia used it on was his and Hunter's brand new song about the Dire Wolf, written after watching the Hound of the Baskervilles, except that Garcia was no longer singing.
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It in the timbers of an area the wolves are running round the winter.
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Was so hard and cold froze 10ft.
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Neath the ground don't murder me, I beg of you don't murder me Please don't murder me.
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B
That was an early version of Direwolf recorded by owsley Stanley on June 27, 1969 in Santa Rosa, California, with vocals by Bobby A. Sweer and Jerry Garcia on pedal steel. The song had made it to the stage less than two weeks after Garcia and Hunter had written it, with Garcia playing acoustic guitar and singing lead and everybody else following behind. Besides being a live workshop for Jerry Garcia's pedal steel chops and Bobby Ace's singing the Other Way, in which the New Riders of the Purple Sage are inseparable from Working Man's Dead, is that their first bassist co produced the album. Here's original New Writers bassist Bob Matthews.
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E
My participation with the New Writers started with the beginning of New Writers in May of 1969, and I played with them all summer of 69 up through the fall of 1969 when I had job opportunities in real recording studios to be a real recording engineer rather than just trying to present myself as a real recording engineer. But I had to make a choice and actually it was Marmaduke who put the choice to me. He said, bob, you know we've had a lot of fun playing. You like it, we'd like to have you play with us, but you're also advancing your recording job and doing a good job at it. You have to make a choice. You have to do one or the other. They are two separate artistic endeavors. And I never really made a choice, which by default made the choice that I stuck with the recording.
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B
Bob Matthews gained invaluable experience with new writers. What he would come to call his both sides of the glass perspective.
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E
That's what it refers to as an engineer producer from the control room side versus the performer who played in the band and understood the music that the band was creating so that I could use the tools from both sides. It was a joy. It helped the music. The musicians liked it because I had good contacts and I could make things happen realistically and economically.
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B
Along with Betty Kanter, Bob Matthews was a full creative partner with the musicians in the creation of Working Man's Dead, and they would receive both producers credits and producers royalties on the album. They can be heard in every groove of the disc, literally. In the case of mastering engineer Betty Kanter, first and foremost, they were the band's collaborators and figured out a sympathetic way to record them.
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E
It was pretty simple. A lot of the basic tracks had acoustic guitars. There was something that Betty and I pulled out of our collective hat, and that was we would have them set up sort of in a semi circle. The acoustic guitars, you know, maybe about six feet apart in a semi arc each with the microphone we were not using directs on the acoustics. These are all Martin D21s, D28s. The outside of the arc, you would have one on stage right, one on stage left, and one stage center. The acoustic guitar on stage right needed to be heard by the acoustic guitar player all the way on stage left without it leaking into the microphone on stage center. What I did was I took baffles as they roll around the studio. And properly made baffles have two sides. One is absorptive, which is what they're usually used for to suck up extra sound. And the other side is reflective. And what I did was I used the reflective side of a baffle that was set between acoustic guitar stage right and acoustic guitar stage center, such that the reflective side went behind stage center and then off to stage left, so that I was redirecting acoustic energy, utilizing the reflective surfaces of the baffles. This is when we were just really starting to discover how important phase was leakage was phase.
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B
By the time Direwolf got to Pacific High in February 1970, it had changed again, with Garcia returning to lead vocals by early July 1969. Here's what it sounded like on January 2, 1970 at the Fillmore east from Dave's Picks 30 with Tom Constantin on Hammond organ Garry introduced the song a lot as a sing along during this period. This is a song with an easy.
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C
Chorus and you can even sing with it.
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B
It's fun.
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C
In the timbers of burial the wolves running around the winter was so hot and cold Most heavy to ground.
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Here's David Lemieux.
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D
Well, and it's interesting with Jerry, when he was with the New Riders on pedal steel, he did not sing at all, no backgrounds or anything. And I gather that it requires so much effort and concentration. Singing's not really on the menu there. And it's interesting because the first half dozen versions of Dire Wolf, Bob Weir sang lead vocal. And that to me just blows my mind. I remember playing one of the versions for Bob with Bob on lead vocal and he had no recollection of that. And it was shortly after that that Jerry stopped playing pedal steel during Direwolf and then he started singing lead on it. And that's the version obviously we have on the album where everything actually lead is sung by Jerry, with the exception of Easy Wind.
- [26:27]
B
Now let's move over to Pacific High recording and the big pile of Working Man's Dead session tapes called the Angel Share. Jerry Garcia's guitar is in the left channel. Bob Weirs is in the right. On that early run through of Direwolf, we hear the band warming up the song with both of the guitarists playing acoustic not too far from the basic track that's on the final album. But that's not all that's on the angel share. When the Dead Bob Matthews and Betty Cantor were at work on Working Man's Dead, they went full speed ahead in such a way that it sometimes leaves our in house sonic archaeologists, archivist Mike Johnson and engineer Brian Kehue at a bit of a loss to explain how the tape got how it did. As they got deeper into the project, they started finding tape fragments everywhere. Here's Brian Kehue to explain.
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H
Direwolf has quite a few takes to. It might be spread across two reels or even three. And sometimes we'd find that they had a little piece of tape somehow left over and they would splice it on the end of another roll, but actually splice it backwards. So sometimes what we heard was backwards music playing because the tape can be actually inserted backwards and it just plays reverse. And then I have to copy it from the tape in one pass and then reverse it in the computer. So sometimes, you know, we had to have the whole pile put together and then start dissecting it. One day they're working on a song, Black Peter and Then they work on direwolf and then you have a piece of new Speedway boogie as a demo. And they may be from different days. They could be from the same day, we don't really know. And part of it might have been that they recorded over something from a previous day because of course, we don't need those outtakes anymore. Where recording a new song and tape is expensive.
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B
For the Working Man's Dead sessions, Betty Kanter and Bob Matthews were recording the band mostly on reels of Ampex 40062 inch mastering tape, which could fit around 40 minutes of music on each 3,600 foot reel. Running at 15 inches per second. Though it would become a studio standard, 406 was brand new in 1970 and sold for slightly cheaper than its competitors, perhaps between 60 and $70 per reel wholesale. Adjusted for inflation, around $400 per reel. Brian is an expert at the Beatles and is an author and an acknowledged professional at this. We're both giant fans of Beetle discographer.
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E
Mark Lewison, and in Lewison's books of.
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D
The Beatles, he went to Abbey Road.
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H
DMI and had access to their files.
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B
They kept wonderful detailed information about every Beetle tracking session. The Grateful Dead didn't use tape quite like anybody else, even in the recording studio. And though Dead scholars have figured out where most of the sessions occurred, the Dead and their cohorts didn't always leave behind the most detailed documentation. Lewison was able to put together these books.
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H
There's no such thing with the Grateful Dead.
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B
None whatsoever.
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D
We don't even know most cases.
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B
We don't even know the recording dates. And this information just does not exist.
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H
Which is a giant crime.
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E
It really should.
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H
Brian Kehue Sometimes they play a song, they don't sing on it. Maybe they sing on two versions. And we found some of that during this process. But the deeper dive and the way to really satisfy people who are fans is to be allowed into the situation where they're working. And that doesn't mean that the output is finished or the output is polished. Sometimes they're just literally talking and tuning or learning the song. I mean, it's funny to hear a song that we all know so well and Dead fans have memorized to the finest detail, but the band doesn't even know the chords yet. This is how new things were. And so I love the discovery of seeing them learn their own songs and come up with a better chord or at least on two of these songs that maybe Jerry starts it on guitar and he says, no, no, I can't do this. And then Bob becomes the main guitar player on the song. And that's the way it's been ever since then. But on that day, they weren't really sure who was going to play this part and so forth. It's fascinating to hear that working process. And so one of our key goals, and I think the real highlight of the whole set, will be for the audience to feel like, you know, you're just between the amplifiers, just in front of the drum set. We tried to make it a very natural sound without a lot of effects on it, without a lot of the reverb and compression and tricks that people used when mixing, so that it's more documentarian and more literal. And you get to hear when they stop and make a noise. You get to hear when they scuffle their feet. You get to hear them yell at each other or praise each other. And then we get to hear them progress as the song gets better and better. And sometimes even they're singing, sometimes they're not. But when they're not singing, you can actually hear the players that much better. You can hear their interaction, what they're trying to do. There are some things you'll hear a moment when a fragment of a song starts and maybe two seconds, sometimes even a brief moment where they're already playing and the tape starts. Somebody realizes they're doing a take and we forgot to push record and the tape starts. You hear all these audio artifacts, but we haven't filtered those out. We haven't removed things just to make it pretty. We tried to keep it very real because the band holds up to that scrutiny. They play well together. They have their unique character. And we're not trying to make it polished or perfected. We're trying to be as real and literal as possible about what was happening without interpretation.
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B
What the Angel Share reveals about Direwolf is that despite intensive preparation with Bob Matthews and Betty Cantor, there was still some experimentation happening in the studio, more subtle fine tuning than radical rewrites. But feeling the songs out as they went. On the Angel Share, we can hear the band working through Direwolf exactly as the basic tracks appear. On Working Man's Dead, the pedal steel would come later. But also on the Angel Share are a number of takes featuring Jerry Garcia playing electric guitar. And we are on acoustic, including a full performance with scratch vocals. But it's also missing the secret sauce, the pedal steel, and the pedal steel solo. Dave Lemieux loves that solo, and rightly so.
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D
It could be, you know, one of the best pedal steel solos I've ever heard. And Jerry, you know, would be the first to say he didn't feel he was quite an expert at the pedal steel. But I listened to this and when I think of Dire Wolf, all I think of is the lead pedal steel throughout. The entire song is driven by the pedal steel guitar. And it is. It really just blows my mind how good he'd become in essentially the less than a year that he'd been playing it. And it's a testament to Jerry's talent as a musician to learn an instrument this well within. It's like what you were saying about teach your children. Jerry was so proficient at it that he was, you know, he was sought after by, you know, Crosby, Stills and Nash to be on their album. Then you listen a year later when he recorded his solo record on the Wheel and you can hear it's distinctly Jerry, you know, it's as distinct listening to that. It's like when I listen to slide players, slide guitar players, and to me a lot of them blend into one another. But Bob Weir, say what you will about his slide playing, it is very distinct. Likewise, Jerry's pedal steel playing is very distinct from all the other players.
- [35:05]
B
All of these things are true in the same way that Jerry Garcia's pedal steel represents a generational divide in rock and roll. Jerry Garcia himself represents something of a generational divide among pedal steel guitar players. Some serious old schoolers disregard his playing as primitive, which Garcia would probably agree with. But younger players have also cited Garcia's creativity and instinctual musicality as inspirations in some ways. On Working Man's Dead, Garcia plays the pedal steel equivalent of punk rock. All instinct and self invented technique. He'd learn more as he played more. One word for Garcia's pedal steel playing on Working Man's Dead is primal. Another would be beautiful. Let's listen to that pedal steel solo from Direwolf, which also features some sweet overdubbed oohs near the end. The pedal steel dances over to the right channel for a moment and then back to the center of the mix. That's Bob Matthews waving hello.
- [36:28]
E
Usually it was whoever's song it was who sang the lead would do the track. And on the tunes that had backup, the backup would be recorded separately. The harmonies would be sung and recorded against the lead vocal. I mean, the whole point of harmonies, listen to Crosby, Stills and Nash. There's the epitome of harmony. And they never. I don't think you'll ever find any demonstration that they did their harmony parts separately to the best of my knowledge, if we were recording the tune, we were working on the tune, we'd play it back to make sure not only was it played without any mistakes, but that it carried the intent, the vibe, the capital M magic.
- [37:19]
B
That capital M magic was there with direwolf all the way from the moment it was written. And that magic would carry well into the future. As some listeners might know, dire wolves appear throughout George R.R. martin's game of Thrones, both the original novels and the popular HBO series. But the connections between George R.R. martin and the Grateful Dead run way deeper and started more than a dozen years before the first Game of Thrones book was even published. George R.R. martin's fourth novel, published in 1983, was called the Armageddon Rag, about a pair of brutal murders connected to a fictional rock band formed in the 60s called the Nazgul. Along with other bands, the Dead played an influence on the novel. But it got even deeper the next year when Phil deguiare optioned the book for a movie. Daguerre was one of the filmmakers behind Sunshine Daydream, the now beloved, then bootlegged concert film from 1972. And Daguerre hired a group of familiar musicians, including Robert Hunter, Merle Saunders, and Quicksilver messenger services John Cipollina, to write the music for the Nazgul. The Armageddon Rag movie never got made, but the soundtrack did, and it circulates among tape collectors. Martin called the Armageddon Rag a total commercial disaster and subsequently took a break from writing novels. But people discover the Grateful Dead in many different ways. Radio tapes, through parents, LPs. And in the early 80s, one of those pathways to the Dead became the world of George R.R. martin. To explain, we have Jeffrey Alexander, who leads a collective known as Direwolves Just exactly Perfect Sisters Band. Despite having two Dead references packed into their name. They're not a Dead cover band, but they definitely jam. Here's Jeffrey.
- [39:05]
I
When I was, like, 15, I got a copy of Armageddon Rag, and it was like, I was so into it. I remember that one summer I read it, like, three times. And I, you know, I mean, I was a teenager into fantasy novels and, like, and Dungeons and Dragons and all of that. And I thought this was the coolest thing. I mean, looking back, it's not really the greatest book. It's okay. I don't know if it ages well, but it's like, you know, there's like this. The fantasy elements and then of a rock band and with, like, supernatural things and, you know, magic and it, you know, it's cool. And so I got into George R.R. martin through that, and then I was just already, like, a really, really serious music head. Like, I went to a lot of sci fi conventions when I was growing up in Baltimore, and I would go to, like, these Dungeons and Dragons workshops with friends, and, like, I talked about this book, and then they. They were like, oh, yeah, you should check out, you know, the project with, like, Robert Hunter and John Cipollina. And I was like, well, I don't know what that is. And then I. And so then I just dove into that and kind of blew my mind. Like, I was a bit of a punker then, you know, like, I was heavily into hardcore and, like, SST stuff. And then I just did some deep dives with, like, Quicksilver and started to.
- [40:22]
E
Get into the Dead.
- [40:22]
I
When I was a senior in high school, a friend of mine said, well, I got tickets for us to go see the Dead. And I was like, okay. So. And then I went to a show. It was 85. And then I was like, oh, no. I was all in at that point. I ended up just for five years, just going on the road, and I got to see Jerry, like, you know, hundred. Sometimes I don't even know. I think that there's just that. That fantasy, sci fi, Grateful Dead connection, it runs pretty deep in my psyche. And I think it's just me, maybe the magical kind of vibe. I think a lot of it is also just my interest in escapism, you know, getting into some sort of alternate headspace, some kind of, like, magical reality, like fantasy books and, you know, improvisational music really run hand in hand. And that's kind of what I try to do with my band as well.
- [41:14]
B
Here's where Jeffrey Alexander and Dire Wolves just exactly perfect Sisters Band sound like mid jam. This is a little bit of I Control the weather from their 2019 album grow towards the Light, available from the label Beyond. Beyond is beyond. In addition to entering American popular mythology, Dire Wolf was an important part of the Grateful Dead's repertoire for almost their entire career from the moment it was introduced. It was shelved very briefly during and immediately following the band's mid-70s road hiatus, but returned to the stage full force by 1977 and never left. But Direwolf wasn't a jam vehicle. In fact, it barely changed at all. An introverse, two bridge verses, a solo and an outro verse, never going over four minutes in length. Because of that. It's the perfect way to hear how the sound of the Grateful Dead changed radically over those years. Mickey Hart leaves and comes back. Donnajean Godscho arrives and departs. The tempo and guitar tones change, as does the band's attack. Here's a special supercut edit of Direwolf that begins with its first performance in 1969 and ends with its last in 1995. A few seconds taken from 26 different versions and arranged chronologically into one coherent performance. Thanks to my co host and super editor Rich Mahan for making this behemoth a reality.
- [43:09]
C
In the Tunis of the burial the wolves are running round the winter was so hard and cold froze 10ft beneath the ground don't murder me, I beg of you don't murder me Please don't murder me I sat down to my supper twice A bottle of red whiskey I said my prayers and went to bed that's the last they saw me.
- [43:44]
G
Don'T murder of me I beg of.
- [43:49]
C
You don't murder me Please don't murder.
- [43:56]
B
Me.
- [43:59]
C
When I woke A D Wolf £600 of S sp it at my window All I said was, was come on don't murder, I beg of you don't mur me Please don't mur me the wolf came in the back of my car we sat down for a game I cut my deck to the queen of spades but the cards were all the same don't murder me.
- [44:46]
G
I.
- [44:46]
C
Beg of you don't murder me.
- [44:51]
G
Please.
- [44:53]
C
Don'T murder me Sam.
- [45:42]
B
Me.
- [45:44]
C
Please don't murder me, don't murder me the baby.
- [45:53]
G
Up you don't murder me.
- [45:57]
C
Please don't murder me don't mur me I beg of you don't murder me please don't matter Me please don't matter.
- [46:28]
G
For a.
- [46:29]
B
Full list of the versions of Direwolf and that Supercut, check out dead.net deadcast. It ended, though, with the very final version of Direwolf, recorded July 2, 1995 at Deer Creek in Indiana. It's a perfect example of how the meaning of the song could change and how those phantom scurrying figures might stick around. Here's David Lemieux.
- [46:50]
D
There was the famous show in the 90s when Jerry was essentially under police protection because he received, I guess, the FBI, the police figured it was a credible death threat. And at the concert that night, it was an outdoor show. They left the house lights on because they wanted to make sure they could see everything. And Jerry and, you know, you think of the later years and what kind of, you know, they didn't talk very much from the stage. So you didn't know Were they in a joking mood or not? They didn't have to talk that night. But Jerry, on the night he received a credible death threat, he played Dire Wolf and sang to that crowd, don't Murder me. And it's just. It's typical Grateful Dead that. They've got this subtle, sly, nuanced sense of humor that, you know, only the Grateful Dead could do. And, you know, they didn't acknowledge it from the stage. They didn't. They didn't have to say anything. But the song kind of spoke for how Jerry was feeling, which is, yeah, this is, you know, a serious thing, but come on, you know, I'm going to turn it into a bit of not a joke, but I'm going to acknowledge that. Know this is the reality. Don't murder me.
- [47:49]
B
Once in a while, everybody's got a reason to sing. Dire Wolf.
- [47:53]
C
No, no, no. Don't murder me. I beg of you. Don't murder me. Please don't murder me. Please don't murder.
- [48:15]
A
Want to catch that super edit of the 26 different versions of Direwolf? Again, interested to know from which shows we compiled it?
- [48:23]
C
Easy.
- [48:24]
A
Stop by and Visit us@dead.net deadcast there's more to check out all the time, including notes about each episode. You can listen to past episodes, and while you're there, be sure to submit your story for the Deadcast. Click on the Learn More button, enter your info, click Start recording, and tell us about that time when that thing happened. Happened your first New Year's show. Or when Jerry wouldn't stop staring at you through the entirety of Morning Dew and transmitted the meaning of the song to you telepathically. Your story could end up in a future episode of the Dead cast. Before you log off, please be kind, hit that like button, rate us and subscribe at your podcast delivery service of choice. It helps. Thank you executive producers for the good old Grateful Dead cast, Mark Pincus and Doran Tyson. Produced for Rhino Entertainment by Rich Mahan Productions and Jesse Jarno. Special thanks to David Lemieux. All rights reserved.