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- [00:00]
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 to the Good Old Grateful Dead cast where we unravel the mysteries of the Grateful Dead and shine a light on topics we know you'll dig. If you haven't already, please subscribe, give us a like and leave a rating. It helps spread the show to those who haven't turned on to it yet and we truly appreciate your help. 2020 finds us celebrating the 50th anniversary of Working Man's Dead and we are deep diving into this classic Grateful Dead studio album, taking it track by track, getting down to the real nitty gritty. Be sure to treat yourself to the expertly remastered re release of the album, which is out now and also includes an epic show from February 21, 1971 at 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 in Marin County. Dead.net has all the info on this release and its various configurations. Well, in this episode we sink our teeth into the final track on side one, New Speedway Boogie. I can't believe we're already halfway through Working Man's Dead after this episode. I've always dug Jerry's killer tone on this song. It cuts like a hot knife through Bakersfield butter. All right folks, let's get this party started. We're going to hand it off to my co host Jesse Jarno.
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B
Closing side one of Working Man's Dead was yet another song, unlike the others to go along with the vibratory calypso of Uncle John's band, the tenderness of high time, and the doomed fable of the dire Wolf. Now there came the dark slink of New Speedway Boogie. It was the album's hardest hitting song yet. The Grateful Dead were notorious for having two drummers, but this boogie didn't have drums at all and it was hot off the press.
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C
Please don't dominate the rap Jack. If you got nothing new to say.
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B
The Grateful Dead appeared at many of the biggest festivals, freakouts and happenings of the 60s, including the Trips Festival, the Human Being, Monterey Pop and Woodstock. Not to mention countless free shows which Dead scholars are still working to identify. One event they didn't play was the free one day festival on December 6, 1969, in held at a speedway in Livermore, California, east of San Francisco. But they were supposed to. The concert now known as Altamont, wouldn't have happened without the Grateful Dead. Headlined by the Rolling Stones, the show featured Jefferson Airplane, Santana, Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young and the Flying Burrito Brothers. A truly stacked lineup and an event that went horribly wrong. Captured in the Maisels brothers classic documentary Gimme Shelter, the day culminated in the death of a black man named Meredith Hunter, stabbed and beaten to death by Hell's Angels while the Rolling Stones played. Two weeks later, the Grateful Dead debuted New Speedway Boogie, a new song by Jerry Garcia and Robert Hunter, Tales from the Golden Road co host Gary Lambert.
- [04:02]
D
It was the closest that Hunter ever got to sort of topical songwriting. It was like musical journalism. It was not a response to Altamont so much as it was a response to the reaction to Altamont. You know, right after Altamont, there was a lot of finger pointing and a lot of accusation and assignment of blame. They blamed the Grateful Dead, others blamed the Rolling Stones, others blamed the film company that wanted to make a movie of the Rolling There was finger pointing on every end. And of course, the Hell's Angels, you know, were called into account as well they should have been. But Hunter just wanted to sum up the uselessness of all that blame and all that finger pointing. And he did it beautifully. But again, even though he wrote it to a specific subject, which was rare for him, it became universal. And that refrain at the end can address whichever darkness is prevailing in the world at any given moment.
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C
One way or another, One way or another, one way or another. This darkness.
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B
A timeless mantra. New Speedway boogie was a topical song, definitely, but it was also deeply philosophical, written in parables that bordered on biblical. While it may have grown from Altamont, New Speedway Boogie was also in some way about the Grateful Dead themselves and what they'd been through over the past half decade. Is perhaps the foremost band of a countercultural underground to talk about New Speedway boogie. Let's rewind a little bit to just before Altamont. Sam Cutler would go on to work for the dead, but in 1969 he worked for the Rolling Stones, shepherding the band through Packed arenas across the United States and back. When the idea of a free show emerged, Cutler was sent out to Mickey Hart's ranch in Nevada to talk about it with the extended Grateful Dead family.
- [05:59]
E
The hey, Ashbury fantasy moved to the country in a way. The meeting that preceded Altamont was in the barn. About 80 people at it who I had to talk to, you know, kind of representing the Rolling Stones. And everyone kept on saying, man, everything will be cool. The Rolling Stones should come out here and hang out. And I was like, I don't think so. Yeah, I don't think they're gonna do that somehow, man, you know, they're not going to come live in a barn. No, you know what I mean? It was the Grateful Dead's idea. It wasn't the Rolling Stones idea, I can assure you. The idea originally came from rock. That the Grateful Dead wanted to do a free concert with the Rolling Stones. That's where it originally came from.
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B
Rock was rock. Scully, the Dead's perpetually star eyed and enthused manager from the days of the Haight Ashbury and intermittently through the 80s. At the end of the Rolling Stones triumphant American tour, the fantasy went, the Stones would play for free in Golden Gate park with the Dead in the airplane, with visions of Woodstock dancing in everybody's heads, musicians and local authorities alike. Events did not unfold smoothly, violating perhaps the first rule of free shows in the park, at least as they existed in the 60s. Mick Jagger made the cardinal mistake of announcing the free show in the park at a press conference. So it was that the festival got moved first to the Sears Point Raceway in Sonoma, and the day before the event, to Altamont Raceway park in Livermore. Gimme Shelter is gripping viewing for any music fan, though hardly captures the full scope of the event. There are many accounts of Altamont, most recently Joel Selvin's book of that name. Sam Cutler has his own take in his colorful memoir, you can't always get what you want. With lots of nuances hashed out in various biographies and primary source reporting elsewhere, the Dead's rehearsal hall at the Hamilton Air Force Base in Nevada became the unofficial festival headquarters. It was also home to Alembic, the sound company inspired by Owsley Stanley. And they donated their speaker system to the free festival, as did the venue, the family dog, who had their own speaker setup created by future NASA engineer Bob Cohen. Members of the Dead's artistic community could be found everywhere around Altamont. In the crowd, Ron Boise of the Merry Pranksters played his Thunder machine. Doug McKechnie who helped the Dead with voltage control on what's Become of the Baby. Anoxymoxoa was part of the Alembic crew for the day and as part of the deal set up his massive Moog synthesizer and played a sunrise meditation. There's a brief clip of him in Gimme Shelter. And there were some familiar faces in the scaffolding with all the gear. At the sound console for Altamont, wrangling the competing sound systems was Owsley Stanley himself. Recording were Bob Matthews and Betty Kanter, using the same Ampex MM1016 track 2 inch tape recorder that they'd used to make Live Dead and would use to record Working Man's Dead a few months later. Here's Bob.
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F
My experience was involved in having gone back for my brand new acquired 16 track machine to record the event, which I ended up recording the Rolling Stones. A few people have gotten to hear the mix of Brown Sugar and Midnight Rambler that they performed.
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B
And on the unorganized organizing committee were members of the Diggers, the radical collective that espoused free productive anarchy. They took free concerts really seriously. Altamonte wasn't organized by the Grateful Dead so much that it grew from their community. The vibes were pretty weird already. Robert Hunter decided to skip out in advance and went to go see the movie Easy Rider instead. Perhaps a wise move.
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C
Hey, hey, people. Sisters, brothers and sisters. Brothers and sisters. Come on now.
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B
That means everybody just cool out, will you?
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C
Cool out, everybody.
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B
The good energy did not prevail, people. I mean, who's fighting?
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C
What for.
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B
Who'S fighting and a what for? There are several accounts of who asked the Hells Angels to be there and why. And I'll leave those to other historical disentanglers. But their presence resulted in the death of Meredith Hunter, a black teenager who possibly pulled a gun out of his pocket and aimed it at Mick Jagger. Here's Jerry Garcia talking about Altamont from a bonus clip released with a DVD of Amir Barlev's Long Strange Trip documentary. This was originally filmed by the BBC in London in May 1970, just six months following the events at Altamont.
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G
Woodstock and Altamont. The same situations were prevailing in terms of how it was for the people there. It was free, essentially. And it was also completely without control of any sort. You know, there were no police. I mean, there was no. There's no way you can realistically control that size, really. You can't expect to. The way I saw it, both of those situations have been sort of like two sides of the same coin. It's like two ways that that kind of expression can go. You know, a huge number of people, people had no rules. And one of the ways obviously you can go is into a terrible bummer like Altamon. And one of the other ways is into an immensely joyful scene like Woodstock. And they both had their extremes, but they were both sort of characterized by a kind of a, you know, by this heaviness, man, this sort of historical heaviness. You know, lots of people, more people than you've ever seen in your life. Our relationship with the Angels is that we both exist in essentially the same area and we both know that each other exists. And they outnumber us about 90 to 1. And we get along okay with them. Those guys are guys that we all know. We've known them for years, you know, and there's. We don't have any fight with them, but we do know that they are Hell's Angels and they're capable of doing a lot of pretty amazing things, and we just stay out of their way. When we did the. The be in. In the park back in. I forgot when. 66, I guess 67 or 66. The angels were at that scene strictly just to be there, you know, just Hell's Angels being there. And it seemed like it would be a good thing to be at music and all. And they sort of found themselves in a position of taking care of lost kids, watching the stage, that kind of thing. You know, they just started doing it.
- [12:33]
B
Altamont rightly became a much talked about topic in the media and, and a landmark in the Dead's own psychic landscape. There would be a lot of fallout and a lot of finger pointing. As always, you can find links for more information@dead.net deadcast in multiple San Francisco Chronicle columns that week, venerable music critic and longtime Dead supporter Ralph J. Gleason attacked the festival. Why did the Grateful Dead people and other locals involved go along with the idea? He wrote on December 10. Now it has ended in murder. And that was a murder, not just a death like the drowning or the hit and run victims. Is this the new community? Is this what Woodstock promised? Gathered together as a tribe? What happened? Brutality, murder, despellation, you name it. The name of the game is money, power and ego. And money is first, and it brings power. And it was this column and Gleason's words that inspired Robert Hunter to write New Speedway Boogie. Yes, obviously Altamont sucked. It was a catastrophe and people made stupid decisions that had terrible results. But Robert Hunter wasn't about to condemn the counterculture's attempt to transform the mainstream culture around them. As the song suggests, one step done and another begun, the song jumped into the Dead's repertoire almost instantly. Here's Buzz Poole, author of the 33 and a Third book about Working Man's Dead.
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F
They get it into a song form in 14 days, and clearly they were responding to something and saying, okay, hey, we're very happy, just kind of going on and doing our thing. It's really all we want to do. It's all we have done up to this point, and it is all we're going to do moving forward. But here we are, we're recognizing that something happened and there's no getting around that. I don't know how many people know that. Had Altman not gone down the way it did. The plan for December 6th of 1969 was the dead. We're going to play that afternoon at the Speedway, and then they had a gig at the Fillmores. And, you know, Kurtzman was the first one to say, I'm not playing, because they left. And then the rest of the band kind of just went along with it. It was just supposed to be another day of gigging. And it actually did stop the Dead in their tracks. And hardly anything stopped these guys in their tracks. They had never really had to deal with the darkness in a meaningful way. And Altman was that first time. Or really they got caught out by it. And, you know, little pock busts and minor arrests and hassles that had happened before were just hassles. They weren't anything that stopped that prime intention of ditching the straight life and living for the music. And Altman was a reminder that there are things that will derail that goal.
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B
The Speedway in the title referred in part to Altamont, but it also referred to a location a little closer to home. Here's Working Man's dad, co producer Bob Matthews.
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F
Speedway Meadows. It's in Golden Gate Park. So obviously New Speedway Meadows, in Hunter's mind, was the newer version of Plan in Golden Gate Park. That's all I can assume. I never actually talked to him about that.
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B
Like Finerio in Direwolf, perhaps the New Speedway was a place of the imagination. Here's what New Speedway boogie sounded like when the Dead first started playing it. This is from the song's second performance, Dec. 21, 1969, at the original Fillmore Auditorium in San Francisco. The Dead's last gigs in that room, as it turned out, released on Dave's Pick Six. Check out the early vocal arrangement, which is pretty intricate Please don't dominate the.
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C
Rap game if you got nothing new.
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A
You see.
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C
If you please don't back up Track this chains got you run.
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F
Today.
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C
Spend a little time on the mountain Spend a little time on the hill. Some say better run away Some say better stand still.
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B
That sounds kind of together for a brand new song. But the Pan apparently wasn't happy with it. They played it a few times like this throughout December 1969, and it does sometimes seem like they're having trouble settling on a groove. It disappeared again until the Working Man's Dead sessions. We've heard a fair bit in the previous episodes of the Dead cast about how much prep the Dead did for Working Man's Dead. But perhaps the most remarkable discovery of the new stash of outtakes called the angel share is the 30 minutes of work documenting the evolution of New Speedway Boogie in the studio. Archivist Mike Johnson.
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H
It opens with a demo. And why would you be doing a demo in studio? You'd think that you've already done this, but it's him and Bill. Bill's playing a snare drum. It's perfect. And this new Speedway boogie, it takes you through the whole process. It's amazing.
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B
It begins with a quick run through of the song. Just Jerry Garcia on acoustic guitar and Bill Kreutzman on drums. The recording is missing the first 20 seconds, but it's still delightful.
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C
It's hard to run with the weight of gold Other hand I heard it said it's just as hard with the weight of it who can deny? Who can deny? Not just a change in style One step done and another deep gun and I wonder how many miles. I spent a little time on the mountain spend a little time on the hill Things went down, don't understand But I think in time we will now I don't know but I was told in the heat of the sun a man died cold. God come and stand and wait with the sun so dark and I was so late. You can't overlook the lag tech of any other highway to rank. Got no signs, a dividing lantern Very few rules to catch. I spent a little time on a mountain spend a little time on a hill. I thought things getting out of hand I guess they always will now I don't know but I've been told if the horse don't pull you got to carry the load oh no, no respect that strong Maybe find out before too long One way or another, one way or another One way or another this darkness got to give one way or another One way or Another. One way or another, this darkness got.
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B
To be.
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D
2 minutes and 57 seconds.
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G
It's too long. It's too long.
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B
Once the New Speedway Boogie session gets going, the studio chatter reveals where the various musicians are positioned in Pacific High as they're working on the song. Jerry Garcia is singing and playing acoustic guitar. Phil Lesh is in the control room with Betty Kanter. Bill Kreutzman is holding down the percussion, maybe sitting in his kit playing what sounds like a woodblock in Maracas, as we can hear from this interaction. Then you gotta put the clapping in my headset. No, I do want it. I don't have it now.
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G
Okay, I got it.
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B
And some unidentified gigglers doing the clapping. I'm guessing in an isolation booth. One of them, Bob, weird music stuff.
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D
Okay, take three.
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B
And they do some experimenting. I really like this take where Garcia tries overdubbing a solo electric part over his own acoustic guitar to say.
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C
Please don't back up the track. This train's got to run today.
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B
Then they do a swap.
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G
Well, it's hard for me to sing and maintain a groove.
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B
This is one of engineer Brian Kehue's favorite moments of the angel share outtakes.
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I
They're doing instrumental versions of quite a few of these songs playing together without singing because they're trying to listen and focus on their parts. They know that generally they put the vocals on later, as most groups did at some point. Let's focus on our playing. There's an amazing moment when Jerry is playing and he's doing New Speedway Boogie, which is a classic, and he says, I have trouble grooving. In other words, playing guitar and singing at the same time. And you're thinking, this is his whole career is playing guitar and singing at the same time. Even then, he'd already been doing it for almost a decade professionally, and it's amazing to hear him feel that he wasn't adequate enough to sing and play guitar at the same time. But he does hand over the part to Bob and lets him play guitar instead, halfway through the takes. That's a nice instance where he sings at the same time as they're recording. We have a few of those, and we have some where they actually seem to even like one of their performances.
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B
It's fascinating to know that Jerry Garcia felt he had to sing this song live. So Bob Weir takes over the acoustic rhythm guitar part, and Jerry Garcia sings without playing any instrument at all on the basic tracks. It leads to some amusing moments as they try to find a groove.
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G
Okay, start again. Keep it nice and Fucking together, you fuckers. Solid shit.
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B
And this is the lineup they stick with for the final Working Man's Dead take of New Speedway Boogie. Jerry Garcia on vocals, Bob Weir on acoustic guitar, Bill Kreutzman on percussion, plus a few hand clappers, presumably including Mickey Hart. Even when Garcia added taught electric leads, it stayed ultra minimalist by Dead standards, with a basic track of only acoustic guitar, hand percussion and actual hands. Co producer Bob Matthews.
- [23:32]
F
The only thing I remember about that was during the mix, if you listen to New Speedway, during Jerry's solo, I panned his guitar from left to right and from right back to left. I panned it in time. That was something that I never had any regrets about. A lot of people didn't even notice it.
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C
You can't overlook the lack Jack.
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B
According to mixed notes, until mid April, the song was actually called New Speedway Blues. It would also be the last song on the album to be completely finished, with the band going through two different vocal mixes. Here's Grateful Dead archivist and legacy manager David Lemieux.
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H
I distinctly remember about 20 years ago, 19 years ago, when we did the first reissue of Working Man's Dead in a big Rhino box set. It was called the Golden Road and it was all of the Warner Brothers records. There's an outtake of New Speedway Boogie that has a background vocal by Bobby the. That's a very high falsetto. It's really interesting. I really. I quite like it. But it's a high falsetto on the one way or another. And we asked Robert Hunter if we could include that as a bonus track on the reissue, and he said no. He said New Speedway Boogie was my political statement about Altamont. It was not our way to give Bob falsetto practice. Since then we have included on something else. But when we did that first reissue of the actual album, we left it off because Hunter specifically didn't want it on there. He thought it was interesting and everything, but he said no for this one. Let's just keep the regular version on there.
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C
If you please call back up the chat. This train's got to run today if.
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B
You know what to listen for. The ghost of that original mix with Phil Lesh and Bob Weir's answer vocals still exists on the final version of Working Man's Dead, though you might need headphones to hear it. Squint your ears and you can definitely hear Leshen Weir respond after the phrase on the Hill with their vocal continuing under the next line. There's some other moments where you can hear it too, but Garcia's electric Guitar punched through and might be the real star of New Speedway Boogie. Shocking. I know when the band played the song live in the months after the album's recording, it exclusively came during the quote unquote acoustic portion of the night. But the part where Jerry would play electric guitar with David Nelson often supplementing Bob Weir on second acoustic, here's longtime Dead freak and serious guitar player Gary Lambert.
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D
Well, that was also right around the period that Jerry switched from Gibson guitars to Fender guitars. He liked that sort of Fender twang. He loved those Bakersfield guitar players and the way they could really make a single note sing. And when Jerry was playing Les Paul's or Gibson sg, the humbucking pickup had that more sort of horn like sound, that more sustainy kind of thing. And so Jerry was exploring the properties of the Fender at that point. He played a Telecaster on some of Working Man's and I think a Strat on some of it. I don't know how it breaks down individually. When I first heard them do New Speedway as part of one of the semi acoustic sets in 70, he was actually playing a Telecaster on that song. I do remember that.
- [27:15]
B
Here's a little bit of a nice jammy version of New Speedway Boogie with David Nelson on second acoustic guitar from the wonderful Family Dog at The Great Highway, April 18, 1970 release that came out on Record Store Day a few years back. That was New Speedway Boogie recorded at the family dog on April 18, 1970. The first recorded version following the Working Man's Dead sessions. Which brings us to a fascinating question that you may have wondered at some point. Just when were the Working Man's Dead sessions archivist Mike Johnson.
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H
Well, there's only a couple that even have dates because of the tracking sheets. So we had determined, though, Brian and I, as this stuff was coming off and we were listening to it again, they would reuse tape over and over and over again so that the sequence of a tape didn't really mean anything. So by deciding to present this in the sequence order, then we had all these pieces and then we built the puzzle and we put them back. We would make song sets for a song.
- [28:45]
B
In fact, Brian Kehue and Mike Johnson only came across one dated session sheet during their Working Man's Dead archaeology for New Speedway Boogie, dated March 3, 1970. You can see it at dead.net deadcast it's as good a time as any to do some Deadology and make our best guesses for the dates that the Grateful Dead made. Working Man's Dead as we heard Bob Matthews and others tell the story. The Dead recorded a demo for Working Man's Dead over a few days at Pacific high in early 1970, then returned a few weeks later for a very quick and focused album session after they'd spent time rehearsing the material. But when were those days? Rehearsal time was all well and good, but the Grateful Dead were broke and on the road constantly in the spring of 1970. They may have spent time rehearsing Working Man's Dead in between the demos and the final sessions, but they also played a number of gigs. The band spent nearly all of January on the road, including their bus to New Orleans and a mutual decision to part ways with organist Tom Constantinople. They returned to San Francisco by February 3rd with gigs every night from the 4th through the 8th before heading cross country for a legendary six show stand at the Fillmore east in New York from February 11th through 14th. It's possible they could have made demos during the day between the Fillmore west gigs from the 5th through the 8th. Pacific High was only a few blocks away, but there's some evidence of the Dead being in Pacific High for session starting on February 16th. Let's pencil a few days around there for the demos. Then they're in Texas for four days. There are no shows on February 25th and 26th, but then they have a four night weekend at the Family Dog in San Francisco. They're then freed up from March 2nd through March 6th with a weekend out of town on the 7th and 8th around from the 9th through the 16th, and then off for an east coast tour. While they might not have kept track of the session dates very well, the mixing was better documented beginning on March 11th. That pretty much leaves March 2nd through the 6th for the dead to have recorded Working Man's Dead, the basic tracks and the overdubs. Maybe they started a few days before that if they were lugging their gear between the Family Dog on the Great highway and Pacific High recording downtown, but nobody seems to remember that as part of the story. Rock and roll legends often compress time, but it really does seem that Working Man's Dead was recorded in just four or five days. It's not going to clear up the dates necessarily, but there's one more piece of the puzzle to introduce. The other song that Jerry Garcia and Robert Hunter wrote immediately after Altamont.
- [31:25]
C
The Mason Last Monday we braked him in the wall all his children grew and through.
- [31:51]
B
That was Mason's Children From Dave's picks 30, recorded January 3, 1970 at the Fillmore East. It too made it to the stage less than two weeks after Altamont and debuted one night earlier, the New Speedway Boogie. It features more allegorical lyrics from Hunter. It's not much of a stretch to think of the Mason's Children as symbolizing the diggers, those radical anarchist collectivists from the Haight Ashbury. They'd been held up by many as the face of the so called new community that columnist Ralph J. Gleason and others were now calling into question after Altamont. Like New Speedway Boogie, Mason's Children can be heard as musical journalism from Robert Hunter, or it can just be heard as that primal driving groove. Deadheads might know it from the bonkers version from February 14, 1970, aka Dix Picks 4, where it springs off into a sweet jam. After the debuts of Mason's Children and New Speedway Boogie just before Christmas, they took to one more quickly than the other through the start of the Working Man's Dead sessions in mid February. There are four surviving versions of New Speedway Boogie and a dozen and a half takes of Mason's Children. So what happened? Working Man's Dead co producer Bob Matthews told us that the song got discarded during the demo process when they were creating a sequence for Working Man's Dead.
- [33:35]
F
We looked at each other and said, we've got an extra tune. We all sort of, without really discussing it very much, said, well, we got an extra tune and left it at that. Which was to say it was not going on that album. It did not fit with all the other tunes as far as the general artistic feel, the type of music, the vision, as it were. I mean, Working Man's Dead was sort of described as a Grateful Dead's version of country in the Western. The only reason that it didn't appear on that album was it didn't seem to fit.
- [34:14]
B
And that's certainly a reasonable explanation for why Mason's Children didn't make it onto the album. But here's where it gets a little hairier. The Grateful Dead did actually record Mason's Children during the proper Working Man's Dead sessions, but by then it had been slowed down considerably from how they'd been playing it on stage a few weeks earlier. The slowed down version of Mason's Children was powered by Bob Weir's rhythm guitar and Phil Lesh's lead bass bombs. This is how they recorded the basic track during the Working Man's Dead sessions. Weir on rhythm guitar, Lesh on bass, plus both drummers. Garcia would have had his own guitar later. Some would compare the feel of the slow version to jumpin Jack Flash by the Rolling Stones, which would make it an answer song in more ways than one. From the same sifting of tapes that yielded the Angel Share recordings, we have a little under three minutes of the Dead working on Mason's Children in the studio, never heard before anywhere. The conversational double drum arrangement that Kreutzman and Hart are working on is pretty cool.
- [35:11]
C
IT.
- [35:37]
B
SA 23121 2, 34121 2, 34.
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H
Do it again, do it again.
- [36:47]
B
121 2, 3, 4 SAM.
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F
SA.
- [37:47]
B
At some point, perhaps moments after this, they tried the song again with only one drummer and made the basic take from which they built the complete version that first appeared on the essential 1999 box set called so Many Roads, which included Jerry Garcia's lead guitar and the same kind of stacked vocals that characterized Uncle John's band.
- [38:13]
C
Mason night On Monday we breaked him in the wall all his children grew and grew they never cross the tall oh, they may never cross the tall again.
- [38:43]
B
So how does this help us date the Working Man's Dead sessions? It doesn't at all. Sorry, it actually makes it a bit more confusing, if such a thing is possible. The last recorded live version of Mason's children with the fast arrangement came February 23rd in Texas, switching to the slowed down version on the tape of February 28th at the family Dog back in San Francisco. Probably they slowed the song down for the demo sessions and kept playing it fast on stage before switching over on the 28th. That's all a lot of heavy math for a Dead cast, but Mason's Children and New Speedway Boogie were some heavy songs for the Dead. In the spring of 1971, the Underground magazine the Realist published an article by the novelist and merry prankster Ed McClanahan titled a brief Exegesis of Certain Socio Philosophical themes in Robert Hunter's lyrics to New Speedway Boogie. Founded in 1958 by Paul Krasner, the Realist was a house zine for the counterculture, one of several continuities between the Beat Generation and the freaks that followed. The March April 71 edition issue 89, with a cover by R. Crumb, was also distributed as the last supplement to the Whole earth catalog, and McClanahan's article was reproduced the next year in Playboy in his much bigger feature titled Grateful that I have Known. Some people only read Playboy for the articles others read it for the Grateful Dead features. The article got around. In it, McClanahan notes, New speedway Boogie may be properly regarded as the Dead's official public statement about the Meaning of the grisly events of that unhappy day. By the time the article appeared, though, the Dead had long since stopped playing both Mason's Children and New Speedway Boogie. Mason's children disappeared first, the version they performed at the Family Dog, in the thick of the Working Man's Dead sessions. The only surviving live version of the slow arrangement is the last time the song appears on a Dead tape. New Speedway Boogies seemingly vanished from set list in the late summer of 1970, not returning until 1991. Here's Sam Cutler, who worked for the Rolling Stones at the time of Altamont and would go on to work for the Dead soon thereafter. We'll hear a lot more from him in the next episode of the good old Grateful Dead Cast.
- [40:55]
E
I mean, they dropped it, you know, and I think they were a little bit embarrassed by it. The Grateful Dead practice being oblique. They never, you know, they were very careful about not being that direct about things. So I think that that song was perhaps one of their most, you know, kind of direct songs. They ended up anyway, I think, feeling uncomfortable about it. They let it die on the vine, as it were. You know, they performed it for a while and then just didn't. With the benefit of hindsight, it was a bit of a simplistic take on Altamont, you know, and the more that the band thought about Altamont, I think the more in some ways responsible they felt for certain aspects of it. And then there was the whole thing that they didn't play, and you know what I mean, it was all really just like the Rolling Stones. All they wanted to do was forget about it, man, and move on. It was a dreadful bummer. I mean, who wants to sit around remembering bummers?
- [42:18]
C
All his children knew and knew they never grew so tall before.
- [42:32]
A
I've always thought that Mason's children would have worked really well back on the very first Grateful Dead studio album. I think it fits the vibe of all of those songs. Born Too Late could be. We try to post extras for each episode for you to check out over at our website, so stop by and cop some visuals@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. Everybody has a crazy story to tell about their ongoing Dead experience, so add your voice to the chorus. Click on the Learn More button, enter your info, click start recording, and your story could end up in a future episode of the Dead Cast. Hey, folks, before you log off, please be kind, hit that like button, rate us 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.