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- [00:00]
Rich Mahan
Announcing Dogfish Head Grateful Dead Juicy Pale Ale Collaborating for over a decade now, Dogfish Head and Grateful Dead have crafted a light bodied pale ale brewed with sustainable kerns of grains, granola and heaps of good karma for a refreshing brew that's music to your taste buds. Check out dogfish.com for more details and to find some Grateful Dead Juicy Pale Ale in your neck of the woods. Dogfish Headcraft Brewery is located in Milton, Delaware. Please drink responsibly the Good Old Grateful Dead Cast the official podcast of the Grateful Dead. I'm Rich Mahan with Jesse Jarno exploring the music and legacy of the Grateful Dead for the committed and the curious. Ladies and gentlemen, welcome back to the good old Grateful Dead cast. 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 appreciate your help. Well, we're now more than halfway through this celebration of the 50th anniversary of Working Man's Dead, and as we deep dive into each song on this classic Grateful Dead studio album, I find myself loving it even more than before. If that's possible. Be sure to treat yourself to the expertly remastered re release of the album out now, which includes a show from February 21, 1971 at the Capitol Theater in Port Chester, New York. This show was mixed by Jeffrey Norman from the original 16 track analog reel to reel tapes. They did it over at Bob Weir's Tri Studios in Marin County. There is a 3 CD set and a 12 inch vinyl picture disc, so cruise over to dead.net and check them out. Want to learn more about each of these episodes? Want to listen to past episodes? Maybe you missed Come on over to dead.netdeadcast where we have all that and more. While you're there, be sure to submit your story for the Dead cast. Everybody's story is just as unique as they are as you are, so share your perspective. Click on the Learn More button, enter your info, click Start recording and your story and your voice could end up in a future episode of the Dead Cast. In this episode, we dive the deepest we have yet into the structure of any of these songs. With Cumberland Blues, it's a perfect storm of all the elements. Jerry continues to deftly explore that Bakersfield twang. The the band skillfully lays out an undeniable rock solid foundation and Robert Hunter crafted lyrics for this song that add image and color. We'll see how the Grateful Dead masterfully combined traditional American music with chord Progressions and key changes that only a band with their experience could envision. Time to go down the rabbit hole with Jessie Jarno.
- [02:47]
Jesse Jarno
Working Man's Dead is sometimes remembered as the Grateful Dead's move into country rock. But the funny thing is, besides the occasional presence of Jerry Garcia's pedal steel guitar, there's not much music on the album that actually resembles country music, at least as it was written and played in the United States in 1970. That is, until you drop the needle on side two of working man's Dead and hear this.
- [03:24]
Gary Lambert
I can't stay much longer, Belinda. The sun is getting high. I can't help you with your troubles if you won't help with mine.
- [03:39]
Jesse Jarno
Tales from the Golden Road host Gary Lambert.
- [03:42]
Sean O'Donnell
That's the Bakersfield in the Grateful Dead right there. You know, it's very, very redolent of Merle Haggard's Working Man's Blues or something like that. And that was some of the music they were most infatuated with in that period. Bobby had that rhythm guitar part. It's pure Bakersfield. And Jerry was just wearing his love for those guys from Bakersfield on his sleeve. Roy Nichols, Merle's great guitar player for decades, and the late Don Rich, who was the equivalent in Buck Owens Band. So, yeah, that was a case of Hunter's lyrics and the song and the genre they chose to mine that genre. They all came together, they converge so beautifully. And just the story that the song tells is perfectly served by the musical setting. Bob Weir has told me about how he and Garcia used to go on long drives and they always had one of those old school buttons on the radio. You know, they had the old mechanical switching buttons on car radios, and one was always tuned to a country station. And Bobby used to watch the Porter Wagoner TV show, which aired locally in the Bay Area. So they always had an outlet for country music and they always had a love for it. People have often said the Grateful Dead had to compromise after making these very weird and very expensive albums, going deep in the hole to Warner Brothers. So they had to compromise and simplify. But it wasn't so much a compromise as a broadening of their artistic perspective.
- [05:15]
Jesse Jarno
Bakersfield was Bakersfield, California, in the southern part of the San Joaquin valley, northeast of LA. It was there in the late 1950s that a new strain of country music emerged. The Bakersfield sound. Pioneered by artists like Merle Haggard and Buck Owens. It stripped country music of its Nashville glitz and gave it more of a hard hitting backbeat. Jerry Garcia would refer to the Dead's approach in the next few years as the band's Bakersfield era, but it didn't happen all at once in terms of original songwriting. Cumberland Blues was the band's first step in that direction, but it wasn't at all a straightforward one. As we'll hear in part, it's the only song on Workingman's Dead with a co writing credit by one time experimental composer Phil Lesh. But let's start with Merle haggard.
- [06:05]
Gary Lambert
I turned 21 in prison doing life without parole no one could steer me right But Mama tried Mama tried Mama TR tried to raise me better but her pleading I denied that leaves only me to blame Cause Mama tried.
- [06:34]
Jesse Jarno
Merle Haggard was a huge influence on the Grateful Dead, no question. In June of 1969, at the same shows where the band rolled out the first songs for what would become Working Man's Dead, they also unveiled their cover of Merle Haggard's Mama Tried, a pretty radical move for a rock band in the summer of 1969. They played it frequently from then on, as did the Dead's country rock spin off the New Riders of the Purple Sage. And Mama Tried stayed in the Dead's repertoire all the way to 1995. I assume if there was a show somewhere tonight, there'd be a decent chance that Bob Weir would sing it, but it was another Merle Haggard song that may have had a bigger immediate impact on the Dead. Check out this groove.
- [07:23]
Gary Lambert
It's a big job just getting by with nine kids and a wife But I've been Working man danger all my life and I'll keep on working.
- [07:36]
Jesse Jarno
That was Merle Haggard's 1969 single Working Man Blues, released a month before the Working Man's Dead songs began to appear at Dead shows and several studio mixing sheets from Pacific High in 1970, the title of the Dead's new album in progress is listed as the Working Man's Dead, with both a definite article and the outlaw apostrophe. Just like Merle's, Jerry Garcia and the new writers were certainly familiar with Working Man Blues, debuting their own cover just a few weeks before the release of Working Man's Dead in the spring of 1970. Merle Haggard's part of the Bakersfield Dead legacy looms large, but maybe even larger is an artist the Dead didn't cover directly, Buck Owens and the Buckaroos, and specifically Buckaroo's lead guitarist, Don Rich. Don Rich wasn't merely a lead guitarist, but a conversational lead guitarist, playing his parts differently each time, dancing around the Buckaroo's not insignificant swing. It really tied the room together. Listen to the way Don Rich fills in the colors on Love's Gonna Live. Here it again from the 1966 live album Carnegie Hall Concert. Thanks to Sean O' Donnell for this example. We'll hear more from Sean momentarily.
- [08:48]
Gary Lambert
Oh, the sun's gonna shine in my life once more Life's gonna live here again Things are gonna be the way they were before Life's gonna live here again.
- [09:06]
Jesse Jarno
Garcia Galva had been a Don Rich fan for at least a few years before Working Man's Dead, with stories of Garcia, Bob Weir, David Nelson and others going to see Buck Owens and the Buckaroos perform around the San Francisco Peninsula in 1964 and 1965. It would be perhaps a full year or more after the Working Man's Dead sessions before the Bakersfield Dead emerged as something like a musical identity for the group. You can hear the Bakersfield Dead sound really starting to come into its own on this February 21, 1971 show at the Capitol Theater in Portchester, New York, released with a beautiful new Jeffrey Norman mix on this year's new Working Man's Dead 50th anniversary reissue. @ these shows, the band debuted a new batch of songs with a Bakersfield approach virtually baked in, leaving plenty of room for that sweet Don Rich like conversational guitar. It would be another new mode of songwriting for the Dead. Check out this primal version of Bertha from February 21, 1971 at the Cap with tasty licks after every lyric.
- [10:32]
Gary Lambert
Test me, test me, test me, test me, test me Light on the University.
- [10:40]
Jesse Jarno
Earlier this year, just before the whole world shut down, my last bit of travel was to one of my favorite places in the entire universe, the annual Grateful Dead Scholars Conference in Albuquerque, New Mexico. At this year's meeting, my friend Sean o', Donnell, a musicologist and chair of the music department at the City College of New York, gave a mind bending presentation about Cumberland Blues and called out that great Buck Owen 66 live album from Carnegie hall that we just heard from. You can find Sean's whole paper over@dead.net deadcast. But here he is to break down Cumberland Blues and the origins of the Bakersfield Dead.
- [11:16]
Sean O'Donnell
To me, to be with the Stratocaster of all, you know, just changing to that guitar and getting that Fender treble cutting sound that Jerry can play in the low register without getting muddy is part of what suddenly, you know, it's channeling Don Rich, you know, and so this other influence of a player, he's listened to and admires. And he was definitely listening to Brumley on pedal steel. So it's sort of like the equipment helped him. I mean, I don't know which drove it, whether he wanted that sound like now I gotta be or the Strat fell into his hands. He's like, this is what you have to play on a Fender. But it really seems to be driven by that.
- [12:02]
Jesse Jarno
Consulting the handy Jerry Garcia instrument history by Deadologist Michael Klemm, available on the Grateful Dead Guide blog, it seems that Garcia first began playing a 1963 Rosewood Stratocaster in the fall of 1969. The earliest photographic documentations from October 24th. Two weeks later, Cumberland Blues arrived in Grateful Dead set lists. Here's a little bit of the first known version recorded at the original Fillmore Auditorium in San Francisco on November 8, 1969, released on Dix Pick 16.
- [12:58]
Sean O'Donnell
You know, the first 30 seconds is right there in Bakersfield. It just kind of minor pentatonic noodling while you have these kind of major chords and you're in this comfortable train ish groove. And then suddenly with that harmonic shift, it's outer space compared to Bakersfield. It's like not something that would ever, ever happen. And we don't notice it because it still sounds like Bakersfield. Sonically, we're still there. But you'll never find harmonic passage like that in their work. It's as soon as you have to.
- [13:30]
Gary Lambert
Get down, I gotta get down, I gotta get down, gotta get down to the main.
- [13:39]
Sean O'Donnell
And you get down and then the chord just drops a half step down from G to G flat or F sharp, however someone wants to imagine it. And so it's physically very easy and close and comfortable. But in terms of functional harmony, there's. There's just no relation to my mind. Immediately what comes is, you know, this is portraying the lyric, it's somehow serving the text. But then instead it just jumps away to B flat again is not functional in G. Then it's up to B and down, back again to B flat and onto A and chromatically down. And those are mostly just chromatic chords. Again, physically very easy, but in terms of tonal function, one of the most far out passages they've used in a song yet as part of the song structure. So in that way it's to my ear, more adventurous in this at least one dimension.
- [14:30]
Jesse Jarno
Sean points out that despite being filled with folk and country influences, Workingman's Dead is filled with bizarro chord changes. Another song he singles out is High.
- [14:41]
Sean O'Donnell
Time I don't know any song that is that weird, to be honest. In the world where you're sitting down, I'm going to play a series of chords and sing a song to it. In that world, I just don't know anything that is that far out. You're not in any key for any amount of time. Like, a pair of chords might make sense in a normal song, you know, and then the next pair of chords might make sense, but not if this other thing already happened. It's like if you're wandering through familiar terrain but you're not going anywhere particular, and then somehow you wind up at home anyway.
- [15:16]
Jesse Jarno
If the craziness of the High Time chord structure intrigues you, seek out Walter Everett's essay High Time and the Ambiguous Harmonic Function, first published in the 1999 book from Greenwood Press Perspectives on the Grateful Dead. Some of the band's earliest songs, going back to the Emergency Crew demo from 1965, now heard on the so many Rhodes box set, were filled with strange chord changes trying to push at the boundaries of pop and rock from the very start. The weird changes persisted into 1969 on Oxa Moxoa, songs like Cosmic Charlie and Doin that Rag. The dense chord changes and unusual moves got dialed down a few notches as the Dead got rootsier, but not entirely. They're still very present on Cumberland Blues. As Sean points out, the song has four distinct sections. First, there's the Bakersfield groove, followed by the strangely leaping transition, and then there's.
- [16:11]
Sean O'Donnell
That middle Bobby section that you know, that's when the train gets from one.
- [16:15]
Sam Cutler
To the other A lot of poor.
- [16:17]
Gary Lambert
Men make a five dollar bill but keep him happy all the time Some of the fellas making nothing at all and you can hear him cry and.
- [16:31]
Sean O'Donnell
That'S kind of neither truly bluegrass and not still in Bakersfield. It seems to have like elements of both. And it doesn't have the outer space harmonic progression. It's very home in harmonic content. But it's traveling towards a true bluegrass, which is not until they make enough money to move away that you actually arrive. So the move away is landing in bluegrass. That's when you're truly at the bluegrass moment. And you got the banjo and all the harmonic monuments really strongly directional. And that, that part could just be any traditional tune at that point. But the sort of section in the middle which kind of leans to another key, it's kind of in C ish for part of it and kind of trails off to E minor where it just kind of ends. And then suddenly you're just in G and you've arrived at the same.
- [17:25]
Jesse Jarno
There's not that much of Cumberland Blues on the new collection of session recordings called the angel share. Only 3 1/2 minutes of the band working through the song's first section with a basic lineup of Bob Weir on acoustic guitar, Jerry Garcia on lead electric guitar, Phil Lesh on lead electric bass, and Bill Kreutzman trying out various kinds of hand percussion. No drums, but all four musicians keep the song's train like motion front and center. There's some conversations about tempo.
- [18:05]
Sam Cutler
Number nine.
- [18:15]
Jesse Jarno
The reason there's so little Cumberland Blues on the Angel Share could well have to do with what musicologist Sean o' Donnell just explained about the song's four part structure. Like the other songs on Working Man's Dead, Cumberland Blues is built around a single live performance. But even so, more than any other song on the album, the final take was built nearly piece by piece in the studio. Truly a marvel of the Pacific High sessions. Here's Rhino archivist Mike Johnson.
- [18:44]
Sam Cutler
That is the track that we had the least for, because they had to be built from pieces. So that's the one that. Yeah, and it's only like less than four minutes. Where some of these other tracks, they last 40 minutes. You're in the studio and it's not at all boring. I mean, if you like this stuff, sometimes when it ends you just go, I want more.
- [19:09]
Jesse Jarno
Us too, man. Even so, Sean points us to a nice little slice that highlights that outer space transition.
- [19:17]
Sean O'Donnell
About a minute into that outtake, you hear it without any of the rest of the song, so it stands out even more so. So his stylistic playing there is just very Jerry. Like he's cruising through this harmonic warpage like nothing happens. So it's very comfortable for him. But to my mind, that doesn't seem like a thing he might have written. I don't know. I mean, Phil gets a writing credit on this one, and it sounds more like, you know, maybe he threw that in.
- [19:58]
Jesse Jarno
The unusual song structure is supported with equally rich musical transitions and scene changes. In fact, the only element that seems to run through the entirety of the final basic take is Bill Kreutzman's drum kit, not at all present on the Angel Share outtakes. On the Working Man's Dead version, the drums come up and down in the mix, becoming the piece that connects the different sonic landscapes. The change really becomes obvious at the end of the bridge section sung by Bob Weir.
- [20:28]
Gary Lambert
Some of the fellas making nothing at all, and you can hear him cry. Can I go Buddy can I go down? Take your ship dap a mine Gotta get down to the Cumberland mine Gotta get down to the Cumberland mine that's where I mainly spend my time.
- [20:51]
Jesse Jarno
Underneath those glorious stacked vocals, Bill Kreutzman is now swinging quietly on his drum kit. And in comes several other instruments. For starters, there's that banjo part album co producer Bob Matthews.
- [21:03]
Sam Cutler
You wanna know who played it? Well, that was me. I first met Jerry when I was 13. Cause he was the only folk music teacher who taught Banjo in 1961. And I'm pulling your leg. It was Jerry who played the banjo. Obviously I did take banjo lessons from Jerry and that's how I introduced Bobby to Jerry again. That's another story.
- [21:28]
Jesse Jarno
And another story we'll be exploring very soon on an upcoming episode of the good old Grateful Dead cast. Stay tuned. Jerry Garcia, of course, had been a virtuoso banjoist before turning his full attention to electric guitar. But besides the last few seconds of the original Darkstar 7 inch in 1967, Cumberland Blues is the only other studio recording by the Dead where Garcia plays the banjo. Coincidentally, those last few seconds of the Dark Star single is also the only time Robert Hunter himself appears on an official Dead recording, reciting a few additional lines of poetry he wrote for the session. You can find them all@dead.net song dark star here's Gary Lambert.
- [22:24]
Sean O'Donnell
Then you hear there's actual banjo. Later in the song as they come toward the very end of it, Jerry actually put a little banjo in there. And when they played that song live, and that was another I recall from the acoustic or semi acoustic sets. Jerry would play telly on that one. On those early live versions of Cumberland. And he had a great thing that he did where he would revert to his banjo technique just before they come in with the final lot of Poor Man's got the Cumberland Blues. Jerry would move his hand down close to the bridge and he'd actually do a little banjo picking with his right hand. You know that little three finger banjo thing. You'd almost think that he had switched to banjo when you weren't looking. You know, he really, he had that facility to use some of his banjo technique on guitar and it of course worked like a charm.
- [23:10]
Jesse Jarno
The other new sound in the mix during the second half of the song is some speedy, flat picked acoustic guitar by Jerry Garcia's old partner in the Black Mountain Boys, David Nelson, by 1970, the electric guitarist and the New Riders of the Purple Sage.
- [23:24]
David Nelson
I remember I played a little acoustic guitar back up on Cumberland. I'D played it so many times with the David Nelson Band and everything. So I get it mixed up with what I played on the album. So, you know. But I think I played the acoustic guitar rhythm backup, Pacific High. Yeah, I remember. Yeah, that was right by the west. And I vaguely remember what it looks like. It was some, you know, some of my very first recording sessions. I liked it. I mean, I liked the studio, but I didn't have a lot to compare it with.
- [23:59]
Jesse Jarno
Nelson and his partner in the New Riders, John Marmaduke Dawson, had been appearing on stage with the dead regularly since mid-1969. And when the Dead went on tour following Working Man's Dead, bringing the New riders on the road with them, Nelson would join the band to add a second acoustic guitar on Cumberland Blues, New Speedway Boogie and other songs. More nights than not. That just about covers the music part of Cumberland Blues. What about the lyrics? Here's Gary Lambert.
- [24:27]
Sean O'Donnell
That's another just a marvel of a Hunter lyric. These little details, the Little Ben clock, which maybe some people will never even know what that means, but there was a brand of clock, a little tiny alarm clock that was called A Little Ben, which has a play on Big Ben, the clock in London. So that was the traveler's clock, the Little Ben. So that was Hutter's little bit of detail that I loved.
- [24:51]
Jesse Jarno
I admit that until Gary pointed it out, I always assumed the lyric was little bed clock, like the kind you might find ticking on a nightstand, which in the case of Cumberland Blues, it also might have been. But look up an image of a Little Ben clock. They're still pretty stylin. Make sure you specify little, though, or you get a much bigger Ben in Box of Rain, Robert Hunter's book of collected lyrics under the entry for Cumberland Blues is. He noted that the best compliment I ever had on a lyric was from an old guy who worked at the Cumberland mine. He said, I wonder what the guy who wrote this song would have thought if he'd ever known something like the Grateful Dead was going to do it. Hunter told the story a few different ways in another version. The compliment didn't come from a minor, but from an audience member at a Dead show who didn't know they were speaking to the songwriter. I like to think of a world in which both of these stories are compatible. So where's Cumberland?
- [25:43]
Sam Cutler
In the town of Spring Hill, Nova Scotia.
- [25:49]
Gary Lambert
Down in the dark of the Cumberland mine There's blood and the coal and.
- [25:56]
Sam Cutler
The miners lie in the roads that never saw sun the sky Roads that never saw sun or Sky.
- [26:08]
Jesse Jarno
That was the Ballad of Spring Hill, sometimes known as the Spring Hill Mining Disaster, by Peggy seeger with Ewan McCall. Recorded in 1960, it was one of several songs about the Spring Hill mining disaster of 1958 and widely circulated in the folk revival on both sides of the Atlantic. There's a pretty good chance that both Jerry Garcia and Robert Hunter were familiar with it. But between the Bakersfield guitar and bluegrass resolution of Cumberland Blues, it doesn't really sound like a song that's attempting to evoke Nova Scotia. There are Cumberland mines all over North America. The one in southern Pennsylvania is still active, though its owners recently announced their intention to sell it. In case anybody's looking to buy a Cumberland mine of their own. Though it sounds like it might be kind of a fixer upper, the unionized miners there recently sued the government for better working conditions. Even more famous, perhaps, is the Cumberland Mine along the Cumberland river in Harlan County, Kentucky, not far from where musicians like Aunt Molly Jackson and Jim Garland began to write topical folk songs in the 1920s about horrific working conditions in local mines. Harlan county is where Witch Cider U on originated. But despite its rich history of mining songs, I can only find one that references the Cumberland Mine in Kentucky, and it's of a slightly more recent vintage. As in southern Pennsylvania, the Cumberland Mine in Kentucky is well organized. And this is a tribute to 21st century whistleblowing miner Charles Scott Howard by Australian songwriter Raymond Crook.
- [27:37]
Gary Lambert
When the officials saw that video, they.
- [27:40]
Rich Mahan
Kicked up quite a row.
- [27:42]
Gary Lambert
I want somebody at that Cumberland mine right now. It wasn't long till Frazier heard about what had been done.
- [27:50]
Sam Cutler
It's that whistle blowing, troublemaking Howard.
- [27:53]
Jesse Jarno
He's the one when it comes to.
- [27:56]
Gary Lambert
Minus, safety is always on the bow. Big Cole don't like his man at all.
- [28:02]
Jesse Jarno
If anybody can find any other folk songs about Cumberland Mines, let us know. But all that's being kind of literal. Though it might have real life antecedents and contemporaries like Finerio and Direwolf and the new speedway of the proverbial boogie, the Cumberland Mine and Cumberland Blues is largely a place of the imagination and perfectly symbolic, a song for anybody who ever had to get down to work. And in 1970, the Grateful Dead certainly had to do that. As Jerry said, we've nothing to lose but our lives. The stakes for the grateful dead in 1970 were extraordinarily high. Not only was the band extremely broke, but exactly as the Working Man's Dead sessions were getting going, they were also in the active process of getting extremely ripped off. But as they were, they were also laying the groundwork for transforming themselves into something new, a real life Working Man's Dead. Working Man's Dead grew out of a pivotal moment in the Grateful Dead's working history. And just as Cumberland Blues resolved into a grand bluegrass finale, our Cumberland Blues episodes now resolves into a grand story. With a voice as weird as the hills, Mr. Sam Cutler. Sam was near the heart of the disastrous festival at the Altamont Raceway park, which we covered in the last episode about new Speedway boogie. And it's a few days after Altamont that our story picks up.
- [29:23]
Sam Cutler
Immediately after Altamont, I was sleeping in Mickey's barn, and Jerry came over there and saw me, like, two days and said, you can't stay here, man. Come on. You come over my house. Which is very sweet of him. Cause, you know, there was all kinds of politics going on, you know what I mean, with the bikers in the club, you know, and the journalists and the cops and. Oh, God, it was a nightmare. Anyway, Jerry was very kind like that, you know. And I can remember having a conversation with Jerry when just immediately after Altamont, Jerry felt very guilty about Altamont. It all, you know, turned to shit. And Jerry felt very bad about it and said to me, well, come and stay at my house, you know? So I stayed at his house, and we had long talks about bands and how you organize bands, you know. And Jerry just couldn't believe that the Rolling Stones had three people working for him. Not on tour, obviously. We hired in shitloads of people for when we were on tour, but, you know, the Grateful Dead had about 70 people working for them. In fact, they could never quite establish how many people worked for him, how many people were on the Pleasure Crew, who was doing what. It was always, you know, deliberately maybe confused and kind of mixed up. And Jerry was just speechless. It's just a completely other way for him seeing how bands could be organized. So, you know, he wanted the Grateful Dead to reorganize themselves going forward. You know, they needed to. They wanted to survive. They were hugely in debt with Jerry. It was just a small house in Larkspur in California. It was a nice house, but it wasn't, you know, any like three, three bedrooms upstairs kind of thing, you know. Pretty straightforward, I would have thought. Built in the 40s maybe, or the 50s. A garden out the back. And we used to sit in the back, you know, and smoke joints and talk about the music business and how the Grateful Dead could survive and stuff like that. There was Jerry and Mountain Girl, a Mountain Girl's little daughter, right, Sunshine. And Hunter and Chris, his girlfriend at the time. So I didn't see much of Hunter and Christie. They were madly in love, so they never came out of the room, basically. I don't know what was going on in there, but the mind boggles. But anyway, they didn't come out much. But Hunter was very sweet to me. He lent me a car. He had a DeSoto, this giant American car. I'd never been in a car so big in my life. I remember he had. The gear stick was on the steering column. Giant fucking car, it was, man. And I used to drive this down the road. I felt like I was in a Sherman tank. I couldn't quite believe he just said, oh, yeah, here's the keys, man. Take my car. Like, no one in England would do that, not in those days, you know what I mean? That was quite far out at that time. Jerry was learning pedal steel guitar. He had a room downstairs. It was off the sitting room that he was in. And he had his pedal steel set up in there and a tv. And he used to play the pedal steel through headphones so you couldn't hear what he was doing. You know, he'd have headphones on and the TV would be on, usually with cartoons or something on it. You know, he just kind of. I think it was just something for him to kind of look at. And he wasn't really looking at anything. He was just, you know, listening to the pedal steel. Because, I mean, the pedal steel is one of these ridiculously complex instruments because you've got both feet are working right on the pedals, you've got your knees working on pedals on underneath the pedal steel. And then you've got two sets of ten strings, your left hand and your right hand, and a, you know, steel in the left hand. I mean, unbelievably complex instrument. So, yeah, he just sat there for, I don't know, at least 10, 12 hours a day just to master it, you know. And, yeah, he used to stop, come out and have a joint. I'd talk to him, whatever. And then he'd go back, you know what I mean? He'd stop for food. Mountain Girl had taken some food in there, and he stopped to sleep. And that was about it.
- [33:27]
Jesse Jarno
One day, Sam wanted to give some space to Garcia and Mountain Girl and met one of their Larkspur neighbors, another acquaintance of Sam's from the music business, Janis Joplin.
- [33:37]
Sam Cutler
Yeah, I went out for a walk. I'd been at Jerry's a day, two Days, maybe. And I walked down the road and I see this house, and outside of it was the painted Porsche that belonged to Janice right outside the garage. So it was obviously like she was either visiting the house or lived there. So I went up and knocked on the door, and so that was nice. Yeah. So I used to visit with her and hang out, bless her. She was a good song. And, you know, Jerry loved Janice. Everybody in the music scene in California loved Janice. She was a sweet, sweet person. She was generous, you know, she didn't have a clue when it came to men. Where, if you look at blues singers, you know, traditionally, lots of them have had very hard times with the. The loves of their lives, as it were. Maybe they have a kind of somewhat tragic view of all that. Who knows? She was constantly either madly in love or madly depressed because the latest one had decided he couldn't handle her or whatever.
- [34:34]
Jesse Jarno
Looking on a map, not only were Jerry Garcia and Robert Hunter neighbors with Janis Joplin, there was actually a secret trail between their houses. Not that there's any evidence they ever used it, but at least on a map, it sure looks like it's possible to walk out of the back garden of the Garcia House at 271 Madrone Avenue, cross Larkspur Creek, follow Piedmont Trail for a quarter mile or so, sneak through some more woods, and end up in Janice's backyard. Not that there was that much time to hang after the holidays. Sam Cutler went on his first trip with the dead in mid January 1970. He wasn't working for them just yet. The first one's free, as they say.
- [35:15]
Sam Cutler
Well, immediately after Altamont, basically, we went to Hawaii. That was the first Grateful Dead gig I'd been at. Sonny Hurd was deputized to look after me. He was my minder. And, yeah, I got completely high. I mean, so wrecked. And I had a briefcase full of money, and we left it in the middle of the dance floor to see what would happen. And nothing happened. Everybody danced around it and heard. And I sat on the side for a while watching it, and then we went back and got it. Yeah, it was a high old gig. I remember the stage was about 6 foot high. It was just higher than my head. And Bob Weir walked off stage over my head and kind of walked through the air and landed and just kept going to the dressing room with his guitar still around his neck, you know what I mean? And didn't miss a beat. And it was above my head. He walked straight off the stage. Didn't like laying with a crunch on it just kept walking. It was quite extraordinary. Yeah, it was a high old time, for sure. So that introduced me to the arcane art of counting money on lsd. It's an interesting skill that one is forced to develop.
- [36:26]
Jesse Jarno
So, Sam, any tips for counting money on lsd?
- [36:29]
Sam Cutler
Any tips? Well, actually, funnily enough, they're all different sizes. American bills are different sizes for blind people. You know, that's how blind people tell what the money is, by the size of it.
- [36:43]
Jesse Jarno
Having mastered this new life skill, Sam soon had a new job. In part, he was in the right place at the right time, or maybe the right place at the wrong time. In the spring of 1970, sometime during the Working Man's Dead sessions, there was a sudden vacancy in Grateful Dead management. That vacancy was caused by the band's most recent manager, the Rev. Lenny Hart, who also happened to be the father of Dead drummer Mickey Hart. After an incident when Mountain Girl confronted the Reverend over non payment for Garcia's work on the Zapriskie Point soundtrack recorded in LA en route to Hawaii, it was discovered that the Reverend was cooking the books, and he soon absconded with a large sum of the band's money.
- [37:24]
Sam Cutler
Prior to Working Man's Dead, it was a struggle, man. You know, When I joined the band, Lenny had just run off with a shitload of money. They were in debt anyway. He took $350,000 off the band. I mean, the Grateful Dead, bless them, they're my brothers. I love them, you know, of course, but they were not what you could call the shrewdest judge of character. I mean, I eventually found out, right, that Jonathan Reester told me, actually, who left the Grateful Dead because of Lenny, that Lenny actually showed up at a meeting, right, with a Bible in his hand and introduced himself as the Reverend Lenny Hart and swore on the Bible that he wouldn't rip them off. It's easy to take advantage of artists. And that's why, you know, honest tour managers, honest managers, people that, you know, handle people, honestly, a few and far between in the music business because, you know, some of the greatest stars that you could possibly imagine in the music business on some levels are, you know, lacking somewhat. They can be brilliant and bright, and everybody in the Grateful Dead had their moments, of course, and their great insights into the human condition, no question. But they also were lacking in some respects, you know. And of course, you know, you can't be good at everything, can you? That's why you need people around you as a musician in the music business, you know, you need People around you that love you, you know, genuinely love you and that are honest now, you know, it's easy in this life to find people that love you. It's not so easy in this life to find people that love you and are honest. Believe it or not, the band was very nice about it. The band were much more concerned with, okay, well, that's happened now what's the solution? What do we do next? Jerry's solution was, well, we've had one manager and he robbed us, so we'll have three. So he had a triumvirate of managers. Dave Parker, who was an old mate of his from school days, who was kind of an accountant. So David looked after the money, John McIntyre looked after the bullshit, and I did the work.
- [39:39]
Jesse Jarno
In a sense, the new management became like the Grateful Dead's three branches of government. Dave Parker had been a member of Mother McCree's Uptown Jug Champions and contributed lyrics to the early Dead original the Only Time Is Now. He and his wife Bonnie would be credited on the back of Workingman's Dead as guardians of the Vault, not the band's tapes, but their actual finances. John McIntyre's job was as band manager, interfacing with the record company and hassling with the real world at large. That spring, Dave Parker found a house at the corner of Fifth and Lincoln and San Rafael in Marin County. McIntyre negotiated with the owners, and on April 1, 1970, the management signed a lease. It remained the Grateful Dead's office for the next several decades. As tour manager, Sam Kudler organized the Dead's road life, which over the next few years would take up the vast majority of their actual lives. Eventually, his company, out of Town Tours, would establish an office a few houses down on workingman's dead. John McIntyre was credited as big nurse and Sam Cutler as executive nanny. By every account, McIntyre and Cutler were polar opposites in the grateful dead metaverse. McIntyre came from the old school mindset of a serious psychedelic head. Not that Sam Cutler wasn't a head, but he represented a turn towards the more ambitious. There's plenty on the court politics of the early 1970s Grateful Dead in Dennis McNally's book Long Strange Trip and David Ganz's and Blair Jackson's oral history. This is all a dream we dreamed. If you're hungry for more of that kind of stuff, John McIntyre would call Sam Cutler an empire builder, maybe kind of intending it as a slur, but it was also accurate. During his four years with the Dead, Sam Cutler was perhaps the primary force in transforming the Grateful Dead from a small, beloved band into an enormous, beloved band. Like many stories in the Grateful Dead world, it began at Mickey Hart's ranch.
- [41:41]
Sam Cutler
It was lovely in a kind of psychedelic, vaguely Wild west kind of way. People wandered about pretty stoned, you know, and then once in a while, they'd have band meetings out there in the barn. It was, you know, kids, dogs, horses, chaos. And never quite sure who I was. Never, you know, I could never work out who the fuck who was who, you know. And various people would have their say. And, you know, I mean, that was one of the things that Jerry and I talked about, you know, is you just can't run a band where, you know, everybody can have a say. That came to a head. I earned the eternal hatred. I don't know if hatred's too strong a word, but dislike of all the old ladies in the band. Because I told the band, look, listen, you got to tell your old ladies they can't come to the meetings. You know what I mean? You know, I work for musicians, man, not for musicians, wives, you know. So that caused a bit of eruption, and finally the women all decided they didn't want to be there, basically under duress. And then one time we were having a meeting. Shitloads of people there. I didn't. I mean, I knew most of the people, but there's quite a few people I didn't know in the Grateful Dead's old house in Lincoln in San Rafael. And I pointed to this guy and who's this guy?
- [43:01]
Sean O'Donnell
Who are you?
- [43:03]
Sam Cutler
He was a hippie that had just walked in off the street and saw this group of people having a meeting and thought, well, this looks interesting. I'll come and join him. Nobody knew who he was. He'd just come in off the street that was like, you know, the straw that broke the camel's back, or whatever you call it. I was like, no, no, no, no, we can't have this. So then the band decided there had to be a band leader because they all became members of the musicians union, which they hadn't been members of before. So they had. Somebody had to sign the contracts, and he had to formally be the band leader. And Jerry immediately went, well, I'm not the band leader. He didn't want to do it. Right. Nobody wanted to do it. So then the band went off and had a meeting to decide who was going to do it. And then they came back and they'd made up their minds Phil was going to do it. So it was like, okay, well, why is Phil going to do it okay, you know, fine. I don't care, you know, I don't give a fuck, really. But, you know, just out of curiosity, say, why is Phil going to do it? So he said, well, he's the most difficult person to persuade that it's a good idea to do a particular gig. So if you can persuade him to do the gig, we're cool. We don't give a fuck. As long as he agrees, everything's cool. The unique Grateful Dead way of organizing things. It's kind of organizing by default. I used to say things to them at Grateful Dead. I'm sure you used to piss them off, right? I used to say, anyone can attack Russia, they better have a good plan. What is the plan here? You go on stage, you know what I mean? And you're going to play a song. Well, you all fucking know that Sugar Magnolia is in the key of D or whatever, right? And you all playing the same key, otherwise it wouldn't work. So you want to be in a band, what's the plan? You need a plan for whatever you do in a band. You need a plan. So how to plan without, you know, being Hitler or Mussolini or Trump, how to lead with people not feeling like they're being led is part of the conundrum of management and tour management. The tour manager has to be the last man standing. He has to be able to answer the question, oh, when do we leave Tomorrow? Where are we? What's happening? How much money did we get? Can I have some money? A million and one. Different things the tour manager has to deal with. So planning is. It's just core to the whole thing. That was something that I tried to achieve with the band was like, okay, we've all got our own individual takes on stuff, and we're all wildly different people, but this is a collaborative, cooperative endeavor. Let's all try and be on the same stage and let's try and be efficient about it. Given the parameters that we're all stone hippies and we don't want to be too efficient otherwise, you know. If we want to be that efficient, we join the army. We're rock and rollers, you know, because we want to be inefficient. What I was trying to do is take the Grateful Dead, and which I achieved, I think, without trying to be big headed about it. I was trying to take the Grateful Dead, who were known in San Francisco and on the west coast, vaguely, right? And we're earning about $2,000 a night, to being a successful band in America, right? That was the same thing Warner Brothers were trying to do, right? To do that, you need the right record as well as, you know, the right shows and da da, da, you know, right? And as well as visiting New York 20 times a year. And the Grateful Dead, bless them, came up with Working Man's Dead. I mean, nobody was more fucking grateful and more thrilled than Joe Smith. Finally, he's got a record that Warner Brothers can get behind, that everyone can understand, you know, everyone can go for. Wow. It's a record with songs on it, with words that people can relate to. Hello. I mean, we did 180 odd gigs in the first year I worked with them in order to get out of debt. We toured relentlessly, man, because that was the only way, for a start, the band could make money. But also it was the way to become successful. It was in those days, for example, we filled the spectrum in Philadelphia of 17,000 people. How did that happen? That happened because three times I did tours of fucking colleges throughout Pennsylvania, right? The band on buses going from college to college and playing in field houses, you know, but, you know, playing for five or six hours, man. Students just stoned off their faces and couldn't believe it. Revolutionary. And we played with Jimi Hendrix in Philly, you know, and you build these things. We played in and around New York all the time. We played the State University of New York all over New York, and we played the Fillmore east and played all kinds of different gigs out on the east coast and built it up, you know, built it and built it and built it and build it and. And basically through word of mouth, people say, oh, you know, I was at this concert with the Grateful Dead the other day, and man, they played for six hours or they played for five hours, whatever, you know, have you heard this new album? And, you know, it's not just one thing with a band. You've got to have this band that's cooking live and you've got to have a band that's got a hot album, you know, all those things like coming together.
- [48:37]
Jesse Jarno
Sam Cutler would pilot the band across the Atlantic for the Europe 72 Tour and was the primary driver behind the 1973 Summer Jam at Watkins Glen with the Band and the Allman Brothers, where an estimated 600,000 attended for many years. It held the record for the biggest concert in history. For Sam Cutler. It was something of a post Altamont Redemption.
- [49:00]
Sam Cutler
We ended up doing huge fucking gigs that were amazing and it ended up with three bands. We said, well, let's do it with three bands. And we did it with the Grateful Dead, the band and the allmer brothers, and 610,000 people bought a ticket at Watkins Glen, right? That wasn't by accident. That wasn't an accident. That wasn't planning by default. That was planned. And it took nine months to get that gig together properly and plan it properly. And that was a result of a conversation I had with Jerry where we wanted to do a big gig again and show people that it was possible and that you didn't have to have, you know, people being killed or, you know, violence or whatever. It could be done right. The sound could be done right. Everybody could be looked after. Everyone could have an amazingly good time, which they did, I'm pleased to say.
- [49:47]
Jesse Jarno
In Amir Barlev's documentary Long Strange Trip, you may have heard Sam talk about how British people didn't go out to discover Britain. Thanks to Sam, the Grateful Dead themselves became a way for people to find America.
- [50:00]
Sam Cutler
People go, I'm gonna go and find America. It's a uniquely American thing, and it's wonderful. I mean, I went to America myself because of on the Road and Loving on the Road as a book. That desire to discover America and find out what America was, what it represented, was strong in me, you know, for sure. It was a dream of every English rock and roller to go to America and be there for that dynamism and that amazing sense of space. And I think the Grateful Dead in Working Man's Dead, particularly invented or were inventing or reinventing their own view of what it constituted to be American. So I think the Working Man's Dead represented a huge, huge kind of quantum leap for the Grateful Dead in terms of their kind of cooperative and artistic endeavors. Amazing, amazing, wonderful, wonderful, wonderful album.
- [50:59]
Jesse Jarno
I can tell by that little Ben clock over there that it's time to go. So here's a last blast of Cumberland Blues. It was the first song from Working Man's Dead to make it to an official Grateful Dead live album, becoming the opening track on side a of Europe 72, a tour that was very much a Sam Cutler joint. Here's the sound of the working man's dead descending on London. April 8, 1972.
- [51:24]
Gary Lambert
I can't stay much longer, Melinda the sun is getting high I can't help you with your trouble if you won't help with mine I gotta get down I gotta get down I gotta get down to.
- [51:52]
Rich Mahan
What a great version that one is. There's so many cool versions of Cumberland Blues. It's such a great song. My favorite is August 6, 1971, at the Hollywood Palladium in Los Angeles, California. This whole show is a heater, but on the Cumberland Blues, Jerry just really lights it up. Let's listen to a little bit of the solo from 8671.
- [52:15]
David Nelson
Sam.
- [52:42]
Rich Mahan
Well, that wraps up this episode of the good old Grateful Dead cast. Thanks very much for listening. Please like subscribe and rate us wherever you listen to podcasts. 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.