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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. Welcome back to the Good Old Grateful Dead cast. Ladies and gentlemen, we hope you're having as much fun with these episodes as we are. Thanks for being here. If you haven't already, please subscribe. Give us a like and leave a rating. Subscribe it helps spread the show to those who haven't turned on to it yet and we so appreciate your help. Thank you. We are cruising at high speeds through this track by track celebration of the 50th anniversary of Working Man's Dead. And if you haven't already, be sure to treat yourself to the expertly remastered re release of the album, which was done so skillfully it now reveals parts of the mix you may not have noticed previously. As always, there's bonus content, this time in the form of a show from February 21, 1971 at at the Capitol Theater in Port Chester, New York. It was mixed by Jeffrey Norman from the original 16 track analog reel to reel tapes at Bob Weir's Tri Studios in Marin County, California. And there's also a 12 inch picture disc available featuring the Working Man's Dead album art that you know you need in your collection. Cruise over to dead.net to check it out. While you're there, visit the deadcast page dead.net deadcast where you'll find additional information and media related to each episode so you can do an even deeper dive. You can listen to past episodes and while you're there, record your story for the Deadcast. Click on the Learn More button, enter your info, click Start recording and we'll check it out to see if we can use your story in a future episode. Well, one of the greatest things for me about being involved in this podcast is getting to have some of my questions about the band answered that have been stewing in the back of my mind for who knows how long. In this episode we uncover some absolutely fascinating information about the Creation of one of the Grateful Dead's most poignant and enduring masterpieces, Black Peter. And we put to bed a couple topics that have been the point of conjecture for some time now. I love how this one came together, and we hope you do, too, Jesse.
- [02:56]
Narrator/Host
After side two of Working Man's Dead opens with the exuberant Bakersfield bluegrass mashup of Cumberland Blues, the album goes dark, way dark. Here's co producer Bob Matthews.
- [03:08]
Graham Nash
Black Peter was one of my favorites. Black Peter I loved, I still love to this day, just the emotion and the emotion that Jerry was able to convey in his rendition of that. I mean, still one that is a tearjerker. I know that Bob Hunter always liked how that came out.
- [03:29]
Narrator/Host
Tales from the Golden Road co host Gary Lambert.
- [03:32]
Gary Lambert
Oh, man, it's maybe the single darkest thing in the repertoire. Incredibly mournful. Again, that Hunter obliqueness that he's not explicit about what's happening there. He leaves elements of it to your imagination. The thing about the fever rolling up gonna roll back down There's a certain hope expressed, but it is extraordinary and so powerful.
- [04:01]
Narrator/Host
And it was one of those things.
- [04:03]
Gary Lambert
About the Grateful Dead that I really respected, was that they never hesitated when songs like that were in the concert repertoire, The Grateful Dead never hesitated to kill your buzz in what I think is a very positive way. There might be people who were there for just the happy, danceable psychedelic thing, and the Grateful Dead would be playing something just stunningly melodic and wonderfully rhythmic and have you dancing. And then they would take this hard left turn and basically say, okay, now it's time for you to gaze into the abyss. Have you met the abyss? Here's the abyss, you know, and make you confront your own mortality. It might be a song like Black Peter. It might be some incredibly dissonant feedback or, you know, just very dark instrumental statement that they made. And I loved that. That was part of what I cherished about the experience, that they presented your life in all its complexity and made you deal with things and made you confront things. And Black Peter was one of those late in the show moments that could really make that happen.
- [05:13]
Narrator/Host
Black Peter was a heavy song with an enduring power in the Grateful Dead's repertoire, becoming one of Jerry Garcia's most consistently played originals in the quarter century after it was introduced. With its languid tempo and faded lyrics, it can be somber and revealing for both singer and listener, filled with wisdom about the passing of time and the briefness of life, sounding far more mature than the 28 years then upon Robert Hunter's head. Its lyrics resonate with the works of poets and philosophers stretching back centuries. There's no question that Robert Hunter was what people call an old soul, though it might not sound it by a certain metric, Black Peter also might be the single most psychedelic song written by Jerry Garcia and Robert Hunter. It began with an estimated $50,000 worth of LS. That was New Potato Caboose, recorded June 8, 1969 at the Fillmore west in San Francisco, released on a bonus disc that came with the 2005 Fillmore west box set, the last recorded version of New Potato Caboose. As it happens, it was a Sunday evening in San Francisco, the end of a regular old four night stand at the Fillmore West. The most people in the Dead kept referring to the place by the name it had when they held the lease with other local the Carousel Ballroom. This week in June, the Dead were headlining early and late shows over Motown saxophonist vocalist Junior Walker and the LA band the Glass Family. Each act played an early set, then the late crowd arrived. The Fillmore west staff often let audience members from the first show stick around for the second, and this Sunday was probably no exception. Though it gave the bands a few hours to kill between sets, it had been an eventful few days already. On Friday, Jerry Garcia was tardy for the late show, and Bill Graham made the band go on without him, with ohm's Wayne Ceballos playing in Garcia's spot for part of the set until the Dead's regular lead guitarist returned. On Saturday, Janis Joplin stopped by for a screamadelic Turn on youn Love Light. Earlier that show, the band debuted Jerry Garcia and Robert Hunter's Dire Wolf, written less than two weeks earlier, which we covered a few episodes back on Sunday, June 8th. The Early show proceeded well enough as we heard from that excerpt of New Potato Caboose, but then all hell broke loose.
- [08:00]
Jerry Garcia
Rye Janice was ready to kill us. It wasn't our fault, but she was ready to kill us.
- [08:05]
Narrator/Host
That, of course, was Jerry Garcia. That and the next part of the story come from Jerry on Jerry, a five hour audiobook of Dennis McNally's interviews with Jerry Garcia, available from Hachette, wherever you get your audiobooks. Thanks Dennis and Hachette. This portion of the conversation describes the night of June 8, 1969, and features Jerry Garcia and Mountain Girl along with Dennis McNally. Backstage, the Apple juice had been electrified.
- [08:31]
Jerry Garcia
I mean, I just, I wet my lips on that. And that's all because I heard it in dust. Yeah, me too. I took one tiny little sip I got really stubbed. Yeah, I remember I took a sip that was probably a teaspoon and a half full. I'll just try that. I'll just let that bit do. You know, 20 minutes later, there was people just coming apart all around is the truth. Yeah. What a disaster. Poor Phil. Phil had to be led on stage by Mickey. Oh, I don't even know if we played that night. Yeah, we played. Yeah, we played. We were out of it. That was bad.
- [09:07]
Narrator/Host
At least on the tape of the night, it sounds like. Elvin Bishop replaces Garcia for the first part of the set. But who's to say what actually went down in the ninth Dimension that evening? Here's how Phil Lesh experienced the night from his 2005 memoir, Searching for the Sound. It was as if the music was being sung by gigantic dragons on the timescale of plate tectonics. Each note seemed to take days to develop. Every overtone sang its own song. Each drum beat generated a new heaven and a new earth. That moment may well have been the peak of psychedelic music for me. The combination of absolute inevitability and ecstatic freedom has never been equaled. On the tape, Elvin Bishop can be heard joining the band. Lesh continues. The myriad voices of the music were fused into an oblique schizoid undulating seven dimensional parallelogram. When I finally dredged up the nerve to look at Elvin, he had the most clearly delineated deer in the headlights expression that I've ever seen spread all over his face. Owsley Stanley was mixing sound for the Dead that night, recording a sonic journal. As usual, Ronnie Stanley was with him. This story and many others are featured in her memoir, Owsley and Me, My LSD Family, co written with Saturday Night Live writer Tom Davis. Here's Roni Stanley.
- [10:26]
Roni Stanley
There's a very notorious drug dealer named Goldfinger. And the reason he was called Goldfinger was because he had lost his hand in a helicopter accident. Smuggling and Bear had gotten him a jeweled, like, Captain Hook hand. That was beautiful. He wore it and that was his nickname, Goldfinger. He was always full of drugs. And that night that we're talking about, what happened was Goldfinger spiked the punch backstage and Owsley spiked the punch backstage and neither of them knew that the other had done it. It was a bad scene and Alsley was really, really pissed at Goldfinger because, you know, he shouldn't have done that. You know, Alsy was in charge of that. And then Goldfinger came in, didn't tell anybody, didn't ask. So he Broke a sort of outlaw law. Janis Joplin had some of her band members there. She had formed this new band and some of them had never had lsd. And they took the punch and it was double dose. So they didn't have a good trip. They ended up in the hospital. And she was really angry at Bear. And they were really close because both of them were from the south and they were both born on January 19th. And they really, even though one was into alcohol and the other was into psychedelics, they loved each other. And this caused a huge drift. And Janice was never quiet and she was really pissed at Bear and yelling at him. But it really wasn't his fault. It was Goldfinger. We were always the last to leave any venue and so nobody else was there. We left the Carousel and Bear was going to go to Goldfinger's to confront Goldfinger. Why did you do this? Look at how many people in our scene have been adversely affected. We get out on the street, on Market street and I found Hunter and I heard this voice looking around. What's his voice? You know, Market street is in rough downtown San Francisco, where the Carousel Ballroom was, was not where you want to hang out. And there's Hunter and he was sort of crouched between the gutter and the sidewalk and he's mumbling and he's like, Owsley Stein. And he sees us and he's mumbling, he's not coherent. I remember talking to Bear and saying, we can't leave him here. Bear is like uni focused, ready to go to Goldfingers. I'm like, no, we cannot leave Hunter here. Bear went and got the car and we managed to get him into the car and we took him over to Goldfinger's because that's where Bear was going. Because Bear wanted to confront Goldfinger and to tell him, you know, that was a bad thing to do. You have to be responsible with lsd. Terry the Tramp, I'm sure was there because Bear called him. Terry was Bear's right hand person. Terry was the Hell's angel who distributed the LSD for Bear. And he also had given us the owl, a little screech owl. Bear would call Terry. And also, given he was a Hell's angel, he could have some control over Goldfinger, who was a bit of a loose cannon. I'm sure that was why Terry was there. I think that we figured out that he had taken over a thousand micrograms, considering what Goldfinger had put in. I mean, when Goldfinger finally got back at he and Bear worked on exactly how many micrograms. If you drank a cup of that punch, how much would you have gotten? How much was the dosage at that point? Hunter never did anything moderately. He probably took a full cup because he was gone. He was really high. And it's not a high that makes you happy. And it wasn't a high that made him feel like he was one with the divine. I couldn't talk him down. And Nikki, Nikki Scully was there because she was having a relationship with golfing at the time. She couldn't talk him down. Nobody could talk him down. Bear, you know, we had all these B vitamins. Bear thoughts that taking multi B was a way to get you to come down off acid. He wasn't coming down and he was ranting. I don't know why. I don't remember being gone that high. So I was more cautious about how much LSD I was going to take. And I never felt like taking it at a show like that was such a good idea. Because a lot of times people did dose you and you didn't know it. And I was very ethical about that thing. And I thought that was the wrong thing to do. And I even had problems. I had arguments a lot with Bear about dosing, you know, whether you should really dose. And also people would make chocolate chip cookies and dose them. And I always thought that was a mistake because of the children that we had children around. So I had a, you know, more of a moderate view. One of the things that happens on lsd, and it's actually one of the beauties of lsd, is that you are not your ego and you're not Robert Hunter, who's the lyricist for the Grateful Dead. That's just sort of an object. Who you are isn't the object, isn't the body, isn't the action you do. It's different. It's more of the divine. In order to get to the universal consciousness, the divine, you have to shed all those things. They have to die. And it's very painful. And I do think that he went through that dying of the ego, of all the aspects of himself that he was attached to that night. And it was painful. So Hunter was very high all night long, all into the morning. And Bare decided. I think it was Bear who decided to call Jerry Garcia and have Jerry come over. Jerry didn't come again already until, like, almost morning. But when Jerry came, that was a big help.
- [17:17]
Narrator/Host
Until Hunter could come to his senses, he was put under the mindful watch of the Hell's angel, known as Terry the Tramp. We'll let Robert Hunter's housemates, Jerry Garcia and Mountain Girl, pick up the story from here.
- [17:28]
Jerry Garcia
Hunter was lying on Market street. Lobsters from the 9th dimension were devouring downtown San Francisco. So there was Owlsley's face, and he just had to take a swing at it. In fact, when I saw him, the first thing that came out of his mouth was Owsley Stein. Owsley Stein. And he's there mumbling and muttering. He was so out of it.
- [17:47]
Roni Stanley
I remember.
- [17:48]
Jerry Garcia
You went to get him. Yeah, I went to the call came about 9 in the morning. I came up there as Terry the Tramp, you know, sitting with him, as nice as can be, you know, just looking after him. I just want to make sure he doesn't hurt himself. And how did we get home? We drove home. I drove us. We drove home about five miles. Five miles an hour, weaving through the hallucinations across the Golden Gate Bridge. It was foggy.
- [18:09]
Narrator/Host
Oh, God.
- [18:10]
Jerry Garcia
Oh, yeah. And then I had to drive back to San Francisco to get Hunter, you know, and I was barely able to deal with it myself, but. Yeah, but Hunter was gone. He was like 19 sheets to the wind, you know, he was out there, the poor. He was really stoned, and he was just coming into the bringing in the sheaves part of his acid trip. You know what I mean? After you. Oh, well, you know, the golden light of Buddhism glowing off in the distance somewhere and all that. I mean, it was. He was done in.
- [18:41]
Narrator/Host
Robert Hunter was a few weeks short of his 28th birthday. He had a horrific night, or more to the point, during that night, he lived and died several horrific lifetimes. He saw blood pouring from Janis Joplin's mouth, in Dennis McNally's words. Hunter experienced every assassination he knew of, dying with JFK and with Lincoln, among many other trips. Holy wow, Talk about heaviness in the 90s. In a public correspondence with psychonaut Terence McKenna, part of their Orpheo dialogues, available at levity.com Robert Hunter wrote that he witnessed the end of consciousness and that the incident effectively marked. Paid to my acid career. Someone who is crawled naked across the Sahara doesn't spend much time in tanning parlors. And that's the story of how Robert Hunter came to write the lyrics to Black Peter, an author who'd recently died a thousand deaths.
- [19:34]
Roni Stanley
It bonded Hunter and me. We became really good friends. After that, I started hanging out at their house. And I guess it was in Larkspur where MG And Jerry and Hunter lived together. It was gentle and nice. It wasn't wild or crazy at all. It was very loving. I think Annabelle was born there. Mountain Girl already had sunshine and she was there, and it was in a beautiful area. And their backyard was like. Went right down into a ravine and there was a swing down there and you could play in the grass or the knoll. It was more like a knoll with a big wooded area. And Janice lived down the street. It was actually quite a great time. And it was our first venture out of the city of the Grateful Dead family. Jerry was always. It was a round kitchen table and a window over there. And Jerry would sit there and he always was playing his guitar not plugged in. He'd play the electric guitar not plugged in all the time. And Hunter had just. He just had one room up there in the bedroom, and he would scribble away. And I remember a lot of things that Hunter was into at that time was getting over your fears that not letting a fear of something control you. And that if you had a fear, the best thing to do was to meet that fear head on and to see that it would dissipate. You know, like his song lay your cards on the table. How can you play your hand if you don't lay the cards on the table? That sort of after that LSD experience became very important to him. If you have a fear, meet that fear and then it will dissipate. If you're afraid of dying, meet your death. Hunter was 28 when he wrote that song. And people commented how at 28 could you have such profound sense of life and death? Everybody at that time was very into astrology, the Grateful Dead and that whole family. We were into that kind of thing. We were into the I Ching, we were into astrology, we were into Chinese astrology. It was universal. And 28 is the time when you have your first Saturn returns. And what that means is that is the time when the path that you're supposed to go on comes clear to you at age 28, and you go on a path that you follow for probably another 28 years. That was a big bridge of your first Saturn returns when your karma comes to you and you choose the path.
- [22:43]
Narrator/Host
Several characters named Black Peter predate the song's writing, and a few of them seem like they could have been in Robert Hunter's cultural scope. David Dodd's super useful annotated Grateful Dead lyrics book and website have a list. Black Peters appear in both Dutch and Russian holiday traditions as the unpleasant companions to the more jolly Saint Nick. In 1964, director Milos Forman debuted with Czerne Peter, Black Peter, a pioneering film of the Czech New Wave. And before that, a character named Black Peter appeared in the Once and future King T.H. white's 1958 reimagining of the King Arthur legend. There, the character Black Peter appears in the form of a sullen magical fish, the King of the Moat. A fan of fantasy novels, Robert Hunter may have been familiar with the character known as Mr. P. Black Peter had a face which had been ravaged by cruelty, sorrow, age, pride, selfishness, loneliness, and thoughts too strong for individual brains. There he hung or hoved, his vast, ironic mouth permanently drawn downward in a kind of melancholy, his lean, clean shaven chops giving him an American expression like that of Uncle Sam. He was remorseless, disillusioned, logical, predatory, fierce, pitiless. But his great jewel of an eye was that of a stricken deer, large, fearful, sensitive and full of griefs.
- [24:07]
Roni Stanley
Somebody commented that Black Peter had the same cadence and rhythm as this opera by Buchner called Wojcick. I remember talking to Hunter about that opera because it was a fabulous story and I knew it and Hunter knew it, and the person Buchner who wrote it died young. And it's a tragic, tragic opera.
- [24:35]
Narrator/Host
So how did Robert Hunter imagine that Black Peter might sound?
- [24:38]
Rusty and Doug Kershaw (musical excerpts)
The clock strikes three Papa jumps to his feet already Mama's cooking Papa, Papa something to eat at half past Papa, he's ready to go he jumps in his bureau Headed down the bayou he's got fishing lines strung across the Louisiana rivers Gotta catch a big fish for us too he decent traps in a swamp Scratching anything he can Gotta make a living, he's a Louisiana man Gotta make a living he's a Louisiana man.
- [25:08]
Narrator/Host
That was Rusty and Doug Kershaw's Louisiana man from 1961. In a box of Rain, Robert Hunter's book of collected lyrics, he wrote that this was the original model for how he imagined Black Peter might sound. It was, quote, a jumpy little tune. The way I wrote it, he said. Another time in a box of rain, he continued. Garcia took it seriously, though, dressing it in subtle changes in a mournful tempo.
- [25:32]
Rusty and Doug Kershaw (musical excerpts)
Just then the wind cane squalling through the dun but who can the weather come in? Just wanna have a little.
- [26:07]
Narrator/Host
The bridge, Robert Hunter noted, was, quote, written after the restructuring of the piece and reflects the additional depth of possibility provided for the song by Garcia's treatment.
- [26:17]
Rusty and Doug Kershaw (musical excerpts)
See here how everything lead up to this thing and it's just like any other day that's ever been. Sun going up and then the sun.
- [26:50]
Narrator/Host
For Sean o', Donnell, musicologist and chair of the music department at the City College of New York. The middle section of Black Peter transcends what a listener might expect from the song's bridge.
- [27:00]
Sean O'Donnell
You know, you think you just have a kind of blues dirge going on at the beginning, and it seems fairly straightforward. But then there's this harmonic interlude that takes you pretty far afield. There's a sort of like a dream passage where you're just in this other harmonic realm. And then when you get to sort of the climax and you're suddenly far afield and you have this F chord, that is the part that everyone responds to. But you can barely remember that you were in this blues dirge before. You know, where someone else would have made a song out of just the blues dirge part. Maybe one related contrasting section, not a whole sort of dream sequence.
- [27:36]
Narrator/Host
It took just under six months for Robert Hunter's horrific acid experience in June 1969 to make it to the stage. In early December, the Dead debuted Black Peter the same night as Uncle John's band at the Fillmore west, the same venue where Hunter had taken too much acid a half year earlier. It was the same week as Altamont. And on December 7, the night after the disastrous free festival, Black Peter was the song the Dead opened with. Here's what some of that first draft of Black Peter sounded like. Recorded a week later on December 12, 1969 at Thelma on the Sunset Strip in LA. Released on Dave's Picks 10 with Uncle John's band, Black Peter was one of the first original songs the band adapted to their acoustic sets in late 1969. This is how it sounded on February 13, 1970 at the Fillmore East. Released in 1973 on Bear's Choice, the dynamics are just a little different. This is just days before the band began the Working Man's Dead demos.
- [29:05]
Rusty and Doug Kershaw (musical excerpts)
Now let's go run and sing, Run and sing, run and sing.
- [29:33]
Narrator/Host
Now let's move over to Pacific High recording in San Francisco in early 1970 and check out the Angel Share session outtakes. They're very similar to what made it to Working Man's Dead. The basic instrumental takes feature Jerry Garcia and Bob Weir on acoustic guitars, Phil Lesh on electric bass, and Bill Kreutzman on drums. The first hard part was aligning everybody's instruments and the headphones. Here's Kreutzman and Garcia.
- [30:00]
Jerry Garcia
Can you hear the drums, Jerry?
- [30:02]
Narrator/Host
No.
- [30:03]
Graham Nash
Oh, well, that's no good.
- [30:06]
Narrator/Host
The second hard part was getting through a take in one piece.
- [30:19]
Jerry Garcia
Nah, man, wrong Chords. Let's take it again.
- [30:30]
Narrator/Host
There's a really great complete alternate take of Black Peter that you can hear on the Angel. Share available through streaming services now. I adore Garcia's vocal performance on this one.
- [30:54]
Rusty and Doug Kershaw (musical excerpts)
Could be as poor as me. Take a look at poor Peter he's lying in pain now let's go run and see.
- [31:25]
Narrator/Host
But that's not to say there was no studio magic involved in the making of Black Peter. Here's Gary Lambert.
- [31:31]
Gary Lambert
It's also interesting to hear the studio chatter and the outtakes, because even though they did prepare a lot, and even though those songs were well on their feet before they went into the studio, you also hear the fine tuning and the introduction of new ideas before they go to a full take. And so the creative process didn't completely stop when they got into the studio by any means. They were refining and discovering exactly how to play those. I also want to add that the way just little instrumental details come out on this album. Black Peter, you know, Bobby's rhythm part is just these exquisite little fills. You hear a little bit of Pigpen's organ on there, which was not that present in the music by that point, but comes in at just the right point. And a bit of Pigpen's harmonica as well. The small details that they attended to on the album are really telling, and it rewards repeated listenings. I still hear things on some of these older records. If I go and revisit them years later, I'll say, oh, I never quite noticed that little bit of detail there.
- [32:36]
Narrator/Host
Pigpen's harmonica appears for the first time on Working Man's Den, just before the final verse of Black Peter. Like a character we'll hear more from soon.
- [33:10]
Rusty and Doug Kershaw (musical excerpts)
Take a look at poor Peter he's lying in pain now let's go run and see.
- [33:32]
Narrator/Host
The Pig Pen didn't know appear on many songs. During the band's acoustic sets in the spring of 1970, he'd often add the organ part he played on the studio version of Black Peter. Black Peter is a beautiful piece of art that came out of a harrowing experience, but it was one of only two important effects of the night. Robert Hunter got massively dosed in the Fillmore West. Here's Jerry Garcia on the last part of the morning from the Hachette audiobook. Jerry on Jerry and I sat there.
- [33:59]
Jerry Garcia
And that was just after that. Crosby still did. Nash record first came out and Nikki was playing that on her home hi Fi. And I said, I got imprinted by listening to that record about 19 times while I was waiting for Hunter to get to where he could walk around.
- [34:14]
Narrator/Host
Crosby, Stills and Nash's self titled debut came out just after Memorial Day at the end of May 1969. It was one of the year's biggest albums and would have been virtually impossible for Jerry Garcia not to have come into contact with the trio's harmonies sooner or later. That he did so while coming down from a massive acid trip with his closest collaborator is only a small nuance. CSN's influence can be heard all over Working Man's Dead and American Beauty after that, just as it could be heard on countless folk rock albums that are still being made. Unlike most of those, though, Jerry Garcia soon became friends with Crosby, Stills and Nash and influenced them right back. To tell that story, we're honored to welcome to the good ol Grateful Dead cast Graham Nash, 69.
- [34:58]
Graham Nash
We were in Wally Hyder studio in San Francisco. We were doing Deja Vu record. We had just constructed a very simple track of Teacher Children, my song. When I first played that song for Stephen, he said, that's a really beautiful song. Don't ever play it like that again. What? He goes, no, this is the way this should go. And he put that great Stephen Stills, right hand picking pattern, you know, it was great. So we had the basic track and so obviously because it was Stephen, we said, well, okay, so what are we gonna do as a solo? And he goes, well, you know, I seem to be playing guitar all over this record. I don't know, what do you think? So Crosby came up with the idea of talking to Jerry. Now, the Grateful Dead were in the next studio to us when we were doing Deja Vu and the Jefferson Airplane, of course, were, you know, in another studio at the same time. So I'd never met Jerry. So I asked David, because he was David's friend, why don't you go and talk to him? Because I've never met him, you know. So he came back, he said, actually, yeah, he's got his pedal steel with him and he'll give it a shot. And I said, give it a shot? He said, yeah, well, because he's only just been playing me for a couple of months, but he'll give it a shot, you know. So Jerry came in and he set up his pedal steel and we greeted each other, of course. I mean, of course I knew exactly who he was, you know, I wasn't that stupid. And he set up his steel guitar, we played the track for him. He listened to it, goes, okay, sure. All right, stop. Press the red button. So we start Recording. And we get to the end of the song and I go, that was amazing. That was. I mean, you got it. That was fantastic. The spirit of what you played, you know, that was fabulous. He goes, yeah, well, you know, I screwed up a couple of places. You know, right before the chorus there, can I do another track? And I said, of course you can do another track. I'm probably not going to use it, but you can definitely do another track. So he sat down and he played another track. And I said, yeah, well, you know, you did repair that one small hole there right before the chorus. So I can take that from this new track. But the first time you played it has the spirit of the song in it. That's what it is. That's the spirit of Teach Children. I thought that when we made the track of Teach that it could possibly be a radio hit, you know, because I wrote a lot of songs with my friends in the Hollies. I think we had, I don't know, 15 top 10 hits before I left. And I was only with him for seven years, so I knew it was going to be a radio hit. When Jerry put his steel guitar on there, there was no doubt in my mind that it was going to be a big hit because of what he played. And I don't think anyone can listen to that first 20 seconds of that intro and not just fall in love with it. So that's what happened.
- [38:17]
Rusty and Doug Kershaw (musical excerpts)
You who are on the road must.
- [38:23]
Graham Nash
Have a code that you can live by.
- [38:27]
Narrator/Host
Graham had never heard the story of how Jerry Gars became imprinted by Crosby, Stills and Nash. But he did have something to say about the legend that Crosby, Stills and Nash taught the Grateful Dead how to harmonize did happen.
- [38:39]
Graham Nash
We weren't teaching them, we were just showing them how we did it, you know, and they went, wait a second. One microphone opened up all the way around. And then just you three standing. That's how you do this. Yeah, watch this. Hey, Bill Halverson, our engineer, play a track of whatever, right? And we would stand there and sing. And they went, wow, okay, simple. We can do that. So we didn't teach them to be able to harmonize because you can't do that. You either can do it or not. But we certainly did encourage them to sing.
- [39:12]
Narrator/Host
It was the beginning of a cross band partnership that would result in both Crosby and Stills joining the Dead numerous times on stage in the next years. The very first performance of Teach youh Children took place at a Dead show when Stills and Nash dropped by for a surprise duo set at Winterland in San Francisco on October 25, 1969, playing between the Dead and the Jefferson Airplane.
- [39:34]
Graham Nash
The first public performance ever. And it was only me and Stephen, because the Dead were given a concert at, I think, the Fillmore East. And Stephen was invited, and he invited me and invited David, too. But unfortunately, Christine, David's girlfriend, had just been killed a week or so before. And David was in no state to even be in public. You know, he was mourning very deeply. And so it was just me and Stephen, and we didn't have any plan of a set. You know, Stephen just started playing songs and I would join in if I could and stuff. And then Stephen goes, oh, we have a country song for you. There's a little country tune we know. 1, 2, 5.
- [40:41]
Rusty and Doug Kershaw (musical excerpts)
You who are on the road must have a code that you can live by.
- [40:51]
Narrator/Host
You can read the whole story of that set in a recent feature on Jambass, written by our buddy Steve Silberman, and hear audio of the set remastered by engineer extraordinaire Charlie Miller. By then, Graham Nash migrated north to San Francisco and settled in the Haight Ashbury. A year and change after the Dead left.
- [41:09]
Graham Nash
We'd just done that first record. We'd spent a lot of time in la. Obviously, Stephen had a house there and so did David. He had a house in Cradle Lane. I didn't have a house. I'd been living with Joni for almost a couple of years. And then our love affair ended and I needed to get away. And because David had all these friends up in Northern California, I decided I would go there. And I tried San Francisco. And I love the city. It's an incredibly beautiful city. I found this four story house on Buena Vista east, part east, you know, there by the hospital, right next door to a white house, a huge double white house. And on the third floor of this gigantic house next to mine on Buena Vista park east was this ginormous speaker. And when I mean ginormous, I mean the thing must have been 8ft round and, you know, maybe 15ft long.
- [42:10]
Narrator/Host
The mansion had been home to Buena Vista Studio, where the Grateful Dead recorded their first single, Don't Ease Me in, backed by Stealin', released by the local Scorpio Records in 1966. Graham Nash and members of the Dead would collaborate even more during sessions at Wally Heiders in San Francisco that unfolded during 1970.
- [42:28]
Graham Nash
I was making songs for beginners also at the same time, in my spare time. And Jerry played a steel guitar on I Used to Be a King and maybe one Other thing, I didn't pay him for the session. I didn't know what we were supposed to do, you know. So I gave him a Fender strap that I bought in, I think Phoenix many years earlier when I was with the Hollies. And we came to probably 67 and I bought this vintage strap and I gave it to Jerry and he immediately put on an alligator sticker and that became the Alligator guitar, which just recently sold for over $400,000.
- [43:11]
Narrator/Host
Jerry Garcia started playing the 57 Strat in mid summer 1971. The serious modification started the next year, including the alligator sticker that gave the guitar its name. Alligator would become Jerry Garcia's first seriously modded guitar. Alembic technicians outfitted the Fender with new tuning pegs, a few different bridges, a new control plate and an onboard blaster for extra volume boost. It played an important part in developing the so called Bakersfield Dead sound of the early 70s as we heard about during our episode on Cumberland Blues. As Garcia told David Ganz in 1981, what I really wanted was to be able to get some of that metallic clang. Strats have that crispness you associate with country and western guitar players. It was part of a wide scale transformation in the way Jerry Garcia conceived of his own music and his songwriting with Robert hunter starting in 1969. Songs like Black Peter were the result. Here's Garcia talking to journalist Ben Fong Torres in 1976. This is from a CD called Got Some Things to Talk About.
- [44:17]
Jerry Garcia
The first two records that we wrote together were totally unwieldy. I mean the songs are just, they're just. Only a couple of of them are remotely singable. Most of them are just too awkward, they're too wordy.
- [44:30]
Narrator/Host
And that was before we started to.
- [44:32]
Jerry Garcia
Learn about the little niceties of songwriting that you should leave room for people to breathe and stuff like that.
- [44:38]
Narrator/Host
The eight songs of Working Man's Dead wouldn't suffer for lack of singability. Even Crosby, Stills and Nash tried singing one eventually, much more recently. In fact, around 2012, one day Rick.
- [44:50]
Graham Nash
Rubin got in touch and wanted to do an album of acoustic songs that we wish we'd written. It was really a brilliant idea. Songs that we wish we'd written. So of course, if we were going to take a song like James Taylor's Close your eyes, close your eyes, right, we had to make it sound like we had written it. And so there's seven songs that we did with Rick Rubin. None of them worked out particularly well for us. We were going through a lot of Changes at the same time. And so was Rick. We didn't feel that he was genuinely interested in what we wanted. For instance, we wanted to do Norwegian Wood and a Blackbird. And he told Crosby, oh, no, no, there'll only be one Beatles song on this record. And Crosby said, there'll only be one Beatles song on his record. If we say there's only one Beatles song from that moment, it was over. But it was quite an interesting project, for sure. I listened to a few of them last week, as a matter of fact, and they sound pretty good. But we are our severest critics, you know, gets past the three of us, then it's probably, you know, right to be able to be played for you, though.
- [46:04]
Narrator/Host
Songs we wish we'd written is still on the shelf. You can find a few murky live clips of CSN singing Uncle John's band on YouTube. Uncle John's band in Black Peter would become the Grateful Dead's own most sung songs from Working Man's Dead, with Black Peter slightly in the lead. Except for a brief pause around the Time of the Dead's 1975, 1976 touring hiatus, Black Peter was a song that Jerry Garcia sang year in and year out, from 1969 all the way up to 1995. It's a song that aged with the band. Here's Buzz Poole, author of the 33 and a third book about Working Man's dead, Black Peter.
- [46:43]
Buzz Poole
It is an ode to death. It is really powerful in that sense. But I think over time, it became much more powerful for listeners because the Dead were getting older. Pigpen, certainly Keith and then Brent, and then Garcia's health problems starting in the 80s. You know, I think these songs take on even more poignancy because you're, you know, at times you're up there basically watching a specter of death sing a song about death. And, you know, that's not the case in 6970. You know, Garcia was in. He was having a high time. He was in great shape. He was happy. He was. Everything seemed good. So I think Black Peter is one song that certainly would have a evolving kind of way, the impact it would have on the audience. I fit better into Black Peter now than I did when I was 16, which, because the song obviously hasn't changed, but I have, and that's the power of any art. We evolve alongside it.
- [47:44]
Narrator/Host
I probably belong in that camp, too. By the time the song returned in 1977, it found its own kind of soulful quiet, with Garcia occupying and navigating the vocal in new ways as his voice aged. Here's how it sounded at Red Rocks in Colorado on July 7, 1978.
- [48:03]
Rusty and Doug Kershaw (musical excerpts)
Just in the Wind came scolded through the door, but who care where the command?
- [48:25]
Narrator/Host
On Working Man's Dead, Garcia had doubled his own vocals on the bridge with a touch of falsetto.
- [48:31]
Rusty and Doug Kershaw (musical excerpts)
Phil Lesh, I think Shine Through My Window and my friends, they Come around, Come around, come around.
- [49:02]
Narrator/Host
Donna Jean Godshow joined the bridge vocals when the song came back in 1977 and the whole section became a gang sing along during Brent Midland's tenure. Here's what it sounded like on July 12, 1989 at RFK Stadium in Washington, D.C. released on CD in 2017.
- [49:19]
Rusty and Doug Kershaw (musical excerpts)
Sun Growing up and.
- [49:44]
Narrator/Host
But the song's biggest fireworks display was generally a final round of Garcia singing Run and See before springing into the solo. Here's how it sounded at that same RFK show, 20 years and one month after Robert Hunter's fateful night at the Fillmore West.
- [50:33]
Rich Mahan
I love the point made in this episode that the Grateful Dead songs mean different things to you at different points in your life. Certainly Black Peter has evolved to mean more to me as I age, and the song is just haunting, familiar, comforting and disturbing all at the same time. If that's even possible. Thanks again for tuning in, friends. Please don't forget to like, subscribe and rate the podcast so we can get it into the ears of more people that need to know what this music is about. Take care. 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.