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Announcing Dogfish Head Grateful Dead Juicy Pale Ale Collaborating for over a decade now, Dogfish Head and Grateful Dead have crafted a light bodied pale ale brewed with sustainable kerns of grains, granola and heaps of good karma for a refreshing brew that's music to your taste buds. Check out dogfish.com for more details and to find some Grateful Dead Juicy Pale Ale in your neck of the woods. Dogfish Headcraft Brewery is located in Milton, Delaware. Please drink responsibly the Good Old Grateful Dead Cast the Official Podcast of the Grateful Dead I'm Rich Mahan with Jesse Jarno exploring the music and legacy of the Grateful Dead for the committed and the curious. Thanks for tuning in to the good old Grateful Dead cast. Ladies and gentlemen, welcome. If you haven't already, please subscribe, mash that like button and leave a rating. With your help, we're bound to cover just a little more ground. We're down to the last couple of episodes about the 50th anniversary of Working Man's Dead. You can visit our website to check out all of the episodes we've already released and there are links there to your favorite podcast platforms so you can get your listen on. The newly remastered version of Working Man's Dead really is a sonic improvement over past releases and the 3 CD set includes content in the form of a show from February 21, 1971 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 over at Bob Weir's Tri Studios. There's also a collectible 12 inch vinyl picture disc featuring the Working Man's Dead album art. Very cool. Also pressed from the 2020 remastered mixes. Did you know we have a feature on the deadcast page dead.net deadcast where you can record yourself telling a story about anything Grateful Dead related. Share your magic moments, adversity, overcome and side splitting happenings with the rest of your fellow Deadheads. You just might hear yourself telling your story in a future episode of the Deadcast. Submit your story@stories.dead.net well, easy wind is the focus of this episode on the good old Grateful Dead cast. It's one of my favorite tracks on Working Man's Dead, in large part to the live band feature feel, but also and more importantly, because Pigpen takes the lead vocal on this one, his vocal leads on studio albums are rare and easy. Win might just be the one that comes closest to the magic he delivered in the band's live sets. There's also plenty of material from the Easy Win recording sessions included in the Angel Share, which are the recently released studio outtakes from the original 1970 Working Man's Dead recording sessions. Make sure to check those out at your favorite streaming or download service for a deep dive into how the band worked this song out. Well, it's time to hand this one off to Professor Jesse Jarno as we take a close look at Easy Wind.
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There are several reasons why Easy Wind isn't like the other songs on Working Man's Dead. Let's start with the most obvious. It's the only song on the album with lead vocalist other than Jerry Garcia. Hey Pigpen I've been ballin a shiny black steel Jack Hammer Ben chipping up rocks for the Great Highway.
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I live.
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Five years if I take my time Ballin that jack and drinking my wine Another reason it's different is that it's the first track on the album to feature the complete double drummer Electric Grateful Dead, as they sounded live in 1969 and 1970. Tales from the Golden Road host Gary.
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Lambert I love that piece from the first live performances I heard. And a wonderful thing about the studio version of Easy Wind is more than almost any other. It conveys the essence of the Grateful Dead in microcosm. It puts across what one of their much longer live jams might have sounded like, and they compress it into less than five minutes on a studio track. It's incredibly successful in that regard.
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It's also the only track on Working Man's Dead not written by Jerry Garcia and Robert Hunter, which might seem obvious by Pigpen's vocals, but it's not by Pigpen. I've been born shining a black steel Jack Camel bend Trippin up rocks with the Great highway live 10 years have to take my time ball nap shack and drink my wine Easy Win Easy Wind was the first Grateful Dead song written solely by Robert Hunter. That performance was from October 13, 1978, at my father's place on Long island, accompanied by bassist Larry Klein. Robert Hunter, of course, was the Grateful Dead's lyricist, but he was also a musician. In high school in Connecticut, he played trumpet in a band called the Crescents. During the days of the Palo Alto folk scenes, he could be heard playing upright bass and mandolin in Jerry Garcia's various acoustic ensembles. Probably in most cases, the division of labor between Jerry Garcia and Robert Hunter was what it might seem. Robert Hunter wrote lyrics, Jerry Garcia wrote music, and occasionally provided editing. But especially during the few years they were housemates in Larkspur, the lines were sometimes blurrier. It was a small house in 1978, around the time of that performance we just heard, Hunter told I'd sit upstairs banging away at my three chords for days and days, working something out. By the time I had it worked out, you know, through the thin walls, he'd heard everything I was doing. I'd come down and hand him this sheet of paper and he'd say, oh, that's interesting. And he'd play the whole arrangement of it right away because he'd heard what I was doing and heard where it was going off. Mountain Girl once said that Hunter might have already worked out some chord changes for a song, and Jerry would say, oh, no, man, that's not the way it should be. It should be like this. In the case of Easy Wind, Hunter apparently got it right the first time. He told Blair Jackson In 1993, my arrangement was a little bit closer to one of those slippin and slidin Robert Johnson type songs, because it was just me and a guitar. Then when the whole band got ahold of it, it changed a bit, as they always do. Still, a lot of that original style crept over into the band's version. But there's a little more to the story of Easy Wind. When we last saw Robert Hunter at the end of our Black Peter episode, he just suffered through an absolutely horrific psychedelic trip. My time is still scrambled from that era, hunter told Blair Jackson in 1988. It took me a full two years after that to get back to where I felt creative or could feel any joy in life or much of anything else. As Blair rightly pointed out, those two years encompassed nearly all of Working Man's Dead, American Beauty, and the songs that would comprise Jerry Garcia's solo debut, some of the most beloved work in the Garcia Hunter songbook. Hunter insisted, I had a vision of a gold bar in the sky, this shining gold bar. But it wasn't shining on me. It was drawing my energy into it, and there was nothing I could do to stop it. It's like it took two years of my energy. Chronologically, Easy Wind was likely the first song Robert Hunter wrote after his experience in early June of 1969. At least that made it to the stage. The Dead debuted The song In August 1969, a few days after Woodstock, but just in time to get played at the New Orleans Pop Festival at the International Speedway near Baton Rouge, one of its only performances in the vicinity of an actual bayou. Whether intentional or not, I like the way the lyric about a whole lot of women out in red in the streets today foreshadows The Trouble Ahead, lady in Red of Casey Jones, which would follow the song on Working Man's Dead. That said, while Robert Hunter may have written Easy Wind, the moment the Grateful Dead added it to their repertoire, it belonged entirely to Pigpen. Here's a little bit from November 8, 1969, at the Fillmore Auditorium on Dix Pick 16. Whole lot of women out on the streets in a ray day. If it wasn't written explicitly for Pig Pen, then Pig Pen occupied it perfectly. Here's Gary Lambert.
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It also fits the aesthetic of the album. A Working man song, you know, it's akin to Cumberland in that way. It's about a guy who's chipping up rocks on the Great Highway. I had not been to California yet when that song came out, and then I found out where the Great highway was and that there's. It's. It's actually the road that runs along Ocean beach for a long stretch of the western end of San Francisco. Yeah. In fact, the Family Dog, after they got kicked out of the Avalon Ballroom, had their second venue. It was called the Family Dog at the Great Highway. You can find some recordings from there. Pigpen was what he projected and what he was. People who knew him well will tell you the disparity was amazing because he was such a thoughtful, gentle, kind person within that incredibly badass looking exterior. And you know, what he projected on stage, the gruffness and the. All the sexual innuendo and all that stuff was his act, you know. But he also. He lived the blues man life, unfortunately to his detriment. But he was also extraordinarily tender and kind. And the women in the Grateful Dead scene regarded him as just a very protective big brother. And that's a wonderful thing to consider, that disparity between who you saw on stage and who the guy was.
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Pigpen was the reason that Mother McCree's Uptown Jug champions took electric instruments off the wall of Dana Morgan's music store and transformed themselves into the Warlocks. He was an intuitive musician and played guitar and banjo along with piano and organ. He was well read and beat poetry, a fan of the hip monologist Lord Buckley, and could spiel off long, charismatic vocal improvisations and marathon versions of Turn on youn Love Light. Though Pigpen dabbled in songwriting in the band's early days, most notably co writing the words and music to Alligator in 67, his creativity didn't necessarily manifest his songs, though that would change after Working Man's Dead. But even if Pigpen didn't write Easy Wind, it was still primo Pig. Grateful the head archivist and legacy manager David Lemieux.
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Easy Wind was a song, you know, in the live setting. It ran 10 minutes long, so it was a pretty big song where Pig had to really, really step up and be the star of the show. Hunter's lyrics sung by Pigpen coming to life. And this is the one Grateful Dead song that I never saw them play live, obviously from this album. It's such a great song. And when they brought it. And again, coming back to Weir, Weir, he does it on the studio version, but in the live setting, Weir got a full blown guitar solo and he got a couple guitar solos from this album. In the live setting, he got the big Casey Jones guitar solo and then he got the Easy Wind. And when Weir was playing his solo in this, boy, when he was on, it really took off. But I find this song, when the Dead had their swing on in a live show, this song really allowed them to swing. We put one on A Working Man's Dead reissue about, oh, gosh, almost two decades ago. And it was from Portland, Oregon, from Springer's Ballroom. January. They played twice, January 16 and 18. It's the one from the January 16 show. And it's a one that again, that swing is perfect. The groove they get into. And Bob and Jerry's solos are perfect. And Pigpen's vocals, he nails them. He is completely present. The drummers were playing so exceptionally well on this version. And then add to that Bob solos, Jerry's solo, and Pigs playing TC was still in the band. He had like another week left in the band, a couple of weeks left. So you've got a little bit of organ in there, really wonderful stuff.
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That's one of my favorite versions of easy win 2. Exactly a month before the start of the Working man's Dead Sessions, January 16, 1970, at Springer's in Portland. Included on the Golden Road box set. That version and many of the live takes before and after the recording of Working Man's Dead crept up near 10 minutes, with ample room for the band to find a flow. But this studio version was different. Gary Lambert.
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The way they structured it, I think by doing that judicious editing of taking out the chorus from the front, it gives them some time where, you know, first Pigpen plays a little bit of harmonica solo and then he hands off to Bobby, who takes one of his rare studio recorded guitar solos. And then Jerry jumps in. Jerry kind of overlaps with Bobby and he solos. And then they go back to the vocal and somehow it just beautifully imparts what The Grateful Dead could really stretch out on on stage in the studio, and it's an underrated track for that reason. I think it has the concision that you need to make an effective studio recording, but it suggests what the band was capable of. Again, it comes to that difference I cited between cinema verite, documentary, and making a fictional work. And I think on Working Man's as much as any album they ever made, they tell the stories really beautifully. And then the function of the live shows was to expand upon that and show where these songs could go.
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They also clicked the tempo up slightly in the studio, a move that would stick in the subsequent live performances. The album version is also highlighted by a lovely stereo recording of the Dead's double drummers in action, the first time they appear that way on Working Man's Dead.
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Sam.
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Working Man's Dead co producer Bob Matthews.
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By the time it got around to recording a Pig song like Easy Wind, there was an agreement about how it was to happen, how it was to be played. Occasionally Pig would recommend or remind somebody that he had a different perspective on a particular part. But it wasn't like there was any conflict. It was like they were all playing in the band together. And that was one of the things, of course, that I loved about the Grateful Dead and their music was the song that Bobby sang on his first solo record. Playing in the band, to me, became a theme song. Playing in a band is playing together as a band, not as five individuals, but as the collective. And that's what everybody loved about the Grateful Dead, was that what you heard from them was the Grateful Dead. You heard their entirety of their individuals, plus one. One of my other favorite sayings is that it's where the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. The Grateful Dead was that whole, and it was greater than the sum of its individual components and musicians. And that was where the magic was. And that's something that I got to observe and contribute a small part of for so many years with so much Glee joy. I mean, they rehearsed the song, what its changes were, how it was focused. You know, Jerry had known Pigpen longer than I knew Jerry, you know, and I knew Jerry from when I was 13. That was like in 1960. So he had known Ron for quite a long time, and they worked together. I mean, Pigpen was part of Mother McCree's Uptown Jug Champions. Well, Bob Weir and I started Mother McCree's Uptown Dunk Champions.
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Archivist Mike Johnson and engineer Brian Kehue annotated the session reels Known as the Angel Share, which you could find on a streaming service near you. Here's Mike Johnson.
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We didn't know what was on these reels. And then when we got the first pass, the rough mixes, it's like, okay, I annotated those. It's like, well, crap, we don't have everything. Oh, well, you gotta roll, you know. And then Brian went in with the fine tooth comb and found even more. And again, some of them were printed backwards on another reel. So that's why this journey to just.
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Keep going in deeper and deeper and.
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Deeper, we kept finding more things that we could use.
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Brian Kehue the main thing that was done to make the tapes into a listenable format was to work on the moments in between the playing. I mean, the mixing of the songs is fairly straightforward, but the. The amount of effort that took to bring out the drum microphone, which picks up most of the room. Sometimes you can hear Phil, who doesn't have his own singing microphone or talking mic. You can ask him for. Ask for changes because Bill Kreuzmann's drum microphones are hearing the bass player talk. So I turn them up quite a bit and have to turn down other things to make it clear what's being said. So as you listen through, most of our time was spent on bringing out the commentary and the working process. So we can understand why they're doing another take, why they didn't like the last one, and how they intend to change the song over the next 10 minutes. They're talking amongst themselves and that really is, to me, the highlight. I love the music, but I love to hear the personalities and the development of the working process.
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Easy Win is the song with the single most surviving session tape, some 35 minutes worth. In addition to the master used on Working Man's Dead. Easy Win, are you guys doing takes or you just rehearsing? Are you guys doing takes or were you rehearsing?
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All right.
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With the dad always doing takes, we get 10 passes on easy Wind, almost all of them a pig's breath from the final version. But more than any other song on the album, Easy Wind required the Dead to channel the energy they found on stage in front of dancing crowds, sometimes a tall order in the studio. One thing to note is that Pigpen is singing live in the studio. In part, the outtakes contain the usual blooper reel material. I been ballin those shiny blacks. Wait, wait a minute. Came in a little bit wrong there with the Easy Win session. All of these stupid little moments are simultaneously mundane and sweet character details about the elusive Pigpen. Ron McKernan. Rarely interviewed, then 24 years old, Pigpen tragically didn't actually live five more years, nor take his time. Gone almost exactly three years to the day after the last Working Man's Dead sessions. But most of what we get on the Angel Share Easy Win session is the band trying to find that elusive groove. As Gary Lambert pointed out, the studio version is the rolling thunder of live Grateful Dead. Compressed into less than five minutes, the differences between the takes are subtle, minute variations in tempo and feel. But to train your ears on the remastered Workingman's Dead version of Easy Wind, enough to hear those differences on the Angel Share is one way to really get inside the grateful dead in 1970. But the river keeps on talking and you never hear nowhere to save. I wants to listen to that. Our dear pal Eric Schwartz is the host of the Lone Star Dead Radio show, which has aired continuously on K9 in Dallas since 1983. Eric shared this with us. I've been rolling a shiny black steel jack hammer Been chipping up rocks for the great highway Good old Grateful Dead, good new Grateful Dead. Yes, friends, America's hardest working rock band now presents Working Man's Dead, an album of country flavored tunes by the Grateful Dead. An album different from anything they've ever done before. Gotta get down to the crumbling man Gotta get down Eric is perhaps the single most committed Grateful Dead collector I've ever encountered. Plenty of Dead heads have walls, or even several walls covered in cassettes. But Eric goes even further than that.
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You know, a gold record here, some metal stampers here, a complete set of Grateful Dead high school yearbooks. My most recent one was Robert Hunter. Some of them are clean, some of them have signatures in it. And I bought one for Mickey Hart, you know, for 20 bucks on eBay. And I open up to the middle page and it's signed by Mickey Hart, you know, in some high school girl's pink ink pencil in 1959. You know, lots of luck in all that you endeavor. Always Mickey Hartman. And he drew a little arrow up to his face and my jaw just dropped. I did own a billboard, you know, a Mars Hotel billboard that was 10ft high by 20ft long that I was never going to be able to display in a house.
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Eric made an informal catalog to his collection. That's a pretty amazing virtual museum show. You can find the link over@dead.net deadcast that previous recording is part of another one of Eric's sub collections. He found it because he's a collector of records. And specifically 45's the Little Records with the big holes.
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When I started getting into the Dead, albums just seemed so pedestrian. And like albums and posters, people are real hardcore collectors of that stuff. But, you know, Working Man's Dead came out on Warner Brothers and then it was reissued with a Burbank label, and then it was reissued with a Reprise label and then it, you know, went to 14 different countries and it just seemed too infinite to get a good solid collection of LPs. Uncle John's band was released once on, you know, 45. That's it, just one version of the single. So it seemed like a more finite goal to be able to collect. And, you know, there's probably over 150 different Grateful Dead singles, if you count the promos and the imports, but there's no re releases.
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One can measure Warner Bros. Excitement about the singable songs on Working Man's Dead by the amount of promotional material they put out.
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The record company started, you know, investing in them a little more. There was Uncle John's and New Speedway came out on a stock copy and a nice promo copy that they would send to the radio stations. You know, they had distribution all over the world, but the single, as far as the album was concerned, they also put out a record that has radio spots on it and, you know, they would send these to AM FM stations and it's the same spot run three times with three different guys reading the script. At the end, they tell their listening audience to steal the record, which seemed like the Grateful Dead just saying, you know, yeah, we'll play along, but only so much.
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Good old Grateful Dead, Good new Grateful Dead. In the timbers up in a the wolves are running round but winter was so hot and cold froze 10ft beneath.
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The ground yes, friends, America's hardest working.
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Rock band now presents Working Man's Dead, an album of country flavored tunes by the Grateful Dead. An album different from anything they ever did before. Please don't dominate the rap Jack if you got nothing new to say Working the Man's Dead, the newest from Dairy, Phil, Bob, Bill, Mickey and Pigpen Ready now on Warner Brothers Records and tapes. Working Man's Dead. Steal it. The Warner Bros. Promotion department was run by industry legend Stan Cornyn, though when interviewed by producer andy Zaks in 2010, neither Cornyn nor his assistant recalled who wrote or produced the Dead spots. In the early years, though, many of Cornyn's spots were voiced and occasionally tweaked by David Ostman to the Fire Sign Theater, the group of radio surrealists that inspired the bozos and Bolos of Europe 72. Here's one from 1969.
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Well, it's finally here, people. We've waited over a year for it, and now it's finally arrived. It's the new Grateful Dead thing on the Warner Brothers 7 Arts label.
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You know, if I were able to.
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Pronounce it, I'd tell you the title of the lp, but instead, why don't you just go down to your local record place and ask for the new Grateful Dead thing on the Warner Brothers 7 Arts label and see if you can dig what the Dead did.
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Andy Zaks has done some amazing excavations into the Warner and Reprise promo departments and spoke about them at the POP conference in Seattle in 2010. Over@dead.net deadcast you can find a link to Andy's presentation By the time Working Man's Dead came around, like the band themselves, the ads were a bit more straightforward, but like the band themselves, only a bit. Warner Bros. Even took out an ad and Billboard that described their efforts on behalf of Working Men's. Though Deadheads helped spread the word for sure, Warner's budget included what they described as 3281 awfully hard sell AM radio spots, with a reported $100,000 spent on radio promotion by the label and distributors. Adjusted for inflation, that's over a half million dollars. Working Man's Dead, the newest from Jerry, Phil, Bob, Bill, Mickey and Pigpen. Ready now on Warner Bros. Albums and tapes. Steal it. When Mike Johnson and Brian Kehue were pulling reels for the angel share, they also came across a battered tape box with an equally battered tape inside labeled Working Man's Dead. Commercial spots Testing, testing, testing. Lyricist Robert Hunter stopped by to record a few promo spots for the same ad series. This was included as an unlisted bonus track on the 2003 Working Man's Dead CD reissue. It didn't make it to Warner's promo 7 inch back in 1970. It was perhaps circulated to radio stations on tape, a frequent practice for promos. If you ever heard this in the wild, let us know. I don't know, but I've been told it's hard to run with the weight of gold. The Working Man's Dead by the Grateful Dead. Available on Warner Brothers Tapes and Records. You should be able to get your copy by May 15th. Working Man's Dead by the Grateful Dead steal one among Dead fans, Robert Hunter is known for being private, even reclusive. And he was, to some degree, but not always. Here's how we described Working man's dead to WLIR's Dennis McNamara in 1978.
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That's my baby. I like that record.
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Hunter wrote the words for all eight of Workingman's Dead songs, is credited with all of Easy Wind, and likely contributed some musical ideas to others. Significantly, he also appears on the album's front cover along with the rest of the band. A portrait of him by Stanley Mouse was set to be included on the album's back cover, but eliminated for reasons of symmetry. When the album came out, Hunter visited radio stations to promote it. He was working like it was his job, which for the first time, it actually was. In the spring of 1970, Robert Hunter was formally put on the payroll as a member of the Grateful Dead. Here's Roni Stanley.
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If you look at the COVID of Working Man's Dead, Robert Hunter is pictured on the COVID And now that was the first time. And I think that sort of marks his recognition and acknowledgement by the band that he is part of the band. He is the seventh member of the band. And if you also notice the way he looks on that cover, he's at the end and he's wearing this big overcoat and he's sort of. His head's down and. And he shrouded it a little bit. So it's a Hunter esque thing. And it was also, I think that was the same coat that Jerry brought him that day when he. When he took too much lsd and Jerry came by and bought him. So I think that's sort of important that he's on the COVID It was an important moment and he was living with Jerry Garcia at the time. Whenever I was over there, it was so peaceful. And Annabelle had just been born. She was born in February and she was a little, cute little baby. And I think they were that close that Hunter named her. Her name was Annabel Bluebird, Ginger Bear. So you could feel that the connection was flowering and coming alive and into the public.
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It also marked the beginning of financial stability for Robert Hunter after a decade of existence on the bohemian fringe. When he first met Jerry Garcia In 1961, the two lived in their cars parked side by side. The person responsible for making sure that Robert Hunter drew a weekly salary was John McIntyre, along with tour manager Sam Cutler, who organized the band's road work, and Dave and Bonnie Parker, who handled their finances. McIntyre was instrumental in reorganizing the Dead after Lenny Hart absconded with the band's money early in 1970. That April, they moved into the house at 5th and Lincoln. That would remain their home and ground control for the next quarter century. One person who drew a weekly paycheck in the spring of 70 was sound engineer and former LSD chemist Owsley Stanley, who the Dead continued to pay even when he was finally sent to Terminal Island Federal Correctional Institution that summer. Roney Stanley had worked as a secretary during the Lenny Hart era when the band's offices were based at a warehouse adjacent to the Hamilton Air Force Base in Nevada.
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They rented the office in San Rafael and they had a PO Box and it was much more PO Box. I still remember the number 1073. It's weird how you remember these things. So every Monday was the day you came into the office and picked up your check. Bear had arranged for his salary to be split between Melissa and me. And so we go in every Monday. Everybody would meet and it would be like a great day because after the weekend where you partied and worked so hard because you know we were working and the band was working. Weekends for fans were fun and Monday was the day off and we'd go into the office and we'd pick up our checks and we'd hang out all day. And I actually have a vision of Andre being there. I can see him as we talk way later, years later, after I'd moved to New York and I'm going to Columbia and getting my degrees and everything, every Monday still that office you went and you picked up your check. I remember I went back to California one day and I went into the office on a Monday and everybody was hanging.
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John McIntyre came into the Grateful Dead scene by virtue of being classmates with Rock Scully at San Francisco State and got a job working as a systems analyst for an insurance company before dropping out and joining the Rock and Roll circus. At the Carousel Ballroom, the Dead's home venue, historian Nicholas Meriwether of the center for Counterculture Studies discussed the importance of John McIntyre as the dead established themselves for real in 1970.
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This is when they get 5th and Lincoln. This is when they actually incorporate in the state of California. You know, these things are not all patched together, but it's right around the same time. And I think what you can see. McIntyre made it explicit at the time that they were going to create this pod, this unit and use the bands music and performance as the kind of anchor. And I think it goes back to what Garcia says to Charles Reich, you know, which is actually right, right around this time too, where he talks about the theory of hip economics was that you would have essentially a self contained community with a few People who had outside jobs. And their function was to have these outside jobs bring in some money, and then that would circulate quickly within the community. So the idea was that you would mostly be focused on the community, but you had to have a few earned ways, to use a later term, that would make that scene solvent. You know, that would give that scene enough of the capital and the money so that they could. They could actually function within the capitalist system. And I think that's important because it's actually a remarkably sophisticated way of imagining how a utopian community has to function. This is not to say that they're doing this in a kind of a studied or scholarly way, but they certainly are doing it in a thoughtful way. And I think this is also a big part of why John MacIntyre. One of his early moves is, let's bring Alan Trist into this.
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Alan Trist, a close friend of both Garcia and Hunter's for nearly a decade, would organize the Dead's in house publishing company, ICE9, a reference to Kurt Vonnegut's Cat's Cradle.
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Alan had worked for his father's think tank, which was the Tavistock Institute. And the Tavistock Institute was really focused on how to have sustainable, ethical, efficient business structures. So, you know, doing things like solving labor management problems in UK mines, things like that. So Alan was perfect for this. He's graduated from Cambridge and he's worked for his father's think tank. And Alan is, you know, an old running buddy of Garcia and part of that early Palo Alto folk scene. So it just. He was a perfect guy to come in. And I think that's also important because MacIntyre is imagining all of this with everybody else. You know, he's not the CEO, but he's acting in a sort of a managerial capacity. Alan is brought in not just to help with that, but also to help them understand what they're doing, to help them theorize, essentially, which is something that anybody who's ever spoken with Alan knows. He is remarkably good at that kind of reflection.
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With the band taking control of nearly every aspect of their business, it was the beginning of a new era for the Grateful Dead, with the skilled ground control of people like John McIntyre. Roney Stanley was close with McIntyre and reconnected later in life.
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I remember we had a Thanksgiving. Now, not sure what year this was, but the whole Grateful Dead family got together and we had a Thanksgiving week, took an inn in Cotati, which is near around, you know, in Sonoma, lower Sonoma, and McIntyre ordered cases of Baron Rothschild wine he had never tasted anything like this and he's like teaching us how to drink fine wine and oh my God. And he was, he was like that. He was very graceful and he was really a sweetheart. Uncle John's band is spelled J O H N John, but John McIntyre, whose name was spelled J O N, always believed that that song was about him. He really wasn't. I think it was. It's much more having to do with the new Lost City Ramblers. I totally think that. But he co opted it because he felt that that band was his and he loved that idea. And even when he was old and just even before he died, he always.
- [39:31]
B
Said that John McIntyre passed away in 2012. Dennis McNally wrote a touching memorial and Robert Hunter contributed a poem. You can find links@dead.net deadcast but back to Easy Wind Remember Easy Wind? Robert Hunter certainly did after he began to perform in 1976. He played easy Wind in virtually every era of his long touring career. Here's a tiny bit of what it sounded like in 2014 at City Winery in New York. Easy Win didn't last nearly as long in the Grateful Dead songbook. It remained a showcase for pigpen throughout 1970, but disappeared from the stage early the next year, not long after Mickey Hart's departure. We'll leave you with one of those final single Drummer versions, recorded February 21, 1971 at the Capitol Theater in Port Chester, New York. Released on the bonus disc with the new expanded Working Man's Dead mixed down from the multi track masters by Jeffrey Norman at Bob Weir's Tri Studios. Easy Wheel There's a whole lot of.
- [41:08]
C
Women.
- [41:22]
B
Jumping and you never.
- [41:37]
A
I know there's not a lot of it, but man, is it cool to hear Pigpen talking in between takes on those Angel Share outtakes. Sometimes I wonder how the band would have progressed if he wouldn't have gotten sick and instead would have stuck around. What a long, strange trip it's been indeed. Thank you for tuning in. See you next time. 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.