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A
Announcing Dogfish Head Grateful Dead Juicy Pale Ale Collaborating for over a decade now, Dogfish Head and Grateful Dead have crafted a light bodied pale ale brewed with sustainable kerns of grains, granola and heaps of good karma for a refreshing brew that's music to your taste buds. Check out dogfish.com for more details and to find some Grateful Dead Juicy Pale Ale in your neck of the woods. Dogfish Headcraft Brewery is located in Milton, Delaware. Please drink responsibly the Good Old Grateful Dead Cast the official Podcast of the Grateful Dead I'm Rich Mahan with Jesse Jarno exploring the music and legacy of the Grateful Dead for the committed and the curious. Welcome back to the Good Old Grateful Dead Cast. Ladies and gentlemen, before we dive in, please subscribe. Hit that like button, leave us a rating and help us spread the gospel far and wide. Well, we're down to the last episode in our series about the 50th anniversary of Working Man's Dead. The other episodes, one for each song on the album, are located on our website, dead.netdeadcast so head on over there and check them out. There's also links to your favorite podcast platforms so you can really listen wherever you feel comfortable. While you're there, check out the newly remastered 50th anniversary edition of Working Man's Dead. It's an incredible sonic improvement over past releases and includes the February 21, 1971 show at the Capitol Theater in Port Chester, New York, mixed by Jeffrey Norman from the original 16 track analog reel to reel master tapes over at Bob Weir's Tri Studios. Have you shared your story with us yet? Seriously, I think that a lot of people don't know about this. We have a feature on the Dead cast page, dead.netdeadcast, where you can record yourself telling your favorite Grateful Dead tale from your own golden road. We're planning a future episode where we use stories people have recorded on the website, so give it a shot. You may hear yourself in an upcoming Deadcast. Well, we are at the end of the line for this season on the good old Grateful Dead cast, but we'll be back soon with more episodes. This season has been an amazing journey through the inner workings of the eight tunes on what many consider the Grateful Dead's finest studio album, Working Man's Dead. Casey Jones Track four on side two is the last of these sonic journals and the focus of this episode. This one's a long train running. There's a lot to cover, so let's get rolling.
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B
Working Man's Dead is a landmark achievement. A legendary album filled with classic songs that continue to live today, both in the popular memory and in the active repertoires of performing musicians. It's an album that even non Dead fans know, but for Deadheads with access to the band's live recordings, it might even be a little forgotten. The Grateful Dead are legendary for their live tapes, each different from every other one, a particular combination of musical and alchemical circumstances that never existed again, shaping the contour and content of the individual performances. Some nights were transcendent, some just okay. The Grateful Dead's albums are a lot like that, too, each capturing the Dead's world as it existed for just a few passing moments. But if you're one of those Dead fans that focuses exclusively on Live Dead, I earnestly suggest that you mentally cross out the name Working Man's Dead and relabel the J card of a virtual cassette to read Grateful Dead March 1970 Pacific High recording San Francisco, California. It's kind of a classic tape. It was a tape they made at one of the most pivotal points in their career, recorded as it became clear that their then manager, Lenny Hart, was stealing money from the band. It was something all this heavy bullshit was flying around us, jerry Garcia told Rolling stone. So we just retreated in there and made music. Only the studio was calm. The record was the only concrete thing happening. The rest was part of that insane legal and financial figment of everybody's imagination. So I guess it came out of a place that was real to all of us. But if grateful that live tapes were underground hits exchanged from hand to hand, working man's dead was a mainstream one. Not top 10, nor even top 20, but a real charting success with an impact far beyond anything they'd done previously. A Stone classic, it both transcended the Dead's world and became a cornerstone for newly minted Dead freaks and well established Dead freaks too. Grateful Dead archivist and legacy manager David Lemieux.
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C
I've met so many people who, a little bit older than me, who would have been, you know, buying records in 1970, and they're certainly not Deadheads or possibly not even Dead fans, and yet they still own a vinyl copy of that in the record collection because they would buy whatever was the bet were the best albums of the year. And maybe they never became a huge fan of that band or that band, but they would still have that band's first best record in their opinion. And generally those people have Working Man's Dead and for the most part also American Beauty. But I've met countless people like that who. When they find out I work for the Dead, and they know nothing about the Dead, but they do have Working Man's Dead in their vinyl collection from 50 years ago. I know a lot of people who consider this the beginning of the Grateful Dead, as we know the Grateful Dead. Whereas, you know, the hardcore, the people who are really huge Deadheads, you know, of course they're going to go back to the first album and Anthem and Oxo Maxo, and of course, Live Dead.
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B
But for.
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C
For people who are Dead fans or know of the Dead, you know, it's accessible music. So accessible music is always, I think, a good place for people to start.
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B
Because of its sheer popularity, it was an album that practically recommended itself. And for good reason. Perhaps no song symbolized it more than Casey Jones. Never released as a single, Casey Jones became an underground legend, in part because of its seemingly risque first line reference to cocaine. Of course, the song was completely catchy, too. But at a time when cocaine was just beginning to come back into American culture, both underground and mainstream, it made the song notorious. Both Casey Jones and Working Man's Dead remain entry points into the wide world of the Grateful Dead. Even a half century later. For new school bluegrass guitarist Billy Strings, Working Man's Dead was his first exposure to the band, and Casey Jones became a quick favorite.
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D
It's just such a classic American record, you know, and it's got so many, like, Americana, country, bluegrass, kind of folky overtones, the steel guitar and stuff like that. There's a lot of. That kind of flavor on there. Every song is just classic. Casey Jones was my one song that I really liked when I was, like, in middle school and high school, you know, I listened to a lot of bluegrass then I listened a lot of Doc Watson, Bill Monroe and Stanley Brothers and stuff like that, and also a lot of David Grisman and Doc Watson. And that's sort of how I got turned on to Jerry, through the music of David Grisman. And, you know, then I found out about the stuff that he did together, and it's like, who's this guy playing with Dog? You know, he must be pretty good if Dog's got him playing, which is really strange to me, that Casey Jones was my favorite because it's just kind of so far from what I love about the Grateful Dead. Now. I don't feel like my ear was mature enough to understand, like, the Estimated Profits and the Dark Stars and the deep jams that would. That would come out on the live stuff. It just went over my head. So Casey Jones I loved it, though, man. I had that song on my ipod, and I'd play it on the bus ride to school and like, all the time when I was, like, skateboarding and stuff. It was weird how much I liked that song. When I started learning about, you know, the Grateful Dead and Jerry's playing specifically, like, his. His leads and the kind of different avenues he would walk down with his notes and just. It just kind of opened up so many doors for me and that I learned that there was, like, that kind of freedom in music and improvisation and stuff. When I did start to acquire the taste for that. In the same way when I was, like, in high school, if I heard Coltrane or something, it would just go right over my head.
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B
Casey Jones is how many people met the Grateful Dead. From its irresistible opening lick, it signaled big fun. But signals can be deceiving, which is maybe part of the point of what you might call a cautionary tale. Driving that train high on cocaine Casey Jones he's bitter Watch your speed, travel ahead here's how Robert Hunter described the genesis of Casey Jones to Dennis McNamara on WLIR in 1978.
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In my notebooks, on one page I had just written. I don't know what prompted it. I heard the line in my head, and it just tickled me. Driving that train high on cocaine Casey Jones, you better watch your speed.
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B
That was the only thing written on that page.
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E
And it was probably about a three or four months later when I opened the book up and just continued it.
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B
I mean, it was easy to continue. It was an easy song to write. Sounds simple enough. There's a complication to the story. But those first two lines that tickled Robert Hunter are so packed that we'll start with them. It's a waste. All a habit I ever had. That was Jerry Garcia singing Cocaine Habit blues with mother McCree's Uptown Jug Champions in 1964, released on CD in 1998. There was a long history of cocaine songs when cocaine was legal and available in numerous pharmaceutical forms. And there was a long history of songs about one John Luther Jones, the doomed train engineer known as Casey, who perished in a workplace accident late in the evening on April 30, 1900, in Vaughan, Mississippi. Here's a bit of furry Lewis epic 1928 Victor recording, originally stretched over two sides of a 78 RPM record.
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E
On the Road Again Nat Barney's on.
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B
The Road Again.
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E
Lot of people tell.
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B
By the thought I'm on the man to find Mr. Casey Jones Mr. Casey Jones, Jerry Garcia and Robert Hunter would have certainly been familiar with that recording included on Harry Smith's foundational Anthology of American Folk Music LP collection in 1952. Eagle Eared listeners might have noticed a few lines that also appear in she's on the Road Again, which the Dead learned from a recording by the Memphis Jug band, also from 1928. Must have been one of those memes. And the Dead's version of Casey Jones is exactly that, updating and combining two of the early 20th century's musical memes into one song that would become a famous example of both. The first version of Casey Jones to be recorded was by fiddle and John Carson in 1923, but Casey Jones was famous long before there was even a recorded song about him. The real Casey Jones was born in Case, Kentucky, which is where he later got the Casey nickname. If you're passing through Jackson, Tennessee, sometime just off I40 between Memphis and Nashville, you can visit the Casey Jones Home and Railroad Museum. Casey Jones worked for the Illinois Central Railroad. His recognizable way of blowing a train whistle is said to be the source of another song popularized on the Anthology of American Folk, KC Moan, also performed by the Dead's favorite the Memphis Jug Band, and which likewise floated through Bob Weir's acoustic repertoire in later years. Like the other Casey Jones songs, Casey Moan didn't turn up for sale until the dawn of the country folk recording boom in the 20s.
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E
I thought I heard that kissy when.
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She blow oh, I thought I heard.
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E
That Casey when she blow.
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I thought.
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E
I heard that Casey when she blow.
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B
She blow like my woman's own boat Casey Jones died in a train accident on a rainy night in the early hours of May 1, 1900, when the cannonball Express, piloted by Casey, collided with another train's caboose. Casey's friend Wallace Saunders, an engine wiper, wrote the first song about him days later, and it hopped into the folk network and seemingly made a jump into vaudeville. By 1912 it was so popular that it had earned its own parody by pioneering radical songwriter Joe Hill, called Casey Jones the Union Scab. Casey wasn't a scab, though. He was a company man all the way. Also, for that matter, a teetotaler, which is to say he was decisively not high on cocaine nor anything else when he drove and crashed that train. After the Dead finished recording Working Man's Dead, but before it came out, they debuted their own version of the Ballad of Casey Jones, done Mississippi John Hurt style. Here's how it sounded at the Fillmore east on May 15, 1970, released on Road Trips Volume 3, Number 3. If they ran, let them ride the wrong.
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E
Would the trust.
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B
In the end, Casey Jones wasn't the first old folk song reimagined by Garcia and Hunter. They tried it the year before an Oxomoxo as Dupree's Diamond Blues, drawing on the ballad Betty and Dupree. But when Robert Hunter added cocaine to the mix, at least proverbially, the song took on a whole new dimension. Hunter tried to find a substitute, he said, instead of cocaine, he tried the lyric whip in that chain and lugging propane. But neither worked. Casey Jones was born a cocaine song and stayed a cocaine song. There was no other line for the song Hunter wrote. He sometimes recounted that story of writing the first line in his pocket notebook and adding the rest several months later. But he told a slightly different version of the song's origin story to Dennis McNally, the Dead's publicist and biographer, saying that the lyrics came to him in a dream. A few episodes back, we examined how the lyrics to Direwolf were also a virtual dream transcription written by Hunter immediately after waking, and hunter told Dennis McNally that the same was true for Casey Jones. This isn't incompatible with the other story. Perhaps he wrote the first few lines and let his subconscious do the rest of the work. A few months later in this dream, Hunter said he encountered the poet Bobby Peterson, several years older than most people in the Dead scene. Peterson was a close friend of Phil Lesh's from the days before the Warlocks. Peterson was a serious poet, had written the lyrics to New potato caboose in 1967, and would go on to write the words to Unbroken Chain, Pride of Kookamunga and Revolutionary Hamstrung Blues. The dream version of Bobby Peterson was working on a new set of lyrics. Hunter read them over his shoulder, then woke up and wrote them down. Casey Jones Why would Robert Hunter be dreaming of Bobby Peterson? Here's historian and archivist Nicholas Meriwether of the center for Counterculture Studies. Especially in the 1960s, there was a genuine sense that Hunter was by far the more skilled lyricist, and his folk.
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D
Music background really, really underscored that.
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B
But the Peterson, at least within the Dead's immediate circle, was really viewed as a very serious and accomplished poet in a way that Hunter was not. Peterson had already been published in a couple of small press magazines, small press poetry periodicals, and Peterson had apparently the ear of some of the actual beats. He seems to have had some connection with Gary Snyder. Hutter already had aspirations to be more than just a lyricist, but I think he probably felt like he was the junior poet when it came to thinking about Peterson. After his Dream World assist from Peterson, Hunter handed the lyrics to Jerry Garcia over breakfast. Garcia told Charles Reich in 1971, the words were just so exquisite, they were just so perfect that I just sat down with the words, picked up a guitar and played the song, and it just came out. It just triggered. Here it is. The Dead were playing Casey Jones on stage a few weeks later. Garcia and Hunter seem to have written Direwolf on May 26, 1969. The Dead debuted a week and a half later at the Fillmore West. On June 8, Robert Hunter had the horrific LSD experience that led to the writing of Black Peter, as we examined a few episodes back, followed by a creative hiatus of at least several months. Almost certainly, Casey Jones was written between these two points. It debuted at the Fillmore east in June 1969, during the same shows where the band first played High Time and Jerry Garcia unveiled his new pedal steel on stage with the Dead. Here's Gary Lambert, who heard Casey Jones for the first time at the Fillmore east that week.
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F
When they first played it in 1969, it was not rhythmically as driving. It had sort of a long, nebulous vamp opening. They didn't have that really dynamic opening figure that just slammed you right into the song. They kind of built up to it. It kind of felt like something more akin to their Jug Band roots than to rock and roll. But, boy, did they figure out how to make that more concise and more powerful. And again, a perfect match of the musical context and Hutter's. It's a very witty lyric and it's a tale of tragedy. And of course, it speaks to something Hunter did a lot, which was taking American folk archetypes and kind of standing them on their head. Casey Jones being one of the oldest of American folk ballads and folk tales, he would do that later with Stagger Lee and various other songs. He'd always invoke something from deeper folkloric roots, but make it very specifically Grateful Dead. And of course, you can't get much more specific than a guy causing a train wreck because he's high on blow.
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B
Despite coming from folk roots, Casey Jones was pure rock and roll, and its energy fit unquestionably into the powerful Double drummer version of the Grateful Dead. The song's loose intro tightened up very gradually, solidifying into a signal like guitar riff from Garcia to something like the final version. By November 1969, it got the finishing touch with a Distinct whip crack, snare drum, snapstart. Here's one very effective usage of the song's new CONCISE beginning. Recorded February 14, 1970. The Fillmore east, introduced by Zacherly just a few days before the Working Man's Dead sessions and released on Dick's Picks four. Well, well, this is glorious Sunday morning. The Grateful Goddamn Dead. Watch your speed, travel ahead. Let's head behind the purple door of Pacific High recording with Working Man's Dead co producer Bob Matthews, who described his view from the control room.
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E
It was a room that was put together piece by piece. I want to say it was something like about 30 by 40 and 18 to 20ft high. Acoustically treated, had multiple movable gobos with different sides, both reflective and absorptive. And very heavy theater velvet curtains that sat out from the actual hard walls inside the studio, maybe about 18 inches.
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B
For a few weeks in 1970, Pacific High became home to the MM1000, the multi track recorder that the Dead purchased directly from Ampex on behalf of Bob, Betty and Alembic.
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E
The 16 track that we purchased was legally purchased through Grateful Dead, but was owned and operated by Alembic. And it was as a result of having figured out how to make Live Dead, which they were just blown away. If you've ever seen an MM1000, you'll understand why anybody would be really sort of surprised that you could get that machine, an 800 pound machine, up three flights of stairs at the Avalon Ballroom on Sutter in San Francisco. I had my crew and we hired other band's crew. We made slings and put it underneath the machine so that we had four people on each side, two people, one person in the back, one person in the front. So we had 10 people lifting up in an in sync, marching up the stairs up the Avalon Ballrooms, which are, I swear, the steepest set of stairs to any of the ballrooms of that time. You know, the 60s, 70s, 80s.
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B
Blank recording tape was expensive in 1970, as we discussed a few episodes back. But the Dead hit on a solution some heads may recognize. They became dealers.
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E
We were an agent for them. We purchased enough tape that we were able to buy it as a dealer. We were a distributor for Amtech's products. Most of it was actually handled under the flag of Alembic between touring and recording.
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B
The early part of 1970 was already one of the busiest periods of the Dead and Bob Matthews careers. But during exactly the same weeks that they began making the Working Man's Dead demos, Bob was thrust into a new job as the Dead's. Live sound engineer after their previous engineer, when Owsley Augustus Stanley III had been busted with a ban in New Orleans, violating the terms of his probation.
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E
As a result of that action, our regular sound man was restricted as far as travel. His bond had been restricted. He couldn't leave the state. So that was when I was told, hey, Tag, you're it. That was fun in a way. It was not fun in another way. And it's. There weren't any instructions on how you made the PA work. I mean, I knew how to make it work. There was no instructions as to what the components were that were plugging together, what filter plugged into which preamp. You had to guess it. And it was halfway through the first show in Rochester that I worked on before I got the right plugs in the right place and then wrote him a horrendous letter and moved forward from there.
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B
At the same time, manager Lenny Hart ran off with the band's money, which certainly didn't help.
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E
It got in the way because I was trying to record this is the same period of time that Working Man's Dead and Live Dead, and this was 69, 70. So, yes, it was a major distraction. It took a while, and it was difficult to get the work done that I was supposed to be getting done with all of these unknowns. It didn't take that long. I think within six months things got straightened out to the point that, you know, I could just go to work and we made records. But it was a. It was a big hassle and there was internal conflict about it.
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B
Bob Matthews was a working man just like the rest of the Dead, and it was work that would get them through 1970. As Jerry Garcia told Jan Wenner, being able to do that was extremely positive. In the midst of all this adverse stuff that was happening, Casey Jones was the electric Grateful Dead at their most buoyant and even joyous, Give or take the impending crash. There were no acoustic guitars, no pedal steel, no banjo, no new riders. But it was a Grateful Dead that was more than the sum of its parts. Brian Kehoe restored the angel share outtakes of Working Man's Dead. There's a part of the Casey Jones song and the versions we hear here versus the record.
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D
The record has a lot more parts.
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B
Added, it has a lot of layers, and this is a very stripped back version.
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G
And they sound like Booker T and the MGs.
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B
They really sound like a Stax Motown kind of band. And I never really felt that influence before, but you can hear that there's elements of that in their music.
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G
That is very clear on that before it got worked on more.
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B
Here's Brian to go through exactly what's on the final Working Man's Dead recording of Casey Jones track by track.
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H
The first track we have is Mickey playing shaker percussion instrument. Along with the drums, bass and two guitars. You can hear them in the room playing live with him at the same time. Next up is Bill playing drums in the room. And then we have Bill's bass drum track. Really good sounding nice and full. And here is the drum track added to the kick drum track, the full drum sound. And we have Phil's bass track he's playing plugged in directly to the console. They're not using a microphone on the amp, although we do hear an amp earlier on the percussion track. And sometimes on some of these tracks. Phil is using three different signals from different amps and the direct input to get a good bass sound. But this one simply has the direct input. It sounds nice and clean. Next we have Jerry's guitar track. He's playing through his Fender twin reverb amplifier. This amplifier has a reverb setting, a stretched spring inside that gives an artificial echo type sound. And you can hear that in the background quietly as he plays. It wouldn't be something noticeable during the actual mix of the song. But when it's isolated like this, we can hear it. And then we have Bob's guitar part played live in the room with the others. It's a full complete take. This guitar part contains a lot of the themes and figures that are really integral to the song. Once the basic track was recorded, Bob went back to overdub a second guitar part, many of the same parts. This time his guitar is going through the rotating speaker system called the Leslie that we heard earlier on High Time. And then when both guitars are put together in the mix, we hear Bob's original guitar plus the Leslie guitar. And they play slightly different parts. It adds a nice bit of orchestration and dimension to the mix.
- [29:44]
B
Another part of Casey Jones is that Bob Weir gets a mini double tracked guitar solo. Perhaps more of a break before a handoff to Jerry Garcia. One thing I like is that on the final version, each of the guitarists gets a subtle vocal spotlight during their respective part of the break.
- [30:29]
H
Jerry also overdubbed a guitar a solo for the middle of the song. It has a little bit of reverb added, which is a nice smooth sound. Not like the amplifier, but more like the studio reverb, which is an echo chamber they had at the time. And on to the vocals. This is Jerry's vocal track. You'll hear him singing by himself, but also in the room next to him, Bob is doing his live harmonies just a few feet over on a different microphone. We'll hear that next, but first, here's Jerry. And you can hear the leakage from Bob singing live in the room along with him.
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B
Driving that train high on cocaine Casey Jones, you better watch your speed Trouble ahead, trouble behind and you know that notion just crossed my mind and then.
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H
Bobby's harmony track, which goes throughout the song. Again, you can hear Bobby singing. When he does a break, you'll hear that Jerry's across the room from him singing his original vocal.
- [31:51]
B
Driving that train high on cocaine Casey Jones, you better watch your speed Trouble ahead, trouble behind and you know that notion just crossed my mind Then for.
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H
The mix, they added to the original vocal track a slap echo, which is kind of a repeating sound done with a tape machine. This echo doesn't have quite the fidelity of the original vocal, but that works well for the mix. It's a little bit more muted and dark sounding, but it adds a cool effect that they've used on some other songs like New Speedway Boogie. And you'll hear that here. First, this is the dark echo added to the vocal. And then the vocal with the echo.
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B
This old engine makes it on time Leave Central Station About a quarter to nine it's River Junction at 17 two at a quarter to ten you know it's traveling again and here are the.
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H
Three vocal tracks combined. You have Jerry's original, Bob's harmony. Then the echo added to Jerry's vocal are the parts you hear on the record.
- [33:04]
B
Trouble ahead, you know trouble behind and you know that notion just crossed my mind and you know that notion just crossed my mind.
- [33:21]
H
How was it after this was done? They went back and recorded another vocal pass with both Jerry and Bob singing. They only used that for a few lines in the song, finding a slight improvement over the original take. But most of this is the original take that we heard before. There are four tracks unused at the end of the 16 track tape. So they didn't find it necessary to add any more parts to make this a complete record.
- [33:43]
B
Andy Zwerling of Rolling Stone called out the blend of instruments on Casey Jones writing. Listen closely, especially to the cymbal work. Then listen to Phil Lesh's bass mixing with Weir's guitar. Now listen to the cymbal again. Yep, they did it. I don't know whose train is better, Casey's or the Deads. Living sound effects Trouble with you is the trouble with me Got two good eyes but still don't see Come round up and you know it's the anthem Five months screams and the engine just gleams Driving that train I'm cocaine Casey Jones will watch your speed. There were also a few subtle studio elements that added to the song's lore. If you ask a musicologist, they might say that they serve the song's text. The first could be heard just before the song started. But if you ask co producer Bob Matthews, which we did, he would say that he regretted that particular decision.
- [34:49]
G
That was never intended and did not occur as a reference to some double entendre. Jerry always had breathing problems, singing problems, and so it was while we were doing overdubs for the vocal on Casey Jones that he was clearing his head. What he used to do to keep his throat clear, he would take a short shot of Drambuill, wash that with lemon juice. The jambuy would. Would be real soft, syrupy, and would coat his throat so it didn't hurt. And then the lemon juice would cut through the jambuy and his throat would feel good. But in the process of that, of after the lemon juice, he cleared his throat and went, Now, I did have a choice of whether to keep that in or not. A number of the. Of the songs on Working Man's Dead, I mixed without any of the band members being there. And I was given that opportunity because I had mixed Live Dead totally without any band members there. The band members didn't hear Live Dead until I had totally completed it and had submitted it to them and the record company. I debated. On one hand it was cute. On the other hand, it's, you know. And I'll tell you, to this day, if I had to do over again, I wouldn't. It was cute, okay? And cute doesn't last long in that environment. In an artistic environment. A lot of people glommed onto it, thought it was funny and blah, blah, blah, but it was not a good artistic choice.
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B
I personally think it's kind of cool. It's so subtle. It took me years to notice. And by the time they get to the song's first chorus, I've usually forgotten about it. Here's Gary Lambert on the other bit of studio tweaking.
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F
Garcia said something about Casey Jones. I think it was in the famous Rolling Stone interview with Charles Reich and Jan Wetter, where he said, yeah, Casey Jones was, like, designed to be a little irritating the way cocaine is. He said, there's just something about the way they produce the song. And he says it's got this. This weird little kind of agitated rhythm thing in it that he said it sort of wanted to epitomize what cocaine was like. And mission accomplished, I guess.
- [37:14]
B
As Garcia explained to Charles Reich in 1971, it's got a split second little delay which sounds very mechanical, like a typewriter almost on the vocal, which is like a little bit jangly. And the whole thing is. Well, I always thought it's a pretty good musical picture of what cocaine is like. A little bit evil and hard edged. That's the so called dark sounding slap echo that Brian Kehoe just demonstrated. Here's a little bit of that new remastered mix for Extra High Fidelity Evil. Listen closely, Switch Man, Sleeping Train, Honor. That too, is on the wrong track and headed for you on the tape box for the final album mixes. Somebody labeled the song Casey Dope, says co producer Bob Matthews.
- [37:58]
E
Those are all written in Betty's handwriting. She was most excellent at a number of things, including her ears, but she was also an excellent documentist.
- [38:07]
B
In 1970, the year of Casey Jones release, it appeared on no charts and Billboard. Robert Hunter later reported to David Ganz that when he'd done a radio appearance later in the decade, the DJ retrieved the station's copy of Working Man's Dead and quote, showed me Casey Jones. And there was a nail scratch across Casey Jones. And he said, the program director did this. He said, we are not to play this because the word cocaine is used in it. And the word's coming from the FCC that if any of this kind of stuff is going on, we stand in danger of losing our licenses. I went, oops, that's where my hits go. But Casey Jones was a hit no matter what the charts or conservative station directors declared. In the fall, when the Dead played in New York, an East Village other writer observed that, quote, everyone was yelling for Casey Jones. The next year, industry publication Cashbox even referred to Casey Jones as a hit in a review of A Dead show.
- [38:59]
F
Gary Lambert, the Final Figure. And you know, that notion just crossed my mind after the buildup. They basically come to the end of the chord progression and then they sing that refrain once again. And it's almost like a parody of like an old vaudeville or barbershop quartet kind of song. You know, it goes from that driving, headed for catastrophe rock thing to sort of this jaunty little tag at the end. I've always loved that.
- [39:26]
B
And, you know, that notion just crossed my mind. While there aren't surviving session sheets for the Album. The dates of its final assemblage are more clear. The dead spent March 11 through March 15 mixing working man's Dead before setting out for a series of shows on the east coast, with Robert Hunter joining the band on the road for the first time. When they got back to town, there was more album business to attend to. Like the album's cover. It needed some art. Here's David Nelson of the New Riders of the Purple Stage, who played on Cumberland Blues.
- [40:01]
E
I love that cover. The front picture is the photograph, and it's. Bob Hunter is the one guy who's not in the band in the photo. He actually didn't want people to know that that was him at the time, but he put a coat on and standing on a street corner. And those portraits on the back, each band member. Was that Stanley Mouse? Yeah. Fantastic man. Yeah.
- [40:24]
B
Gary Lambert.
- [40:25]
F
Those interesting pictures of the band members on the back, it really tells you what this album is going to be in a very direct and profound way. Because the Grateful Dead had before that had some of the most wildly psychedelic album art. And so this was as they were entering their pastoral period musically as a recording band at least, they stayed plenty weird in the live forum. But as they were announcing this change in their musical direction, they were also heralding it with the artwork. And I thought that was absolutely brilliant. And just that font that Stanley Mauser or Elton Kelly picked up. There was a store, by the way, in Oakland, California, called the Working Man's Store. And if you can ever find an old picture of it, I think that may have been the inspiration for that, for that particular bit of artwork.
- [41:15]
B
The artwork for Working Man's Dead was handled by the San Francisco art studio of Stanley Mouse and Alton Kelly, who'd created cover art for the band's self titled debut in 1966, OXA, Mock SOA in 1969, and numerous posters for Bay Area shows. They'd go on to create art for most of the Dead's album covers over the next decade and beyond. In the case of Working Man's Dead, it was apparently handled mostly by Mouse. Mouse took photos of the band and applied his technique to create the sepia tone vibe they requested. Pull out your copy of Working Man's Dead. The band is standing on a street corner. Robert Hunter is with them, standing at the rear of the pack with Jerry Garcia. Drummer Bill Kreutzman was in no mood for photo shoots and retired to the shaded steps on the corner. At the rear of the image, the shadows of three billowing smokestacks can be seen. Look more closely though, and you might notice that the shadows aren't real, melting into the sky behind them. There are two work in progress drafts of the album art floating around online. In one auctioned by Bonhams in 2015, the album is still titled the Working Man's Dead and has the beginnings of a faux picture frame around it, though it seems as if Mouse abandoned it part way through. In another version of the art, a star nosed mole looms next to the smokestack shadows. It was determined that the star nosed mole wasn't appropriate for the front cover of the band's country flavored album. I can't imagine why, but I'm fond of the alternate timeline that includes working moles Dead the curious Deadologist might pose two related when and where was the COVID photo taken? To figure out when we first apply one of the basic skills of any good old grateful facial hair forensics on the front cover of Working Man's Dead, Mickey Hart has a mutton chop sideburn mustache combination and Jerry Garcia has a big bushy beard. A group of German Deadheads has attempted to date every known photograph of the Grateful dead up through 1975. Thanks to the help of Uli Tutti and Volkmar Rupp, we see that Mickey Hart doesn't have his sideburns. On March 21st in Portchester, they turned up in concert photos at the Fillmore west performances with Miles Davis starting on April 9th. Jerry Garcia, meanwhile, actually shaved his beard between nights of the Fillmore west shows. The Dead were on tour until April 3rd, which means that the photo on working man's dead, taken in San Francisco, had to have been shot somewhere between April 4 and April 9, 1970. Figuring out where the photo was taken is considerably more complicated. For that we turn to Bob Egan, who runs the absolutely wild worldwide website popspotsnyc.com in which he uses a vast and creative toolkit of techniques to figure out the locations of famous album covers and other music related photographs. Working Man's Dead was kind of a doozy. You can read about Bob's full methodology@popspotsnyc.com for this and many other incredible location hunts, but here's Bob Egan to explain some of the salient points.
- [44:19]
I
They're at a street corner. It looks like they're waiting for a bus, and they're at what looks like a bar and there's a sign in the front and you can kind of just see the bottom of a like a G in the background. There's a Victorian house. It has Three smokestacks on it. And the smoke coming, the smoke comes out. So initially saw, well, that's a industrial area I'm going to have to look at. But if you look closer, you see that the shadow of the smokestacks continues into the sky. Which meant that it was airbrushed in. And they didn't, you know, they airbrushed the shadow. So that was a false lead. The other clue on the front page is that the way the guys are standing, they're casting a shadow. So you know that the light comes from the south. So the street they're on goes east west. Because the way the shadow is cast.
- [45:07]
B
Bob kept looking for little clues. Two more came when an auction of Stanley Mouse's photographs. Contained a short description of the photo shoot from Mouse himself.
- [45:16]
I
And Mouse says it was 104 degrees. And mouse dressed the band in heavy work overalls. And posed them in front of Barney's Beanery in San Francisco. All right, so there's the next clue. Across the street from a meat rendering plant. Now, a meat rendering plant takes the carcasses of livestock. And transforms them into oils and fats. It is really gross. And the guys hated having their photograph taken. And they said it smelled a high heaven. Anyway, so that's two more clues. Barney's Beanery and the meat rendering plant. Anyway, so there is a famous Barney's Beanery. And I don't know if you know it, but it's in Los Angeles on the Sunset Strip. It's a place where Jim Morrison used to hang out. And Janis Joplin. And if you look at the front cover of Cheap Thrills by Big Brother and the Holding Company, there's a drawing by R. Crumb.
- [46:10]
B
The only problem is that there was no Barney's Beanery in San Francisco. A temporary setback.
- [46:15]
I
So the next thing I went after was where they said that they took the picture across from a rendering plant. So I looked under slaughterhouses in San Francisco. I finally ended up calling a guy and he told me about a place called Butchertown, which is southeast San Francisco.
- [46:32]
B
The trail went temporarily cold again. Following a dead end lead about the Victorian house at the rear of the photograph. Bob had been in touch with San Francisco architectural historian Jonathan Lammers. Who later got back in touch. He'd found the missing piece.
- [46:47]
I
The 2001 box set the Golden Road had an outtake of that session. And you could see the guys in the street corner. And way in the background were two giant storage tanks. What they did was they went to aerial shots of San Francisco and they looked down in that section of the meat area where we were looking, and they could find the two oil tanks. And from the oil tanks, they could figure out where the building was. They went to an overhead picture source called David Rumsey Map Collection. And they found overhead picture taken from that era that showed the house. And then they go to a San Francisco library and you can find a thing called a Sanborn Map, which they have of every of the major cities which show every single building. They found the building and they found it was at 1199 Evans. And then they looked in a reverse phone book or you put in 119 Evans and it tells you who's there. And it turns out to be Beanies Place Tavern. So Barney's Beanery was Beanies Place Tavern. So they were all kind of right, but. But they were off. So anyway, that gave the exact location of the building. The album cover was taken in a place called 1199 Evans Avenue at Keith street in way southeast San Francisco, a place called Hunter's Point. And right now the area is a brewery called Speakeasies.
- [48:16]
B
You can see the documentation for all of this@popspotsnyc.com with maps, overlaid images, and those few dead ends. You can also see Bob's fascinating work on tons of other album covers and photographs, including a few other shots of the dead. But like Working Man's Dead, his page on the COVID remains a classic.
- [48:34]
I
When I put up this Grateful Dead pop spot, my server is in Texas, and there were so many Deadheads passed this around, it broke his server. He had 250 other companies on that server. So he had to cut me off for four days because so many people were trying to get to it, because nobody could get to his other 250 customers. So since then, he had to give me a private server and stuff.
- [49:01]
B
It's almost surely just a coincidence, but I also can't help but note that the album cover featuring Robert Hunter was shot in the neighborhood called Hunter's Point. Stanley Mouse remembered the photo being shot on an unseasonably warm day. He said it was 104 degrees, but let's call that a slight exaggeration. But with this information, we might narrow the photo shoot day down even further. If the photo was taken between April 4 and April 9, 1970, we can see by historical weather data that only April 4 reached a balmy peak of 73 degrees in Hunter's Point, about 10 degrees hotter than the usual average of 63, where it lingered during the other five days. In that Window. So unless you've got another theory, we'll go ahead and suggest that the COVID of Working Man's Dead was shot on April 4, 1970, the day the Dead got back from their east coast tour. The first time Robert Hunter had joined them on the road. If you want, maybe you can even imagine Stanley Mouse corralling the Dead into a van straight from the airport. The location in Hunter's Point would have been. On their way home sometime in early April, there was another bit of album business to attend to. Something that had become a bit of a tradition for the Dead in recent years. To tell the first part of this story, we have Michael Parish, who was a world renowned paleontologist, but who you may know from such awesomeness as the Dead Heads Taping Compendium, as well as organizing the so Many Rhodes Conference at San Jose State in 2014. He saw his first dead show on March 1, 1969 at the Fillmore west, and has been a professional grade Deadologist ever since.
- [50:33]
D
When I was in high school, I was an inveterate listener to KSAN and kmpx. Before that, they had a lot of connections with the bands. But it was pretty routine for the Dead, you know, somebody in the Dead organization to drop their albums really early to the radio stations. One of the things that sort of led to this epiphany for me getting fascinated with music was the first night they played Anthem of the Sun. It was a really pretty cool night because they played Anthem of the sun all the way through. They played Waiting for the sun, which, you know, was gonna drop in a few weeks. The new Doors album had a Donovan live album. They did so all on the same night. They were playing all this stuff, but it was two months before the album came out. And then Live Dead, they actually played the whole album, I want to say, in March or April. I was coming home from swimming practice and I didn't get to record all of it. I had to like start it a little bit late. So it didn't come out till November. I had a tape of Live Dead six months before it came out. Four to six weeks before Working Man's Dead came out. They had put ksan, put together a scoop. Nisker, I think, who was their news reporter, had put together this two hour documentary which was most of the radio conversations around Altamont. At the end of that, they said, we're gonna play the new Dead album. And it was Working Man's Dead. But what was really interesting was that there were two things that were weird. One was they Played everything but Direwolf. And I don't know why they excised Dire Wolf from it. But then the other thing was the version of New Speedway Boogie was different in that it had the count in. And I think it may have been the version that actually ended up on the last expanded edition of Working Man's.
- [52:17]
B
Dead, which totally adds up with the mix down dates on the tape box. Direwolf received a secondary mix on April 8, and new speedway got a new mix on April 23, probably to tone down the backing vocals. Sometime around then, KSAN listeners like Michael Parish got a surprise. The people responsible were in fact Bob Matthews and Betty Kanter.
- [52:37]
E
Betty and I, we were friends with Several of the DJs over there, one of which was, whose name went by the name of Tony Pig. There was also Larry Miller, who of course everybody knows as Howard Hessman. And there was also a AM jock named Big Daddy Tom Donahue, who ran KSAN when it was in its 80s as FM. Anyway, we had a relationship with them and whenever we would finish an album like Working Man's Dead or Live Dead or album that Betty and I were working on, when we had the final approval, we would take a tape copy or an asset. Usually we take a tape copy over to KSAN and unannounced, until the moment that the music was played, played this new release. So people got to hear it for the first time. They didn't know what they were hearing. They got to hear it in a way that they could reference it without any prior cognizance. Particularly not knowing, not expecting that anything new was coming out.
- [53:39]
B
The phone lines, of course, would light up.
- [53:40]
E
That was a problem sometimes because we get calls back from fans who wanted to talk, you know, and suddenly we had tied up all the phone lines. But it was okay. I mean, Deadhead's always been good fans.
- [53:51]
B
Once those fixes were made, Bob and Betty were responsible for the final touches. Here's Bob.
- [53:57]
G
When we were done with the mix, Bob and Betty, as an engineering producing team, we did the mastering for the discs. Betty was quite talented at that, did really good. We were responsible for doing all of that. We lived in Oakland at the time. We would get up at 6 in the morning, jump on a flight from Oakland to Burbank, where the mastering engineer and studio that we really liked had his studio. And we would go through and do the mastering process of creating reference acetates.
- [54:30]
B
Betty Kanter took a hands on approach to the mastering.
- [54:33]
G
She picked up on mastering, understood the physics of a cutter head and the tangential accelerations of what happened when you spun a disc and you put a fixed needle on it. So as the platen spun, the cutting head was always being driven tangentially. As the disk turned, the tangential forces wanted to throw the cutting head towards the outside, away from the center. So that needed to be overcome and that's done by frequency. That was an. An artistic component that very few engineers, let alone mastering engineers, really understood how to do. Betty always did the mastering because she had such a great ear for it. She always produced some magic that was above and beyond what it originally started out as. We would fly home at the end of the day because we hated la, mainly. No, it wasn't so much we hated la. We couldn't stand the smog. It really did screw with our. Our mental processes. Anyway, we would come back and the next day we would arrange to get together with the band at the studio and we would play the references and the band approved them. So it got turned over to Warner's for manufacturing. And at some point within the following month, Betty and I had cause to be in Los Angeles again and had an appointment with Joe Smith, who was the president of Warner's and Reprise at that time. When we went into Joe Smith's office, whose experience in his mind with the Grateful Dead had been a boat, a huge hole in the water into which to throw money. And not only that, you couldn't understand the words. When we went into his office, Joe stood up with a big smile, came around his desk, gave me a handshake, quasi hug, and the first thing he says was, damn, you can understand every word. And then he said, not only that, you turned the whole album in for under $15,000, which was unheard of. People did demos for that in those days.
- [57:02]
B
Joe Smith would tell Rolling Stone's David Brown that he and the Dead quote, weren't best friends, but we established a relationship. Garcia was a sensible, gentle guy. Bobby Weir too. But I was dealing with lunatics. You have to understand, they drifted in and out of reality depending on the amount of acid they dropped at the time. Whatever the Dead's LSD intake was in 1970, though, Joe Smith was very on board with the results. And Warner Bros. Threw itself into the promotion of Working Man's Dead. Cashbox reported that backing up this album, Warner Bros. Records is directly involved in the most widespread advertising campaign in its history. Besides the radio ads we discussed in our episode about Easy Wind, the label took out both a front cover spot and a full page ad in Billboard with a quote from David Crosby calling the Dead one of the best bands in the world. The record company also bought outdoor advertising quote beautifying America coast to coast, as the Billboard page put it.
- [57:59]
E
When it did actually get released in Hollywood, right next to the Hyatt Intercontinental was a 10 story billboard with the COVID of Working Man's Dead on it that always made me feel real good.
- [58:14]
B
It became the first album advertised on a billboard above the Fillmore west, just a few blocks from where the album was recorded at Pacific High. If you look online, you can see an image from the summer of 1970 with the Billboard advertising the album and the band's mid August shows. Good New Grateful Dead, the billboard reads, which might seem like a backhanded compliment about the quality of their older work. But Good Old Grateful Dead, Good New Grateful Dead since the name of our podcast is the Good Old Grateful Dead Cast, this is an opportune moment to note that the Dead were called the good old Grateful Dead as early as 1966, less than a year after they changed their name from the Warlocks. Its origin was the first piece of fan made Dead merchandise, a pin that simply read Good Ol Grateful Dead. Sold by one of the band's neighbors in the haight Ashbury, it became perhaps their first tagline. Another aspect of Working Man's Dead promotion didn't come to fruition. That summer, Warner Bros. Planned to sponsor a summer tour of free coast to coast Dead shows with other affiliated label acts, specifically former Beau Brummels frontman Sal Valentino and the band Crazy Horse, minus Neil Young. They got as far as designing and printing up a few posters, which you can see online. Fate had other plans and the free tour morphed into a different project involving key personnel from Working Man's Dead, but that's for a different podcast. Working Man's Dead was supposed to have been released by May 15, but delays kept it from appearing for another month. Officially, Working Man's dead release date is remembered and celebrated as June 14, 1970, but June 14 was a Sunday when some record stores probably weren't open. Release dates were more nebulous in 1970, and June 14 likely meant more practically that the LP would show up in stores sometime that week, with some perhaps getting them slightly earlier.
- [60:10]
F
Here's Gary Lambert I was sufficiently insane Deadhead at that point to have like my strategy down for finding the record as soon as I can. The day it was released there was a little cluster of really excellent record stores in Manhattan, very close together in Midtown in the 40s there was the Record Hunter on 5th Avenue. There was King Carol Records on 42nd Street. And there was Sam Goody on 49th. And I would call them, you know, and I say, when are you getting your new shipment? Today. So I'm not sure if I was the first person in New York City to get his hands on Working Man's Dead, but I was, yeah, probably in the top hundred. And I remember running across Fifth Avenue and seeing it. They had already placed it in the window and just seeing that artwork and it hit me. It just had an impact.
- [61:00]
B
In 1970, good new grateful Dead was appropriate. Working Man's Dead was an instant success. Here's how Robert Hunter remembered the album's success to Dennis McNamara on WLIR in 1978.
- [61:13]
E
We had gotten around 190 on the charts. We were getting in an elevator and somebody, I think it was rock, came out and said, we're number 17 in Billboard with a bullet block.
- [61:23]
B
And that was the beginning, you know.
- [61:25]
E
Like all of a sudden that elevator was going up. We might have been going down in it. But yeah, it was an amazing flash, you know. Just wanted to fill your head with light trips. You say, my God. God, we're really making it, you know, it's not a fantasy anymore.
- [61:42]
B
On the whole, reviewers loved the album. Rolling Stone would go on to declare it Album of the Year. And reviewer Andy Zwerling was on board. It's so nice to receive a present from good friends, he wrote. The Minneapolis Star declared, it is enough to make an instant fan out of anyone. Many reviewers seem somewhat surprised, but won over by the country turns. Here's some of what the Cincinnati Inquirer had to say. Chances are strong you aren't ready as the Dead are doing something you've probably never heard them do before. The album has eight cuts, rather high for them, and they're amazingly close to what folks might call commercial. It's a very strange album. Hardly what we would expect from the Dead. It's such a strange album, in fact, that it could very well be a put on. But that isn't important. What is important is the fact that the Dead has turned out a very nice album. Loaded with nice thoughts and happy sounds. It'll probably make you smile. Some reviewers were a little more plugged in. Bob Lin at the Daily Bruin UCLA student paper observed. Heavens to lie. Surge, mama. What's the Dead doing playing country live? Witnesses will know that it's not so new. And historians would know that the Dead started as a jug band. The wheel hath almost come full circle. In 1970, as now, the times were pretty weird, and Working Man's Dead was a wonderful bomb. To be truly meaningful, music today should relate to the apocalypse, and few musicians capture the spirit of any apocalypse. As well as the Grateful Dead, Bob Lin wrote, Working Man's Dead marks the Dead's first recorded venture into country and folksy areas. They do it very well and without pretension. What could be better after the Apocalypse album, co producer Bob Matthews, Working Men's.
- [63:24]
G
Dead was also the first album to chip gold and immediately started producing revenue because, believe me, that album sold really well, and paying back $15,000 didn't take but a week or two.
- [63:42]
B
Over the summer, Cashbox reported that the album sold 200,000 copies within three weeks of its release, and the number soon doubled. One part of the Working Man's Dead story, as it's often told, is that it helped the band get out of debt to Warner Bros. And while Warner had fronted lots of money for the band's albums, that wasn't precisely how their accounting worked. As Bob Matthews explained, the way it.
- [64:05]
G
Worked then was that we didn't take one and charge it to another. Oaxa Moxoa didn't pay itself off until four or five years later, after Jerry and I, when I had my own studio, Alembic. When I got that, Jerry said, okay, finally we got our own studio that we don't have to worry about building unless we come up with something we like. We went in and we remixed. Jerry and I and Betty remixed the Waxamoxoa on our own nickel. And when we built it to them again, it reflected the same kind of good budgeting that Working Man's Dead included. And I want to say it was the mid to late 70s before WaxoMaxo paid itself off. But in the meantime, nobody was really counting, because Working Man's Dead, life Dead. And of course, in the interim, they had also gone off and done American Beauty. The GD were a very positive revenue stream for the big wb, and for a good period there, we could do almost no wrong.
- [65:12]
B
If Working Man's Dead sales didn't literally pay back the band's debt to Warners, it certainly did. So symbolically, the album sold and kept selling, continuing to get pressed, repressed, copied to cassette, saved at garage sales, reissued on cd, and eventually repressed to vinyl. The Dead loaded their instruments out of Pacific high in early March 1970, but it was to become a very familiar locale. As Bob mentioned, he soon got his own studio, Alembic. That studio happened to be Pacific High which he took over roughly a year following the Working Man's Dead sessions.
- [65:45]
E
Pacific High itself was a studio built by a guy named Peter Weston. He had the only 12 track machine on the west coast at that point. That was 68, I think maybe. Yeah. And he was totally self financed and was a great guy, but eventually failed acoustically. The room needed a lot of modification which when we we being Alembic took over the leash of the building, we did quite amount of acoustic modification.
- [66:29]
B
The room was a familiar home to various Dead related projects over the years, including a 1972 KSAN session by Jerry Garcia and Merle Saunders. Later that same year, the Dead set up their equipment in the same room they made Working Man's Dead in to perform overdubs on the live recordings that would become Europe 72. And of course, Pacific High had a sweet location.
- [66:51]
E
Pacific High was on Brady street, which was between 12th and Van Ness and between Mission and Market. In reality, you walked a block and a half down to Market and a block and a half towards the Bay on Market, and you were at the.
- [67:09]
B
Carousel Ballroom, AKA the Fillmore West. With the help of Bob and Betty, the Grateful Dead launched their music into the world from the heart of downtown San Francisco, beaming out their images of Uncle John by the Riverside, the Dire Wolf at the door, and the coked up engine driver. Casey Jones, though didn't have a monster jam. Casey Jones could be a powerful set anchor. Here's Grateful Dead archivist David Lemieux.
- [67:34]
C
It's one of those songs that if you listen to a Dead show from any era, but if you listen to a dead show from 70 to 73, 74, and maybe even beyond where you know, as much as I'd like to think every single person in that venue was a huge Deadhead, it's not always true. Some people might have been dragged, some people might have been on their college campus and said, oh, Grateful Dead, I'll go see that. It's five bucks. And the one song, there's a few that everybody there would have known. I'm sure they played, you know, a Good Lovin' or something like that. And not everybody knows that. But then when they kick into this, you can hear a palpable kind of group release that. Oh, they're playing something we know, and it's also a song we love. I remember once talking with the DJ at my local classic rock station in Ottawa, Canada in the mid-80s. I said, hey man, you should play. And I threw out like, you know, Unbroken Chain or something like that. He goes no, we said, we have a very strict playlist of what we're allowed to play by the Dead. And one of the songs they were allowed to play, of the five, I think it was literally five songs. Casey Jones was one of them. The other ones are what you'd expect. Truckin and Uncle John's Band and things like that. It is a song that tells a story, and the music tells that same story. And I do love the. It speeds up at the end, particularly live versions from 1980, 1972 onward, where they do that kind of double speed ending. And then when they play it in the more rarer times, they play it in the late 70s where they'd really. It would pick up, well, a head of steam, to use the train phrase. It would just keep going. I distinctly remember in the few months I was very fortunate to work with Dick Lotvala at the Grateful Dead's Vault, and I went over to his house for lunch one day. I'll never forget, he ate a huge takeout order of chicken wings and a big soda. And I remember we were sitting on his couch and he was playing me music from the Academy of music in 1972, the March Run, right before Europe. It was a seven night run, and he was playing me highlights. The Dead had just acquired the tapes from that run. They'd been missing from the Vault for many years, and they just got them. And Dick was so excited about these tapes. You know, we spent a couple hours listening to these shows, the Seven Nights. But one of the things he specifically wanted to play for me was a version of Casey Jones where they do the double speed time. And Dick said, I think this is the first time they really do this. And I played it. And just to hear his observation and his excitement about a song that I had heard a thousand times. And I had heard that double speed ending, you know, many, many times. But to hear the excitement of him discovering that this was the show where the Dead really kicked it into the double speed. And to Dick, and that was something I very much learned from Dick, was that these subtle little things are what makes so much Grateful Dead music so exciting and so different, is that this show is where they started doing this. And I just remember listening to that Casey Jones, and that was the moment where I'd heard, like I say, so many live Casey Jones in my tape trading Days. This was when I realized, oh, my gosh, this song has so much more depth than I ever knew it had. And, you know, and from then on, I've listened to the song very differently.
- [70:32]
B
And here's a bit of that sped up Outro Jam, recorded slightly later that spring at Tivoli Gardens in Copenhagen on April 14, 1972. After the Dead's Casey Jones, the traditions of songs about Casey Jones and cocaine continue naturally onwards. In the world historical scheme of cocaine songs, plenty would far outpace Casey Jones and eventually whole genres. In the scheme of Casey Jones songs, though, the Dead song can take a lot of credit for continuing to spread the meme and memory of Casey Jones. But they're hardly the only ones with Casey making appearances in songs by acdc, Motorhead, Gillian Welch and Bad Religion, to name a few. For a Dead railroad Man, Casey got around. There was also the hockey stick wielding Casey Jones in the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles universe who successfully made the jump to global hip hop lyrics, but I'm not sure I see any connection between him and our engineer. Hit us up if you know of one. For the Dead, Casey Jones went in and out of the repertoire a few times. They played it hard and heavy up through their break from touring that began in 1974. It was back on and off from 77 to 84 before reappearing again in 1992, but it always lingered. When I was growing up in the 80s and 90s, the song was almost like an urban legend. When the Dead made their live network television debut on Saturday night live in 1978, they were four days away from releasing Shakedown Street. But when host Buck Henry introduced the band, they didn't play their newest single. Perhaps they were still smarting about all the Lost airplay when Working Man's Dead came out. Driving that train while cooking Casey Jones, you better watch your speed, Trouble behind and though that notion just crossed my mind We've reached the end of Working Man's Dead and this season of the good old Grateful Dead cast. Traditionally, this is pretty much the part where the credits roll. At the risk of sounding like an enormous hippie, or this being a podcast about the Dead, an even more enormous hippie. We should thank every single person who made Working Man's Dead possible. The musicians and songwriters Jerry Garcia, Robert Hunter, Phil Lesh, Bob Weir, Bill the drummer Kreutzman Pigpen and Mickey Hart, plus guitarist David Nelson the producers Bob Matthews and Betty Cantor, who thankfully recorded more than they erased equipment crew members Ramrod Rex Jackson and Sonny Hurd, BIG Nurse John McIntyre, Executive Nanny Sam Cutler, lady in Waiting Cosmic Gail Helland, Guardians of the Vault David and Bonnie Parker, Stanley Mouse and Alton Kelly of Mouse Studios and John Marmaduke Dawson. We'd also like to once again thank everyone we interviewed this Bob Matthews, Ronnie Stanley, Sam Cutler, Graham Nash, David Lemieux, Gary Lambert, Brian Kehue, Mike Johnson, Eric Schwartz, Billy Strings, Jeffrey Alexander, Sean o', Donnell, Nicholas Merriweather, Michael Parish, Bob Egan, and good ol Buzz Poole. For miscellaneous assistance. Thanks enormously as well to Janet Salby, Light Into Ashes, Corey Arnold, Andy Zaks, Alex Allen, Dennis McNally, Blair Jackson and David Ganz. Thanks for listening. See.
- [74:39]
A
Quite fitting to end this season with Casey Jones during a week where cocaine is trending so high on social media, don't you think? Thanks again to all of you out there who donated during this summer's shakedown streams. The generosity of our community really was on display and we thank you for your heartfelt contributions and thank you very much for tuning into these Working Man's Dead episodes. We hope you've enjoyed listening as much as we've enjoyed making them more to come. Stay well. Thanks for tuning in and we'll 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.