409. Grateful Dead, "Workingman’s Dead"

 


Imagine for a second that the Grateful Dead never became the GRATEFUL DEAD with the tours and the Deadheads and the scene and everything and instead were just a semi-well-known psych-roots-rock band from Northern California.  Unladen of all the baggage, you might put this album on and think "Oh wow, this is a really nice record! I wonder what became of these guys."

Because it is.  This is Americana before "Americana" was a genre, an extremely chill mixture of rock, country, bluegrass, blues, just about everything in American music.  Kicking off with "Uncle John's Band," an invitation to listen to the band and also a meditation on the liminal, semi-conscious state you enter when completely engaged with music, the album progresses through country-folk ("Dire Wolf"), straight rock ("New Speedway Boogie") and something like bluegrass-stomp-rock ("Cumberland Blues").  Then it ends with one of the band's best-known songs, "Casey Jones," with its famous "riding that train/high on cocaine" couplet that for many people is the only Dead lyric they know.

It's really a lovely album, perfect for a lazy, stoned Sunday or a whiskey-drinking Friday night.  In the Deadhead community, studio albums are a distant second to the band's legendary shows, tapes of which circulate like holy talismans.  Ask a Deadhead which they like better, this album or "Cornell '77" and you'll see what I mean.  And that's a shame!  This album is a portrait of a band in complete control of their sound and knowing exactly what they want to do.  

P.S. Here's a very long but fascinating post about how the author tracked down the location of the photo on the cover - the corner of Evans and Keith in the Bayview.  I had also written a post on the same subject in my former blog, but was unsuccessful.

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