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.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

My Personal Top 100: 20-1; also, thanks and goodbye

Image
 As you'll notice below, I have irritatingly refused to rank the Top 10, which all together exist in a nebulous cloud of Top 10ness. 20. Beulah, Yoko 19. Wolf Parade, Apologies to the Queen Mary 18. Sturgill Simpson, Metamodern Sounds in Country Music 17. Dandy Warhols,  Thirteen Tales from Urban Bohemia 16. Game Theory, The Big Shot Chronicles 15. The Beatles, The Beatles (White Album) 14. Wilco, Yankee Hotel Foxtrot 13. Elliott Smith, XO 12. The Clash, London Calling 11. R.E.M., Murmur The Top 10 The Libertines, Up the Bracket Neutral Milk Hotel, In the Aeroplane Over the Sea The Wrens, Meadowlands The Rolling Stones, Exile on Main Street Weakerthans, Reconstruction Site The Trash Can Sinatras, Cake The Loud Family, Plants and Birds and Rocks and Things Pavement, Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain The Beatles, Abbey Road R.E.M., Reckoning This was fun!  Let's do it again never. The single question I was asked most often was "Did you discover any new music that you really like b...
Read more

103. De La Soul, "Three Feet High And Rising"

Image
  Sorry for the service interruption!  Monday I had, like, work stuff to do and yesterday I was picking my wife up at the airport and they lost her bag and we had to file a claim about that and by the time I got home it was well into my Work Hours and you know, I'm just sorry.  (This was tail end of quite a journey for my wife that found her taking off in Ireland and landing in Newark, New Jersey, and then sitting in a plane for almost three hours and then the flight just getting cancelled and then staying in the Courtyard by Marriott in downtown Newark, NJ [not recommended, she says] and then getting on a flight to SFO at 6:30 am and finally getting back here a solid 14 hours later than expected.) Speaking of the greater New York City metropolitan area, a group of kids from Amityville, Long Island, got together in 1988 and started making songs and released this album, one of the best in hip hop or any other genre, in 1989.  De La have been called the "Beatles of hip...
Read more

A break before the final 2: My Personal Top 100, 100-81

Image
  Like many music dorks my age, I've always been captivated by lists.  I mean, obviously, I'm doing this project , which is just my takes on someone else's lists.  From time to time, I've compiled my own lists of my favorite music in some form or another, but I have never undetaken the daunting task of figuring out my favorite 100 albums and then putting them into order from 1 to 100.  It's an inherently transitory task, as it represents my feelings about these albums at this particular date in history.  Nevertheless, the top 20 at least is very, very similar to a top 20 list I made about 15 years ago, so it's not all out of left field. Brief comments on some of the albums, as warranted. 100. New Order, Low-Life Kind of a forgotten New Order album, but the first one I bought, way back as a youth.  I still remember the tracing paper sleeve that let you slide band members photos in and out so you could have whoever you wanted on the cover.  Best known pr...
Read more