grateful dead workingmans dead

​Grateful Dead (from the album Workingman’s Dead 50th Anniversary Deluxe Edition available on Rhino/Warner Records)
Fifty years on and history has, at times, featured edited-out rewrites and stitched together stories for abridged versions of day-to-day events in the past as an elevator pitch. Workingman’s Dead, and its sister release, American Beauty, have become touchstones for Americana, cave paintings on the walls of music connecting the past to today. The importance of the album matches the band to the sound, citing a switch for The Dead, a step away from the psychedelic music that brought them to the party. Nice snippet though the full picture shows that the Grateful Dead were an Americana band in their infancy, starting out as a Bluegrass band, expanding their musical setlist when they went electric for long extended jams with touches of Soul, Rock’n’Roll, and Country in acid-washed soundscapes. Workingman’s Dead took the band back to Blue collar Roots, stripping away any excess that had come with elongated sets and presenting Country Blues with “Dire Wolf”, electric mountain music in “High Time”, rockabilly rebel riffs for “New Speedway Boogie”, and the sad, bottom-of-the-barrel Blues of “Black Peter”. 
 
The remaster of Workingman’s Dead for the 50th Anniversary Deluxe Edition showcases not only musical visionaries and curators for Americana, the results bring an intimacy to the playing that was missing on the original Warner Brothers release. The string band telling the story of “Dire Wolf” lets the voice of mandolin strums, pedal steel theatrics, and whatever the hell Bill Kreutzman is using for percussion wrap around the front porch harmonies like morning mist. The harmonies and percussion are each given spotlights on opening track “Uncle John’s Band”, the chiming of the guitar’s a true clarion call to follow The Dead as pied pipers while wandering string-driven notes freefall down through “Cumberland Blues”. Pigpen’s guttural growl and Bluesy hums are the stars of “Easy Wind”, the hard-drinking tone of the track fitting The Dead’s keyboardist like a second skin in the tune written specifically for him by Dead lyricist Robert Hunter. The sniff hits the back of your eardrum like air in a nostril for The Dead’s self-policing warnings in “Casey Jones”. 
 
The song collection on Workingman’s Dead is precise, the band’s initial shot for Roots music coming via eight well-honed bullets on the album’s song roster. The 50th Anniversary Deluxe Edition shows the band ready to spend more time on stage with four of the studio tracks expanded on the live set. The two-discs of the re-mastered set are 23-songs from one show, recorded on February 21, 1971 at the Capitol Theatre in Port Arthur, New York. If the studio album Workingman’s Dead and American Beauty capture a band in their musical zone, the live discs pinpoint a group in top form on their performance. Intuition was always a key ingredient of a Grateful Dead live show, and the Workingman’s Dead Deluxe Edition gather cuts from other Dead albums in the period (American Beauty, Europe ’72, Bob Weir’s solo, Ace, and Jerry Garcia’s solo Garcia), featuring tracks such as “Loser”, “Playing in the Band”, “Greatest Story Ever Told” and covering Chuck Berry (“Johnny B. Goode”), Kris Kristofferson (“Me and Bobby McGee”), Slim Harpo (“I’m a Kingbee”), and The Young Rascals (“Good Lovin’”).
 
Listen and buy the music of Grateful Dead from AMAZON
 
For more information, please visit the Grateful Dead website
 
 

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