Workingman's Dead

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The main rhythm has an almost Motown feel to it (think “I Second That Emotion”), and there are a couple of fairly lengthy guitar extrapolations. It wouldn’t be too long, however, before the song found its finished form. A day after the debut of “Casey Jones” came “High Time,” a gorgeous bittersweet ballad that easily could have come from George Jones, Merle Haggard or any number of other country greats. Garcia once complained that he felt could never quite do the song justice as a singer, but from mid 1969 through mid 1970, it became an important cornerstone of the band’s repertoire, often serving as a nice, grounding contrast to spacey songs such “Dark Star” and “That’s It for the Other One,” or the spunky combo of “China Cat Sunflower” and “I Know You Rider.” With the release of Workingman's Dead in late 1970, the group made a sharp stylistic shift. Produced by Bob Matthews, Betty Cantor and the band, the album features eight original songs written by Garcia and lyricist Rober Top 200 Albums - week of June 27, 1970". Billboard. Scroll down to Workingman's Dead and hover . Retrieved 3 December 2016.

In 2003, the album was ranked number 262 on Rolling Stone magazine's list of the 500 greatest albums of all time, 264 in a 2012 revised list, [7] and 409 in the 2020 list. [8] It was voted number 371 in Colin Larkin's All Time Top 1000 Albums. [9] Recording [ edit ] When the Grateful Dead convened to record Workingman’s Dead in February 1970, they were intent on change. They wanted something lighter, simpler; something closer to a folk or country record than a psychedelic one. Conveniently, they were also deep in debt to their record company and trying to extract themselves from a recent—and costly—drug bust. Their previous album, Aoxomoxoa, took nearly six months at the cost of more than a million dollars in today’s money; Workingman’s Dead was done in nine days. Workingman's Dead is the fourth studio album by the Grateful Dead. It was recorded in February 1970 and originally released on June 14, 1970. That being said however, I did get to listen to the rest of Workingmans in Atmos and it was like a dream. I love this mix Everything just plays together nicely and you get swept away by all the nuances in Workingman's Dead. A great new way to hear the old classic So many great versions of this LP now.Greatest Albums of All Time Rolling Stone's definitive list of the 500 greatest albums of all time". Rolling Stone. 2012 . Retrieved September 10, 2019.

Soon, though, Garcia reclaimed it, and on occasion in 1969 he would suggest that the crowd sing along on the chorus. “Casey Jones” was the next new tune to emerge from the Larkspur songwriting sessions, and though Garcia’s original acoustic guitar-voice demo from early June is strikingly similar to the way it ended up on Workingman’s Dead, the first several Grateful Dead versions in early summer ’69 have a different vibe.Grateful Dead: The Illustrated Trip. Jake Woodward, et al. Dorling Kindersley Limited, 2003, p. 119. Mason's Children" (recorded at the Civic Auditorium in Honolulu on 1/24/1970) (Garcia, Hunter, Lesh, Weir) – 6:32 Garcia commented that much of the sound of the album comes both from his pairing with Hunter, as well as the band's friendship with Crosby, Stills and Nash: "Hearing those guys sing and how nice they sounded together, we thought, 'We can try that. Let's work on it a little'." [18] Release [ edit ]

But those discoveries are the exception. “For some albums, we have nothing,” Lemieux says. “There’s not much [leftover] from Wake of the Flood. Literally nothing from Terrapin Station. That’s always been a big mystery in the Dead world. We never found out what happened with the Terrapin tapes.” Some studio tapes exist for American Beauty, which will be celebrating its own 50th in November and will be given an in-progress deluxe release. But Lemieux cautions that those tapes are not “on the same level” and not as extensive as those found for Workingman’s Dead. The complete takes show the development,” says Dead legacy manager David Lemieux, who oversees the band’s archiving. “The Dead had been playing these songs for so long, in some cases nine months, so they had them down. But this is where the nuances developed.”At the time of its original issue, the record was—as it still is, to startling effect—unlike any other entry in their discography. In the wake of a bust in New Orleans, with their business organization struggling and in debt to their Warner Bros. Record label, the band was also confronting seismic cultural changes that caused profound alterations in the music they were creating: the new-found emphasis on folk and country styles outweighed that concentration on the blues during their early days as well as the more freewheeling psychedelic improvisation that followed. Yet even today, this bittersweet collection of original songs, just over a half-hour in duration, recorded within a single month in the same year it came out, remains a testament to creativity as a refuge from chaos and bad fortune. Still, Warner Bros. was ready to promote the album. “An album of country-flavored tunes by the Grateful Dead — an album different from anything they ever did before,” went one of its radio ads, which cheekily added, “Steal it.” But at the time, no one worried about record-store theft. In spite of that ad and problems with radio play, Workingman’s Dead became the band’s most popular record to that point, breaking into the Top 30 on the Billboard album chart. To this day, Matthews says he still receives royalties for his work on it. The album’s closer and other hit, Casey Jones, showed a different side to the Dead. Robert Hunter repurposed the folk tale of the titular locomotive engineer who died in a train crash in 1900 with one hand on the train’s whistle and the other hand on its brake. Here the story is set to a radio-friendly boogie, Casey Jones is “high on cocaine” and the narrator is issuing a warning for the engineer to “watch his speed”. Garcia spoke about the song in an interview with Flash magazine in 1971: “It’s partly a way of redeveloping what’s been put into us, and it’s partly my way of expressing thanks to the whole tradition: to try and add a good song to it.”