Listen back to Bob Dylan and The Grateful Dead’s mammoth 74 track rehearsal session, 1987
We’re dipping into the Far Out vault to bring you the meeting of two of our favourite artists, the mercurial Bob Dylan and the unstoppable creative force that is The Grateful Dead. It may seem a natural fit on the face of it but it took a long chunk of the artists’ careers to go by before they would link up. Though both Dylan and the Dead were prominent in the 1960s and ’70s, it would be way into the following decade before the stars aligned and the group would work with the freewheelin’ Bob Dylan.
While The Grateful Dead have always enjoyed the uncanny ability to live within the moment and, therefore, never truly let time pass them by, the 1980s were an incredibly odd time for Bob Dylan. As well as not being quite revered as the inspirational musical genius that he is today, the singer had yet to really crack the charts and his glow was beginning to fade. His career was nosediving and it was a situation that would eventually land him on a farewell tour alongside The Grateful Dead.
As you might have expected, instead of The Grateful Dead providing Dylan with the perfect tie-dye coffin to put his career in, the band instead inspired and rejuvenated icon. They rekindled not only his career but his love of music as a whole and, perhaps more importantly, the love of his own music which had been slowly slipping away from him. Much of it can be traced back to one mammoth rehearsal session with the Dead.
In Dylan’s autobiography, he recalls: “Everything was smashed. My own songs had become strangers to me, I didn’t have the skill to touch the right nerves, couldn’t penetrate the surfaces. It wasn’t my moment of history anymore.” The ‘Mr Tambourine Man’ singer felt pushed aside and was perhaps now more than happy to take his place in the history books as one of the greats.
Following a tour with Tom Petty and The Heartbreakers, Dylan came to a realisation: “Tom was at the top of his game and I was at the bottom of mine.” The singer was ready to retire, sick of the downward spiral he was struggling against. However, before he hung up his guitar he was scheduled to do some shows with The Grateful Dead. The group invited the mercurial songwriter out to San Rafael in California to rehearse as one and beef up their chances of a good show. It was unlike any rehearsal Dylan had ever experienced — but you already guessed that.
In Chronicles, Volume 1, he writes: “After an hour or so, it became clear to me that the band wanted to rehearse more and different songs than I had been used to doing with Petty. They wanted to run over all the songs, the ones they liked, the seldom-seen ones.” It saw the band ready to devour the content of Dylan’s catalogue and offer him the stage to realise the glory of performing once more. It was clear that Jerry Garcia and the band were huge fans. Speaking of Dylan’s album Bringing It All Back Home, Garcia once remarked it was “beautiful mad stuff. And that turned us all on, we couldn’t believe it.”
That kind of fandom was something Dylan wasn’t used to, especially coupled with the group’s ability to break down any notion of superiority between the two factions. “I found myself in a peculiar position and I could hear the brakes screech,” remembered Dylan, worried about how things would go down. “If I had known this to begin with, I might not have taken the dates…There were so many [songs] that I couldn’t tell which was which—I might even get the words to some mixed up with others.”
It was a daunting task for an artist who thought his time was up. He left the studio and was determined to never return until a run-in with a jazz band made him reconsider. Dylan & The Dead, as the live show and subsequent album was titled, arrived as a frightening concept for the singer but “then miraculously,” he adds, “Something internal came unhinged.” It was the breakthrough he had been hoping for.
It may have been the reaction the two artists rekindled in one another or it may have been the relaxants on offer at the studio but soon enough something just ‘clicked’. “I played these shows with The Dead and never had to think twice about it,” recalled Dylan. “Maybe they just dropped something in my drink, I can’t say, but anything they wanted to do was fine with me.”
The joining of Dylan and The Dead is noted as one of the most cohesive examples of its kind but what’s even better are the rehearsal sessions that began it all. Below, you can listen to the full recording session (around 74 tracks) which features, ‘It’s All Over Now Baby Blue’, ‘Maggie’s Farm’, ‘Tangled Up in Blue’ and so many more.
You can listen to some of the session below but also find individual songs and a full playlist here.
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