Jerry Garcia on the idea behind the Grateful Dead’s ‘Workingman’s Dead’
For fans and casual listeners alike, Workingman’s Dead came as a bit of a surprise when it was released in early 1970. In the five years prior to its release, the Grateful Dead had been working hard to create some of the most psychedelic and hard-hitting rock music ever conceived. Albums like Anthem of the Sun and Aoxomoxoa were so dense with experimentation that they were nearly inscrutable. The Dead were creating “freak” music, and along the way, they gathered some freakishly devoted fans.
But Workingman’s Dead was something completely different. Largely an acoustic record with easily digestible songs and potent melodies, the album was a massive turn for a band that was still melting faces in their electric live sets. What could possess a band like the Dead to completely change their identity?
There were multiple answers. For one, it wasn’t a total reinvention. Most of the Dead, and most prominently Jerry Garcia, were card-carrying members of the Palo Alto folk scene. Throughout late 1969, the Dead began to play country and folk favourites like ‘Silver Threads and Golden Needles’ and ‘Me and My Uncle’ after years of dormancy. The band fully embraced their folk roots when incorporating acoustic sets into their live performances in 1970. It was a natural progression that would later be solidified in the studio.
Along with the Dead’s natural move over to acoustic music, there was an issue of practicality. After two highly experimental records with prolonged recording sessions put the band into massive debt with their label Warner Bros, Jerry Garcia decided that the next Dead record would be a more stripped-back affair. Armed with some of his and Robert Hunter’s most accessible songs, Garcia was on a mission to keep things simple for Workingman’s Dead.
“We’d spent so much time and so much money working on our second two records, and we didn’t want to go through that experience again, definitely,” Garcia told Warner Bros. executive Joe Smith in 1988. “So I thought, what I’m gonna do is write some songs that are so fuckin’ simple, man, and so easy for everybody to understand that we’ll do ‘em in the studio in about a minute — it’ll take us no time, and it’ll cost us hardly anything, and we’ll be able to get out of this endless thing of spending more than we make on records, which seemed crazy to me.
“That’s kind of the idea behind Workingman’s Dead, although, really — and also the next record, Workingman’s Dead and American Beauty, they’re both kind of one record, really, and that worked out beautifully,” Garcia added. “It really did, it worked out great.”
One of the more unsavoury realities of the time was that the band had just been ripped off by their manager, Lenny Hart. The father of drummer Mickey Hart, Lenny was a true swindler who convinced the band that his evangelical beliefs made it impossible for him to steal anything from them. Then, Hart absconded with most of the band’s finances. The Dead opted for more serene tones for their studio work as a purposeful balm to the sting of getting burned.
“It was something, all this heavy bullshit was flying around us,” Jerry Garcia told Rolling Stone. “So we just retreated in there and made music. Only the studio was calm. The record was the only concrete thing happening, the rest was part of that insane legal and financial figment of everybody’s imagination, so I guess it came out of a place that was real to all of us.”
Check out ‘Uncle John’s Band’ down below.
