The Grateful Dead classic co-written by Bill Kreutzmann
Bill Kreutzmann was an indispensable element to the classic Grateful Dead sound. As one of just four members whose tenure in the band extended all throughout the band’s 30-year career (with the others being guitarists Jerry Garcia and Bob Weir, along with bassist Phil Lesh), Kreutzmann held down the rhythm and anchored the band through its many stylistic changes.
Along with Mickey Hart, Kreuztmann formed the formidably double attack that came to be known as the “Rhythm Devils”. But Kreuztmann was around before Hart joined the band, and during the brief period when Hart left in the early 1970s, Kreutzmann held down the fort as the band’s sole drummer once again, creating a sound that caused his bandmates to fondly refer to him as the “Gang of One”. During the band’s formative growth years, Kreutzmann was the adaptable and rock-steady base on which the other members could explore the vast cosmos of improvisational rock music.
However, Kreutzmann wouldn’t necessarily come off as a strong presence if you just looked at the band’s writing credits. He gets credits on some of the key group compositions like ‘Dark Star’ and ‘Caution’, but once the band began to focus on the powerful collaborations between Jerry Garcia and Robert Hunter, group improvisations became the domain of live performances solely. Kreutzmann continued to get a showcase with his ‘Drums’ segment, but songwriting wasn’t really his job in the band, so he let the other members handle it.
With one major exception. Kreutzmann had been towing with the idea of polyrhythms during the Dead’s psychedelic days in Haight-Ashbury. He wanted to devise a rhythm that would emphasise three beats while resting on top of a typical four-four time signature. His dedication to the triplet form eventually created a jam on which the band would enter otherworldly psychedelic areas.
Eventually, Bob Weir took hold of the rhythm and began to craft a song on top of it. The trippy composition eventually transformed into a full song suite, featuring an introductory section penned by Garcia and a coda of experimental sounds crafted by keyboardist Tom Constanten. ‘That’s It For The Other One’ would open with Garcia’s ‘Cryptical Envelopment’ before crashing into a nebulous jam called ‘Quadlibet for Tenderfeet’. As that section dissolved, Kreutzmann and Weir’s ‘The Faster We Go, The Rounder We Get’ came in, followed by Constanten’s ‘We Leave The Castle’ heady sounds.
When the Dead became unsatisfied with their studio performances of the track, they sourced live tapes and began overdubbing directly onto their performances. That’s how Anthem of the Sun was crafted, and ‘The Faster We Go, The Rounder We Get’ has a distinctively live edge that was impossible to replicate in a studio.
When performed in concert, the Dead initially attempted to perform all sections of ‘That’s It For The Other One’. ‘Quadlibet for Tenderfeet’ and ‘We Leave the Castle’ were quickly dropped, and Garcia grew tired of playing ‘Cryptical Envelopment’ by 1971, with only brief appearances in 1972 and 1985 afterwards. That left just ‘The Faster We Go, The Rounder We Get’ segment, which eventually took on the succinct name of ‘The Other One’.
Live, ‘The Other One’ became one of the Dead’s primary vehicles for outer space exploration. Often bookended by Kreutzmann’s drum solos, ‘The Other One’ was cued by a heavy Phil Lesh bass riff before the band took off into uncharted territory. Like ‘Dark Star’, ‘The Other One’ only came back to earth during its verses, and just like the second verse of ‘Dark Star’, Weir occasionally dispensed with the “Cowboy Neil” verse if the band transitioned into another song.
The first time most fans heard ‘The Other One’ in its classic form was on the 1971 live album Grateful Dead, better known as either Skull and Roses or Skull Fuck. The nearly 20-minute ‘The Other One’ takes up the entirety of side B, and it was the first time the truncated title was used to refer to the section penned by Kreutzmann and Weir. After an extended drum solo, the song comes barrelling in with the same form it would take for the next 25 years.
After ‘The Other One’, Kreutzmann got a few writing credits, mostly on group-penned instrumentals. He’s credited on the Blues for Allah tracks ‘Slipknot!’, ‘Franklin’s Tower’, ‘Stronger than Dirt or Milkin’ the Turkey’, and ‘Sand Castles & Glass Camels’, along with the sections of ‘Terrapin Station’ entitled ‘Terrapin Transit’ and ‘Terrapin Flyer’. He and Hart created the Shakedown Street track ‘Serengetti’ and the Go to Heaven track ‘Antwerp’s Placebo (The Plumber)’, but those would be Kreutzmann’s final writing credits with the Dead. ‘The Other One’ is probably his greatest compositional contribution to the Grateful Dead songbook – a song that wouldn’t exist without Kreutzmann’s unique approach to rhythm.
Check out ‘The Other One’ from Skull and Roses down below.
