The song on a classic Grateful Dead album that was almost never played live
If you ask anyone from the Grateful Dead fandom, from the most hardened of Deadheads to the most casual of newcomers, which studio album they’re most likely to listen to, the choice usually boils down to either Workingman’s Dead or American Beauty. Both released in 1970, the two albums represent the sonic peak of the Dead actually getting along with the studio environment.
Part of that was thanks to their decision not to experiment or even really play rock music at all. With an acoustic setup and a stripped-back philosophy, the Dead mainly wanted to keep costs down after racking up quite the debt to their label, Warner Bros. But outside of practical concerns, it was undeniable that the Dead had also hit their stride in terms of songwriting, producing classic cuts like ‘Casey Jones’, ‘Uncle John’s Band’, ‘Sugar Magnolia’, ‘Friend of the Devil’, and ‘Truckin’ that would become known even outside the cult-like world of the Dead.
There are some songs from those two records, however, that haven’t quite crossed over in the same way. Sometimes it was due to unfortunate circumstances, like the early death of Ron ‘Pigpen’ McKernan sending songs like ‘Easy Wind’ and ‘Operator’ into early retirement. Sometimes, the band’s electric live set-up simply didn’t accommodate otherwise classic songs in the making like ‘Ripple’ and ‘High Time’. And other times still, the songs simply never caught on for no reason in particular.
That’s what can be said for ‘Till the Morning Comes’, a prime cut from the back half of American Beauty. Upbeat and energetic, ‘Till the Morning Comes’ would have made a perfect addition to the band’s spirited live shows, but it never caught on. It’s not because the band we’re afraid of that style (it bears more than a passing resemblance to ‘Sugar Magnolia’) nor would the band have been thrown off by the song’s intricate harmonies (the vocals for ‘Uncle John’s Band’ were arguably harder, but that didn’t stop the Dead from playing it almost every single year from 1970 to 1995).
In fact, it seems as though there was a conspiracy of bad luck that made ‘Till the Morning Comes’ so difficult to track and hear years later. The Grateful Dead might have been the most catalogued and archived band of all time, but there’s a notorious gap in audience tapes in 1970. This was still only five years since the band’s formation, and widespread taping of each show was still in its infancy. While Deadheads have been lucky enough to find tapes of literally thousands of shows from across 30 years of music, 1970 is a notoriously wayward year.
Even if every single show was taped, it appears as though you could still count the number of times the Dead played ‘Till the Morning Comes’ on one hand. Setlist.com puts the number at five, while the website deaddisc.com hypothesises that it was only played “a handful of times… in the last few months of 1970.” A version from the band’s performance at the Winterland Arena on October 4th, 1970 remains the only officially released live version of ‘Till the Morning Comes’. Check out that version down below.
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