The story of how the Grateful Dead got into playing country music
By 1970, the Grateful Dead were an entirely different band from when they first formed five years earlier. While the membership hadn’t changed (give or take the additions of Mickey Hart and Tom Constanten), the Dead were no longer the highly psychedelic outfit that stormed through San Francisco in the late ’60s. Things had gotten calmer, more mature, and more acoustic. Deadheads, “Dead Freaks” as they were more commonly called in the early days, knew that the Dead had started out as a jug band, but to follow the acid-soaked experimentation of Aoxomoxoa with the jaunty country stylings of Workingman’s Dead was still a bit shocking.
On the most recent episode of The Good Ol’ Grateful Deadcast focused on Bob Weir’s 1972 solo debut Ace, Weir shed some light on how the Dead turned the corner from electric noise machines to psychedelic cowboys. “We went through a sort of intense little cowboy phase,” Weir explained. “Early on, we were sort of listening to country music, and a lot of us had little mini ranches that we were running… I was raising horses.”
“My girlfriend at the time was big into raising horses, and by god, that was what we were gonna do,” Weir continued. “None of us were raising cattle, I’ll put it that way. We were all raising horses. Billy [Kreutzmann] had a ranch, Mickey had a ranch. We had horses and goats and stuff like that. Peacocks. I was just starting to sing and write and all that stuff. I was young. I was in my early 20s, 21 maybe… The guys came up with a nickname for me: I was Bobby Ace, and it pretty much stuck.”
Weir had done a small bit of writing and singing for the Grateful Dead prior to Ace, including the highly psychedelic ‘Born Cross-Eyed’ from the band’s 1967 debut, the ‘The Faster We Go, The Rounder We Get’ section of ‘That’s It for the Other One’ from 1968’s Anthem of the Sun that later transformed into ‘The Other One’, and some lead vocals on classic tracks like ‘Cumberland Blues’, ‘Truckin’, and ‘Sugar Magnolia’. But with Ace, Weir had finally found his identity within the Dead, one that largely revolved around his love of cowboy culture.
Starting in the late 1960s, Weir began taking on classic country songs like Marty Robbins’ ‘El Paso’, John Phillips’ ‘Me and My Uncle’, and Merle Haggard’s ‘Mama Tried’. Jerry Garcia got in on the fun as well, taking up classic country numbers like Johnny Cash’s ‘Big River’ and Hank Williams’ ‘You Win Again’. By 1970, Garcia had picked up the pedal steel guitar and began infusing the Dead’s original songs with a strong country flavour. Garcia was so adept at the instrument that he even formed a new country side project, The New Riders of the Purple Sage, just to play more.
But it was Weir who truly embodied the Dead’s country leanings. Even though Ace was technically a solo album it featured the entire Grateful Dead (minus the ailing Ron ‘Pigpen’ McKernan) as Weir’s backing band. Apart from ‘Walk in the Sunshine’, each of Ace‘s tracks became integral to the Grateful Dead’s live concerts, and Weir got his first real taste of country songwriting with ‘Mexicali Blues’, a song that Weir said impressed Garcia for perhaps the first time.
“I took my first vacation. We had been at it about five years,” Weir explained in the Good Ol’ Grateful Deadcast episode focused on ‘Sugar Magnolia’. “[John Perry] Barlow and I, and our manager at the time, Jon McIntire, went down to Mexico and drove all the way to the southern tip of Oaxaca, on the Pacific Ocean… and had a great little vacation there. When we got back, having listened to the radio for all the way up and down Mexico, we listened to a bunch of Mexican radio, we sort of got Mexican popular music in our bones.”
“We decided, ‘OK, let’s write a song. Let’s sit down and write a song together.’ And we did. It was sort of patterned after one of the old Marty Robbins gunfighter ballads,” Weir added. “It was ‘Mexicali Blues’. I played it for Jerry, and he seemed mightily impressed. I have nothing to judge it by, no frame of reference, so I didn’t know if this was good or bad or anything like that, but it seemed to please Jerry, so we started playing it. People seemed to enjoy it, so we were off to the races.”
Check out ‘Mexicali Blues’ down below.
