Good Ol’ Grateful Deadcast
Season 6, Episode 7 ACE 50
Archival interviews:
- John Perry Barlow, by David Gans, Conversations with the Dead,11/1982.
- John Perry Barlow, The Grateful Dead Movie, 10/1974.
- John Perry Barlow, by David Gans, Conversations with the Dead KFOG, 1/1986.
- Robert Hunter, by David Gans, Conversations with the Dead, 11/15/1977.
- Robert Hunter, by Denis McNamera, WLIR, 3/1978.
- Bob Weir, by David Gans, The Greatest Pump Song Ever Wrote, 1981.
AUDIO: “Playing in the Band” [Ace] (3:09-2:28) - [dead.net] [Spotify] [YouTube]
JESSE: In the late spring of 1972, Bob Weir’s solo debut Ace made its way into record stores, featuring eight songs by Weir with backing almost entirely by the Grateful Dead. Recorded over two weeks in February and finished in under a month, the story of Ace is a few years longer than that. And since this is Bob Weir we’re talking about, the story isn’t always linear.
AUDIO: “Greatest Story Ever Told” [Ace] (0:04-0:27) - [dead.net] [Spotify] [YouTube]
JESSE: Ace would both introduce Bob Weir to the world and transform his role in the Grateful Dead, neither of which happened overnight either.
The oldest piece of Ace is its title, named of course for the famed leader of the San Francisco band, Bobby Ace and His Cards From the Bottom of the Deck. Please welcome to the Deadcast, Bobby Ace, also known as Bobby Weir.
BOB WEIR: We went through sort of an intense little cowboy phase early on. We were sort of listening to country music and a lot of us had little mini-ranches that we were running. I had a ranch out in Nicasio and I was raising horses. It was basically a little self-inflicted Dust Bowl. But my girlfriend at the time was big into raising horses and, by god, that was what we were gonna do. And the other guys were into… none of us were raising cattle, I’ll put it that way. We were all raising horses: Billy had a ranch, Mickey had a ranch, and we had horses and goats and stuff like that. Peacocks.
I was just starting to sing and write and all that kind of stuff. I was young — I was in my early 20s, 21 maybe, and I was just starting to sing and write and stuff like that. So the guys came up with a nickname for me: I was Bobby Ace, and it pretty much stuck. I don’t know where it came from.
JESSE: Bobby Ace and His Cards From the Bottom of the Deck starts turning up on occasional posters for under-the-radar Dead gigs in the spring of 1969, as they began their transition into cowboy territory. Weir’s friends would deploy the name when he was trying out his new Bobby Ace persona with the New Riders of the Purple Sage, as heard in this August 1969 show on the Dawn of the New Riders of the Purple Sage box from the Owsley Stanley Foundation.
JOHN “MARMADUKE” DAWSON [8/28/69]: Is the famous Bobby Ace in the audience? Let him get on up here if he can.
AUDIO: “Mama Tried” [New Riders of the Purple Sage, Bear’s Sonic Journals: Dawn of the New
Riders of the Purple Sage, 8/28/69] (0:07-0:29) - [Spotify]
JESSE: Bobby Weir received his first songwriting credits on Anthem of the Sun in 1968. The first was for “The Other One,” instantly a signature jam with the Dead, though not much by way of songwriting besides its distinct 6/8 groove. Another was “Born Cross-Eyed.”
AUDIO: “Born Cross-Eyed” (1968 mix) [Anthem of the Sun] (0:00-0:26) - [dead.net] [Spotify] [YouTube]
JESSE: I love “Born Cross-Eyed.” But it wasn’t until 1970’s American Beauty that Weir found his voice.
AUDIO: “Sugar Magnolia” [American Beauty] (0:13-0:30) - [dead.net] [Spotify] [YouTube]
JESSE: We talked with Weir about “Sugar Magnolia” during the American Beauty season of the Deadcast. It was that album, along with its companion, Workingman’s Dead, that kicked the door open for the band, virtually earning them carte blanche at Warner Brothers. Jerry Garcia recorded his first solo album in the summer of 1971 and shortly thereafter, both Bobby and Mickey Hart earned contracts of their own. The success also earned Weir something else.
BOB WEIR: ‘70 or ‘71, I took my first ever vacation: myself, our manager, Jon McIntire, and [John Perry] Barlow. And we hopped in McIntire's beat up old Saab and drove down to Mexico, spent most of the month down there.
JESSE: One of their destinations was Guadelajara, where they stayed with Curly Jim Stalarow, the Haight-Ashbury character who taught Weir “Me and My Uncle” a half-dozen years earlier, as we discussed during our Skull and Roses season.
BOB WEIR: He was a dope dealer. He sold pot for a living.
JESSE: And in Mexico, he and his wife had begun to grow it.
BOB WEIR: I wonder whatever became of him…
JESSE: Well, Bobby, you can stay tuned for our Rolling Thunder 50 episode, coming soon to a Deadcast near you.
BOB WEIR: I had to get back for gigs, but they stayed down there.
JESSE: It was a vacation that would set the stage for Ace, as well as one of the longest creative partnerships of Weir’s career. While manager Jon McIntire and Bobby’s boarding school friend
John Perry Barlow hung out in Mexico, Weir headed north. Back home, in late January or early February 1971, was probably when Weir finished up his first two songs for Ace. Both were created for another album, though, written in collaboration with Mickey Hart and Dead lyricist Robert Hunter, and it was probably in this window that early versions of both were tracked for Mickey’s long-delayed 1972 solo debut, Rolling Thunder. Both songs would debut with the Dead at the Capitol Theatre in Port Chester in February 1971. One had been gestating for quite some time.
“Playing in the Band”
AUDIO: “The Main Ten” [Dick’s Picks 16, 11/8/69] (0:30-1:00) - [Spotify] [YouTube]
JESSE: That was the instrumental theme known as “The Main Ten,” performed November 8th, 1969 at the Fillmore Auditorium in San Francisco, now Dick’s Picks 16. There are a few different stories about where it came from. One, from Weir, is that David Crosby came up with the riff during a jam at Mickey’s Barn. It started threading into Dead jams by early 1969. When Mickey turned his Barn into a proper studio, it was one of the first pieces they tried.
AUDIO: “The Main Ten” [Mickey Hart, Rolling Thunder] (0:00-0:18) - [Spotify]
JESSE: Robert Hunter remembered the process slightly differently, beginning with Mickey’s 10/4 rhythm part. Here’s Hunter speaking with WLIR in 1978.
ROBERT HUNTER [3/78]: We’re looking at a rhythm for it, and I wrote the words to Mickey’s rhythm. And then Weir came in, dug it, and Mickey asked him to put chords to it — which he did, and that’s about all there was to that.
JESSE: However it got to him, it would take Weir roughly two years to transform the riff in 10/4 into a popular Grateful Dead song.
AUDIO: “Playing in the Band” [Skull and Roses] (0:31-1:01) - [dead.net] [Spotify] [YouTube]
JESSE: “Playing in the Band” would first be released on Skull and Roses in 1971, and we got way into Robert Hunter’s alternate lyrics and other songwriting bits on the first episode of our season about that album. It would continue to evolve before making it to Ace, and we’ll check in again on it later. The other first draft that Weir would debut in February 1971—and which, after a good bit of editing, would become the first song on Ace—also grew from experiments at Mickey’s ranch.
“Greatest Story Ever Told”
AUDIO: The Greatest Pump Song Ever Wrote (1:48-1:59)
JESSE: That was the sound of the water pump at Mickey Hart’s ranch in Novato, the rhythm that inspired the writing of what became “Greatest Story Ever Told.” The following pieces are from David Gans’s miniature radio documentary, The Greatest Pump Song Ever Wrote. This interview clip with Bobby is from 1981.
BOB WEIR [1981]: That one started out with the rhythm guitar. Actually, that one started out with a pump that Mickey had: he had recorded a pump and told me to write a song.
AUDIO: The Greatest Pump Song Ever Wrote — Mickey’s pump plus guitar
BOB WEIR [1981]: That pump was in C — whatever it was doing, it was in C. Yeah, it had pitch. And so I ran the pump, the pump tape, and just built sort of a chord structure around it.
AUDIO: The Greatest Pump Song Ever Wrote — Mickey’s pump plus guitar plus vocals
BOB WEIR [1981]: Mickey suggested that I pattern on the song after “Froggie Went A Courtin’ (He Did Ride).”
JESSE: We’ll interrupt slightly here, in case you’re not familiar with the old folk song “Froggie Went A Courtin’.” It can be traced back to Scotland in the mid-15th century, but we’ll just start with a bit of the Pete Seeger version from American Favorite Ballads, volume 2, from 1958, the standard text for many a folkie.
AUDIO: “Froggie Went A Courtin’” [Pete Seeger, American Favorite Ballads, Vol. 2] (0:04-0:15) [Spotify]
JESSE: You can totally sing it along with the pump tape.
BOB WEIR [1981]: And then Hunter responded [to] “Froggie went a courtin’ and he did ride”: “Moses come ridin’ up on a quasar” was about as close as Hunter could get.
AUDIO: “Greatest Story Ever Told” [Europe ‘72: The Complete Recordings, Vol. 1, 4/7/72] (0:18-0:40) - [Spotify] [YouTube]
JESSE: That’s how “Greatest Story Ever Told” sounded on the opening night of the Europe ‘72 tour, not long after the Ace sessions. From a distance, there are a bunch of things that “Playing in the Band” and “Greatest Story Ever Told” have in common. The first is that neither was written by sitting down at an instrument and matching chords to words. Both came with their own methods of composition, both were recorded in early versions for Mickey Hart’s Rolling Thunder, and both would undergo at least one major change before the Ace sessions.
Another thing the two songs have in common is that their lyricist was Robert Hunter. When Hunter arrived back in the Bay Area in September 1967, he took up the position of the band’s lyricist in-residence, and he’d worked mostly with Jerry Garcia and Phil Lesh. He began writing with Weir on “Sugar Magnolia” in 1970, and immediately began squabbling with Weir over “Sugar Magnolia” in 1970. It’s often cited that the pair’s songwriting partnership dissolved backstage at the Capitol Theatre in February 1971, still fighting over Weir’s lyric, “jumps like a Willys in 4-wheel drive.” While I have no doubt that Hunter didn’t like that particular edit and never forgot it, I also wonder if the fight wasn’t really about “Greatest Story Ever Told,” which was then in the active process of revision at the Capitol. If you ever thought the image of Moses riding in on a quasar—that is a quasi-stellar object—felt out of place, Robert Hunter might agree with you.
ROBERT HUNTER [1981]: I didn't put that. I wrote “Moses came riding up on a guitar” — and Weir didn't want to sing that, and I exchanged “quasar” for it. He thought, Oh, that's great. And then subsequently I thought, Whoa, wait, that doesn’t fit the song in any way — “guitar” fits it, it's a wooden image. It has wood in it, wood and metal, and there's fences and stuff like that. It fits the textures that are happening in the song. “Quasar” does not fit it — that comes from outer space.
JESSE: Weir sang it with Hunter’s lyric at the debut on February 18th, 1971 at the Capitol.
AUDIO: “Greatest Story Ever Told” [American Beauty 50, 2/18/71] (0:00-0:16) - [dead.net] [Spotify] [YouTube]
JESSE: But the next night, later released as Three From the Vault —
AUDIO: “Greatest Story Ever Told” [Three From the Vault, 2/19/71] (0:38-0:44)
JESSE: Hunter was at the Capitol that week with the band, and “in the bar car” might have been his revision, too. But it lasted all of two versions. On February 21st, now on Workingman’s Dead 50, the third and final draft was just right.
AUDIO: “Greatest Story Ever Told” [Workingman’s Dead 50, 2/21/71] (0:24-0:36) - [dead.net] [Spotify] [YouTube]
JESSE: This is Robert Hunter talking with David Gans in 1977.
ROBERT HUNTER [11/15/77]: I love to write with Weir. Well, he makes me work awfully, awfully hard; he’s very hard to satisfy. He wants something to sound more textural. He’s not looking for the telling phrase, like a real apt combination of words to fire off a thought or an emotional process. He’s looking more for watercolor. He doesn’t go for the sharp social comment song. I haven’t worked with him as much as I might, considering how much I respect his work. I think he puts together a damn good song. I have a tendency not to write the sort of things he wants in his songs, although I will. He wants something different out of a song than I do, basically.
JESSE: Sometime that week at the Capitol in February ‘71, Weir and Hunter got into a tiff over Weir’s lyric rewrites. They had a bunch of other songs in the works, and would continue working together very occasionally through the later ‘70s and ‘80s, but their much-mythologized fight was also a decisive beginning point for what became Ace.
Also backstage at the Capitol was Weir’s old friend John Perry Barlow, fresh from their trip to Mexico. Hunter turned to Barlow and told him that Weir was all his. Barlow died in early 2018, and—as usual—we have our friend David Gans to thank for a pair of Barlow interviews today, both featured in David’s eyebrow-spinning book, Conversations with the Dead. These first bits come from November 1982.
JOHN PERRY BARLOW [11/82]: Bobby had just started writing songs, really, and he and Hunter had worked together on a few of them, but very few. Their relationship as co-conspirators was a bit flawed, as are all of them, but they didn’t quite have the same rapport. So Bobby said, “Well, you write poetry — you might try your hand at writing song lyrics.” I wasn’t doing anything else, so I did try my hand at it. I sort of made up some things that sounded like song lyrics.
“Mexicali Blues”
BOB WEIR: We spent most of a month listening to Mexican music, because that's what's on the radio. So that was kind of ringing around in our heads.
JESSE: Barlow, too, was thinking about their south of the border adventure and what they were hearing constantly on the Mexican radio. But according to Barlow, what was ringing around his head was a song written by Kris Kristofferson, but brought to the toppermost of the country & western poppermost in 1970 by Johnny Cash.
AUDIO: “Sunday Morning Coming Down” [Johnny Cash, The Johnny Cash Show] (1:53-2:18) -[Spotify]
JOHN PERRY BARLOW [11/82]: The first one was “Mexicali Blues,” and I was just stricken when I heard what kind of a setting he’d chosen for it.
DAVID GANS [11/82]: Why?
JOHN PERRY BARLOW [11/82]: It was a whole different thing from what I had in mind, but it turned out to be okay.
AUDIO: “Mexicali Blues” [Ace] (0:17-0:32) - [dead.net] [Spotify] [YouTube]
DAVID GANS [11/82]: You didn’t expect a brassy polka. More of a desperado feeling?
JOHN PERRY BARLOW [11/82]: Yeah, that was what I had in mind. I thought, “This is gonna be swell.”
JESSE: In his memoir, Mother American Night, Barlow wrote, “These days, I know it would be tricky to write a song referring to a presumably physical relationship with a girl who was just fourteen years old. Even though everything in the song was purely imaginary, I did it because Weir had specifically asked me to write a cowboy song. Hoping that maybe something would be there, I just turned on the song faucet. I still like the last verse.”
AUDIO: “Mexicali Blues” [Ace] (3:01-3:23) - [dead.net] [Spotify] [YouTube]
JESSE: If the character in the song is by no means a good person, he certainly faces the consequences. Well, some consequences. Of all the songs on Ace, “Mexicali Blues” not only holds the distinction of staying in the Grateful Dead repertoire continuously through 1995, but of undergoing the fewest subsequent tweaks over the years. With the exception of the album’s sole song that didn’t make it into the lasting songbook, every other tune on Ace would undergo additional adjustments. But the way “Mexicali Blues” sounded in 1972 is more or less how it sounded in 2022, when Weir staged a pair of Ace 50 concerts at Radio City Music Hall in New York, now the second disc of the expanded Ace 50 reissue.
AUDIO: “Mexicali Blues” [Ace 50, 4/3/22] (0:43-1:04) - [dead.net]
JESSE:Though “Mexicali Blues” might be cancellable, and not just because it’s a polka, we’ll shout it out to Mexicali Blues, the popular chain of heady stores in the greater Portland, Maine area who actually outrank the original song in Google. But “Mexicali Blues,” the song, didn’t just create a first set standard for Weir, it created a new partnership.
JOHN PERRY BARLOW [11/82]: And since then, he and I have been working on things more or less continuously: sometimes over the phone, sometimes at the ranch, sometimes in California. Sometimes hardly at all.
BOB WEIR: I caught my groove. I finally got the drift of how things are done, kinda. I mean, you never really get the drift of how things are done for songwriting. But yeah, I kind of fell into it.
JOHN PERRY BARLOW [11/82]: It is not easy trying to write with somebody. But those things have a certain advantage, in spite of the amount of turmoil that goes on. It’s a lot like being married, actually. Sometimes we just can’t stand each other, over what are fundamentally aesthetic differences. But fortunately, as with being married, we’ve been good friends for so long that we’ve got a fallback position if things get too scary.
JESSE: “Mexicali Blues” debuted alongside the Dead’s new piano player Keith Godchaux in October 1971 along with two other Weir songs, one of which would make its way to Ace.
“One More Saturday Night”
AUDIO: “One More Saturday Night” [Dave’s Picks 3, 10/22/71] (0:00-0:28)
JESSE: That was an early version of “One More Saturday Night,” from Dave’s Picks 3, recorded
October 22nd, 1971 in Chicago. Along with “Jack Straw,” the other song debuted at those October shows, which we explored during our Europe ‘72 season, “One More Saturday Night” was the one of the last pieces to emerge from the original Bob Weir/Bob Hunter songwriting partnership. But you won’t find Robert Hunter credited for it. On Ace and elsewhere, Weir has the songwriting credit alone. Though Robert Hunter wrote the first draft for “One More Saturday Night,” it apparently had pretty different lyrics and a different title. Here’s Robert Hunter speaking with Denis McNamera on WLIR in 1978.
ROBERT HUNTER [3/78]: The song that Weir did, “One More Saturday Night,” was originally
“U.S. Blues,” but he got it into his mind to rewrite the lyrics. He still wanted to call it “U.S. Blues.” I said, “No way, I’ll write another ‘U.S. Blues,’” which I did.
AUDIO: “U.S. Blues” [From the Mars Hotel] (0:00-0:06) - [Spotify] [YouTube]
AUDIO: [record needle scratch]
JESSE: Slip a bookmark there for another day. In the end, “One More Saturday Night” was Weir’s and Weir’s alone. He told the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, “The song is my attempt at poetic images. It’s my dream world of what kids do when they’re out for a good time on a Saturday night.” “One More Saturday Night” would transform each and every room into Saturday when it was performed. Scorching hot take incoming: I said this during our Europe ‘72 season, but—though the Dead became known for playing it on Saturday nights—I think it’s cooler on other evenings.
AUDIO: “One More Saturday Night” [Dave’s Picks 3, 10/22/71] (0:40-1:07)
JESSE: With a good handful of songs ready to go, more than would fit onto the next Dead album, what with Jerry Garcia and Robert Hunter’s songwriting hot streak and all, it was about time for Weir to pursue a solo album of his own. This is from John Perry Barlow with David Gans on KFOG in 1986.
Bobby Ace at the Bar Cross Ranch
JOHN PERRY BARLOW [1/86]: It’s also the first of our collaborations. We hadn’t set up ideas about ourselves as collaborators — we were going at everything from a purely fresh standpoint.
It was also written in the middle of nowhere in the middle of the winter. And I was just getting used to the idea of being back in Wyoming, and Weir was just getting used to the idea of being the kind of guy that could go out and make a record all by himself. So it had that nice freshness of a beginning.
JESSE: After a few years of post-college misadventures, Barlow had been on the verge of relocating to the Bay Area, in part to work with Weir. But his father fell ill and Barlow returned to Pinedale, Wyoming to tend to his father and soon take over the Bar Cross Ranch where he’d grown up, and where Weir had visited and worked for a summer as a teenager. In January 1972, while Jerry Garcia toured the East Coast with Howard Wales, Bobby Weir decamped for the Bar Cross Ranch. He had studio time booked the next month and needed to finish off more songs. It was the first of many songwriting sessions with Barlow.
BOB WEIR: As much as we could, I went out to the ranch in Wyoming and hung there, lived there for a while. We would get up in the morning, feed cattle for most of the morning and then come back and write for the rest of the day.
JESSE: They just had one problem they had to solve before they could get down to work.
BOB WEIR: We were living in this cabin two or three miles from the main ranch house. We were living out there — there was nobody within miles of us, so we couldn’t bother anybody. But the cabin we were living in was haunted, and so we had to deal with that. The ghost was bothering my dog — the ghosts are trying to climb into a body, that’s what they seem to think they want. And the dog didn’t want a ghost comin’ in and inhabiting his body, so it got loud at night and messy as well.
JESSE: Weir had brought his dog with him, a malamute named Moondog, less than a year old. And, according to Barlow’s memoir, around 3 in the morning, Moondog freaked out. Barlow wrote, “The dog did a couple of revolutions around the kitchen and left a dog-high line of liquid shit around the full circumference of the room.” Barlow and Weir went back to bed after cleaning it up, though the ghost woke up Weir again soon thereafter.
BOB WEIR: So I called my friend Rolling Thunder and he told me, “Okay, well, here's how you put the ghost down. Make sure the dog’s in, put the ghost out — cedar chips, opening all the windows and stuff like that. Of course, it’s the middle of the winter in Wyoming, about 8,000 feet, so it was cold. I’d put the ghost out, put the dog in and go to bed. I’d get up in the morning and let the ghost back in—he could get in as long as the house wasn’t smoked up with cedar smoke and all that kind of stuff—and everything worked out.
JESSE: Barlow’s account is a little different, with Weir smearing charcoal on his face from kitchen matches, waking to discover Weir looking—as Barlow delicately put it—“like Al Jolson about to break into ‘My Mammy.’ It was one of those rare moments in my life when I was totally speechless.”
BOB WEIR: Maybe a year later, but it was in March — I was out there and I was writing. We were having a rain/snowstorm, and we got hit by lightning, winter thunder. We had a lightning rod that was attached to the water heater where the ghost lived. We had this agreement where he didn’t make noise while I was playing, but as soon as I stopped, he’d start rattling and make all kinds of noise with the water heater. As soon as I started playing, he shut up, and that worked pretty well for the longest time. Then, one day, we got hit by lightning. Lightning strikes from the ground up. So, he was there and then he wasn’t — he was gone. I think he finally escaped being a ghost, and finally moved on.
JESSE: They were able to get to work soon thereafter. Here’s how Barlow remembered Weir’s working habits when he was interviewed for The Grateful Dead Movie in 1974.
JOHN PERRY BARLOW [10/74]: There is a way in which he's pretty inertial, but it has some good side effects. He's so lazy that once he gets going he's too lazy to stop, and if you can get a little momentum set up, he can really work very well. I've seen him sit down with his guitar for five hours every morning for two or three weeks straight, and beat out stuff that didn’t please him. It sounded pretty good to me, but it didn't please him. But he was willing to go on doing it just because he started doing it.
JESSE: During Weir’s time in Wyoming, the two finished two songs, sort of, and got nearly there with two others, also sort of. There’s a work tape circulating among your favorite tapers, probably recorded during Weir’s January 1972 trip to the Bar Cross Ranch. The other voice on it is most likely John Perry Barlow.
“Black-Throated Wind”
BOB WEIR [1/72]: Okay, this is “Black-Throated Wind” as it stands — I’m gonna do the first verse.
JOHN PERRY BARLOW [1/72]: Alright, second take… [tape cut] Alright, third take… [tape cut]... [tape cut] Alright, fourth take…
JESSE: It’s not so much a demo as a work tape. Weir only sings a little bit of “Black-Throated Wind” into this particular microphone because it was yet unfinished. This tape was a guide for Barlow to write the other verses before Weir got to the studio in a few weeks. It’s got a few different chords. I like the loner-folk vibe.
AUDIO: “Black-Throated Wind” [Ace demos] (0:14-0:50)
JOHN PERRY BARLOW [10/74]: You get to “Black-Throated Wind,” which is a particular dog. And that happened in the middle of a blizzard with the aid of a lot of pressure — which probably was unnecessary, but it seemed important at the time.
JESSE: Though John Perry Barlow had never tried writing songs before “Mexicali Blues” in early 1971, he’d had a premonition of it a few years earlier. His memoir, co-written with Robert Greenfeld, takes its name from the chorus of “Black-Throated Wind.”
AUDIO: “Black-Throated Wind” [Ace demos] (1:18-1:41)
JESSE: In Mother American Night, Barlow wrote, “Oddly enough, I had written the chorus while riding on a bus to the airport in Kathmandu and not anywhere near drowning in the Mother American night. If anything, I was drowning in the weird Nepali night. It was the first thing that ever showed up that seemed like it might be part of a song and not a poem.” It still needed a bunch more verses.
AUDIO: “Black-Throated Wind” [Ace demos] (1:40-2:00)
“Looks Like Rain”
JESSE: Seemingly, they only finished one song beginning to end at the Bar Cross Ranch, which is why it’s not on the tape.
AUDIO: “Looks Like Rain” [Ace] (0:08-0:31) - [dead.net] [Spotify] [YouTube]
JESSE: Along with the ghost, the Finn cabin came furnished with a print by the painter Andrew
Wyeth depicting a Native American with their arms open. One night at the cabin, Weir and Barlow were drinking Wild Turkey and Weir told Barlow, “You know what he’s saying, don’t you?” “What”? “Looks like rain.” And with that prompt, Weir’s chords become a song.
AUDIO: “Looks Like Rain” [Ace] (1:25-1:48) - [dead.net] [Spotify] [YouTube]
JESSE: The song’s narrative didn’t come from any part of either of their lives. Barlow would write, “at that point my experience with ‘being in love’ was pretty much restricted to
Shakespeare, opera, and novels by women with three names from the southern states in which someone would swoon. I had often thought about what actually being in that sort of love would be like and had concluded that it was a fiction humans had created to make us all feel more painfully aware of our limitations.” Both Weir and Barlow would grow into the song. Amid the cattle and the blizzards and the ghost, that was all they were able to get done face-to-face on the ranch in terms of setting words to music. Barlow had Weir record him a version of “Jack Straw,” debuted recently by the Dead.
JOHN PERRY BARLOW [1/72]: I’d kinda like to have you do “Jack Straw,” just so I have something to enjoy.
BOB WEIR [1/72]: This is for playback purposes only… this here’s “Jack Straw,” take 1. One only.
AUDIO: “Jack Straw” [Ace demos] (0:27-0:57)
JESSE: But mostly Barlow had Weir record the instrumental skeletons of FIVE more songs, some of which were fairly developed.
AUDIO: “Unknown Song #2” [Ace demos] (0:00-0:24)
JESSE: That particular bit wouldn’t resurface, but this one might sound familiar. Its working title was apparently called “Madrigal.”
JOHN PERRY BARLOW [1/72]: Alright, “Madrigal.”
BOB WEIR [1/72]: This one’s “Madrigal,” take 1. [plays guitar, stops abruptly] Oh wait a minute— take 2. [plays again, stops]. Ha ha, take 3…
AUDIO: “Weather Report Suite Prelude” [Ace demos] (0:00-0:15)
JESSE: Not an easy madrigal, apparently. Bits of the “Weather Report Suite Prelude,” recorded in 1973 for Wake of the Flood, had been floating around since early 1969, and would have to continue to float for another year or so. One of the pieces already had a name, and a pretty distinct melody.
“Cassidy”
JOHN PERRY BARLOW [1/72]: Okay, cue in.
BOB WEIR [1/72]: Okay, this here is “Cassidy.”
AUDIO: “Cassidy #2” [Ace demos] (0:00-0:40)
BOB WEIR: It had been around for a while. That song was poppin’ out right when Cassidy Law, my goddaughter, was also poppin’ out. She was busy being born, and so was that song at the same time. So that was in August I think.
JESSE: Cassidy Law was born in August 1970 at the Rukka Rukka Ranch in Nicasio, where Weir was living, just as the Dead were about to start recording American Beauty. He’d been working at it for a while. According to Dennis McNally’s Long Strange Trip, Robert Hunter wrote a set of lyrics for the music, titled “Blood Red Diamonds,” but it didn’t stick. Sometime in ‘71, Barlow tried his own hand at it, but Weir rejected the first results.
AUDIO: “Cassidy #2” [Ace demos] (1:09-1:23)
JESSE: After Weir packed up and headed back to California, Barlow made the connection between Cassidy Law and Neal Cassady, the hero of On the Road, Merry Prankster, and one-time roommate of Bobby’s at 710 Ashbury in the fall of 1967. In 1994, Barlow wrote an illuminative essay titled, “Cassidy’s Tale,” where he describes the sweet and peculiar relationship between Weir and Neal Cassady, nearly 20 years his senior. On February 18th, Barlow received word that his father was dying in Salt Lake City. He ran through his work at the ranch and prepared to drive through the blizzards to see him. He wrote, “Somewhere in there, the words to “Cassidy” arrived, complete and intact. I just found myself singing the song as though I’d known it for years.” It was a rich meditation on Cassidy Law, busy being born, Norman Barlow, busy dying, told through the disembodied voice of Neal Cassady, some flashing spirit of life, connecting them. That same day, back in San Francisco, Weir was recording the instrumental tracks for what was already called “Cassidy.” Barlow would make it back to San Francisco soon.
AUDIO: “Cassidy” [Ace] (1:40-1:53) - [dead.net] [Spotify] [YouTube]
The Adventures of Bobby Ace in Studio C
JESSE: On Valentine’s Day 1972, Bobby Weir oversaw his first session as a bandleader, beginning two weeks in Studio C at Wally Heider’s San Francisco studio, the same comfortable room where the Dead had recorded American Beauty in the summer of 1970.
BOB WEIR: It went by in a blurry, blinding flash. I couldn't afford many sessions, so we packed ‘em to the point where stuff just happened blindingly fast.
JESSE: At the board were Bob Matthews and Betty Cantor, the production team behind Workingman’s Dead, and who would soon help create Europe ‘72. Also, the Grateful Dead were with him.
JOHN PERRY BARLOW [1/86]: It ended up being their studio album for that year, but that certainly wasn’t the way it was approached in his mind. That was what made all the difference. It became that later on, that’s all.
JESSE: Originally, Weir hadn’t planned to use the Dead as his band, but he hadn’t really made any plans at all. Later that summer, he told Crawdaddy, “I pretty much knew in the back of my mind what would happen. I go and get the time booked and start putting the material together. Everybody gets wind of the fact I got the time booked, and I may be going into the studio. So, one by one, they start coming around, Lesh and Garcia, ‘Hey, man, I hear you got some time booked at Wally Heider’s. Need a bass player? A guitarist? etc., etc.’ It’s kinda like the Tom Sawyer routine with the fence. And I say, ‘Wel-l-l, I wanna be careful and get just the right musicians for the record, you know.’ Of course, I ended up with the Grateful Dead on the record, which I figured upfront. I don’t have any reason to believe anybody else thought it’d be any different. And we had a great time making the record.”
BOB WEIR: The guys played wonderful lines and all the instruments really knitted together pretty well. Everyone was listening to each other, you could hear that.
JESSE: It certainly helped that his bandmates had already played half of the songs in concert. But the sessions began with one they hadn’t.
AUDIO: “Black-Throated Wind” [Ace] (0:00-0:26) - [dead.net] [Spotify] [YouTube]
JESSE: If they’d had time to rehearse “Black-Throated Wind,” it was only a few days, and before the song was entirely finished. Barlow had finished the lyrics in time for the vocal overdubs, but he was still in Wyoming when the sessions started. Weir would never be entirely happy with the results, and the song disappeared when the band took their road hiatus in late 1974. It would only reappear with the Dead a decade-and-a-half later.
After the basic tracks for “Black-Throated Wind,” the band continued with some of the songs they were already familiar with, including one that had been released on a Dead album less than six months before.
AUDIO: “Playing in the Band” [Ace] (0:00-0:30) - [dead.net] [Spotify] [YouTube]
JESSE: “Playing in the Band” had kept a fairly static arrangement during its early performances, documented on Skull & Roses. But in the fall ‘71, after that album was already out, the band dropped in an extended guitar break that quickly became more of a jam.
AUDIO: “Playing in the Band” [Listen To the River, 12/10/71] (3:27-3:57) - [dead.net] [Spotify] [YouTube]
JESSE: Damn, Keith. That was from December 10th, 1971 at the Fox Theater in St. Louis, on the Listen to the River box set. It wasn’t a very long jam, but it was pretty sweet. And when the Dead assembled at Wally Heider’s in February, it did something that Grateful Dead songs don’t usually do in a recording studio — it got even longer. And not only longer, but one of the most thrilling jams the Dead ever played in a studio, setting off all their fireworks in rapid succession.
AUDIO: “Playing in the Band” [Ace] (4:39-5:09) - [dead.net] [Spotify] [YouTube]
BOB WEIR: It's in 10/4 time, which nobody in that ensemble had a chance to play with until we got there. The fact that the whole jam remained in the 10/4 time signature, that’s I think quite an accomplishment for a bunch of young musicians.
AUDIO: “Playing in the Band” [Ace] (6:25-6:55) - [dead.net] [Spotify] [YouTube]
JESSE: The Ace session unlocked what would become one of the Dead’s biggest jams. The take on Ace was barely 7-and-a-half minutes, longer than any version the band had yet played onstage. By the end of 1972, it was regularly between 20 and 30 minutes a night. For the next seven years especially, the song was a portal to strange places, the band dropping decisively into the Dorian mode at the start of the jam. When Brent Mydland joined in 1979, the arrangement changed slightly, with less of an emphasis on the far-off places, though it still remained one of the band’s most dependable springboards for the duration of their career. There are versions they still haven’t finished. The one on Ace also featured the newest member of the Grateful Dead.
AUDIO: “Playing in the Band” [Ace] (1:59-2:09) - [dead.net] [Spotify] [YouTube]
JESSE: Keith Godchaux had joined the Dead in September 1971, and Ace was his first time in the studio with the band, and really his first time recording in a studio period. Donna Godchaux on the other hand, had logged at least as many studio hours as anybody in the Dead. She’d sung with the band briefly at Winterland over New Year’s, but the studio was her natural home, and Ace was when she really joined the band. We talked extensively to Donna for an episode all about her last fall, and one thing we learned was that, until the Ace sessions, nobody had ever called her Donna Jean.
DONNA JEAN GODCHAUX-MACKAY: It was a kind of preemptive thing of getting me involved more specifically in singing with the Grateful Dead. That's when Bobby first coined calling me Donna Jean. Here I was, born in the South and lived here all my life, and I was never called
Donna Jean. It was just Donna. You hear the cliche of people down here — Billy Bob, Peggy Sue and all of that. I was never called Donna Jean. And Bobby started calling me Donna Jean, and so it's all his fault. That was old Ace, that was old Ace.
BOB WEIR: In the country aesthetic, there's a sort of formality that occurs. You hear it in the South a lot — people address other people with their middle name and stuff like that. And Donna Jean was… I guess maybe I hung that on her. I didn't know that.
DONNA JEAN GODCHAUX-MACKAY: To this day, Bobby is one of my best friends. I love that guy. We're brothers and sisters.
JESSE: Donna would appear on four of the album’s songs, including the opener, “Greatest Story Ever Told.”
AUDIO: “Greatest Story Ever Told” [Ace] (0:50-1:02) - [dead.net] [Spotify] [YouTube]
JESSE: The bridge was a new addition since the early versions of the tune the previous spring. It had come a long way since its “Pump Song” origins. For starters, the herky-jerky rhythm of the water pump from Mickey’s barn had been smoothed over with a relentless Gang of One groove by Bill Kreutzmann, and a pump of a different kind — Garcia’s boot on a wah-wah pedal. AUDIO: “Greatest Story Ever Told” [Ace] (1:24-1:47) - [dead.net] [Spotify] [YouTube]
JESSE: The song featured a subtly augmented Grateful Dead lineup with the same bassist who’d also appeared on American Beauty’s opening track – Dave Torbert of the New Riders of the Purple Sage. The new arrangement would quickly become a barn burner for the Dead, powered by what some tape traders refer to as the “St. Stephen” jam. Here’s a gnarly version recorded at the Stanley Theater in Jersey City on September 27, 1972, now Dick’s Picks 11.
AUDIO: “Greatest Story Ever Told” [Dick’s Picks 11, 9/27/72] (3:45-4:15) - [Spotify] [YouTube]
JESSE: Ask a tapester about the next night. In the ‘80s, the song became a power jam of a different kind, even more worlds removed from Mickey’s pump in Novato. Here’s one from July 1989, Truckin’ Up to Buffalo.
AUDIO: “Greatest Story Ever Told” [Truckin’ Up to Buffalo, 7/4/89] (0:42-1:07) - [Spotify] [YouTube]
JESSE: We’ll catch up with “Greatest Story Ever Told” again momentarily. As with the Dead’s work on their previous studio album at Wally Heider’s, Ace was a chance to try things out that wouldn’t necessarily work in a live setting. Weir called in a small horn section, credited as Luis Gasca and the Space Rangers, featuring Gasca and Snooky Flowers, his bandmate in Janis
Joplin’s Kozmic Blues Band. At the end of the sessions, they overdubbed horn parts onto
“Mexicali Blues,” “One More Saturday Night,” and “Black-Throated Wind.”
AUDIO: “Black-Throated Wind” [Ace] (1:36-2:03) - [dead.net] [Spotify] [YouTube]
JESSE: The studio version of “Looks Like Rain” featured the song’s lovely early arrangement with Jerry Garcia on pedal steel.
AUDIO: “Looks Like Rain” [Ace] (0:30-0:57) - [dead.net] [Spotify] [YouTube]
JESSE: They could do that part live. But it also featured Bobby Weir’s first encounter with a string section, an unnamed ensemble arranged by Ed Bogas.
AUDIO: “Looks Like Rain” [Ace] (5:12-5:39) - [dead.net] [Spotify] [YouTube]
BOB WEIR: I remember the guy who did the string arrangement. I brought him in and he got a little too busy for me, so I had to lose some of the stuff he did. Really, listening back to it, I think I just had it in my head that this song needs strings. If I had really bothered to take the time to listen to what Jerry was doing on the pedal steel, it didn't need strings because he was doing that – he was covering the sustain. But I was young and brash and I wanted strings and, by god, I was going to have strings.
AUDIO: “Looks Like Rain” [Ace] (5:40-6:10) - [dead.net] [Spotify] [YouTube]
JESSE: That’s what it sounded like with strings. Here’s what the slightly dialed down new mix sounds like.
AUDIO: “Looks Like Rain” (2023 mix) [Ace 50] (5:40-6:10) - [dead.net]
JESSE: The pedal steel would only last 10 versions with the Dead before somebody, most likely Jerry Garcia himself, decided it was a pain to lug and tune a pedal steel just to play it on one song a night. I like the window where Phil Lesh sang the harmony part, officially the first arrangement tweak to the just-recorded album, like this version from Dick’s Picks 30, the last night in New York before heading off to Europe ‘72, which also has Pigpen on B3.
AUDIO: “Looks Like Rain” [Dick’s Picks 30, 3/28/72] (1:52-2:23) - [Spotify] [YouTube]
JESSE: Even if the subsequent versions lacked all the extra strings, the song would evolve a different kind of drama, by the late ‘80s summoning up raging storms, a place for a powerful big venue Garcia shred, and for Weir to extend the ending. Our buddy Mr. Completely calls out a musical development we missed on the In and Out of the Garden box set episodes, which we’ll place here, specifically that—between 1981 and 1982—Garcia refined and articulated the cool countermelody that became a hallmark of the song’s vocal outro. Here it is from Madison Square Garden, September 21st, 1982, the song coming into even more focus 10 years after it was written.
AUDIO: “Looks Like Rain” [In and Out of the Garden, 9/21/82] (6:53-7:22) - [dead.net]
JESSE: There were at least two songs that had never been performed beginning to end before the Ace sessions, each having the words added in the studio, with Weir singing off the lyric sheet. One would become an enduring classic for the Dead. Let’s start with the other.
“Walk in the Sunshine”
AUDIO: “Walk in the Sunshine” [Ace] (0:00-0:23) - [dead.net] [Spotify] [YouTube]
JESSE: For the next bit of storytelling about the song that we now know as “Walk in the Sunshine,” we’re going to alternate between a tale Weir told at the first of the two Ace 50 shows in New York and a version told by lyricist John Perry Barlow to David Gans on KFOG in 1986.
BOB WEIR [4/2/22]: We're gonna bring out another guest, but first, I’ve gotta tell you all the story. It's not a happy story, it's not a sad story, but it is a weird story.
JOHN PERRY BARLOW [1/86]: At the time, we were under duress, we were already in the studio, and Weir and I had been battling over this song, and my father died the night before that was written, and I had to write the song and get back, for obvious reasons.
BOB WEIR [4/2/22]: When we were making the Ace record, it came down to—as always does—it came down to the last night before the last day of sessions that I had at Wally Heider’s studio in San Francisco. I had a one day session left, we had been there for a week or so, maybe two, I don’t remember. But we had one day left, and we had a bunch of vocals to do. And I still had to finish the lyrics on this one that we still call the “C Shuffle.”
BOB WEIR [1/72]: This is the “C Shuffle.”
AUDIO: “C Shuffle #2” [Ace demos] (0:00-0:20)
BOB WEIR [4/2/22]: And… I also had to get a night's sleep. So I was working with my old pal John Barlow on the lyrics. I said, “Hey, John, I'm gonna go, I gotta go to bed. I gotta be fresh in the morning, I gotta be able to sing.” “No problem, I’ll finish the… me and Frankie”—Frankie was my girlfriend at the time—”We’ll stay up and we’ll finish those lyrics for it. No problem.”
JESSE: Norman Barlow, John Perry’s father, died on February 24th, 1972 at age 66. His son needed to return to Wyoming.
JOHN PERRY BARLOW [1/86]: I was feeling especially burnt out, and I wrote the first thing that came into my head, and it was just terrible. It was straight out of a greeting card, sort of a hip cosmic greeting card.
DAVID GANS [1/86]: “Go placidly amid the noise and haste . . . . ”
JOHN PERRY BARLOW [1/86]: Yeah, right. Well, Desiderata did it a lot better. It was painfully obvious it was like [a] 14-year-old’s very earnest poetry. But it was all I could come up with. I was just shell-shocked. So I figured that the only way that I could get Weir to do it so I could get out of the way, whatever the consequences, was to write something that was really twisted and perverse that would make the sunny sentiments of “Walk in the Sunshine” seem much more palatable, and then he’d agree to do it, and then I could leave. So I wrote a song called “The Dwarf.”
JESSE: It began with the immortal couplet, “I’m just a small man, I’m not a tall man.”
BOB WEIR [4/2/22]: John had been reading a book called The Dwarf, and he wrote a dark set of lyrics — I mean, we're talking dark.
JOHN PERRY BARLOW [1/86]: Based on the Par Lagerkvist novel about a very twisted little man able to manipulate everybody in power around him. It’s kind of a great song, now I see, but I figured if I gave Weir this twisted song it would work. The pity was that I didn’t throw away “Walk in the Sunshine” and just give him “The Dwarf” and let the devil take the hindmost. That’s what I should have done. [laughs]
BOB WEIR [4/2/22]: And he knew damn well that there's no way that… I was 20 something, in my early 20s, and it was still sort of the flower child era. I just wasn't gonna sing those lyrics and he knew that — he just wrote them because he wanted to. Then he wrote another set of lyrics, and he says, “Work over these.” They’re sort of hippie-dippie, and I think I sang ‘em one time in the studio, just straight through.
AUDIO: “Walk in the Sunshine” [Ace] (0:40-1:10) - [dead.net] [Spotify] [YouTube]
BOB WEIR [4/2/22]: And as I recall, you can actually hear on the studio recording that my voice is starting to go with it, at the end of the song. And that was it, I was done singing for the day and for the project.
AUDIO: “Walk in the Sunshine” [Ace] (2:21-2:51) - [dead.net] [Spotify] [YouTube]
JOHN PERRY BARLOW [1/86]: That’s the worst song we ever wrote.
BOB WEIR: I didn't like “Walk in the Sunshine,” and I still don't like the name. That part of the song is a little too hippie-dippie for this boy.
JESSE: The Dead never even played it, though if you squint your ears at the off-mic between-song chatter on the March 22nd, 1972 show, just a few weeks later, you can actually hear Phil Lesh suggest it off-mic. That left one more song to tie up.
AUDIO: “Cassidy” [Ace] (0:00-0:19) - [dead.net] [Spotify] [YouTube]
JESSE: Around the time the album came out, Weir told Crawdaddy, “‘Cassidy’ fell together fast. It was the last song we did in the studio.” Earlier in the sessions, Weir recorded a basic track with just his guitar and Bill Kreutzmann’s drums, reminiscent of Jerry Garcia’s strategy for his own debut. “That night I overdubbed a couple of rhythm guitar tracks and a lead track, and threw them all together to make this sort of lush, a bit out of tune, sort of angular sound I wanted.” He told the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, “the guitars aren’t quite in tune and I feel they really shouldn’t be.” But besides Kreutzmann, it’s all Weir, with no additional piano or bass.
AUDIO: “Cassidy” [Ace] (2:13-2:43) - [dead.net] [Spotify] [YouTube]
JESSE: As the sessions were getting going, Barlow showed up with a sheet of lyrics. Weir remembered that, “I just looked at the words and said ‘Beautiful.’ Thought it was just dynamite and just right. And they were. I just folded (the paper) up, put it in my pocket, and didn’t even attempt to make sure that the words coincided with my melody line.” It helped that he had given Barlow such a tightly phrased demo for the song.
AUDIO: “Cassidy #2” [Ace demos] (1:39-1:53)
JESSE: Weir worked out a vocal arrangement with the newly re-named Donna Jean, and off they went.
AUDIO: “Cassidy” [Ace] (1:43-2:12) - [dead.net] [Spotify] [YouTube]
JESSE: Crawdaddy writer Andy McKale observed that it was odd that “One More Saturday Night” usually closed Dead shows, but it was “Cassidy” that closed Ace. Weir told him, “it seems that after ‘One More Saturday Night,’ you’re all jacked up. At least, ‘One More Saturday Night’ jacks me up. And if you’re all filled up with energy, it seems a nice gesture to me – not to sedate that energy but more to put a finishing touch on it. In my opinion, ‘Cassidy’ is a much more polished song. At least, the vibes I’m trying to put out…the picture I’m trying to paint is a much more mellow sort of thing…which is not to say lazy, laid-back, slow or down, cause it’s a very up song to me.”
AUDIO: “Cassidy” [Ace] (2:56-3:26) - [dead.net] [Spotify] [YouTube]
JESSE: In some ways, it was like “Walk in the Sunshine.” It didn’t make it into the Dead sets in 1972. In fact, it wouldn’t receive its debut for another two years, the so-called Wall of Sound Test at the Cow Palace on March 23rd, 1974, released as Dick’s Picks 24.
AUDIO: “Cassidy” [Dick’s Picks 24, 3/23/74] (0:20-0:50) - [Spotify] [YouTube]
JESSE: But it would take another three years after that until “Cassidy” truly found its home in the Dead’s repertoire, re-debuting in June 1976 and remaining an anchor in Weir’s songbook ever since. In 1980, the Dead would create an acoustic arrangement, releasing it on Reckoning the following year.
AUDIO: “Cassidy” [Reckoning] (1:10-1:36) - [Spotify] [YouTube]
JESSE: And by the mid-’80s, the intimate album closer had become a jumping point for full-powered Grateful Dead thunder that sometimes made a run for more open territory, like this righteous version from View from the Vault IV, recorded July 24, 1987 in Oakland.
AUDIO: “Cassidy” [View from the Vault IV, 7/24/87] (4:20-4:50)
JESSE: Ace was mixed at Alembic in early March, just before the Dead departed for points east and then easterly on their Europe ‘72 tour. Cover art was assigned to and created by Stanley Mouse and Alton Kelley, operating just across San Rafael from the Dead office, extrapolating the Ace motif into a low-brow psychedelic playing card fantasia. The Ace version of “One More Saturday Night” was pulled to be the Dead’s new single for the tour, and they promoted it overseas on West German & Danish television, Luxembourgian pirate radio, and elsewhere, playing it so often that they included a version from the last night of the tour on the subsequent Europe ‘72 album. In the studio getting it ready for release, they added new answer vocals.
AUDIO: “One More Saturday Night” [Europe ‘72] (3:23-3:45) - [dead.net] [Spotify] [YouTube]
Life After Ace-Time
JESSE: As we’ve discussed before on this podcast, album release dates in the late ‘60s and early ‘70s were slippery things. and it seems like Ace arrived in stores around the country in mid-June 1972, just after the Dead returned from Europe. It received warm reviews. Robert Christgau was into it, mostly. “Side Two is pretty fantastic,” he wrote in his Consumer Guide. “Especially the big ballad ‘Looks Like Rain,’ and Weir’s own rockabilly epiphany, ‘One More Saturday Night’--and new pianist Keith Godchaux sounds like a cross between Little Richard and Chick Corea, which would make him the best ever.” He had some unkind things to say about “Walk in the Sunshine” but apparently so does everybody, and still gave the album a solid A. Here’s John Perry Barlow speaking with David Gans in 1986.
JOHN PERRY BARLOW [1/86]: He hadn't been writing songs before that. Neither had I. That record has aged very well too. I don't look back at those songs with the usual degree of remorse.
JESSE: In late June, Weir headed east on a brief promotional tour for the album, no musical performances, stopping in St. Louis, Boston, New York, and perhaps elsewhere. He told Crawdaddy that Dead would “like to rehearse a brass section and maybe even a string section and do a tour like that. We’ve kicked the idea around, but we’re nowhere near doing it yet.” They’d do a run with a horn section the following fall. The strings would have to wait. Cue the brass and strings, please.
AUDIO: “Playing in the Band” [Ace 50, 4/3/22] (0:01-0:26) - [dead.net]
JESSE: That was “Playing in the Band” from the bonus disc to the new Ace 50 album, with a complete performance of Ace recorded at Radio City Music Hall in April 2022. Weir teamed up with the Marin Symphony Orchestra for a performance in 2011, but it wasn’t until late 2020 that Weir really got brass and strings of his own.
AUDIO: “Cassidy” [Ace 50, 4/3/22] (3:50-4:20) - [dead.net]
BOB WEIR: We got strings and we got wind instruments.
JESSE: The expanded Wolfpack debuted on New Year’s Eve 2020 at Weir’s TRI Studios, a combination horn and string section, creating perhaps the richest palette Weir has ever had in his command as a bandleader, releasing a two-volume Live From Colorado album on Third Man. We’ll be exploring more of the Wolfpack in our next episode. At Radio City, they put their mark on the Ace songs. That’s Barry Sless on pedal steel.
AUDIO: “One More Saturday Night” [Ace 50, 4/3/22] (3:17-3:44) - [dead.net]
JESSE: “One More Saturday Night” wasn’t even the first song to continue its own organic evolution since the completion of Ace. That was “Looks Like Rain,” first getting a new harmony vocal in the spring and, over the summer, losing the pedal steel, though it wouldn’t really move into the Dead repertoire until early ‘73. For most artists, the notion of revisiting one of their own classic albums straight through is often synonymous with recreating the details of the original album. Nothing about Ace 50 has been that, which shouldn’t really be a surprise. Virtually none of the songs have stopped changing since 1972. We’ll delve into one of the more extreme examples.
AUDIO: “Black-Throated Wind” [Spring 1990, 3/26/90] (1:44-2:07)
JESSE: That’s from March 26th, 1990 in Albany, on the Spring 1990 box. That tour, Weir debuted a pretty drastically rewritten version of “Black-Throated Wind.”
BOB WEIR: If I came up with some new lyrics, I can't remember what they were.
AUDIO: “Black-Throated Wind” [Spring 1990, 3/26/90] (2:09-2:32)
BOB WEIR: I'm gonna have to look into that. You've piqued my curiosity.
JESSE: Sir Alex Allan of Whitegum has posted his transcriptions. Check them out on the Spring 1990 box set. In 1989, Bobby talked to our buddy Blair Jackson about what he didn’t like about “Black-Throated Wind.” Bobby told Blair, “The character in that particular tale is not somebody I can get behind. It’s always been a poor fit for me. There’s stuff in there I just didn’t want to be singing; that seem like words to fill out a melody rather than something I really cared about, and that finally got in the way. I’ve always felt like the words I was singing in some specific places–I won’t list them–were like wearing lead shoes in a track race. I couldn’t carry those words through the melodic and harmonic changes that the rest of the song had suggested to me. So it needs some adjusting.” A few months later, Weir adjusted it.
AUDIO: “Black-Throated Wind” [Spring 1990, 3/26/90] (4:03-4:33)
JESSE: The new lyrics wouldn’t stick. Instead, after not too long, the song went full circle back to its original words, which is how it stayed through 1995 and beyond. The new lyrics became just another part of the song’s history, something else to check out on the old tapes. Or you could just check out the new tapes, by which of course I mean Ace 50.
AUDIO: “Black-Throated Wind” [Ace 50, 4/3/22] (5:23-6:02) - [dead.net] [YouTube]
BOB WEIR: Alright, there we are — all good. Most of the songs, almost all of those songs, we played pretty much all the time.
JESSE: From the Wolf Bros, please welcome bassist Don Was.
DON WAS: We were on tour, so we started working them up. Most of them we do, so it wasn't that hard. We'd start throwing in one Ace song every night, to get it tight. So by the time we got to Radio City, we pretty much knew ‘em.
BOB WEIR: The songs were written to sort of evolve. That's kind of how we do things, or how I learn to do things.
JESSE: In fact, part of Ace 50 has been about literally altering the details of the original album.
BOB WEIR: I just remixed the record. More recently, Derek Featherstone and I, mostly Derek, put a more modern sort of mix on it — brought the vocal further up and stuff like that. I’m delighted to say that, for a 20, 21, maybe 22-year old kid, I could hit a note and hang onto it.
AUDIO: “Looks Like Rain” [Ace] (0:29-0:46) - [dead.net] [Spotify] [YouTube]
BOB WEIR: And so a lot of it came back to me in the course of remixing it, a lot of the notes that we went in with and that kind of thing. It was well-recorded. Certain guys in the ensemble tended to rush; I don't do that very often, and so that was sort of pulling at the groove, because I like to sit in the groove — not rush or not drag, just play a little forward, play a little back, all that kind of stuff. Some guys only go forward. And there was a little of that nagging at me.
JESSE: So in addition to remixing the album, Weir got to revisit it, adjust the tempos, and tweak the grooves. Ace 50 isn’t so much a progress report as it is the progress itself. For every song on the album, one could create a title card to shorthand what it’s been up to since 1972, like at the end of Animal House. Calling an album an “album” is an archaic leftover from the days of 78 rpm shellac discs, when music fans kept their collections in albums filled with slots for different records. Grateful Dead albums, and Ace especially, might be considered with this very much in mind, capable of accumulating new memories and perspectives over the years, with the original only a placeholder for the ideas as they once stood. The shows at Radio City were just as much as a showcase for Weir’s new band as it was a celebration of Ace.
DON WAS: On this reissue of Ace, at least some versions will have the live show from Radio City. One of the things we did in the mixing was to move Bobby’s guitar and Barry’s guitar to the center, so it’s one thing. And then you really get the interplay, and it becomes this whole other thing. It’s guitar weaving is what it is. That’s what Keith Richards and Ronnie [Wood] would talk about all the time — when you listen to “Beast of Burden,” you don’t necessarily know who’s playing what. You just hear the thing, the end result. It was the same with Jerry and Bobby, but it’s going on with Barry and Bobby too. By putting them together, it can really emphasize that. It’s real cool.
AUDIO: “Looks Like Rain” [Ace 50, 4/3/22] (3:56-4:26) - [dead.net]
JESSE: At the Ace 50 shows, Weir didn’t even sing its opening song.
AUDIO: “Greatest Story Ever Told” (feat. Tyler Childers) [Ace 50, 4/3/22] (0:50-1:21) [dead.net]
JESSE: That was Nashville musician Tyler Childers, a recent friend of Weir’s, born nearly 20 years after Ace’s release, and singing into the future.
DON WAS: I was really impressed with Tyler Childers, man. I thought he came in and he’s a very interesting guy. I played with him one time at the Americana Music Awards years ago, but I didn't fully understand his breadth as an artist. He's studying tanning leather, and he's got a working farm that he owns and lives on. So he's got some interests that are not that usual among lead singers. And I thought, when I heard the recordings back, that he sang the fuck out of the songs. He sounded great.
AUDIO: “Greatest Story Ever Told” (feat. Tyler Childers) [Ace 50, 4/3/22] (1:51-2:04) - [dead.net]
JESSE: Just like the songs can become reflections of constant change through the variables in their performances, they’ve also surely accreted a half-century of memories for Dead fans through decades of live shows and live tapes. “Walk in the Sunshine” by comparison is a blank slate.
AUDIO: “Walk in the Sunshine” (feat. Brittney Spencer) [Ace 50, 4/3/22] (0:46-1:03) - [dead.net]
JESSE: That was Brittney Spencer joining Bobby Weir and the gang for “Walk in the Sunshine” at the Ace 50 shows, a 50-year old song living—for four more minutes—nowhere near the past. It’s almost surely the only song in the set that Weir couldn’t sing in his sleep. It’s not a Grateful Dead song, just a piece of music from a half-century old album turned to a his/hers duet and airdropped into the weird year of 2022 with barely a carry-on.
AUDIO: “Walk in the Sunshine” (feat. Brittney Spencer) [Ace 50, 4/3/22] (3:20-3:55) - [dead.net]
JESSE: Ace was Weir’s solo debut, and though everybody involved considers it a Dead album, it also exists in a liminal space outside the band’s proper discography, the result of a subtly different decision-making and even legal process. Maybe because of this, it’s as unselfconscious and natural as the Grateful Dead ever sounded in a recording studio, tricked into being somebody else for a few weeks. Approached from another angle: Ace is one of the late period classics recorded during the golden age of Wally Heider’s San Francisco studio by a promising 24-year-old songwriter and some of the hottest talents on the local music scene, happy to lend their friend a hand as he got out into the world. They also happened to be his bandmates. What Ace presupposes is, what if they weren’t?
AUDIO: “Cassidy” [Ace] (3:10-3:42) - [dead.net] [Spotify] [YouTube]