Good Ol’ Grateful Deadcast
Season 1, Episode 1
Workingman’s Dead 50: Uncle John’s Band
Archival interviews:
- Jerry Garcia & Joe Smith, Off the Record, 5/23/88.
JESSE: Let’s start with a word from Jerry Garcia, from a 1988 interview conducted by Joe Smith, the beloved Warner Bros. executive who signed the Grateful Dead to the label. This interview is now part of the Library of Congress’s collection.
JERRY GARCIA [5/23/88]: 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. 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. Iit really did, it worked out great.
JESSE: Workingman’s Dead is often called “a return to the basics” or some such, usually in comparison with the screaming psychedelic peaks and Martian valleys of the Dead’s two albums from the year before, Live/Dead and Aoxomoxoa.
RICH MAHAN: Gary Lambert.
GARY LAMBERT: They started introducing some of those country songs in early or mid 1969. Jerry Garcia trotted out a pedal steel guitar on stage with the Grateful Dead, and they were doing old country standards like “Green Green Grass of Home,” or “Silver Threads and Golden Needles.” Now, if you were used to the Grateful Dead being the most anarchic, psychedelic, weird-sounding band in the world, that could be a shock to the system, even in 1969.
One of my favorite stories comes from my third and fourth Grateful Dead shows at the Fillmore East, on June 21st of 1969. They opened the first show with “Green Green Grass of Home,” a beautiful whining pedal steel, sad. And they played a few more country tunes in the course of those two shows in one night at Fillmore East. And late in the second show, I think it was, there was another country song they were playing, and I saw a guy stalking toward the exit, obviously wildly psychedelicized — maybe he had timed his dose to “Dark Star” or something like that. And they’re playing yet another country song. And this guy’s headed for the exit, saying: “They’re turning into a bunch of goddamn cowboys!” But there was some pushback to that from the more psychedelic fans, because there was kind of a divide in the country between the hippies and who the hippies would derisively call the rednecks. So I do remember some of my friends being a little dismayed by this. But then, when it fully flowered, when the Dead came into their own as songwriters and guys who could sing really sweet harmonies and all of that, I hope all was forgiven.
JESSE: But while it’s true that all eight songs on Workingman’s Dead have deep connections to the band’s roots, and the album was mostly made by the musicians performing live in the same room with an emphasis on acoustic guitars and what Garcia called “wooden music,” the songs themselves were also anything but unambitious. And, as we’ll see, it took a lot of weirdness to arrive back at the Grateful Dead’s version of the basics. In their own ways, each track on Workingman’s Dead is still radical and surprising, even 50 years later.
To tell the story of Workingman’s Dead, we have the album’s co-producer, Bob Matthews. But Bob Matthews didn’t just help make Workingman’s Dead happen, he helped make the Grateful Dead themselves happen. As a teenage banjo student of Jerry Garcia and close school buddies with Bob Weir, it was Matthews who introduced the two future Dead guitarists, and would soon become a co-founder of the original Mother McCree’s Uptown Jug Champions. That barely scratches the surface of Bob’s CV with the Dead though. By a half-decade later, in 1969, he and his girlfriend Betty Cantor had become the Grateful Dead’s in-house audio engineers, with production credits on both Aoxomoxoa, released that June, and Live/Dead, released on Bob Matthews’s 22nd birthday, in November 8th, 1969.
AUDIO: “St. Stephen” [Aoxomoxoa] (0:35-0:50) - [dead.net] [Spotify] [YouTube]
BOB MATTHEWS: Let's go back to an album that everybody always wondered: where the heck did that name come from? Aoxomoxoa. Aoxomoxoa was the first album where we— that is to say, the band members and myself as the equipment manager, who wanted to become an engineer—worked in an independent studio for real cheap and recorded Aoxomoxoa–first time– over a six-month period, utilizing one-inch 8-track. We learned a whole bunch of things. Mostly, what we learned was what not to do, and that had to do with what not to do aesthetically, as far as the music. You don't want to go in and beat the music like a dead horse; you want to perform, to present the music in its most artistic manifestation. So, Aoxomoxoa got made twice. By the end of the 16-track version of it, us on the production end of it and the performing end of it had no interest in it. It had lost all of its energy and excitement long ago.
We removed all of its magic — we did it so much. We tried different versions of, “Oh, this might be neat.” We’d spend three days trying to get the ringing of a telephone down the hallway of the studio to sound just right. So, upon starting the thought of Workingman’s Dead, my approach and suggestion to the band members was: we're not going to go in and push ‘record’ on the 16-track to record the album itself until we have understood and come up with an agreed arrangement, a plan, of not only how the song itself was to be arranged, and who had what parts, who sang, etc, etc. But we rehearsed it. We created the concept of the album before we recorded it.
What I suggested was that we go into Pacific High Recording for two days. We set the band up and we recorded the tunes that [Robert] Hunter and Jerry and Pig [Pen] were proposing for this product. We went through and we did an acceptable performance of each of these songs — acceptable as far as we didn't make any musical blunders, but we represented the concept and the feeling, musically and artistically. So we ended up with two sides of an album, recorded in stereo. We spent those two days — actually, we spent the first day recording all of the tunes in stereo. And we came back in the next day, and not all the band members were there. It was mainly myself, Betty, Jerry and Phil, I think. What we did was we took all of the stereo tracks that were on 1/4-inch tape on two reels. And we started from the beginning. We said, “Okay, what song do we want? What song makes the most sense to start?” And that was “Uncle John’s Band.”
JESSE: We’ll hear a lot more from Bob later about those demos and many other topics. But first, let’s take this moment to consider that very first song, “Uncle John’s Band.”
Drop the needle on Side A of Workingman’s Dead and the first thing you hear is a simple acoustic guitar strum, timeless and beautiful...
AUDIO: “Uncle John’s Band” [Workingman’s Dead] (0:00-0:07) - [dead.net] [Spotify] [YouTube]
JESSE: But what is “simple,” really? We all have our own definitions, and when Jerry Garcia called the songs on Workingman’s Dead “simple,” his definition was a bit more complex than most. This is what the song that became “Uncle John’s Band” sounded like at first.
AUDIO: “Uncle John’s Band Jam” [Dick’s Picks 16, 11/8/69] - [Spotify] [YouTube]
JESSE: That’s from November 8th, 1969 at the original Fillmore Auditorium in San Francisco, released on Dick’s Picks 16, played inside a completely bananas “Dark Star” sequence that’s definitely worth checking out. Jerry Garcia had been listening to recordings of Eastern European folk songs, he later told Blair Jackson. Specifically, he’d been listening to music by the Bulgarian Women’s Choir and LPs by the Pennywhistlers, a vocal group that specialized in harmonies from around the world.
Here’s how Garcia put it: “On one of those records there was a song that featured this little turn of melody that was so lovely that I thought, ‘Gee, if I could get this into a song it would be so great.’ So I stole it… Actually, I only took a little piece of the melody, so I can’t say I plagiarized the whole thing. Of course it became so transmogrified when Bob and Phil added their harmony parts to it that it really was no longer the part of the song that was special for me. That was that melodic kicker originally though.”
But what I want to know is — what was that song, though?
Recently, along with my colleague Light Into Ashes, proprietor of a great blog called the Grateful Dead Guide, we tried to find out. We sifted through a handful of likely albums and candidates, and Light Into Ashes found this contender.
AUDIO: “Shto Mi E Milo” [The Pennywhistlers, Folksongs of Eastern Europe] (0:00-0:25) - [YouTube]
JESSE: That was “Shto Mi E Milo” from The Pennywhistlers’ Nonesuch album, Folksongs of Eastern Europe. If you head over to YouTube, you can see them perform it on Pete Seeger’s television show Rainbow Quest in 1966. The song title translates from Bulgarian to “I Will Be Glad.”
Is that what Jerry Garcia was hearing when he wrote “Uncle John’s Band”? It’s certainly not the definitive answer, but if you’ve got an alternate proposal, we’d love to hear it. After locking into Garcia’s new melody, the band recorded a tape of themselves for lyricist Robert Hunter, playing the instrumental theme over and over again.
“I kept hearing the words, ‘god damn Uncle John’s mad,’” Robert Hunter said later. Until, all of a sudden, he didn’t. The words for “Uncle John’s Band,” written in the late fall of 1969, were a powerful new mission statement for the Grateful Dead. Though their folk influences could be found just below the psychedelic surface of their earlier albums, “Uncle John’s Band” made clear that this was a whole new Dead, filled with sweet melodies and panoramic lyrics packed with allusions to American music both old and new, connecting the Dead to an American heritage, a bold present, and weird future. So who was “Uncle John”?
RICH MAHAN: Gary Lambert.
GARY LAMBERT: One of the great things about the meanings of Hunter’s songs is that he refused to impose meaning on them. People could take from them what they wanted. And, of course, Hunter would be famously evasive. There's a hilarious place where someone asked him what “Uncle John's Band” meant, and he said it was about a guy who owned a flea circus. He was completely spitballing, and completely making it up on the fly. People have always talked about “who was Uncle John?” There are several answers and they're probably all valid.
AUDIO: “Buckdancer’s Choice” [John Cohen, Stories The Crow Told Me] (0:00-0:30) - [Spotify]
JESSE: That was the late John Cohen, there playing the traditional fiddle tune, “Buckdancer’s Choice,” from the wonderful 1998 Acoustic Disc album, Stories The Crow Told Me. If you’re looking for an actual person named John who might’ve been the inspiration for Uncle John, John Cohen might well be it, and you could do a lot worse for a folk hero.
Sometimes known in folk music circles as Uncle John Cohen, Cohen was a co-founder of the New Lost City Ramblers, one of the most pivotal bands of the folk revival of the late ‘50s and early ‘60s — and a profound influence on a young Jerry Garcia and Robert Hunter. Arguably the first group to revive old-time music without spiffing it up into folk-pop, the Ramblers weren’t only musicians, but scholars, tracking down forgotten performers and bringing them to new audiences. A not-insignificant number of the songs in Jerry Garcia’s various acoustic repertoires made their way there via the New Lost City Ramblers, and both Garcia and Robert Hunter crossed paths with the Ramblers themselves during their days traveling the folkways. In an exchange with David Dodd, author of The Complete Annotated Grateful Dead Lyrics, Robert Hunter said that the idea that Uncle John came from John Cohen was “right on the money.”
But “Uncle John” wasn’t any one person, with many threads of culture woven into the song’s fabric.
When I was researching this episode, though, I came across another reference that seemed to resonate directly with “Uncle John’s Band.” This is from the memoir of Jelly Roll Morton, the pioneer jazz pianist from New Orleans, speaking in 1939 about one of the great mythical figures of jazz history, Buddy Bolden.
“Buddy Bolden was the most powerful trumpet in history,” Morton said. “I remember we’d be hanging around some corner, wouldn’t know that there was going to be a dance out at Lincoln Park. Then we’d hear old Buddy’s trumpet coming on and we’d all start. Any time it was a quiet night at Lincoln Park because maybe the affair hadn’t been so well-publicized, Buddy Bolden would publicize it! He’d turn his big trumpet around toward the city and blow his blues, calling his children home, as he used to say.”
Buddy Bolden wasn’t the first to come to take his children home; the phrase turns up in old spirituals stretching back into the mists. But he might’ve been the first to make it a musical act.
AUDIO: “Uncle John’s Band” [Dave’s Picks 10, 12/12/69] (5:16-5:46)
JESSE: That was a very early version of “Uncle John’s Band,” still carrying traces of its psychedelic birth, recorded at Thelma on LA’s Sunset Strip on December 12th, 1969, a week after the song’s debut. You can hear that version on Dave’s Picks 10.
Along with the mysterious melody, the song divides itself into its own weird time — there are a few bars played in 4/4, followed by one in 3/4, creating the effect of a skipped beat, which continues to make the song slightly trickier for campfire acoustic guitar players the world over. It also features an outro in 7/4, a juxtaposition that sometimes felt like an acceleration when the Dead played it, launching them into fierce outro jams. But it was, as Jerry Garcia said, also a simple song. And, by February 1970, the Dead had started playing it acoustic.
All right, one “simple” song taken care of. Back to album co-producer Bob Matthews.
BOB MATTHEWS: So I put some head leader on it, a little tail leader on it, and we played it. And it was – okay, there's a feeling. Now, what follows after that? What feels right next? What we did was we went through and we came up with the next tune and it fit together. And we spent that day sequencing all the tunes that we had into the beginning of Side 1: the second tune on Side 1, the third tune on Side 1, all the way up to through the last tune on Side 1. So that was then on one 10-inch reel. And we went onto Side 2, and we sequenced it, starting with “Cumberland Blues.” We went onto “New Speedway [Boogie],” I think it was — or “Black Peter.” So we got to “Casey Jones” and it was a perfect finish. But we looked at each other and said, “We've got an extra tune.” And we all sort of, without really discussing it very much said, “Well, we got an extra tune,” and left it at that — which was to say, it was not going on that album. So that's how we ended up with the tunes that were on it and how we ended up with the one tune that didn't make it on.
At the end of the second day, we had created Side 1, Side 2 as masters — that is to say, I had a 10.5-inch reel of Side 1, and a 10.5-inch reel, stereo, that was Side 2. I then copied those two reels to cassettes. Each cassette had Side 1 and Side 2. At the end of the second day, we had made sufficient stereo cassette copies to hand to each band member, with the instructions to go back to Point Reyes, where they were currently rehearsing. The instructions were: “Go rehearse these cassettes, starting with ‘Uncle John’s Band’ and continuing all the way forward to the end of Side 2.” So that after two weeks of recording that, in their minds, they already had the concept of how the album would evolve — where it would start with, how it would finish, basically how it would feel as you listen to it.
When they came back into the studio, I think it was actually almost three weeks later, to record the album, we started right away with “Uncle John's Band.” It took us maybe four or five days of sessions to put down really good basic tracks of all the songs, and we did it in the order that the album occurred.
JESSE: For those keeping score at home, that one extra song was “Mason’s Children,” which we’ll get into a few episodes down the line.
Let’s thread up the first take of “Uncle John’s Band,” heard here through the massive stash of Workingman’s Dead session tapes now known as The Angel’s Share.
JERRY GARCIA [1970]: We have nothing to lose but our lives…
AUDIO: “Uncle John’s Band” ((False Start 1) - Not Slated) [Workingman’s Dead: The Angel’s Share] (0:00-1:04) - [dead.net] [Spotify] [YouTube]
JESSE: Thanks to the incredible detective work of engineer Brian Kehew and archivist Mike Johnson, we now have a new way to listen to Workingman’s Dead. While the surviving tapes don’t include much by way of lost jams, they provide an intimate view into how Workingman’s Dead was constructed, with nearly each scrap of tape revealing something about a song’s arrangement and recording, what was tracked live and what was overdubbed later.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, session reels for the album weren’t always labeled with the utmost clarity. We’ll go for a long dive with Brian and Mike in an upcoming episode, where they explain the detective work they had to go through to identify and rescue The Angel’s Share.
RICH MAHAN: Engineer Brian Kehew.
BRIAN KEHEW: If they did seven or eight or nine tapes of something, until they found they had a good version, they would take the good version, whether it be in the middle or at the end, and cut it out with a razor blade and move it to a different reel of tape. And then you'd end up with a reel of tape that has the finished version of each major song. So they didn't have to shuffle through a bunch of outtakes to try to find the right one, and even maybe confuse themselves as to which was the right one. We chose this one, cut it out now, move it over there to what's called a master reel.
JESSE: Besides the version used on the final album, there’s only one complete take of “Uncle John’s Band.”
AUDIO: “Uncle John’s Band” ((Complete Take) - Not Slated) [Workingman’s Dead: The Angel’s Share] (0:00-0:42) - [dead.net] [Spotify] [YouTube]
JESSE: What we hear on this version of “Uncle John’s Band,” as on the final take, is Jerry Garcia leading off the song and setting the tempo with his guitar in the left channel, with the other musicians following immediately — in this case, Bob Weir, Phil Lesh, and a single drummer playing a hi-hat, snare, and kick. To my ear, it’s almost unquestionably Bill Kreutzmann. What we don’t hear on the basic tracks to “Uncle John’s Band” are Garcia’s lead guitar part, which came overdubbed later. There’s no second percussionist on the basics, either, though—on one of the false starts—we do get Garcia’s concept for the percussion arrangement to come.
AUDIO: “Uncle John’s Band” ((Breakdown) - Not Slated) [Workingman’s Dead: The Angel’s Share] (0:14-0:23) - [dead.net] [Spotify] [YouTube]
JERRY GARCIA [1970]: Claves together with maracas and with a scratcher or something like that, you know, each doing a simple trick. Here we go again?
JESSE: Also obvious is that the vocals weren’t recorded live with this or most songs, which is a normal practice and hardly a surprise, but also a reminder that during all of the instrumental takes, the musicians had to keep track of the song’s different sections in their heads.
AUDIO: “Uncle John’s Band” ((Take 7 Breakdown) - Slated) [Workingman’s Dead: The Angel’s Share] (1:35-1:46) - [dead.net] [Spotify] [YouTube]
BOB WEIR [1970]: Aw...
JERRY GARCIA [1970]: I fucked up, too, I forgot where we were.
JESSE: Part of that, too, involved a cool rhythmic handoff from Kreutzmann back to Garcia, for Garcia to count into the song’s big outro.
AUDIO: “Uncle John’s Band” ((Complete Take) - Not Slated) [Workingman’s Dead: The Angel’s Share] (3:40-4:42) - [dead.net] [Spotify] [YouTube]
JESSE: Now here’s what that same stretch of “Uncle John’s Band” sounds like from the final album, with extra percussion and angelic stacks of layered vocals.
AUDIO: “Uncle John’s Band” [Workingman’s Dead] (3:40-4:20) - [dead.net] [Spotify] [YouTube]
JESSE: “Uncle John’s Band” became the band’s first charting song on the Billboard Top 100, rising—with a bullet—to #69. Nice. But that wasn’t simple, either.
Lyricist Robert Hunter, in a rare fit of extroversion, announced to Warner Brothers that he wanted to do some publicity appearances for the album. It was the dawning age of bootlegs and the label asked him politely not to leak any of the songs by playing them on the air. But, as Hunter later recounted to David Gans, when he got to WBCN in Boston, longtime supporters of the Dead, he couldn’t resist. As Hunter recalled, “The first notes of ‘Uncle John’s Band’ began, and lightning struck the station.”
AUDIO: [thunderbolt cracks]
JESSE: Acts of angry goddesses weren’t the only thing getting in the way of “Uncle John’s Band.” The powerful Metromedia Group, who owned radio stations in the nation’s biggest city, including New York’s influential WNEW-FM, banned the song because of the lyric, “Goddamn, well I declare have you seen the like?” It remains, as they say, an evergreen question. Without the band’s permission, the label even released a version of the song with the offending word edited out.
AUDIO: “Uncle John’s Band” (radio edit) (1:07-1:18)
JESSE: For the Dead and the Dead Heads, “Uncle John’s Band” was an instant favorite, slipping easily into the acoustic performances the band played throughout 1970. And when they were done with those, it slipped right back out into the electric sets, even melting back into psychedelic jam-suites with “Playing in the Band.”
Even more significantly, though, as their first notable single and opening song from their first biggish album, “Uncle John’s Band” was a doorway, inviting new fans, and becoming the Grateful Dead’s entrance point into the world outside their own. It was a beautiful song, performed beautifully, and recorded beautifully. Here’s Grateful Dead archivist David Lemieux.
DAVID LEMIEUX: I remember working on a project with Jeffrey Norman, my longtime producer with the Grateful Dead, he's the audio guy. The album came out and Rolling Stone did their glowing review—they named [Workingman’s Dead] their Album of the Year for 1970—and Jeffrey knew who the Dead were, knew of them and knew their music. So when the review came out, he specifically remembered that the review said that “‘Uncle John's Band’ sounded like 64 vocal tracks layered one on top of another.” And I knew the album, I knew the song, I knew the performance on the album [like the] back of my hand. But when he said that, I started specifically listening to that. And then I found the review in the old 1970 Rolling Stone, and sure enough, that's exactly [it] — he remembered it perfectly.
JESSE: In the July 23rd, 1970 Rolling Stone, Andy Zwerling called “Uncle John’s Band,” “without question, the best recorded track done by this band. Staunch Dead freaks probably will hate this song. It’s done acoustically for a starter. No Garcia leads. No smasho drumming. In fact, it’s got a mariachi/calypso type feeling. . … Near the end of the song there is an a capella section by everyone, sounds like 62 tracks, maybe 63. Just listen to it, and try not to smile.”
That wasn’t the Stone’s only praise for Workingman’s Dead. In December, they printed a letter from their future National Affairs editor, Hunter S. Thompson, who wrote, "If the Grateful Dead came to town, I'd beat my way in with a fucking tire iron, if necessary. I think Workingman's Dead is the heaviest thing since Highway 61 [Revisited] and 'Mr. Tambourine Man' (with the possible exception of the Stones' last two albums...)”
The song became a staple for pretty much the rest of the band’s career, minus a few years in the late ‘70s. When it returned to the Dead’s repertoire in 1979, the gentle acoustic strum was long gone, and the song’s 7/4 outro jam blossomed into an even bigger platform for Jerry Garcia, sometimes sounding not too different from how the song started a decade earlier.
AUDIO: “Uncle John’s Band” [Dick’s Picks 5, 12/26/79] - [Spotify] [YouTube]
RICH MAHAN: Gary Lambert.
GARY LAMBERT: While we talk about the Dead having gotten away from the jam band thing to make these records, let us also interject that some of these songs would grow into great performance pieces, would open up into great jam songs. And “Uncle John’s” certainly had that potential and did do that. “Uncle John’s” was just this lovely revelation of a song. I first heard it I think in January of ‘70 at Fillmore East, and it just took your breath away. It was just such a beautifully crafted, coherent, melodic thing, that nothing in their previous history could have prepared you for. So that was a great way of announcing the intent of this record.
JESSE: A final postscript. When the original draft of the lyrics went up for auction in 2002, eagle-eyed Dead Heads discovered that Robert Hunter wrote several additional verses that didn’t make it into the final song:
Why wait in the dark for dawn [when] the sun’s still going down
Maybe I’ll dust off your chair if you say you’re comin’
Keep your place in line, all things come in time
Whoa-oh, all I need to know, [why] do these coals glow?
Would you carry me uphill back the way I carried you?
Take my further, if you can, [you know] I’d do the same for you
Think this through with me, let me know your mind
Whoa-oh, all I want to know is, will you be kind?
Well now, I can hear the flutter of their wings
Standin' still or run like hell, can you hear the sirens sing?
After that it reads, “come hear UJB, playing to the tide,” with Robert Hunter already using the same abbreviation for the song—UJB—that so many Dead Heads would use on their setlists and tape labels to come.
We’ll leave you with the Stanford Marching Band, from the super-cool Dead tribute album, Stolen Roses, produced by your pal and ours, David Gans.
AUDIO: “Uncle John’s Band” [Stanford Marching Band, Stolen Roses] (0:00-0:45)