Good Ol’ Grateful Deadcast
Season 1, Episode 4
Workingman’s Dead 50: New Speedway Boogie / Mason’s Children
Archival interviews:
- Jerry Garcia, BBC (via Long Strange Trip), 5/70.
JESSE: Closing Side 1 of Workingman’s Dead was yet another song unlike the others. To go along with the vibratory calypso of “Uncle John’s Band,” the tenderness of “High Time” and the doomed fable of the “Dire Wolf,” now there came the dark slink of “New Speedway Boogie.” It was the album’s hardest hitting song yet. The Grateful Dead were notorious for having two drummers, but this boogie didn’t have drums at all. And it was hot off the press.
AUDIO: “New Speedway Boogie” [Workingman’s Dead] (0:00-0:14) - [dead.net] [Spotify] [YouTube]
JESSE: The Grateful Dead appeared at many of the biggest festivals, freak-outs, and happenings of the ‘60s, including the Trips Festival, the Human Be-In, Monterey Pop, and Woodstock, not to mention countless free shows which Dead scholars are still working to identify. One event they didn’t play was the free one-day festival held at a speedway on December 6th, 1969 in Livermore, California, east of San Francisco. But they were supposed to. The concert now known as Altamont wouldn’t have happened without the Grateful Dead.
Headlined by the Rolling Stones, the show featured Jefferson Airplane, Santana, Crosby Stills Nash and Young, and the Flying Burrito Brothers. A truly stacked lineup — and an event that went horribly wrong. Captured in the Maysles Brothers’ classic documentary Gimme Shelter, the day culminated in the death of a Black man named Meredith Hunter, stabbed and beaten to death by Hells Angels while the Rolling Stones played. Two weeks later, the Grateful Dead debuted “New Speedway Boogie,” a new song by Jerry Garcia and Robert Hunter. Tales From the Golden Road co-host Gary Lambert.
GARY LAMBERT: It was the closest that Hunter ever got to topical songwriting — it was like musical journalism. It was not a response to Altamont so much as it was a response to the reaction to Altamont. Right after Altamont, there was a lot of finger-pointing and a lot of accusation, and assignment of blame. They blamed the Grateful Dead; others blamed the Rolling Stones; others blamed the film company that wanted to a make a movie of [the festival]. There was finger-pointing on every end. Of course, the Hells Angels were called into account, as well they should have been. But Hunter just wanted to sum up the uselessness of all that blame, all that finger-pointing. And he did it beautifully. But again, even though he wrote it to a specific subject, which was rare for him, it became universal. That refrain at the end can address whichever darkness is prevailing in the world at any given moment.
AUDIO: “New Speedway Boogie” [Workingman’s Dead] (3:01-3:15) - [dead.net] [Spotify] [YouTube]
JESSE: A timeless mantra. “New Speedway Boogie” was a topical song, definitely, but it was also deeply philosophical, written in parables that bordered on Biblical. While it may have grown from Altamont, “New Speedway Boogie” was also in some way about the Grateful Dead themselves and what they’d been through over the past half-decade as perhaps the foremost band of a countercultural underground.
To talk about “New Speedway Boogie,” let’s rewind a little bit, to just before Altamont. Sam Cutler would go onto work for the Dead, but—in 1969—he was with the Rolling Stones, shepherding the band through packed arenas across the United States and back. When the idea of a free show emerged, Cutler was sent out to Mickey Hart’s ranch in Novato to talk about it with the extended Grateful Dead family.
SAM CUTLER: The Haight-Ashbury fantasy moved to the country, in a way. The meeting that preceded Altamont was in the barn, about 80 people at it who I had to talk to, kind of representing the Rolling Stones. And everyone kept on saying, “Man, everything would be cool — The Rolling Stones should come out here and hang out.” I was like, “Eh, I don’t think so, I don’t think they’re gonna do that somehow…” They’re not gonna come live in a barn.
It was the Grateful Dead’s idea. It wasn’t the Rolling Stones’ idea — I can assure you. The idea originally came from Rock [Scully], that the Grateful Dead wanted to do a free concert with the Rolling Stones. That’s where it originally came from.
JESSE: Rock was Rock Scully, the Dead’s perpetually starry-eyed and enthused manager from the days of the Haight-Ashbury and intermittently through the ‘80s. At the end of the Rolling Stones’ triumphant American tour, the fantasy went, the Stones would play for free in Golden Gate Park with the Dead and the Airplane. With visions of Woodstock dancing in everybody’s heads, musicians and local authorities alike, events did not unfold smoothly.
Violating perhaps the first rule of free shows in the park, at least as they existed in the ‘60s, Mick Jagger made the mistake of announcing the free show in the park at a press conference. So it was that the festival got moved, first to the Sears Point Raceway in Sonoma, and—the day before the event—to Altamont Raceway Park in Livermore.
Gimme Shelter is gripping viewing for any music fan, though hardly captures the full scope of the event. There are many accounts of Altamont, most recently Joel Selvin’s book of that name. Sam Cutler has his own take in his colorful memoir You Can’t Always Get What You Want, with lots of nuances hashed out in various biographies and primary source reporting elsewhere.
The Dead’s rehearsal hall at the Hamilton Air Force Base in Novato became the unofficial festival headquarters. It was also home to Alembic, the sound company inspired by Owsley Stanley, and they donated their speaker system to the free festival, as did The Family Dog, who had their own speaker system, created by future NASA engineer Bob Cohen.
Members of the Dead’s artistic community could be found everywhere around Altamont. In the crowd, Ron Boise of the Merry Pranksters played his Thunder Machine. Doug McKechnie, who’d helped the Dead with voltage control on “What’s Become of the Baby,” on Aoxomoxoa, was part of the Alembic crew for the day and, as part of the deal, set up his massive Moog synthesizer and played a sunrise meditation. There’s a brief clip of him in Gimme Shelter.
And there were familiar faces in the scaffolding with all the gear. At the sound console for Altamont, wrangling the competing sound systems, was Owsley Stanley himself. Recording were Bob Matthews and Betty Cantor, using the same Ampex MM-1000 16-track 2-inch tape recorder that they’d used to make Live/Dead and would use to record Workingman’s Dead a few months later. Here’s Bob.
BOB MATTHEWS: My experience was involved in having gone back from my brand-new acquired 16-track machine to record the event. I ended up recording the Rolling Stones. A few people have gotten to hear the mix of “Brown Sugar” and “Midnight Rambler” that they performed.
JESSE: And on the unorganized organizing committee were members of the Diggers, the radical collective that espoused free, productive anarchy. They took free concerts really seriously. Altamont wasn’t organized by the Grateful Dead so much that it grew from their community. The vibes were pretty weird already. Robert Hunter decided to skip out in advance and went to go see the movie Easy Rider instead. Perhaps a wise move.
MICK JAGGER [12/6/69]: Hey people — sisters, brothers and sisters, brothers and sisters. Come on now, that means everybody just cool out! Will you cool out, everybody?
JESSE: The good energy did not prevail.
MICK JAGGER [12/6/69]: People, who’s fighting, what for? Who’s fighting and what for?
JESSE: There are several accounts of who asked the Hells Angels to be there and why, and I will leave those to other historical dis-entanglers, but their presence resulted in the death of Meredith Hunter, a Black teenager who possibly pulled a gun out of his pocket and aimed it at Mick Jagger. Here’s Jerry Garcia talking about Altamont, from a bonus clip released with the DVD of Amir Bar-Lev’s Long Strange Trip documentary. This was originally filmed by the BBC in London in May 1970, just six months following the events at Altamont.
JERRY GARCIA [5/70]: Woodstock and Altamont, the same situations were prevailing in terms of how it was for the people there. It was free, essentially, and it was also completely without control of any sort. There were no police. I mean,there's no way you can realistically control that size, really. You can't expect to. The way I saw it, both of those situations being sort of like two sides of the same coin — it's like two ways that that kind of expression can go. A huge number of people, and no rules. One of the ways it can go is a terrible bummer, like Altamont; and one of the other ways is an immensely joyful scene, like Woodstock. And they both had their extremes, but they're both sort of characterized by a kind of, by this heaviness, man, this sort of historical heaviness. Lots of people, more people than you've ever seen in your life.
Our relationship with the Angels is that we both exist in essentially the same area, and we both know that each other exists. They outnumber us about 90 to 1. We get along okay with ‘em. Those guys are guys that we all know. We’ve known ‘em for years, and we don’t have any fight with ‘em. But we do know that they are Hells Angels, and they’re capable of doing a lot of pretty amazing things. We just stay out of their way.
When we did the Be-In in the park back in ‘66—’67, or ‘66—the Angels were at that scene strictly just to be there, just the Hells Angels being there. It seemed like it would be a good thing to be at music at all. And they’ve sort of found themselves in a position of taking care of lost kids, watching the stage, that kind of thing. They just started doing it.
JESSE: Altamont rightly became a much-talked about topic in the media, and a landmark in the Dead’s own psychic landscape. There would be a lot of fall out and a lot of finger-pointing. In multiple San Francisco Chronicle columns that week, venerable music critic and longtime Dead supporter Ralph J. Gleeson attacked the festival. “Why did the Grateful Dead people and other locals involved go along with the idea?” he wrote on December 10th. “Now it has ended in murder. And that was a murder, not just a death like the drowning or the hit-and-run victims... Is this the new community? Is this what Woodstock promised? Gathered together as a tribe, what happened? Brutality, murder, despoliation, you name it. The name of the game is money, power and ego, and money is first and it brings power." And it was this column—and Gleeson’s words—that inspired Robert Hunter to write “New Speedway Boogie.”
Yes, obviously Altamont sucked, it was a catastrophe, and people made stupid decisions that had terrible results. But Robert Hunter wasn’t about to condemn the entire project of the counterculture’s attempt to transform the mainstream culture around them. As the song suggests, “one step done, and another begun.” The song jumped into the Dead’s repertoire almost instantly. Here’s Buzz Poole, author of the 33 1/3 book on Workingman’s Dead.
BUZZ POOLE: They get it into a songform in 14 days, and clearly they were responding to something, saying: Okay, hey, we're very happy just kind of going on and doing our thing. It's really all we want to do; it's all we have done up to this point; and it is all we're going to do moving forward. But here we are: we're recognizing that something happened, and there's no getting around that.
I don't know how many people know that, had that Altamont not gone down the way it did, the plan for December 6th of 1969 was the Dead were going to play that afternoon at the Speedway, and then they had a gig at the Fillmore. And [Bill] Kreutzmann was the first one to say, “I'm not playing.” They left, and then the rest of the band kind of just went along with it. It was just supposed to be another day of gigging, and it actually did stop the Dead in their tracks. Hardly anything stopped these guys in their tracks. They had never really had to deal with the darkness in a meaningful way, and Altamont was that first time, really. They got caught out by it. Little pot busts and minor arrests and hassles that had happened before were just hassles — they weren't anything that stopped that prime intention of ditching the straight life and living for the music. Altamont was a reminder that there are things that will derail that goal.
JESSE: The “Speedway” in the title referred in part to Altamont, but it also referred to a location a little closer to home. Here’s Workingman’s Dead co-producer Bob Matthews.
BOB MATTHEWS: Speedway Meadows. It’s in Golden Gate Park. So, obviously New Speedway Meadows, in Hunter’s mind, was the newer version of playing in Golden Gate Park. That’s all I can assume — I never actually talked to him about that.
JESSE: Like Fennario in “Dire Wolf,” perhaps the New Speedway was a place of the imagination. Here’s what “New Speedway Boogie” sounded like when the Dead first started playing it. This is from the song’s second performance, December 21st, 1969, at the original Fillmore Auditorium in San Francisco—the Dead’s last gigs in that room, as it turned out—released on Dave’s Picks 6. We’ll listen to the whole first minute. Check out the early vocal arrangement, which is pretty intricate.
AUDIO: “New Speedway Boogie” [Dave’s Picks 6, 12/21/69] (0:31-1:01)
JESSE: That sounds kind of together for a brand-new song, but the band apparently wasn’t happy with it. They played it a few times like this throughout December 1969, and it does sometimes seem like they’re having trouble settling on a groove. It disappeared again until the Workingman’s Dead sessions.
We’ve heard a fair bit in the previous episodes of the Deadcast about how much prep the band did for Workingman’s Dead. But perhaps the most remarkable discovery of the new stash of outtakes called The Angel’s Share is the 30 minutes of work documenting the evolution of “New Speedway Boogie” in the studio. Archivist Mike Johnson.
MIKE JOHNSON: It opens with a demo. Why would you be doing a demo in-studio? You’d think that you would’ve already done this. But it’s him and Bill — Bill’s playing a snare drum. It’s perfect — this “New Speedway Boogie” takes you through the whole process. It’s amazing.
JESSE: It begins with a quick run-through of the song, just Jerry Garcia on acoustic guitar and Bill Kreutzmann on drums. The recording is missing the first 20 seconds, but it’s still delightful.
AUDIO: “New Speedway Boogie” ((Demo with Acoustic Guitar, Drums & Vocals) - Not Slated)
[Workingman’s Dead: The Angel’s Share] (0:00-2:34) - [dead.net] [Spotify] [YouTube]
BOB MATTHEWS [1970]: Two-minutes-and-fifty-seven seconds.
JERRY GARCIA [1970]: Fuck, it’s too long. Still too long…
JESSE: Once the “New Speedway Boogie” session gets going, the studio chatter reveals where the various musicians are positioned in Pacific High as they’re working on the song. Jerry Garcia is singing and playing acoustic guitar. Phil Lesh is in the control room with Betty Cantor. Bill Kreutzmann is holding down the percussion, maybe sitting at his kit, playing what sounds like woodblock and maracas, as we can hear from this interaction.
BILL KREUTZMANN [1970]: You’ve gotta put the clapping in my headset —
PHIL LESH [1970]: You don’t want it in your headset?
BILL KREUTZMANN [1970]: No, I do want it. I don’t have it now.
[band gradually begins playing]
PHIL LESH [1970]: Okay, Betty? Turn up the clapping in the headset.
BILL KREUTZMANN [1970]: Hold it, Jerry. Okay, I got it.
PHIL LESH [1970]: Take 3, right?
JESSE: And some unidentified gigglers doing the clapping, I’m guessing in an isolation booth, one of them Bob Weir.
[some introductory percussion and handclaps]
UNIDENTIFIED [1970]: Take it easy, boys… don’t get carried away.
BOB WEIR [1970]: Huh, the music stopped.
BETTY CANTOR [1970]: Okay, Take 3.
JESSE: And they do some experimenting. I really like this take where Garcia tries overdubbing a solo electric part over his own acoustic guitar.
AUDIO: New Speedway Boogie” ((Take 4 Complete With Vocals & Lead Guitar) - Slated)
[Workingman’s Dead: The Angel’s Share] (0:00-0:27) - [dead.net] [Spotify] [YouTube]
JESSE: Then, they do a swap.
JERRY GARCIA [1970]: It’s hard for me to sing and maintain a groove.
JESSE: This is one of engineer Brian Kehew’s favorite moments of The Angel’s Share outtakes.
BRIAN KEHEW: They're doing instrumental versions of quite a few of these songs, playing together without singing, because they're trying to listen and focus on their parts. They know that, generally, they put the vocals on later, as most groups did at some point — “let's focus on playing.” There's an amazing moment when Jerry is playing, and he's doing “New Speedway Boogie,” which is a classic, and he says, “I have trouble grooving and singing at the same time.” And you’re thinking: this is your whole career, playing guitar and singing at the same time! Even then, he’d already been doing it for almost a decade professionally. And it’s amazing to hear him feel that he wasn't adequate enough to sing and play guitar at the same time. But he does hand over the part to Bob, and lets him play guitar instead halfway through the takes. That's a nice instance where he sings at the same time as they're recording. We have a few of those, and we have some more [in which] they actually seem to even like one of their performances.
JESSE: It’s fascinating to know that Jerry Garcia felt he had to sing this song live. So Bob Weir takes over the acoustic rhythm guitar, and Jerry Garcia sings without playing any instrument at all on the basic tracks. It leads to some amusing moments as they try to find a groove.
JERRY GARCIA [1970]: Okay, start again. Keep it nice and fuckin’ together, you fuckers — solider‘n shit.
JESSE: And this is the lineup they stick with for the final Workingman’s Dead take of “New Speedway Boogie” — Jerry Garcia on vocals, Bob Weir on acoustic guitar, Bill Kreutzmann on percussion, plus a few hand clappers, presumably including Mickey Hart. Even when Garcia added taut electric leads, it stayed ultra-minimalist by Dead standards, with a basic track of only acoustic guitar, hand percussion, and actual hands. Co-producer Bob Matthews.
BOB MATTHEWS: The only thing I remember about that was, during the mix, if you listen to the “Speedway” — during Jerry’s solo, I panned his guitar from left to right, and from right back to left. I panned it in time. That was something I never had any regrets about. A lot of people didn't, didn't even notice it.
AUDIO: “New Speedway Boogie” [Workingman’s Dead] (1:59-2:14) - [dead.net] [Spotify] [YouTube]
JESSE: According to mix notes, until mid-April, it was actually called “New Speedway Blues.” It would also be the last song on the album to be completely finished, with the band going through two different vocal mixes. Here’s Grateful Dead archivist and legacy manager David Lemeiux.
DAVID LEMIEUX: I distinctly remember about 20 years ago, 19 years ago, when we did the first reissue of Workingman’s Dead in a big Rhino box set — it was called The Golden Road, and it was all of the Warner Bros. records. There’s an outtake of “New Speedway Boogie” that has a background vocal by Bobby that’s a very high falsetto. It’s really interesting — I quite like it. But it’s a high falsetto on the “one way or another.” We asked Robert Hunter if we could include that as a bonus track on the reissue, and he said no. He said, “‘New Speedway Boogie’ was my political statement about Altamont. It was not our way to give Bob falsetto practice.” [laughs] Since then, we have included it on something else. But when we did that first reissue of the actual album, we left it off because Hunter specifically didn’t want it on there. He thought it was interesting and everything, but he said, “No, for this one, let’s just keep the regular version on there.”
AUDIO: “New Speedway Boogie” (alternate mix) [The Golden Road: 1965-1973] (0:21-0:28)
JESSE: If you know what to listen for, the ghost of that original mix with Phil Lesh and Bob Weir’s answer vocals still exists on the final version of Workingman’s Dead, though you might need headphones to hear it. Squint your ears and you can definitely hear Lesh and Weir respond after the phrase “on the hill,” with their vocal continuing under the next line.
AUDIO: “New Speedway Boogie” [Workingman’s Dead] (0:29-0:39) - [dead.net] [Spotify] [YouTube]
JESSE: There are other moments where you can hear it, too. But Garcia’s electric guitar punched through and might be the real star of “New Speedway Boogie.” Shocking, I know. When the band played the song live in the months after the album’s recording, it exclusively came during the “acoustic” portion of the night, where Jerry would play electric guitar with David Nelson often supplementing Bob Weir on second acoustic. Here’s longtime Dead freak and serious guitar player Gary Lambert.
GARY LAMBERT: That was also right around the period that Jerry switched from Gibson guitars to Fender guitars. He liked that sort of Fender twang. He loved those Bakersfield guitar players, and the way they could really make a single note sing. When Jerry was playing Les Pauls or Gibson SG, the humbucking pickup had that more sort of horn-like sound, that more sustain-y kind of thing. And so Jerry was exploring the properties of the Fender at that point. He played a Telecaster on some of Workingman’s, and a Strat[ocaster] on some of it. I don’t know how it breaks down individually. When I first heard them do “New Speedway” as part of one of the semi-acoustic sets in ‘70, he was actually playing a Telecaster on that song. I do remember that.
JESSE: Here’s a little bit of a nice jammy version of “New Speedway Boogie” with Nelson on second acoustic guitar, from the wonderful Family Dog at The Great Highway, April 18, 1970 release, which came out on Record Store Day a few years back.
AUDIO: “New Speedway Boogie” [Family Dog at The Great Highway, 4/18/70] (2:00-2:30)
JESSE: That was “New Speedway Boogie,” recorded at the Family Dog on April 18th, 1970, the first recorded version following the Workingman’s Dead sessions. Which brings us to a fascinating question that you may’ve wondered at some point: just when were the Workingman’s Dead sessions? Rhino archivist Mike Johnson.
MIKE JOHNSON: There's only a couple that even have dates because of the tracking sheets. We had determined, though, Brian and I, as this stuff was coming off and we were listening to it—again, they would reuse tape over and over and over again—that the sequence of tape didn't really mean anything. So, by deciding to present this in the sequence order, then we had all these pieces, and then we built the puzzle and we put them back. We would make song sets for a song.
JESSE: In fact, Brian and Mike only came across one dated session sheet during their Workingman’s Dead archeology — for “New Speedway Boogie,” dated March 3rd, 1970. It’s as good a time as any to do some Deadology and make our best guesses for the dates that the Grateful Dead made Workingman’s Dead. As we heard Bob Matthews and others tell the story, the Dead recorded a demo for Workingman’s Dead over a few days at Pacific High in early 1970, then returned, a few weeks later, for a very quick and focused album session after they’d spent time rehearsing the material. But when were those days?
Rehearsal time was all well and good, but the Grateful Dead were broke and on the road constantly in the spring of 1970. They may have spent time rehearsing Workingman’s Dead in between the demos and the final sessions, but they also played a number of gigs. The band spent nearly all of January on the road, including their bust in New Orleans and a mutual decision to part ways with organist Tom Constanten. They returned to San Francisco by February 3rd, with gigs every night from the 4th through the 8th, before heading cross-country for a legendary six-show stand at the Fillmore East in New York from February 11th through 14th. It’s possible they could’ve made demos during the day between the Fillmore West gigs from the 5th through the 8th — Pacific High was only blocks away. But there’s some evidence of the Dead being in Pacific High for sessions starting on February 16th. Let’s pencil a few days around there for the demos.
Then they’re in Texas for four days. There are no shows on February 25th and 26th, but then have a four-night weekend at the Family Dog in San Francisco. They’re then freed up from March 2nd through March 6th, with a weekend out of town on the 7th and 8th, around from the 9th through 16th, and then off for an East Coast tour. While they might not’ve kept track of the session dates very well, the mixing was better documented, beginning on March 11th.
That pretty much leaves March 2nd through 6th for the Dead to have recorded Workingman’s Dead, the basic tracks and the overdubs. Maybe they started a few days before that, if they were lugging their gear between the Family Dog on the Great Highway and Pacific High Recording downtown, but nobody seems to remember that as part of the story. Rock and roll legends often compressed time, but it really does seem Workingman’s Dead was recorded in four or five days.
It’s not going to clear up the dates, necessarily, but there’s one more piece of the puzzle to introduce: the other song that Jerry Garcia and Robert wrote immediately after Altamont.
AUDIO: “Mason’s Children” [Dave’s Picks 30, 1/3/70] (0:00-0:30)
JESSE: That was “Mason’s Children” from Dave’s Picks 30, recorded January 3rd, 1970 at the Fillmore East. It, too, made it to the stage less than two weeks after Altamont, and debuted one night earlier than “New Speedway Boogie.” It features more allegorical lyrics from Hunter. It’s not much of a stretch to think of the “Mason’s Children” as symbolizing the Diggers, those radical anarchist-collectivists from the Haight-Ashbury. They’d been held up by many as the face of the so-called new community that columnist Ralph J. Gleeson and others were calling into question after Altamont. Like “New Speedway Boogie,” “Mason’s Children” can be heard as musical journalism from Robert Hunter. Or it can just be heard as that primal driving groove.
Dead Heads might know it from the bonkers version from February 14th, 1970, aka Dick’s Picks 4, where it springs off into a sweet jam.
AUDIO: “Mason’s Children” [Dick’s Picks 4, 2/14/70] (2:42-3:12) - [Spotify] [YouTube]
JESSE: After the debuts of “Mason’s Children” and “New Speedway Boogie” just before Christmas, they took to one more quickly than the other. Through the start of the Workingman’s Dead sessions in mid-February, there are four surviving versions of “New Speedway Boogie” and a dozen-and-a-half takes of “Mason’s Children.” So what happened? Workingman’s Dead co-producer Bob Matthews told us that the song got discarded during the demo process, when they were creating a sequence for Workingman’s Dead.
BOB MATTHEWS: We looked at each other and said, “We've got an extra tune.” 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. It did not fit with all the other tunes, as far as the general artistic feel, the type of music, the vision, as it were. Workingman’s Dead was sort of described as a Grateful Dead version of country-western. The only reason that it didn't appear on that album was it didn't seem to fit.
JESSE: And that’s certainly a reasonable explanation for why “Mason’s Children” didn’t make it onto Workingman’s Dead. But here’s where it gets a little hairier. The Grateful Dead did actually record “Mason’s Children” during the proper Workingman’s Dead sessions. But by then, it had been slowed down considerably from how they’d been playing it onstage a few weeks earlier.
The slowed down “Mason’s Children” was powered by Bob Weir’s rhythm guitar and Phil Lesh’s big lead bass bombs. This is how they recorded the basic track during the Workingman’s Dead sessions — Weir on rhythm guitar, Lesh on bass, plus both drummers. Garcia would add his guitar later. Some would compare the feel of the slow version to “Jumpin’ Jack Flash” by the Rolling Stones, which would make it an answer song in more ways than one.
From the same sifting of tapes that yielded The Angel’s Share recordings, we have a little under three minutes of the Dead working on “Mason’s Children” in the studio, never heard before anywhere. The conversational double-drum arrangement that Kreutzmann and Hart are working on is pretty cool.
AUDIO: “Mason’s Children” [outtake]
BOB WEIR [1970]: 23. One, two, one two three four…
[Weir, Kreutzmann, and Hart play]
BOB WEIR [1970]: One, two, one-two-three-four…
[Weir, Kreutzmann, and Hart play again; Weir stops the performance]
BOB WEIR [1970]: Nah, do it again, do it again. One, two, one-two-three-four…
[Band begins rehearsing again]
JESSE: At some point, perhaps moments after this, they tried the song again with only one drummer, and made the basic take from which they built the complete version that first appeared on the essential 1999 box set called So Many Roads — which included Jerry Garcia’s lead guitar and the same kind of stacked vocals that characterized “Uncle John’s Band.”
AUDIO: “Mason’s Children” [So Many Roads] (0:00-1:00)
JESSE: So, how does this help us date the Workingman’s Dead sessions? It doesn’t at all, sorry. It actually makes it a bit more confusing, if such a thing is possible. The last recorded live “Mason’s Children” with the fast arrangement came February 23rd in Texas, switching to the slowed-down version on the tape of February 28th at the Family Dog, back in San Francisco. Probably, they slowed the song down for the demo sessions and kept playing it fast onstage, before switching over on the 28th. That’s all a lot of heavy math for a Deadcast, but “Mason’s Children” and “New Speedway Boogie” were some heavy songs for the Dead.
In the spring of 1971, the underground magazine The Realist published an article by the novelist and Merry Prankster Ed McLanahan titled, “A Brief Exegesis of Certain Socio-Philosophical Themes in Robert Hunter’s Lyrics to New Speedway Boogie.” Founded in 1958 by Paul Krassner, The Realist was a house zine for the counterculture, one of several continuities between the Beat generation and the freaks that followed. The March/April ‘71 edition, issue #89, with a cover by R. Crumb, was also distributed as The Last Supplement to the Whole Earth Catalog, and McClanahan’s article was reproduced the next year in Playboy in his much bigger feature titled “Grateful Dead I Have Known.” Some people only read Playboy for the articles. Others read it only for the Grateful Dead features. The article got around.
In it, McClanahan notes, “‘New Speedway Boogie’ may be properly regarded as [the Dead’s] ‘official’ public statement about the meaning of the grisly events of that unhappy day.” By the time the article appeared, though, the Dead had long since stopped playing both “Mason’s Children” and “New Speedway Boogie.” “Mason’s Children” disappeared first. The version they performed at the Family Dog in the thick of the Workingman’s Dead sessions—the only surviving live version of the slow arrangement—is the last time the song appears on a Dead tape. “New Speedway Boogie” seemingly vanished from setlists in the late summer of 1970, not returning until 1991. Here’s Sam Cutler, who worked for the Rolling Stones at the time of Altamont, and would go to work for the Dead soon thereafter. We’ll hear a lot more from him in the next episode of the Good Ol’ Grateful Deadcast.
SAM CUTLER: They dropped it, and I think they were a little bit embarrassed by it. The Grateful Dead practice being oblique. They were very careful about not being that direct about things. So I think that that song was perhaps one of their most direct songs. They ended up feeling uncomfortable about it — they let it die on the vine, as it were. They performed it for a while, and then… just didn’t. With the benefit of hindsight, it was a bit of a simplistic take on Altamont. And the more that the band thought about Altamont, I think the more responsible they felt for certain aspects of it — and then there’s the whole thing that they didn’t play. It was just like the Rolling Stones: all they want to do is forget about it, man, move on. Nobody wanted to talk about it, think about it. It was a dreadful bummer. Who wants to sit around remembering bummers?
AUDIO: “Mason’s Children” [Dick’s Picks 4, 2/14/70] - [Spotify] [YouTube]