Good Ol’ Grateful Deadcast
Season 1, Episode 7
Workingman’s Dead 50: Easy Wind
Archival interviews:
- Robert Hunter, by Denis McNamera, WLIR, 3/78.
JESSE: There are several reasons why “Easy Wind” isn’t like the other songs on Workingman’s Dead. Let’s start with the most obvious: it’s the only song on the album with a lead vocalist other than Jerry Garcia. Hey, Pigpen.
AUDIO: “Easy Wind” [Workingman’s Dead] (0:00-0:23) - [dead.net] [Spotify] [YouTube]
JESSE: Another reason it’s different is that it’s the first track on the album to feature the complete double drummer electric Grateful Dead as they sounded live in 1969 and 1970. Tales From the Golden Road host Gary Lambert.
GARY LAMBERT: I love that piece from the first live performances I heard. A wonderful thing about the studio version of “Easy Wind” is, more than almost any other, it conveys the essence of the Grateful Dead in microcosm. It puts across what one of their much longer live jams might have sounded like, and they compress it into less than five minutes on a studio track. It's incredibly successful in that regard.
JESSE: It’s also the only track on Workingman’s Dead not written by Jerry Garcia and Robert Hunter, which might seem obvious by Pigpen’s vocals. But it’s not by Pigpen.
AUDIO: “Easy Wind” [Robert Hunter, 10/13/78] (0:02-0:16) - [archive.org]
JESSE: “Easy Wind” was the first Grateful Dead song written solely by Robert Hunter. That performance was from October 13th, 1978 at My Father’s Place on Long Island, accompanied by bassist Larry Klein.
Robert Hunter, of course, was the Grateful Dead’s lyricist, but he was also a musician. In high school in Connecticut, he played trumpet in a high school band called The Crescents. During the days of the Palo Alto folk scene, he could be heard playing upright bass and mandolin in Jerry Garcia’s various acoustic ensembles.
Probably in most cases, the division of labor between Jerry Garcia and Robert Hunter was what it might seem: Robert Hunter wrote lyrics, Jerry Garcia wrote music and occasionally provided editing. But especially during the few years they were housemates in Larkspur, the lines were sometimes blurrier. It was a small house.
In 1978, around the time of that performance we just heard, Hunter told Relix, “I’d sit upstairs banging away at my three chords for days and days working something out. By the time I had it worked out, you know, through the thin walls he’d heard everything I was doing. I’d come down and hand him this sheet of paper, and he’d say, ‘Oh, that’s interesting,’ and he’d play the whole arrangement of it right away, because he’d heard what I was doing and heard where it was going off.”
Mountain Girl once said that “[Hunter] might have already worked out some chord changes for [a song] and Jerry would say, ‘Oh no, man, that’s not the way it should be; it should be like this.’” In the case of “Easy Wind,” Hunter apparently got it right the first time. He told Blair Jackson in 1993, “my arrangement was a little bit closer to one of those slippin’ and slidin’ Robert Johnson-type songs because it was just me and a guitar. Then when the whole band got a hold of it, it changed a bit, as they always do. Still, a lot of that original style crept over into the band’s version.”
But there’s a little more to the story of “Easy Wind.” When we last saw Robert Hunter, at the end of our “Black Peter” episode, he’d just suffered through an absolutely horrific psychedelic trip. “My time is still scrambled from that era,” Hunter told Blair Jackson in 1988. “It took me a full two years after that to get back to where I felt creative or could feel any joy in life, or much of anything else.”
As Blair rightly pointed out, those two years encompassed nearly all of Workingman’s Dead, American Beauty, and the songs that would comprise Jerry Garcia’s solo debut, some of the most beloved work in the Garcia/Hunter songbook. Hunter insisted, “I had a vision of a gold bar in the sky, this shining gold bar. But it wasn’t shining on me -- it was drawing my energy into it and there was nothing I could do to stop it. It’s like it took two years of my energy.”
Chronologically, “Easy Wind” was likely the first song Robert Hunter wrote after the experience in early June of 1969, at least that made it to the stage. The Dead debuted the song in August 1969, a few days after Woodstock, but just in time to get played at the New Orleans Pop Festival at the International Speedway near Baton Rouge — one of its only performances in the vicinity of an actual bayou.
Whether intentional or not, I like the way the line about “a whole lotta women out in red in the streets today” foreshadows the “trouble ahead, lady in red” of “Casey Jones,” which would follow the song on Workingman’s Dead. That said, while Robert Hunter may’ve written “Easy Wind,” the moment the Grateful Dead added it to their repertoire, it belonged entirely to Pigpen. Here’s a little bit from November 8th, 1969 at the Fillmore Auditorium, on Dick’s Picks 16.
AUDIO: “Easy Wind” [Dick’s Picks 16, 11/8/69] (1:17-1:44) - [Spotify] [YouTube]
JESSE: If it wasn’t written explicitly for Pigpen, then Pigpen occupied it perfectly. Here’s Gary Lambert.
GARY LAMBERT: It also fits the aesthetic of the album — a workin’ man song. It's akin to “Cumberland [Blues]” in that way. It's about a guy who’s chipping up rocks on the Great Highway. I had not been to California yet when that song came out, and then I found out where the Great Highway was — it’s actually the road that runs along Ocean Beach for a long stretch of the western end of San Francisco. In fact, The Family Dog, after they got kicked out of the Avalon Ballroom, had their second venue — it was called The Family Dog at the Great Highway. You can find some recordings from there. Pigpen, what he projected and what he was… people who knew him well will tell you, the disparity was amazing. He was such a thoughtful, gentle, kind person within that incredibly badass-looking exterior. What he projected on stage—the gruffness and all the sexual innuendo—all that stuff was his act. He lived the blues man life, unfortunately to his detriment; but he was also extraordinarily tender and kind. The women of the Grateful Dead scene regarded him as just a very protective big brother. That’s a wonderful thing to consider, that disparity between who you saw on stage and who the guy was.
JESSE: Pigpen was the reason that Mother McCree’s Uptown Jug Champions took electric instruments off the wall of Dana Morgan’s music store and transformed themselves into The Warlocks. He was an intuitive musician, and played guitar and banjo along with piano and organ. He was well-read in Beat poetry, a fan of the hip monologist Lord Buckley, and could spiel off long, charismatic vocal improvisations in marathon versions of “Turn On Your Lovelight.” Though Pigpen dabbled in songwriting in the band’s early days, most notably co-writing the words and music to “Alligator” in ‘67, his creativity didn’t necessarily manifest as songs — though that would change after Workingman’s Dead. But even if Pigpen didn’t write “Easy Wind,” it was still primo Pig. Grateful Dead archivist and legacy manager David Lemieux.
DAVID LEMIEUX: “Easy Wind” was a song that, in the live setting, ran 10 minutes long. It was a pretty big song where Pig had to really step up and be the star of the show. Hunter’s lyrics, sung by Pigpen, come to life. This is the one Grateful Dead song that I never saw them play live, obviously, from this album. It’s such a great song, and when they brought it live… and again, coming back to Weir — he does it on the studio version, but in the live setting, Weir’s got a full-blown guitar solo. He has a couple of guitar solos from this album in the live setting: the big “Casey Jones” guitar solo, and then he got the “Easy Wind.” When Weir was playing that solo in this song… boy, when he was on, it really took off. But when the Dead had their swing on in a live show, this [is the] song that really allowed them to swing.
We put out a Workingman’s Dead reissue about, oh gosh, two decades ago, and [there was a take] from Portland, Oregon at the Springers Ballroom. They played twice, in January: January 16th, and 18th [1970]. It’s the one from the January 16th show. That swing is perfect. The groove they get into; Bob and Jerry’s solos are perfect; and Pigpen’s vocals — he nails them. He is completely present. The drummers were playing so exceptionally well on this version. And then add to that Bob’s solo, Jerry’s solo and Pig’s playing. TC [organist Tom Constanten] was still in the band—he had another week left in the band, maybe a couple weeks left—so you’ve got a little bit of organ in there. Really wonderful stuff.
AUDIO: “Easy Wind” [The Golden Road: 1965-1973, 1/16/70] (6:00-6:32)
JESSE: That’s one of my favorite early versions of “Easy Wind,” too, exactly a month before the start of the Workingman’s Dead sessions — January 16th, 1970 at Springers in Portland, included on The Golden Road box set. That version, and many of the live takes before and after the recording of Workingman’s Dead, crept up near 10 minutes with ample room for the band to find a flow — but the studio version was different. Gary Lambert.
GARY LAMBERT: The way they structured it, by doing that judicious editing of taking out the chorus from the front — it gives them some time where, first, Pigpen plays a little bit of harmonica solo; and then he hands it off to Bobby, who takes one of his rare studio-recorded guitar solos; and then Jerry jumps in. Jerry kind of overlaps with Bobby, he solos, and then they go back to the vocal. And somehow it just beautifully imparts what the Grateful Dead could really stretch out on on stage in the studio. It's an underrated track for that reason I think. It has the concision that you need to make an effective studio recording, but it suggests what the band was capable of. Again, it comes to that difference I cited between cinéma vérité documentary and making a fictional work. I think on Workingman’s, as much as any album they ever made, they tell the stories really beautifully, and then the function of the live shows was to expand upon that, show where these songs could go.
JESSE: They also clicked the tempo up slightly in the studio, a move that would stick in the subsequent live performances. The album version is also highlighted by a lovely stereo recording of the Dead’s double drummers in action, the first time they appear that way on Workingman’s Dead.
AUDIO: “Easy Wind” [Workingman’s Dead] (1:52-2:22) - [dead.net] [Spotify] [YouTube]
JESSE: Workingman’s Dead co-producer Bob Matthews.
BOB MATTHEWS: By the time we got around to recording a Pig song like “Easy Wind,” there was an agreement about how it was to happen, how it was to be played. And occasionally Pigpen would recommend or remind somebody that he had a different perspective on a particular part. But it wasn’t like there was any conflict — it was like they were all playing in the band together. And that was one of the things of course that I loved about the Grateful Dead and their music. The song that Bobby sang on his first solo record, “Playing in the Band,” to me, became a theme song. Playing in a band is playing together, as a band: not as five individuals, but as a collective. And that’s what everybody loved about the Grateful Dead. What you heard from them was the Grateful Dead. You heard the entirety of the individuals, plus one. One of my other favorite sayings is where the whole is greater than the sum of its part. The Grateful Dead was that whole, and it was greater than the sum of its individual components and musicians — and that was where the magic was. That was something that I got to observe and contribute a small part of, for so many years and with so much glee and joy. They’d rehearse the song—what the changes were, how it was focused. Jerry had known Pigpen longer than I’d known Jerry. I knew Jerry since I was 13, that was like 1960. He had known Ron for quite a long time. They worked together — Pigpen was part of Mother McCree’s Uptown Jug Champions. Well, Bob Weir and I started Mother McCree’s Uptown Jug Champions.
JESSE: Warner archivist Mike Johnson and engineer Brian Kehew annotated the session reels known as The Angel’s Share, which you can find on a streaming service near you. Here’s Mike Johnson.
MIKE JOHNSON: We didn't know what was on these reels, and then, when we got the first pass of the rough mixes — it's like, “Okay, I annotated those… well, crap, we don’t have everything.” You’ve gotta roll. Then Brian went in with the fine-toothed comb and found even more. Some of them were printed backwards, on another reel. So that’s why, in this journey to just keep going deeper and deeper, we kept finding more things that we could use.
JESSE: Brain Kehew.
BRIAN KEHEW: The main thing that was done to make the tapes into a listenable format was to work on the moments in between the playing. The mixing of the songs is fairly straightforward, but the amount of effort that it took to bring out the drum microphone, which picks up most of the room… sometimes you can hear Phil, who doesn't have his own singing microphone or talking mic; you can hear ask him for ask for changes, because Bill Kreutzmann’s drum microphones are hearing the bass player talk. I turned them up quite a bit and had to turn down other things, to make it clear what's being said. So, as you listen through, most of our time was spent on bringing out the commentary and the working process, so we can understand why they're doing another take, why they didn’t like the last one, and how they intend to change the song over the next 10 minutes, understand why they didn't like the last one, and how they intend to change the song over the next 10 minutes. They're talking amongst themselves and that really is, to me, the highlight. I love the music, but I love to hear the personalities and the development of the working process.
JESSE: “Easy Wind” is the song with the single most surviving session tape — some 35 minutes worth, in addition to the master used on Workingman’s Dead.
AUDIO: “Easy Wind” ((Breakdown with Vocals 4) - Not Slated) [Workingman’s Dead: The Angel’s Share] (0:00-0:24) - [dead.net] [Spotify] [YouTube]
BOB MATTHEWS [1970]: Are you guys doin’ takes, or are you just rehearsing? [pause] Are you guys doin’ takes, or are you rehearsing?
JERRY GARCIA [1970]: Yeah, we’re always doing takes!
BOB MATTHEWS [1970]: Alright.
JESSE: With the Dead “always doing takes,” we get 10 passes on “Easy Wind,” almost all of them a Pig’s breath from the final version. But more than any other song on the album, “Easy Wind” required the Dead to channel the energy they found onstage in front of dancing crowds, sometimes a tall order in the studio. One thing to note is that Pigpen is singing live in the studio. In part, the outtakes contain the usual blooper reel material.
AUDIO: “Easy Wind” ((False Starts & Breakdowns with Vocals) - Not Slated) [Workingman’s Dead: The Angel’s Share] (0:55-1:11) - [dead.net] [Spotify] [YouTube]
[take abruptly stops]
PIGPEN [1970]: Came in a little bit wrong there.
JESSE: With “Easy Wind,” all of these little stupid moments are simultaneously mundane and sweet character details about the elusive Pigpen, Ron McKernan, rarely interviewed. Then 24 years old, Pigpen tragically didn’t actually live five more years, nor take his time — gone almost exactly three years to the day after the last Workingman’s Dead sessions.
AUDIO: “Easy Wind” ((Take 4) Breakdown With Vocals - Not Slated) [Workingman’s Dead: The Angel’s Share] (0:49-1:01) - [dead.net] [Spotify] [YouTube]
JESSE: But most of what we get on the Angel’s Share “Easy Wind” session is the band trying to find that elusive groove. As Gary Lambert pointed out, the studio “Easy Wind” is the rolling thunder of live Grateful Dead compressed into less than five minutes. The differences between the takes are subtle — minute variations in tempo and feel. But to train your ears on the remastered Workingman’s Dead version of “Easy Wind” enough to hear those differences on The Angel’s Share is one way to really get inside the Grateful Dead in 1970.
AUDIO: “Easy Wind” (Complete Track with Vocals 1 - Not Slated) [Workingman’s Dead: The Angel’s Share] (4:29-4:50) - [dead.net] [Spotify] [YouTube]
JESSE: Our dear pal Eric Schwartz is the host of Lone Star Dead radio show, which has aired continuously on KNON in Dallas since 1983. Eric shared this with us.
ANNOUNCER [1970]: Good ol’ Grateful Dead… good new Grateful Dead. Yes, friends, America’s hardest working rock band now presents Workingman’s Dead, an album of country-flavored tunes by the Grateful Dead — an album different from anything they’ve ever done before.
JESSE: Eric is perhaps the single most committed Grateful Dead collector I’ve ever encountered. Plenty of Dead Heads have walls, or even several walls, covered in cassettes. But Eric goes even further than that.
ERIC SCHWARTZ: You know, a gold record here; some metal stampers here; a complete set of Grateful Dead high school yearbooks. My most recent one was Robert Hunter. Some of them are clean, some of them have signatures in it. I bought one from Mickey Hart for 20 bucks on eBay, and I opened up to the middle page, and it's signed by Mickey Hart, in some high school girl’s pink ink pencil in 1959: “Lot's of luck in all that you endeavor… Always Mickey Hartman.” He drew a little arrow up to his face, and my jaw just dropped. I did own a billboard, a modern hotel billboard that was 10 feet high by 20 feet long, that I was never going to be able to display in a house.
JESSE: Eric made an informal catalog to his collection that’s a pretty amazing virtual museum show. That previous recording is part of another one of Eric’s sub-collections. He found it because he’s a collector of records, and specifically 45s — the little records with the big holes.
ERIC SCHWARTZ: When I started getting into the Dead, albums just seemed so pedestrian — albums, and posters. People are real hardcore collectors have that stuff, but Workingman’s Dead came out on Warner Bros., and then it was reissued with a Burbank label, and then it was reissued with a Reprise label, and then it went to 14 different countries. It just seemed too infinite to get a good, solid collection of LPs. “Uncle John's Band” was released once on 45 — that's it. There's one version of the single, so it seemed like a more finite goal to be able to collect. There's probably over 150 different Grateful Dead singles, if you count the promos and the imports. But there's no re-releases.
JESSE: One can measure Warner Brothers’ excitement about the singable songs on Workingman’s Dead by the amount of promotional material they put out.
ERIC SCHWARTZ: The record company started investing in them a little more. There was “Uncle John’s [Band]” and “New Speedway [Boogie]” that came out on a stock copy, a nice promo copy that they would send to the radio stations. They had distribution all over the world, but the single [was a priority], as far as the album was concerned. They also put out a record that has radio spots on it — they would send these to FM stations, and it’s the same spot, run three times and with three different guys reading the script. At the end, they tell their listening audience to “steal the record,” which seemed like the Grateful Dead just saying: “Yeah, we’ll play along, but only so much.”
WARNER BROS. WORKINGMAN’S DEAD RADIO AD [1970]: Good ol’ Grateful Dead… good new Grateful Dead. Yes, friends, America’s hardest working rock band now presents Workingman’s Dead, an album of country-flavored tunes by the Grateful Dead — an album different from anything they ever did before.
WARNER BROS. WORKINGMAN’S DEAD RADIO AD [1970]: Workingman’s Dead: the newest from Jerry, Phil, Bob, Bill, Mickey and Pigpen. Ready now on Warner Bros. Records and Tapes. Workingman’s Dead — steal it…
JESSE: The Warner Brothers promotion department was run by industry legend Stan Cornyn, though when interviewed by producer Andy Zax in 2010, neither Cornyn nor his assistant recalled who wrote or produced the Dead spots. In the early years, though, many of Cornyn’s spots were voiced and occasionally tweaked by David Ossman of the Firesign Theatre, the group of radio surrealists that inspired the Bozos and Bolos of Europe ‘72. Here’s one from 1969.
WARNER BROS. AOXOMOXOA RADIO AD [1969]: Well, it’s finally here, people. You’ve waited over a year for it, and now it’s finally arrived. It’s the new Grateful Dead thing on the Warner Bros.-Seven Arts label. You know, if I were able to pronounce it, I’d tell you the title of the LP. But instead, why don’t you just go down to your local record place and ask for the new Grateful Dead thing on the Warner Bros.-Seven Arts label, and see if you can dig what the Dead did…
JESSE: Andy Zax has done some amazing excavations into the Warner and Reprise promo departments and
spoke about them at the Pop Conference in Seattle in 2010.
By the time Workingman’s Dead came around, like the band themselves, the ads were a bit more straightforward. But, like the band themselves, only a bit. Warner Brothers even took out an ad in Billboard that described their efforts on behalf of Workingman’s Dead. Though Dead Heads helped the spread word, for sure, Warners’ budget included what they described as “3,281 awfully hard-sell AM radio spots” with a reported $100,000 spent on radio promotion by the label and distributors. Adjusted for inflation, that’s over a half-million dollars.
WARNER BROS. WORKINGMAN’S DEAD RADIO AD [1970]: Workingman’s Dead: the newest from Jerry, Phil, Bob, Bill, Mickey and Pigpen. Ready now on Warner Bros. Albums and Tapes. Steal it…
JESSE: When Mike Johnson and Brian Kehew were pulling reels for The Angel’s Share, they also came across a battered tape box with an equally battered tape inside labeled “Workin Man Dead’s Commercial Spots.”
ROBERT HUNTER [1970]: Testing, testing, testing…
JESSE: Lyricist Robert Hunter stopped by to record a few promo spots for the same ad series. This was included as an unlisted bonus track on the 2003 Workingman’s Dead CD reissue. It didn’t make it to Warner’s promo 7-inch back in 1970. It was perhaps circulated to radio stations on tape, a frequent practice for promos. If you ever heard this in the wild, let us know.
AUDIO: Robert Hunter Workingman's Dead promo spot
ROBERT HUNTER [1970]: The Workingman’s Dead, by the Grateful Dead — available on Warner Bros. Tapes and Records. You should be able to get your copy by May 15th. Workingman’s Dead, by the Grateful Dead. Steal one…
JESSE: Among Dead fans, Robert Hunter is known for being private, even reclusive. And he was to some degree. But not always. Here’s how he described Workingman’s Dead to WLIR’s Denis McNamera in 1978.
ROBERT HUNTER [1978]: Ah, that’s my baby, I like that record.
JESSE: Hunter wrote the words for all eight of Workingman’s Dead’s songs, is credited with all of “Easy Wind,” and likely contributed some musical ideas to others. Significantly, he also appears on the album’s front cover along with the rest of the band. A portrait of him by Stanley Mouse was set to be included on the album’s back cover, but eliminated for reasons of symmetry. When the album came out, Hunter visited radio stations to promote it. He was working like it was his job. Which, for the first time, it actually was. In the spring of 1970, Robert Hunter was formally put on the payroll as a member of the Grateful Dead. Here’s Rhoney Stanley.
RHONEY STANLEY: If you look at the cover of Workingman’s Dead, Robert Hunter is pictured on the cover. And that was the first time: I think that sort of marks his recognition and acknowledgement by the band that he is part of the band. He is the seventh member of the band. If you also notice the way he looks on that cover — he's at the end, and he's wearing this big overcoat, his head’s down and he's shrouded a little bit. So it's a Hunter-esque thing. And also, I think that was the same coat that Jerry brought him that day when he took too much LSD and Jerry came by and got him. I think that’s sort of important that he’s on the cover. It was an important moment.
Hunter was living with Jerry Garcia at the time. Whenever I was over there, it was so peaceful. Annabelle had just been born: she was born in February. She was a cute little baby. I think they were that close that Hunter named her. Her name was Annabelle Ginger Bear Blue Bird. You could feel that, that the connection was flowering and coming alive and into the public.
JESSE: It also marked the beginning of financial stability for Robert Hunter after a decade of existence on the bohemian fringe. When he first met Jerry Garcia in 1961, the two lived in their cars, parked side by side.
The person responsible for making sure that Robert Hunter drew a weekly salary was Jon McIntire. Along with tour manager Sam Cutler, who organized the band’s road work, and Dave and Bonnie Parker, who handled their finances, McIntire was instrumental in reorganizing the Dead after Lenny Hart absconded with the band’s money early in 1970.
That April, they moved into the house at 5th and Lincoln that would remain their home and ground control for the next quarter-century. One person who drew a weekly paycheck in the spring of 1970 was sound engineer and former LSD chemist Owsley Stanley, who the Dead continued to pay even when he was finally sent to Terminal Island Federal Correctional Institution that summer. Rhoney Stanley had worked as a secretary during the Lenny Hart era, when the band’s offices were based at a warehouse adjacent to the Hamilton Air Force Base in Novato.
RHONEY STANLEY: They rented an office in San Rafael and they had a PO box. I still remember the number, 1073 — so weird, I remember these things. Every Monday was the day you came into the office and picked up your check. Bear had arranged for his salary to be split between Melissa and me. So, we’d go in every Monday, and everybody would meet and it would be a great day. After the weekend, where you partied and worked so hard—we were working, and the band was working weekends for fans, for fun—Monday was the day off. We’d go into the office and we’d pick up our checks, and we’d hang out all day. I actually have a vision of Hunter being there… I can see him, as we talk.
Way later, years later after I’d moved to New York—going to Columbia and getting my degrees and everything—every Monday, still, that office, you went and you pick up your check! I remember, I went back to California one day, and I went into the office on a Monday, and everybody was hangin’ out, picking up their checks.
JESSE: Jon McIntire came into the Grateful Dead scene by virtue of being classmates with Rock Scully at San Francisco State, and got a job working as a systems analyst for an insurance company before dropping out and joining the rock and roll circus at the Carousel Ballroom, the Dead’s home venue. Historian Nicholas Meriwether of the Center for Counterculture Studies discussed the importance of Jon McIntire as the Dead established themselves for real in 1970.
NICHOLAS MERIWETHER: This is when they get 5th and Lincoln; this is when they actually incorporate in the state of California. These things are not all patched together, but it's right around the same time. I think what you can see is that McIntire made it explicit at the time that they were going to create this pod, this unit, and use the band’s music and performance as the anchor. It goes back to what Garcia says to Charles Reich right around this time, too. The theory of hip economics is you would have essentially a self-contained community with a few people who had outside jobs. Their function was to have these outside jobs bring in some money, and then that would circulate quickly within the community. So the idea was you would mostly be focused on the community, but you had to have a few earnways, to use a later term, that would make that seem solvent — that would give that scene enough of the capital and the money so that they could actually function within the capitalist system. I think that’s important, because it’s actually a remarkably sophisticated way of imagining how a utopian community has to function. This is not to say that they’re doing this in a kind of studied or scholarly way, but they certainly are doing it in a thoughtful way. And I think this is also a big part of why one of Jon McIntire’s early moves is — let’s bring Alan Trist into this.
JESSE: Alan Trist, a close friend of Garcia and Hunter’s for nearly a decade, would organize the Dead’s in-house publishing company, Ice-9, a reference to Kurt Vonnegut’s Cat’s Cradle.
NICHOLAS MERIWETHER: Alan had worked for his father's think tank, which was the Tavistock Institute. The Tavistock Institute was really focused on how to have sustainable, ethical, efficient business structures — doing things like solving labor management problems in UK mines, things like that. So Alan was perfect for this: he graduated from Cambridge, he's worked for his father's think tank. Alan is an old, old running buddy of Garcia, and part of that early Palo Alto folk scene. He was just a perfect guy to come in. I think that’s also important because McIntire is imagining all of this with everybody else. He’s not the CEO, but he’s acting in a sort of managerial capacity. Alan is brought in not just to help with that, but also to help them understand what they're doing — to help them theorize, essentially. Which is something that, as anyone who has ever spoken with Alan knows, he is remarkably good at that kind of reflection.
JESSE: With the band taking control of nearly every aspect of their business, it was the beginning of a new era for the Grateful Dead, with the skilled ground control of people like Jon McIntire. Rhoney Stanley was close with McIntire and reconnected later in life.
RHONEY STANLEY: I remember we had a Thanksgiving — I’m not sure what year this was, but the whole Grateful Dead family got together. We took an inn at Cotati, which is near Sonoma, lower Sonoma. McIntire ordered cases of Baron Rothschild wine. We had never tasted anything like this and he's, like, teaching us how to drink fine wine… oh my. He was like that: he was very graceful, really a sweetheart.
“Uncle John’s Band” is spelled J-o-h-n, John. But Jon McIntire, whose name was spelled J-o-n, always believed that that song was about him! But it really wasn’t. I think it’s much more having to do with the New Lost City Ramblers. I totally think that, but he co-opted it. He felt that that band was his, and he loved that idea! Even when he was old, even before he died, he always said that.
JESSE: Jon McIntire passed away in 2012. Dennis McNally wrote a touching memorial on dead.net, and Robert Hunter contributed a poem.
But back to “Easy Wind.” Remember “Easy Wind”? Robert Hunter certainly did. After beginning to perform in 1976, he played “Easy Wind” in virtually every era of his long touring career. Here’s a tiny bit of what it sounded like in 2014 at City Winery in New York.
AUDIO: “Easy Wind” [Robert Hunter, 7/21/14] (1:42-1:58) - [archive.org]
JESSE: “Easy Wind” didn’t last nearly as long in the Grateful Dead’s repertoire. It remained a showcase for Pigpen throughout 1970, but disappeared from the stage early the next year, not long after Mickey Hart’s departure. We’ll leave you with one of those final single-drummer versions, recorded February 21st at the Capitol Theater in Port Chester, New York, released on the bonus disc with the new expanded Workingman’s Dead, mixed down from the multi-track masters by Jeffrey Norman at Bob Weir's TRI Studios.
AUDIO: “Easy Wind” [Workingman’s Dead 50 bonus disc, 2/21/71] - [dead.net] [Spotify] [YouTube]