Good Ol’ Grateful Deadcast
Season 8, Episode 3
Wake of the Flood 50: Mississippi Half-Step Uptown Toodeloo
Archival interviews:
- Bob Weir, Keith Godchaux, Donna Godchaux, and Jon McIntire, WAER, 9/17/73.
- Robert Hunter, by Denis McNamera, WLIR, 3/1978.
JESSE: In October 1973, the Grateful Dead released Wake of the Flood, their sixth proper studio album and first since American Beauty, almost exactly three years earlier.
AUDIO: “Mississippi Half-Step” [Wake of the Flood] (0:00-0:22) - [dead.net] [Spotify] [YouTube]
JESSE: Grateful Dead archivist and legacy manager David Lemieux.
DAVID LEMIEUX: Wake of the Flood—I will go on record here saying it—is one of my favorite Grateful Dead studio records. Wake of the Flood is up there for me, definitely in the top five world with American Beauty and Workingman’s Dead of course.
JESSE: And from the Grateful Dead, Donna Jean Godchaux-MacKay.
DONNA JEAN GODCHAUX-MACKAY: Wake of the Flood was kind of a real departure. It was like a new era in the Grateful Dead. It started something different. Part of that difference was Keith, the writing of the songs to be geared towards Keith.
AUDIO: “Stella Blue” [Wake of the Flood] (0:10-0:43) - [dead.net] [Spotify] [YouTube]
DONNA JEAN GODCHAUX-MACKAY: Some of the most classic Grateful Dead songs in the world came in with Wake of the Flood.
JESSE: So what’s on the album? After the album was recorded but before it came out, WAER interviewed Bob Weir and other band members.
BOB WEIR [9/17/73]: Oh, wait a minute, let me see if I can remember… The first side starts off with “Half-Step Mississippi Uptown Toodeloo.” And then the second song is Keith’s new song, “Sing Your Blues Away.” And the third song is “Row Jimmy.” The fourth song is “Stella Blue.” Then song one, side two is “Here Comes Sunshine”; then “Eyes of the World”; then my suite, “Weather Report Suite,” parts 1 and 2.
JESSE: Thank you Weir, that’s very impressive.
DONNA JEAN GODCHAUX-MACKAY: What's not to love about singing those songs? They are just classic, classic (chef’s kiss) Grateful Dead.
AUDIO: “Eyes of the World” [Wake of the Flood] (0:55-1:29) - [dead.net] [Spotify] [YouTube]
DAVID LEMIEUX: There was so much on there that was different than what I was used to hearing: a lot of horns, other vocalists aside from Donna, the electric piano sounds, Vassar Clements.
AUDIO: “Mississippi Half-Step” [Wake of the Flood] (1:05-1:20) - [dead.net] [Spotify] [YouTube]
JESSE: That was the great Vassar Clements on fiddle, part of a pretty rich guest list that reflected some of the Dead’s musical network in 1973.
DAVID LEMIEUX: They enhance the album completely. I don't want to hear a stripped-down version of this album; I don't want to hear a naked version of it, without all these great horns and extra vocals and fiddle and all sorts of great stuff.
JESSE: Wake of the Flood is an album with thick arrangements and deep songs. In Circus magazine, Jerry Garcia told Cameron Crowe about the songs on the album. “They’re a little more sophisticated in terms of structure than our other ones, the new tunes. But they’re Grateful Dead all the way. I mean they sound like the Grateful Dead. I can’t really look at them objectively, but I feel that they’re better. It’s hard to tell what direction they’re moving in. They’re really sort of dispersed in that they are widely-patterned. All the tunes are very different from each other and the ones that preceded them as well.”
One of the Dead Head hosts at WAER asked Weir about where he thought the Dead’s music was headed.
BOB WEIR [9/17/73]: This is maybe sort of an elusive answer, but I really have little or no idea which way it’s going now. But I imagine we’ll probably keep doing a lot of it.
JESSE: As Marge Simpson once said — whatever it does, it’s doing it now.
BOB WEIR [9/17/73]: Wait ‘til you hear our next record before you try to have any concept of what direction our music’s heading. This next record that’s coming up is as marked a departure, I feel at least, from what we’ve been doing in the past, recording-wise, as any other record we’ve ever put out.
JESSE: 50 years later, both Weir and Garcia’s assessments of Wake of the Flood seem pretty accurate. If you have a Deadcast bingo card, these next few establishing sentences will tick off a bunch of truisms about the Grateful Dead that we feel worth reiterating whenever we’re starting to focus in on a new period of the band’s history. By 1973, both fans and the general public had known to expect constant change from the Dead. If they’d been seeing the Dead for any amount of time, they knew that the band were liable to show up the next time with a whole new set of songs that weren’t on their albums, maybe even a whole new vibe with a whole new set of facial hair. They’d flowered from a psychedelic blues dance band to modal space-jazz improvisers and studio experimenters before becoming the roots-driven Bakersfield Dead of American Beauty, Workingman’s Dead, and Europe ‘72. But in 1973, the Dead were ready for their next evolution.
AUDIO: “Here Comes Sunshine” [Wake of the Flood] (1:00-1:24) - [dead.net] [Spotify] [YouTube]
Grateful Dead Records
JESSE: Last season, we talked about the music on the Here Comes Sunshine box set — six shows from the spring of 1973. While the Dead were playing some of the biggest shows of their career, in the background, they were organizing something audacious. In the fall, the Grateful Dead showed up with not only a new record of their own but a new record company of their own. That spring, at least in the Dead’s business papers, it was still known as So What Records. By the time Wake of the Flood came out, it was Grateful Dead Records. We talked a bunch about the formation of the label in our “Grateful Dead & Co.” episode last season, speaking with the great Alan Trist of Ice Nine Publishing about how the idea of questing was literally written into the band’s business papers.
ALAN TRIST: The term questing — the idea of a group vision questing is kind of what we were going on. It's normally associated with an individual vision quest, but there's no reason why a group can't have a vision quest too, and we did.
JESSE: This season, we have a new perspective on Grateful Dead Records, which the band co-founded with a friend they’d met after he’d moved from New York to San Francisco in 1966. To tell his own story, please welcome to the Deadcast, president and co-founder of Grateful Dead and Round Records — Ron Rakow.
RON RAKOW: I was a young Wall Street person, and when I wasn't around, they called me Moneybags. I found that out later, and it's hilarious — I didn't have any money. I mean, I had some money, but not, like, money. It was a little money.
JESSE: Over the next half-dozen years, Ron Rakow was a trusted member of the band’s inner circle, from the Haight to Europe ‘72. He helped in the management of the Carousel Ballroom, took photographs, and served in a variety of roles.
RON RAKOW: I brought people down from bad acid trips. I developed a way to do that, and it's infallible.
JESSE: Oh yeah? Do tell.
RON RAKOW: Well, I mean, the equipment guys would dose the audience every Saturday night. So, it happened, and a lot of people got too stoned. I would be looking out for them, but yes, otherwise they were directed to me. I had the secret stuff that brought them down: gum. Chewing gum. That was hilarious. How did I discover it? Having gotten myself very fucked up more than once. You gotta have a lot of it because if you give [someone] a stick of gum, and it's a long, thin thing, they chew it and then they say, “Oh, I'm better.” “Oh, good. Now enjoy yourself.” Or they say, “I'm chewing the gum, and I'm still fucked up.” “Oh, sorry” — and I give them another one. I’d say, “I didn’t give you enough gum.” And they chew that one. And then if they're still fucked up, I give them a third one. The most I ever had to give anybody is four. And then when they could hardly close their mouth, they were so concentrating on closing their mouth, they forgot they were stoned.
JESSE: [mumble mumble, swallow] Hey — it works! Ron had many adventures around the Dead world during the band’s first half-dozen years. We’re going to save most of those for another time and jump right to his gig in 1973 as new record company president.
RON RAKOW: I never had any other job in the music business except with the Dead.
JESSE: So how’d you end up organizing their record company?
RON RAKOW: I had a background in organizing businesses and doing that. I worked on Wall Street, and I went to college and specialized in that sort of thing. I actually was an aide to a professor whose name was John R. Shubin, S-h-u-b-i-n, who wrote a book on how to effectively study an industry, and or a company within an industry. And it was a big fat book — my wife typed it for him as a volunteer. So I knew a lot about how to go about it, just to sort of do it. I wanted to create a situation where the Grateful Dead did something else unique. So, that's what happened. I did what I always do: I told Jerry, Jerry said take it away, and I did.
JESSE: Ron wrote up a set of fairly radical proposals called the So What Papers, presenting alternatives to signing with a regular already-existing record label. Robert Hunter’s copy is in the Dead’s archive at UC Sant Cruz for scholars to check out.
RON RAKOW: I presented the So What Papers papers to the band, and the whole family, on July 4th, 1972 at the home of Bill Kreutzmann. The whole Grateful Dead family was invited. At that meeting, I presented these volumes that you've seen, which we made by hand. We made about 30 of them. And they got sucked up in a second.
JESSE: Independence Day 1972 seemed like a powerful day to start talking about an independent record company. There’s lots more on this meeting from some other perspectives in our “Grateful Dead & Co.” episode last season, but I wanted to ask Ron about a few of the more absurd but forward-thinking ideas he had. One was to distribute the Dead’s records via ice cream trucks.
RON RAKOW: I was thinking about Good Humor ice cream — ice cream trucks, repurposed, reconfigured and redesigned by Kelley and Mouse. So there would be these little psychedelic trucks all around.
AUDIO: “Pop Goes the Weasel” [anonymous NYC ice cream truck] (0:00-0:07)
JESSE: These days, those would be called pop-up shops. Jack White’s Third Man Records sells albums in a set-up pretty close to this, for example. At its core, Grateful Dead Records was an attempt to rethink selling records from the ground up — a genuinely independent label, not just a subsidiary of an existing operation.
RON RAKOW: Everybody's saying — how are we going to be able to afford this? Everybody said that, sooner or later. I mean, you would have said it sooner or later too. How did you think you were gonna pay for it? So that was the first thing I dealt with. I went to… I forget the name of the guy, but he was the congressman from the district that I lived in. I went to his office and told his staff that they have a lot of hippies in their constituency. And the hippies are a separate form, and we should be designated as such. That started a whole process. In three months, we got part of the United States government to declare hippies as a separate minority. The reason I did that was so that I could get MESBIC money: Minority Enterprise Small Business Investment Company. SBIC. I made a deal with them that if we put up 1500 bucks, they would give us some money — that would chip off more money, and that would chip off money. P.S.: $1,500 would turn into $350,000. So, that was my plan for how to finance it. That was going to start us with a quantity of ice cream trucks. But I had to submit to answering questions by the SBIC, which was the government agency that ran this money program for the government.
AUDIO: “Pop Goes the Weasel” [anonymous NYC ice cream truck] (0:07-0:14)
RON RAKOW: So I made that all on a big oak-tag chart that was, I think, three feet by four feet. I hung it up in front, and up on top in the right hand corner, it talked about the SBIC. Bonnie Parker listened to the whole presentation, then she went and walked around and looked at this thing. She sees “SBIC” up in the corner of this chart, and she goes into an anxiety fit. I don't know what to call it — she has an anxiety attack. She's an important person in this organization as well. She was very effective at the time being the controller, I guess you'd call her that. Her husband was the CFO, and she'd be the controller.
JESSE: Bonnie and David Parker were some of the band’s oldest friends. David played in Mother McCree’s Uptown Jug Champions and contributed lyrics to the Warlocks-era song “The Only Time Is Now.”
AUDIO: “The Only Time Is Now” [Birth of the Dead] (0:21-0:34) - [Spotify] [YouTube]
JESSE: When Lenny Hart ran away with the band’s money in 1970, the Parkers became part of a new 3-pronged management system. Sam Cutler looked after road business, Jon McIntire handled industry business, and the Parkers handled the business of the business.
RON RAKOW: She just couldn't catch your breath. She worked at a company that had an FDIC loan and they couldn't pay it, and the SBIC sent monitors to stay inside the company. Every time a check came in, or money came in of any kind, they took it. It got everybody crazy that worked at the company, and Bonnie was the bookkeeper. She remembered how fucked up it made her and she had an anxiety attack, right then and there. I pulled out my pocket knife and cut that section of the chart off. Right there. I just cut it off. I said, “I’ll find another way to raise the money. Don’t worry about it.” But I did, I found another way to raise the money.
JESSE: But that was still a little ways off. The meeting was in early July 1972 with the ideas circulating around the band for a while. Imagine this conversation going on in the background of the Springfield Creamery benefit the next month, or the Fox Theater shows from the fall on the Listen To The River box.
RON RAKOW: I wrote the So What Papers, and then it took those guys six or seven months to agree. Jerry agreed that we should do it in six or seven hours. Pigpen agreed in about a week, and everybody else just danced around. I remember saying, “Well, what the fuck, I could wait forever for this.” Just to keep myself cool, I got a job on the equipment crew because they really worked hard. So I worked on the equipment crew for six months or so. That was a trip.
JESSE: But there was one more record industry boss that Rakow had to defeat.
RON RAKOW: When we decided to go into the record business alone, it was a very unpopular idea with everybody in the record industry. Just imagine what it would be like if the best bands that people had on the label went into business for themselves like we did. The labels, how would they do it? It was a dangerous thing for them. So Clive Davis called up Jon McIntire. He asked to meet the band at a meeting with me, so that he could debate me, in front of the band. Clive Davis is a big name! He didn’t become a big name last Thursday. He’s been a big name for a very long time. So I was very anxious to do that. Anything that sped the process up, I was for. And I knew my shit.
JESSE: Clive Davis had become president of Columbia Records in 1966 and added many illustrious artists to their roster, infamously plundering acts from the Monterey Pop Festival the next year. He’d wanted the Dead for years and signed the New Riders of the Purple Sage in an effort to woo Jerry Garcia for when the Dead got out of their own contract. In the summer of 1972, as the band were pondering the So What Papers, Davis was busy signing Aerosmith and Earth, Wind and Fire.
RON RAKOW: So anyway, we set it up. [Sam] Cutler had a booking agency down the street from the Grateful Dead office. He had the most stunning Gothic dining room table you ever saw. It was a big table with 12 thrones around it, hand-carved Gothic chairs. So they’re around the table, and Clive Davis comes in. All the important guys are there. Let’s see: there was the band; [Robert] Hunter; Owsley; Ram Rod; and maybe [Kidd] Candelario, somebody like that. Anyway, we’re sitting around and starting to talk, and Owsley comes in. Owsley goes right for Clive Davis, moves a little folding chair next to Clive Davis’s arm, and starts to talk in his ear. Clive is trying to have this incredible debate with these guys and me. And Owsley, in his monotone voice, is whispering into his ear. We can all hear him, of course.
JESSE: One of Clive Davis’s early signings to Columbia was Janis Joplin, a close friend to the Dead and especially Owsley Stanley, who’d of course become a huge star. Her relationship with Clive Davis and Columbia was complicated. Both before and after her death in 1970, there are those who might describe that relationship as exploitative, to use a fairly mild synonym.
RON RAKOW: He's saying, “Sir, you're putting out press about a woman who's very, very important in our lifestyle. Her name is Janis Joplin, and you're making it look like she's a tramp. We find it really offensive and it's not good for you, it's not good for her, it's not good for us. We'd like you to change that.” And he goes on and on and on. That's the way Owsley was. He was amazing. Anyway, we're sitting there, and we're choking back laughter because Owsley’s doing what he does with us, but he’s doing it with Clive Davis! It's hard for us not to be rolling on the floor. So Clive is like lookin’... it was really funny. He was so uncomfortable. He didn’t know how to get rid of Owsley, he didn’t know what to do.
JESSE: Hell yeah Bear. That’d be Dead: 1, Clive: nil.
RON RAKOW: All of a sudden, Hunter, who's sitting there and bored to tears from this whole process, writes a name—“C-L-I-V-E DAVIS”—on a piece of paper. He bends over and writes it. And then he takes the name, and he writes “SIVA DEVIL C.” That’s Clive Davis spelled backwards… look at it.
JESSE: Amazing. It’s true, Clive Davis’s name backwards is [audio plays in reverse]: CLIVE DAVIS.
RON RAKOW: So he takes this piece of paper and passes it around the table, and all of us look at it. It goes up to where Clive is, and then it goes back the other way and then it goes down the other side. “SIVA DEVIL C.”
JESSE: Dead: 2, Clive: nil.
RON RAKOW: There's no way that a guy with a name like Siva Devil C is going to make a deal with the Grateful Dead if Robert Hunter is in the room. No fucking way! Period.
JESSE: If a friend of the devil is a friend of mine, then a friend of [name read in reverse] CLIVE DAVIS obviously isn’t. By 1973, the band committed to the project of starting their own label. Ron Rakow just needed some start-up money.
RON RAKOW: I raised the money by selling the foreign rights to Atlantic. I made the deal for the foreign rights to Atlantic at Jerry Wexler’s. Remember him? Jerry Wexler? He was one of the founders. Anyway, he lived in the Hampshire House. I was staying at the Navarro, 112 Central Park South. The Hampshire House is 150 Central Park South. I walked over to Jerry’s house and went up in the elevator. We sat in his kitchen and made the deal. We used it to get the label up and running. It was $300,000.
Going To Work
JESSE: The formation of Grateful Dead Records wouldn’t be announced until the end of the summer of 1973, but probably everything was in place by August. Here’s Bob Weir and Donna Jean Godchaux on WAER in September 1973, just after finishing the album.
BOB WEIR [9/17/73]: We took the entire month of August off and went in there every day.
DONNA JEAN GODCHAUX [9/17/73]: We started the day we got back from Watkins Glen.
BOB WEIR [9/17/73]: Yeah, we started the day we got back from Watkins Glen and finished recording the day before we left —
DONNA JEAN GODCHAUX [9/17/73]: The day before we left.
JESSE: The Record Plant in Sausalito had been open for less than a year when the Dead rented Studio A for the entirety of August, shifting their dates slightly to accommodate getting back from their August 1st gig at Roosevelt Stadium. The original Record Plant had opened in New York in 1967 with an LA studio following in 1969. The Sausalito Record Plant officially began operations on October 29th, 1972. It would become as storied as the others. Brian Kehew is the engineer responsible for mixing the new batch of Angel’s Share recordings.
BRIAN KEHEW: Sly Stone had his own room there. There's the Fleetwood Mac history. In very late years, Metallica took it on. So it's got these multi-generational roots spreading out into the soil there. Depending on what you like and what you appreciate, it was all done there.
JESSE: But before all that, for a moment in 1973, it was the Dead’s turf. Besides side sessions at Mickey Hart’s Rolling Thunder barn in Novato, it was the first real studio the Dead could work safe in the confines of Marin County. KSAN DJ Tom Donahue had purportedly encouraged the owners to open a Bay Area outpost in part by promising that he would host live broadcasts. Four months later, Jerry Garcia’s brand new bluegrass band, Old & In the Way, made their world debut from the Record Plant, Garcia’s first public appearance on banjo in years.
AUDIO: “Goin’ to the Races” [Old & In the Way, 3/2/73] (0:49-1:17)
JESSE: Garcia was through a few times throughout early 1973 for more broadcasts with Old & In the Way as well as his group with Merl Saunders, just a few weeks before the Dead were to take up residency. This version of “Georgia on My Mind” is now on Keepers.
AUDIO: “Georgia On My Mind” [Merl Saunders, Keepers] (8:28-9:01) - [Spotify]
JESSE: And sometime that summer, too, the New Riders of the Purple Sage were through the Record Plant to make The Adventures of Panama Red, with a title track written by Old & In the Way’s Peter Rowan. A few songs featured Donna Jean Godchaux.
AUDIO: “Important Exportin’ Man” [New Riders of the Purple Sage, The Adventures of Panama Red] (1:50-2:10) - [Spotify]
JESSE: Grateful Dead archivist David Lemieux.
DAVID LEMIEUX: It was a hometown studio right there in Marin County. Great studio. I’ve been there a whole lot. It was still open when I lived in Marin. There were a few times when Jeffrey was so busy in the Dead studio that we had to, with Tom Flye, Mickey's longtime engineer, we'd have to go and do projects at the Plant. I loved going there — it was so great. You just come off the causeway there, in Sausalito. There's a place there called the Bay Model too. I used to love going down to the Plant and then going into the Bay Model. Great part of Sausalito. But the studio was amazing: a lot of hallways that were very dark and then these incredible recording rooms. I got to see where they recorded this album. Wonderful place.
JESSE: The studio closed in 2008, but earlier this year engineer Brian Kehew got a surprise.
BRIAN KEHEW: Four months ago, I walked up to the door and knocked on it. My brother lives up in the northern part of California—we were in Sausalito—and I said, “Hey, this building over here is highly significant to me. I work for Warner Brothers. I've done a lot of the projects that were recorded here. I'm an engineer by trade.” And he said, “Come on in. We have bought the building.” Ken Caillat and Richard Dashut, who did Rumours for Fleetwood Mac, have bought the building and are restoring it to a studio. And I said, “That's great news.” And he said, “More than that, you'd be surprised at how much is left.” We went through the room and old tape machines, old compressors, old mics, they're still there. And the hippie psychedelic-y wooden painted carvings—my friends called them cocaine pirates, but it’s probably before the cocaine days kicked in—those things are still all over the building. And I just love being in that room.
JESSE: One long-standing rumor about the Record Plant is that they had nitrous tanks delivered on the regular. It was a substance with which the Dead collectively had a long-standing relationship.
AUDIO: “N2O” [9/26/71] (8:22-8:50)
JESSE: For more on the Dead’s relationship with nitrous and the story of that tape, check out our episode, “Closing of the Fillmore West.” Steve Brown of Grateful Dead Records.
STEVE BROWN: The Record Plant was new — “Oh, it's right close to home, how convenient!” And there's a restaurant right down the street! I can't think of the [restaurant’s] name right now… look at the phone book. It's probably still there.
JESSE: Steve had been hired for his long experience being a head in the record industry.
STEVE BROWN: We were still trying to set up the record company stuff. I was kind of in and out of the door a lot of time.
JESSE: Without an album out yet, Steve served as a production coordinator.
STEVE BROWN: It was part of one of the hats I wore, making sure the scenes were gonna go down, to get everybody in there at the right time, and that we had all the equipment and stuff ready for everybody. It was kind of being in charge of checking off stuff. It was kind of easy because I'd been doing a lot of that in my world. It had to do with record companies, stuff that I work with. It was talking about what the next sessions would be and what we were trying to do time-wise, working with these studios; where we’re going to be going and what time we can be there with everybody. I’d make sure that we'd made contact with everybody, any kind of food things that might be needed if it's an evening thing. Stuff like that.
JESSE: Naturally, when the Dead arrived, they brought plenty of gear.
STEVE BROWN: We kind of filled up the hallway sometimes there with a lot of our equipment. They wound up complaining: ‘The guys on the other side of the studio are here, they want to get in and can’t get in… you’ve got to move those things…’
JESSE: There’d been some preproduction work on the album. Jerry Garcia brought a large batch of songs with him, all of which the Dead had been performing since at least the beginning of 1973, if not earlier. He’d made some demos for the band to learn them.
AUDIO: “Eyes of the World” (Demo) [Wake of the Flood 50] (1:16-1:52) - [dead.net] [Spotify] [YouTube]
JESSE: We’ll have more on Garcia’s exciting, never-heard home demos in upcoming episodes, to my ears one of the most enthralling finds in recent years. The Dead finished their East Coast shows on August 1st—Jerry Garcia’s 31st birthday—and the sessions at the Record Plant began on August 4th. David Lemieux.
DAVID LEMIEUX: It didn't run long — certainly done before the 18th or so. Then they mixed it really quickly, and then they hit the road on September 6th for the September 7th show at Nassau. They presumably mastered it in that time, too. Our lead times now on vinyl are 10 to 12 months; this was finished and mastered six weeks before the album came out. October 15 it came out. They recorded it quickly.
JESSE: The first day of the sessions seems to have been devoted to demo songs for a few new tunes the band hadn’t yet performed live. One was Bob Weir’s involved “Weather Report Suite.”
AUDIO: “Weather Report Suite” (acoustic demo) [Wake of the Flood 2006 expanded edition] (11:52-12:10) - [Spotify] [YouTube]
JESSE: The demo can be heard on the expanded 2006 edition of Wake of the Flood. We’ll revisit it in a few episodes. The other demo on August 4th was by Phil Lesh.
AUDIO: “Pride of Cucamonga” (acoustic demo) [From the Mars Hotel 2006 expanded edition] (1:00-1:20) - [Spotify] [YouTube]
JESSE: “Pride of Cucamonga” wouldn’t find a home on Wake of the Flood, but that demo can be heard on the 2006 edition of From the Mars Hotel. August 4th was a Saturday. On August 5th, they took advantage of the fact that they’d booked the studio for an entire month. According to paperwork discovered by Joe Jupille of JerryBase, Jerry Garcia spent his Sunday helping Robert Hunter mix some tracks that would end up on his solo debut the next year, Tales of the Great Rum Runners, including “Arizona Lightning,” with Keith Godchaux on Rhodes.
AUDIO: “Arizona Lightning” [Robert Hunter, Tales of the Great Rum Runners] (0:00-0:24)
JESSE: When they returned to the Record Plant on Monday, the Grateful Dead began their album sessions with the song that would eventually lead off Wake of the Flood. It was one they didn’t need to demo.
“Mississippi Half-Step”
AUDIO: “Mississippi Half-Step” [Wake of the Flood] (0:41-1:05) - [dead.net] [Spotify] [YouTube]
JESSE: Properly, the name of the song is “Mississippi Half-Step Uptown Toodeloo,” but I’m not sure I’ve ever heard anyone use the full name. On tapes, it was always just “Mississippi Half-Step,” which is what we’re going to call it and save those five extra syllables. Sometimes, six is enough. David Lemieux.
DAVID LEMIEUX: I think of a straightforward Grateful Dead song, if there is such a thing, as maybe “Bertha,” something like that. This is not that. This is a song that has multiple parts that are very distinct.
AUDIO: “Mississippi Half-Step” (Take 1) [Wake of the Flood: The Angel’s Share] (0:00-0:13) - [dead.net]
JESSE: From its very introduction, “Mississippi Half-Step” signaled something new but not-new in the Dead’s music. Though its title hinted at a continuation of the Americana themes of Europe ‘72 and the albums that preceded it, the music began to lean somewhere different, with “Mississippi Half-Step” acting as a good transition. Please welcome back musicologist Shaugn O’Donnell, Deputy Dean of the Humanities & Arts at The City College of New York.
SHAUGN O’DONNELL: It's coming out of their Bakersfield-plus zone coming post-’72 tours. They shift gears a little bit more, and there's more synthesis. The opening of the verses has moves that are sort of in the bluegrass vocabulary; “The Old Home Place” has the same sort of opening move in the verse. There’s a whole bunch of ii-V progressions in here that would be in any sort of standard jazz tune — it just doesn’t feel like that. The feel isn’t jazz. It’s still closer to honky-tonk or maybe Dixieland or Western swing-ish.
JESSE: “Mississippi Half-Step Uptown Toodeloo” was one of the first songs the Dead debuted after returning from the Europe ‘72 tour, before the album had even been finished. Here’s an early version from Baltimore, September 17th, 1972, two months and one day after its debut, now Dick’s Picks 23.
AUDIO: “Mississippi Half-Step” [Dick’s Picks 23, 9/17/72] (0:00-0:22) - [Spotify] [YouTube]
JESSE: Compared to the simple and somewhat obvious descending intro lick to, say, “Dire Wolf,” “Mississippi Half-Step” begins with a somewhat involved melodic loop-de-loop that sets up the whole song. For this episode of the Deadcast, we’re pleased to have access to the multitracks for the studio recording of “Mississippi Half-Step,” so we’ll get to illustrate some of Shaugn’s points with isolated parts.
SHAUGN O’DONNELL: You're coming down with the A, the G#, G, F#, that's motivic to the song. But before he does that, you get a little G, G#, A, into it. So you feel like you're going in reverse, and that creates the little loop for you.
AUDIO: “Mississippi Half-Step” [Guitar 1, Wake of the Flood] (0:00-0:09) - [dead.net]
JESSE: It was pretty much done by the time it hit the stage in ‘72. Especially with that “Toodeloo” in the chorus and title making it clear that it’s a “goodbye” song of sorts, I personally hear “Mississippi Half-Step” as another in a line of Garcia/Hunter songs about down-on-their-luck Southerners, perhaps sung by a friend of “Tennessee Jed.”
AUDIO: “Mississippi Half-Step” [Dick’s Picks 23, 9/17/72] (0:22-0:30) - [Spotify] [YouTube]
JESSE: That first lyric about mixing the Biblical brothers Cain and Abel with loaded dice and card games is classic Hunter to my ears. And then there’s this.
AUDIO: “Mississippi Half-Step” [Dick’s Picks 23, 9/17/72] (0:30-0:37) - [Spotify] [YouTube]
JESSE: Robert Hunter loved his card games, and they play into a number of Dead tunes, pun half-intended. But the invocation of Cain catching Abel cheating was getting near the end of the line for Hunter’s poker period, at least with the Dead themselves. Thanks to the great Alex Allan of Whitegum.com for pointing these out: there’s the Queen of Spades in “Dire Wolf,” the Queen of Diamonds in “Loser,” and a Jack of Diamonds—a popular card in folk music—in “China Cat Sunflower.” But to rewind and get slightly geekier about that lyric, the title might also be heard as a multi-leveled musical joke.
SHAUGN O’DONNELL: There's a bunch of half-steps because the chromatic riff at the opening is a half-step, and that's also the basis of the solo. And then the turnaround is a tritone substitution, where you would be getting a B7 to an E7 to go into the A minor, but it’s a tritone sub of an F chord there — so you get the half-step, F to E. Jerry even sings at the end of each verse, he’s singing the D# over the F, which makes it a real traditional tritone substitution.
AUDIO: “Mississippi Half-Step” [Dick’s Picks 23, 9/17/72] (0:30-0:38) - [Spotify] [YouTube]
JESSE: And unlike “Ramble On Rose,” which references but contains no actual ragtime, “Half-Step” switches to half-time at the beginning of the chorus.
AUDIO: “Mississippi Half-Step” [Dick’s Picks 23, 9/17/72] (0:39-0:46) - [Spotify] [YouTube]
JESSE: The song might not sound like progressive rock, but there was lots of movement inside it.
SHAUGN O’DONNELL: It's in the smaller bits that that happens. We think of big sections: there's a verse and a chorus, an outro. The solos are over a different progression, but it all feels familiar structurally. But when you take the four-bar units that are internal, there's way more variation than… I was going to say normal. Maybe not normal for a Dead song, but for a looping song. There’s something about the feel of the four-bar chunks, even in the verse, that starts to vary. And the way the two halves of the verse start to cadence differently. The second chunk of four bars has to turn around to start back on the C again, in major. But then the last four bars of the turnaround are rewritten so that it gets to the chorus in A minor convincingly. And that's where you get the very cool F to E half-step progression.
AUDIO: “Mississippi Half-Step” [Dick’s Picks 23, 9/17/72] (0:46-1:02) - [Spotify] [YouTube]
JESSE: “Rock and rye” is a classic southern drink, mixing rye whiskey with sweet rock candy. But as others have astutely pointed out, “rye” might be heard as a stand-in for the original source-material of LSD, making “rock and rye,” in turn, a stand-in for the Dead themselves. Many thanks to Alex Allan of Whitegum.com and David Dodd and the o.g. users of the Annotated Grateful Dead Lyrics site, who have shared pointers towards the various allusions in the lyrics. Though Jerry Garcia wasn’t a lyricist, this verse has an antecedent in his and Robert Hunter’s lives, and the collective lives of the Dead as a social group.
AUDIO: “Mississippi Half-Step” [Acapella Mix, Wake of the Flood] (1:50-2:06) - [dead.net]
JESSE: In early 1961, when he was 18, not long after Jerry Garcia moved to Palo Alto, he was involved in an auto accident that left Paul Speegle Jr., one of his newest, closest friends, dead. Here’s how he described it to biographer Dennis McNally, now in Jerry on Jerry, available as an audiobook from Hachette.
JERRY GARCIA [Jerry On Jerry, Chapter 6]: At 90 miles an hour, things happen fast.
DENNIS MCNALLY [Jerry On Jerry, Chapter 6]: It was like that? They were going that fast?
JERRY GARCIA [Jerry On Jerry, Chapter 6]: Oh yeah. We were hauling, we were going fast. It was a Studebaker Golden Hawk, with the blower in it.
JESSE: But the driver lost control.
JERRY GARCIA [Jerry On Jerry, Chapter 6]: I went through the windshield. It was so violent, so furious. I don't even know. I have no– nothing. For me, there was an unbroken moment between being in the car and being in a field. I was literally thrown out of my shoes. That was what the force of it was like, and it was a sobering sensation.
JESSE: Understandably, it was a powerful and transformative moment in Jerry Garcia’s life.
JERRY GARCIA [Jerry On Jerry, Chapter 6]: My life started there. I was fucking around before then I was just a dumb kid. I mean, I had a few half-formed ideas, but my life… that is the slingshot. Boom. That’s what got me going. That’s what made my life, gave life that urgency.
JESSE: We explored this moment of Jerry Garcia’s life more in our “American Folkie” episode in the first season of the Deadcast. I’m not sure of the deepest origins of how the phrase “when your ship comes in” came to be synonymous with striking it rich, but I also hear Hunter’s usage here as presaging “Ship of Fools,” written the next year.
AUDIO: “Mississippi Half-Step” [Acapella Mix, Wake of the Flood] (3:01-3:17) - [dead.net]
JESSE: The last verse of “Half-Step” contains a small insight into Hunter’s writing.
AUDIO: “Mississippi Half-Step” [Acapella Mix, Wake of the Flood] (3:17-3:32) - [dead.net]
JESSE: In 2015, Hunter told the author David Browne, “Jerry took objection to the word Styrofoam. He said, ‘This is so uncharacteristic of your work, to put something as time dated’— or whatever that word would be — ‘as Styrofoam into it.’ I’ve never sung that song without regretting I put that line in.” It’s one of the few post-World War II brands to appear in Hunter’s lyrics for the Dead, though I can appreciate the way it pulls the narrator from some idyllic pre-War period into something closer to modernity. Hunter had his own similar objection to Weir using “quasar” in “Greatest Story Ever Told.” After this comes the part perhaps most difficult to catch in a recording studio. This is from Take 9 of the new batch of Angel’s Share outtakes.
AUDIO: “Mississippi Half-Step” (Take 9 - Not Slated) [Wake of the Flood: The Angel’s Share] (3:52-4:14) - [dead.net] [Spotify] [YouTube]
JESSE: “Mississippi Half-Step”’s final verse ends with a big dynamic peak, a drop into a quiet guitar solo resolves into a quiet coda which, in turn, builds back to a peak.
SHAUGN O’DONNELL: You have the sort of “My Funny Valentine” solo section. It's the descending motion over the single chord.
AUDIO: “Mississippi Half-Step” (Take 16 - Slated) [Wake of the Flood: The Angel’s Share] (1:33-2:05) - [dead.net] [Spotify] [YouTube]
JESSE: A fascinating side note is that while “Half-Step” debuted in the summer of ‘72, in the summer of ‘73, just before the Wake of the Flood sessions, Garcia began playing “My Funny Valentine” in his band with Merl Saunders, recording it for their Live at Keystone album.
AUDIO: “My Funny Valentine” [Jerry Garcia & Merl Saunders, Live at Keystone] (3:17-3:36) - [Spotify]
SHAUGN O’DONNELL: It's even possible that he played that song and someone said, “Oh yeah, that’s the lick from ‘My Funny Valentine,’” and then he started playing “My Funny Valentine.” The solos have that sort of “My Funny Valentine” chromatic minor descent, and then you release on major for that coda. So it’s got this big gospel-esque release feel, and the discussion of the river.
JESSE: And that last section hints, maybe, at where the narrator might be headed.
AUDIO: “Mississippi Half-Step” (Take 1) [Wake of the Flood: The Angel’s Share] (0:51-1:19) - [dead.net]
JESSE: That’s from take 1 on the new Angel’s Share release. You’ll notice that the band is singing live in the studio, but those are only scratch vocals, intended to probably be overdubbed on top of later — though they’re all singing with a lot of intention. If you’re a fan of Donna Jean Godchaux’s voice, or even if you’re not, these sessions are a treat.
AUDIO: “Mississippi Half-Step” (Take 1) [Wake of the Flood: The Angel’s Share] (3:05-3:10) - [dead.net]
DONNA JEAN GODCHAUX [8/73]: Dan, could I have a little more of me in the earphones?
JESSE: Donna Jean could hear herself loud and clear.
DONNA JEAN GODCHAUX-MACKAY: My wheelhouse was the studio. I was an earphone rat, a headphone rat, a studio rat. So it was just so much fun. It was such a pleasant thing for me to be able to be in the studio, because that was my stomping grounds — the studios in Muscle Shoals and Memphis. It was just like riding a bike for me, getting back in the studio.
JESSE: Thanks enormously to Brian Kehew for his loving audio restoration on the Angel’s Share.
BRIAN KEHEW: We just dried it up, made it sound like people in the room. I'm pleased with that version of just the band unfiltered, no overdubs. Very pure in the room, which is oftentimes the most pure representation of a group. That's captured, and you can kind of hear the goodness that's going on the tape. You've got a very basic two-dimensional version of the band. And then it's all these things that were missing from the released record… when people hear The Angel’s Share, they’ll notice, Oh wow, that’s different. We’re missing that harmony. We’re missing that steel guitar, that fiddle.
JESSE: They’d played the song live, but Garcia still needed to clarify some details.
AUDIO: “Mississippi Half-Step” (Take 4-6) [Wake of the Flood: The Angel’s Share] (0:00-0:10) - [dead.net]
JERRY GARCIA [8/73]: [Plays guitar line] No you guys, should pick it up on… [plays guitar line again]... Okay, one more.
BRIAN KEHEW: And in these days, whether you're the Who or the Beatles or whomever, you’re really a live band who happens to go into the studio once in a while to cut a record. So, we’re at the other end of the telescope. Every track here is everyone in the room, talking to each other, leakage, even bleed — the bass is on the drum tracks, the drums are on the vocal tracks. They're consistently able to do that without problems, and then add to it to make it sound more like a record that has a little bit of polish and a little bit of gloss beyond the live show.
JESSE: But it meant they had to get the takes just exactly, what’s that word?
AUDIO: “Mississippi Half-Step” (Take 4-6) [Wake of the Flood: The Angel’s Share] (0:10-0:35) - [dead.net]
JERRY GARCIA [8/73]: [goofily vocalizes/riffs on “Half-Step” melody] Nah nah nah nah nah nah… nah nah, uh hiya uh huh…. uh dumpty dumpty dum… [slobbering sounds]... [in a nasally voice] And so, we leave The Shadow…
AUDIO: “Mississippi Half-Step” (Take 7) [Wake of the Flood: The Angel’s Share] (0:00-0:15) - [dead.net]
PHIL LESH [8/73]: Let’s see, just tootling along…
BRIAN KEHEW: As we know, things were looser in those days, less serious. This band is a part of that factor, but they also wanted to get work done. I do think that the tapes also represent that — they're very focused and they're still working hard to get good feel, get good takes. They're not slacking at all. People often use drugs as a subtext of things, and honestly, it's not really the truth, even in the Dead world. People are focused, people are working hard, and people are caught concentrating on… they may have been a little lit up. They may have been a little warm on some wine. But it wasn't like anybody was tripping out when this stuff was happening.
AUDIO: “Mississippi Half-Step” (Take 9) [Wake of the Flood: The Angel’s Share] (6:49-7:24) - [dead.net]
PHIL LESH [8/6/73]: Hey, it sure is neat to play this way, ain’t it, fellas?
JERRY GARCIA [8/6/73]: Yeah, it’s a kick! It’s a kick, it’s a kick, it’s a kick, it’s a kick.
PHIL LESH [8/6/73]: You can hear everything.
JERRY GARCIA [8/6/73]: [in nasally Southern accent] Say, it’s a kick!
PHIL LESH [8/6/73]: [in similar Southern accent] Say, I like it!
JERRY GARCIA [8/6/73]: It’s fun, baby!
PHIL LESH [8/6/73]: Hey, let’s get one of these, huh?
JERRY GARCIA [8/6/73]: Alright, alright…
DONNA JEAN GODCHAUX-MACKAY: It was a really relaxed atmosphere in the studio doing Wake of the Flood. I think it shows up on that record. It was not only a departure from previous Grateful Dead-ville, but just the solid beginnings of another one. It was just very solid, very sure of itself. I just love that about it.
JESSE: Most of the work wasn’t so much about getting the right chords but the right feel.
BOB WEIR [8/6/73]: Let’s slow it down a little, I thought it was rushed.
JERRY GARCIA [8/6/73]: Yeah, you’re right, it was a little fast, and it did rush.
PHIL LESH [8/6/73]: Could we hear it for the sound of the instruments?
JERRY GARCIA [8/6/73]: Yeah, let’s go back, let’s go in and listen to it.
JESSE: Though there are 16 marked takes of “Mississippi Half-Step,” only five of those were complete performances, the fourth of which was the keeper take for the album — take 15, technically, snipped off the reels, and not heard on the Angel’s Share. But with the basic tracks as our guide, let’s run down exactly what created the intended feel of the song. Note, first, that Jerry Garcia sets the tempo with his intro lick, drummer Bill Kreutzmann coming in after him.
AUDIO: “Mississippi Half-Step” [Wake of the Flood] (0:00-0:07) - [dead.net] [Spotify] [YouTube]
JESSE: So here’s a little composite of the song’s component instrumental parts. Garcia begins.
AUDIO: “Mississippi Half-Step” [Guitar 1, Wake of the Flood] (0:00-0:08) - [dead.net]
AUDIO: “Mississippi Half-Step” [Drums, Wake of the Flood] (0:09-0:15) - [dead.net]
JESSE: Phil Lesh would play some fairly obtuse bass parts in his day, but here, he just dances along with the melody. It’s pretty much always recognizable where in the song they are.
AUDIO: “Mississippi Half-Step” [Bass, Wake of the Flood] (0:21-0:37) - [dead.net]
AUDIO: “Mississippi Half-Step” [Piano, Wake of the Flood] (0:41-1:05) - [dead.net]
AUDIO: “Mississippi Half-Step” [Guitar 2, Wake of the Flood] (1:07-1:35) - [dead.net]
BRIAN KEHEW: One of the noticeable differences here from American Beauty and Workingman’s Dead especially is that they were so vocally oriented and layered and working hard on [those records], whereas [this album] didn't do as much of that — they were more into instrumental things being layered.
JESSE: The most prominent overdub on “Mississippi Half-Step” is Vassar Clements’ fiddle.
AUDIO: “Mississippi Half-Step” [Wake of the Flood] (0:24-0:40) - [dead.net] [Spotify] [YouTube]
JESSE: Vassar Clements had come into Jerry Garcia’s musical world roughly two months earlier, when the bluegrass legend signed on to play an East Coast tour with Old & In the Way in early June, the week before the Washington DC shows on the Here Comes Sunshine box set. We got way into Old & In the Way in our “Garcia ‘73” episode.
AUDIO: “Kissimmee Kid” [Old & In the Way] (0:00-0:30)
JESSE: That was “Kissimmee Kid,” one of Clements’ signature instrumentals, as performed by Old & In the Way. A young phenom who’d played with Bill Monroe in the ‘50s, Vassar Clements was in and out of the bluegrass world through the ‘60s, and in the early ‘70s was poised for his own revival. Besides working with the Dead, he appeared on Will the Circle Be Unbroken, the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band’s generation-spanning best-seller. It began a new phase of Clements’ career at the wide-open space between bluegrass, rock, and jazz that he helped pioneer. With his contribution to “Mississippi Half-Step,” it no longer sounds quite like any of those. We’re going to cram the next chunk of Deadcast with lots of Vassar Clements’ isolated fiddle part, which stands up as a wonderful piece of music on its own, where you can hear the innovations of Stephane Grapelli filtered through a distinct bluegrass sensibility.
AUDIO: “Mississippi Half-Step” [Violin] (0:06-0:21)
JESSE: The Grateful Dead loved their custom gear, a point you may be sick of hearing on the Deadcast, but we do feel obligated to point out that Vassar was playing his beautiful violin that was built sometime in the 16th century by the renowned violin maker Gaspar Duiffoprogcar, possibly for the Russian Prince Youssoupov. Thanks to Mr. Completely for the heads up.
AUDIO: “Mississippi Half-Step” [Violin, Wake of the Flood] (1:03-1:39) - [dead.net]
JESSE: We don’t have dates for the overdub sessions, but can pretty much infer that they occurred during the third week of August 1973, August 20th through 24th, with Vassar playing a gig in Oakland mid-week. I love the way Vassar is just blended in with the band in the last verse, another part of the conversational weave, even though he was overdubbed later. Kinda too bad he never played with them live.
AUDIO: “Mississippi Half-Step” [Wake of the Flood] (3:02-3:33) - [dead.net] [Spotify] [YouTube]
BRIAN KEHEW: They had all kinds of flavors in their music, like a soup. There's all kinds of mixtures of things, and that's a great example of it. It definitely has a different flavor than almost any other track in their catalog.
AUDIO: “Mississippi Half-Step” [Violin, Wake of the Flood] (5:07-5:39) - [dead.net]
BRIAN KEHEW: The New Orleans sound had infected a lot of people, with the Meters and the Neville Brothers and things. But the word “Mississippi” leans me that way too: there's kind of that swing, but I feel there’s also that Southern looseness that is almost perfect for the vibe that the Dead have when they play. It's very not-controlled, it’s about feel. That’s a kind of musical approach that was not common in those days.
AUDIO: “Mississippi Half-Step” [Violin, Wake of the Flood] (5:55-6:08) - [dead.net]
JESSE: And there’s one little Southern-flavored mystery to go along with the Wake of the Flood version of “Mississippi Half-Step.” Listening to the isolated vocal tracks, there’s a harmony part in the mix that’s not by a member of the Grateful Dead.
AUDIO: “Mississippi Half-Step” [Harmony Vocal, Wake of the Flood] (0:48-1:01) - [dead.net]
JESSE: My first thought is that it might be Sir Douglas Sahm, who’s credited on the album, though not for vocals.
AUDIO: “Mississippi Half-Step” [Harmony Vocal, Wake of the Flood] (3:58-4:02) - [dead.net]
JESSE: Feel free to get in touch with us at dead.net/deadcast with other candidates, though that harmony part is pretty buried in the final mix. It might not be there at all.
AUDIO: “Mississippi Half-Step” [Wake of the Flood] (0:48-1:05) - [dead.net] [Spotify] [YouTube]
JESSE: “Mississippi Half-Step” would open Wake of the Flood. When the album came out that fall, it was by no means a failure, but nor was it as successful as expected or hoped. We’ll get into some of that later down the line. In an interview with WLIR in 1978, Robert Hunter wasn’t totally sold on the wisdom of beginning the album with it. This audio’s a bit hard to hear, sorry. I’ll try to translate afterwards.
ROBERT HUNTER [3/78]: I think there’s some excellent songs on it. They didn’t grab the tempo the way the other ones did. They’re exceedingly laid back, for one thing. “Mississippi Half-Step Uptown Toodeloo” is also, I think, one that suffers for tempo. It’s a lot to ask, but the public at-large wants things a bit snappier.
JESSE: Maybe it wasn’t the most upbeat, toe-tappin’ album opener of all time, but I can understand why it fit there. It has a certain gravity to it. Though the song didn’t have an open jam, Jerry Garcia often saved it for meaningful slots in the show, sometimes deep in the second set. This is where it appears on the bonus disc to the new Wake of the Flood 50th anniversary release, recorded November 1st, 1973 at Northwestern University in Illinois, similar to “Ramble On Rose” in its early days.
AUDIO: “Mississippi Half-Step” [Wake of the Flood 50 bonus disc, 11/1/73] (6:43-7:15) - [dead.net] [Spotify] [YouTube]
post-Wake
JESSE: David Lemieux.
DAVID LEMIEUX: They came back home after the Buffalo September 26th show and then they hit the road again on October 19th, four days after the album came out. I think it must have been great for fans to go see that tour in October — presuming that they just bought the album, listened to it a dozen times and went to see the Dead. They got to see great versions of all these new songs — which, in typical Dead fashion, weren't all that new. A couple of them go back to the summer of ‘72.
JESSE: Throughout late 1973 and 1974, the Dead placed “Half-Step” in various dramatic situations, sometimes in their jam suites, and in 1974 often leading into the new song “It Must Have Been the Roses.”
DAVID LEMIEUX: I've always found it interesting: when the Dead took their hiatus in October of ‘74, the last song they played as an encore—which they'd never done; “We Bid You Goodnight” also was the last one—was “Half-Step.” I always figured it was, “Farewell to you…” and “I'm on my way.” I get it, it was a perfect choice. That's always struck me as an important version of it.
AUDIO: “Mississippi Half-Step” [10/20/74] (1:38-1:53) - [Spotify] [YouTube]
JESSE: Well, it is Mississippi Half-Step Uptown Toodeloo.
AUDIO: “Mississippi Half-Step” [10/20/74] (3:39-4:14) - [Spotify] [YouTube]
JESSE: As we know, the Dead have never been great about saying goodbye.
DAVID LEMIEUX: I'm very partial to those later ‘77 and 1978 versions that have those peaks that just… it becomes its [own] song in those versions. And those, to me, are some of my favorite versions. I feel the inspiration where they just don't want it to end and they blow the roof off the place.
AUDIO: “Mississippi Half-Step” [Dave’s Picks 25, 11/6/77] (7:21-7:44)
JESSE: This is Dave’s Picks 25, recorded in Binghamton, November 6th, 1977.
DAVID LEMIEUX: It's similar to those versions of “Wharf Rat.” “Wharf Rat”’s always, again, one of my favorite songs, but there’s just something where they turn it into something [elevated]. “Half-Step” is a wonderful Americana song, it’s a wonderful Hunter song. But they turn it into this thing that now has the power to blow the roof off the place — as they did with “Wharf Rat,” which, ostensibly, is kind of a ballad song.
AUDIO: “Mississippi Half-Step” [Dave’s Picks 25, 11/6/77] (11:03-11:37)
JESSE: Oftentimes in the later ‘70s and early ‘80s, “Mississippi Half-Step” was paired with “Franklin’s Tower,” making a mini-suite of its own, not infrequently used as a set opener. There wasn’t really a jam between the two so much as a musical intentionality that turned “Franklin’s Tower” into the exuberant release on the other side of the Rio Grand-i-o. Here’s how the transition sounded on September 3, 1980 in Springfield… Massachusetts. Now the Download Series, Vol. 7.
AUDIO: “Mississippi Half-Step” [Download Series 7, 9/3/80] (8:19-8:26) - [Spotify] [YouTube]
AUDIO: “Franklin’s Tower” [Download Series 7, 9/3/80] (0:00-0:17) - [Spotify] [YouTube]
JESSE: Grateful Dead songs continued to make new meanings far from their original intents and even their original performances. Please welcome back New Yorker staff writer Nick Paumgarten, who made his connection to “Mississippi Half-Step” in the mid-1980s.
NICK PAUMGARTEN: I was in boarding school, so we were not so much trading tapes — you're just recording other people's tapes, and listening to other people's tapes. Some guys had the double tape deck and started making tapes. You’d go to the bookstore and use all your book money on 10 packs of Maxells, and then you’d just steal school books or something.
When I first saw them in 1984, I probably had a half-dozen tapes, so I didn’t really know much. Some spotty different eras. That's the amazing thing: even if you had one from every year—let's just say you had 20 tapes—it still would give you just a tiny glimpse of what this band was all about. To have 20 tapes in 20 years in any other band would be considered kind of strange, but that's just scratching the surface.
The indoctrination was gradual in those days. So for whatever reason, none of the tapes or live albums I'd been exposed to in that first year of getting interested in the Grateful Dead had a “Half-Step” on it, as far as I can remember. None of those epic 1977 or 1978 versions had reached me yet.
JESSE: Nick also happened to start seeing the Dead during one of the only periods in which “Mississippi Half-Step” went briefly toodeloo from the band’s setlists, getting rarer in the early ‘80s and disappearing in 1982.
NICK PAUMGARTEN: In the spring of 1985, I went to see the Dead at Nassau Coliseum with a friend. I had just turned 16, took the train out to Nassau Coliseum. They opened with this song I had never heard before, and it was “Mississippi Half-Step.”
JESSE: Brace for a tempo shift, friends.
AUDIO: “Mississippi Half-Step” [3/27/85] (0:05-0:25)
JESSE: The March 27th, 1985 version was the first since the fall of 1982, the song’s longest break from the Dead’s repertoire.
NICK PAUMGARTEN: These little scraps of words come to you: this picture of a scoundrel in a kind of cockeyed world. The part that stuck with me, the part that I noticed, was the coda part, the flight across the Rio Grande. That stuck: it instantly occurred to me that this is an important song, this is a big song. I’m sort of side-stage, and my memory of it is them sort of ensemble-singing, and then sort of stepping to the mic together. I think Phil had a mic.
AUDIO: “Mississippi Half-Step” [3/27/85] (5:58-6:30)
NICK PAUMGARTEN: It has this sass to it that I love, but it also has this kind of grandiosity which they could bring things. Even the Rio Grande stuff — I hadn't read Cormac McCarthy yet, but I think this fleeing for Mexico idea was just kind of in the bones. All of those different parts—Old Weird America, outlaw culture—slowly begin to seep in. For me, until I saw the man, Garcia, performing these songs… he was just the boss, the way he would present the material and these stories. It wasn’t like he was embodying them; it wasn’t that he was necessarily a great actor. But they just kind of flowed through him — Hunter’s voice, Hunter’s version of this alternate universe. That really hit me when I went to see them. Certainly “Half-Step” was one of those songs that got that across to me very early in my years of seeing the Dead.
JESSE: It was an alternate universe that you could literally get swept into, as Nick learned that fall.
NICK PAUMGARTEN: I went in November to see them at Brendan Byrne [Arena], November ‘85. I took a long weekend from boarding school, flew down to New York with a friend, went to the show. Didn't have tickets. The whole plan was to go see this show. Walked around a lot, got increasingly desperate. I assumed that we'd be able to get some, because I'd been to concerts before and there were always people selling tickets. I couldn't get tickets, and all of a sudden, we found ourselves part of this mass of people that were pouring toward the gates — this was an infamous gatecrashing. Someone threw a smoke bomb, and everybody ran in after it: Charge! Take that hill! I'm just in this group, and I'm not proud of this. And I never did this again. I know gatecrashing was one of the many things that sunk the scene.
This incident is one of the things that made the infamous yellow jackets, the heinous Meadowlands security, so horrible in the years to come. I mean, they killed a kid — Adam Katz. It was always a bad scene in there, and I think that incident probably contributed to that. But I was in a sort of feral stage: I had a bit of a punk spirit, despite the affinity for hippie music. And so it was kind of like: let's go. We joined this heavy, heaving crowd, overrunning the turnstiles. Blew right through the turnstiles. These security guys are beating people up. I was 16, lithe, sprung out of the way, disappeared in the crowd, took a tab, and had one of the great nights of my life.
JESSE: Nick got another memorable “Half-Step” that night.
AUDIO: “Mississippi Half-Step” [11/10/85] (3:01-3:35)
NICK PAUMGARTEN: Something went a little dark in that period. I think it was probably something in the American psyche; I think it was like a whole new crop of kids. Gen X was sort of catching on en masse. There was a pushback against Reagan energy. The whole thing got a little crazy. The whole thing metastasized later in the decade and into the ‘90s. This was the first taste of that.
JESSE: That night, Half-Step found someplace different on the other side of the river.
AUDIO: “Mississippi Half-Step” [11/10/85] (6:38-6:53)
AUDIO: “I Know You Rider” [11/10/85] (0:00-0:30)
JESSE: A nice little variation, going into “I Know You Rider” for the one and only time. Even Garcia sounds a little surprised to be playing it. But it marked the song for Nick, who in turn became marked.
NICK PAUMGARTEN: There was some karmic blowback to all this. So the end of the story is — after the show, we took the bus back to the Port Authority terminal in New York. We’re just a couple of skinny little kids dressed like bumpkins. Out on Eighth Avenue, these four shady dudes surround us, mug us. My friend actually punched one of them and we ran, grabbed a cab. I remember jumping into a cab in front of the Milford Plaza. Later that night—I’d been sick, I'd had a fever—I had taken something called Leopard Skins, these tabs. And that night, I looked in the mirror and I had chickenpox all over my face. I had gotten chickenpox! It was a pox on me.
AUDIO: “Mississippi Half-Step” [Wake of the Flood] (0:16-0:23) - [dead.net] [Spotify] [YouTube]
NICK PAUMGARTEN: It's sort of just all fit — still had the boots on, but felt like I'd lost them in transit, that kind of feeling. “Half-Step,” in a way, is like this outlaw who’s a schlimazel. Everything has this celebratory air, and yet everything is all cracked. Bent pool cue, Styrofoam balls, loaded dice, retreads. The image even of tearing apart a ship… everything’s falling apart, and then there’s this spirited ‘See ya, sucker’ outro…
AUDIO: “Mississippi Half-Step” [Wake of the Flood] (4:45-5:15) - [dead.net] [Spotify] [YouTube]