Good Ol’ Grateful Deadcast
Season 8, Episode 7
Wake of the Flood 50: Here Comes Sunshine
Archival interviews:
- Jerry Garcia, by Steve Marcus, 10/4/86.
- Jerry Garcia, by Jon Sievert, Guitar Player, 12/77.
- Jerry Garcia, by Jon Sievert, Guitar Player, 6/78.
- Jerry Garcia, by Jon Sievert, Guitar Player, 7/78.
- Doug Irwin, by Jon Sievert, Guitar Player, 8/78.
- Dick Latvala, by David Gans, Grateful Dead Hour #267, 10/5/93.
AUDIO: “Here Comes Sunshine” [Wake of the Flood] (0:00-0:11) - [dead.net] [Spotify] [YouTube]
JESSE: When listeners flipped the original LP of Wake of the Flood, they immediately heard the Grateful Dead do something they’d never do before on record: they achieved title.
AUDIO: “Here Comes Sunshine” [Wake of the Flood] (0:22-0:33) - [dead.net] [Spotify] [YouTube]
JESSE: That is — “Here Comes Sunshine” mentions the title of the album in its very first line. Later Dead albums would come with title tracks, but Wake of the Flood is the only one with its name drawn from a lyric within a song. And it was a catchy song.
AUDIO: “Here Comes Sunshine” [Wake of the Flood] (1:00-1:23) - [dead.net] [Spotify] [YouTube]
JESSE: Grateful Dead archivist and legacy manager David Lemieux.
DAVID LEMIEUX: “Here Comes Sunshine” I think, for me, is possibly my favorite song on the album. And this predates ever having heard it live.
JESSE: You might recognize “Here Comes Sunshine” as the theme music to the previous season of the Good Ol’ Grateful Deadcast, when it lent its title to the recent box set of shows from the spring of 1973, a few months before the band recorded Wake of the Flood. This one is from Kezar Stadium in San Francisco, May 26th, 1973.
AUDIO: “Here Comes Sunshine” [Here Comes Sunshine, 5/26/73] (6:27-6:57) - [dead.net]
DAVID LEMIEUX: Boy oh boy, is that ever a great song. Again—and this is not to detract from anything else on the album—but I do think it's quite possibly my favorite song on the album, up there with “Eyes of the World” and “Weather Report Suite” and “Row Jimmy.”
JESSE: I see what you did there, that’s like the whole album! It stuck out to teenage listener Bruce Hornsby.
BRUCE HORNSBY: It's so Beatles-esque as a composition. It just sounds like something they could have written, in a great way. It sounds like the Dead rhythm section concept and Garcia's sound and feel, their sound playing a Beatles-esque song that they had written.
AUDIO: “Here Comes Sunshine” [Wake of the Flood] (3:47-4:17) - [dead.net] [Spotify] [YouTube]
DAVID LEMIEUX: The studio version of this was such a beautiful song, with a great jam and wonderful vocals and guitar sounds I'd never heard before.
JESSE: The new feel of “Here Comes Sunshine” was evident from the very beginning, one of a bushel of songs that Jerry Garcia demoed at his home studio in January 1973, now available on the 50th anniversary edition of Wake of the Flood.
AUDIO: “Here Comes Sunshine” (Demo) [Wake of the Flood 50] (0:58-1:23) - [dead.net] [Spotify] [YouTube]
The Vanport Flood
JESSE: There’s not a lot of what might be described as “folk music” on Wake of the Flood. It’s certainly not a competition, but “Here Comes Sunshine” meets that description as well as anything — not-folk-music. And yet it was inspired by an event so folkloric that Woody Guthrie once wrote a song about it.
AUDIO: “Vanport’s Flood” [Ben Hunter & Joe Seamons] (1:36-1:53)
JESSE: In case you weren’t sure, that wasn’t Woody Guthrie singing, but the Seattle duo of Ben Hunter and Joe Seamons, performing “Vanport’s Flood.” There’s no known recording of Guthrie singing it, existing only in manuscript form and one of his many songbooks. Though Guthrie wrote a cycle about the Columbia River earlier in the 1940s, he wrote this song in early June 1948, living in the house on Mermaid Avenue in Coney Island, Brooklyn that Wilco and Billy Bragg later immortalized. A news junkie, Woody Guthrie probably read about the Vanport flood in a newspaper. There wasn’t television news just yet. Others may’ve learned about it like this.
VANPORT NEWS REEL [1948]: The swollen Columbia River burst through a railway embankment to sweep out of existence the whole town of Vanport, Oregon. 18,000 are rendered homeless within the hour. Scores perish in the floodwaters, despite the efforts of quickly-mobilized rescue workers.
JESSE: Though the first line of “Here Comes Sunshine” would refer to the laughing water of ‘49, the real Vanport flood happened on May 30th, 1948. A public housing community that grew from World War II workers at the Kaiser Shipyards in Portland, Vanport’s name was a mix of Portland and Vancouver, Washington, just over the river. After the war, the population shrunk some, but a new racially mixed population of veterans and their families arrived. One of our Deadcast listeners, Bill Polits, left us a message about his own connection to Vanport.
BILL POLITS: My dad used to tell stories about many twists and turns that led him from a Depression era ham radio kid to an executive at a big electronics corporation. So that's why I love it. What happened was my dad went to the Navy; taught electronics there; was discharged in 46; and enrolled, as a kid growing up in a north Portland suburb, in Vanport College. I think it might have been their first year.
JESSE: Because of the flood, there’s been a remarkable amount of scholarship about Vanport and how racist housing policies resulted in some 20,000 people living in what was supposed to be temporary housing. It literally upended lives.
VANPORT NEWS REEL [1948]: So brief was the warning that hundreds of families had only time to scramble to precarious safety on their own roofs.
BILL POLITS: My father had a childhood friend named Jimmy Reagan, and they would go fishing all the time. They had some little rowboat they had parked out on the river that they use for all sorts of adventuring purposes. But during the Vanport flood, the story has it that my father and his buddy Jimmy Reagan rode out and rescued people and animals who were in need of floating help during the flood.
JESSE: Row Jimmy, indeed. One of the people living in Vanport in May 1948, and maybe up on a roof that day, was six-year-old Robert Hunter, just three weeks before his 7th birthday. But the future Grateful Dead lyricist wasn’t Robert Hunter yet, he was young Bobby Burns. His birth father had been in the Navy, and moved from job to job after the war, moving the family town to town, landing in Vanport. It’s difficult to say everywhere they went, but the lyricist would say that he attended a different school each year until he was around 14. He only mentioned his time in Vanport once, as far as I know, in a note that appeared in his lyrics collection, A Box of Rain. Below the lyrics to “Here Comes Sunshine,” he wrote: “Remembering the great Vanport, Washington flood of 1949, living in other people’s homes, a family abandoned by father; second grade.”
VANPORT NEWS REEL [1948]: The Red Cross is immediately at work to register, clothe and feed the thousands of refugees who have lost all, but count themselves lucky to have saved their lives.
JESSE: The Vanport flood was a major historical event, covered in the papers, seen in news reels, reported by Woody Guthrie, and Robert Hunter had a well-established history of repurposing folk songs and motifs for his own usage in songs like “Dupree’s Diamond Blues” and “Candyman,” to name just a couple. But “Here Comes Sunshine” isn’t a disaster ballad, at least in the folk sense. The disaster Robert Hunter was memorializing was more psychic and emotional.
VANPORT NEWS REEL [1948]: Yet 30,000 people are safely evacuated from the town, to swell the total of the homeless—in an area which includes British Columbia—to over 100,000. Divers continue to search for the yet unnumbered victims of the worst flood in the history of America's Pacific Coast.
AUDIO: “Here Comes Sunshine” (Demo) [Wake of the Flood 50] (0:25-0:57) - [dead.net] [Spotify] [YouTube]
JESSE: Considered against Robert Hunter’s traumatic family experiences around the Vanport flood, the “laughing water” of “Here Comes Sunshine” doesn’t seem like the ha-ha kind of laughing. And we should linger on what comes before the laughing water, because it provides the title of the Grateful Dead’s new album for 1973. I hear the phrase “wake of the flood” as the moment after the devastation but before things have settled into a new normal. It’s got Biblical resonances, of course, if you swing that way. And I actually hear a funny response the following June when Bob Dylan put out a double live album of his 1974 comeback tour and called it Before the Flood. Whenever and wherever it occurred, there was a different world on the other side.
AUDIO: “Here Comes Sunshine” (Demo) [Wake of the Flood 50] (1:41-2:12) - [dead.net] [Spotify] [YouTube]
JESSE: The Vanport flood upended every life connected to the town in any way. 15 people died. For a few people, probably not most, it was a positive turning point, like Bill Polits’ father.
BILL POLITS: After that flood, he had to change schools and he picked Oregon State University. So at OSU, he met his electronics teacher there — he was a guy named Cliff Moulton. They used to hang out together, my mom and dad and Cliff and his wife. Cliff was a brilliant guy, very forward-thinking in many ways. And he had connections at Tektronix in Portland and hooked my dad up there. And the rest is history.
JESSE: For Bobby Burns, the wake of the flood would last for the next half-dozen years or so. His mother remarried the book editor Norman Hunter and he took on the new last name, finding a few years of stability around the time he reached high school in Palo Alto — the town he would fatefully return to a few years later. The Beatles-y melody fits well with the chorus’s powerful optimism.
AUDIO: “Here Comes Sunshine” (Demo) [Wake of the Flood 50] (0:58-1:21) - [dead.net] [Spotify] [YouTube]
JESSE: The expression “Here Comes Sunshine” shows up in plenty of contexts in text searches, all standing in for roughly the same thing. I’m going to guess that Hunter and Garcia never heard the 1968 single of the same name by the Higher Elevation, the appropriately named group out of Greeley, Colorado.
AUDIO: “Here Comes Sunshine” [The Higher Elevation, 7-inch single] (0:43-1:10)
JESSE: Kinda cool, though. Closer to home, Robert Hunter may’ve used the phrase or heard it deployed during his few years cohabitating with Jerry Garcia, Mountain Girl, and their brood, which included young Sunshine Kesey. Probably one of the reasons that the song became known as Beatlesque are the words to the chorus.
AUDIO: “Here Comes the Sun” [The Beatles, Abbey Road] (0:15-0:18) - [Spotify]
JESSE: Ohhh yeah. In 2002, Guernsey’s auctioned the original handwritten lyrics for the song and reproduced the draft in their catalog. There were a few differences that I’ll shout out.
The first difference, which I have a slightly difficult time reconciling with the melody, is that the chorus was originally a little wordier, reading “Here comes sunshine / one more time, one more time for music.” The second difference is what looks like a lost verse at the end, which you can sing to the same melody — “Wake of the flood / laughin water / in and out of the door / Get out the boats / don’t stand there cheerin’ / get out the way…” Or maybe it repeats “don’t stand there dreamin’,” it’s hard to tell. Like this, but different.
AUDIO: “Here Comes Sunshine” (Demo) [Wake of the Flood 50] (0:25-0:37) - [dead.net] [Spotify] [YouTube]
JESSE: And while we’re at it, let’s pause briefly on this really fascinating solo Garcia demo from January 1973. It’s available on the new Wake of the Flood 50 double-CD set. It’s from a longer demo that Garcia made while writing songs for what became Wake of the Flood. We discussed it a bit more during our “Row Jimmy” episode. The “Here Comes Sunshine” demo is long, too, over seven-and-a-half minutes, and you can really hear how Garcia sketched out parts for everybody else. This wasn’t a song that he strummed a few times in rehearsal and everybody fell in behind him.
AUDIO: “Here Comes Sunshine” (Demo) [Wake of the Flood 50] (2:38-2:57) - [dead.net] [Spotify] [YouTube]
JESSE: I think one of those guitars has a Leslie rotating cabinet on it, giving it that shimmering sound. It might just be the difference in dynamics, but this section has a slightly different mood when Garcia plays it alone.
AUDIO: “Here Comes Sunshine” (Demo) [Wake of the Flood 50] (2:58-3:26) - [dead.net] [Spotify] [YouTube]
JESSE: The handclap breakdown is awesome, an alternate universe with audience participation.
AUDIO: “Here Comes Sunshine” (Demo) [Wake of the Flood 50] (3:37-4:01) - [dead.net] [Spotify] [YouTube]
JESSE: And one of the highlights of the demo is the outro to “Here Comes Sunshine,” where multiple early ‘73s Garcias cut loose, including one playing the keyboards. It’s almost a jam.
AUDIO: “Here Comes Sunshine” (Demo) [Wake of the Flood 50] (6:43-7:13) - [dead.net] [Spotify] [YouTube]
JESSE: Even before hearing the demo version, musicologist Shaugn O’Donnell’s description of the song’s composition matches what the demo expresses.
SHAUGN O’DONNELL: It's intricate in the way that a lot of their open jamming would be, but except it has to go this particular way. So it's not a language that they aren't doing elsewhere in improv moments, but it's saying: we picked this particular set of C mixolydian things to do in a particular way. So, in that sense, it’s not quite memorization, but it’s harder work. It's a harder lift to execute than when you're freeforming that, just your normal vocabulary. So it's not harmonically too bad, it's just that there are parts. So it's — are you going to play parts? Or are you going to improvise over or around a progression? It's very contrapuntal. Again, it's that chamber music kind of thing that holds it together. So Bob and Phil have to work together a lot to create the texture that underlies it all.
JESSE: There’s a lo-fi rehearsal tape from January 1973 where Lesh and Weir are working on those textures. It’s a quick and simple example of the Dead’s group arrangement process in action. When this version starts, they’re trying out a new part just before the chorus that doesn’t quite work. It might sound familiar though.
AUDIO: “Here Comes Sunshine” [rehearsal, 1/73] (0:41-0:54) (1:04-1:19)
JERRY GARCIA [1/73]: I don’t get it. That’s the way we do it in the verse. It goes A minor from G, not from C… why don’t you guys do that lick in G?
JESSE: Garcia suggests they change the part to the key of G, but instead they move it to after the chorus and presto, it’s the familiar counterpoint that Lesh and Weir play together to set up the jam. Thanks to Shaugn for helping clarify that. Here it is between verses on the Wake of the Flood version.
AUDIO: “Here Comes Sunshine” [Wake of the Flood] (1:25-1:46) - [dead.net] [Spotify] [YouTube]
JESSE: There’s a version of the song from its first tour in the late winter of 1973 that demonstrates some other fascinating things about it. Though the band extended “Here Comes Sunshine,” it wasn’t often a jam vehicle, but this one from February 17th in St. Paul did something it never did again.
AUDIO: “Here Comes Sunshine” [2/17/73] (7:03-7:32)
AUDIO: “China Cat Sunflower” [2/17/73] (0:00-0:10)
JESSE: I hear that move as a sort of sleight-of-hand that kind of reveals how similar “Here Comes Sunshine” and “China Cat Sunflower” are — big happy bounces, harmonically compatible. But to Shaugn, it’s also indicative of Bob Weir’s evolution as a guitarist between Aoxomoxoa in 1969 and Wake of the Flood in 1973.
SHAUGN O’DONNELL: Bob's parts in this record really stand out in that same way that his “China Cat” accompaniment sounds at the beginning there.
JESSE: That’s the lead guitar here, one of the few parts that Jerry Garcia dictated to Bob Weir. You can hear it clearly on the Kezar show. Garcia plays the low part then Weir comes in with the lead.
AUDIO: “China Cat Sunflower” [Here Comes Sunshine, 5/26/73] (0:12-0:26) - [dead.net]
SHAUGN O’DONNELL: So that was a written one for a particular situation. And then his language in improv is getting more and more like that across ‘72, developing into a sort of pizzicato type of background. I feel on Wake of the Flood he hit his sort of goal to be the second violinist, where the parts don’t make sense on their own. The “China Cat” stands out as highly defined. But here, he’s doing inner parts, like in the “Row Jimmy” chorus, or the background of the main riff of “Here Comes Sunshine.” This to me is where he hits his mature vocabulary. And it gets refined and changed, right, but this is sort of where all the ideas that were coming along are now like: oh, this is my language. And it’s pretty amazing and unique.
AUDIO: “Here Comes Sunshine” [Here Comes Sunshine, 5/13/73] (3:59-4:29) - [dead.net]
JESSE: That was from Des Moines, May 13th, 1973, where you can really Weir’s parts come into their own. David Lemieux.
DAVID LEMIEUX: It's some of my favorite stuff on the Here Comes Sunshine box set. There's a very good reason we named this box set [after] that. But those versions, each of them is a standout. I think there’s four of them on there — each is a standout, complete to the note.
JESSE: It was very much the theme song of our Deadcast season devoted to that box set. As I mentioned in that season, even though the arrangement of the song is the same in each of the versions, it’s a tune that I find really reflects the particular qualities of the recordings, from the way the drums spring to the way the vocals sound. This one is from Washington DC, June 10th, 1973, also on the recent Here Comes Sunshine box set. Maybe my imagination, but I hear an Allmans wink in Jerry’s licks there.
AUDIO: “Here Comes Sunshine” [Here Comes Sunshine, 6/10/73] (8:43-9:13) - [dead.net] [Spotify] [YouTube]
JESSE: Another aspect to “Here Comes Sunshine” that I find to be symbolic of the Dead’s sound in ‘73 is what I think of as gang vocals — when Jerry Garcia, Bob Weir, Phil Lesh, and Donna Jean Godchaux are all singing at once, a giant forceful sound exemplified to my ears by the choruses to songs like “Eyes of the World,” the ending of “Mississippi Half-Step,” and especially “Here Comes Sunshine.”
AUDIO: “Here Comes Sunshine” [Here Comes Sunshine, 5/26/73] (1:16-1:37) - [dead.net]
JESSE: Scott Metzger of Joe Russo’s Almost Dead.
SCOTT METZGER: It's got a Beatle thing. I also feel like the R&B kind of feel… again, to me, I keep thinking of The Band. I can see Levon Helm sittin’ down at the kit and playing that beat under the verse, for sure. For my money, the grooviest tune on the record, whatever that means: like, ‘70s, put the top down, drivin’. Just feel-good, ‘70s AM/FM radio kind of thing.
JESSE: The first single off Wake of the Flood would be Keith Godchaux’s “Let Me Sing Your Blues Away,” but “Here Comes Sunshine” was on the flip. Neither side got much airplay, AM or FM, but it does seem like a few DJs and program directors focused their efforts on the “Here Comes Sunshine”side. In addition to everything we just spoke about—Hunter’s lyrics, Garcia’s groove, the band’s arrangement—the song also showcased something else new, heard throughout Wake of the Flood: a new guitar.
AUDIO: “Here Comes Sunshine” [Wake of the Flood] (0:00-0:11) - [dead.net] [Spotify] [YouTube]
Wolf
JESSE: We’re sad that we weren’t able to speak with the late Tom Anderson for these Deadcasts, an in-house engineer at the Record Plant who worked with the Dead on the Wake of the Flood sessions. But he wrote some liner notes for the 2004 edition of Wake of the Flood that offer a few interesting tidbits. For starters, he was there when Jerry Garcia’s new guitar arrived. “It was delivered to the Record Plant before the sessions began,” Anderson wrote. “I am embarrassed to say I had the audacity to take it out of its case and play it before he ever saw it. What was I thinking?” If Anderson’s memory is correct, that would make the first take of “Mississippi Half-Step” on the first day of the sessions some of the first music Garcia was playing on his new guitar, known to Dead freaks and guitar nerds as Wolf, for reasons we’ll get to. This is from the recent edition of the Angels Share.
AUDIO: “Mississippi Half-Step” (Take 1) [Wake of the Flood: The Angel’s Share] (0:00-0:13) - [dead.net]
JESSE: Courtesy of Jay and Ricki Blakesberg of the Retro Photo Archive, we have access to a pretty remarkable body of interviews conducted by the writer, photographer, and Dead fan Jon Sievert for Guitar Player magazine with Jerry Garcia, guitar maker Doug Irwin, and others, which we’re just delighted to tap into. Thanks immensely to the late Jon Sievert and the Retro Photo Archive. We’ll be using quotes from a number of interviews here from 1977 and 1978. We’ll keep them dated when we post the transcripts at dead.net/deadcast, but for now we might just keep them rolling. The first interview was from December 1977, just after Wolf returned to his hands after some intensive repairs.
JERRY GARCIA [12/77]: This particular guitar that I'm playing this evening is a guitar that was made for me by Doug Irwin. I think I got it at the end of ‘72, I started playing it then. And it’s been through some transformations since then.
JESSE: ‘73, Jer. Garcia went through three different periods playing Wolf — from mid-1973 through mid-1975, from late 1977 to mid-1979, and then on and off again from 1989 through 1994.
JERRY GARCIA [12/77]: I'm one of those kind of guys that I pretty much play one kind of guitar and get used to its idiosyncrasies.
JERRY GARCIA [7/78]: The more elements that I can keep stable, the more you can concentrate on your playing and not be continually adapting your technique to your equipment.
JESSE: Wolf is not an Alembic guitar, though its maker, Doug Irwin, first met Jerry Garcia while he was an Alembic employee. This is from Jon Sievert’s August 1978 conversation with Doug Irwin.
DOUG IRWIN [8/78]: I originally started out working for Alembic quite a number of years ago. I separated from them about five or six years ago. I've been mostly into the function of the wooden unit itself, rather than getting into the electronics. Most of the people that I've dealt with are like Jerry — the electronics worked for them, but they can hear a difference, a real distinct difference. And they want a natural sound of an instrument. Now, Jerry had a real specific idea of what he was going for. And I just happened to be lucky enough, on the first time that I was trying to get it for him, that I hit something for him that made him feel good. The first one that had my own name on it. The serial number on the guitar is 001. I was still working for Alembic at the time that I was building. But as a result of building that guitar, I got fired.
JESSE: That first guitar, Irwin 001 was known as Eagle. We discussed Eagle a little bit in our episode about Des Moines, May 13th, 1973, now on the Here Comes Sunshine box set, a show where photographs document Garcia playing three different guitars over the course of the afternoon — his usual Stratocaster with Alligator sticker, his Dan Erlewine Stratocaster with cool numbers on the fretboard, and Doug Irwin’s new Eagle.
AUDIO: “China Cat Sunflower” [Here Comes Sunshine, 5/13/73] (5:09-5:38) - [dead.net]
JESSE: From there, Garcia commissioned something more to his liking. This is how he described it in 1978.
JERRY GARCIA [6/78]: That's my Doug Irwin guitar, which is my off-and-on favorite. It’s a custom-made guitar — there isn’t anything like it, really. It’s more-or-less patterned after a Stratocaster.
JESSE: In 1930, an original Stella Blue guitar would’ve cost $9, about $165 now. Thanks to the payrolls in the Grateful Dead Archive, we know that Garcia’s custom Irwin guitar involved a $500 deposit in 1973, followed by an additional $1090 balance payment on August 28th, $1,590, translating to around $11,000 now. Bit more than a Stella Blue. There were a lot of things that made Wolf special. Though it was patterned after a Fender Stratocaster in some ways, there were plenty of differences, borrowing ideas from Gibson guitars and beyond. Shaugn O’Donnell.
SHAUGN O’DONNELL: Fender comes out of a car culture mentality, where you're assembling it and you can replace parts and it's the working man's kind of guitar, where you can just change out parts on your own. Gibson thinking comes out of instrument builders: a luthier has to do the work, and it's a different tradition. So Wolf kind of moves a bit in that direction, where the neck goes all the way through the body. If you look at a picture in the back, you see the neck right through the body. That has a very different impact on the sort of sustain and feel of the instrument.
JESSE: And, of course, a lot of the sound comes in the pickups and modifications, and Wolf had three pickups, like a Stratocaster.
SHAUGN O’DONNELL: The Wolf picked up from where the Strat mods left off, and then and then he continued to mod that across the decade.
JESSE: We’ll find reasons to get into Garcia’s future Wolf modifications on future Deadcasts. In 1977, Garcia proudly showed off Wolf to Jon Sievert. He wanders a little bit away from the tape recorder, so some of it’s a little hard to hear, headphones help. We’ll fill in all the details afterwards.
JERRY GARCIA [12/77]: This is purpleheart, this wood in here. And these are actual laminations, these little thin skinny lines here. They go all the way through the body, these vertical planks. Yeah, the work is really incredible: five-piece neck, a purpleheart and curly maple, cross-braid laminations, so that’s the way these are laminated, that way and that way. The neck goes the whole length of the guitar, which is, I think, a really sensible idea.
DOUG IRWIN [8/78]: The whole guitar is basically maple except for the core and some of the stripes in the neck. Essentially, it's the whole body except for the purple part of it, which is purpleheart, is made out of western maple. It's much softer and generally a lot more figured than the eastern type. All that bubbled figure[s] and everything like that. Those large bubbles that you're looking at in Jerry’s guitar are almost nonexistent in eastern-type maple. They only exist in western-type maple. And it's an unusual trip — you only find it, very rarely, in certain pieces of wood.
JESSE: But the maple exterior hid what made the guitar special.
DOUG IRWIN [8/78]: The main thing that makes for his guitar being what it is is the scale that it is. And the core of the thing is made out of purplehearts. Appearance-wise, it appears the guitar is maple. But in performance, the main thing you hear is the purpleheart: you hear the density of the core. He’s got a situation where he’s got something that looks real pretty on the outside of it. But in terms of function, it’s something on the inside you can’t see. The thickness of the guitar is one and three-quarter inches. The total inside dimension of the purpleheart would be more than half I guess. So he’s got a quarter-inch of maple on each side of the quarter-inch of purpleheart on the inside.
JESSE: Shaugn O’Donnell.
SHAUGN O’DONNELL: The fretboard is ebony, which tends to not be quite as snappy as the maple that's on the Strat. So that warms up the tone a little bit.
JESSE: So what are the differences?
SHAUGN O’DONNELL: It would be the kind of thing where you could go on to any forum on the Web and go down a rabbit hole on the argument. But to my ear, when you back-to-back on these things—like, take a body of mahogany on the exact same guitar, then play an ash one—you do hear a difference. But it’s the kind of difference you hear when you’re doing it back-to-back, and when you’re in isolation. I don't think it's the kind of thing you hear directly, especially in a big ensemble, especially with drums.
JESSE: While we can’t do a strict comparison with the same songs, we do have some isolated guitar parts we can compare. This is how Jerry Garcia sounds soloing on the 1956 sunburst Stratocaster he was playing in the summer of 1972, different than his Alligator Stratocaster. Probably this Strat had a few modifications as well, likely including Alembic blasters, but wasn’t as customized as either Alligator or Wolf. This is from the transition between “China Cat Sunflower” and “I Know You Rider” from the August 27th, 1972 Springfield Creamery benefit.
AUDIO: “China Cat Sunflower” [Garcia guitar, 8/27/72] (6:24-6:50)
JESSE: And this is a little bit of how Garcia’s brand new Wolf sounded during the Wake of the Flood sessions in August 1973, from “Eyes of the World.”
AUDIO: “Eyes of the World” [Guitar 3, Wake of the Flood] (1:32-1:49) - [dead.net]
JERRY GARCIA [12/77]: Because this guitar is custom-made for me, it's not like production guitars. There’s something to it. But I know that, for example, if anything goes wrong with it, I can’t replace it. There's no other no guitar that's comparable to it or similar to it.
JESSE: That was Garcia speaking in 1977, a few years after something had gone wrong with Wolf and had required a fair bit of tender, love, and care to fix.
JERRY GARCIA [6/78]: I really seek a kind of a universal guitar, something that will sound like anything I want it to at any moment — which is maybe impossible. But that's kind of what I'm going for. I revise my ideas every year or so, again, like everything else.
DOUG IRWIN [8/78]: I've been fortunate and being a guitar builder and having Jerry for a customer. He's asked me for certain specific peculiars that he's wanted on the instrument. Other than that, he let me go my route, which, apparently for him, turned out to be the successful way to go about it. It’s definitely an unusual situation.
JESSE: Wolf wasn’t the last guitar that Doug Irwin would build for Jerry Garcia, a storyline we’ll return to down the road. Look forward to tapping into the Sievert tapes again soon. It was about 10 days into Wolf’s life with the Dead that the band recorded “Here Comes Sunshine” for Wake of the Flood — Thursday, August 15th, 1973, just after they wrapped work on “Let Me Sing Your Blues Away.”
At the Record Plant
AUDIO: “Here Comes Sunshine” (Take 1) [Wake of the Flood: The Angel’s Share] (0:20-0:48) - [dead.net]
JESSE: As is pretty obvious, perhaps too obvious, Keith Godchaux is playing some electric keyboard on the raw takes of “Here Comes Sunshine.” But I think it was removed entirely for the album version. On the track sheet for the mixed-down recording, there are three keyboards listed, all of them noted as overdubs—one piano, one Hammond organ, one ARP—but none match what Keith is playing on the basic takes.
AUDIO: “Here Comes Sunshine” (Take 2) [Wake of the Flood: The Angel’s Share] (0:00-0:30) - [dead.net]
JESSE: I like listening to the raw takes with whatever keyboard Keith’s playing. To nod back to some of our conversations about “Row Jimmy,” it feels a little like a garage band playing reggae.
AUDIO: “Here Comes Sunshine” (Take 2) [Wake of the Flood: The Angel’s Share] (1:15-1:42) - [dead.net]
JESSE: They’re still working out details in the studio.
AUDIO: “Here Comes Sunshine” (Take 2) [Wake of the Flood: The Angel’s Share] (2:18-2:49) - [dead.net]
JERRY GARCIA [8/15/73]: Aw, hey aw, arrangement-wise, the middle one, that one there is the middle one — there’s three verses, right? I was thinking during that middle one, Phil, if you and Weir played that figure that you play in the C at the end of that instrumental —
[Phil plays bass figure]
JERRY GARCIA [8/15/73]: Right… while me and Keith play that other thing, it’ll sound nice.
PHIL LESH [8/15/73]: Alright, let’s try it… That’s the same thing.
JERRY GARCIA [8/15/73]: I only want it in that middle one. Okay
PHIL LESH [8/15/73]: Or do you only want us to double it in the middle one?
JERRY GARCIA [8/15/73]: Yeah, yeah. Yeah.
PHIL LESH [8/15/73]: I usually play something else in there.
JERRY GARCIA [8/15/73]: Right. Well, that’s cool. Play whatever you usually play in the other two times that happens.
PHIL LESH [8/15/73]: Groovy.
JERRY GARCIA [8/15/73]: And the other middle one, play that way.
JESSE: A few takes later, Weir’s got some thoughts.
BOB WEIR [8/15/73]: Hey, I was gonna suggest, do that figure—[plays guitar lick]—that one, on the first and the last verses, instead of on the middle verse.
PHIL LESH [8/15/73]: No, it’s good in the middle. I like it in the middle.
BOB WEIR [8/15/73]: Okay. And then we’re not gonna do anything on the first verse, and nothin’ on the last verse?
PHIL LESH [8/15/73]: Just the same old shit, which is —
JERRY GARCIA [8/15/73]: Just play what you’d normally play.
PHIL LESH [8/15/73]: — which, for him, is the same thing I think.
BOB WEIR [8/15/73]: Okay, well I normally play that. So I’ll normally play something else I guess…
JERRY GARCIA [8/15/73]: Well, you know, you can play that same thing if you want.
PHIL LESH [8/15/73]: It’s just so I’m not doubling anyone.
BOB WEIR [8/15/73]: I’m… my heart’s not set on it. I was just trying to get it clear.
JESSE: As the band worked through the takes, they sang scratch vocals. There’s a casual quality I like.
AUDIO: “Here Comes Sunshine” (Take 3) [Wake of the Flood: The Angel’s Share] (0:54-1:27) - [dead.net]
JESSE: But not everybody sang all the time, which results in nice moments like this — where only Donna Jean Godchaux singing with the band, a fun alternate perspective.
AUDIO: “Here Comes Sunshine” (Take 3) [Wake of the Flood: The Angel’s Share] (1:30-1:54) - [dead.net]
JESSE: Or maybe you get just Jerry and Donna singing together.
AUDIO: “Here Comes Sunshine” (Take 3) [Wake of the Flood: The Angel’s Share] (2:53-3:13) - [dead.net]
JESSE: On the tape box, Take 6 is labeled “Bob’s Freakout,” but I think they actually mean Take 5.
BOB WEIR [8/15/73]: Can I suggest that we do the —
PHIIL LESH [8/15/73]: Hey, what’s happening —
BOB WEIR [8/15/73]: Oh, what the…
JERRY GARCIA [8/15/73]: There’s a delay on Weir’s vocal for some obscure reason.
BOB WEIR [8/15/73]: Hey man, I might just…
JERRY GARCIA [8/15/73]: Anyway, I’d like…
PHIL LESH [8/15/73]: What?
BOB WEIR [8/15/73]: I’d like to suggest, sug-fucking-gest…
PHIL LESH [8/15/73]: No, please don’t. Oh god…
JERRY GARCIA [8/15/73]: Don’t bother.
BOB WEIR [8/15/73]: Goddamn. That we do, uh, that figure on the first and last —
JERRY GARCIA [8/15/73]: Would somebody mind telling me why we’re getting a delay on Weir’s voice? Anybody, tell me?
PHIL LESH [8/15/73]: Not that it matters.
BOB WEIR [8/15/73]: It makes it real difficult to…
PHIL LESH [8/15/73]: Just tell us: why?
JESSE: There was one suspect in view.
JERRY GARCIA [8/15/73]: I see the Bear fuckin’ around out there…
JESSE: Phil jumps to Owsley’s defense.
PHIL LESH [8/15/73]: Oh, he’s just threadin’ his tape.
JERRY GARCIA [8/15/73]: Oh…
JESSE: You know, just a former LSD chemist making safety copies of the Dead’s studio sessions. Surely nothing to worry about.
BOB WEIR [8/15/73]: Somebody’s puttin’ the slapback on. Ah fuck, man, there it is!
JERRY GARCIA [8/15/73]: Ah fuck, man, there it is!
PHIL LESH [8/15/73]: Oh fuck, man — oh fuck, man! Oh fuck, man…
BOB WEIR [8/15/73]: I didn’t know if you could ever try to talk in this shit goin’ on, man. It gets slower and slower and slower and doesn’t fuckin’ stop. You can’t be done. Ahhhhhhhhhh.
DONNA JEAN GODCHAUX [8/15/73]: [laughs]
PHIL LESH [8/15/73]: Painful.
JESSE: They did, in fact, solve the problem.
JERRY GARCIA [8/15/73]: What was it?
[off-mic mumbling]
JERRY GARCIA [8/15/73]: Never mind…
JESSE: For anybody’s who’s ever spent any time in a recording studio, it’s the kind of routine annoyance that burps up in the middle of sessions. All in all, though, it was a fairly productive evening. They only made it through the song in its entirety twice — takes 7 and 10, with take 10 snipped from the reel, overdubbed, and turned into the album performance. Let’s compare the intro from the raw take 7 with the overdubbed take 10. Here’s take 7.
AUDIO: “Here Comes Sunshine” (Take 7) [Wake of the Flood: The Angel’s Share] (0:21-0:34)
JERRY GARCIA [8/15/73]: One, two, three, four…
JESSE: And here’s Wake of the Flood.
AUDIO: “Here Comes Sunshine” [Wake of the Flood] (0:00-0:11) - [dead.net] [Spotify] [YouTube]
JESSE: That’s an early ARP synthesizer, probably the ARP 2600, one of the first fully electronic synths with a keyboard attachment, played by Keith Godchaux. It’s mixed pretty ambiently, but it’s all over “Here Comes Sunshine,” a really lovely touch. The song is a keyboard delight. Listen to the chorus, which I think is the ARP and a Hammond B3 playing together under the spectacular gang vocals.
AUDIO: “Here Comes Sunshine” [Wake of the Flood] (1:00-1:24) - [dead.net] [Spotify] [YouTube]
JESSE: And if you listen throughout the song, there’s traditional grand piano mixed in throughout, a later overdub as well. It’s a rich texture with all three keyboard parts, sometimes doubling each other, sometimes adding colors by themselves.
AUDIO: “Here Comes Sunshine” [Wake of the Flood] (1:25-1:45) - [dead.net] [Spotify] [YouTube]
JESSE: But there’s not much of a jam. In fact, at four-and-a-half minutes, it’s the second shortest song on the album, after “Let Me Sing Your Blues Away,” perhaps another reason it was picked to go onto a single. The outro fade-out does have a short bit of music that captures the Dead’s full weave, ready to set off into a jam, with more overdubbed ARP squigglies that remind of the outro to the Beatles’ “It’s All Too Much.”
AUDIO: “Here Comes Sunshine” [Wake of the Flood] (4:11-4:33) - [dead.net] [Spotify] [YouTube]
After the Flood
JESSE: During the band’s fall 1973 tour, the song got even longer, regularly climbing over 10 minutes, sometimes a little shy of 15. Grateful Dead archivist David Lemieux.
DAVID LEMIEUX: I think as the year went on, as ‘73 went on, it was played less as kind of… it's got great vocals live, for the most part. But instead of a vocal showpiece, it is definitely an instrumental showpiece. Some of those jams… 11/14, 11/17, 12/19/73.
JESSE: Ah, yes, December 19th, 1973. I like that you can hear a cheer for the song as they start — an underground hit even if it didn’t get much airplay.
AUDIO: “Here Comes Sunshine” [Dick’s Picks 1, 12/19/73] (0:00-0:11) - [Spotify] [YouTube]
JESSE: Many Dead Heads probably know the date 12/19/73 better as Dick’s Picks, Volume 1, released in 1993, with a mammoth version of “Here Comes Sunshine” kicking off both the CD and the series. But “Here Comes Sunshine” didn’t open the show in Tampa. It was, however, the reason the show was released. After finishing Wake of the Flood, the Dead played powerful shows through the end of the year, a period of maturity that more than justified leading off the Dick’s Picks series with the Tampa performance, and how “Here Comes Sunshine” became an invisible hit again in 1993. When the discs went on sale through the Dead’s mail order label, David Gans interviewed Dick on the Grateful Dead Hour about how, of all the hundreds Dead shows and nearly two decades of discussion, “Here Comes Sunshine” was what finally got the Dead’s release program into full motion. Thanks, David, and thanks, Dick.
DICK LATVALA [10/5/93]: I didn't realize that live tapes existed until around 1974, which was just around the time that the good equipment started—the Sony 152 portable decks—and then people started having pretty good quality tapes. So, late '74, I discovered that actual tapes existed, and I started writing people from Hawaii, collecting a few tapes and then writing someone else and getting to know a few more people and just trying to get to the real core, the hardcore tapers that existed at the time.
JESSE: It took another decade and change, but Dick Latvala became the Grateful Dead’s archivist through a convoluted process that we detailed in our episode titled “Inside the Vault,” as well as my book Heads: A Biography of Psychedelic America. In 1991, the Grateful Dead put out their first official archival release, One From the Vault.
BILL GRAHAM [8/13/75]: On the vocals, Mrs. Donna Jean Godchaux. On lead guitar and vocals, Mr. Jerry Garcia. Would you welcome please, the Grateful Dead.
AUDIO: “Help On the Way” [One From the Vault, 8/13/75] (0:00-0:11) - [Spotify] [YouTube]
JESSE: The original Vault series, helmed by Dan Healy and John Cutler, was intended to draw on the wealth of multi-track live recordings in the band’s archive. It followed with Two From the Vault in 1992, but then paused. The series that became Dick’s Picks was designed to draw on the even more voluminous collection of raw 2-track tapes — warts and all, as the phrase goes. Dick started working in the Vault in the mid-1980s, but it wasn’t until early 1993 that roadie Kidd Candelario proposed to the band that Dick select some older recordings for release. He asked Dick for three recommendations.
DICK LATVALA [10/5/93]: I know hundreds of great shows. But when it came to really having to pick them for the band to listen to and judge, boy oh boy, did I become extra special and critical then. Then it knocked out a whole bunch of choices. So, it was under what I felt like was extreme pressure that I chose three shows, and I did a lot of work listening and making sure they were okay.
JESSE: Dick felt like he was under extreme pressure because the band would be listening to and making the final decision. The reason why only two complete shows had been released from the band’s vault up until then is because they were intended to match the incredibly high standards the individual musicians had applied to their live albums up to that point like Live/Dead and Skull and Roses, in which they’d scrapped a whole set of shows they’re multi-tracked at the Capitol Theatre. Check out our Skull and Roses season for more on that. If a show opened with a version of a song that didn’t offer anything special or the sound levels were still being adjusted, off with its head — to use a technical tape-slicing term.
DICK LATVALA [10/5/93]: It became apparent to me and others—me and others, John Cutler and Jeffrey Norman, who were working on this—that each CD should have a life of its own. This isn't an attempt to recapture the total picture or the whole show. It's a picture of the show. These shows are going to always be edited. It's not going to ever be literal, just like it happened on the show itself. You can check Deadbase or your audience tapes for those things.
JESSE: So what were the three shows you picked to audition with the band?
DICK LATVALA [10/5/93]: The ones I chose were 12/19/73 and 2/13/70 and 10/11/77, I think it is — 10/11, Norman, Oklahoma.
JESSE: February 13th, 1970 became part of Dick’s Picks 4.
ZACHERLE [2/13/70]: Well well, this is glorious Sunday morning. The Grateful goddamn Dead!
[audience cheers]
AUDIO: “Casey Jones” [Dick’s Picks 4, 2/13/70] (0:00-0:17) - [Spotify] [YouTube]
JESSE: October 11th, 1977 remains unreleased. While the February 1970 Fillmore East shows had long been known to tape collectors and fans, in part because they took place at the Fillmore East, the Tampa ‘73 shows had never circulated among collectors. Dick’s first Pick was an instant classic.
DICK LATVALA [10/5/93]: It was just to get some rough idea of some good shows. And then as it became closer to a reality, we settled on 12/19/73, because it was right in the middle of the other two releases and it was a real creative era. The late '73 period for me, I'm discovering more and more, had some just magnificent shows.
JESSE: We couldn’t agree more. There are Dead Heads who absolutely savor this period in November and December 1973, after the Wake of the Flood songs had been tightened, recorded, loosened again and their vocabularies assimilated, with the band’s ears on the hunt for the thing. The new expanded release of Wake of the Flood has a disc’s worth of the November 1st, 1973 show in Evanston. Highly recommended.
AUDIO: “Weather Report Suite” [Wake of the Flood 50, 11/1/73] (12:53-13:20) - [dead.net] [Spotify] [YouTube]
DICK LATVALA [10/5/93]: Weird things would come out of nowhere. The jams would take the shape of themes sometimes — like the Spanish theme, of course, or the Mind Left Body Jam. I don't like the wording for that, but that feeling that they used to do. It was real jazzy and experimental, and boy, did they have some meltdowns, when they turn their back to the audience and go up to their rack and just do these sounds that would terrify you in the audience.
AUDIO: “Jam” [Dick’s Picks 1, 12/19/73] (2:39-3:00) - [Spotify] [YouTube]
JESSE: That was a little more from Dick’s Picks 1. Check out our “Stella Blue” episode to see what happens next.
DICK LATVALA [10/5/93]: I could have easily [picked], say, five other shows right from that late '73 period that were great. But 12/19 had this version of “Here Comes Sunshine” that just kills me. So I was really swayed for that show, just to have that in there, because when you folks hear it, I'm telling you, it will raise the hair on your arms. And then throughout the show, I mean everything was really well-played.
AUDIO: “Here Comes Sunshine” [Dick’s Picks 1, 12/19/73] (0:22-0:33) - [Spotify] [YouTube]
JESSE: It’s a magical version, 14 minutes long, with a jam that keeps giving and giving.
AUDIO: “Here Comes Sunshine” [Dick’s Picks 1, 12/19/73] (8:38-9:04) - [Spotify] [YouTube]
DICK LATVALA [10/5/93]: I think this is really an experiment, this first one, to see how it does, because no one has a clue as to how much interest there is out there to get at this material. This is only mail-order, you see; it's not going to be in record stores. So this will be like a little private club, so to speak, that is willing to go that extra mile for the really good stuff.
JESSE: They would switch to the complete show model a few releases later, a shift in a still-ongoing conversation about how to best present live Dead. There are a few more things to note about that Tampa ‘73 show, all of them inaudible on the tape in slightly different ways. Love what Keith Godchaux plays at the end here.
AUDIO: “Here Comes Sunshine” [Dick’s Picks 1, 12/19/73] (2:21-2:44) - [Spotify] [YouTube]
JESSE: The first is that Donna Jean Godchaux’s not singing with the band.
DONNA JEAN GODCHAUX-MACKAY: The very last show that I did before Zion was born was in Phoenix, and I believe that was the end of November. It was a Phoenix show that we did. You guys would probably know what day it was.
JESSE: Uh, that’d be November 25th at Diablo Stadium in Tempe.
DONNA JEAN GODCHAUX-MACKAY: Anyway, it was around the end of November and we were in Phoenix. Bill Graham was there as well. I got on stage and I knew that it was the last show I could do before that baby just popped out. And Bill Graham, bless his heart—and this is something I will never forget about that man, with all the things that people can say about him—he flew me back to the Bay Area in his private jet. That was huge. A month later, I had Zion, who is now 49.
JESSE: Happy almost-50th to Zion Godchaux, who you might know as the musician behind Boombox. Another thing is even more inaudible than that.
AUDIO: “Here Comes Sunshine” [Dick’s Picks 1, 12/19/73] (11:54-12:10) - [Spotify] [YouTube]
JESSE: It was sometime in the last few weeks of December that Garcia’s shiny new Doug Irwin guitar gained its first sticker — a hungry looking cartoon wolf, just below the bridge. Thanks to Uli and Volki for contributing to this research. The origins of the sticker art came up when we spoke with road crew member Steve Parish last year for our Europe ‘72 episodes and asked about origins of the Alligator sticker on Garcia’s Stratocaster, which first appears in photos of the Munich show in late May ‘72.
STEVE PARISH: We were in London, and we were in this place that was like a cathedral. We’re in there in the afternoon, Kidd was playing around with this airplane that he’d got in England — you could wind it up, and it would shoot across the room and fly. We were paying attention to that. And Jerry was always there early with us when we set up. He was now tinkering around with the guitar, and in comes Sonny Heard. Heard had been out shopping in London, and he found all these stickers. We couldn’t believe how cool they were, man. “Wow, look at these!” They were really beautiful. There was one of an alligator with a big dinner bib on, and a knife and fork in each hand, and he’s just drooling, coming for dinner. And so we stuck that right on that guitar, and that guitar at that moment became the Alligator.
JESSE: But the pack of stickers had some other great art, too.
STEVE PARISH: Also, Heard pulls out another sticker, and this is the typical… what we knew in the United States as the Tex Avery wolf. I guess there were no copyrights in England or whatever — so, here it was. And that got stuck on what became the Wolf guitar, right at the base of the guitar, at the bottom where the bridge was, and the saddles, right below them.
JESSE: Incredibly cool to know that Alligator and Wolf came from the same pack of stickers, making them musical siblings. But it wasn’t a Tex Avery wolf, also known as Slick Joe McWolf, with a little mustache under the nose. The Wolf on the Doug Irwin guitar was a more generic design sold in packs to hot rod racers and apparently used as a patch for the U.S. Air Force’s 377th Bombardment Group in World War II. Thanks to the various online threads at Reddit and phish.net who went looking for that. A few years later, when Wolf went in for repairs, Doug Irwin emblazoned the cartoon wolf directly into the body of the guitar.
AUDIO: “Here Comes Sunshine” [Dick’s Picks 1, 12/19/73] (12:10-12:36) - [Spotify] [YouTube]
JESSE: Those co-leads by Weir during the jam peak are great. The other thing about the Tampa ‘73 “Here Comes Sunshine” is that it was the second-to-last version for nearly 20 years. What happened? The song occasionally turned up on scraps of paper where Garcia brainstormed potential songs to rehearse, and the band apparently got as far as soundchecking it in the fall of 1983, just after they brought back “St. Stephen.” In 1986, as Jerry Garcia recovered from his diabetic coma, Steve Marcus of Grateful Dead Ticket Sales conducted a video interview with him, and asked him about a number of songs that the band hadn’t played in a while, including “Here Comes Sunshine.”
JERRY GARCIA [10/4/86]: I can imagine a situation in which we would do that. We never did perform it… I mean, if we performed it, we performed maybe twice.
JESSE: Our buddy David Gans was in the room, and did what I sometimes do on this podcast and interjected. Except he got to do it with Jerry Garcia in the room. He’s off-mic on this recording, but notes that it was considerably more than twice.
JERRY GARCIA [10/4/86]: Really? How many times would you say? [giggles]
DAVID GANS [10/4/86]: Well… a couple dozen at least…
STEVE MARCUS [10/4/86]: Come on, David Gans! You have to know…
JERRY GARCIA [10/4/86]: Not very many though. I mean, we never played it to the point where it became one of our songs.
JESSE: It was about two-and-a-half dozen times.
JERRY GARCIA [10/4/86]: It's one of those songs that’s like a formula song. It's an easy song to pull off. It might be a good song to do some time.
JESSE: Grateful Dead archivist David Lemieux.
DAVID LEMIEUX: It's unfortunate it didn't work for him, because it certainly worked for me.
JESSE: I wonder if maybe one reason it didn’t stick around is because the lyrics had a few places where they were close enough that Garcia would confuse the verses, some of which have similar rhymes, which you might notice on occasion. But, after nearly 19 years, the song returned to the Dead’s repertoire in December 1992 with new keyboardist Vince Welnick. It began a capella. This one is from Cal Expo, May 26th, 1993, now Road Trips Vol. 2, No. 4.
AUDIO: “Here Comes Sunshine” [Road Trips Vol. 2, No. 4, 5/26/93] (0:00-0:25) - [Spotify] [YouTube]
JESSE: The next year, Vince Welnick told Dupree’s Diamond News that the reason the band revived the song is because somebody sent in a letter and requested it, citing the last time it’d been played. Welnick’s synths call back to the ARP on the studio version, probably intentionally on his part, if I had to guess.
AUDIO: “Here Comes Sunshine” [Road Trips Vol. 2, No. 4, 5/26/93] (0:40-1:10) - [Spotify] [YouTube]
JESSE: The song stayed in the band’s repertoire all the way through 1995, a late breaking favorite. It was not in the setlists when the Dead played two shows at Portland Meadows, situated in the swampy lowlands virtually on the site of Vanport and the flood. It was played by many of the post-1995 incarnations of Dead members as well. “Here Comes Sunshine” isn’t a song I think about covered too often, but it’s surprisingly durable. The earliest cover that I can see on the very useful deaddisc.com was fusion, from Jazz Is Dead on their 1999 Wake of the Flood tribute, Laughing Water.
AUDIO: “Here Comes Sunshine” [Jazz Is Dead, Laughing Water] (2:50-3:07)
JESSE: The Persuasions did a vocal version the next year under the guidance of David Gans.
AUDIO: “Here Comes Sunshine” [The Persuasions, Persuasions of the Dead: The Grateful Dead Sessions] (0:00-0:30) - [Spotify]
JESSE: It was part of Lee Johnson’s Dead Symphony No. 6 with the Russian National Orchestra in 2007.
AUDIO: “Here Comes Sunshine” [Lee Johnson with the Russian National Orchestra, Dead Symphony: An Orchestral Tribute to the Music of the Grateful Dead] (4:40-4:59) - [Spotify]
JESSE: The Yonder Mountain String Band had it in their live repertoire and on a few official live releases.
AUDIO: “Here Comes Sunshine” [Yonder Mountain String Band, 10/18/13] (0:00-0:29) [nugs.net]
JESSE: And the indie rock band Real Estate recorded it for the Day of the Dead tribute in 2016.
AUDIO: “Here Comes Sunshine” [Real Estate, Day of the Dead] (4:15-4:45) - [Spotify]
JESSE: Please welcome to the Deadcast, the bassist from Real Estate as well as the super fun new band Taper’s Choice, Alex Bleeker.
ALEX BLEEKER: I've been sort of the known outspoken kind of resident Dead Head in Real Estate. There is a sort of spiritual relationship — just that Real Estate is very tight in terms of songwriting and structure most of the time. We stretch out a little bit, but in terms of the way we like to structure songs and feature a melodic lead guitar line, I’ve always felt that there were certain tunes in the Dead repertoire that sort of overlapped with the thing that we did. And also I thought that would be really well-suited to Martin [Courtney]'s vocal. Martin sometimes really can tap into the sort of, like, lazy tenor Jerry Garcia vocal delivery thing.
AUDIO: “Here Comes Sunshine” [Real Estate, Day of the Dead] (0:16-0:33) - [Spotify]
JESSE: Earlier in the episode, we focused on the break that happens after the song’s chorus.
AUDIO: “Here Comes Sunshine” [Real Estate, Day of the Dead] (3:58-4:10) - [Spotify]
ALEX BLEEKER: That is where Real Estate chose to jam — in that, which is like a descending line in G. G, kind of Mixolydian. I don't remember how we got there. I think we were working off the studio version and going back and listening to more live versions. It's like a happy thing and a sad thing.
AUDIO: “Here Comes Sunshine” [Real Estate, Day of the Dead] (4:11-4:36) - [Spotify]
ALEX BLEEKER: It's a short jam, but it comes after the third verse and we just sort of stick on that descending line. I think we do it kind of—I'm using air quotes here—“as written,” and then it just sort of takes off into this, like, groovy spacey G Mixolydian hangout kind of jam thing. I'm actually glad it worked out that way, because it's cool and they do it a little bit when they jam — they kind of return to it, and then go back to the C. But it's sort of a cool space for the song to live in for a little while.
AUDIO: “Here Comes Sunshine” [Real Estate, Day of the Dead] (5:30-6:00) - [Spotify]
JESSE: In an unassuming indie rock kind of way, that’s one way to reinvent the Dead — subtly put a jam where there didn’t used to be one. A few seasons back, the Deadcast did two episodes titled “Playing Dead,” about the evolution of bands that play Dead music, from the ‘60s to the present. But another way to carry the Dead’s legacy is to find a path that doesn’t involve playing Dead songs at all. While Alex was the outspoken Dead Head of Real Estate, he encountered the outspoken Dead Heads of two other bands — drummer Chris Tomson of Vampire Weekend, and guitarist Dave Harrington of Darkside. With keyboardist Zach Tenorio-Miller, they became… Taper’s Choice.
ALEX BLEEKER: Every once in a while we'll throw a cover in, like any good jam band. But we have not based ourselves, at least repertoire-wise, on the music of the Grateful Dead. We have specific songs that you can probably hear in the catalog, where we're like — this is a loving homage to a Grateful Dead feeling. And that is usually: Let's do like a big Mixolydian jam, at least as a jumping off point.
AUDIO: “Hieronymus Bong” [Taper’s Choice, The History of Taper’s Choice, Vol. 1 (Taper’s Choice)] (3:32-4:02) - [Bandcamp]
JESSE: That’s “Hieronymus Bong” from Taper’s Choice first proper album, The History of Taper’s Choice, Vol. 1 (Taper’s Choice). Instead of honoring the Dead by covering their music, Taper’s Choice honored the Dead by designing a group that could fit into the tape-trading network that the Dead inspired, and whose history we’ve been tracking on this podcast — an accidental alternative to the traditional record industry on the Dead’s part, but an intentional alternative on the part of Taper’s Choice, whose music can’t be found on major streaming services for now. For the first year and change, it was only possible to hear Taper’s Choice on tape, either virtual live tapes or actual cassettes released by the band, and—perhaps obviously—they now have a little taping scene of their own.
ALEX BLEEKER: I'm like, deeply heart-warmed and amazed by the amount of tapers that have taken it upon themselves to come and record our shows. And obviously, the name is in there — we baited them in a little bit. But just even being a tiny bit a part of that massive network and community…
AUDIO: “Hieronymus Bong” [Taper’s Choice, The History of Taper’s Choice, Vol. 1 (Taper’s Choice)] (6:19-6:44) - [Bandcamp]
ALEX BLEEKER: The sweet spot for me is like ‘72-’73, which is why it's been fun to talk about “Here Comes Sunshine” — just in terms of the way the live tapes sound, the way the band was playing. It sounds like a super scrappy band that's just about to become a big stadium rock band, and it's such an awesome middle point for me.
AUDIO: “Here Comes Sunshine” [Dick’s Picks 1, 12/19/73] (12:41-13:11) - [Spotify] [YouTube]
JESSE: Just listen to those sunbeams. Like Alex, I can never get enough of that Dick’s Picks 1 version, and that’s a beautiful way to think about the Dead in 1973 — perpetually on the verge of something even newer and brighter just over the horizon.
AUDIO: “Here Comes Sunshine” (Demo) [Wake of the Flood 50] (7:02-7:35) - [dead.net] [Spotify] [YouTube]