Good Ol’ Grateful Deadcast
Season 8, Episode 4
Wake of the Flood 50: Let Me Sing Your Blues Away
Archival interviews:
- Jerry Moore, by David Gans, 2008.
- Bob Weir, Keith Godchaux, Donna Godchaux, and Jon McIntire, WAER, 9/17/73.
JESSE: In early 1973, Steve Brown was hired by the company that became Grateful Dead Records to organize its radio promotions. Steve was a long time Dead freak and deep music fan. As a production coordinator when the band set up camp at the Record Plant for the Wake of the Flood sessions in August 1973, he heard them bring in the material that would become the album he would be charged with promoting.
STEVE BROWN: It seemed like it was spreading out even more, with different people in the band coming up with their music. There was a different feel to it that was coming through — it had come from country and blues and rock and roll before all these other things were starting to kind of creep in. When we heard them doing [“Row Jimmy”], we thought “this sounds like a reggae song or something. Oh, well, reggae is popular right now…”
AUDIO: “Row Jimmy” [Wake of the Flood] (0:14-0:37) - [dead.net] [Spotify] [YouTube]
STEVE BROWN: It's not just [Robert] Hunter, and it's not just Jerry — it's a little bit of everybody kind of chipping in on this one. It’s gonna be different than the ones they've done before. You had [John Perry] Barlow and you had Bob, getting [new] kinds of things going in there.
AUDIO: “Weather Report Suite” [Wake of the Flood] (7:08-7:36) - [dead.net] [Spotify] [YouTube]
STEVE BROWN: And some of them… even with Keith, he had a nice long piece for himself.
AUDIO: “Let Me Sing Your Blues Away” [Wake of the Flood] (0:38-0:48) - [dead.net] [Spotify] [YouTube]
JESSE: “Let Me Sing Your Blues Away,” written and sung by Keith Godchaux with lyrics by Robert Hunter, was the very first release on Grateful Dead Records — the first single from Wake of the Flood, out a few weeks before the album itself. Grateful Dead archivist and legacy manager David Lemieux.
DAVID LEMIEUX: “Let Me Sing Your Blues Away” — it’s not so much that it's underrated, it's just a little under-known. And it's always been… I won't say one of my favorites, but it kind of is. It reminds me a lot of a song like “Till the Morning Comes.” There’s a few examples like that, songs that were never really given life in concert.
AUDIO: “Let Me Sing Your Blues Away” [Dave’s Picks 38, 9/8/73] (0:19-0:38)
JESSE: That was one of only six live versions of “Let Me Sing Your Blues Away,” its debut, performed September 8th, 1973 at Nassau Coliseum on Long Island, now on Dave’s Picks 38.
DAVID LEMIEUX: Keith has a very nice voice. I really like that. But it's a great lyric, and it's got a nice little shuffle to it. That's a song I hope, with the album coming out for the 50th, that a lot of people are going to reevaluate as an important part of the Dead's canon. It's the only song on a [Dead] album that Keith ever sang lead on, and he's got a good voice. I think it works really well.
AUDIO: “Let Me Sing Your Blues Away” [Wake of the Flood] (0:24-0:43) - [dead.net] [Spotify] [YouTube]
JESSE: I’ll wager you probably haven’t spent much time thinking about “Let Me Sing Your Blues Away.” And, you know, that’s cool. I’ll be honest, I hadn’t either until recently. It’s never been my favorite Dead tune, but after putting this episode together, I have to confess that Keith Godchaux has once again broken my brain in a really sweet way. Like Keith himself, “Let Me Sing Your Blues Away” possesses a musical intelligence that is both unassuming and head-spinning. It’s very Grateful Dead.
AUDIO: “Let Me Sing Your Blues Away” [Wake of the Flood] (0:50-1:14) - [dead.net] [Spotify] [YouTube]
The Godchauxs
JESSE: Thanks to the Grateful Dead Archive at UC Santa Cruz, we’ve been able to peep into the band’s checkbooks and other files from 1973, and they tell part of the story of Keith and Donna Godchaux in the Dead. One side fun tidbit to note is that the equipment crew’s various expenditures are invoiced under the heading “truckin’.” We’re going to recap a few bits here. Here’s something Donna Jean told us last episode that we’re going to lean into today.
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.
JESSE: Keith Godchaux had come into the Dead’s life almost magically less than two years earlier. We told that story in our “Enter Keith Godchaux” episode a few years back. He was ear-trained almost from his birth by musician parents and he transformed the Grateful Dead when he joined them in fall 1971. He’d contributed to Bob Weir’s Ace in 1972, but Wake Of The Flood was Keith’s first full studio album as band member. In 1973, the Dead invested in Keith and Donna. That summer, only a few days after the band got back from the shows in Washington DC with the Allman Brothers, Keith and Donna Godchaux put down money on their first home — 125 Laurel Avenue in Stinson Beach, a five-minute walk to the Garcias. Here’s what Donna told us previously.
DONNA JEAN GODCHAUX-MACKAY: If you notice on the Keith & Donna album, it was recorded at Studio R. And Studio R was our living room — which was huge, number one. It had that grand, nine-foot Steinway. It was a big living room, overlooking Stinson Beach. Oh my gosh, it was fantastic.
JESSE: The receipt for the Steinway is in the Dead’s checkbooks, too.
DONNA JEAN GODCHAUX-MACKAY: That was bought for Keith and me personally and was at our house in Stinson Beach. It was the most beautiful, beautiful nine-foot Steinway. It had the most glorious sound. I've heard a lot of Steinways and this one was just pristine. The sound was just incredible.
JESSE: When the Godchauxs moved to Stinson Beach, the Garcias were nearby, but directly next door was the new president of Grateful Dead Records. Please welcome back, Ron Rakow.
RON RAKOW: They were groovy. I loved them. They were my next door neighbors. Donna’s great. Keith and Donna had a totally opposite life from me. I had to be ready to be on the phone at 9 AM in the morning because I was a business guy. Keith would call me at two o'clock in the morning and ask me, “What are you doing?” “What am I doing? I’m sleeping!” He’d say, “C’mon, fuck that! Come get high.” So I was next door, I’d walk in whatever shape I was in and we got higher or whatever.
JESSE: Rakow had watched them arrive in the Dead’s world in 1971.
RON RAKOW: She was an unknown surprise. It wasn't part of the deal. She sort of ran interference and got Keith to talk to Jerry, and then play for Jerry and then play for everybody. And then all of a sudden it turns out that she was a pretty well-known backup singer in Muscle Shoals and bingo — she starts working herself into the thing.
AUDIO: “Playing in the Band” [Listen To The River, 10/17/72] (1:31-1:43) - [dead.net]
DONNA JEAN GODCHAUX-MACKAY: At that time, I was learning how to be in that band: what my place was, how to incorporate myself in a way that was not obtrusive and yet do what was needed.
JESSE: But make no mistake, Donna Jean wasn’t there to be anybody’s backup singer.
DONNA JEAN GODCHAUX-MACKAY: “I want to be in the band” — that was my ambition, as far as being in the Grateful Dead, to do what needed to be done for that band. Team player. I was not out there to make a big deal of myself.
JESSE: Another thing that you can see in the band’s checkbooks are their pay stubs. In 1973, the members of the Dead, management, and road crew all received the same base salary of $275 a week, around $1,900 in contemporary money. The pay stubs reveal something fascinating — between June and July 1973, Donna’s weekly pay jumped for $50 a week to that of a full band member.
DONNA JEAN GODCHAUX-MACKAY: I refused to take a full salary. I just refused. And then there was some kind of meeting and Garcia said, “Well, she works as hard as the rest of us” — which I never did felt like I did, I felt like they worked much harder. They were, of course, singing and playing instruments and writing the songs and all that. But I just refused for a while to take a full salary. I guess it was really Garcia that pushed it through and said, “She should have a full salary.” That's how that went down.
AUDIO: “Playing in the Band” [Listen To The River, 10/17/72] (1:59-2:09) - [dead.net]
“Let Me Sing Your Blues Away”
JESSE: Keith and Donna Godchaux had done some writing together before they met Jerry Garcia and became members of the Grateful Dead. But “Let Me Sing Your Blues Away” was something new.
DONNA JEAN GODCHAUX-MACKAY: I think Keith was encouraged to write something and he did. [laughs] I don't remember how it came about, but all I remember is that it was difficult. That song is chordally really tough to play. It's complicated — the changes are complicated, so it was always a little bit difficult to pull off. It's a good song.
AUDIO: “Let Me Sing Your Blues Away” [Wake of the Flood] (1:54-2:19) - [dead.net] [Spotify] [YouTube]
JESSE: On first listen, “Let Me Sing Your Blues Away” seems to have a good bit in common with other music that fans might hear on FM radio in the early 1970s.
AUDIO: “Elderberry Wine” [Elton John, Don’t Shoot Me, I’m Only the Piano Player] (0:31-0:48) - [Spotify]
JESSE: Elton John released Don’t Shoot Me, I’m Only the Piano Player in early 1973 and would storm the charts with Goodbye Yellow Brick Road, released a week before Wake of the Flood that fall. And, of course, just days before the Dead entered the studio to make Wake of the Flood, they were hanging out with another seemingly big influence.
AUDIO: “Kingdom Come” [The Band, Music from Big Pink] (0:26-0:51) - [Spotify]
JESSE: There’s a photo from Watkins Glen of Keith Godchaux literally looking over the shoulder of Richard Manuel as he plays piano during The Band’s set. That’s an obvious starting point for the song, which is where our next guest started with it, too. Please welcome to the Deadcast, one of the only musicians I know to have “Let Me Sing Your Blues Away” in their current song rotation. From WOLF!, RANA, and Joe Russo’s Almost Dead, guitarist Scott Metzger, on tour with LaMP this fall.
SCOTT METZGER: I immediately was like, Oh, this sounds like a song that The Band would write. There's something about that whole record, the whole Wake of the Flood record, that sounds like The Band to me — the choice of instrumentation, the production of it.
JESSE: But “Let Me Sing Your Blues Away” is not by The Band. It’s by the Dead. And it’s really complicated.
SCOTT METZGER: It's a song that you have to know — it does not play itself. When I first put it on, I was like, how am I gonna learn this? There’s so much information.
JESSE: I asked our musicologist friend Shaugn O’Donnell from the City College of New York about “Let Me Sing Your Blues Away,” too. And he described it in almost exactly the same terms.
SHAUGN O’DONNELL: When I first was digging a little deeper and listening, I became sort of completely exasperated with the amount of information.
JESSE: Scott Metzger.
SCOTT METZGER: I think it goes through five different keys. There's five verses and each verse is in a different key. I don't know of any other song that does that, ever. Of all the songs — not just Grateful Dead songs, but other bands. That is a pretty ambitious move.
JESSE: Shaugn O’Donnell.
SHAUGN O’DONNELL: It starts in Db, on the initial bit. That framework is there, like this is going to be a normal tune. And that’s where you get a sense of, Okay, I get how this is. But then it just starts to take off.
JESSE: Mr. Metzger.
SCOTT METZGER: Then it goes to G and then it moves up in whole steps. The first verse is in G, the second verse is in A; third verse is in B; fourth verse is in C#; and then it goes back Bb at the end there, then down to G for solos, then back to Bb. The song starts in Bb on a chorus and it’s bookended — it ends there too. And there’s a half-time verse in the middle of it.
JESSE: You know, for symmetry.
AUDIO: “Let Me Sing Your Blues Away” [Wake of the Flood] (0:50-1:00) - [dead.net] [Spotify] [YouTube]
JESSE: This is the part that unlocked the song for Shaugn O’Donnell.
SHAUGN O’DONNELL: When it modulates to G, it introduces a whole bunch more chords. And even in the G section, it's using a lot of applied dominants, so it manages to cycle through everything until you get that half-step, that “ain’t no knock-down” moment.
AUDIO: “Let Me Sing Your Blues Away” [Wake of the Flood] (1:00-1:14) - [dead.net] [Spotify] [YouTube]
SHAUGN O’DONNELL: At the point that it was “knock-down, drag-out race,” that’s when I realized that they’ve finally hit every single possible root for the chords. It’s like, ‘Oh, that’s why I’m overloaded.’ The sheer amount of information that it's presenting is completely not noticeable on the surface. But by the time every chord root is hit, you're just like: What is going on here? It's just the unexpected move that adds two chords that completes all 12 pitch classes.
JESSE: “Let Me Sing Your Blues Away” isn’t 12-tone music by the classical definition, but it pulls off a pretty wild feat for a rock song.
SHAUGN O’DONNELL: It's not even moving through 12 keys. It’s just using a chord built on every possible note. What’s interesting is that it’s all functional. A tune like “High Time” was very ambiguous in terms of tonal center. It drifts and wanders, and you can’t be sure what key you’re in for too long. But here, every chord behaves in pretty much the way it would in functional harmony. It’s just that it’s moving so fast through everything.
AUDIO: “Let Me Sing Your Blues Away” [Wake of the Flood] (1:15-1:30) - [dead.net] [Spotify] [YouTube]
JESSE: Complicated music wasn’t new to the Dead. Some of their earliest songs, written in the year before their debut album, involved songs that could be difficult to play, including one that was so convoluted that the band apparently referred to it as “The Monster.”
AUDIO: “Cardboard Cowboy” [30 Trips Around the Sun, 7/3/66] (1:00-1:30)
JESSE: That was “The Monster,” officially known as “Cardboard Cowboy,” from the July 3rd, 1966 Fillmore Auditorium show, now on the 30 Trips Around the Sun box set, so far the song’s only official release. Later that same year, the Beach Boys put out a game-changing single that gave a definition to the Dead’s ambitions, even if those ambitions would change almost immediately.
AUDIO: “Good Vibrations” [The Beach Boys] (2:53-3:28) - [Spotify]
JESSE: “Good Vibrations” was one of rock’s first giant singles that might be called progressive, a term that would come to define an approach to music, a radio format, and a style all its own. The Grateful Dead would often be lumped as a quote-unquote “acid rock” band, part of the great freeform psychedelic ‘60s, where anything went. But in old newspaper clippings, “progressive” shows up too. And it leads to a question posed by Wake of the Flood and the albums that followed: Were the Grateful Dead prog rock? To discuss it, please welcome my good buddy Dave Mandl. Dave’s a writer for the righteous UK music magazine The Wire and, like me, is a DJ on the freeform radio station WFMU. Dave hosts a prog rock show with the perfect name — It’s Complicated.
DAVE MANDL: Originally, there was progressive rock and it meant sort of post-Sgt. Pepper: ‘Okay, we're tired of playing the three-chord stuff. We’re gonna use weird instruments, we’re gonna do funny trickery in the studio.’ It’s progressive rock: how can you argue with that? It’s like, Okay, what’s next? Of course it applies to the Dead. They were breaking all kinds of boundaries, getting away from three-chord rock and roll. But in the ‘70s, when I was a teenager, there was progressive rock, and that generally meant the English bands. There was some kind of US-UK split, and it’s hard to imagine any American band being called a progressive rock band at the time.
JESSE: In the next few years, the Dead would start to cross the divide between “progressive” and “prog.” They weren’t there just yet, but that was one intersection their music was approaching in 1973. “Let Me Sing Your Blues Away” might be at home on progressive radio, but also might not be called prog rock or even progressive, at least at the time. It’s progressive rock by a different, literal definition, cycling through keys. One reason why “Let Me Sing Your Blues Away” puts the Dead more in the country-pop bin than prog-rock is its easy bounce, which masks all the wild changes. But there’s also Robert Hunter’s lyrics, which are so straight as to almost be surreal.
AUDIO: “Let Me Sing Your Blues Away” [Wake of the Flood] (0:12-0:24) - [dead.net] [Spotify] [YouTube]
JESSE: It might be Robert Hunter’s first car song. Unless you count the lyric about “not a cloud in the sky, such a sunny day,” it’s also the only song on Wake of the Flood that doesn’t build its lyrics on natural imagery. They’re certainly Robert Hunter’s most traditional pop lyrics to date.
AUDIO: “Let Me Sing Your Blues Away” [Wake of the Flood] (0:26-0:49) - [dead.net] [Spotify] [YouTube]
JESSE: I’m amused by Hunter’s literal reference to top 10 radio on a song that would at least generate a brief attempt at making it onto top 10 radio. I do kind of think this feels like Robert Hunter’s earnest attempt to write what felt like good-time pop music for 1973 that stood a fair chance in the marketplace. Like lots of Robert Hunter’s lyrics, there were antecedents.
AUDIO: “Sing Your Blues Away” [Blackwood Brothers, Sheltered in the Arms of God] (0:02-0:22)
JESSE: That was the Blackwood Brothers in 1971 with “Sing Your Blues Away” — not that they were necessarily an influence. The phrase “sing your blues away” pops up in popular culture as far back as the late 19th century, and there seem to be numerous pop songs with variations on that name from the early part of the 20th century, and—as with “Truckin’”—perhaps Hunter sensed the time was right to revive it. And I think, in the exact moment of August 1973, Robert Hunter and Keith Godchaux might have been onto something. The Dead had surfed the edges of popular trends before, and the same week that the band was entering the Record Plant to record Wake of the Flood, and maybe even the same week that Robert Hunter was still finishing the lyrics to “Let Me Sing Your Blues Away,” a new trend hit American popular culture.
AUDIO: American Graffiti trailer (0:00-0:31)
WOLFMAN JACK: American Graffiti! Where were you in ‘62?
[“Let’s Go to the Hop” by Danny & the Juniors]
NARRATOR: Grab that special one and jump into your candy-colored custom or your screamin’ machine! Cruise downtown and catch — American Graffiti!
WOLFMAN JACK: American Graffiti! Baby, what’s that?
NARRATOR: It’s a movie!
WOLFMAN JACK: Can you dig it? Can you dig it?
NARRATOR: Go back in time!
WOLFMAN JACK: Where were you in ‘62?
JESSE: George Lucas’s American Graffiti opened on August 2nd, 1973 and kicked off a new trend of nostalgia for the ‘50s and ‘60s before John F. Kennedy’s assassination. Did Robert Hunter see American Graffiti that opening weekend and immediately write lyrics that vibed with it, or did he merely sense the change coming?
AUDIO: “Let Me Sing Your Blues Away” [Wake of the Flood] (1:30-1:43) - [dead.net] [Spotify] [YouTube]
JESSE: “One for the money and two for the show” has its roots in English nursery rhymes, but also made its rock and roll roots in Carl Perkins’ immortal “Blue Suede Shoes.”
AUDIO: “Blue Suede Shoes” [Carl Perkins] (0:00-0:18) - [Spotify]
JESSE: Maybe Hunter had been sniffing at the zeitgeist through Moondog Matinee, the Band’s new albums of covers. Maybe he’d finally caught up with Sha Na Na. Or maybe he’d picked up on Jerry Garcia and Merl Saunders’ versions of “Mystery Train” and other Elvis-affiliated tunes. There’d be another reference to “Blue Suede Shoes” a few months later when Hunter and Garcia turned the early draft called “Wave That Flag” into the finished “U.S. Blues.” Wherever it came from, “Let Me Sing Your Blues Away” was in some ways the most authentic kind of ephemeral pop single — absolutely of the moment, perhaps responding to current demands, flashing briefly, and disappearing.
AUDIO: “Let Me Sing Your Blues Away” [Wake of the Flood] (2:59-3:12) - [dead.net] [Spotify] [YouTube]
JESSE: With “Let Me Sing Your Blues Away,” the Dead were trying to have it all — a roots-pop hit in a subliminal, progressive package. I have no idea when they decided it might make for a good single. The band had never performed the song live before recording it for Wake of the Flood. No demo for the song has surfaced, but Phil Lesh visited the Record Plant over the weekend of August 11th to make a solo demo for “Unbroken Chain,” another difficult song the band planned to tackle that week but had yet to perform live. It’s possible Keith did the same for “Let Me Sing Your Blues Away.” There were no full Dead sessions over the weekend of August 11th and 12th, and no apparent recordings from the 13th and 14th. But when the band convened on August 15th to record “Let Me Sing Your Blues Away,” sessions you can hear on The Angel’s Share, they’ve clearly at least temporarily mastered the song’s changes. It would make sense that they spent at least the previous day drilling the song, if not both, getting it to feel natural. Engineer Brian Kehew did the audio restoration on The Angel’s Share.
BRIAN KEHEW: “Let Me Song Your Blues Away,” I think that’s the one that they worked on the most except for “Weather Report Suite.” They are going again and again and again, something like over 40, almost 45 minutes on Keith’s song.
AUDIO: “Let Me Sing Your Blues Away” ((Take 1) - Not Slated) [Wake of the Flood: The Angel’s Share] (0:00-0:26) - [dead.net] [Spotify] [YouTube]
JESSE: You’ll notice immediately that Martin Fierro’s saxophone part on “Let Me Sing Your Blues Away” is no overdub. He’s live in the room with the band. In fact, take 1 and take 2 on the tape boxes aren’t takes at all — they’re just the band and Fierro looping through the song's intro and solo section to give the saxophonist a feel for it. Take 2 is 10 pretty chill minutes of Martin Fierro getting ready to take the first saxophone solo on a Dead album.
AUDIO: “Let Me Sing Your Blues Away” ((Take 2) - Slated) [Wake of the Flood: The Angel’s Share] (6:45-7:15) - [dead.net] [Spotify] [YouTube]
JESSE: Since he earned the honor of taking the first saxophone solo on a Dead album, now is the time on the Deadcast where we get to talk about Martín Fierro.
MARTIN FIERRO [1989]: AW, CHUTUP! - [YouTube]
JESSE: Martín Fierro was not new to the Grateful Dead’s musical universe. His group Shades of Joy had shared the stage with the Dead at the Fillmore West, but it was through keyboard player Howard Wales that Martín Fierro entered the Garciaverse.
AUDIO: “Morning In Marin” [Jerry Garcia & Howard Wales, Hooteroll?] (2:56-3:18)
JESSE: Martín Fierro received a songwriting credit for “Southside Strut,” the opening track on the collaborative Garcia/Wales album Hooteroll?, recorded in late 1970. We spoke with the late Howard Wales during our American Beauty season and he had nothing but love for Martín Fierro, born in Mexico in 1942, but who grew up over the border in El Paso.
HOWARD WALES: Martín and I met each other in El Paso, Texas. I was working at an all Black club — and this is really a long time ago, man, ‘65 I think it was. Martín walked into the club, man. You ever seen one of those Robert Hall sport coats? He kind of looked like a cat who just walked out of New York, with those big goggles and that jazz look. So, he sat in with us.
JESSE: Howard Wales and Martín Fierro had all kinds of adventures inside music and out, and Martín was part of the regular crew that played at the Matrix in 1970 alongside Wales, bassist John Kahn, drummer Bill Vitt, and the new guitarist on the bandstand, Jerry Garcia. Hooteroll? didn’t make it to the stores until early 1972, but by then Martín was still a regular with the Matrix band, even though Howard Wales had been replaced by Merl Saunders and they’d moved on from the Matrix itself. He’s on GarciaLive vol. 15, recorded in May 1971.
AUDIO: “Keystone Korner Jam” [Jerry Garcia & Merl Saunders, GarciaLive 15, 5/21/71] (5:11-5:41) - [Spotify]
JESSE: By 1973, Martín had joined Doug Sahm’s band and appeared on the album Doug Sahm and Friends. Formerly the leader of the Sir Douglas Quintet, Sahm’s new booking agent in 1973 was Sam Cutler’s Out of Town Tours. When the Dead hit the road in the fall, Doug Sahm would open the East Coast leg and his horn players would do double-duty with the Dead. Donna Jean got to know Martín in these years.
DONNA JEAN GODCHAUX-MACKAY: I have Martín stories that all kind of go in one direction: that he was always Martin, all the time, 24/7. One of the things that I totally remember about him—in whatever band I was in or whatever situation we were playing—is he would always talk to the audience. ‘Well, fuck this, fuck this!’ He would tell me, “You need to drink tequila! That’s the best thing to drink. Spiritual!” Then he would get out there and just… I mean, he was just the sweetest, dearest, most darling man in the world, and then he would get out there on the mic and just rail. Whatever was on his mind at the time, he would let it fly. He was just the most gracious and wonderful person. I just loved him so much.
MARTIN FIERRO [1989]: AW CHUTUP! - [YouTube]
JESSE: Martín Fierro would play with Jerry Garcia in the Legion of Mary and remained a beloved and colorful figure of the Bay Area music scene into the 21st century. He died in 2008. In 1973 at the Record Plant, he had a job to do. He’d never played “Let Me Sing Your Blues Away” before—nobody had—but you can hear Keith Godchaux reassure him.
KEITH GODCHAUX [8/15/73]: It’s simple —
MARTIN FIERRO [8/15/73]: Okay.
KEITH GODCHAUX [8/15/73]: It’s simple…
JESSE: It was not simple. Here’s Weir and Garcia sort of trying to translate things to Martín on behalf of their shy piano player.
BOB WEIR [8/15/73]: There’s a billion changes in it. You want to shape it a little —
JERRY GARCIA [8/15/73]: You may just want to play in some of the holes—
MARTIN FIERRO [8/15/73]: Right —
JERRY GARCIA [8/15/73]: But I mean, you’ll dig it.
MARTIN FIERRO [8/15/73]: Right, okay.
BOB WEIR [8/15/73]: When there’s a space and we’re going to be playing on one change, rocking back before the I and the IV chord — for any time, I’ll just holler the tonic of that particular… it modulates…
JESSE: It’s got a lot of chords, but Garcia’s confident Martín can get it.
JERRY GARCIA [8/15/73]: [chuckles] We picked it up…
MARTIN FIERRO [8/15/73]: Yeah…
[Martín begins honking on saxophone]
JESSE: Wish I could make out what happens under that saxophone honk about how long it took. Engineer Brian Kehew.
BRIAN KEHEW: They definitely get there. He just tries a bunch of different versions of it. He's kind of leading it, but maybe not as strong a leader as Jerry is with his sense of humor. And Jerry has so much intelligence in what he's perceiving that there's a little more guidance going on when you hear most of the other songs being recorded.
JESSE: As we heard a moment ago, Weir and Garcia were left to explain the changes. Keith Godchaux was not the most gregarious musician.
BRIAN KEHEW: “Let Me Sing Your Blues Away”... I forget how many takes there were, but there were numerous takes of that one.
JESSE: I differ a little with the tape boxes about what constitutes a complete take, but to my ears the Dead got seven complete takes of the song from start to finish.
JERRY GARCIA [8/15/73]: That was a good’n!
BOB WEIR [8/15/73]: Yeah.
JERRY GARCIA [8/15/73]: Had a lot of spirit. Might’ve been funky, but it had that spirit!
JESSE: But by the numbering on tape box, the keeper is officially take #10 — the fifth full pass through the song. It’s not until take #9 that Martín Fierro nails his big soaring entrance. If you listen to this on headphones, you can hear somebody say “whoa,” in surprise after the initial flourish. I think maybe Bill Kreutzmann.
BILL KREUTZMANN [8/15/73]: Whoa…
AUDIO: “Let Me Sing Your Blues Away” (Take 9) [Workingman’s Dead: The Angel’s Share] (0:04-0:15) - [dead.net]
JESSE: And with take 9, Martin nails his part. Here’s the beginning of take 10, on the album.
AUDIO: “Let Me Sing Your Blues Away” [Wake of the Flood] (0:00-0:13) - [dead.net] [Spotify] [YouTube]
JESSE: Scott Metzger from JRAD.
SCOTT METZGER: I liked it immediately — maybe it's because I'm a New Yorker or something. The opening sequence is right out of Saturday Night Live, that saxophone sound. You can totally hear it being, “Live from New York…”
JESSE: While I’m happy to detour into prog rock, this is neither the appropriate time nor place for the oral history of the Saturday Night Live saxophone sound. I said — good day!
MARTIN FIERRO [1989]: AW CHUTUP! - [YouTube]
JESSE: For all its moving parts, take 10 of “Let Me Sing Your Blues Away” is a winner. There’s a little bit of overdubbing. You can hear some organ pop up midway through.
AUDIO: “Let Me Sing Your Blues Away” [Wake of the Flood] (1:14-1:30) - [dead.net] [Spotify] [YouTube]
JESSE: And I like the last part of the song where there are some stacked vocals and you can hear Donna singing against herself.
AUDIO: “Let Me Sing Your Blues Away” [Wake of the Flood] (2:46-3:12) - [dead.net] [Spotify] [YouTube]
JESSE: The song debuted at Nassau Coliseum on September 8th, three weeks after they’d recorded it, a performance now on Dave’s Picks 38. On the live versions, Jerry Garcia doubles Keith Godchaux’s vocal part in the later verses.
AUDIO: “Let Me Sing Your Blues Away” [Dave’s Picks 38, 9/8/73] (1:27-1:44)
JESSE: The Dead Head DJs at WAER in Syracuse caught the new song and asked Keith about it when they interviewed Keith, Donna, and Weir a few weeks later. As always, Keith is a bit self-deprecating. Donna and Weir step up for him.
RADIO DJ #1 [9/17/73]: How about that new song that you did at Nassau?
RADIO DJ #2 [9/17/73]: A little curiosity.
KEITH GODCHAUX [9/17/73]: Oh, that was crazy.
[all laugh]
KEITH GODCHAUX [9/17/73]: That was purely… that was really fun.
RADIO DJ #1 [9/17/73]: Is that, like, newly written?
KEITH GODCHAUX [9/17/73]: Yeah, Hunter and I wrote that. We never had a chance to really… we never practiced it, so nobody can sing it or play it at the same time.
[all laugh]
RADIO DJ #2 [9/17/73]: It came out pretty well.
KEITH GODCHAUX [9/17/73]: It came out bizarre.
BOB WEIR [9/17/73]: A lot better on the album, I’ll say.
DONNA JEAN GODCHAUX [9/17/73]: Yeah, it’s really good on the album.
JESSE: By dint of Grateful Dead history, it was the only time the band performed the song without Martín Fierro on saxophone.
BOB WEIR [9/17/73]: Well, the last couple of gigs we've been working with some horn players.
JESSE: Martín Fierro joined the band onstage for a number of shows in September, performing “Let Me Sing Your Blues Away” nearly a half-dozen times. At around this same moment, the song was released to radio as a single, a decision made by Ron Rakow.
RON RAKOW: I was making the call. I would present the calls to the band, and I was persuasive.
JESSE: So why “Let Me Sing Your Blues Away”?
RON RAKOW: Well, you know, you were assuming that I knew what the fuck I was doing. Why would you assume that?
JESSE: Well there’s that to consider.
RON RAKOW: The fact is: you have to try something. So that's what I picked to try. I just said, “Let’s try a single, let’s try this one.” What was on the other side?
JESSE: That’d be “Here Comes Sunshine.” “Let Me Sing Your Blues Away” was gone from the Dead’s repertoire before the single even came out, perhaps a victim of too many chords. Billboard barely acknowledged its release. Shout out to forward-thinking program directors at WNEW in New York, WOWI in Norfolk, WORJ in Orlando, WABX in Detroit, and KZEL in good ol’ Eugene. It’s somewhat surreal to see it on fall 1973 playlists alongside Uriah Heep, Elton John, and the Steve Miller Band.
AUDIO: Cat call from “The Joker” [Steve Miller Band, The Joker] (0:16-0:17) - [Spotify]
JESSE: And more specifically, when you pushed in the button and let the top 10 play in October 1973, “Let Me Sing Your Blues Away” would’ve going head-to-head with ‘70s classics that included Edgar Winter’s “Free Ride,” Gladys Knight’s “Midnight Train to Georgia,” Eddie Kendricks’ “Keep On Truckin’,” Grand Funk Railroad’s “We’re An American Band,” the Allman Brothers’ “Ramblin’ Man,” and Stevie Wonder’s “Higher Ground.”
AUDIO: “Higher Ground” [Stevie Wonder, Innervisions] (0:19-0:49) - [Spotify]
JESSE: As far as I can tell, the Keith & Donna Band that existed in 1975 and 1976 never played it. Our forever-buddy Joe Jupille of JerryBase.com turned us on to a document buried in a folder in the Dead Archive at UC Santa Cruz — a songlist from 1977 in Jerry Garcia’s handwriting containing some two dozen Grateful Dead songs not then in the Dead’s repertoire, perhaps suggestions of tunes to re-learn. Some, including “Brokedown Palace,” “Dupree’s Diamond Blues,” “China Cat Sunflower,” and “Truckin’” would re-enter the band’s repertoire by the end of 1977. Over the next decades, most of the songs on the list would make it back; “Let Me Sing Your Blues Away” would not. Robert Hunter did perform it a few times in the late ‘70s, apparently, sounding pretty together.
AUDIO: “Let Me Sing Your Blues Away” [Robert Hunter, 5/8/79] (0:43-1:10)
JESSE: As we’ve made clear, it’s not the easiest song for musicians to remember. And, sure, it wasn’t a hit. But it’s good fun. Not too many Dead-adjacent or Dead cover bands have tackled it regularly. Even Joe Russo’s Almost Dead didn’t get to it until somewhat recently, debuting it in late 2022 with Scott Metzger on vocals. I dig the groove they play it with; latent in the Dead’s version but pulled out and made a bit more obvious here.
AUDIO: “Let Me Sing Your Blues Away” [Joe Russo’s Almost Dead, 12/3/22] (2:19-2:57)
JESSE: One of the other reasons I think the song never found a place in Dead Head memory is because, in some ways, Dead Head memory was built without it for reasons that had less to do with the song’s musical qualities and more to do with building a collective memory through technology. The fall of 1973 saw another quiet turning point in Dead history, one that made the necessity of having a hit single that much more obsolete.
Franchising The Dead
AUDIO: “Pop Goes the Weasel” [anonymous NYC ice cream truck] (0:00-0:07)
JESSE: Ron Rakow had brainstormed a number of alternatives to the contemporary record industry, including the idea of having ice cream trucks to distribute records. Steve Brown, who worked the radio promotions for the label, was sad it never came to fruition.
STEVE BROWN: I just wish we would have done it once somewhere, just for the fun of it. But, in fact, it never got much further than all the other business we had to take care of just to do a real show somewhere. But going around in a place where you go up and down the streets, with their music coming out of the truck—[sighs wistfully]—and people running out of their house…
JESSE: Grateful Dead Records was intended to be a radical enterprise from the ground up. As we learned last time, they acquired some start-up money by selling the foreign rights to Atlantic Records. But their initial seed money came by tapping a slightly more underground source.
RON RAKOW: The very first money, I got it from Cousin David. He's just Cousin David — he's your Cousin David also. Cousin David was the head of a seven airplane–seven small airplanes–smuggling operation—with about 12 people, really tight—that smuggled Mexican weed into the United States. And it wasn't in blocks or bricks. So, Cousin David lent me $41,000. I had a line of credit with Cousin David. I needed it.
JESSE: One idea that I find brilliant and truly far-thinking was the notion of creating Grateful Dead franchises to distribute the product — essentially building a wholesale distribution network through the Dead Heads themselves. They would distribute the product to local head shops and such, but Rakow’s vision was even more inclusive and unusual. Ron Rakow.
RON RAKOW: I went on a tour, and I broke away from the band during a four- or five-hour spell. And I did two things: one was, I walked up to people and introduced myself and said, “If I had a band that you had heard of with a brand-new record that was only available from me, right here and right now, would you buy it?” And most people said yes! So, that’s what I envisioned: I envisioned people walking up to people on the street and putting together little parties in their home —like Tupperware, that kind of thing. Anyway, that was my plan. But it was difficult.
What I did was I took an ad in the New York Times business opportunities section—which really doesn't even exist anymore—and said: “Grateful Dead is looking for franchisees across the country.” I got 60 responses. Once we had a franchise network, we would have found other things to send through it, because we have an obligation now to give these guys enough stuff to make a living.
JESSE: Unfortunately, it didn’t quite make it to the next level.
RON RAKOW: It's a question of human resources. We didn't have any people that knew anything about how to make a profit. We had fucking lunatics everywhere.
JESSE: Oh yeah? This idea from the summer of ‘73 would fall more under promotion than distribution.
RON RAKOW: One time, I had an idea for promo where I was going to have a guy walk into Grand Central Station with a suitcase — this was well before 9/11, obviously. He would walk into Grand Central Station with a suitcase, and have the suitcase pop open. And inside is a big rubber balloon and a compressed air cylinder. All of a sudden, this balloon fills up and it gets to be 50 feet around. People would run out of the way and it causes a great stir. And Garcia said, “You know you’re gonna get busted. You’re gonna get busted!” I said, “That’s what I want, I want to get busted!” Just as I said, “I want to get busted,” believe this or not, the phone rings and it's Mountain Girl. She rings up my office. I pick up the phone and she says, “I just passed your house. You’re busted. The cops are all over the place.” Isn’t that funny?
JESSE: That was July of 1973, just before Watkins Glen, and the bustee was one of Rakow’s housemates. A long story. A few weeks later, in August of 1973, as the Dead were in the Record Plant working on Wake of the Flood, Rakow would acquire the more traditional funding.
RON RAKOW: My first hire was a woman by the name of Jeanne Jones. She was a licensed CPA. She was going to be our money person. She had a hobby… she had two hobbies. One was some kind of embroidery, and the other was calligraphy. It was because of the calligraphy that I hired her. I went to the Paper Museum in San Francisco, and I bought real old parchment, a bunch of it. She calligraphed all the cash flows that you see in the So What? Papers — she calligraphed onto parchment, parchment sheets that were 36 x 24. Big sheets of parchment. I had about 15 of them, all hand-calligraphed. Each one started on page 1 with The Grateful Dead sales at Warner Bros. for the last album we put out before Wake of the Flood. So those were the numbers. Then I had 10% above that, and 10% below that — what would happen, financially, if we put out an album and it went 10% more than that, or 20% below that? Then I went 20% above and below; 30% above and below; 40% above and below; and 50% above. And I walked in with this sheaf of hand-calligraphed pages at the First National Bank of Boston. I presented them to Jim Dollard. I went through every item on every page, and I showed him that, no matter what happens, we would make money and they would not be stuck for any bread. He said, “This guy from the Grateful Dead came into our office and presented parchment scrolls. They looked like they came from God. We analyzed them, and we figured that we had no risk.”
JESSE: The Dead would employ the more traditional network of independent record distributors to get their product out, but something remarkable was happening — in the exact moment that Ron Rakow was contemplating organizing Grateful Dead franchises, Grateful Dead franchises were organizing themselves… kinda.
Taping ‘73
AUDIO: “Playing in the Band” [Jerry Moore audience tape, 7/31/73] (6:53-7:12)
JESSE: That was the Dead at Roosevelt Stadium on July 31st, 1973, just days before the Wake of the Flood sessions began. It’s one of the first audience recordings made by a Bronx Dead freak named Jerry Moore. By 1973, the amount of tapers was growing by leaps and bounds. The earliest known audience tape recorded by a Dead fan was actually made in March 1968 of the Dead playing for free on Haight Street by our friend Steve Brown, a story we told in our Listen To The River: October 1973 episode. But by fall 1973, Steve was actually working for Grateful Dead Records and watched as the taping scene blew up.
STEVE BROWN: It didn't seem like a problem because I knew what happens when you make a copy, and then other people you're going to share those copies with start bringing out more people. And these people go to the concerts to buy tickets that go to the Grateful Dead. So, it seemed to me to be not a bad idea on a certain level because it's promoting, promoting, promoting, promoting — more, more, more, more. The fact that they wouldn't still buy albums? No, they would still buy the albums. So as long as I knew they had to have in their hands the thing that has a beautiful cover on it with stuff that is on this album you can play over and over, and ‘It’s a better quality than the one recorded up in the balcony…’
JESSE: Sounds like something a taper would say. Ron Rakow had his own relationship with taping. Like some, he reacted negatively at first.
RON RAKOW: When I first started at the Grateful Dead, I regarded the tapers as a threat. I went draconian at some point during the thing. One time, I went out into the audience and cut microphone cables with a wirecutter. That incident happened at the Fillmore West, a Bill Graham gig in San Francisco. It might have been Winterland. It was completely alien to me. I never addressed it, I never thought about it. I never was involved with anything like that. It's not… It was not normal. It wasn't normal.
JESSE: You personally cut some tapers’ cables?
RON RAKOW: I did everything, at least some time, personally. I cut two or three of ‘em, and I felt like a piece of shit. I went backstage. I really didn’t like it. I started to think about it, and then I remembered my time at Montauk Junior High School in Brooklyn. I was in the seventh, eighth and ninth grade, those are the junior high school years. When I was in the eighth grade… How old is someone in the eighth grade? 13, right? I went out of school one day, and there was a station wagon outside. And they were giving out three four-packs of Camels. In thinking about that, I realized that the tapers were making us, not hurting us.
JESSE: In their earliest days, when the Dead visited a city for the first time, they would often play for free in the local park in advance of their paying gigs — it was a form of promotion.
RON RAKOW: If you really sit down and think about it, they're not that dissimilar. Cigarettes are an addictive product. So is music.
JESSE: First one’s free! And actually, thanks to what unfolded, all the tapes after the first one remained free, too — in part because of the Dead themselves, and in part because of what was far out of their control.
RON RAKOW: It was either that we allow it or we don't. It just became, in my world, very smart to let it happen. Jerry dismissed the whole issue in one sentence. It was very far out. At a meeting, he just said: “I play music. When I play it, I’m finished with it. Anybody can do whatever they want with it.”
JESSE: It’s an often repeated quote. From a legal point-of-view, that remains complicated.
RON RAKOW: You can analyze it in some way, but that is what he said. Period. Being a business guy inside the Grateful Dead was not the easiest task.
JESSE: By 1973, Ron Rakow experimented with taping himself.
RON RAKOW: Hanging out with Owlsley, I bought a Nagra for myself. I only bought equipment that Owsley recommended. I was a very acceptable person because I believed that he knew all about the right stuff to have. For example, I bought a Nagra because he told me to. I did the original recording of Old & In the Way, pre-Bear. I set it up and then called Bear to come. Then, he came. That was at the Stinson Beach Firehouse. He put the headphones on and he said, “Amazing! You have every piece of equipment exactly right, exactly what I have. Exactly right. You copied it exactly — but everything in the setup is fucked up. It could not be more fucked up.” I couldn’t even hear what he was talking about, but he went and straightened everything out. He wound up starting to record Old & In the Way and recorded what we put out as an album.
JESSE: In 1973, taping was blowing up. More of the Dead’s crew were starting to tape the band internally, but it was really the Dead Heads that were firing the energy. That September, when Bob Weir and the Godchauxs spoke with WAER, there was some talk of the taper phenomenon. This is Dead manager Jon McIntire.
JON MCINTIRE [9/17/73]: Some of those guys have as many as 500 separate performances.
JESSE: Keith was down with the tapers, though Bob Weir was a little more skeptical.
KEITH GODCHAUX [9/17/73]: I think it's far out.
BOB WEIR [9/17/73]: I think it's okay, as long as we don't… as long as they don’t try to make a lot of bread off of it and try to promote it in a big way because most of those performances and the recordings are just not up to any sort of quality standards that I can hear.
JESSE: Keith was pretty clear that taping was an act perpetrated by serious music fans.
KEITH GODCHAUX [9/17/73]: As far as I can tell, the people that are into it, like the music.
BOB WEIR [9/17/73]: If they want to tape it, tape it, and take it home and listen to it, roll in it or whatever, it's perfectly fine by me. A lot of times, our onstage performances come off being less than… bearing not-too-close scrutiny. You don't want to listen to 50 or 60 times.
JESSE: If the Dead didn’t have much choice in the matter before Wake of the Flood came out on October 15th, just a few days before the album’s release, Rolling Stone ran a story that changed the game permanently, shining a spotlight on the people who’d been taping, trading, and collecting Grateful Dead tapes and hipping Dead freaks who read Rolling Stone to the idea that they could do this FOR themselves. The Dead taping scene was already pretty big, but it really blew up from here and would slowly change the complexion of who the Grateful Dead were as a band, building what amounted to an alternative distribution system for music by the Dead that extended to other acts as well. I focused a lot on this network in my book Heads and interviewed a number of the original tapers. Most of the time, they tried to keep themselves off-microphone on the tapes they were making, but today we’re going to hear some of their voices. We’ll start with the subject of the Rolling Stone article, which was titled “Mr. Tapes of Brooklyn: He Rules the Grateful Dead Tape Empire.” The “Mr. Tapes” in question was a Brooklyn Dead Head named Les Kippel. He’d started taping in 1970 but didn’t start to connect to other tapers for a little bit.
LES KIPPEL [2013]: The Jerry Garcia Band was playing at the Academy of Music, if I remember correctly, on 14th Street in Manhattan. I was with my friend Ramblin’ R.T. and there were two people from New Jersey.
JESSE: I’m pretty sure Les was remembering the Jerry Garcia/Howard Wales show at the Academy in January 1972.
LES KIPPEL [2013]: Four of us were just sitting around. At that time, I might have had about five or six tapes. They were taping and they had some tapes, and we started trading. We came up with the idea of a tape exchange. We felt it was extremely important that no one made money on it. So therefore, that was just about the date of the creation of the First Free Underground Grateful Dead Tape Exchange.
JESSE: They named it Dead Relics, r-e-l-i-c-s. In the next year, the Tape Exchange would morph into Relix magazine, still running today. But in 1972 and 1973, the Dead Relics Tape Exchange was a white-hot center of the underground taping world.
LES KIPPEL [2013]: We made a decision that there's no reason there shouldn't be a Free Underground Tape Exchange of New Jersey, a Free Underground Tape Exchange of San Francisco, or Australia or England. So we said to all these people, “This is what you do: get a tape machine; go record shows, and start trading!” And almost immediately, we had 13 Tape Exchanges. Rolling Stone magazine picked up a story—Charlie Rosen wrote it—about Mr. Tapes, the Ruler of the Underground Tape Empire who lives in Brooklyn and works for the New York City Housing Authority. And I was getting letters coming to me from all over the world.
JESSE: In setting up tape exchanges, Les discovered the other recordists who’d started taping the Dead. The Rolling Stone article ended with Les pouring a glass of wine for Marty Weinberg, the original East Coast audience taper.
LES KIPPEL [2013]: Marty is like the god. He's due all the respect and courtesies because he was really the first on the scene.
JESSE: By 1973, Marty Weinberg was pretty much gone from the Dead scene, but he’d influenced a whole generation of fellow New York teens since starting to tape the Dead as a 15-year-old in 1968. I interviewed Marty over dinner, not imagining anybody might want to hear it, but here’s a little bit of the late Marty Weinberg. I miss him.
MARTY WEINBERG [2013]: I began to watch the Dead a bunch starting in ‘67. And I said, “Wow, this music is amazing.” I felt that there was something about the music that was very different. The music was extremely fleeting — almost like Charlie Parker. He played something that will never be played again, no one will ever hear that again. That solo that he just played, if it wasn’t recorded, and the world will never hear that solo again. And it was so insane, but it won’t be heard again.
Not every song, not every concert — but there were things I was listening to that were just like listening to Bach... Just, how did these guys do it? How does this band… they were like one unit. It was like they were playing music that was written for them very tightly in one sense, but they were freeform jazz. At a given point, I said, “You know, I should record this — for me.” I wasn’t thinking globally, trust me. Later on, I really regretted that. I was thinking very, very me only, maybe for a friend or two.
JESSE: Marty’s full story is outside our scope today, though I wrote more about him in my book Heads and an adjacent article. He didn’t trade with many people, but he was an influence on the Dead fans who encountered him. We spoke with Howie Levine in our episode about the RFK ‘73 shows.
HOWIE LEVINE: I knew the Bronx heads, but we were in Brooklyn. I had a friend whose brother — my friend was Howie Weinberg, his brother was Marty Weinberg, who was one of the one of the original tapers. So I used to get tapes way early on.
JESSE: Marty’s younger brother Howie Weinberg would go on to an illustrious career in the music business himself. If you’ve ever looked at the mastering credits on a CD, you’ve probably caught the name Howie Weinberg.
HOWIE LEVINE: Of course, that got me into starting to tape. We would go there with our reel-to-reel deck, plug it in and have our microphones.
JESSE: We take it for granted these days that a taping scene emerged around the Grateful Dead in the late 1960s and early 1970s, but one important underlying condition was the emergence of tape itself. Reel-to-reels had been around since the early 1950s, and Marty Weinberg and a few other bold early tapers smuggled reel-to-reels into the Fillmores and other places, but it was really the innovation of the compact cassette that broke it open for Dead freaks. In fact, 1973 was the 10th anniversary of the format’s introduction, but it had taken a while to spread. Marc Masters is the author of a really wonderful new book titled High Bias: The Distorted History of the Cassette Tape, available in October from the University of North Carolina Press. Please welcome to the Deadcast, Marc Masters.
MARC MASTERS: The technical birth of the compact cassette is ‘63 or so when Lou Ottens creates it, and then Philips decides that, instead of trying to sell it to people, they're going to let the license be held for free — thinking, hopefully, that they're going to be able to do better selling it if it's a standard thing than if they're competing with other people's formats. Sony kind of said to them, ‘If you don't let us have this for free, we're gonna go buy from somewhere else.’
JESSE: Definitely a case of an open format driving innovation.
MARC MASTERS: The late ‘60s is when it really starts, mostly indicated by the way mass media started to respond to it. In ‘68 and ‘69, there’s all of these articles that say: the great new thing in music is the compact cassette. Cassettes are rolling, kids are buying cassette players, kids are taping things off the radio. That kind of thing was the first moment it became recognized in mass media.
JESSE: And certainly this is the exact period when the first audience tapes start turning up, the opening of the Overton window perhaps. Through the 1970s and beyond, as cassettes got more popular, incremental improvements made them better suited for recording live shows.
MARC MASTERS: Much of the quality [of the recording] had to do with the quality of the tape. The tape had to be so thin to be able to have a decent speed but also to fit into such a small package. They found that certain oxides and different kinds of materials were going to work to make these tapes, then the sound got better that way.
JESSE: In Marc’s book, he focuses on different subcultures that used the cassette in various creative ways, and it’s clear that Dead tapers were really among the earliest adopters of the format.
MARC MASTERS: Most of the subcultures I've discussed come after the Dead tape trading culture started. Hip-hop is basically mid- to late-’70s, and it's really centered around DJs, not rappers. These guys were innovating DJ mixing and people wanted to hear it who couldn't get to the show, or they wanted to hear it again after the show. So cassette tapes became a way for people to trade them and for the DJs to eventually sell them on the streets and actually make a living. Go-Go is somewhat parallel, a few years later probably but around the same time. It was very concentrated in Washington DC, a very similar thing. It was very much live music, more than recorded music, although some records came out eventually. People wanted to trade tapes of shows, and there were shows happening every night, much like there were hip hop parties happening every night in New York. In DC, there were actually full-on stores, they were called “PA tapes.”
JESSE: Marc’s book High Bias has a cool section on Dead tapers. But we know plenty of those. Please welcome back Jim Cooper. We spoke a bunch with Jim in our RFK and Watkins Glen episodes. He started taping at the same Fillmore shows as Les Kippel in January 1970.
JIM COOPER: I had a couple of friends who were into the Dead and they said, “We're going to get a tape recorder.” They bought a Hitachi, a Hitachi TRQ 222, the big-ass deck with two speakers that could come off. It had a little amp in it and six D-cell [batteries]. I bought one of those in late ‘69 and then started January 3rd, 1970 at the Fillmore [East] getting the Dead. And that was it.
JESSE: Everybody seemed to know or know about Marty Weinberg.
JIM COOPER: Marty Weinberg was really cool. I knew Marty back then, he was an early taper.
JESSE: In the Bronx, a teenager named Harvey Lubar discovered the Dead, then discovered Dead tapes, then discovered Marty Weinberg’s Dead tapes through a mutual friend.
HARVEY LUBAR [2013]: I just sat there with my mouth open. I had never heard anything like this in my life! What he played for me was Marty [Weinberg’s]... his first-gen reel from his Marty’s Uher master – 7 ½ IPS. Marty called it July 11th, but it’s technically July 12th, 1970, the show where they opened with the “Easy Wind.” I just sat there. I remember he had a couch that converted into a bed — and trust me when I tell you that we did not play this music at 60 or 70 decibels. I was pinned, I was pinned against the wall, sitting there. I’m like, “Holy shit, this is so much better than listening to ‘Death Don’t Have No Mercy’ into ‘Feedback’!”
JESSE: Around the same time that Les Kippel was organizing Dead Relics Tape Exchange in 1972, Harvey Lubar took his own collecting to the next level. Harvey wasn’t really a taper, but he’s a good example of how Dead tape trading fostered friendships. I also miss Harvey.
HARVEY LUBAR [2013]: I had a spiral bound notebook for every class, so I just tore out the last six pages from one of the spiral notebooks and I wrote: “Trade Grateful Dead Tapes, Live Grateful Dead Tapes with the Hell’s Honkies Tape Club,” or something like that. I put my name and phone number. I said, okay, I’ll put one up at Lehman [College], they had an activity board that you didn’t need to get the student government to approve. I put one at Columbia, one at Queens College, probably NYU. And people started calling me! [chuckles] Out of nowhere! This guy at Columbia called me. I remember his name was Nick. A couple of people at Queens College called, a couple of people in the Bronx called me. And some guy named Jerry Moore.
JESSE: The idea of taping spread alongside the tapes themselves. It was also a period when the rock underground was flush with bootleg LPs that weren’t always available through normal means. These so-called “undergrounds” are what inspired Jerry Moore, who turned out to be Harvey Lubar’s classmate at Lehman College in the Bronx. Jerry would become one of the most pivotal of the early Dead tapers. I never got to speak with him. Thanks to David Gans for this interview from 2008.
JERRY MOORE [2008]: I was in high school, this was long about maybe 1971. And one of my friends put in a Grateful Dead bootleg album. I'd never seen such a thing before. So I asked, “This is very interesting… where did you get this artifact?” And he said he bought it down in the Village, he’d been walking around Sheridan Square and a guy was walking around with an armload of these things, selling them. And I said, “Cool, I’m gonna go get me one of those things.” Except I couldn’t — I never saw that guy. Believe me, I haunted that neighborhood too, looking for him. I could not find him. I’ve never been good at dealing with frustration. So somehow or other, this eventually led to me making my own.
JESSE: In the early ‘70s, tapers often met by accident.
JERRY MOORE [2008]: I met Louis Falanga under the George Washington Bridge as the Hells Angels boat ride sailed around out there. You couldn't hear Garcia.
JESSE: That would’ve been in September 1973, just before the Rolling Stone article. By then, Harvey Lubar and Jerry Moore and the Hell’s Honkies Tape Club were in full operation.
JERRY MOORE [2008]: My first efforts didn't turn out very well, to say the least. I didn't keep them, even through 1972 they weren’t turning out too well. But by the time we got into the middle of 1973, they were doing okay.
JESSE: Jerry would eventually connect with Les Kippel and become the first editor of Dead Relix, the tape trading magazine that Les published. It was also during this period that the consumer gear surrounding taping began to improve noticeably, with a number of new cassette decks and microphones introduced into the ecosystem that made the collective project that much easier.
JERRY MOORE [2008]: I'm not even gonna describe the failed experiments, but the first ones I made that turned out okay were with the Sony 110 mono portable cassette machine, and an AKG D-1000 E.
JESSE: The TC 110A was introduced in 1971, the AKG in the late ‘60s. That was also when JIm Cooper upgraded, having had his gear stolen after RFK in June ‘73.
JIM COOPER: We decided that we needed to step up our game for Watkins Glen. We bought a pair of Sony ECM 22P condenser mics and we used those, still with the Hitachi.
JESSE: The Sony ECM 22P had been introduced in 1972. Both Jim Cooper and Jerry Moore started using homemade mic stands at around the same moment that summer of 1973. Harvey Lubar.
HARVEY LUBAR [2013]: So, [along similar lines], he got the idea of a pole. I don't know if he saw someone else using it or if he thought it up himself. But there was nobody using it. And I know he had the pole because when he came back after the two Roosevelt shows, they sounded like soundboards and there was no screaming. And he said, “I used a pole.” I think he might have also used one for Watkins Glen. But I just thought it was a brilliant idea, and it caught on really quickly. At Roosevelt in ‘74, there were a bunch of poles.
JESSE: I love Harvey’s description of the life of a tape trading Dead Head in 1973.
HARVEY LUBAR [2013]: I would take my reel-to-reel, put it in the back seat. I wouldn't put it in the trunk because it would rust it out and I was just scared it would end up on the Major Deegan Expressway. I put it on the backseat, and I’d drive to different people's homes. Usually it was on a Saturday or a Sunday. I would take my reel-to-reel and go to person X’s house and plug in. In real time—which meant every hour and a half, because most of us did it at 3 ¾ [IPS]… at 7 ½, it got really expensive. Jerry did it at 7 ½, I did it at 3 ¾ with Dolby D [noise reduction], which was very common. We felt the Dolby D would keep the quality that it would at 7 ½. It didn’t, but it was better than 3 ¾ with nothing, provided we decoded with our Dolby machines correctly. We would set up a Dolby signal — we all had what we’d call outboard Dolby machines. They were not part of the tape recording. We would always set our signals: we had a hum, we would set our signals and then start taping. And then we would listen, and sit around for seven or eight hours. So guess what would happen in the seven or eight hours? We would start becoming friends. And we would start talking. Not like email, but actually people — two people, three people, sitting together. We all learned about each other’s families and difficulties, our dreams, our aspirations, all while the music was playing. And every now and then, we’d go, “Ooh, ooh, that was a good solo he just took! Yeah, so what’s going on with your sister and her boyfriend?” I bonded with so many people. We were all around the same age. We weren’t rich kids. We weren’t poverty stricken either, we weren’t from the ‘hood. But we were all, like, lower middle class kids who had this wonderful hobby that was all-consuming, and we had the same outlook on life. We would just sit there and just… I bonded with so many people.
JESSE: Whether they had real names or were just heads hanging out with each other, Grateful Dead tape exchanges had sprung up over the previous year, each one set up to distribute Grateful Dead music, just like a little Grateful Dead franchise, exactly how Ron Rakow planned. Except free. The Dead’s own idea to franchise themselves was unknown to Dead Relics.
LES KIPPEL [2013]: We came to them with a proposal for a tapers club — the Connoisseurs Club. And what we suggested was that we charge $10 for a concert. It'd be on two cassettes—first set, second set. We’d set up a table at the shows, and you’d pay. Because we didn’t have instant duplication back then, you’d pay and we’d mail the concerts to the people.
JESSE: But the Dead weren’t biting. Ron Rakow.
RON RAKOW: Les Kippel, I think he's the guy that started Relix. It didn't come across my desk. I would remember it, and I would have turned it down with less words then you just made explaining it to me.
JESSE: It does seem to have gone across Rakow’s desk in the summer of 1973, though. In Mark Rodriguez’s remarkable recent book, After All Is Said and Done, he reproduces the full proposal for the Connoisseurs Club, and some correspondence indicating that Rakow turned it down instantly. Not sure about the word count of his reply, though, but the tape exchanges wouldn’t be converted to Dead franchises. Selling their own recordings was an idea the Dead had talked about among themselves. In 1971, the legendary Marty Weinberg met Phil Lesh backstage at New York’s Felt Forum and they discussed his concert taping. You can read much more about this story in my book Heads.
MARTY WEINBERG [2013]: I'll never forget this, because it was actually pretty cool. Phil said, “We dreamed about being able to play a place and people being able to get it the next day. How great would that be? What you’re doing — just do it, and then the next day people can buy it, and then people can have a record of it.” “Ah, that’s great.”
JESSE: It was another idea that would have to wait. Librarians have an acronym, LOCKSS, with 2 Ss — it stands for Lots of Copies Keeps Stuff Safe. And that’s true. It’s true for memory just as much as it is for preservation. The Dead played many of their songs many hundreds of times, resulting in their preservation on many thousands of tapes and countless digital files, but more importantly, imprinted in the memories of people who listen to them. The half-dozen versions of “Let Me Sing Your Blues Away,” from only six shows, didn’t go forth and multiply in quite the same way. The versions on the Angel’s Share more than double that amount. It was less about the quality of the song and more about the success of free tape trading, which in turn probably has a good deal to do with why we’re still here talking about “Let Me Sing Your Blues Away” today. And why hopefully you’ll have it stuck in your head tomorrow.
AUDIO: “Let Me Sing Your Blues Away” ((Take 13) - Not Slated) [Wake of the Flood: The Angel’s Share] (2:45-3:20) - [dead.net] [Spotify] [YouTube]