Good Ol’ Grateful Deadcast
Season 8, Episode 10
Wake of the Flood 50: Weather Report Suite
Archival interviews:
- Bob Weir, Keith Godchaux, Donna Godchaux, and Jon McIntire, WAER, 9/17/73.
- Robert Hunter, by Denis McNamera, WLIR, 3/1978.
AUDIO: “Weather Report Suite” [Wake of the Flood] (1:28-1:48) - [dead.net] [Spotify] [YouTube]
JESSE: Listeners bringing Wake of the Flood home from the record store and taking it out of the sleeve might immediately note that its second side contained the longest piece of music yet on a Grateful Dead studio album — Bob Weir’s “Weather Report Suite,” three pieces of music over two cuts, flowing into one multitude-containing album-closing blow-out.
AUDIO: Weather Report Suite” [Wake of the Flood] (8:01-8:14) - [dead.net] [Spotify] [YouTube]
JESSE: Here’s Bobby Weir on WAER in Syracuse in 1973.
BOB WEIR [9/17/73]: My suite, that’s more or less the “Weather Report Suite.” We have yet another song about the weather.
JESSE: Weir’s song about the weather fit right in with a collection that included songs like “Here Comes Sunshine” and “Eyes of the World,” both lyrically and musically. The Grateful Dead were a progressive band, and “Weather Report Suite” was a progression. Grateful Dead archivist and legacy manager David Lemieux.
DAVID LEMIEUX: It's a very rare Grateful Dead song that kind of hadn't been really written until they recorded it, and wasn't played live until after they'd recorded it. There aren't a lot of songs like that.
JESSE: And if the Dead had long thought in terms of suites, like the interlocking pieces of Anthem of the Sun or Live/Dead or their modular setlists, this was something new for Bob Weir—a suite of his own—and the most ambitious piece of music he’d written or attempted to record.
AUDIO: Weather Report Suite” [Wake of the Flood] (10:31-10:53) - [dead.net] [Spotify] [YouTube]
JESSE: “Weather Report Suite” held a privileged place, closing out the Dead’s first album on their very own label, Grateful Dead Records, and it can be heard as a stand-in for the album as a whole — a highlight for people who love Wake of the Flood, and a point of contention for people who don’t. So like the piece of music we’re talking about, today’s episode will be something of a multitude-containing suite, following the album to its completion and then out into the world, the future, and our own blow-out ending with many voices. Here’s a tease, courtesy of our friend Steve Brown at Grateful Dead Records.
STEVE BROWN: You pick up the phone, and it's the federal government calling you — the FBI. It’s like: what?
Forecasts
JESSE: Listen extra close to this very short bit of between-song tuning from 1969.
AUDIO: “Doin’ That Rag” [4/5/69] (7:43-7:47)
JESSE: That was from a tape of the Grateful Dead at the Avalon Ballroom on April 5th, 1969, more than three years before the debut of the “Weather Report Suite,” where you can hear the first breath of Weir’s intro. Those distinctive intro licks pop up in numerous Dead jams over the next few years. Here it is on August 6th, 1971 as the band moves back into “The Other One,” now on Dick’s Picks 35.
AUDIO: “The Other One” (2) [Dick’s Picks 35, 8/6/71] (0:36-0:52) - [Spotify] [YouTube]
JESSE: Bobby Weir takes his time writing songs, as we’ve learned on past seasons of the Deadcast. The earliest glimpses of “Playing in the Band” came in early 1969 as well, a few years before the rest of the song. In the summer of 1970, he began work on “Cassidy,” a song that he and lyricist John Perry Barlow were still working on right up until he recorded it in the studio in the spring of 1972.
AUDIO: “Cassidy” [#2] [Ace demos] (0:00-0:13)
JESSE: Early in 1972, Weir had spent time on Barlow’s ranch in Pinedale, Wyoming, working on the songs that he was to record back home in California. Before he left, he recorded a tape of unfinished songs that included that unfinished version of “Cassidy.” It also included an instrumental piece that Weir was calling “Madrigal.” The other voice on the tape is lyricist John Perry Barlow.
JOHN PERRY BARLOW [1972]: Alright, “Madrigal.”
BOB WEIR [1972]: This one’s “Madrigal,” take 1.
JESSE: It was somewhat difficult to play.
AUDIO: “Weather Report Suite Prelude” [Ace demos] (0:04-0:25)
BOB WEIR [1972]: [plays “Prelude” guitar phrase; stops] Oh wait a minute… take 2. [tries playing “Prelude” guitar phrase again; stops again] Ha ha… take 3. [plays again; stops again]
JOHN PERRY BARLOW [1972]: [laughs]
BOB WEIR [1972]: [laughs] Spider fingers here…
JESSE: But eventually he got through it.
AUDIO: “Weather Report Suite Prelude” [Ace demos] (0:36-0:59)
JESSE: Over the summer of ‘72 in Seattle, Weir earnestly debuted the instrumental with the Dead, now on the Download Series 10.
AUDIO: “Casey Jones” [Download Series 10, 7/21/72] (7:40-7:58) - [Spotify] [YouTube]
JESSE: But the rest of the band didn’t quite know it yet.
AUDIO: “Casey Jones” [Download Series 10, 7/21/72] (7:59-8:09) - [Spotify] [YouTube]
BOB WEIR [7/21/72]: Well anyway… what we’re gonna do next is, uh, history.
JESSE: Not that it stopped Weir from dropping the piece into other Dead jams in the era. By the spring of 1973, though, the rest of the Dead fleshed out “Madrigal” a little bit more and played it a few times as a dramatic prelude of sorts to other pieces of music, like this one from Springfield on March 28th, where it sets up “Dark Star.”
AUDIO: “Weather Report Suite Prelude” [Dave’s Picks 16, 3/28/73] (2:40-3:09)
AUDIO: “Dark Star” [Dave’s Picks 16, 3/28/73] (0:00-0:09)
JESSE: In our “Here Comes Sunshine” episode, musicologist Shaugn O’Donnell discussed how Weir had developed a new improv vocabulary in this period.
SHAUGN O’DONNELL: I think it's the other side of that coin — it's sort of the composer version of that in some ways, basically doing a recital piece. Being on the tightrope on your own like that, it’s scary and big. It's brave. That's a lot of work to keep those chops and keep that ready to go the whole time.
JESSE: By the spring, the future suite had developed a second section, though it’s not clear if the pieces of music were attached just yet. There’s an early 1973 Dead rehearsal, probably from Point Reyes, where the band plays through what’s now known as “Weather Report Suite, Part 1,” so it’s hard to say if the “Prelude” is there, too.
AUDIO: “Weather Report Suite, Part 1” [rehearsal, 1/73] (0:55-1:27)
JESSE: Like some of Weir’s earlier song sketches, he already had a vocal melody for it. His usual songwriting partner John Perry Barlow wasn’t able to find words, apparently. He was going to have to keep working on it. They were more successful at what became the later part of the suite. We’ll use the August 1973 rehearsal tape for this next segment, now on the 2004 edition of Wake of the Flood. It’s got an alternate line in the first verse.
AUDIO: “Weather Report Suite” (Demo) [Wake of the Flood 2004 expanded edition, 8/4/73] (5:33-6:03) - [Spotify] [YouTube]
JESSE: Without having gone through every single one of Bob Weir’s original contributions to the Grateful Dead to this degree just yet, I’d wager a guess that “Let It Grow” is one of the top two or three least complicated in terms of songwriting process. Weir told our buddy Alan Paul in 2001 that it was “one of the few times Barlow and I sat and wrote words and music simultaneously.”
AUDIO: “Weather Report Suite” (Demo) [Wake of the Flood 2004 expanded edition, 8/4/73] (6:04-6:24) - [Spotify] [YouTube]
JESSE: According to Barlow’s notes, their songwriting session took place at his mother Mim’s apartment in Salt Lake City in February 1973, meaning either February 27th or 28th, when the Dead were in town for the show that’s now on Dick’s Picks 28.
AUDIO: “Weather Report Suite” (Demo) [Wake of the Flood 2004 expanded edition, 8/4/73] (6:25-6:35) - [Spotify] [YouTube]
JESSE: Shaugn O’Donnell hears the chord changes of under the verse as striking a kind of keynote, or perhaps more of a mode-note, that puts the song in line with Jerry Garcia’s compositions on the album.
SHAUGN O’DONNELL: For me, the tone is set right away when they sit on the diminished chord each time. So you have the A minor chord, then you go to the G# diminished 7th chord. And it functions just like the dominant chord would in there—like an E7 would—except they are making this epic sound just by changing sonority. Even though the function doesn't change, suddenly, it's not just a tune going A minor, E, A minor, E. You're saying, this is something bigger and more grand. In that way, it kind of immediately sets the tone of being… this is the Grateful Dead’s prog statement.
AUDIO: “Weather Report Suite” (Demo) [Wake of the Flood 2004 expanded edition, 8/4/73] (7:31-8:03) - [Spotify] [YouTube]
SHAUGN O’DONNELL: And then of course the life cycle, almost Biblical kind of text really makes it epic in itself, too.
JESSE: Ah, yes, the Biblical kind of text with, shall we say, Biblical gender roles. In the liberated territory of the Grateful Dead, it wasn’t a very liberated song, and still isn’t.
AUDIO: “Weather Report Suite” (Demo) [Wake of the Flood 2004 expanded edition, 8/4/73] (9:00-9:12) - [Spotify] [YouTube]
JESSE: But it was also rich in imagery. At the Grateful Dead scholars caucus, presentations have used it as a springboard to Taoism, German Romantic philosophy, and images of light and dark in Dead lyrics.
AUDIO: “Weather Report Suite” (Demo) [Wake of the Flood 2004 expanded edition, 8/4/73] (7:00-7:28) - [Spotify] [YouTube]
JESSE: Scott Metzger from Joe Russo’s Almost Dead and a gazillion other projects has spent time internalizing “Let It Grow.”
SCOTT METZGER: It's actually not that complicated compared to some of the other Weir stuff. When you start talking about “Lost Sailor” and “Saint of Circumstance,” you’re talking about, like, ‘How did he think of this kind of stuff?’ But “Let It Grow”... it is involved, yes, but with all of Weir’s stuff, once you learn it, you’re kind of like, ‘Oh, I see what he was thinking.’ Kinda. I kind of see how he came to this conclusion. There’s some complex chords, there’s some diminished chords, which are a little more advanced. They’re in the same school, those seventh chords that we keep talking about through the record. The verses are in A minor, and they kind of stay around A minor.
AUDIO: “Weather Report Suite” (Demo) [Wake of the Flood 2004 expanded edition, 8/4/73] (5:40-5:52) - [Spotify] [YouTube]
SCOTT METZGER: The chorus is very complicated. There are a lot of chords in a very short amount of time. I mess it up regularly in JRAD. It’s a lot to remember.
AUDIO: “Weather Report Suite” (Demo) [Wake of the Flood 2004 expanded edition, 8/4/73] (7:31-8:03) - [Spotify] [YouTube]
JESSE: The problem is that, by the time the Dead were ready to record Wake of the Flood in August, Weir still didn’t have words for the first part, nor had the Dead sewn all the pieces together and performed them. Over the weekend of August 4th, both Weir and Phil Lesh recorded solo acoustic demos for songs they hoped to track with the band for Wake of the Flood. “Weather Report Suite” is finally performed as a whole piece of music. Except —
BOB WEIR [8/4/73]: This one doesn’t have a name yet.
AUDIO: “Weather Report Suite” (Demo) [Wake of the Flood 2004 expanded edition, 8/4/73] (2:50-3:11) - [Spotify] [YouTube]
“Unbroken Chain”
JESSE: Almost every ‘60s and ‘70s Dead studio album besides Workingman’s Dead had songs that weren’t played live before being recorded. Because of the automatic publishing payoff that occurred when songs were on albums by semi-well-paying bands, album sessions also served as popular motivators for finishing songs. And most often, those still working on their songs were songwriters besides Jerry Garcia and Robert Hunter.
AUDIO: “Pride of Cucamonga” (Demo) [From the Mars Hotel 2004 expanded edition, 8/4/73] (1:00-1:23) - [Spotify] [YouTube]
JESSE: That was Phil Lesh demoing a version of “Pride of Cucamonga” on August 4th, now on the 2004 edition of From the Mars Hotel. And this is Lesh demoing “Unbroken Chain” that same day, also on the 2004 edition of Mars Hotel.
AUDIO: “Unbroken Chain” (Demo) [From the Mars Hotel 2004 expanded edition, 8/4/73] (1:00-1:23) - [Spotify] [YouTube]
JESSE: In our “Eyes of the World” episode, we played a bit of the studio outtakes from “China Doll,” recorded for Wake of the Flood, but put aside until the sessions for From the Mars Hotel in 1974. The band also spent some time working on “Unbroken Chain” on August 10th and again on August 16th. It didn’t go terribly well.
PHIL LESH [8/16/73]: Nope. Nope, nope, nope, nope, nope, nope.
JESSE: Brian Kehew is the engineer responsible for the transfer of the Angel’s Share tapes.
BRIAN KEHEW: Jerry’s songs are defined and Jerry’s songs are compact in a way, too. They're also pretty tight, they're well-arranged, and everybody's had time to work for them. So, those go down pretty quickly. But Phil's song as it starts, “Unbroken Chain,” takes a lot more time.
JESSE: “Unbroken Chain” was a complicated song, no doubt.
PHIL LESH [8/16/73]: I mean, the first lines, the first lines of each half should have that rhythm, and the other halves should have a straight —
JERRY GARCIA [8/16/73]: Right.
PHIL LESH [8/16/73]: Yeah.
JESSE: It’s one of the only times on the Angel’s Share tapes where there’s any real tension.
JERRY GARCIA [8/16/73]: Right. Well, either make it straight or else everybody learn in that way.
PHIL LESH [8/16/73]: Let’s everybody learn it that way, please. You just simply count: 1, 2, 3, 4, 1, 2, 3 — da da da, da da da — D minor.
JERRY GARCIA [8/16/73]: What’s fun about that?
PHIL LESH [8/16/73]: It ain’t fun. It ain’t supposed to be fun.
JERRY GARCIA [8/16/73]: Fuck it.
PHIL LESH [8/16/73]: It’s just supposed to be right.
JESSE: They did make it through one full version of the song. Sorta.
AUDIO: “Phil’s Song (Unbroken Chain)” ((Take 8) - Slated) [Wake of the Flood: The Angel’s Share] (4:26-5:01) - [dead.net] [Spotify] [YouTube]
JESSE: But Phil Lesh had a decent suggestion.
PHIL LESH [8/16/73]: I think it’d be neat if everybody learned the chords and stuff, before we tried to rehearse the thing…
JESSE: They tabled the song until they returned to the studio next spring, and so will we.
PHIL LESH [8/16/73]: And I don’t think us trying to make a tape with all the wrong chords is gonna make a lot of difference.
“Loose Lucy”
JESSE: Not only did they table the song but, according to Brian Kehew, actually taped over some of their attempts to record it, including apparently a few finished takes, using the reel for more work on “Weather Report Suite.” It’s a handy example of why these sessions can be difficult to date, even if they have dates all written on the boxes. On August 7th, they worked on the Garcia/Hunter song “Loose Lucy” for a while. First they try it at the brisker tempo at which they’d debuted it, around 110 bpm.
AUDIO: “Loose Lucy” (Take 1) [Wake of the Flood: The Angel’s Share] (0:46-1:06) - [dead.net]
JESSE: And they try it at the slower tempo that they’d changed to in July, around 10 bpm slower.
AUDIO: “Loose Lucy” (Take 3) [Wake of the Flood: The Angel’s Share] (0:28-0:51) - [dead.net]
JESSE: That one was a bit easier, in their setlists since the early part of the year at a few different tempos, and they tracked three quick takes. Though it would be tabled until the next album, too, Jerry Garcia was on record as saying the game plan for Wake of the Flood was always to whittle the music down to a single disc, but I will use this occasion to propose a double LP version, based on the songs in development at the time of the sessions. The first LP would be the same as the final album, except with “Eyes of the World” replaced by “They Love Each Other.” Side C would be “Unbroken Chain,” “Loose Lucy,” and “Wave That Flag”; Side D would be the extended “Eyes of the World” with the full ending jam, followed by “China Doll.” A fella can dream.
AUDIO: “Pistol Shot (China Doll)” ((Take 1) - Slated) [Wake of the Flood: The Angel’s Share] (2:30-2:53) - [dead.net] [Spotify] [YouTube]
JESSE: Before we table “Loose Lucy” until the spring, I’ll use it to flag something. If you’re a regular listener to this podcast, you’ve probably observed that there are a whole lot of dudes, and we’re always looking to counter that. When we discuss Mars Hotel next year, we’re going to get to a few songs that, as our old friend Thoughts on the Dead might’ve put it, are residents of the Problem Attic. If you’re a Deadcast listener that identifies as non-male, we’d love to hear your takes on “Loose Lucy,” “Money Money,” or any topic you think might be relevant. You can record or leave text messages at stories.dead.net. But let’s get back to what the tape boxes originally labeled “Bob’s Song.”
“Bob’s Song”
AUDIO: “Weather Report Suite” (Demo) [Wake of the Flood 2004 expanded edition, 8/4/73] (3:12-3:37) - [Spotify] [YouTube]
JESSE: At some point during the sessions at the Record Plant, Weir located the missing piece of his new song – a new neighbor in Mill Valley.
AUDIO: “Come to My Bedside, My Darlin’” [Eric Andersen, Blue River] (0:00-0:20) - [Spotify]
JESSE: That was the songwriter Eric Andersen, performing “Come to My Bedside” from his 1972 breakthrough Blue River. Eric was a Greenwich Village songwriter in the mid to late ‘60s. Besides his own songwriting and performing, he was also Joni Mitchell’s portal into alternate guitar tunings. He first met the Grateful Dead on the Festival Express in 1970. Please welcome to the Deadcast, the wonderful Eric Andersen.
ERIC ANDERSEN: I had met everybody when we did the Canadian train tour, the rock and roll tour across Canada. I was the only acoustic act on the show. Janis [Joplin] was on there, and Buddy Guy. It was probably the biggest party on wheels that ever happened in the history of mankind… and womankind. I think they had like six doctors on board. They had special rooms for the doctors — in case somebody was about to collapse, they could revitalize them to do the shows. We were having amphetamines and B12 shots.
JESSE: You can learn a lot more about Eric in the documentary “The Songpoet,” now streaming from PBS. The Festival Express was just the beginning.
ERIC ANDERSEN: So that's where I met John Dawson. We were both on Columbia. They teamed me up with The Byrds on some shows, and they teamed me up with the New Riders.
JESSE: Briefly a labelmate of the Dead on Warner Brothers in 1969, Eric Andersen had migrated to Venice Beach, signed with Columbia in 1972, and released his successful Blue River.
AUDIO: “Come to My Bedside, My Darlin’” [Eric Andersen, Blue River] (2:49-3:18) - [Spotify]
ERIC ANDERSEN: And then when I was with Colombia, I made some money and we moved to Mill Valley. That's how that happened — money.
JESSE: In Mill Valley, Eric Andersen came into close range with the Grateful Dead, though—more than a decade into his own career—he didn’t entirely process.
ERIC ANDERSEN: I was a singer-songwriter. I knew singer-songwriters, but I didn't listen to a lot of them because that's what I did. I wasn't really into the Grateful Dead. Musically, I leaned more into soul music, listening to stuff like Otis Redding and blues. Lightnin’ Hopkins.
JESSE: At some point in August 1973, Bobby Weir found Eric Andersen and drafted him into service.
ERIC ANDERSEN: Just as a personal connection, I was like a little hired gun. Other than having heard a couple gigs, I just lived in the neighborhood and I came over and tried to help the cause.
JESSE: Just as “Cassidy” had struck out with Robert Hunter, it seems like this one had, too.
ERIC ANDERSEN: I think they had tried to do the song with Garcia and Robert Hunter. I don't know the details, but they kind of went down the list and they’d say, ‘Hey, lyrics aren’t on here, I'll see what he comes up with.’ So I went over to Bobby Weir’s house. I arrived there in the dark and I left in the dark. I don't remember actually seeing the place. He was the only one there — there wasn't anyone, I didn't see a soul. It was just him. He answered the door, and it was just him and me for a couple hours and we knocked this thing off.
AUDIO: “Weather Report Suite” [Acoustic Guitar and Vocal, Wake of the Flood] (1:33-2:02) - [dead.net]
JESSE: We’re using the multi-tracks to make this version, which you can play with at dead.net/playingintheband. For the songwriters, it would prove to be a one-night stand. In Weir’s telling of the story, there was a bottle of whiskey involved, but Eric Andersen doesn’t remember it like that.
ERIC ANDERSEN: I started cold, just sitting at a table in a kitchen or something like that. He was just looking for a specific thing, lyrics for a certain part I think. I didn't know how extensive this thing was. We had guitars, there were guitars. They'd been trying different situations. I guess he got lucky and got a shortcut with me.
AUDIO: “Weather Report Suite” [Acoustic Guitar and Vocal, Wake of the Flood] (2:30-2:59) - [dead.net]
ERIC ANDERSEN: The album came out, and I don't think I heard it right away for a couple years. I didn't even know about it, and then a couple years later, I heard about the record. I’d been getting some money, but I didn’t really pay attention closely.
JESSE: I’m not even going to invoke the name of the songwriter that reminds me of, but you can hear the story of “Me and My Uncle” in the Side C episode of our Skull & Roses season. I think Eric actually did hear the song live a few times.
ERIC ANDERSEN: I was doing shows in Colorado. They were playing and I just remember there's like a wall of speakers — kind of like an auditorium, one of those big places where they play hockey or something. And I just remember there's just a wall of speakers. And I thought: How could anybody stand [it]? And it was just a huge amount of speakers piled up. You wondered how they could play and not go completely deaf.
JESSE: If my math is correct, this would’ve been in November 1973, when Eric was playing at Ebbets Field in Denver and the Dead came through for two nights at the Coliseum.
ERIC ANDERSEN: Garcia came to my hotel room and I had a guitar, a 12-fret Martin. He loved this song “Come to My Bedside” that I’d written. He started to play it, but the bridge snapped off [the guitar]. I’ve never seen it happen before; I’ve never seen it happen since. In the back, the bridge… well, anyway, the thing just became unglued and just snapped. But he just kept playing, even with no bridge. He found the chords, he found the thing. He just kept going like nothing happened. It was hilarious.
JESSE: I’m not sure how to emulate that sound but here’s a little more of “Come to My Bedside, My Darlin’”, the Eric Andersen song that Garcia dug.
AUDIO: “Come to My Bedside, My Darlin’” [Eric Andersen, Blue River] (1:15-1:45) - [Spotify]
JESSE: I can totally hear him Garcia-ing on it. I can sort of guess why it maybe didn’t register if Eric heard “Weather Report Suite” live.
ERIC ANDERSEN: I just remember that everybody was on acid, to the point where I was even doing shows on acid for a while. Garcia and I, we kicked around. We were talking about trying to do something together, but of course, our fates never intertwined again.
JESSE: It was a briefly lived partnership for Eric Andersen and Bob Weir, too. Eric is still making music and actively touring. I quite love the first part of “Weather Report Suite,” and we’ll listen to some more of it shortly, but apparently Bobby Weir had some regrets about his musical one night stand. As with “Walk in the Sunshine,” another song finished in a drunken lyric session just before the vocal overdubs for Ace, Weir sometimes tried to forget it, even if Andersen was just remembering it. Weir told Alan Paul in 2001, “I liked the music but it sounded like a love song, which is not my forte. Then Eric Andersen and I got a bottle of whiskey and wrote this sappy love song. I always hated what we did, which is why that part of the song vanished for years. Those words couldn’t pass my lips without me visibly retching, and I’m not going to do anything that I’m embarrassed about walking into. I do enough stuff that I’m embarrassed about after the fact!” Yeah, well, sorry, Weir.
AUDIO: “Weather Report Suite” [Acoustic Guitar and Vocal, Wake of the Flood] (3:40-4:06) - [dead.net]
JESSE: When transferring the tapes, Brian Kehew couldn’t help but notice the complexity of “Weather Report Suite” and how much tape they spent on it.
BRIAN KEHEW: Certainly, the “Weather Report Suite”—just because of the scale of it—is so much time spent, so much effort spent. But it’s hard to learn! It’s really a lot to digest. And yet, it does make sense when you hear the final thing. But you can imagine them at the beginning, this is like how Yes or ELP probably tried to learn their songs at the time. There was a lot to take in just to get through that “Weather Report Suite.” It’s a lot.
“I Am the Rain”
JESSE: The tapes for “Weather Report Suite” aren’t a mess, exactly, but they’re somewhat confusing because of the order in which it was recorded. And possibly a case where the sessions spilled over onto the ends of earlier tapes, making it somewhat hard to date when, exactly, each piece is from. Compounding the confusion is that all of the pieces had sometimes blurry working titles. The first part of the suite was generally known as “Bob’s Song,” and “Let It Grow” was then called “I Am the Rain.” I’m attempting a bit of reconstruction here, but I think the process began by the band attempting to play through the entire suite in one pass. Though the tape boxes for August 7th and 8th show it, I think those might be spillover sessions, with the main work beginning on August 11th. Whenever it was, it sounds like lyrics still weren’t done for the first part.
AUDIO: “Weather Report Suite” ((Take 8) - Slated) [Wake of the Flood: The Angel’s Share] (2:34-2:53) - [dead.net] [Spotify] [YouTube]
JESSE: Somewhere nearby, Eric Andersen doesn’t know he’s about to be drafted. On the early takes, Jerry Garcia plays electric guitar, almost as if he’s sketching out the pedal steel overdub to come. In the background, you can hear Keith Godchaux playing a monophonic synth of some sort.
AUDIO: “Weather Report Suite” ((Take 8) - Slated) [Wake of the Flood: The Angel’s Share] (1:30-2:00) - [dead.net] [Spotify] [YouTube]
JESSE: They make into “Let It Grow,” Keith Godchaux switches to piano. The lyrics for “Let It Grow” were in place, as we can hear by Weir’s scratch vocals, but he’s still singing the alternate lyrics in the first verse, apparently rewritten before overdubbing it in the week or so after this.
AUDIO: “Weather Report Suite” ((Take 8) - Slated) [Wake of the Flood: The Angel’s Share] (5:55-6:25) - [dead.net] [Spotify] [YouTube]
JESSE: Weir is calling out changes when they hit the jam.
AUDIO: “Weather Report Suite” (Take 7) [Wake of the Flood: The Angel’s Share] (10:00-10:23) - [dead.net]
JESSE: Ultimately, the band would jettison these takes of the “Prelude” and the first part, recording those by themselves on August 17th, then creating a single piece of music. On The Angel’s Share, there are only two versions like this, which seems to mean that the keeper take of “Let It Grow” was perhaps only the third time they’d played it through as a band. Certainly, Jerry Garcia sounds plenty comfortable playing through the changes already, and you can hear him play through the peak that would be given over to the horns on the final version.
AUDIO: “Weather Report Suite” ((Take 8) - Slated) [Wake of the Flood: The Angel’s Share] (10:44-11:04) - [dead.net] [Spotify] [YouTube]
JESSE: The working title for the “Let It Grow” portion of the suite, as labeled on the original track sheets, was “I Am the Rain” — and it is this elemental thought that comes at the center of the song. Like the rest of the piece, the music’s dynamics match the lyrics.
AUDIO: “Weather Report Suite” ((Take 8) - Slated) [Wake of the Flood: The Angel’s Share] (7:51-8:27) - [dead.net] [Spotify] [YouTube]
JESSE: Shaugn O’Donnell.
SHAUGN O’DONNELL: It might be their biggest level of bombast to that point. That sort of end of “Terrapin [Station]” hits a bigness later on, but it’s massive. There’s others too — “The Other One” is powerful and they can pummel it. But this is composed big like that.
JESSE: The jam in “Let It Grow” would evolve over the years, though its form was in place on the album version. We’re going to mute the horns, and as you’ll note, Jerry Garcia left space for them. We’ll let Scott Metzger annotate.
SCOTT METZGER: It is an enormous open section at the end of the verses, where there's a major jam that goes through a few different key centers. We're in D major, very triumphant feeling. When we play it, I always think it can almost get into kind of Phish-sounding territory, just because of the nature of the progression.
AUDIO: “Weather Report Suite” [Submix with No Horns or Harmonica, Wake of the Flood] (9:36-10:01) - [dead.net]
SCOTT METZGER: Then you drop down to an A minor bit. It's a bit more mysterious and dramatic.
AUDIO: “Weather Report Suite” [Submix with no Horns or Harmonica, Wake of the Flood] (10:01-10:23) - [dead.net]
SCOTT METZGER: And then you get to that big E minor where you’re like—[sings melody] —which you can hear on the record, but they don't really lay into it on the record.
JESSE: They certainly don’t, neither in the middle of the song nor the outro. Though implied by the song’s changes, the part Scott just sang wouldn’t emerge for another few years into the life of “Let It Grow,” long after the album’s release, which we’ll get to shortly.
AUDIO: “Weather Report Suite” [Submix with No Horns or Harmonica, Wake of the Flood] (10:30-11:02) - [dead.net]
JESSE: The master take for “I Am the Rain” seems to be from August 11th, with a few stars and exclamation points written on it and a note that says “wow.” We’re going to double back to the “Let It Grow” section momentarily, but first the band had to nail the “Prelude” and the first part, which they worked on August 17th, one of the final sessions for basic tracks. Though they’d played it live, there was still some arranging to do. They knew already that Garcia would overdub pedal steel, and he lays out of the “Prelude” but still plays some electric when they get to Part 1. Keith Godchaux is on Rhodes.
AUDIO: “Weather Report Suite” ((Take 16) - Not Slated) [Wake of the Flood: The Angel’s Share] (3:50-4:18) - [dead.net] [Spotify] [YouTube]
JESSE: And they iron out the drum entrance and dynamics.
AUDIO: “Weather Report Suite” ((Take 16) - Not Slated) [Wake of the Flood: The Angel’s Share] (0:50-1:19) - [dead.net] [Spotify] [YouTube]
BOB WEIR [8/16/73]: On the second one of these—[plays guitar line]—I want Billy to come in right… boom!
BILL KRUETZMANN [8/16/73]: Do it one more time, Bobby?
BOB WEIR [8/16/73]: One, two… this is the second one of these —
BILL KRUETZMANN [8/16/73]: Is that right?
BOB WEIR [8/16/73]: [plays guitar line] Boom.
JESSE: I’m not positive about the order of everything, but I’m pretty sure it’s after this that Weir switches over to acoustic and Garcia drops out of the basic tracks entirely.
AUDIO: “Weather Report Suite Prelude/Part 1” (Take 4) [Wake of the Flood: The Angel’s Share] (3:36-4:10) - [dead.net]
JESSE: The math is a bit furry on the tape boxes, but the tape box says they nailed the prelude and the first part on take 12. Let’s get into the multi-tracks, with Scott Metzger, who’s way into the album version.
SCOTT METZGER: That is an epic, epic couple of minutes of music. The arrangement is so good on all 12 minutes of that. You start out with the nylon string guitar thing.
AUDIO: “Weather Report Suite” [Acoustic Guitar, Wake of the Flood] (0:00-0:13) - [dead.net]
SCOTT METZGER: And the bass comes in —
AUDIO: “Weather Report Suite” [Bass, Wake of the Flood] (0:14-0:22) - [dead.net]
AUDIO: “Weather Report Suite” [Drums, Wake of the Flood] (0:23-0:50) - [dead.net]
AUDIO: “Weather Report Suite” [Rhodes, Wake of the Flood] (0:51-1:20) - [dead.net]
SCOTT METZGER: And the pedal steel, right?
AUDIO: “Weather Report Suite” [Pedal Steel, Wake of the Flood] (1:21-1:39) - [dead.net]
AUDIO: “Weather Report Suite” [Lead Vocal, Wake of the Flood] (1:35-1:54) - [dead.net]
JESSE: On the basic live track for the first part of “Weather Report Suite,” Keith Godchaux is playing Rhodes. But he also overdubbed a layer of organ.
AUDIO: “Weather Report Suite” [Organ, Wake of the Flood] (1:55-2:25) - [dead.net]
JESSE: Here’s a sub-mix of the two keyboards and pedal steel combined into one lovely texture.
AUDIO: “Weather Report Suite” [Submix with Rhodes, Organ and Pedal Steel, Wake of the Flood] (2:25-2:59) - [dead.net]
JESSE: For the transition into “Let It Grow,” they add what sounds like a Leslie rotating cabinet to the pedal steel.
AUDIO: “Weather Report Suite” [Pedal Steel, Wake of the Flood] (5:13-5:35) - [dead.net]
SCOTT METZGER: And then you get to the whole vocal thing.
AUDIO: “Weather Report Suite” [Background Vocals, Wake of the Flood] (2:35-2:58) - [dead.net]
JESSE: There are some lush vocal overdubs that start in here, too. In the vocal blend is a second female voice — Sarah Fulcher. She’d released her solo debut the year before, titled Sarah, and credited to Sarah and Friends. She’d been singing with Garcia’s club band that year, and introduced favorite “Like A Road” into the Garcia repertoire. Here she is freestyling a verse and a chorus on “I Second That Emotion” from GarciaLive, Volume 12, recorded January 23rd, 1973.
AUDIO: “I Second That Emotion” [Jerry Garcia & Merl Saunders feat. Sarah Fulcher, GarciaLive 12, 1/23/73] (5:20-6:00) - [Spotify]
SCOTT METZGER: Then you get eventually to “Let It Grow,” where a whole horn section comes in.
AUDIO: “Weather Report Suite” [Horns, Wake of the Flood] (5:57-6:24) - [dead.net]
SCOTT METZGER: And you're so far from where you started with the nylon string bit, but you're still in the same… somehow it all kind of makes sense. You don't really notice how far you've gone. That's production, man. That's great production.
JESSE: It was part of the expanding vision of Bob Weir. From The Golden Road, Shakedown Stream, and a jazz gig near you, Gary Lambert.
GARY LAMBERT: I first interviewed Bobby very shortly after Wake of the Flood came out. We specifically got to the area of “Weather Report Suite,” and he talked about that being sort of the tentative beginnings of an ambition he'd had for a long time, which was to introduce extended ensembles into the music. And of course, on Ace, there had been some strings and some horns, but that was arranged by someone else.
AUDIO: “Looks Like Rain” [Ace] (5:20-5:50) - [dead.net] [Spotify] [YouTube]
GARY LAMBERT: But this was really Bobby's baby, and he had this conception in his head. And of course, if you've heard his solo acoustic demo of “Weather Report Suite,” all the music is in there, in his hands.
AUDIO: “Weather Report Suite” (Demo) [Wake of the Flood 2004 expanded edition, 8/4/73] (9:20-9:36) - [Spotify] [YouTube]
GARY LAMBERT: His challenge in making the record was to have a larger section realize what was in his head that he couldn't get to with his hands. And he told me—being not literate as far as musical notation was concerned—he just sang parts to the players. I thought it came out remarkably well for a first effort in arranging. And Bobby has told me at that period he was inspired by things like Gil Evans’ arrangements for Miles Davis’ Sketches of Spain.
AUDIO: “Solea” [Miles Davis, Sketches of Spain] (8:18-8:48) - [Spotify]
GARY LAMBERT: And another favorite of his in the larger ensemble arrangement field was the charts that Eric Dolphy and McCoy Tyner fashioned for John Coltrane’s Africa/Brass.
AUDIO: “Blues Minor” [John Coltrane Quartet, Africa/Brass] (2:15-2:34) - [Spotify]
AUDIO: “Weather Report Suite” [Wake of the Flood] (9:38-10:01) - [dead.net] [Spotify] [YouTube]
GARY LAMBERT: So Bobby was listening to all that stuff and absorbing it, and not having the full musical vocabulary to put it down on paper. But he had an intuitive way of communicating it to people. It's extraordinary. And this was a guy who is, what, 23 or something like that? 24?
JESSE: The scope of the song comes into fuller view with its big scene change. Let’s hear a stripped down version of it first.
AUDIO: “Weather Report Suite” [Acoustic Guitar and Vocal, Wake of the Flood] (6:10-6:42) - [dead.net]
JESSE: Scott Metzger.
SCOTT METZGER: Then you get this really cool Tex-Mex [feel]… I love that. I love that halftime feel section where it goes between D and A chords.
JESSE: Shaugn O’Donnell.
SHAUGN O’DONNELL: I think the change in feels make a big difference, too. You start with that epic progression, and then suddenly you're somewhere that lives closer to “Mexicali [Blues]” and “El Paso” when it switches to the D major stuff. So you're moving through a lot of landscapes, quick.
JESSE: With the full complement of overdubs, “Let It Grow” shifts into a moment that suddenly sounds like they could be in a Marty Robbins song or on a big soundstage Western.
AUDIO: “Weather Report Suite” [Wake of the Flood] (6:10-6:42) - [dead.net] [Spotify] [YouTube]
JESSE: From a madrigal to a singer-songwriter tune with pedal steel, through some proto-prog moves, into cinematic C&W, and towards Gil Evans-influenced horn arrangements, “Let It Grow” had some sweep. By my count, there are eight musicians on “Let It Grow” besides the core sextet of the 1973 Grateful Dead. We’ve heard from vocalist Sarah Fulcher and we spoke about saxophonist Martin Fierro during our “Let Me Sing Your Blues Away” episode. The other horns included Bill Atwood on trumpet, Frank Morin on tenor sax, Pat O’Hara, and Joe Ellis on trumpet. Lately, Ellis and Fierro had been making names for themselves on the local salsa scene, playing with bandleader Benny Velarde, who contributed timbales to “Eyes of the World.”
AUDIO: “Eyes of the World” [Percussion, Wake of the Flood] (0:22-0:32) - [dead.net]
JESSE: But the real connecting glue was a musician who can only be heard for a little over a minute of “Let It Grow” and only then pretty far in the background.
AUDIO: “Weather Report Suite” [Wake of the Flood] (6:11-6:24) - [dead.net] [Spotify] [YouTube]
JESSE: Do you hear the Bajo sexto part in there?
AUDIO: “Weather Report Suite” [Bajo sexto, Wake of the Flood] (6:08-6:30) - [dead.net]
JESSE: It’s played by the legendary Texas musician Sir Douglas Sahm. Gary Lambert.
GARY LAMBERT: It was wonderful to me to see those credits on Wake of the Flood when they came out and, there in the fine print, is: Doug Sahm – Bajo sexto. How cool is that? I sort of wondered at the time how that came about.
JESSE: Like virtually all of the guest musicians on Wake of the Flood, Sahm was a fixture of the Bay Area music scene, even if he wasn’t always a resident. Gary Lambert would connect with Sahm later down the line.
GARY LAMBERT: He was an absolute baseball addict. He would plan his drives from San Antonio to the Bay Area by the schedules of Minor League baseball teams. So he’d come by way of Visalia and Fresno, maybe drive up and see the Sonoma Crushers play. He also told me if he was driving down the road and he saw a pickup sandlot game going on, he’d probably park the car and watch three or four innings.
JESSE: But let’s back up slightly.
GARY LAMBERT: It was a real privilege to know him. He was such a unique character in that he covered so much musical ground. He was a child prodigy steel guitar player in his preteens. There's an apocryphal story that he was onstage with Hank Williams at Hank’s last show, and he put out records—I think at 11 or 12 years old—as Little Doug on the steel guitar. And then he got a little weirder as he got a little older and formed the group that turned out to be the Sir Douglas Quintet.
AUDIO: “She’s About a Mover” [Sir Douglas Quintet, The Best of the Sir Douglas Quintet] (0:53-1:25) - [Spotify]
GARY LAMBERT: After they moved to the Bay Area, they just became hippier and hippier, and the records got a little weirder. They had horns on them, including Martin Fierro.
AUDIO: “And It Didn’t Even Bring Me Down” [Sir Douglas Quintet, The Complete Mercury Masters] (0:00-0:16) - [Spotify]
GARY LAMBERT: And Doug always had a great affinity and love for the Grateful Dead. Of course, there was that famous jam at Armadillo World Headquarters in Austin in 1972, with Jerry, Phil, Leon Russell, among others, and Doug, which is a coveted tape.
AUDIO: “San Antone” [11/23/72] (0:40-0:54)
GARY LAMBERT: There was always an interesting Texas-to-Bay Area connection. So many people essential to the scene: Boz Scaggs; Janis, of course; some of the members of Mother Earth; and Chet Helms. So, it’s an interesting little sub-history.
JESSE: It’s a sub-history that plays out across “Let It Grow,” also featuring another pair of Texas-to-California musicians in Martin Fierro and Sarah Fulcher. When the band needed a horn section for “Let It Grow,” they borrowed Doug Sahm’s. They happened to be genuine Texans, but they also happened to be convenient for a number of other reasons. Only a few weeks after the Thanksgiving Jam in Texas, sometime in December 1972, Jerry Garcia and David Grisman appeared on a studio session for Sahm, not released for some years, on the Genuine Texas Groover collection from Rhino Handmade.
AUDIO: “From A Jack To A King” [Doug Sahm, Genuine Texas Groover] (0:00-0:18) - [Spotify]
JESSE: There are rumors that Jerry Garcia plays uncredited pedal steel on Sahm’s classic 1973 album, Doug Sahm and Friends, but I’m not sure I hear it. Anyone? Either way, by the spring of 1973, Doug Sahm was stable-mates with the Dead on the Out Of Town Tours roster. Sir Doug opened for the Dead in June at RFK Stadium, which we covered last season, and then again for a week of shows after the album came out, where Martin Fierro and Joe Ellis joined the band onstage most nights, which we’ll get to shortly. But in the summer of 1973, when the Dead needed horns, they got ‘em. And they got Sahm, too, playing Bajo sexto — a 12-nylon-string acoustic guitar, perhaps as a union-rate “thank you” for borrowing his horns.
AUDIO: “Weather Report Suite” [Bajo sexto, Wake of the Flood] (8:33-8:57) - [dead.net]
JESSE: That’s seven musicians. The eighth is so ambient I wouldn’t’ve been able to pick it out without the multi-tracks.
AUDIO: “Weather Report Suite” [Harmonica, Wake of the Flood] (9:33-10:03) - [dead.net]
JESSE: That’s the isolated harmonica of Matt Kelly, from the big explosion in “Let It Grow.” Here it is in context.
AUDIO: “Weather Report Suite” [Wake of the Flood] (9:35-10:01) - [dead.net] [Spotify] [YouTube]
JESSE: Matt Kelly and Bob Weir went to junior high school together in Atherton, but as Dead scholar Corry Arnold has highlighted, Matt Kelly’s adjacencies to the Dead scene ran deep, jamming partners with the future members of the New Riders of the Purple Sage. In 1974, he would become a co-founding member of Kingfish, Bob Weir’s side trip for the next few years. He and Weir went back a ways, but he appeared on David Rea’s Slewfoot in 1972, Weir’s debut as a producer, and it seems like they reconnected then. It seems like he actually made music on stage with Jerry Garcia first, sitting in with Garcia and Saunders at the Great American Music Hall a few weeks before the Wake of the Flood sessions. I like what his harmonica brings to Wake of the Flood. In isolation, it sounds like the now somewhat-forgotten western part of what the “country & western” equation originally meant. Like, say, the Bing Crosby version of “Streets of Laredo.”
AUDIO: “Streets of Laredo” [Bing Crosby, How the West Was Won] (0:00-0:20) - [Spotify]
JESSE: And Matt Kelly on Wake of the Flood.
AUDIO: “Weather Report Suite” [Harmonica, Wake of the Flood] (9:33-9:44) - [dead.net]
JESSE: It was a whole pile of musicians on both “Let It Grow” and the album as a whole, the most ambitious studio production since the widescreen excesses of Aoxomoxoa. With the Dead producing themselves, they were mixing themselves, too. Sessions at the Record Plant lasted through the end of the month. The basic tracks were done by August 17th, before they shifted into overdubbing and mixing. Here’s how Bob Weir described the process to interviewers from WAER a few weeks later.
BOB WEIR [9/17/73]: One of those animals that was created by a committee. [All laugh]
RADIO HOST [9/17/73]: But after this many years, I guess everybody pretty much knows what's gonna fit and what isn’t?
BOB WEIR [9/17/73]: You come up with a better and better camel.
JESSE: The master tape seems to feature the album’s first draft track order — “Here Comes Sunshine,” “Mississippi Half-Step,” “Stella Blue,” and “Row Jimmy” on side 1; “Eyes of the World,” “Let Me Sing Your Blues Away,” and “Weather Report Suite” on side 2. Apparently, the order wasn’t finalized until mastering. It seems like they moved into Studio B at the Record Plant to track more takes of “Row Jimmy” and “Eyes of the World” on August 28th and 30th, respectively, which would’ve been after everything else had already been overdubbed and mixed, but they stuck with the takes they’d already caught. It’s possible, too, that Jerry Garcia was doing double mixing duty during late August 1973. According to paperwork turned up by Joe Jupille, from August 26th through September 3rd, the Jerry Garcia/Merl Saunders Live at Keystone album—recorded earlier that summer—was being mixed at Fantasy Records in Berkeley.
AUDIO: “The Harder They Come” [Jerry Garcia & Merl Saunders, Live at Keystone] (0:42-0:59) - [Spotify]
JESSE: It’s unclear if Garcia was there for the mixing. But he certainly was when Garcia/Saunders played Labor Day weekend at Keystone Berkeley, probably the live debut of his new Wolf guitar, which we tackled about on our “Here Comes Sunshine” episode, just before they departed for their East Coast debut, including a Hells Angels party on a boat and a gig in Passaic, before the Dead opened their own East Coast tour. As the gears of their new record company fired up, the Dead played a few weeks of shows. During our “Stella Blue” episode, we heard about Bruce Hornsby’s revelatory experience seeing the Dead in Virginia during that tour. They’d open the run with two shows at Nassau Coliseum on Long Island, September 7th and 8th, 1973, where “Let It Grow” got its live debut on the first night, separate from the rest of the “Weather Report Suite.” And, on the second night, the band debuted the full shebang, now on Dave’s Picks 38. I love how it sounds with Garcia and Donna Jean singing the answer vocals on the first part.
On the Road
AUDIO: “Weather Report Suite” [Dave’s Picks 38, 9/8/73] (5:23-6:03)
JESSE: The Grateful Dead were one of the biggest bands in the United States in September 1973 with a fanbase that was still expanding. The Dead would have an influence in all kinds of ways that might not be obvious at first glance. One new fan in the crowd was a 16-year-old who’d trekked down from a few hours to the north. Please welcome, from one of my all-time favorite bands, Ira Kaplan of Yo La Tengo.
IRA KAPLAN: I'm guessing the first one I got when it came out was Europe ‘72, and everything else was like catch-up. The first time I saw them was at the Nassau Coliseum, and they did “Weather Report Suite,” or maybe just “Let It Grow,” before it came out.
JESSE: At 16, Ira was already a veteran showgoer, having convinced his parents to take him to see Country Joe and the Fish with the Peter Green-era Fleetwood Mac at the Fillmore East in December 1968, just before his 12th birthday.
IRA KAPLAN: I got to go to the last weekend of the Fillmore [in June 1971], I think because it was closing — I don't think that would have been, like, normal permission. And then I went to lots of shows at Wollman Rink [in Central Park] because that was just so suburban-friendly. They were over before it was dark, and then I’d just get on the train.
JESSE: Nassau Coliseum was, and is, a little less friendly by public transportation, an hour trek down from Ira’s hometown of Croton.
IRA KAPLAN: That must be something of an aberration, but I guess there's probably something to turning 16 and friends having cars. It was definitely a car full of people driving out to Long Island. I only saw them maybe four times or so and, oddly, that’s the least vivid of them. I certainly remember “Let It Grow” — that really stuck out.
AUDIO: “Weather Report Suite” [Dave’s Picks 38, 9/8/73] (12:20-13:00)
JESSE: A rare jam where Keith Godchaux moves from piano to organ, which he had with him for the first legs of the fall ‘73 tour, though rarely played it. It was only about a month later that the album hit the streets.
IRA KAPLAN: I remember being kind of befuddled by it — all the slow songs, and even “Weather Report Suite.” I could recall, ‘This is so exciting live, and now it’s… different! What’s with this different stuff?’
AUDIO: “Weather Report Suite” [Wake of the Flood] (10:02-10:31) - [dead.net] [Spotify] [YouTube]
IRA KAPLAN: Especially because they hadn’t made a record like that, maybe ever— and if they had, not since before Live/Dead—like a real studio record, to the extent that [was] like Aoxomoxoa. As a 16-year old, I was confused.
AUDIO: “Mississippi Half-Step” [Wake of the Flood] (4:30-5:00) - [dead.net] [Spotify] [YouTube]
IRA KAPLAN: It's an ambitious record, which is pretty exciting — especially now, looking back, this notoriously studio-averse band really dove in and went to work on it, instead of putting out “Me and Bobby McGee.” Especially now, I can enjoy it and really respect it. At the time, it definitely wasn’t… “Half-Step Toodeloo” didn’t exactly burst out of the speakers. [chuckles] It was no “Bertha.”
AUDIO: “Bertha” [Yo La Tengo, Murder in the Second Degree] (1:01-1:21)
JESSE: That was Yo La Tengo covering “Bertha,” featured on Murder in the Second Degree, a compilation drawn from their appearances during the annual fundraising marathon for the noncommercial radio station WFMU, where for a pledge, they’ll perform by any song by anybody — without looking it up or really practicing it. Sure, your local Dead cover band can probably play “Bertha” better than that without practice, but what about “Hey Ya!,” “Slurf Song,” “Pay To Cum,” or “Some Velvet Morning”? I wouldn’t request “Weather Report Suite,” but Ira did about as well as Weir sometimes does when tested with “Truckin’.”
AUDIO: “Truckin’” [Yo La Tengo, WFMU 2003] (0:30-0:43)
JESSE: Talk about an intersection of my interests. I should mention here that, besides being a DJ on WFMU, I also wrote a book about Yo La Tengo, called Big Day Coming: Yo La Tengo and the Rise of Indie Rock. We talked in more depth about the Dead’s influence on Ira’s high school band during our “Playing Dead” episodes a few seasons back.
IRA KAPLAN: The group I was in in high school, one of our centerpieces was a much-too-long version of “Dancing in the Street.” I cannot recall if Vintage Dead had anything to do with that — we must have known it. That included some ridiculous piano-playing excursion into something…
JESSE: Despite the surprise, Ira stayed a fan.
IRA KAPLAN: I have a couple of bootleg albums. I had a friend, a good friend who had a reel-to-reel player, and he had some recordings. I remember I used to drive him nuts because I always wanted to hear “Ain’t It Crazy,” and he grew very tired of finding it on the tape for me.
AUDIO: “Ain’t It Crazy (The Rub)” [Ladies and Gentlemen… The Grateful Dead, 4/28/71] (0:22-0:38) - [Spotify] [YouTube]
JESSE: That’s now on the Ladies and Gentlemen… The Grateful Dead, recorded in New York in April 1971.
IRA KAPLAN: I had definitely filled out the Dead Heads thing, and I have the 7-inch samplers that got mailed to me.
JESSE: He caught a few more shows and even taped the band at Roosevelt Stadium in the summer of 1974, which we talked about a little more on the “Playing Dead” episode.
IRA KAPLAN: It wasn't that long a period when I was going to shows and listening to them. Punk rock kind of knocked them off the stereo. I guess I just didn’t have that much of a community of listeners to swap tapes with — you know, friends. So I’m not sure why I never did get more involved in it.
JESSE: In later years, as Yo La Tengo found their own voice and grew into one of the most beloved bands of the American underground, one flag to Dead freaks in the audience might be this verse of their 1989 song “Drug Test,” from President Yo La Tengo.
AUDIO: “Drug Test” [Yo La Tengo, President Yo La Tengo] (2:41-3:14) - [Spotify]
JESSE: It’s a Dead reference, but not exactly a Dead Head reference. To me, it conjures the feeling of listening to the Grateful Dead as a teenager from a faraway perspective.
IRA KAPLAN: I was certainly happy to out myself as a Grateful Dead listener. That wasn't accidental.
JESSE: It certainly gets a cheer at almost any Yo La Tengo show, and not just because it’s a drug reference. But the bigger influence of the Dead on Yo La Tengo, and one of the reasons I will be going to see Yo La Tengo for eight consecutive nights this December during their annual Hanukkah shows, is because of their incredibly varied setlists.
IRA KAPLAN: I'm sure they're a direct influence to that. I mean, NRBQ also. But I always, from a young age, responded to [bands that changed their setlists], and negatively responded to the bands that didn’t. I would go to multiple Kinks shows in a week and try to pay attention to the minute differences. Like: oh, look, he did a second verse of “Sunny Afternoon” at this show! But, wondering why a band with a repertoire that deep was just doing the same songs every night. It never made sense to me.
JESSE: In more recent years, Ira’s gotten a little more in touch with Dead music, playing an occasional Dead tune or adjacent cover with Yo La Tengo, and appearing a few times with High Time, a way-fun New York Dead band who focus on the band’s early years. If you listen closely to Yo La Tengo’s latest excellent record, This Stupid World, you’ll even catch a Dead easter egg in the song “Tonight’s Episode,” though it’s sung by James McNew, the band’s other Dead freak.
AUDIO: “Tonight’s Episode” [Yo La Tengo, This Stupid World] (3:28-3:43) - [Bandcamp]
JESSE: Dead-curious fans like Ira would have lots of chances to see the Grateful Dead in the fall of 1973. Here’s manager Jon McIntire on WAER in mid-September, just after the show Ira saw.
JON MCINTIRE [9/17/73]: The whole country will be covered, starting the 15th of October and going through the middle of December.
JESSE: The previous fall, they’d been playing multiple nights at a few bigger theaters. By 1973 though, the Dead had moved almost entirely into coliseums, civic arenas, and the occasional stadium.
JON MCINTIRE [9/17/73]: There'll be two tours. The first one will be mostly Midwest and Southwest, and West Coast. And then, later on, we’ll be back east more, in the latter part of November. We want to give it a little rest — we’ve been here for a while now. We’ll stay away for a couple months and then come back here.
“Let It Grow”
JESSE: There’s plenty more to discuss about Wake of the Flood, but let’s follow the path of “Let It Grow” first. After the shows at Nassau Coliseum, the Suite was pretty much sewn into place. For a run of shows in late September, they were joined by opening act Doug Sahm, who had saxophonist Martin Fierro and trumpet player Joe Ellis in his touring band. Over the course of the shows, they evolved a mini set with the horns, almost always centered around “Weather Report Suite.” The horns shows get mixed reviews from tape collectors, but to my ears they drive the band—and “Let It Grow” especially—to some pretty wild heights. This is from September 21st, 1973 at the Spectrum in Philadelphia. You know, ask a taper.
AUDIO: “Let It Grow” [9/21/73] (9:55-10:25)
JESSE: But the horns were a briefly lived experiment in the live setting. Grateful Dead archivist David Lemieux.
DAVID LEMIEUX: When they started playing it a month after recording it, it was pretty true to form, as it would be through 1974. And unfortunately, they dropped the first two parts.
JESSE: As Weir later said, he didn’t really like the lyrics to the first part. So it goes. There are lots of great versions from 1973 and 1974. To me, and I know at least a few other heads, “Weather Report Suite” is unquestionably an autumn song — especially the first parts. The versions from fall 1973 in particular capture this. Before I even got Wake of the Flood, my first exposure to the full suite was Dick’s Picks 1, recorded at the very end of 1973. Hearing Garcia emulate the pedal steel with a regular slide guitar is a beautiful part of the live versions.
AUDIO: “Weather Report Suite” [Dick’s Picks 1, 12/19/73] (2:06-2:39) - [Spotify] [YouTube]
JESSE: After the band’s touring hiatus in 1975, the first two parts of the “Suite” fell away, but—with second drummer Mickey Hart back in the fold—they found a new power in ”Let It Grow.”
DAVID LEMIEUX: There's the version from Providence, 5/14/78 — that show is on the 30 Trips box set. At the time, I think most “Let It Grow”s came in around 12 minutes or so, and this one is 17.
AUDIO: “Let It Grow” [30 Trips Around the Sun, 5/14/78] (11:26-11:56)
DAVID LEMIEUX: And I've listened to that version a hundred times… they don’t do one specific thing to stretch it from the classic 12-13 to 17. They just keep it going, keep the jams going, because that’s what they were feeling. I don’t think they put a lot of effort into, ‘Let’s do a 17-minute version right now.’ It’s just the music played the band.
AUDIO: “Let It Grow” [30 Trips Around the Sun, 5/14/78] (15:20-15:45)
JESSE: It was actually immediately following this version that the song underwent its most major change besides dropping the first parts, which—in true Grateful Dead fashion—was actually pretty subtle at first. Following the Providence ‘78 version, the song disappeared from Dead setlists for over a year, returning in September ‘79. Listen closely to what Bob Weir is playing as Jerry Garcia takes off on a jam that will eventually bring the song over the 20-minute mark.
AUDIO: “Let It Grow” [9/2/79] (7:46-8:09)
JESSE: It’s that part that Scott Metzger sang for us earlier. This little guitar figure would become more prominent and reshape the song’s dynamics. Here’s a version from almost exactly a year later in Springfield, Massachusetts, now the Download Series, Vol. 7. By now the rest of the band has picked up on the riff and turned it into a powerful new part of the jam, almost like something written in the era when “Let It Grow” was first conceived.
AUDIO: “Let It Grow” [Download Series 7, 9/3/80] (6:20-6:52) - [Spotify] [YouTube]
JESSE: Occasionally the song got played in the second set, but usually it was played near the end of the first, and it was one of the most reliable rippers in the band’s songbook. Though they didn’t play it again with horns, they could certainly surf the dynamics. I love the version from Alpine Valley ‘82, now on Dick’s Picks 32, especially the detailing in the half-time section when they take it at a faster tempo.
AUDIO: “Let It Grow” [Dick’s Picks 32, 8/7/82] (0:42-1:08) - [Spotify] [YouTube]
JESSE: Followed by a soaring multi-flare jam.
AUDIO: “Let It Grow” [Dick’s Picks 32, 8/7/82] (9:43-10:13) - [Spotify] [YouTube]
JESSE: In the mid-1980s especially, I hear “Let It Grow” as pretty much the platform for power Dead. I adore the version from June 24, 1985 in Cincinnati, now on the 30 Trips Around the Sun box set, where the band seems to be flying free of gravity.
AUDIO: “Let It Grow” [30 Trips Around the Sun, 6/24/85] (7:05-7:30) - [Spotify] [YouTube]
JESSE: Like the shifting chords of the 1973-1974 “Eyes of the World” jams, the new pattern drove “Let It Grow” to new heights.
AUDIO: “Let It Grow” [30 Trips Around the Sun, 6/24/85] (8:31-9:05) - [Spotify] [YouTube]
DAVID LEMIEUX: I saw Bob with Wolf Bros three months ago in October with the horns, and the “Prelude” and “Part 1,” it was so beautiful. And it was interesting, because the part after “Prelude” as they go into “1”—where Jerry comes in with the big huge slide note—the way they did it with Wolf Bros was they came in with the horn section, the Wolfpack. The horns came in on that and it was just spectacular.
AUDIO: “Weather Report Suite” [Bobby Weir & Wolf Bros, 3/17/21] (1:34-2:04)
JESSE: Gary Lambert.
GARY LAMBERT: And of course now, so gloriously, he's doing that kind of stuff with Wolf Bros and the Wolfpack, and realizing this music he’s had for such a long time in his head… I think it's wonderful that, for example, when the Wolfpack does “Weather Report Suite,” the woodwinds and the strings play Bobby's little guitar etude — transcribed for their instruments, and it sounds so beautiful.
JESSE: This version is from the band’s March 17th, 2021 webcast from TRI. With Barry Sless’s pedal steel, Jeff Chimenti’s piano, and the full horn section, both channeling the album, plus another half-century of wisdom in Weir’s playing, it’s one of my favorite things I’ve heard the Wolf Bros do. And beyond the Wolf Bros, it’s a piece that Weir is now doing with his ongoing symphonic project with Giancarlo Aquilanti, which is to say, “Weather Report Suite” remains an open question.
AUDIO: “Weather Report Suite” [Bobby Weir & Wolf Bros, 3/17/21] (15:34-16:00)
Fear the Reaper? Y/N
JESSE: Back in 1973 though, there were some final pieces that the new record company had to get together to get the record out into the world. From Grateful Dead Records, please welcome back Steve Brown.
STEVE BROWN: We had this quality thing that Rakow kept pushing on: ‘We want high-quality stuff, so that people will have a really good sense of what the Grateful Dead have done.’ Yeah, great. The most I could get on that was getting Rick Griffin to do the cover — which was nice.
JESSE: Rick Griffin was one of the so-called Big Five San Francisco poster artists. He designed the front cover of Aoxomoxoa in 1969, originally a poster for the band’s January 1969 shows at San Francisco’s Avalon Ballroom.
STEVE BROWN: I was a fan of his all of my life. I was a surfer, and he did all the Surfing Magazine stuff, so it was a person that I really, really admired. It was like [pep talking him into] making him feel that they needed this as their first album to really get people to be interested in seeing this Grateful Dead new album come out.
JESSE: The Dead didn’t have a concept for the cover, just the title, courtesy of Robert Hunter.
STEVE BROWN: Title and theme of the different songs that were in it, and he went right to it. It seemed to impress everybody that I showed it to, when he came up with the test one.
JESSE: In the early 1970s, between designing Aoxomoxoa and the Dead asking for his art for Wake of the Flood, Rick Griffin had become a Christian. An album called Wake of the Flood filled was a fantastic assignment that he definitely understood, coming back with a wheat-carrying reaper in front of a receding ocean. Or perhaps it’s the receding waters of a massive flood. Please welcome back the fantastic Erik Davis, author of the very heady newsletter the Burning Shore, and the author of several righteous books, the most relevant today being High Weirdness: Drugs, Esoterica, and Visionary Experience in the Seventies.
ERIK DAVIS: He's a Christian by this point. It's always a fascinating thing just to imagine how did the Christian Rick Griffin continue to interact with the Dead — which was not just like a commercial entity that he occasionally produced art for, but his friends. It's a very interesting thing in his own kind of career. But one way of thinking about it is: if you go back to his cover of Aoxomoxoa — what is this, what’s going on here? It’s kind of a mandala of natural cyclicity, where birth and sex and death are just constantly churning through each other. Life is this sort of wheel of birth and sex and decay and death — over and over, overlapping, interacting, consuming itself, feeding on itself. It’s a glorious vision, but from certain angles, it’s also kind of terrifying. It’s the wheel you can’t get off of. Part of the spiritual quest for some people—for some people, not everybody—is: is there a way out? Or is there another element that I’m missing here?
JESSE: The back cover of the album features a crow with its beak open amid a bushel of wheat and a sky that’s mostly wide open, except for one certain cloud hanging there.
ERIK DAVIS: The elongated skull-cloud is hidden in that image. It's an early kind of Renaissance gesture, when you have a stretched-out image that comes together when you look at it from an angle. Is called anamorphosis. It starts in the 16th century, and it's often a skull.
JESSE: Go on, get out your copy of Wake of the Flood and tilt it just slightly, you’ll see.
ERIK DAVIS: You look at a picture of some captain of the world and all their goods and their amazing furniture and beautiful clothes and hot wife, and then you look at it and it’s like: oh, there’s this skull across the whole thing! It’s a reminder that, yeah, this too shall pass. All the kings and pawns go back into the same box at the end.
JESSE: Well that fits right in.
ERIK DAVIS: It's something about the recognition of death, or that death is always in the picture, I think is kind of the idea. It's one of those great sort of elements of the Grateful Dead — their name, so much of their material. So much of it is tragic, or has to do with death or mortality. The fact that becomes an enlivening thing — it’s not a bummer, it’s not a heavy metal doom move. It’s a way of actually waking up to the situation, and enjoying what’s here even more, loving what’s here even more. I feel like that’s also kind of captured in the cover art.
JESSE: At least on the original LP, there was no text on the back cover besides the small copyright notice at the bottom.
ERIK DAVIS: There was originally a Biblical quote that was supposed to be part of the album cover, from Revelation: “And the sea gave up the dead that were in it, and death and hell gave up the dead that were in them; and they were judged, every man, according to their works.”
JESSE: But it wasn’t to be.
ERIK DAVIS: They removed it. But it was part of his original plan — he wanted to put it in, and they were like, “Sorry, man, you can't do it. That’s a step too far, Rick, sorry.” So what you’re left with, then, is this kind of enigmatic image. Is the reaper a horror to avoid? Or is the Reaper a beautiful part of the loop? You know: don't fear the reaper, right? That's the kind of conundrum. I think, in general, psychedelic mysticism says, Don't fear the reaper — we’re just part of the loop. But there's this weird tension there.
JESSE: In 1973, Rick Griffin told the British magazine ZigZag, “the image was designed to show an alternative to that. I wanted to juxtapose that scripture with a loving image, an image of loving harvest.” Maybe because it was slightly too on the nose, the reaper never really became part of the Grateful Dead iconography alongside the skull and roses and dancing bears. The crow on the back cover, though, did enter the mythos somewhat. Steve Brown.
STEVE BROWN: The crow has its place. It's in there with everything that was on that album I think. There was something that he had to find, something that would be out near an ocean somewhere… and there's crows out by the ocean. And it fits perfectly for the Grateful Dead. Is it a good thing? A bad thing? Something in between?
JESSE: A professor of art history named Kenneth Hartvigsen is working on a project about Grateful Dead iconography. We’ve posted a link to a survey about Grateful Dead-related art. One of my favorite uses of the crow is in the literal center of LPs and 7-inches produced by Grateful Dead Records, where the crow is seen to be literally grasping the spindle of the turntable.
STEVE BROWN: It was an open fill-in kind of a situation. We could put stuff into it, too, also when we put it out.
JESSE: Working together on Wake of the Flood, Steve became friends with Rick Griffin.
STEVE BROWN: After I got to know him when I was doing this, we would stop at my place and go out surfing. I've got a big decoration in my hall here of Rick Griffin and his whole life. I took it up to Burning Man with me, and when they built this beautiful big castle there, you put in things of people that have passed away and that you want to honor.
AUDIO: [Crow caws]
The Crow Knows
JESSE: The crow is going to continue to circle us for a while.
AUDIO: [Crow caws]
JESSE: In the fall of 1973, the Grateful Dead were not only launching their first studio album in three years, but their very own record company. As we’ve discussed throughout this year, their label—Grateful Dead Records—wasn’t like other artist-owned record labels. It was designed to be genuinely independent, not just a subsidiary of a bigger label. What’s more, it was a Grateful Dead record company done the Grateful Dead way. In charge was Ron Rakow, who was definitely unlike any other label boss in the business. For starters, he takes credit for the crow.
RON RAKOW: What happened with the crow was really simple. That was in response to an interview between Joe Smith and Mo Ostin in an industry trade paper. Record World, I think it was. And they said, “Yeah, we lost the Grateful Dead, and they think they're going to be able to duplicate us on their own, and they are going to fail so miserably when they can't get paid for their records. You won't believe it.” Of course, I'm not an imbecile — that's the first thing I thought of, is how to get paid for the records. But I was able to then send out postcards with the crow. So I just said in our mail-out to the fans: the record industry is predicting our failure. So in order to make them happy, should we fail, I put a crow on the cover because if I have to eat crow, I want one convenient.
JESSE: It was a challenge, but a worthwhile one.
RON RAKOW: Our starting the record company turned out to be a way bigger deal than I thought. I didn't know that it had never been done before — I thought for sure [it had]. It had never been done before. A lot of bands had label deals and had separate labels, but they were all distributed by the majors. There was nobody that took on distribution by themselves. That had never happened.
JESSE: There were many and deep reasons for the Grateful Dead to start their own label.
RON RAKOW: There was another thing that was going on, which was — we had the right to audit Warner Bros. twice a year to see if we were getting paid for it. And we did it. We did it twice a year, and we never didn't come up with money. I don't know what other artists do, but it just seems to me that it keeps everybody honest. But you could never scare those guys into being honest. They just paid.
JESSE: So when the Dead put crows on their record and razzed the Joe Smiths of the world in myriad ways over the next few years, it was a deep wink.
RON RAKOW: I was always having fun with those guys. I mean, those guys didn't buy records — they sold records, so they couldn't affect our market no matter what they said. And they tried everything. They didn't know how to sell Grateful Dead records, and I didn't either. Nobody did.
JESSE: Rakow had his own solution to the challenge, but it was only one of the issues the new record company was meant to tackle. Another problem they tried to solve was pressing their records on what they deemed to be high-quality vinyl, a problem perhaps exacerbated by who they chose to come up with a definition of high-quality vinyl.
RON RAKOW: It wasn't difficult — it was impossible. I don't know what you would do; I'll tell you what I did. First, I went to the smartest guy I knew in this area, his name was Augustus Owsley Stanley III. I said, “I want to have records that play well.” He said, “So do I.” I said, “Okay: here is every vinyl that they use in records.” I bought a little bit from 25 different vendors. “Do whatever you want to do to them. Tell me which I should specify as the only vinyl acceptable to us.” So he comes back in a week and said, “This vinyl is the best for storing musical information.” And he gave me a bottle that I had given him, and it had a number on it. So I wrote that into our contracts with every pressing plant, that they had to use this kind of vinyl. They all signed it, all of them. Big companies! Columbia, this one, that one. Big companies. Nobody had that fuckin’ vinyl. Only a couple of places could even use that vinyl, because their system didn’t allow for it. They just signed [an agreement! They’d sign anything.
JESSE: I’ve not gone down the Discogs rabbit hole of different Wake of the Flood pressings, but if you’re a hot stampers type record collector, this album might liquify your brain. At some point, there was even a small run of the album on swirled green vinyl, personally overseen by Betty Cantor, probably just for friends, family, and close business associates, but memories are murky. Betty Cantor was also sent to the pressing plants to check out the issues with the vinyl.
RON RAKOW: And Betty Cantor went there. She's a top quality sound technician. She said, “Not only are they not using the specified vinyl — they can't. Their machines won’t even accept it.” They didn’t tell me that before. So, believe it or not, as the record is being pressed in other places, I moved pressing plants in the East.
JESSE: The company developed its own quality control team.
RON RAKOW: I put a Grateful Dead monitor on every plant that made records. And there were some sophisticated people: Bob Matthews, Betty Cantor, Billy Wolf. All those guys went to pressing plants and stayed there and took random samples off the line. And we determined when the mothers were no good, when the mothers were worn out, the parts were worn out. We made them tow the line. It was still impossible.
JESSE: The Grateful Dead might’ve had a huge audience of Dead freaks ready to buy new albums, but there was still a lot of message-spreading and work to do for the new label to get their record into stores.
RON RAKOW: That was also one of my breakthroughs: the little square cards that were an album cover. They were five-and-a-quarter by five-and-a-quarter inches.
JESSE: Our friend Michael Parrish received one, and joined one of the earliest promotional street teams in rock and roll.
MICHAEL PARRISH: I had gotten one of these letters that was like: ‘We’re starting our record company, we're looking for boots on the ground to get the word out. Steve Parish is organizing it. And if you want to be involved, let us know.’ So I wrote back, and then right before Wake of the Flood came out, I got this big package with a bunch of posters and flyers and things. They said, “Please, get these around.” I went to the record stores in Santa Cruz and some of the dining halls on campus.
JESSE: The record company worked to raise awareness of the record.
RON RAKOW: We had six people, and three or four of them were administrative people. We had three people that were responsible for selling this shit. When the record came out, I personally went to every distributor and played it for their staff. So, I took a great sound system on the road. The week an album came out, it was hard work, because I personally went to 18 distributors and played the album for them. I had to carry this sound system. Owsley put together a sound system for me that was un-fucking-believable. Nobody had heard anything like it. But, it was heavy. I had to carry it… I didn’t carry it far, I got help. But sometimes, there was no help. There were two 60-lbs. aluminum cases. No turntable — I flew with a cassette recorder, a Uher cassette recorder, made in Germany. And it was the smallest top-flight tape recorder you could find. I went to all 16 distributors in three days — get everybody excited, then split. It was 17. The one other one that I did was the First National Bank of Boston. I catered to them, because I was using them in so many different ways. I wanted to feel important, and they did. So I flew to New York, and then worked my way back across the country.
JESSE: It gave Ron Rakow and Jerry Garcia a ground-level view of the record business.
RON RAKOW: They loved us, they loved us. And I gave a volume figure to the distributors of what my projections were for them. I broke up the whole country and gave them quotas. And there were no inducements or penalties for not making the quota — except that, if you made the quota, I brought Garcia to your office.
JESSE: In the Northeast, especially, not making the quotas wouldn’t be a problem.
RON RAKOW: I took Jerry with me to some of the distributors — one in particular, on the Wake of the Flood one, and later in New York City. His name was Harry Apostoleris. He was a terrific guy. And he and Jerry, it was love at first sight. They loved each other — it was amazing. Harry Apostoleris had been a record distributor for 25 years. He had survived some shit, man. He was a great guy. A tough game, and Jerry got it. Jerry got it in a second. He really liked the guy and got comfortable with the guy and stretched out and told jokes. He found a lot of things to laugh about there, and he cackled when he laughed. The whole room laughed when he laughed. These guys are not fancy. They had their office in a warehouse. Jerry was an amazing communicator. You can really trust Jerry to do his part, no matter what the thing was. Jerry was an amazing guy — period, end of story. And a nice guy.
JESSE: When the album came out, Steve Brown got to work on radio promotion, mapping a route from the home office in San Rafael.
STEVE BROWN: It was fun to see a lot of people that were interested in what the Grateful Dead were going to be doing. And it was nice to find the Dead Head of the crowd, as it were, to talk to. I tried to pick that out when I made the calls from the office first, and set all these up. Because I didn't really want to talk to somebody: ‘What is that band? Oh, is that their name?’
JESSE: The album was officially out on Monday, October 15th, which is a rare date inasmuch as it’s early in the timeframe of records being released on specific dates. And it seems like the band hit it. We spoke to Steve more about his radio promotion work during our “Listen To The River ‘73” episode.
STEVE BROWN: Me and another partner there at the Grateful Dead Records were both involved with that — getting it to the radio people, especially the ones at the universities, where they had radio stations to play that kind of music a lot, especially Grateful Dead We were going around. I even traveled around for a while going to these stations before the record was even completed. I did a lot of Northeast travel, where we had a real good backing already with Grateful Dead. East Coast. Most of my stuff was done there, and it was done in many cases with locals who knew who the people were there. I’d connect with them and we drive around, go to all these places and talk to the people at the universities as well.
JESSE: In early October, a few days before the album was out, he was dispatched to St. Louis, and debuted the whole LP over the airwaves.
STEVE BROWN: It was a treat to be able to hear it on the radio. It came out on the 15th of October, and this was a show on the 29th and 30th.
JESSE: On the “Listen To The River ‘73” episode, we focused pretty closely on this very small window of late fall 1973. In October 1973, concurrent with the release of Wake of the Flood and Ron Rakow and Steve Brown’s promotional trips, there was what we’ll call the October War, a continuation of a fight over colonized and still-contested land that unfortunately remains topical. For reasons that many other scholars, journalists, politicians, podcasts and pretty much everybody else continue to discuss, it’s a division with global ramifications, as Ron Rakow was reminded.
RON RAKOW: And I was gone for four days. When I came back, I was a wreck — I mean, I went to three cities a day. When I got home, I had to wait on a line for an hour to get gas at the gas station in Stinson Beach. It's really funny, because it impacted the shit out of me in my life, but I’d never even thought about it in terms of the record or the record company. I just went around and did what I planned to do.
JESSE: The subsequent oil embargoes would cause disruptions across the world. For the Grateful Dead, it impacted the cost of making records, throwing any of their best-laid plans about quality control straight out the window. It also greatly expanded the cost of keeping a rock band on the road with a still-growing and very heavy speaker system.
AUDIO: “Weather Report Suite” [Listen To The River, 10/30/73] (8:41-8:55) - [dead.net]
JESSE: That was the Grateful Dead in St. Louis at the Kiel Auditorium on October 30th, 1973, playing through the giant system that was the immediate precursor to what’s now known as the Wall of Sound. The next day was Halloween, and we’re going to throw in a tantalizing but unresolved Halloween 1973 story here. Many thanks to Alan Bershaw for recently surfacing a clip from Down Beat, published in December 1973. I’m just going to read it in its entirety.
“No Tricks, All Treats”: Jim Schaffer, Down Beat managing editor, held a rather unique gathering at his 6000 square foot Chicago loft on Halloween night. Approximately 425 people partied to the sounds of Great Lakes Express, a Michigan-based group led by multi-horn man Bob Stroup (a Woody Herman sideman of the ‘60s). Those present included Frank Zappa and his band, John McLaughlin, Stevie Wonder, Billy Cobham, Herbie Hancock and his new band, Bill Chase, Lou Rawls, The Allman Brothers, Bobby Hutcherson, Chris Jagger, The Grateful Dead, The Moody Blues, Steve McCall, and sculptor Claes Oldenberg, as well as record company representatives and radio and TV personalities from Chicago, New York, and Los Angeles. After the Great Lakes Express warmed things up, members of the Grateful Dead and the Allman Brothers played a set together, leading up to the luminescent jam session that climaxed the (by then) early morning party. The 2 ½ hour session grouped McLaughlin, Hancock, Cobham, bassists Paul Jackson (of Hancock’s band) and Jamie Colton (of Great Lakes Express) and, towards the end, percussionist Schaffer on conga. McLaughlin was later quoted on TRIAD radio as saying, “This was the best Halloween I’ve ever had.”
Okay, wow. It seems like all those acts were actually around Chicago and free on Halloween 1973. We’ve got some feelers out. Alan Paul queried Jaimoe from the Allman Brothers, who remembers the party but says he wasn’t there. We’ll let you know if anything comes back. The next night, the Dead were in Evanston at Northwestern University, a show that’s now on Wake of the Flood 50.
AUDIO: “Mississippi Half-Step” [Wake of the Flood 50 bonus disc, 11/1/73] (1:07-1:38) - [dead.net] [Spotify] [YouTube]
Piracy
JESSE: The real thing wreaking havoc on Wake of the Flood’s release wasn’t the oil crisis, but bootleggers, as Ron Rakow and Steve Brown recall.
RON RAKOW: We were counterfeited.
STEVE BROWN: It was right at the beginning. It was like: holy shit! Like, what? Somebody's bootlegging it already? That was so scary, because when you pick up the phone, and it's the federal government calling you—you know, the FBI—it's like: what? ‘Yeah, we've got this bootlegging going on that people are calling and reporting to them about.’ All of a sudden, they're on us, and telling us that “there's something that you gotta check into here, and we're gonna go check out if we can find the people that are doing it.” And they did.
JESSE: Rakow remembers the FBI trying to stay out of it.
RON RAKOW: The FBI, they didn't give a shit. They called it a commercial dispute. I don’t know how you could do that. But anyway, this lucky thing happened. I made an error selecting the plates that went on the printing press. And the bootleg was done without that error, so the price code on the spine came out white. I had the error — mine came out orange. It's a small little number on the spine: 0598. It was a $5.98 cent retail item.
STEVE BROWN: It was just the square on the back that made the difference, with the songs and stuff in it. There's the ones that we did and the ones that they did. That was the only difference. Oh, except it didn't look quite as good as ours…
RON RAKOW: We sent out a postcard to all the people on the fan club list, and they went and checked all the record stores.
JESSE: The cards were ready to go.
RON RAKOW: I used them as postcards and sent a postcard out to the fans, saying: the government doesn't realize that our survival is at stake. And I explained the difference between the good album and the fake album. I asked them to go into the stores and, if they found the fake album, buy it, keep the receipt, send it to me, and I would send them back a check for the money and give them a backstage pass the next time we were in town, including two free tickets and one backstage pass. There were four kids from Harvard who immediately quit school, got in a Volkswagen van, and gave me a written report on 1,972 record locations. It worked. As a matter of fact, we hired the just retired District Attorney of Los Angeles County to head a suing operation to sue every record store that had these fake records in them. And we would not press charges if they gave us where they got them from and made a financial offer of settlement. And so it got to be the small stores paid $5,000, and larger places paid $10,000. And everybody gave us the distributors they got them from, and we sued everybody. And I worked my way up to the people that made them.
JESSE: Sometimes when you look behind the curtain of the record business, there are surprises.
RON RAKOW: And that's when I got a visitor. Guy came to my hotel room in the Navarro Hotel in New York with two other guys and he said, “You’re really impressive. I don’t know how you did this, but you got back to us, and I want you to stop here and now.” And I said, “I’m sorry, just for you to say ‘stop’ is not gonna do it, because I think we’ve been fucked around, and I think you owe us more than that.” And he said, “I’ll tell you what — I will give you a guarantee that for as long as you’re in business we will never duplicate a Grateful Dead product ever again.” And that was the deal I made with them, and that's what happened. And that helped me enormously one other time, because I had a guy inside the mob that would vouch for the fact that I could keep my word because something else happened sometime later that was weirder. And the fact of how I acted during that time was what made the other one really easy to pull off.
JESSE: Maybe we’ll get back to that one, maybe not. In Steve Brown’s estimation, it didn’t eat into the profits too much.
STEVE BROWN: It seemed like it was cutting into us in the hundreds, not in the thousands.
Or Does It?
JESSE: At some point, parts of the Wake of the Flood story got memory-holed. Ron Rakow.
RON RAKOW: The first album was Wake of the Flood, and Wake of the Flood was very, very profitable. Somehow the numbers got twisted — it was one of our best-selling albums, and it never got that credit.
JESSE: There’s a rap that goes around sometimes that the Grateful Dead’s studio albums weren’t important, or that the Dead didn’t care about them.
RON RAKOW: Everybody fought like hell to make good studio albums, and I think they made good studio albums. But the Grateful Dead weren’t about 1 + 1 is 2 — they’re about how it feels. The Grateful Dead were playing to a place in the mind and body and soul of mankind that was different from other bands. They had a different goal. They really worked hard, hard, hard on that shit. They didn't not care about it. They weren't cavalier about it.
JESSE: Gary Lambert.
GARY LAMBERT: Another remarkable aspect of the album is that they put it out on their indie label incredibly efficiently. Between recording and getting it pressed and putting it out, it really happened fast. At that point, it was their highest charting upon initial release: I think it got to 18 on the Albums chart, and American Beauty peaked at 19. So, it did really well under the circumstances. It may not have had the legs that Workingman’s or American Beauty had in terms of sales, but it showed that they were really serious about being a fully independent record company. How long that lasted is another matter, but I was very impressed by that. I looked at things like Billboard and Cashbox in those days because I was kind of trying to get started in the music business. And I said, “Man, the Dead have a Top 20 album that they put out themselves without Warner Bros.?”
JESSE: We received an extremely thoughtful dissenting take on Wake of the Flood from listener Carey Coles, which we’re going to include in somewhat edited form here.
CAREY COLES: I'm an English follower of the Dead and it's been a lifelong love affair, from when I first saw them at the London Lyceum on the last night of Europe ‘72. My main reaction to Wake of the Flood was actually one of disappointment. I had bought everything pretty much by them by 1973, and also had the amazing Glastonbury Fayre “Dark Star” from Wembley Empire Pool, which few people heard ‘til Europe ‘72 came out. So, I was really full of expectation when I put the record on. But what I heard was a series of tunes which all seemed to proceed at a kind of shuffle pace — sometimes either a little bit bouncy, and sometimes just flat on the floor. The poetry just seemed to me to be whimsical, or nonsensical or cartoonish, and it didn't open the doors for my imagination. There was nothing on the disc that rocked; there was no blues; there was no chance for Jerry to let rip and go high and wild, which we all love in his work.
I've been looking back and thinking about why that record didn't speak to me and didn't, I felt, speak to the moment. It was a moment when the London counterculture was really going full steam: the Microdot Gang, pre-Operation Julie, were in full flow. Speed also rocked the concert scene. The Free Festivals were also just getting going in that period. The vibe and the fashion though was kind of shifting away from Californian psychedelia and denim, and it was heading for something more urban and hard-edged and more genderfluid.
JESSE: In the UK, it was an age of David Bowie and Brian Eno, of Peter Gabriel-era Genesis and, most of all, Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon. Carey expected more out of the next phase of the Dead.
CAREY COLES: I just think of the anger and kind of chaos that they had captured and refracted in those gigs, just the previous year. And that was all just gone. In place was a sort of introversion and self-absorption, or at least that’s how it seemed to me.
JESSE: Carey would find more in the songs as the Dead continued to play them. Somehow the perception of the album being less-than-successful commercially spread around. In its initial run, it sold something close to 400,000 copies. Reviewers didn’t always take to it, though. Robert Hunter blamed himself in this 1978 interview with WLIR.
ROBERT HUNTER [3/78]: I didn't give them the material. Here we were, all set up, ready to go and ready to rip. And if I had written albums like I’d been writing, fine. But it’s just one of those situations where you get this nice snazzy Cadillac and the battery doesn’t work for some reason. My streak ended. I don’t know what it was.
JESSE: I think that’s unfair. There are plenty of ways to critique Wake of the Flood. I’m not sure I would’ve made all those production choices exactly, for example, but the material itself lasted. The band dropped “Let Me Sing Your Blues Away” quickly, probably because the chords were a pain to remember, and Weir dropped the beginning of “Weather Report Suite” that he wrote with Eric Andersen. But besides that, the band would continue to discover the power of everything else over the course of the next 20-plus years. But with Wake of the Flood, there’s always that crow circling just overhead.
AUDIO: [Crow caws]
RON RAKOW: And my birthday in 1973 was on November 10, which is what it is every year. But the 9th, 10th and 11th, the Grateful Dead were playing Winterland. They gave me a birthday cake that was a big crow.
JESSE: Which is to say that the November 10th, 1973 show at Winterland that we focused on for our “Prelude/Tuesday Night Jam” episode was also Rakow’s 36th birthday.
RON RAKOW: Incidentally, on Sunday night when I went home, my house had burned down.
JESSE: No shit?
RON RAKOW: I walked out of the house—could not be late for the show—and I threw the Sunday paper on the pile of papers that was next to the fireplace, which was a standalone fireplace. And one section of the paper flapped open after I was no longer in eyesight, and laid on the fireplace. One page of a paper! It burst into flames, and it caught the other papers on fire. And it caused a pretty serious fire.
JESSE: Not the whole house, but yikes.
AUDIO: [Crow caws]
JESSE: Housefires notwithstanding, the Grateful Dead ended 1973 at a profit. Three months of solid touring gave them a liquid cash flow, and the year-end statement for their new record company showed a net profit of over $186,000 — around $1.2 million, adjusted for inflation. They’d reached the point where having a lot of money started to become a tax issue. Or, as Rakow put it just after Wake of the Flood came out, they were taking “measures to… ensure that the Dead are never financially secure." Garcia said that, after he’d made his self-titled debut, “I found for a while I was rich, so I started giving the money away. And I found after a while that it cost me $1500 to give away $1000. So we're getting an institution registered to promote research in the arts, sciences and education so I can give away my money easier.” They had a great name for it, too.
RON RAKOW: The Neal Cassady Foundation.
JESSE: It was an idea that would remain in-progress for the next few years.
RON RAKOW: The Neal Cassady Foundation was what the Rex Foundation… well, in the process of talking about the Neal Cassady Foundation, Rex died.
JESSE: The chronology might have a few lumps, and it would take a decade for the Neal Cassady Foundation to turn into the Rex Foundation, named for the late roadie Rex Jackson, who died in 1976. But in 1973, the world was theirs, and getting not only bigger but brighter. The flood waters were receding, and the Grateful Dead were on high ground, entering into their 10th year as a band.
AUDIO: “Here Comes Sunshine” (Demo) [Wake of the Flood 50] (1:00-1:21) - [dead.net] [Spotify] [YouTube]