Good Ol’ Grateful Deadcast
Season 1, Episode 6
Workingman’s Dead 50: Black Peter
Archival interviews:
- Jerry Garcia & Mountain Girl, by Dennis McNally, Jerry On Jerry: The Unpublished Jerry Garcia Interviews, 1986.
- Jerry Garcia, by Ben Fong-Torres, Got Some Things To Talk About, 1976.
JESSE: After Side 2 of Workingman’s Dead opens with the exuberant Bakersfield-bluegrass mash-up of “Cumberland Blues,” the album goes dark. Way dark. Here’s co-producer Bob Matthews.
BOB MATTHEWS: “Black Peter” is one of my favorites. “Black Peter” I loved, and still love to this day. The emotion that Jerry was able to convey in his rendition of that… still a tearjerker. I know that Bob Hunter always liked how that came out.
JESSE: Tales From the Golden Road co-host Gary Lambert.
GARY LAMBERT: Oh man, it's maybe the single darkest thing in the repertoire. Incredibly mournful. Again, that Hunter obliqueness — he’s not explicit about what’s happening there. He leaves elements of it to your imagination. The thing about the “fever roll up… gonna roll back down,” there's a certain hope expressed. But it is extraordinary and so powerful. One of those things about the Grateful Dead that I really respected was that they never hesitated… when songs like that were in the concert repertoire, the Grateful Dead never hesitated to kill your buzz, in what I think is a very positive way. There might be people who were there for just the happy, danceable psychedelic thing. The Grateful Dead would be playing something just stunningly melodic and wonderfully rhythmic and have you dancing, and then they would take this hard left turn and basically say: “Okay, now it's time for you to gaze into the abyss. Have you met the abyss? Here's the abyss…” and make you confront your own mortality. It might be a song like “Black Peter”; it might be some incredibly dissonant feedback, or just a very dark instrumental statement that they made. I loved that: that was part of what I cherished about the experience, that they presented your life and all this complexity, made you deal with things and made you confront things. “Black Peter” was one of those late-in-the-show moments that could really make that happen.
JESSE: “Black Peter” was a heavy song with an enduring power in the Grateful Dead’s repertoire, becoming one of Jerry Garcia’s most consistently played originals in the quarter-century after it was introduced. With its languid tempo and fated lyrics, it can be somber and revealing, for both singer and listener, filled with wisdom about the passing of time and the briefness of life, sounding far more mature than the 28 years then upon Robert Hunter’s head. Its lyrics resonate with the work of poets and philosophers stretching back centuries. There’s no question that Robert Hunter was what people call an “old soul.”
Though it might not sound it, by a certain metric, “Black Peter” also might be the single most psychedelic song written by Jerry Garcia and Robert Hunter. It began with an estimated $50,000 worth of LSD.
AUDIO: “New Potato Caboose” [Fillmore West 1969 bonus disc, 6/8/69] (10:45-11:15)
JESSE: That was “New Potato Caboose,” recorded June 8th, 1969 at the Fillmore West in San Francisco, released on a bonus disc that came with the 2005 Fillmore West box set — the last recorded version of “New Potato Caboose,” as it happens.
It was a Sunday evening in San Francisco, the end of a regular ol’ 4-night stand at the Fillmore West, though most people in the Dead kept referring to the place by the name it had when they held the lease with other local bands, the Carousel Ballroom. This week in June, the Dead were headlining early and late shows over Motown saxophonist/vocalist Junior Walker and the LA band, the Glass Family. Each act played an early set, then the late crowd arrived. The Fillmore West staff often let audience members from the first show stick around for the second, and this Sunday was probably no exception, though it gave the bands a few hours to kill between sets.
It’d been an eventful few days already. On Friday, Jerry Garcia was tardy for the late show and Bill Graham made the band go on without him, with Aum’s Wayne Ceballos playing in Garcia’s spot for part of the set until the Dead’s regular lead guitarist returned. On Saturday, Janis Joplin stopped by for a screamodelic “Turn On Your Lovelight.” Earlier that show, the band debuted Jerry Garcia and Robert Hunter’s “Dire Wolf,” written less than two weeks earlier, which we
covered a few episodes back.
On Sunday, June 8th, the early show proceeded well enough, as we heard from that excerpt of “New Potato Caboose.” But then all hell broke loose.
JERRY GARCIA [1986]: Janis was ready to kill us. It wasn’t our fault, but she was ready to kill us.
JESSE: That, of course, was Jerry Garcia. That and the next part of the story come from Jerry on Jerry, a five-hour audiobook of Dennis McNally’s interviews with Jerry Garcia and available from Hachette wherever you get your audiobooks. Thanks, Dennis and Hachette. This portion of the conversation describes the night of June 8th, 1969, and features Jerry Garcia and Mountain Girl, along with Dennis McNally. Backstage, the apple juice had been electrified.
JERRY GARCIA [1986]: I just wet my lips on that, and that's all, because I heard it’d been dosed.
MOUNTAIN GIRL [1986]: Yeah, me too, I took one tiny little sip —
JERRY GARCIA [1986]: And I got really stoned.
MOUNTAIN GIRL [1986]: Yeah, I took a sip that was probably a teaspoon and a half. I thought, “I’ll just try that, I’ll just let that bit do.” Twenty minutes later, there were people just comin’ apart all around me.
JERRY GARCIA [1986]: That’s the truth. Poor Phil! Phil had to be led onstage by Mickey. I don’t even know if we played that night… yeah, we played. But we were out of it… that was bad.
JESSE: At least on the tape of the night, it sounds like Elvin Bishop replaces Garcia for the first part of the set. But who’s to say what actually went down in the ninth dimension that evening. Here’s how Phil Lesh experienced the night, from his 2005 memoir, Searching For the Sound:
“It was as if the music was being sung by gigantic dragons on the timescale of plate tectonics; each note seemed to take days to develop, every overtone sang its own song, each drumbeat generated a new heaven and a new earth. That moment may well have been the peak of psychedelic music for me – the combination of absolute inevitability and ecstatic freedom has never been equaled."
On the tape, Elvin Bishop can be heard joining the band. Lesh continues, “the myriad voices of the music were fused into an oblique, schizoid, undulating, seven-dimensional parallelogram. When I finally dredged up the nerve to look at Elvin, he had the most clearly delineated ‘deer in the headlights’ expression that I've ever seen spread all over his face.”
Owsley Stanley was mixing sound for the Dead that night, recording a Sonic Journal as usual. Rhoney Stanley was with him. This story and many others are featured in her memoir, Owsley and Me: My LSD Family, co-written with Saturday Night Live writer Tom Davis. Here’s Rhoney Stanley.
RHONEY STANLEY: There was a very notorious drug dealer named Goldfinger. And the reason he was called Goldfinger was because he had lost his hand in a helicopter accident, smuggling, and Bear had gotten him a jeweled Captain Hook hand. That was beautiful. He wore and that was his nickname, Goldfinger. He was always full of drugs. That night that we’re talking about, what happened was Goldfinger spiked the punch backstage — and Owsley spiked the punch backstage, and neither of them knew that the other had done it. It was a bad scene. Owsley was really, really pissed at Goldfinger, because he shouldn’t have done that. Owsley was in charge of that, and then Goldfinger came in, didn’t tell anybody, didn’t ask. So, he broke a sort of outlaw law.
Janis Joplin had some of her band members… she had formed this new band, and some of them had never had LSD. They took the punch and it was double dosed! They didn’t have a good trip — they ended up in the hospital. She was really angry at Bear, and they were really close. Both of them were from the South, and they were both born on January 19th. Even though one was into alcohol and the other was into psychedelics, they loved each other — and this caused a huge rift. Janis was never really quiet, and she was really pissed at Bear, yelling at him. But it really wasn’t his fault. It was Goldfinger! We were always the last to leave any venue, so nobody else was there. We left the Carousel, and Bear was gonna go to Goldfinger’s to confront Goldfinger: “Why did you do this! Look at how many people in our scene have been adversely affected!” We get out on the street, on Market Street, and I found Hunter and I heard this voice — looking around, what’s this voice? Market Street is rough downtown San Francisco; where the Carousel Ballroom was is not where you want to hang out. And there’s Hunter, he’s sort of crouched between the gutter and the sidewalk. He’s mumbling, “Owsley Stein…” — he’s not coherent. I remember talking to Bear and saying, “We can’t leave him here!” Bear’s like totally focused, ready to go to Goldfinger’s. I said, “No, we cannot leave Hunter here.” Bear went and got the car, and we managed to get him into the car. We took him over to Goldfinger’s, because that’s where Bear was going. Bear wanted to confront Goldfinger and just tell him, “That was a bad thing to do — you have to be responsible for LSD.”
Terry the Tramp I’m sure was there. Bear called him. Terry was Bear’s right hand person. Terry was the Hells Angel who distributed the LSD for Bear. He also had given us the owl, a little screech owl. Bear would call Terry… and also, given that he was a Hells Angel, he could have some control over Goldfinger, who was a bit of a loose cannon. I’m sure that was why Terry was there.
I think that we figured out that he had taken over 1,000 micrograms, considering what Goldfinger had put in. When Goldfinger finally got back, he and Bear went: “Exactly how many micrograms?! How much was the dosage at that point?” Hunter never did anything moderately; he probably took a full cup, because he was gone. He was really high. And it’s not a high that makes you happy — it wasn’t a high that made him feel like he was one with the divine. I couldn’t talk him down. Nicki Scully was there, because she was having a relationship with Goldfinger at the time. She couldn’t talk him down, nobody could talk him down. Bear… we had all of these B vitamins. Bear thought that taking multi-Bs was a way to get you to come down off acid. He wasn’t coming down, and he was ranting.
I don’t remember being gone, that high. I was more cautious. I was more cautious about how much LSD I was gonna take. I never felt like taking it at a show like that was such a good idea, because a lot of times people did dose you and you didn’t know it. I was very ethical about that — I thought that was the wrong thing to do. I even had problems, I had arguments a lot with Bear about dosing, whether he should really dose people. People would make chocolate chip cookies and dose them. I always thought that was a mistake because of the children! We had children around. So, I had more of a moderate view.
One of the things that happens on LSD—and it’s actually one of the beauties of LSD—is that you are not your ego. And you’re not Robert Hunter, who’s the lyricist of the Grateful Dead; that’s just sort of an object. Who you are isn’t the object, isn’t the body, isn’t the action you do. It’s different: it’s more of the divine, and in order to get to the universal consciousness, you have to channel those things. They have to die. It’s very painful, and I do think that he went through that dying of the ego, of all the aspects of himself that he was attached to that night. It was painful. So, Hunter was very high, all night long and into the morning. Bear decided to call Jerry Garcia and have Jerry come over. Jerry didn’t come until almost morning. But when Jerry came, that was a big help.
JESSE: Until Hunter could come to his senses, he was put under the mindful watch of the Hells Angel known as Terry the Tramp. We’ll let Robert Hunter’s housemates, Jerry Garcia and Mountain Girl, pick up the story from here.
JERRY GARCIA [1986]: Hunter was lying on Market Street—
MOUNTAIN GIRL [1986]: He wasn’t even Owsley’s fault —
JERRY GARCIA [1986]: He said lobsters from the ninth dimension were devouring downtown San Francisco. All of a sudden, there was Owsley’s face, and he just had to take a swing at it. In fact, when I saw him, the first thing that came out of his mouth was, “Owsleystein!” [laughs] “Owsleystein!” He’s there mumbling and muttering…
MOUNTAIN GIRL [1986]: [laughs] Oh god, he was so out of it —
JERRY GARCIA [1986]: He was so out of it.
MOUNTAIN GIRL [1986]: I remember you went to get him —
JERRY GARCIA [1986]: Yeah, I went to —
MOUNTAIN GIRL [1986]: The call came about 9 in the morning…
JERRY GARCIA [1986]: I came up, and there’s Terry the Tramp, sitting with him as nice as can be, just lookin’ after him. He said, “I just want to make sure he doesn’t hurt himself.”
MOUNTAIN GIRL [1986]: How did we get home?
JERRY GARCIA [1986]: We drove him, I drove us home.
MOUNTAIN GIRL [1986]: We drove home, about five miles an hour…
JERRY GARCIA [1986]: Weaving through the hallucinations —
MOUNTAIN GIRL [1986]: Past the Golden Gate Bridge, it was foggy…
JERRY GARCIA [1986]: Oh god, oh yeah. And then I had to drive back to San Francisco to get Hunter. I was barely able to deal with it myself… but yeah, Hunter was gone. He was like nineteen sheets to the wind. He was out there. The poor fucker, he was really stoned. And he was just coming into the bringing-in-the-sheaves part of his acid trip. [laughs] Ah well… the golden light of Buddhism, glowing off in the distance somewhere. All that shit. He was done in.
JESSE: Robert Hunter was a few weeks short of his 28th birthday. He had a horrific night. Or, more to the point, during that night he lived—and died—several horrific lifetimes. He saw blood pouring from Janis Joplin’s mouth. In Dennis McNally’s words, Hunter “experienced every assassination he knew of, dying with JFK and with Lincoln, among many other trips.”
Holy wow, talk about heaviness. In the ‘90s, in a public correspondence with psychonaut Terence McKenna, part of their Orfeo Dialogues available at levity.com, Robert Hunter wrote that he witnessed “the end of consciousness” and that the incident “effectively marked ‘paid’ to my acid career. Someone who has crawled naked across the Sahara doesn’t spend much time in tanning parlors.”
And that’s the story of how Robert Hunter came to write the lyrics to “Black Peter,” an author who’d recently died a thousand deaths.
RHONEY STANLEY: [The experience] bonded Hunter and me. We became really good friends after that. I started hanging out at their house in Larkspur, when MG and Jerry and Hunter lived together.
It was gentle and nice. It wasn’t wild or crazy at all — it was very loving. Annabel was born there. Mountain Girl already had Sunshine, and she was there. It was in a beautiful area, and their backyard went right down into a ravine. There was a swing down there, and you could play in the grass, or the knoll — it was more like a knoll, a big wooded area. And Janis [Joplin] lived down the street. It was actually quite a great time. It was our first venture out of the city, of the Grateful Dead family.
Jerry was always… it was a round kitchen table and a window over there, and Jerry would sit there. He always was playing his guitar, not plugged in. He’d play the electric guitar, not plugged in. All the time. And Hunter had just one room up there, in the bedroom. He would scribble away. I remember a lot of things that Hunter was into at that time: getting over your fears, not letting a fear of something control you. If you had a fear, the best thing to do was to meet that fear head on, and to see that it would dissipate. Like his song [“Truckin’”]—lay your cards on the table, how can you play your hand if you don’t lay the cards on the table— that sort of after-the-LSD experience became very important to him. If you have a fear, meet that fear, and then it will dissipate. If you’re afraid of dying, meet your death.
Hunter was 28 when he wrote that song, and people commented how, at 28, you could have such a profound sense of life and death? Everybody at that time was very into astrology. The Grateful Dead and the whole family, we were into that kind of thing. We were into the I Ching, we were into astrology; we were into Chinese astrology. It was universal. 28 is the time when you have your first Saturn returns. What that means is that is the time when the path you’re supposed to go on becomes clear to you — at age 28. You go on a path that you follow for probably another 28 years. That was a big bridge of your first Saturn returns. Your karma comes to you, and you choose the path.
JESSE: Several characters named “Black Peter” predate the song’s writing, and a few of them seem like they could’ve been in Robert Hunter’s cultural scope. David Dodd’s super useful Annotated Grateful Dead Lyrics book and website have a list. Black Peters appear in both Dutch and Russian holiday traditions as the unpleasant companions to the more jolly St. Nick. In 1964, director Miloš Forman debuted with Black Peter, a pioneering film of the Czech New Wave.
And before that, a character named Black Peter appeared in The Once and Future King, T.H. White’s 1958 re-imagining of the King Arthur legend. There, the character Black Peter appears in the form of a sullen magical fish, the King of the Moat. A fan of fantasy novels, Robert Hunter may have been familiar with the character known as “Mr. P.”
Black Peter had “a face which had been ravaged… by cruelty, sorrow, age, pride, selfishness, loneliness and thoughts too strong for individual brains. There he hung or hoved, his vast ironic mouth permanently drawn downward in a kind of melancholy, his lean clean-shaven chops giving him an American expression, like that of Uncle Sam. He was remorseless, disillusioned, logical, predatory, fierce, pitiless—but his great jewel of an eye was that of a stricken deer, large, fearful, sensitive and full of griefs.”
RHONEY STANLEY: Somebody commented that “Black Peter” had the same cadence and rhythm as this opera by [Georg] Büchner called Woyzeck. I remember talking to Hunter about that opera, because it was a fabulous story. I knew it and Hunter knew it, and the person who wrote it, Büchner, died young, and it's a tragic, tragic opera.
JESSE: So how did the lyricist imagine that “Black Peter” might sound?
AUDIO: “Louisiana Man” [Rusty & Doug Kershaw, Louisiana Man and Other Favorites] (0:22-0:51) - [Spotify]
JESSE: That was Rusty & Doug Kershaw’s “Louisiana Man” from 1961. In A Box of Rain, Robert Hunter’s book of collected lyrics, he wrote that this was the original model for how he imagined “Black Peter” might sound. It was “a jumpy little tune the way I wrote it,” he said another time. In A Box of Rain, he continued, “Garcia took it seriously, though, dressing it in subtle changes and a mournful tempo.”
AUDIO: “Black Peter” [Workingman’s Dead] (1:07-1:41) - [dead.net] [Spotify] [YouTube]
JESSE: The bridge, Robert Hunter noted, “was written after the restructuring of the piece and reflects the additional depth of possibility provided for the song by [Garcia’s] treatment.”
AUDIO: “Black Peter” [Workingman’s Dead] (3:00-3:35) - [dead.net] [Spotify] [YouTube]
JESSE: For Shaugn O’Donnell, musicologist and chair of the music department at the City College of New York, the middle section of “Black Peter” transcends what a listener might expect from the song’s bridge.
SHAUGN O’DONNELL: You think you just have a kind of blues dirge going on at the beginning, and it seems fairly straightforward. But then there's this harmonic interlude that takes you pretty far afield. There's a sort of dream passage, where you're just in this other harmonic realm. When you get to the climax and you're suddenly far afield, then you have this F chord. It’s the part that everyone responds to, but you can barely remember that you were in this blues dirge before. Whereas someone else would have made a song out of just the blues dirge part, maybe one related contrasting section — not a whole sort of dream sequence.
JESSE: It took just under six months for Robert Hunter’s horrific acid experience in June 1969 to make it to the stage. In early December, the Dead debuted “Black Peter” the same night as “Uncle John’s Band” at the Fillmore West, the same venue where Hunter had taken too much acid a half-year earlier. It was the same week as Altamont, and—on December 7th—the night after the disastrous free festival, ”Black Peter’ was the song the Dead opened with. Here’s what some of that first draft of “Black Peter” sounded like, recorded a week later—on December 12th, 1969—at Thelma on the Sunset Strip in LA, released on Dave’s Picks 10.
AUDIO: “Black Peter” [Dave’s Picks 10, 12/12/69] (9:20-9:50)
JESSE: With “Uncle John’s Band,” “Black Peter” was one of the first original songs the band adapted to their acoustic sets in late 1969. This is how it sounded on February 13th, 1970 at the Fillmore East, released in 1973 on Bear’s Choice. The dynamics are just a little different. This is just days before the band began the Workingman’s Dead demos.
AUDIO: “Black Peter” [History of the Grateful Dead, Vol. 1: Bear’s Choice, 2/13/70] (6:49-9:23) - [Spotify] [YouTube]
JESSE: Now let’s move over to Pacific High Recording in San Francisco in early 1970 and check out The Angel’s Share session outtakes. They’re very similar to what made it to Workingman’s Dead. The basic instrumental takes feature Jerry Garcia and Bob Weir on acoustic guitars, Phil Lesh on electric bass, and Bill Kreutzmann on drums. The first hard part was aligning everybody’s instruments in the headphones; here’s Kreutzmann and Garcia.
BILL KREUTZMANN [1970]: Can you hear the drums, Jerry?
JERRY GARCIA [1970]: No.
BILL KREUTZMANN [1970]: Ah well, that’s no good.
JESSE: The second hard part was getting through a take in one piece.
AUDIO: “Black Peter” ((Breakdown 3) - Not Slated) [Workingman’s Dead: The Angel’s Share] (5:06-5:27) - [dead.net] [Spotify] [YouTube]
[band abruptly stops]
JERRY GARCIA [1970]: Aw, man… wrong chords, fuck!
BOB WEIR [1970]: [quietly] I misplaced a finger.
JERRY GARCIA [1970]: Let’s take it again.
JESSE: There’s a really great complete alternate take of “Black Peter” that you can hear on The Angel’s Share, available through streaming services now. I adore Garcia’s vocal performance on this one.
AUDIO: “Black Peter” ((Complete Track With Vocals) - Not Slated) [Workingman’s Dead: The Angel’s Share] (4:13-5:00) - [dead.net] [Spotify] [YouTube]
JESSE: But that’s not to say that there was no studio magic involved in the making of “Black Peter.” Gary Lambert.
GARY LAMBERT: It's also interesting to hear the studio chatter and the outtakes, because even though they did prepare a lot, and even though those songs were well on their feet before they went into the studio, you also hear the fine tuning and the introduction of new ideas before they go to a full take. The creative process didn't completely stop when they got into the studio, by any means; they were refining and discovering exactly how to play those things. I also want to add that the way that little instrumental details come out on this album, on “Black Peter” — Bobby’s rhythm part is just these exquisite little fills; you hear a little bit of Pigpen’s organ there, which was not that present in the music by that point, but it comes in at just the right point. Pigpen’s harmonica as well. The small details that they attended to on the album are really telling, and it rewards repeated listening. I still hear things on some of these older records… if I go and revisit them years later, I'll say, “Oh, I never quite noticed that little bit of detail there.”
JESSE: Pigpen’s harmonica appears for the first time on Workingman’s Dead just before the final verse of “Black Peter,” like a character we’ll hear more from soon.
AUDIO: “Black Peter” [Workingman’s Dead] (4:13-5:00) - [dead.net] [Spotify] [YouTube]
JESSE: Though Pigpen didn’t appear during many songs in the band’s acoustic sets in the spring of 1970, he’d often add the organ part he played on the studio version of “Black Peter.”
“Black Peter” is a beautiful piece of art that came out of a harrowing experience. But it was only one of two important effects of the night Robert Hunter got massively dosed at the Fillmore West. Here’s Jerry Garcia on the last part of the morning, from the Hachette audiobook, Jerry on Jerry.
JERRY GARCIA: I sat there and that was just after that Crosby, Stills and Nash record first came out. And Nicki [Scully] was playing that on her home hi-fi, and I got imprinted, listening to that record about 19 times as I waited for Hunter to get to where he could walk around.
JESSE: Crosby, Stills, and Nash’s self-titled debut came out just after Memorial Day, at the end of May 1969. It was one of the year’s biggest albums, and it would’ve been virtually impossible for Jerry Garcia not to have come into contact with the trio’s harmonies sooner or later, that he did so while coming down from a massive acid trip with his closest collaborator is only a small nuance. CSN’s influence can be heard all over Workingman’s Dead and American Beauty after that, just as it could be heard on countless folk-rock albums that are still being made. Unlike most of those, though, Jerry Garcia soon became friends with Crosby, Stills, and Nash and influenced them right back.
To tell that story, we are honored to welcome to the Good Ol’ Grateful Deadcast, Graham Nash.
GRAHAM NASH: ‘69, we were in Wally Heider Studios in San Francisco. We were doing the Déjà Vu record; we had just constructed a very simple track of “Teach Your Children,” my song. When I first played that song for Stephen, he said, “That’s a really beautiful song — don’t ever play it like that again.” I went, “What?” He goes, “No, this is the way this should go.” And he put that great Stephen Stills right-hand picking pattern [on it]. It was great. So, we had the basic track; because it was Stephen, we said, “Okay, so, what are we going to do as a solo?” He goes, “Well, I seem to be playing guitar all over this record. What do you think?” Crosby came up with the idea of talking to Jerry.
Now, the Grateful Dead were in the next studio over from us when we were doing Déjà Vu, and Jefferson Airplane were in another studio at the same time. I’d never met Jerry, so I asked David to [ask him]—because he was David’s friend—“Why don’t you go talk to him?” I had never met him. He came back and he said, “Actually, yeah, he’s got his pedal steel with him, and he’ll give it a shot.” I said, “Give it a shot?” And [Crosby] said, “Yeah, he’s only just been playing it for a couple of months. But he’ll give it a shot.”
So Jerry came in and he set up his pedal steel; we greeted each other, of course. I knew exactly who he was… I wasn’t that stupid. He said it was a steel guitar — we played the track, he listened to it, and he goes, “Okay, sure. Alright, start — press the button.” So we start recording, and we get to the end of the song, and I go: “Fuck, that was amazing. You got it. That was fantastic. The spirit of what you played… that was fabulous.” He goes, “Yeah, well, you know… I screwed up a couple of places, right before the chorus there. Can I do another track?” And I said, “Of course, you can do another track! I’m probably not gonna use it, but you can definitely do another track. So we sat down and he played another track. We repaired one small hole there, right before the chorus, so I could take that from the new track. But the first time he played it had the spirit of the song in it. That’s what it is: that’s the spirit of “Teach Your Children.” I thought that, when we made the track of “Teach,” that it could possibly be a radio hit. A lot of songs with my friends in the Hollies… I think we had 15 Top 10 hits before I left, and I was only with ‘em for seven years. I knew it was going to be a radio hit when Jerry put his steel guitar on there — there was no doubt in my mind that it was going to be a big hit, because of what he played. I don’t think anyone can listen to that first 20 seconds of that intro and not just fall in love with it. So, that’s what happened.
AUDIO: “Teach Your Children” [Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young, Déjà Vu] (0:00-0:20) - [Spotify]
JESSE: Graham had never heard the story about how Jerry Garcia became “imprinted” by Crosby, Stills, and Nash, but he did have something to say about the legend that Crosby, Stills and Nash taught the Grateful Dead how to harmonize.
GRAHAM NASH: Didn't happen. We weren't teaching them; we were just showing them how we did it. They went, “Wait a second: one microphone, opened up all the way around, and then just you three, standing? That's how you do this?” “Yeah, watch this. Hey, Bill Halverson”—our engineer—“play a track of whatever…” We would stand there and sing, and they went: “Oh, okay. Simple. We can do that.” So, we didn’t teach them to be able to harmonize, because you can’t do that; you either can do it, or not. But we certainly did encourage them to sing.
JESSE: It was the beginning of a cross-band partnership that would result in both Crosby and Stills joining the Dead onstage numerous times in the next years. The very first performance of “Teach Your Children” took place at a Dead show, when Stills and Nash dropped by for a surprise duo set at Winterland in San Francisco on October 25th, 1969, playing between the Dead and the Jefferson Airplane.
GRAHAM NASH: The first public performance ever. It was only me and Stephen, because the Dead were giving a concert at the Fillmore East. Stephen was invited, and he invited me and David too. But unfortunately, Christine, David’s girlfriend, had just been killed a week or so before. David was in no state to even be in public — he was mourning very deeply. So that was just me and Stephen, and we didn’t have a plan, have a set. Stephen just started playing songs, and I would join in if I could. Then Stephen goes, “Oh, we have a country song for you.”
STEPHEN STILLS [10/25/69]: Here’s a little country tune we know.
AUDIO: “Teach Your Children” [Stephen Stills & Graham Nash, 10/25/69] (0:00-0:17) - [Soundcloud]
JESSE: You can read the whole story of that set in a recent feature on JamBase written by our buddy Steve Silberman — and hear audio of the set remastered by engineer extraordinaire Charlie Miller.
By then, Graham migrated north to San Francisco, and settled in the Haight-Ashbury, a year and change after the Dead left.
GRAHAM NASH: We’d just done that first record. We’d spent a lot of time in L.A. Obviously, Stephen had a house there, and so did David. I didn’t have a house: I had been living with Joni [Mitchell] for a couple of years, and then our love affair ended and I needed to get away. Because David had all these friends up in northern California, I decided I would go there. I tried San Francisco, and I love the city — it’s an incredibly beautiful city. I found this four-story house on Buena Vista Park East, by the hospital, right next door to a huge double white house. And on the third floor of this gigantic house next to mine on Buena Vista Park East was this ginormous speaker. When I mean ginormous, I mean that the thing must have been eight feet round, and maybe 15 feet long.
JESSE: The mansion had been the home of Buena Vista Studio, where the Grateful Dead recorded their first single, “Don’t Ease Me In” b/w “Stealin’,” released by the local Scorpio Records in 1966. Graham Nash and members of the Dead would collaborate even more during sessions at Wally Heider’s in San Francisco that unfolded during 1970.
GRAHAM NASH: I was making Songs for Beginners at the same time, in my spare time. Ha! Jerry played the steel guitar on “I Used To Be a King,” maybe one other thing. I didn’t pay him for the session — I didn’t know what we were supposed to do. So I gave him a Fender Strat that I’d bought in Phoenix many years earlier, when I was with The Hollies. We came there probably in ‘67, and I bought this vintage Strat. I gave it to Jerry, and he immediately put on an alligator sticker, and that became the Alligator guitar — which just recently sold for over $400,000.
JESSE: Jerry Garcia started playing the ‘57 Strat in mid-summer 1971. The serious modifications started the next year, including the Alligator sticker that gave the guitar its name. Alligator would become Garcia’s first seriously modded guitar. Alembic technicians outfitted the Fender with new tuning pegs, a few different bridges, a new control plate, and an on-board blaster for extra volume boost. It played an important part in developing the so-called Bakersfield Dead sound of the early ‘70s, as we heard about during our episode on “Cumberland Blues.”
As Garcia told David Gans in 1981, “What I really wanted was to be able to get some of the metallic clang Strats have… that crispness you associate with country-and-western guitar players."
It was part of a wide-scale transformation in the way Jerry Garcia conceived of his own music and his songwriting with Robert Hunter, starting in 1969. Songs like “Black Peter” were the result. Here’s Garcia talking to journalist Ben Fong-Torres in 1976. This is from a CD called Got Some Things To Talk About.
JERRY GARCIA [1976]: The first two records that we wrote together were totally unwieldy, only a couple of them are remotely singable. Most of them were just too awkward or too wordy. That was before we started to learn about the little niceties of songwriting, that you should leave room for people to breathe and stuff like that.
JESSE: The eight songs of Workingman’s Dead wouldn’t suffer from lack of singability. Even Crosby, Stills, and Nash tried singing one eventually. Much more recently, in fact, around 2012.
GRAHAM NASH: One day, Rick Rubin got in touch and wanted to do an album of acoustic songs that we wish we’d written. It was really a brilliant idea: songs that we wish we’d written. So, of course, if we were going to take a song like James Taylor’s “Close Your Eyes”—[hums “Close Your Eyes”]—we had to make it sound like we had written it. There’s seven songs that we did with Rick Rubin. None of them worked out particularly well for us: we were going through a lot of changes at the same time, and so was Rick. We didn’t feel that he was genuinely interested in what we wanted. For instance, we wanted to do “Norwegian Wood” and “Blackbird,” and he told Crosby, “Oh, no, no, there’ll be only one Beatles song on this record.” And Crosby said, “There will only be one Beatles song on this record if we say there’s only one Beatles song.” From that moment, it was over. But it was quite an interesting project, for sure. I listened to a few of them last week, as a matter of fact. They sound pretty good, but we are our severest critics. If it gets past the three of us, it’s probably alright to be able to be played for you.
JESSE: Though Songs We Wish We’d Written is still on the shelf, you can find a few murky live clips of CSN singing “Uncle John’s Band” on YouTube.
“Uncle John’s Band” and “Black Peter” would become the Grateful Dead’s own most-sung songs from Workingman’s Dead, with “Black Peter” slightly in the lead. Except for a brief pause around the time of the Dead’s 1975-1976 touring hiatus, “Black Peter” was a song that Jerry Garcia sang year in and year out, from 1969 all the way up to 1995. It’s a song that aged with the band.
Here’s Buzz Poole, author of the 33 ⅓ book about Workingman’s Dead.
BUZZ POOLE: “Black Peter” is an ode to death. It is really powerful in that sense, but I think, over time, it became much more powerful for listeners because the Dead were getting older. Pigpen, certainly Keith, and then Brent, and Garcia’s health problems starting in the ‘80s — these songs take on even more poignancy because, at times, you’re basically watching a specter of death sing a song about death. That’s not the case in ‘69 or ‘70. Garcia was having a high time: he was in great shape, he was happy, everything seemed good. So I think “Black Peter” is one song that would certainly have an evolving impact it would have on the audience. I fit better into “Black Peter” now than I did when I was 16. The song obviously hasn’t changed, but I have. That’s the power of any art: we evolve alongside it.
JESSE: I probably belong in that camp, too. By the time the song returned in 1977, it found its own kind of soulful quiet, with Garcia occupying and navigating the vocal in new ways as his voice aged. Here’s how it sounded at Red Rocks in Colorado on July 7th, 1978.
AUDIO: “Black Peter” [July 1978: The Complete Recordings, 7/7/78] (1:42-2:02)
JESSE: On Workingman’s Dead, Garcia had doubled his own vocals on the bridge with a touch of falsetto. Phil Lesh, I think.
AUDIO: “Black Peter” [Workingman’s Dead] (3:38-3:58) - [dead.net] [Spotify] [YouTube]
JESSE: Donna Jean Godchaux joined the bridge vocals when the song came back in 1977, and the whole section became a gang vocal during Brent Mydland’s tenure. Here’s what it sounded like on July 12th, 1989 at RFK Stadium in Washington, DC, released on CD in 2017.
AUDIO: “Black Peter” [Robert F. Kennedy Stadium, Washington D.C., 7/12/89] (5:10-5:33)
JESSE: But the song’s biggest fireworks display was generally a final round of Garcia singing “run and see” before springing into the solo. Here’s how it sounded at that same RFK show, 20 years and one month after Robert Hunter’s fateful night at the Fillmore West.
AUDIO: “Black Peter” [Robert F. Kennedy Stadium, Washington D.C., 7/12/89] (7:10-7:40)