While the Dead was letting Live/Dead define the era (and pay the bills) the band had already moved on, capitalizing on the newly flourishing writing partnership between Jerry Garcia and Robert Hunter. While that team was responsible for all of Aoxomoxoa, that album was something very different. Workingman’s Dead was the point where that duo stopped simply emulating the folk tradition and started contributing to it. This first album of 1970 features a laid-back, acoustic-based Dead, one that believed in serving the song, over musical chops and trippy ideas.
This time, it was all about the songs. The ones offered on this album were songs that, with few exceptions, stayed with the band for the rest of its days. “Uncle John’s Band”, which opens the album, is one of the band’s most iconic songs and the closer, “Casey Jones” was another of the band’s all-time classics (despite being played only 21 times in the back half of their career). Between those bookends we have cosmic folk (“High Time” and the brilliant “Dire Wolf”, featuring Jerry flexing his pedal steel skills), death ballads (“Black Peter”), grimy rock & roll (“New Speedway Boogie”), revved-up bluegrass (“Cumberland Blues”), and some dirty blues (“Easy Wind”, written by Hunter and sung brilliantly by Pigpen).
This was a completely new Grateful Dead and I can only imagine what it was like for a fan to hear this for the first time. On this album, the band wasn’t trying to emulate or replicate their live experience but instead they were totally focused on the song itself, as an art form. Cleverness was replaced with depth, experimental bits were traded for concise, coherent thoughts, and sonic density gave way to spacial balance. It helped that they had such a brilliant batch of songs at their disposal.
They would take this idea to the next level, only four and half months later, cementing their place in history with the classic, American Beauty….
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