Workingman's Dead

About

When the Grateful Dead convened to record <i>Workingman’s Dead</i> in February 1970, they were intent on change. They wanted something lighter, simpler; something closer to a folk or country record than a psychedelic one. Conveniently, they were also deep in debt to their record company and trying to extract themselves from a recent—and costly—drug bust. Their previous album, <i>Aoxomoxoa</i>, took nearly six months at the cost of more than a million dollars in today’s money; <i>Workingman’s Dead</i> was done in nine day. The band was spending more and more time on Mickey Hart’s ranch up north, shooting gun, riding horse, and generally communing with the land. They were cowboys now, singing cowboy songs: the card-game gamble of “Dire Wolf,” the rustic fever dream of “Black Peter.” Robert Hunter, the band’s lyricist, became a more prominent member and, in turn, enlarged the share of narrative in the band’s sound, creating a world that felt both contemporary and oddly ancient, in which American folk figures (the train conductor of “Casey Jone,” the miners of “Cumberland Blues”) commingled with archetypes from dreams and myth. The psychedelia of <i>Workingman’s Dead</i> didn’t lie in sound effect, but in the way it flattened time, blurring the line between 1870 and 1970, between the frontiers of the gold rush and of the counterculture, of a past that, as it turned out, could still be felt with the correct (ahem) kind of goggle. .

via Apple Music

The Clerk says

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