Good Ol’ Grateful Deadcast
Season 1, Episode 8
Workingman’s Dead 50: Casey Jones
Archival interviews:
- Robert Hunter, by Denis McNamera, WLIR, 3/78.
JESSE: Workingman’s Dead is a landmark achievement, a legendary album filled with classic songs that continue to live today both in the popular memory and in the active repertoires of performing musicians. It’s an album that even non-Dead fans know. But for Dead Heads with access to the band’s live recordings, it might even be a little forgotten.
The Grateful Dead are legendary for their live tapes, each different from every other one, a particular combination of musical and alchemical circumstances that never existed again, shaping the contour and content of the individual performances. Some nights were transcendent, some just okay.
The Grateful Dead’s albums are like that, too, each capturing the Dead’s world as it existed for just a few passing moments. But if you’re one of those Dead fans that focuses exclusively on live Dead, I earnestly suggest that you mentally cross out the name “Workingman’s Dead” and label the j-card of a virtual cassette to read “Grateful Dead, March 1970 Pacific High Recording, San Francisco, CA.” It’s kind of a classic tape.
It was a “tape” they made at one of the most pivotal points of their career, recorded as it became clear that their then-manager Lenny Hart was stealing money from the band. “It was something, all this heavy bullshit was flying around us,” Jerry Garcia told Rolling Stone. “So we just retreated in there and made music. Only the studio was calm. The record was the only concrete thing happening, the rest was part of that insane legal and financial figment of everybody's imagination, so I guess it came out of a place that was real to all of us.”
But if Grateful Dead live tapes were underground hits, exchanged from hand to hand, Workingman’s Dead was a mainstream one. Not top 10, nor even top 20. But a real charting success, with an impact far beyond anything they’d done previously. A stone classic, it both transcended the Dead’s world and became a cornerstone for newly minted Dead freaks. And well-established Dead freaks, too.
Grateful Dead archivist and legacy manager David Lemieux.
DAVID LEMIEUX: I've met so many people, a little bit older than me, who would have been buying records in 1970, and they're certainly not Dead Heads or possibly not even Dead fans. And yet, they still own a vinyl copy of [Workingman’s Dead] in their record collection, because they would buy whatever were the best albums of the year. Maybe they never became a huge fan of that band, but they would still have that band's best record in their opinion. Generally, those people have Workingman’s Dead and, for the most part, also American Beauty. I’ve met countless people like that who, when they find out I work for the Dead, they know nothing about the Dead, but they do have Workingman’s Dead in their vinyl collection from 50 years ago. I know a lot of people who consider this the beginning of the Grateful Dead as we know the Grateful Dead. The hardcore, the people who are really huge Dead Heads, of course they’re going to go back to the first album and Aoxomoxoa and of course Live/Dead. But for people who are Dead fans or know of the Dead, it’s accessible music. Accessible music is, I think, a good place for people to start.
JESSE: Because of its sheer popularity, it was an album that recommended itself, and for good reason. Perhaps no song symbolized it more than “Casey Jones.” Never released as a single, “Casey Jones” became an underground legend in part because of its seemingly risque first line reference to cocaine. Of course, the song was completely catchy, too. But at a time when cocaine was just beginning to come back into American culture, both underground and mainstream, it made the song notorious.
Both “Casey Jones” and Workingman’s Dead remain entry points into the wide world of the Grateful Dead, even a half-century later. For new school bluegrass guitarist Billy Strings, Workingman’s Dead was his first exposure to the band, and “Casey Jones” became a quick favorite.
BILLY STRINGS: [Workingman’s Dead] is just such a classic American record. It’s got so many Americana, country, bluegrass, folky overtones: the steel guitar and stuff like that, there's a lot of that flavor. Every song is just a classic. “Casey Jones” was my one song that I really liked when I was in middle school and high school. I listened to a lot of bluegrass then — I listened to a lot of Doc Watson, Bill Monroe and Stanley Brothers, also a lot of David Grisman and Doc Watson. And that's sort of how I got turned on to Jerry, through the music of David Grisman. I found out about the stuff that he did together and it's like: who's this guy playing with Dawg? He must be pretty good if Dawg’s got him playing.
It’s really strange to me that “Casey Jones” was my favorite, because it’s just so far from what I love about the Grateful Dead now. I don’t feel like my ear was mature enough to understand the “Estimated Prophet”s and the “Dark Star”s, the deep jams that would come out on the live stuff. It just went over my head. But “Casey Jones”... I loved it, man. I had that song on my iPod and I’d play it on the bus ride to school, and all the time when I was skateboarding. It was weird how much I liked that song.
When I started learning about the Grateful Dead—and Jerry’s playing specifically, his leads and the different avenues he would walk down with his notes—it just opened up so many doors for me, in that I learned that there was that freedom in music and improvisation, when I did start to acquire the taste for that. In the same way, when I was in high school, when I heard Coltrane or something, it would just go right over my head.
JESSE: “Casey Jones” is how many people met the Grateful Dead. From its irresistible opening lick, it signaled big fun. But signals can be deceiving. Which is maybe part of the point of what you might call a cautionary tale.
AUDIO: “Casey Jones” [Workingman’s Dead] (0:00-0:15) - [dead.net] [Spotify] [YouTube]
JESSE: Here’s how Robert Hunter described the genesis of “Casey Jones” to Denis McNamera on WLIR in 1978.
ROBERT HUNTER [1978]: In my notebook, on one page, I had just written on it… I don’t know what prompted it, I just heard the line in my head and it just tickled me: “Driving that train, high on cocaine, Casey Jones you better watch your speed.” It was the only thing written on that page, and it was probably about three or four months later [when] I opened the book up and just continued it. It was easy to continue it — it was an easy song to write.
JESSE: Sounds simple enough. There’s a complication to the story, but those first two lines that tickled Robert Hunter are so packed that we’ll start with them.
AUDIO: “Cocaine Habit Blues” [Mother McCree’s Uptown Jug Champions, s/t] (0:18-0:44)
JESSE: That was Jerry Garcia singing “Cocaine Habit Blues” with Mother McCree’s Uptown Jug Champions in 1964, released on CD in 1998. There was a long history of cocaine songs when cocaine was legal and available in numerous pharmaceutical forms. And there was a long history of songs about one John Luther Jones, the doomed train engineer known as Casey, who perished in a workplace accident late in the evening on April 30th, 1900 in Vaughn, Mississippi. Here’s a bit of Furry Lewis’s epic 1928 Victor recording, originally stretched over two sides of a 78 rpm record.
AUDIO: “Kassie Jones” [Furry Lewis, Anthology of American Folk Music] (3:36-3:58)
JESSE: Jerry Garcia and Robert Hunter would’ve certainly been familiar with that recording, included on Harry Smith’s foundational Anthology of American Folk Music LP collection in 1952. Eagle-eared listeners might’ve noticed a few lines that also appear in “She’s On the Road Again,” which the Dead learned from a recording by the Memphis Jug Band, also from 1928. Must’ve been one of those memes.
And the Dead’s version of “Casey Jones” is exactly that, updating and combining two early 20th century musical memes into one song that would become a famous example of both. The first version of “Casey Jones” to be recorded was by Fiddlin’ John Carson in 1923.
AUDIO: “Casey Jones” [Fiddlin’ John Carson, Fiddlin’ John Carson Vol. 1 1923-1924] (1:26-1:39) - [Spotify]
JESSE: But Casey Jones was famous long before there was even a recorded song about him. The real Casey Jones was born in Kayce, Kentucky, which is where he later got the “Casey” nickname. If you’re passing through Jackson, Tennessee sometime, just off I-40 about between Memphis and Nashville, you can visit the
Casey Jones Home and Railroad Museum.
Casey Jones worked for the Illinois Central Railroad. His recognizable way of blowing a train whistle is said to be the source of another song popularized on the Anthology of American Folk Music, “K.C. Moan,” also performed by the Dead’s favorite, the Memphis Jug Band, and which likewise floated through Bob Weir’s acoustic repertoire in later years. Like the other Casey Jones songs, “K.C. Moan” didn’t turn up for sale until the dawn of the country-folk recording boom in the ‘20s.
AUDIO: “K.C. Moan” [Memphis Jug Band, Anthology of American Folk Music] (0:27-0:52)
JESSE: Casey Jones died in a train accident on a rainy night, in the early hours of May 1st, 1900, when the Cannonball Express, piloted by Casey, collided with another train’s caboose. Casey’s friend Wallace Saunders, an engine wiper, wrote the first song days later, and it hopped into the folk network, and seemingly made a jump into Vaudeville. By 1912, it was so popular that it’d earned its own parody by pioneering radical songwriter Joe Hill called “Casey Jones -- The Union Scab.” Casey wasn’t a scab, though. He was a company man all the way. Also, for that matter, a teetotaler. Which is to say, he was also decisively not high on cocaine nor anything else when he drove and crashed that train.
After the Dead finished recording Workingman’s Dead but before it came out, they debuted their own version of “The Ballad of Casey Jones,” done Mississippi John Hurt style. Here’s how it sounded at the Fillmore East on May 15th, 1970, released as Road Trips Volume 3, Number 3.
AUDIO: “The Ballad of Casey Jones” [Road Trips Vol. 3, No. 3, 5/15/70] (1:26-1:54) - [Spotify] [YouTube]
JESSE: “Casey Jones” wasn’t the first old folk song reimagined by Garcia and Hunter. They’d tried it the year before on Aoxomoxoa’s “Dupree’s Diamond Blues,” drawing on the ballad “Betty and Dupree.” But when Robert Hunter added cocaine to the mix, at least proverbially, the song took on a whole new dimension. Robert Hunter tried to find a substitute, he said, instead of cocaine. He tried “whipping that chain” and “lugging propane,” but neither worked. “Casey Jones” was born a cocaine song and stayed a cocaine song. “There was no other line for the song,” Hunter wrote. He sometimes recounted the story of writing the first line in his pocket notebook and adding the rest several months later. But he told a slightly different version of the song’s origin story to Dennis McNally, the Dead’s publicist and biographer, saying that lyrics came to him in a dream.
A few episodes back, we examined how the lyrics to “Dire Wolf” were a virtual dream transcription, written by Hunter immediately after waking. And Hunter told Dennis McNally that the same was true for “Casey Jones.” This isn’t incompatible with the other story. Perhaps he wrote the first few lines and let his subconscious do the rest of the work a few months later. In this dream, Hunter said, he encountered the poet Bobby Petersen. Several years older than most people in the Dead scene, Petersen was a close friend of Phil Lesh’s from the days before The Warlocks. Petersen was a serious poet, had written the lyrics to “New Potato Caboose” in 1967 and would go on to write the words to “Unbroken Chain,” “Pride of Cucamonga,” and “Revolutionary Hamstrung Blues.” The dream version of Bobby Petersen was working on a new set of lyrics. Hunter read them over his shoulder, then woke up and wrote them down — “Casey Jones.” Why would Robert Hunter be dreaming of Bobby Petersen? Here’s historian and archivist Nicholas Meriwether of the Center For Counterculture Studies.
NICHOLAS MERIWETHER: Especially in the 1960s, there was a genuine sense that Hunter was by far the more skilled lyricist, and his folk music background really underscored that. But Petersen, at least within the Dead’s immediate circle, was really viewed as a very serious and accomplished poet in a way that Hunter was not. Petersen had already been published in a couple of small-press magazines, small-press poetry periodicals, and Peterson had, apparently, the ear of some of the actual Beats. He seems to have had some connection with Gary Snyder. Hunter already had aspirations to be more than just a lyricist, but I think he probably felt like he was the junior poet when it came to thinking about Petersen.
JESSE: After his dream-world assist from Petersen, Hunter handed the lyrics to Jerry Garcia over breakfast. Garcia told Charles Reich in 1971, “The words were just so exquisite, they were just so perfect that I just sat down with the words, picked up a guitar and played the song … It just came out. It just triggered. Here it is.” The Dead were playing “Casey Jones” onstage a few weeks later.
Garcia and Hunter seem to have written “Dire Wolf” on May 26th, 1969. The Dead debuted it onstage a week-and-a-half later at the Fillmore West. On June 8th, Robert Hunter had the horrific LSD experience that led to the writing of “Black Peter,” as we examined a few episodes back, and a creative hiatus of several months, as we heard last time. Almost certainly, “Casey Jones” was written between these two points.
It debuted at the Fillmore East in June 1969, during the same shows where the band first played “High Time” and Jerry Garcia unveiled his new pedal steel onstage with the Dead. Here’s Gary Lambert, who heard “Casey Jones” for the first time at the Fillmore East that week.
GARY LAMBERT: When they first played it in 1969, it was not as rhythmically driving. It had sort of a long, nebulous vamp opening; they didn't have that really dynamic opening figure that just slammed you right to the song. They kind of built up to it. It felt like something more akin to their jug band roots than to rock and roll. But boy, did they figure out how to make that more concise and more powerful — and, again, a perfect match of the musical context and Hunter’s very witty lyric. It's a tale of tragedy. It speaks to something Hunter did a lot, which was taking American folk archetypes and standing them on their head — Casey Jones being one of the oldest of American folk ballads and folktales. He would do that later with “Stagger Lee” and various other songs. He would always invoke something from deeper folkloric roots, but make it very specifically Grateful Dead. And, of course, you can't get much more specific than a guy causing a train wreck because he's high on blow.
JESSE: Despite coming from folk roots, “Casey Jones” was pure rock & roll, and its energy fit unquestionably into the powerful double-drummer version of the Grateful Dead. The song’s loose intro tightened up very gradually, solidifying into a signal-like guitar riff from Garcia to something like the final version. By November 1969, it got the finishing touch, with the distinct whip-crack snare-drum snap-start. Here’s one very effective usage of the song’s new concise beginning, recorded February 14th, 1970 at the Fillmore East, introduced by [John] Zacherle, just a few days before the Workingman’s Dead sessions and released on Dick’s Picks 4.
ZACHERLE [2/14/70]: Well well, this is glorious Sunday morning... the Grateful goddamn Dead!
[audience cheers]
AUDIO: “Casey Jones” [Dick’s Picks 4, 2/14/70] (0:00-0:30) - [Spotify] [YouTube]
JESSE: Let’s head behind the purple door of Pacific High Recording with co-producer Bob Matthews, who described his view from the control room.
BOB MATTHEWS: It was a room that was put together piece by piece. I want to say it was something like about 30’ by 40’, and 18-20’ high; acoustically treated with multiple moveable gobos with different sides, both reflective and absorptive; and very heavy theater velvet curtains that sat out from the actual hard walls inside the studio maybe about 18 inches.
JESSE: For a few weeks in 1970, Pacific High became home to the MM-1000, the multi-track recorder that the Dead purchased directly from Ampex on behalf of Bob, Betty, and Alembic.
BOB MATTHEWS: The 16 track that we purchased was legally purchased through the Grateful Dead, but was owned and operated by Alembic. It was just a result of having figured out how to make Live/Dead. They were just blown away. If you’ve ever seen an MM-1000, you’d understand why anybody would be really surprised that you could get that machine—an 800-pound machine—up three flights of stairs at the Avalon Ballroom, on Sutter in San Francisco. I had my crew and we hired other bands’ crew, and we made slings to put underneath the machine. We had four people on each side, and two [other] people, one person in the back and one person in the front. So we had 10 people lifting up in sync, marching up the stairs up the Avalon Ballroom — which are, I swear, the steepest set of stairs to any of the ballrooms at that time, the ‘60s, ‘70s, ‘80s.
JESSE: Blank recording tape was expensive in 1970, as we discussed a few episodes back, but the Dead hit on a solution some heads may recognize. They became dealers.
BOB MATTHEWS: We were an agent for them. We purchased enough tape that we were able to buy it as a dealer. We were a distributor for Ampex products. Most of it was actually handled under the flag of Alembic.
JESSE: Between touring and recording, the early part of 1970 was already one of the busiest periods of the Dead and Bob Matthews’ careers. But during exactly the same weeks that they began making Workingman’s Dead demos, Bob was thrust into a new job as the Dead’s live sound engineer, after their previous engineer—one Owsley Augustus Stanley the Third—had been busted with the band in New Orleans, violating the terms of his probation.
BOB MATTHEWS: As a result of that action, our regular sound man was restricted as far as travel. His bond had been restricted, and he couldn't leave the state. So that was when I was told: hey, tag, you’re it. That was fun, in a way; it was not fun in another way. There weren’t any instructions on how you made the PA work. I knew how to make it work, but there were no instructions as to what the components were, what was plugged together, what filter plugged into which preamp. You had to guess it, and it was halfway through the first show in Rochester that I worked on that before I got the right plugs in the right place. Then I wrote him a horrendous letter, and moved forward from there.
JESSE: At the same time, manager Lenny Hart ran off with the band’s money, which certainly didn’t help.
BOB MATTHEWS: He’d gotten away just as I was trying to record. This was the same period of time that Workingman’s Dead and Live/Dead— this was ’69, ‘70—[were being made] so it was a major distraction. It took a while, and it was difficult to get the work done that I was supposed to be getting done, with all of these unknowns. It didn't take that long — I think within six months, things got straightened out to the point where I could just go to work and make records. But it was a big hassle, and there was an internal conflict about it.
JESSE: Bob Matthews was a working man just like the rest of the Dead, and it was work that would get them through 1970. As Jerry Garcia told Jann Wenner, “Being able to do that was extremely positive in the midst of all this adverse stuff that was happening.”
“Casey Jones” was the electric Grateful Dead at their most buoyant and even joyous, give or take the impending crash. There were no acoustic guitars, no pedal steel, no banjo, no New Riders. But it was a Grateful Dead that was more than the sum of their parts. Brain Kehew restored The Angel’s Share outtakes of Workingman’s Dead.
BRIAN KEHEW: There's a part of the “Casey Jones” song in the versions we hear here, vs. the record… the record has a lot more parts in it, it has a lot of layers. And this is a very stripped version, and they sound like Booker T & the MGs. They really sound like a Stax / Motown kind of band, and I never really had felt that influence before. But you can hear that there's elements of that in their music that is very clear on that, before it got worked on more.
JESSE: Here’s Brian to break down exactly what’s on the final Workingman’s Dead recording of “Casey Jones,” track by track.
BRIAN KEHEW: The first track we have is Mickey playing shaker, a percussion instrument, along with the drums, bass, and two guitars. You can hear them in the room, playing live with him at the same time. [playback of first track] Next up is Bill playing drums in the room. [playback of second track] And then we have Bill’s bass drum track, really good sounding, nice and full. [playback of bass drum track] And here is the drum track added to the kick drum track, the full drum sound. [playback of composite drums tracks] And we have Phil’s bass track — he’s plugged in directly to the console. They’re not using a microphone on the amp, although we do hear an amp earlier on the percussion track. Sometimes on some of these tracks, Phil is using three different signals from different amps and the direct input to get a good bass sound. But this one simply has a direct input — it sounds nice and clean. [playback of Phil’s bass track] Next we have Jerry’s guitar track. He’s playing through his Fender Twin Reverb amplifier. This amplifier has a reverb setting, a stretched string inside that gives an artificial echo-type sound. You can hear that in the background quietly as he plays. It wouldn’t be something noticeable in the actual mix of the song, but when it’s isolated like this, we can hear it. [playback of Jerry’s guitar track] Then we have Bob’s guitar part, played live in the room with the others. It’s a full, complete take. This guitar part contains a lot of the themes and figures that are really integral to the song. [playback of Bob’s guitar track] Once the basic track was recorded, Bob went back to overdub a second guitar part — many of the same parts. This time, his guitar is going through the rotating speaker system called the Leslie, which we heard earlier on “High Time.” [playback of Bob’s second guitar track] And then when both guitars are put together in the mix, we hear Bob’s original guitar, plus the Leslie guitar. They play slightly different parts; it adds a nice bit of orchestration and dimension to the mix.
JESSE: Another part of “Casey Jones” is that Bob Weir gets a mini double-tracked guitar solo, perhaps more of a break, before a hand-off to Jerry Garcia. One thing I like is that, on the final version, each of the guitarists gets a subtle vocal spotlight during their respective part of the break.
AUDIO: “Casey Jones” [Workingman’s Dead] (1:59-2:16) - [dead.net] [Spotify] [YouTube]
BRIAN KEHEW: Jerry also overdubbed a guitar, a solo for the middle of the song. It has a little bit of reverb added, which is a nice, smooth sound, not like the amplifier but more like the studio reverb, which is an echo chamber they had at the time. [playback of Jerry’s guitar solo overdub track] And onto the vocals. This is Jerry’s vocal track. You’ll hear him singing by himself, but also in the room next to him, Bob is doing his live harmonies, just a few feet over on a different microphone. We’ll hear that next, but first, here’s Jerry. You can hear the leakage from Bob singing live in the room along with him. [playback of lead vocal track] And then Bobby’s harmony track, which goes throughout the song. Again, you can hear Bobby singing — when he has a break, you can hear Jerry is across the room from him singing the original vocal. [playback of harmony vocal track] Then, for the mix, they added to the original vocal track a slap echo, which is kind of a repeating sound done with a tape machine. This echo doesn’t have quite the fidelity of the original vocal, but that works well for the mix. It’s a little bit more muted and dark sounding. But it adds a cool effect that they’ve used on some other songs like “New Speedway Boogie.” You’ll hear that here first. This is the dark echo added to the vocal, and then the vocal with the echo. [playback of echo vocal track] So here are the three vocal tracks combined: you have Jerry’s original, Bob’s harmony, and then the echo added to Jerry’s vocal. Those are the parts you hear on the record. [playback of composite vocal tracks] After this was done, they went back and recorded another vocal pass with both Jerry and Bob singing. They only use that for a few lines in the song, finding a slight improvement over the original take. But most of this is the original take that we heard before. There are 4 tracks unused at the end of the 16-track tape, so they didn’t find it necessary to add any more parts to make this a complete record.
JESSE: Andy Zwerling of Rolling Stone called out the blend of instruments on “Casey Jones,” writing, “Listen closely, especially to the cymbal work. Then listen to Phil Lesh's bass mixing with Weir's guitar. Now listen to the cymbal again. Yep. They did it. I don't know whose train is better, Casey's or the Dead's. Living sound effects.”
AUDIO: “Casey Jones” [Workingman’s Dead] (2:41-3:10) - [dead.net] [Spotify] [YouTube]
JESSE: There were also a few subtle studio elements that added to the song’s lore. If you ask a musicologist, they might say that they serve the song’s text. The first could be heard just before the song started.
AUDIO: “Casey Jones” sniff
JESSE: But if you ask co-producer Bob Matthews, which we did, he would say that he regretted that particular decision.
BOB MATTHEWS: That was never intended, and did not occur, as a reference to some double entendre. Jerry always had breathing problems, singing problems. So it was while we were doing overdubs for the vocal on “Casey Jones” that he was clearing his head. What he used to do to keep his throat clear he would take a short shot of Drambuie, wash that with lemon juice; the Drambuie would be really soft and syrupy, and it would coat his throat, so it didn’t hurt. And then the lemon juice would cut through the Drambuie, and his throat would feel good. But in the process of that, after the lemon juice, he cleared his throat and [sniffles]. Now, I did have a choice to whether to keep that in or not. A number of the songs on Workingman’s Dead I mixed without any of the other band members being there. I was given that opportunity because I had mixed Live/Dead totally without any band members there. The band members didn’t hear Live/Dead until I had totally completed it and submitted it to them and the record company. I debated — on one hand, it was cute; on the other hand… I’ll tell you, to this day, if I had to do it over again, I wouldn’t. It was cute, okay, and cute doesn’t last long in that environment, in an artistic environment. A lot of people globbed into it, thought it was funny, blah blah blah. But it was not a good artistic choice.
JESSE: I personally think it’s kinda cool. It’s so subtle it took me years to notice, and by the time they get to the song’s first chorus, I’ve usually forgotten about it. Here’s Gary Lambert on the other bit of studio tweaking.
GARY LAMBERT: Garcia said something about “Casey Jones” — I think it was in the famous Rolling Stone interview with Charles Reich, where he said, “Yeah, ‘Casey Jones’ was designed to be a little irritating, the way cocaine is.” There’s just something about the way they produced the song, it’s got this kind of agitated rhythm thing. He said he sort of wanted to epitomize what cocaine was like. Mission accomplished, I guess.
JESSE: As Garcia explained to Charles Reich in 1971, “it's got a split-second little delay, which sounds very mechanical, like a typewriter almost, on the vocal, which is like a little bit jangly, and the whole thing is, well...I always thought it's a pretty good musical picture of what cocaine is like. A little bit evil. And hard-edged.” That’s the so-called “dark-sounding” slap echo that Brian Kehew just demonstrated. Here’s a little bit of the new remastered mix, for extra high-fidelity evil. Listen closely...
AUDIO: “Casey Jones” [Workingman’s Dead] (1:24-1:33) - [dead.net] [Spotify] [YouTube]
JESSE: On the tape box for the album mixes, somebody labeled the song “Casey Dope.” Says co-producer Bob Matthews…
BOB MATTHEWS: Those are all written in Betty's handwriting. She was most excellent at a number of things, including her ears, but she was also an excellent documentist.
JESSE: In 1970, the year of the song’s release, it appeared on no charts in Billboard. Robert Hunter later reported to David Gans that when he’d done a radio appearance later in the decade, the DJ retrieved the station’s copy of Workingman’s Dead and “showed me Casey Jones, and there was a nail scratch across Casey Jones. And he said, 'The program director did this. He said we are not to play this, because the word 'cocaine' is used in it, and the word's coming from the FCC that if any of this kind of stuff is going on, we stand in danger of losing our licenses.' I went, 'Oops, that's where my hits go...'"
But “Casey Jones” was a hit, no matter what the charts or conservative station directors declared. In the fall, when the Dead played in New York, an East Village Other writer observed that “everyone was yelling for ‘Casey Jones.’” The next year, industry publication Cashbox even referred to “Casey Jones” as a hit in a review of a Dead show. Gary Lambert.
GARY LAMBERT: The final figure, “And you know that notion just crossed my mind” — after the buildup, they come to the end of the chord progression and they sing that refrain once again. And it's almost like a parody of an old vaudeville or barbershop quartet kind of song: it goes from that driving headed-for-catastrophe rock thing to this jaunty little tag at the end. I 've always loved that.
AUDIO: “Casey Jones” [Workingman’s Dead] (4:15-4:23) - [dead.net] [Spotify] [YouTube]
JESSE: While there aren’t surviving the session sheets for the album, the dates of its final assemblage are more clear. The Dead spent March 11th through March 15th mixing Workingman’s Dead before setting out for a series of shows on the East Coast, with Robert Hunter joining the band on the road for the first time. When they got back to town, there was more album business to attend to. Like the album’s cover — it needed some art. Here’s David Nelson of the New Riders of the Purple Sage, who played on “Cumberland Blues.”
DAVID NELSON: I love that cover. The front picture is the photograph and Bob Hunter is the one guy who is not in the band in the photo. He actually didn't want people to know that that was him at the time. He put a coat on, standing on the street corner. And those portraits on the back, each band member — was that Stanley Mouse? Yeah. Fantastic, man.
JESSE: Gary Lambert.
GARY LAMBERT: Those interesting pictures of the band members on the back, it really tells you what this album is going to be in a very direct and profound way, because the Grateful Dead had, before that, had some of the most wildly psychedelic album art. So as they were entering their pastoral period musically—as a recording band at least; they stayed plenty weird in the live forum—as they were announcing this change in their musical direction, they were also heralding it with the artwork. I thought that was absolutely brilliant. And just that font that Stanley Mouse or Alton Kelley picked… there was a store, by the way, in Oakland, California, called the Workingman’s Store. And if you ever find an old picture of it, I think that may have been the inspiration for that particular bit of artwork.
JESSE: The artwork for Workingman’s Dead was handled by the San Francisco art studio of Stanley Mouse and Alton Kelley, who’d created cover art for the band’s self-titled debut in 1966, Aoxomoxoa in 1969, and numerous posters for Bay Area shows. They’d go on to create art for most of the Dead’s album covers over the next decade and beyond. In the case of Workingman’s Dead, it was apparently handled mostly by Mouse.
Mouse took photos of the band and applied his technique to create the sepia-toned vibe they requested. Pull out your copy of Workingman’s Dead. The band is standing on a street corner. Robert Hunter is with them, standing at the rear of the pack with Jerry Garcia. Drummer Bill Kreutzmann was in no mood for photo shoots and retired to the shaded steps on the corner. At the rear of the image, the shadows of three billowing smoke-stacks can be seen. Look more closely, though, and you might notice that shadows aren’t real, melting into the sky behind them.
There are two work-in-progress drafts of the album art floating around online. In one, auctioned by Bonhams in 2015, the album is still titled The Workingman’s Dead, and it has the beginning of a faux-picture frame around it — though it seems as if Mouse abandoned it part way through. In another version of the art, a star-nosed mole looms next to the smokestack shadows. It was determined that the star-nosed mole wasn’t appropriate for the front cover of the band’s country-flavored album. I can’t imagine why, but I’m fond of the alternate timeline that includes Workingmole’s Dead.
The curious Deadologist might pose two related questions: When and where was the cover photo taken? To figure out when, we first apply one of the basic skills of any good ol’ Grateful Deadologist: facial hair forensics. On the front cover of Workingman’s Dead, Mickey Hart has a mutton chop sideburn / mustache combination and Jerry Garcia has a big bushy beard.
A group of German Dead Heads have attempted to date every known photograph of the Grateful Dead up through 1975. Thanks to the help of Uli Teute and Volkmar Rupp, we see that Mickey Hart doesn’t have his sideburns on March 21st in Port Chester. They turn up in concert photos at the Fillmore West performances with Miles Davis starting on April 9th. Jerry Garcia, meanwhile, actually shaved his beard between nights of the Fillmore West shows. The Dead were on tour until April 3rd, which means that the photo on Workingman’s Dead—taken in San Francisco—had to have been taken somewhere between April 4th and April 9th, 1970.
Figuring out where the photo was taken is considerably more complicated. For that, we turn to Bob Egan, who runs the absolutely wild world wide web site, popspotsnyc.com, in which he uses a vast and creative toolkit of techniques to figure out the locations of famous album covers and other music-related photographs. Workingman’s Dead was kind of a doozy. You can read about Bob’s full methodology at popspotsnyc.com for this and many other incredible location hunts, but here’s Bob to explain some of the salient points.
BOB EGAN: They’re at a street corner and it looks like they’re waiting for a bus. They’re at what looks like a bar, and there’s a sign in the front — you can kind of see the bottom of a “G.” In the background is a Victorian house; it has three smokestacks on it and the smoke comes out. So I initially saw it and thought — well, that’s an industrial area that I’ll have to look at. But if you look closer, you’ll see that the shadow of the smokestacks continues into the sky, which meant that it was airbrushed in — they airbrushed the shadows, so that was a false lead. The other clue on the front page is the way the guys are standing. They’re casting a shadow, so you know that the light comes from the south, and the street they’re on goes east-west, based on the way the shadow was cast.
JESSE: Bob kept looking for little clues. Two more came when an auction of Stanley Mouse’s photographs contained a short description of the photo shoot from Mouse himself.
BOB EGAN: Mouse says it was “104 degrees, and Mouse dressed the band in heavy work overalls, and posed them in front of Barney’s Beanery in San Francisco. So, there’s a next clue. Across the street from a meat rendering plant. Now, a meat rendering plant takes the carcasses of livestock and transforms them into oils and fats. It is really gross, and the guys having their photograph taken, they said it smelled to high heaven. Anyway, two more clues — Barney’s Beanery and the meat rendering plant. Anyway, there is a famous Barney’s Beanery, I don’t know if you know it but it’s in Los Angeles on the Sunset Strip. It’s a place where Jim Morrison used to hang out, Janis Joplin too. If you look at the front cover of Cheap Thrills by Big Brothers and the Holding Company, there’s a drawing by R. Crumb.
JESSE: The only problem is that there was no Barney’s Beanery in San Francisco. A temporary setback!
BOB EGAN: So, the next thing I went after was where they said that they took the picture, across from a rendering plant. So I looked under slaughterhouses in San Francisco. I finally ended up calling a guy, and he told me about a place called Butchertown, which is southeast San Francisco.
JESSE: The trail went temporarily cold again. Following a dead-end lead about the Victorian house at the rear of the photograph, Bob had been in touch with San Francisco architectural historian Jonathan Lammers, who later got back in touch. He’d found the missing piece.
BOB EGAN: The 2001 box set The Golden Road had an outtake of that [photo] session, and you can see the guys in the street corner. Way in the background were two giant storage tanks. What they did was they went to aerial shots of San Francisco, and they looked down in that section of the meat area — they were looking to find the two oil tanks. And from the oil tanks, they could figure out where the building was. They went to an overhead picture source called David Rumsey Map Collection, and they found an overhead picture taken from that era that showed the house. Then, they went to a San Francisco library, and found a thing called a Sanborn map, which they have of the major cities to show every single building. They found the building, and found there was a 1199 Evans [Avenue]. Then, they looked in a reverse phonebook — you put in 1199 Evans, and it tells you who is there. And it turns out to be Beanie’s Place Tavern. So, Barney’s Beanery was Beanie’s Place Tavern. So they were all kind of right, but they were off. Anyway, that gave the exact location of the building. The album cover was taken in a place called 1199 Evans Avenue at Keith Street in way-southeast San Francisco, a place called Hunter’s Point. Right now, the area is a brewery called Speakeasy’s.
JESSE: You can see documentation for all of this at PopSpotsNYC.com, with maps, other overlaid images, and those few dead ends. You can also see Bob’s fascinating work on tons of other album covers and photographs, including a few other shots of the Dead. But, like Workingman’s Dead, his page on the cover remains a classic.
BOB EGAN: When I put up this Grateful Dead PopSpot, my server is in Texas, and so many Dead Heads passed this around that it broke his server. He had 250 companies on that server, so he had to cut me off for four days because so many people were trying to get to it. Nobody could get to his other 250 customers! So, since then, he had to give me a private server.
JESSE: It’s almost surely just a coincidence, but I also can’t help but note that the album cover featuring Robert Hunter was shot in the neighborhood called... Hunter’s Point.
Stanley Mouse remembered the photo being shot on an unseasonably warm day. He said it was 104 degrees, but let’s call that a slight exaggeration. But with this information we might narrow the photo shoot day down even further. If the photo was taken between April 4th and April 9th, 1970 we can see by historical weather data that only April 4th reached a balmy peak of 73 degrees in Hunter’s Point — about 10 degrees hotter than the usual average of 63, where it lingered during the other 5 days in that window.
So, unless you’ve got another theory, we’ll go ahead and suggest that the cover of Workingman’s Dead was shot on April 4th, 1970, the day the Dead got back their East Coast tour, the first time Robert Hunter had joined them on the road. If you want, maybe you can even imagine Stanley Mouse corralling the Dead into a van straight from the airport. The location in Hunter’s Point would’ve been on their way home.
Sometime in early April, there was another bit of album business to attend to, something that had become a bit of a tradition for the Dead in recent years. To tell the first part of the story, we have Michael Parrish, who is a world-renowned paleontologist, but who you may know from such awesomeness as The Deadhead’s Taping Compendium, as well as organizing the So Many Roads conference at San Jose State in 2014. He saw his first Dead show on March 1st, 1969 at the Fillmore West and has been a professional-grade Deadologist ever since.
MICHAEL PARRISH: When I was in high school, I was an inveterate listener to KSAN and KMPX before that. They had a lot of connections with the bands, but it was pretty routine for somebody in the Dead organization to drop their albums really early to the radio stations. One of the things that sort of led to this epiphany of getting fascinated with music is the first night they played Anthem of the Sun, it was a pretty cool night. They played Anthem of the Sun all the way through; they played Waiting for the Sun, which was gonna drop in a few weeks, The Doors album; a Donovan live album. They were playing all this stuff. But it was two months before the album came out. Then, for Live/Dead, they actually played the whole album in March or April. I was coming home from swimming practice, and I didn’t get to record all of it. It didn’t come out until November. I had a tape of Live/Dead six months before it came out. Four to six weeks before Workingman’s Dead came out, KSAN and [Wes] “Scoop” Nisker, their news reporter, had put together this two-hour documentary with most of the radio conversations about Altamont. After that, they said, “We’re gonna play you the new Dead album.” It was Workingman’s Dead. There were two things that were weird: they played everything but “Dire Wolf.” I don’t know why they excised “Dire Wolf” from it. But then the other thing was the version of “New Speedway Boogie” was different — it had the count-in, and I think it may have been the version that ended up on the last expanded edition of Workingman’s Dead.
JESSE: Which totally adds up with the mixdown dates on the tape box. “Dire Wolf” received a secondary mix on April 8th, and “New Speedway Boogie” got a new mix on April 23rd, probably to tone down the backing vocals. Sometime around then, KSAN listeners like Michael Parrish got a surprise. The people responsible were, in fact, Bob Matthews and Betty Cantor.
BOB MATTHEWS: Betty and I, we were friends with several of the DJs over there, one of whom went by the name of Tony Pig. There was also Larry Miller, who of course everybody knows as Howard Hessman [whose WKRP In Cincinnati character Dr. Johnny Fever was inspired by Miller]. There was also an AM jock named Big Daddy Tom Donahue, who ran KSAN, when it was in its heyday as FM. Anyway, we had a relationship with them, and whenever we would finish an album like Workingman’s Dead or Live/Dead or any album Betty and I were working on, when we had the final approval, we would take the tape copy over to KSAN, unannounced until the moment that the music was played. “Play this new release” — so, people got to hear it for the first time. They didn’t know what they were hearing; they got to hear it in a way that they could reference it without any prior cognizance, particularly not knowing and not expecting that anything new was coming out.
JESSE: The phone lines, of course, would light up.
BOB MATTHEWS: That was a problem some time, because we’d get called back from fans who wanted to talk. Suddenly, it would call up all the phone lines. Dead Heads have always been good fans.
JESSE: Once those fixes were made, Bob and Betty were responsible for the final touches. Here’s Bob.
BOB MATTHEWS: When we were done with the mix, Bob and Betty as an engineering / producing team, we’d do the mastering for the disc. Betty was quite talented at that, did really [well]. We were responsible for doing all that. We lived in Oakland at the time — we would get up at six in the morning, get on a flight from Oakland to Burbank, where the mastering engineer and studio that we really liked had his studio, and we would go through and do the mastering process of creating reference acetates.
JESSE: Betty Cantor took a hands-on approach to the mastering.
BOB MATTHEWS: She picked up on mastering, understood the physics of a cutter head, and the tangential accelerations of what happened when you spun a disc and you put a fixed needle on it. So as the platter spun, the cutting head was always being driven tangentially; as the disc turned, the tangential forces wanted to throw the cutting head towards the outside and away from the center. That needed to be overcome, and that’s done by frequency. That was an artistic component that very few engineers, let alone mastering engineers, really understood how to do. Betty always did the mastering because she had a great ear for it. She always produced some magic that was above and beyond how it originally started out.
We would fly home at the end of the day, because we hated L.A. Well, it wasn’t so much that we hated L.A…. we couldn’t stand the smog, it really did screw with our mental processes. We would come back and then, the next day, we would arrange to get together with the band at the studio; we would play the references, and the band approved them. It got turned over to Warner Bros. for manufacturing. At some point within the following month, Betty and I would have cause to be in Los Angeles again. We had an appointment with Joe Smith, who was the president of Warner Bros. and Reprise at that time. When we went into Joe Smith’s office, whose experience in his mind with the Grateful Dead had been a boat—a huge hole in the water into which to throw money. And not only that, you couldn’t understand the words. When we went into his office, Joe stood up with a big smile, came around his desk, gave me a handshake and quasi-hug. And the first thing he said was, “Damn — you can understand every word!” And then he said, “Not only that, but you turned the whole album in for under $15,000.” This was unheard of — people did demos for that in those days.
JESSE: Joe Smith would tell Rolling Stone’s David Browne that he and the Dead “weren’t best friends but we established a relationship. Garcia was a sensible, gentle guy. Bobby Weir, too. But I was dealing with lunatics, you have to understand. They drifted in and out of reality depending on the amount of acid they dropped at the time.”
Whatever the Dead’s LSD intake was in 1970, though, Joe Smith was very on board with the results, and Warner Brothers threw itself into the promotion of Workingman’s Dead. Cashbox reported that “Backing up this album, Warner Bros. Records Inc. is directly involved in the most wide-spread advertising campaign in its history.”
Besides the radio ads we discussed in our episode about “Easy Wind,” the label took out both a front cover spot and a full page ad in Billboard with a quote from David Crosby calling the Dead “one of the best bands in the world.” They also bought outdoor advertising, “beautifying America coast-to-coast,” as the Billboard page put it.
BOB MATTHEWS: When it did actually get released in Hollywood, right next to the Hyatt Intercontinental was a 10-story billboard with the cover of Workingman’s Dead on it. That always made me feel good.
JESSE: It became the first album advertised on a billboard above the Fillmore West, just a few blocks from where the album was recorded at Pacific High. If you look online, you can see an image from the summer of 1970 with the billboard advertising the album and the band’s mid-August shows. “Good New Grateful Dead” the billboard reads, which might seem like a backhanded compliment about the quality of their earlier work. But...
WARNER BROS. WORKINGMAN’S DEAD RADIO AD [1970]: Good ol’ Grateful Dead… good new Grateful Dead.
JESSE: Since the name of our podcast is the Good Ol’ Grateful Deadcast, this is an opportune moment to note that the Dead were called the Good Ol’ Grateful Dead as early as 1966 — less than a year after they’d changed their name from The Warlocks. Its origin was the very first piece of fan-made Dead merchandise — a pin that simply read Good Ol’ Grateful Dead, sold by one of the band’s neighbors in the Haight-Ashbury. It became perhaps their first tagline.
Another aspect of Workingman’s Dead promotion didn’t come to fruition. That summer, Warner Brothers planned to sponsor a summer tour of free coast-to-coast Dead shows with other label affiliated acts, specifically former Beau Brummels frontman Sal Valentino and the band Crazy Horse, minus Neil Young. They got as far as designing and printing up a few posters, which you can see online. Fate had other plans, and the free tour morphed into a different project, involving key personnel from Workingman’s Dead, but that’s for a different podcast.
Workingman’s Dead was supposed to have been released by May 15th, but delays kept it from appearing for another month. Officially, Workingman’s Dead’s release date is remembered and celebrated as June 14th, 1970. But June 14th was a Sunday, when some record stores probably weren’t open. Release dates were more nebulous in 1970, and June 14th likely meant more practically that the LP would show up in stores sometime that week, with some perhaps getting them slightly earlier. Here’s Gary Lambert.
GARY LAMBERT: I was a sufficiently insane Dead Head at that point. I’d have my strategy down for finding the record as soon as I could on the day it was released. There was a little cluster of really excellent record stores in Manhattan, very close together in Midtown in the 40s. Record Hunter on 5th Avenue, King Carol Records on 42nd Street, there was Sam Goody on 49th. I would call them and say, “When are you getting your new shipment today?” I’m not sure if I was the first person in New York City to get his hands on Workingman’s Dead, but I was probably in the top 100. I remember running across 5th Avenue and seeing it — they had already placed it in the window. Just seeing that artwork, it hit me. It just had an impact.
JESSE: In 1970, “Good New Grateful Dead” was appropriate. Workingman’s Dead was an instant success. Here’s how Robert Hunter remembered the album’s success to Denis McNamera on WLIR in 1978.
ROBERT HUNTER [1978]: We had gotten around 190 on the charts. We were getting in an elevator, and somebody, I think was Rock, came up and said, “We’re number 17 in Billboard with a bullet.” And that was the beginning: all of a sudden, that elevator was going up. [laughs] We might have been going down in it, but… phew yeah, it was an amazing flash, one of those fill-your-head-with-light trips. You say: by god, we’re really making it. It’s not a fantasy anymore.
JESSE: On the whole, reviewers loved the album. Rolling Stone would go on to declare it album of the year, and reviewer Andy Zwerling was on board. “It's so nice to receive a present from good friends,” he wrote. The Minneapolis Star declared, “It is enough to make an instant fan out of anyone.”
Many reviewers seemed somewhat surprised but won over by the country turns. Here’s some of what the Cincinnati Inquirer had to say: “Chances are strong you aren't ready, as the Dead are doing something you've probably never heard them do before. The album has eight cuts (rather high for them), and they're amazingly close to what folks might call commercial… It's a very strange album - hardly what we would expect from the Dead. It's such a strange album, in fact, that it could very well be a put on. But that isn't important. What is important is the fact that the Dead has turned out a very nice album loaded with nice thoughts and happy sounds. It'll probably make you smile.”
Some reviewers were a little more plugged in. Bob Lynn at the Daily Bruin, UCLA’s student paper, observed, “Heavens to Lyserge momma, what's the Dead doing playing country? Live witnesses will know that it's not so new, and historians would know that the Dead started as a jug band. The wheel hath almost come the full circle.”
In 1970, as now, the times were pretty weird, and the Workingman’s Dead was a wonderful balm. “To be truly meaningful, music today should relate to the Apocalypse, and few musicians capture the spirit of any Apocalypse as well as the Grateful Dead,” Bob Lynn wrote. “Workingman's Dead… marks the Dead's first recorded venture into country and folksy areas. They do it very well and without pretension. What could be better after the Apocalypse?”
Album co-producer Bob Matthews.
BOB MATTHEWS: Workingman’s Dead was also the first album that shipped gold, and it immediately started producing revenue. Believe me, that album sold really well, and paying back $15,000 didn’t take but a week or two.
JESSE: Over the summer, Cashbox reported that the album sold 200,000 copies within three weeks of its release, and the number soon doubled. One part of the Workingman’s Dead story as it’s often told is that it helped the band get out of debt to Warner Brothers. And while Warner had fronted lots of money for the band’s albums, that wasn’t precisely how their account worked, as Bob Matthews explained.
BOB MATTHEWS: The way it worked was that we didn't take one and charge it to another. Aoxomoxoa didn’t pay itself off until four or five years later. When I had my own studio, Alembic, Jerry said, “Alright, finally we’ve got our own studio that we don’t have to worry about billing unless we come up with something we like.” We went in, Jerry and I and Betty, remixed Aoxomoxoa on our own nickel. When we billed them, again, it reflected the same kind of good budgeting that Workingman’s Dead included. I want to say it was the mid to late ‘70s before Aoxomoxoa paid itself off. But in the meantime, nobody was really counting because Workingman’s Dead, Live/Dead, and they had also gone off and done American Beauty. The GD were a very positive revenue stream for the big WB. For a good period there, we could do almost no wrong.
JESSE: If Workingman’s Dead sales didn’t literally pay back the band’s debt to Warners, it certainly did so symbolically. The album sold and kept selling, continuing to get pressed, re-pressed, copied to cassette, saved at garage sales, reissued on CD, and eventually re-pressed to vinyl.
The Dead loaded their instruments out of Pacific High in early March 1970, but it was to become a very familiar locale. As Bob mentioned, he soon got his own studio, Alembic. That studio happened to be Pacific High, which he took over roughly a year following the Workingman’s Dead sessions.
BOB MATTHEWS: Pacific High itself was a studio built by a guy named Peter Weston. He had the only 12-track machine on the West Coast at that point — that was ‘68, I think. He was totally self-financed, and he was a great guy but, eventually, failed. Acoustically, the room needed a lot of modification. When we—we being Alembic—took over the lease of the building, we did quite [a big] amount of acoustic modification.
JESSE: The room was a familiar home to various Dead-related projects over the years, including a 1972 KSAN session by Jerry Garcia and Merl Saunders. Later that same year, the Dead set up their equipment in the same room they made Workingman’s Dead to perform overdubs on the live recordings that would become Europe ‘72. And, of course, Pacific High had a sweet location.
BOB MATTHEWS: Pacific High was on Brady Street, which was between 12th and Van Ness, and between Mission and Market. In reality, you walked a block and a half down to Market, and a block and a half towards the bay on Market, and you were at the Carousel Ballroom.
JESSE: AKA the Fillmore West. With the help of Bob and Betty, the Grateful Dead launched their music into the world from the heart of downtown San Francisco, beaming out their images of Uncle John by the riverside, the Dire Wolf at the door, and the coked-up engine driver Casey Jones. Though it didn’t have a monster jam, “Casey Jones” could be a powerful set anchor. Here’s Grateful Dead archivist David Lemieux.
DAVID LEMIEUX: It's one of those songs that, if you listen to a Dead show from any era, but [specifically] ‘70 to ‘73, ‘74 and beyond, were as much I’d like to think every single person in that venue was a huge Dead Head, it’s not always true. Some people might have been dragged; some people might have been on their college campus and said, “Oh Grateful Dead, I’ll see that, it’s five bucks.” And the one song, well there’s a few, that everybody there would have known—I’m sure they played a “Good Lovin’” or something like that—but when they kick into [“Casey Jones] you can hear a palpable group release: they’re playing something we know, and it’s also a song we love.
I remember once talking with the DJ at my local classic rock station in Ottawa, Canada in the mid-’80s. I said, “Hey man, you should play…” — and I threw out “Unbroken Chain” or something like that. He said, “No, we have a very strict playlist of what we’re allowed to play by the Dead.” And one of the songs they were allowed to play, of the five—I think it was literally five songs— “Casey Jones” was one of them. The others are ones you’d expect: “Truckin’,” “Uncle John’s Band,” things like that. It is a song that tells the story, and the music tells that same story. I do love how it speeds up at the end, particularly live versions from 1972 onward, where they do that kind of double-speed ending. And then when they played it in the rarer times, they played it in the late ‘70s where it would really pick up a head of steam, to use the train phrase. It would just keep going.
I distinctly remember in the few months I was fortunate to work with Dick Latvala at the Grateful Dead’s vault — I went over to his house for lunch one day, and I’ll never forget, he ate a huge takeout order of chicken wings and a big soda. I remember we were sitting on his couch and he was playing me music from the Academy of Music in 1972, the March run right before Europe. It was a seven-night run. He was playing the highlights that the Dead had just acquired the tapes from that run; they had been missing from the vault for many years. They had just gotten them, and Dick was so excited about these tapes. We spent a couple of hours listening to these shows, the seven nights.
But one of the things he specifically wanted to play for me was a version of “Casey Jones” where they do the double-speed time. Dick said, “I think this is the first time they really do this.” Just to hear his observation and his excitement about a song that I had heard a thousand times, and I had heard that double-speed ending many, many times… but to hear the excitement of him discovering that this was the show where the Dead really kicked it into the double-speed. That was something I very much learned from Dick — these subtle little things are what makes so much Grateful Dead music so exciting, and so different – that this show is where they start doing this. I remember listening to that “Casey Jones.” I’d heard so many live “Casey Jones” in my tape trading days. This was when I realized: oh my gosh, this song has so much more depth than I ever knew it had. From then on, I’ve listened to the song very differently.
JESSE: Here’s a bit of that sped-up outro jam, recorded slightly later that spring, at Tivoli Gardens in Copenhagen on April 14th, 1972.
AUDIO: “Casey Jones” [Europe ‘72: The Complete Recordings, Vol. 4, 4/14/72] (4:56-5:26) - [Spotify] [YouTube]
JESSE: After the Dead’s “Casey Jones,” the traditions of songs about Casey Jones and cocaine continued naturally onwards. In the world historical scheme of cocaine songs, plenty would far outpace “Casey Jones” and eventually whole genres. In the scheme of “Casey Jones” songs, though, the Dead’s song can take a lot of credit for continuing to spread the meme and memory of Casey Jones, but they’re hardly the only ones, with Casey making appearances in songs by AC/DC, Motörhead, Gillian Welch, and Bad Religion to name a few.
For a dead railroad man, Casey got around. There was also the hockey-stick wielding Casey Jones in the Teenage Ninja Mutant Turtles universe, who has successfully made the jump to global hip-hop lyrics, but I’m not sure I see any connection between him and our engineer. Hit us up if you know of one.
For the Dead, “Casey Jones” went in and out of the repertoire a few times. They played it hard and heavy up through their break from touring that began in 1974. It was back, on and off from ‘77 to ‘84, before reappearing again in 1992.
But it always lingered. When I was growing up in the ‘80s and ‘90s, the song was almost like an urban legend. When the Dead made their live network television debut on Saturday Night Live in 1978, they were four days away from releasing Shakedown Street. But when host Buck Henry introduced the band, they didn’t play their newest single. Perhaps they were still smarting about all the lost airplay when Workingman’s Dead came out.
AUDIO: “Casey Jones” [Saturday Night Live, 11/11/78] (23:17-23:47) - [archive.org]
JESSE: We’ve reached the end of Workingman’s Dead and this season of the Good Ol’ Grateful Deadcast. Traditionally, this is pretty much the part where the credits roll. At the risk of sounding like an enormous hippie, or this being a podcast about the Dead, an even more enormous hippie, we should thank every single person who made Workingman’s Dead possible.
The musicians and songwriters: Jerry Garcia, Robert Hunter, Phil Lesh, Bob Weir, Bill the drummer Kreutzmann, Pigpen, and Mickey Hart, plus guitarist David Nelson.
The producers Bob Matthews and Betty Cantor, who thankfully recorded more than they erased.
Equipment crew members Ramrod, Rex Jackson, and Sonny Heard. Big Nurse Jon McIntire. Executive Nanny Sam Cutler. Lady in Waiting Cosmic Gail Hellund. Guardians of the Vault David and Bonnie Parker. Stanley Mouse and Alton Kelley of Mouse Studios. And John Marmaduke Dawson.
We’d also like to once again thank everyone we interviewed this season: Bob Matthews, Rhoney Stanley, Sam Cutler, Graham Nash, David Lemieux, Gary Lambert, Brain Kehew, Mike Johnson, Eric Schwartz, Billy Strings, Jeffrey Alexander, Shaugn O’Donnell, Nicholas Meriwether, Michael Parrish, Bob Egan, and good ol’ Buzz Poole. For miscellaneous assistance thanks enormously as well to Janet Saleby, Light Into Ashes, Corry Arnold, Andy Zax, Alex Allan, Dennis McNally, Blair Jackson, and David Gans.
Thanks for listening, see you next time.