Good Ol’ Grateful Deadcast
Season 1, Episode 5
Workingman’s Dead 50: Cumberland Blues
JESSE: Workingman’s Dead is sometimes remembered as the Grateful Dead’s move into country-rock. But the funny thing is, besides the occasional presence of Jerry Garcia’s pedal steel guitar, there’s not much music on the album that actually resembles country music — at least as it was written and played in the United States in 1970.
That is, until you drop the needle of Side 2 of Workingman’s Dead and hear this…
AUDIO: “Cumberland Blues” [Workingman’s Dead] (0:00-0:30) - [dead.net] [Spotify] [YouTube]
JESSE: Tales of the Golden Road host Gary Lambert.
GARY LAMBERT: That's the Bakersfield in the Grateful Dead right there. It’s very, very redolent of Merle Haggard's “Workin’ Man Blues” or something like that. That was some of the music they were most infatuated with in that period. Bobby had that rhythm guitar part that's pure Bakersfield, and Jerry was just wearing his love for those guys from Bakersfield on his sleeve. Roy Nichols, Merle’s great guitar player for decades, and the late Don Rich, who was the equivalent in Buck Owens’s band. [“Cumberland Blues”] was a case of Hunter’s lyrics and the song and the genre they chose to mine — they all came together and converged so beautifully. The story that the song tells is perfectly served by the musical setting.
Bob Weir has told me about how he and Garcia used to go on long drives, and they always had one of those old-school buttons on the radio. They had the old mechanical switching buttons on car radios, and one was always tuned to a country station. Bobby used to watch The Porter Wagoner Show, which aired locally in the Bay Area. They always had an outlet for country music and they always had a love for it. People have often said the Grateful Dead had to compromise after making these very weird and very expensive albums, going deep in the whole to Warner Brothers, so they had to compromise and simplify. But it wasn't so much a compromise as a broadening of their artistic perspective.
JESSE: Bakersfield was Bakersfield, California, in the southern part of San Joaquin Valley, northeast of LA. It was there, in the late 1950s, that a new strain of country music emerged. The Bakersfield Sound, pioneered by artists like Merle Haggard and Buck Owens. It stripped country music of its Nashville glitz and gave it more of a hard-hitting backbeat. Jerry Garcia would refer to the Dead’s approach in the next few years as the band’s Bakersfield era. But it didn’t happen all at once.
In terms of original songwriting, “Cumberland Blues” was the band’s first step in that direction — but it wasn’t at all a straightforward one, as we’ll hear. In part, it’s the only song on Workingman’s Dead with a co-writing credit by one-time experimental composer Phil Lesh. But let’s start with Merle Haggard.
AUDIO: “Mama Tried” [Merle Haggard and The Strangers, Mama Tried] (0:52-1:11) - [Spotify]
JESSE: Merle Haggard was a huge influence on the Dead, no question. In June of 1969, at the same shows where the band rolled out the first songs for what would become Workingman’s Dead, they also unveiled their cover of Merle Haggard’s “Mama Tried,” a pretty radical move for a rock band in the summer of 1969. They played it frequently from then on, as did the Dead’s country-rock spin-off, the New Riders of the Purple Sage, and “Mama Tried” stayed in the Dead’s repertoire all the way to 1995. I assume if there was a show somewhere tonight, there’d be a decent chance that Bob Weir would sing it. But it was another Merle Haggard song that may have had a bigger immediate impact on the Dead. Check out this groove.
AUDIO: “Workin’ Man Blues” [Merle Haggard and The Strangers, A Portrait Of Merle Haggard] (0:00-0:15) - [Spotify]
JESSE: That was Merle Haggard’s 1969 single “Workin’ Man Blues,” released a month before the Workingman’s Dead songs began to appear at Dead shows. In several studio tracking sheets from Pacific High in 1970, the title of the Dead’s new album-in-progress is listed as “the Workin’ Man’s Dead,” with both a definite article and the outlaw apostrophe just like Merle’s. Jerry Garcia and the New Riders were certainly familiar with “Workin’ Man Blues,” debuting their own cover just a few weeks before the release of Workingman’s Dead in the spring of 1970.
Merle Haggard’s part of the Bakersfield Dead legacy looms large. But maybe even larger is an artist the Dead didn’t cover directly: Buck Owen and the Buckaroos, and specifically Buckaroos lead guitarist Don Rich. Don Rich wasn’t merely a lead guitarist, but a conversational lead guitarist — playing his parts differently each time, dancing around the Buckaroos’ not-insignificant swing. It really tied the room together.
Listen to the way Don Rich fills in the colors on “Love’s Gonna Live Here [Again],” from the 1966 live album Carnegie Hall Concert. Thanks to Shaugn O’Donnell for this example. We’ll hear more from Shaugn momentarily.
AUDIO: “Love’s Gonna Live Here” [Buck Owens, Carnegie Hall Concert] (0:00-0:17) - [Spotify]
JESSE: Garcia had been a Don Rich fan for at least a few years before Workingman’s Dead, with stories of Garcia, Bob Weir, David Nelson and others going to see Buck Owen and the Buckaroos perform around the San Francisco Peninsula in 1964 and 1965.
It would be perhaps a full year or more after the Workingman’s Dead sessions before the Bakersfield Dead emerged as something like a musical identity for the group. You can hear the Bakersfield Dead sound really starting to come into its own on this February 21st, 1971 show at the Capitol Theater in Port Chester, New York, released in a beautiful new Jeffrey Norman mix on this year’s new Workingman’s Dead 50th anniversary reissue.
At these shows, the band debuted a new batch of songs with the Bakersfield approach virtually baked in, leaving plenty of room for that sweet Don Rich-like conversational guitar. It would be another new mode of songwriting for the Dead. Check out this primal version of “Bertha” from February 21st, 1971 at the Capitol, with tasty licks after every lyric.
AUDIO: “Bertha” [Workingman’s Dead 50th Anniversary Deluxe Edition, 2/21/71] (2:19-2:37) - [dead.net] [Spotify] [YouTube]
JESSE: Earlier this year, just before the whole world shut down, my last bit of travel was to one of my favorite places in the entire universe — the annual Grateful Dead scholars conference in Albuquerque, New Mexico. At this year’s meeting, my friend Shaugn O’Donnell, a musicologist and Chair of the Music Department at City College of New York, gave a mind bending presentation about “Cumberland Blues,” and called out that great Buck Owens ‘66 live album from Carnegie Hall we just heard. You can read Shaugn’s whole paper, but here he is to break down “Cumberland Blues” and the origins of the Bakersfield Dead.
SHAUGN O’DONNELL: To me, the Stratocaster—just changing to that guitar, and getting that Fender treble cutting sound that Jerry can play in the low register without getting muddy—is part of what’s suddenly channeling Don Rich. So, this other influence of a player he's listened to and admires—and he was definitely listening to [Tom] Bromley on pedal steel [too]—it’s sort of like the equipment helped him… I don’t know which drove it, whether he wanted that sound or a Strat fell into his hands and he’s like, “This is what you have to play on a Fender.” but it really seems to be driven by that.
JESSE: Consulting the handy “Jerry Garcia Instrument History” by Deadologist Michael Clem, available on the Grateful Dead Guide blog, it seems that Garcia first began playing a 1963 Rosewood Stratocaster in the fall of 1969. The earliest photographic documentation is from October 24th. Two weeks later, “Cumberland Blues” arrived in Dead setlists. Here’s a little bit of the first known version, recorded at the original Fillmore Auditorium in San Francisco on November 8th, 1969, released on Dick’s Picks 16.
AUDIO: “Cumberland Blues” [Dick’s Picks 16, 11/8/69] (0:00-0:22) - [Spotify] [YouTube]
SHAUGN O’DONNELL: The first 30 seconds is right there in Bakersfield: minor pentatonic noodling while you have these major chords, and you’re in this comfortable train-ish groove. Then, suddenly, with that harmonic shift, it’s outer space compared to Bakersfield — it’s not something that would ever happen, and we don’t notice it because it still sounds like Bakersfield, sonically. You’ll never find a harmonic passage like that in their work. It’s as soon as “[I’ve got] to get down.”
AUDIO: “Cumberland Blues” [Workingman’s Dead] (0:30-0:41) - [dead.net] [Spotify] [YouTube]
SHAUGN O’DONNELL: And you get down and then the chord just drops a half step down from G to G-flat or F-sharp, or however someone wants to imagine it. So, it’s physically very easy and close and comfortable — but in terms of functional harmony, there’s just no relation. To my mind, immediately what comes is that this is portraying the lyric, [the harmony] is somehow serving the text. But then, instead, it just jumps away to B-flat — which, again, is not functional in G. It’s up to B, down back again to B-flat, and chromatically down. Those are mostly just chromatic chords. Again, physically, very easy, but in terms of tonal function, it’s one of the most far-out passages they’ve used in a song yet, as part of the song structure. So in that way it’s, to my ears, more adventurous in this one dimension.
JESSE: Shaugn points out that, despite being filled with folk and country influences, Workingman’s Dead is filled with bizarro chord changes. Another song he singles out is “High Time.”
SHAUGN O’DONNELL: I don't know any song that is that weird, to be honest. In the world where you're sitting down—”I'm going to play a series of chords and sing a song to it”—in that world, I just don't know anything that is that far out. You're not in any key for any amount of time. A pair of chords might make sense in a normal song, and then the next pair of chords might make sense, but not if this other thing already happened. It's like if you're wandering through familiar terrain, but you're not going anywhere particular, and then somehow you wind up at home anyway.
JESSE: If the craziness of the “High Time” chord structure intrigues you, seek out Walter Everett’s essay “‘High Time’ and Ambiguous Harmonic Function,” first published in the 1999 book from Greenwood Press, Perspectives on the Grateful Dead.
Some of the band’s earliest original songs, going back to the Emergency Crew demo from 1965, now heard on the So Many Roads box set, were filled with strange chord changes, trying to push at the boundaries of pop and rock from the very start. The weird changes persisted into 1969 on Aoxomoxoa songs like “Cosmic Charlie” and “Doin’ That Rag.” The dense chord changes and unusual moves got dialed down a few notches as the Dead got rootsier, but not entirely. They’re still very present on “Cumberland Blues.”
As Shaugn points out, the song has four distinct sections. First, there’s the Bakersfield groove, followed by the strangely leaping transition. And then...
SHAUGN O’DONNELL: There's that middle Bobby section — that's when the train gets from one to the other.
AUDIO: “Cumberland Blues” [Workingman’s Dead] (1:35-1:53) - [dead.net] [Spotify] [YouTube]
SHAUGN O’DONNELL: That's kind of neither truly bluegrass and not still in Bakersfield — it seems to have elements of both, and it doesn't have the outer space harmonic progression. It’s very home in harmonic content, but it's traveling towards a true bluegrass [sound]; it’s not until they make enough money to “move away” that you actually arrive. So the “move away” is landing in bluegrass: that's when you're truly at the bluegrass moment. You’ve got the banjo, all the harmonic movements are really strongly directional. That part could just be any traditional tune at that point. But the section in the middle leans to another key — kind of in C-ish for part of it, and it trails off to E minor, it just kind of ends and, suddenly, you’re just in C, and you’ve arrived at the station.
JESSE: There’s not that much of “Cumberland Blues” on the new collection of session recordings called The Angel’s Share, only 3-and-a-half minutes of the band working through the song’s first section with a basic lineup of Bob Weir on acoustic guitar, Jerry Garcia on lead electric guitar, Phil Lesh on lead electric bass, and Bill Kreutzmann trying out various kinds of hand percussion. No drums, but all four musicians keep the song’s train-like motion front and center. There are some conversations about tempo.
AUDIO: “Cumberland Blues” ((Various Breakdowns & Take 9) - Slated) [Workingman’s Dead: The Angel’s Share] (2:42-2:59) - [dead.net] [Spotify] [YouTube]
JERRY GARCIA [1970]: One more time.
BILL KREUTZMANN [1970]: It’s too slow. Too slow, Bobby.
JERRY GARCIA [1970]: It’s slowed down.
ENGINEER [1970]: Number 9…
BILL KREUTZMANN [1970]: Why don’t one of you guys count it off?
BOB WEIR [1970]: I’ve got it faster. 1, 2, 3, 4…
JESSE: The reason there’s so little “Cumberland Blues” on The Angel’s Share could well have to do with what musicologist Shaugn O’Donnell just explained about the song’s four-part structure. Like the other songs on Workingman’s Dead, “Cumberland Blues” is built around a single live performance. But, even so, more than any other song on the album, the final take was built nearly piece by piece in the studio, truly a marvel of the Pacific High sessions. Here’s Rhino archivist Mike Johnson.
MIKE JOHNSON: That is the track that we had the least for, because it had to be built from pieces. So that's that's the one that… eh, it’s only less than four minutes, whereas some of these other tracks… they last 40 minutes. You're in the studio. And it's not at all boring: if you like this stuff, it's just sometimes like when it ends, you just go: I want more.
JESSE: Us too, man. Even so, Shaugn points us to a nice little slice that highlights the outer space transition.
SHAUGN O’DONNELL: About a minute into that outtake, you hear [guitar] without any of the rest of the song, so it stands out even more so. [Jerry’s] stylistic playing there… he's cruising through this harmonic warpage like nothing happened, so it's very comfortable for him. But to my mind, that doesn't seem like a thing he might have written. Phil gets a writing credit on this one, and it sounds more like maybe he threw that in there.
AUDIO: “Cumberland Blues” ((Various Breakdowns & Take 9) - Slated) [Workingman’s Dead: The Angel’s Share] (0:58-1:11) - [dead.net] [Spotify] [YouTube]
JESSE: The unusual song structure is supported with equally rich musical transitions and scene changes. In fact, the only element that seems to run through the entirety of the final basic take is Bill Kreutzmann’s drum kit, not at all present on The Angel’s Share outtakes. On the Workingman’s Dead version, the drums come up and down in the mix, becoming the piece that connects the different sonic landscapes. The change really becomes obvious at the end of the bridge section sung by Bob Weir.
AUDIO: “Cumberland Blues” [Workingman’s Dead] (1:46-2:10) - [dead.net] [Spotify] [YouTube]
JESSE: Underneath those glorious stacked vocals, Bill Kreutzmann is now swinging quietly on his drum kit. And in come several other instruments. For starters, there’s that banjo part. Album co-producer Bob Matthews.
BOB MATTHEWS: Do you want to know who played it? Well, that was me! I first met Jerry when I was 13, because he was the only folk music teacher who taught banjo in 1961. And… I'm pulling your leg. It was Jerry who played the banjo, obviously. I did take banjo lessons from Jerry and that's how I introduced Bobby to Jerry. Again, that's another story…
JESSE: And another story we’ll be exploring very soon on an upcoming episode of the Good Ol’ Grateful Deadcast. Stay tuned. Jerry Garcia, of course, had been a virtuoso banjoist before turning his full attention to electric guitar. But besides the last few seconds of the original “Dark Star” 7-inch in 1967, “Cumberland Blues” is the only other studio recording by the Dead where Garcia plays the banjo. Coincidentally, those last few seconds of the “Dark Star” single is also the only time Robert Hunter himself appears on a Dead song, reciting a few additional lines of poetry he wrote for the session.
AUDIO: “Dark Star” [“Dark Star” 7-inch] (2:30-2:41) - [Spotify] [YouTube]
JESSE: Here’s Gary Lambert.
GARY LAMBERT: Then you hear [that] there's actual banjo later in the song, as they come toward the very end of it. Jerry actually put a little banjo in there. When they played that song live—that was another one, I recall, from the acoustic or semi-acoustic sets; Jerry would play Tele on that one, on those early live versions of “Cumberland”—he had a great thing that he did where he would revert to his banjo technique just before they come in with the final “lotta poor man got the Cumberland blues.” Jerry would move his hand down close to the bridge, and he'd actually do a little banjo picking with his right hand, that little three-finger banjo thing. You'd almost think that he had switched to banjo when you weren’t looking — he had that facility to use some of his banjo technique on guitar. And, of course, it worked like a charm.
JESSE: The other new sound in the mix during the second half of the song is some speedy flat-picked acoustic guitar by Jerry Garcia’s old partner in the Black Mountain Boys, David Nelson, by 1970 the electric guitarist in the New Riders of the Purple Sage.
DAVID NELSON: I played a little acoustic guitar back-up on “Cumberland.” I'd played it so many times with David Nelson Band, so I get it mixed up with what I played on the album. But I think I played the acoustic guitar rhythm backup. Pacific High, I remember… that was right by the Fillmore West, and I vaguely remember what it looks like. [Those were] some of my very first recording sessions. I liked it — I liked the studio, but I didn’t have a lot to compare it with.
JESSE: Nelson and his partner in the New Riders, John “Marmaduke” Dawson, had been appearing onstage with the Dead regularly since mid-1969. And when the Dead went on tour following Workingman’s Dead, bringing the New Riders on the road with them, Nelson would join the band to add a second acoustic guitar on “Cumberland Blues,” “New Speedway Boogie,” and other songs more nights than not.
That just about covers the music part of “Cumberland Blues.” What about the lyrics? Here’s Gary Lambert.
GARY LAMBERT: That's another just a marvel of a Hunter lyric: these little details, the Little Ben clock. Maybe some people will never know what that means, but there was a brand of clock — a little tiny alarm clock called a Little Ben, as a play on Big Ben, the clock in London. So, that was the traveler’s clock, the Little Ben. That was Hunter's little bit of detail that I loved.
JESSE: I admit that until Gary pointed that out, I always assumed the lyric was “little bed clock,” like the one ticking that might be ticking on a night-stand. Which, in the case of “Cumberland Blues,” it also might have been. Look up an image of a Little Ben clock, they’re still pretty stylin’. Make sure you specify “Little,” though, or you get a much bigger Ben.
In A Box of Rain, Robert Hunter’s book of collected lyrics, under the entry for “Cumberland Blues,” he noted that “the best compliment I ever had on a lyric was from an old guy who'd worked at the Cumberland mine. He said, 'I wonder what the guy who wrote this song would've thought if he'd ever known something like the Grateful Dead was gonna do it.'”
Hunter told the story a few different ways. In another version, the compliment didn’t come from a miner, but from an audience member at a Dead show who didn’t know they were speaking to the songwriter. I like to think of a world in which both of these stories are compatible.
So, where’s Cumberland?
AUDIO: “The Ballad of Springhill” [Ewan MacColl & Peggy Seeger, New Briton Gazette, Vol. 1] (0:08-0:34) - [Spotify]
JESSE: That was “The Ballad of Springhill,” sometimes known as the Springhill mining disaster, by Peggy Seeger with Ewan MacColl, recorded in 1960. It was one of several songs about the Springhll mining disaster of 1958, and widely circulated in the folk revival on both sides of the Atlantic. There’s a pretty good chance Jerry Garcia and Robert Hunter were familiar with it.
But between the Bakersfield guitar and a bluegrass resolution of “Cumberland Blues,” it doesn’t sound like a song from Nova Scotia. There are Cumberland mines all over North America. The one in Southern Pennsylvania is still active, though its owners recently announced their intention to sell it, in case anybody’s looking to buy a Cumberland Mine of their own — though it sounds like it might be kind of a fixer-upper. The unionized miners there recently sued the government for better working conditions.
Even more famous, perhaps, is the Cumberland Mine along the Cumberland River in Harlan County, Kentucky, not far from where musicians like Aunt Molly Jackson and Jim Garland began to write topical folk songs in the 1920s about horrific working conditions in local mines. Harlan County is where “Which Side Are You On” originated. But despite its rich history of mining songs, I could only find one song that references the Cumberland Mine in Kentucky, and it’s of a slightly more recent vintage. As in Southern Pennsylvania, the Cumberland Mine in Kentucky is well-organized, and this is a tribute to 21st century whistleblowing miner Charles Scott Howard, by Australian songwriter Raymond Crooke.
AUDIO: “Big Coal Don’t Like This Man At All” [Raymond Crooke, 10/2011] (1:50-2:16) - [YouTube]
JESSE: If anybody can find any other folk songs about Cumberland Mines, let us know. But all that’s being kinda literal. Though it might have real life antecedents and contemporaries, like Fennario in “Dire Wolf” and the “New Speedway” of the proverbial boogie, the “Cumberland Mine” in “Cumberland Blues” is largely a place of the imagination — and perfectly symbolic, a song for anybody who ever had to get down to work. And in 1970, the Grateful Dead certainly had to do that. As Jerry said...
JERRY GARCIA [1970]: We have nothing to lose but our lives…
AUDIO: “Uncle John’s Band” ((False Start 1) - Not Slated) [Workingman’s Dead: The Angel’s Share] (audio continues beneath narration) - [dead.net] [Spotify] [YouTube]
JESSE: The stakes for the Grateful Dead in 1970 were extremely high. Not only were they extremely broke, but—exactly as the Workingman’s Dead sessions were getting going—they were in the active process of getting extremely ripped off. But as they were, they were also laying the groundwork for transforming themselves into something new — a real-life Workingman’s Dead.
Workingman’s Dead grew out of a pivotal moment in the Grateful Dead’s working history. And just as “Cumberland Blues” resolved into a grand bluegrass finale, our “Cumberland Blues” episode now resolves into a grand story with a voice as weird as the hills, Mr. Sam Cutler.
Sam was near the heart of the disastrous festival at the Altamont Raceway Park, which we covered in the last episode about “New Speedway Boogie.” And it’s a few days after Altamont that our story picks up.
SAM CUTLER: Immediately after Altamont, I was sleeping in Mickey's barn. Jerry came over there and saw me, like two days after, and said, “You can’t stay here, man! Come on over to my house.” Which is very sweet of him, because there were all kinds of politics going on: the bikers in the club and the journalists and the cops. God, it was a nightmare. Anyway, Jerry was very kind like that. I can remember having a conversation with Jerry — just immediately after Altamont, Jerry felt very guilty about Altamont. It all turned to shit, and Jerry felt really bad about it. He said to me, “Well, come and stay at my house.” So, I stayed at his house and we had long talks about bands, and how you organize bands. Jerry just couldn’t believe that the Rolling Stones had three people working for them. Not on tour, obviously — we’d hire shitloads of people for when we were on tour. But the Grateful Dead had about 70 people working for ‘em. In fact, they could never quite establish how many people worked for them, how many people were on the Pleasure Crew, who was doing what. It was always, deliberately maybe, confused and kind of mixed up. And Jerry was just speechless: it was just a completely other way for him, of seeing how bands could be organized. He wanted the Grateful Dead to reorganize themselves going forward. They needed to — they wanted to survive, they were hugely in debt.
Jerry had just a small house in Larkspur in California. It was a nice house, but it wasn’t… it had three bedrooms upstairs. Pretty straightforward. I would have thought [it was] built in the ‘40s, or the ‘50s. A garden out in the back. We used to sit in the back and smoke joints, talk about the music business and how the Grateful Dead could survive, stuff like that. It was Jerry and Mountain Girl, Mountain Girl’s little daughter Sunshine, and Hunter and Christie, his girlfriend at the time. I didn’t see much of Hunter and Christie; they were madly in love, so they never came out of the room, basically. I don't know what was going on in there, but the mind boggles. But anyway, they didn't come out much. But Hunter was very sweet to me. He lent me a car — he had a DeSoto, this giant American car. I’ve never been in a car so big in my life. I remember the gear stick was on the steering column. Giant fucking car it was, man. I used to drive this on the road, and I felt like I was in a Sherman tank. I couldn’t quite believe he just said, “Oh yeah, here’s the keys, man. Take my car.” No one in England would do that, not in those days. That was quite far out.
At that time, Jerry was learning pedal steel guitar. He had a room downstairs that was off the sitting room that he was in, and he had his pedal steel set up in there, and the TV. He used to play the pedal steel through headphones, so you couldn’t hear what he was doing — he’d have headphones on, and the TV would be on, usually with cartoons or something like that. I think it was just something for him to kind of look at. He wasn’t really looking at anything, he was just listening to the pedal steel. The pedal steel is one of these ridiculously complex instruments. You’ve got both feet working on the pedals; you’ve got your knees working on pedals underneath the pedal steel; and then you’ve got two sets of ten strings, your left hand and your right hand, steel in the left hand. Unbelievably complex instrument. So he just sat there for… at least 10-12 hours a day, just to master it. He used to stop, come out, have a joint, I’d talk to him; then he’d go back. He’d stop for food, Mountain Girl would take him some food in there, and he’d stop to sleep, and that was about it.
JESSE: One day, Sam wanted to give some space to Garcia and Mountain Girl and met one of their Larkspur neighbors, another acquaintance of Sam’s from the business — Janis Joplin.
SAM CUTLER: I went out for a walk—I had been at Jerry's a day, two days, maybe—and I walked down the road and I see this house. Outside of it was the painted Porsche that belonged to Janis, right outside the garage. She was either visiting the house or lived there. So I went up and knocked on the door. That was nice — I used to visit with her and hang out, bless her. She was a good soul, man. Jerry loved Janis. Everybody in the music scene in California loved Janis. She was a sweet, sweet person. She was generous, you know? She didn't have a clue when it comes to men. But when we look at blues singers, traditionally, lots of them have had very hard times with the loves of their lives, as it were. Maybe they have a kind of somewhat tragic view of all that… who knows. She was constantly either madly in love or madly depressed, because the latest one decided he couldn’t handle her.
JESSE: Looking on a map, not only were Jerry Garcia and Robert Hunter neighbors with Janis Joplin, there was actually a secret trail between their houses. Not that there’s any evidence they ever used it, but—at least on a map—it sure looks like it was possible to walk out the the back garden of the Garcia house at 271 Madrone Avenue, cross Larkspur Creek, follow Piedmont Trail for a quarter mile or so, sneak through some more woods, and end up in Janis Joplin’s backyard. Not that there wasn’t much time to hang. After the holidays, Sam Cutler went on his first trip with the Dead in mid-January 1970. He wasn’t working for them just yet. The first one’s free, as they say.
SAM CUTLER: Immediately after Altamont, basically, we went to hawaii. That was the first Grateful Dead gig I’d been at. Sonny Heard was deputized to look after me — he was my minder. Yeah, I got completely high… so wrecked. I had a briefcase full of money, and we left it in the middle of the dance floor to see what would happen. And nothing happened: everybody danced around it, and Heard and I sat on the side for a while, watching it. And then we went back and got it. It was a high ol’ gig.
I remember the stage was about six feet high. Just a bit higher than my head, and Bob Weir walked off stage over my head, and kind of walked through the air and landed, just kept going to the dressing room with his guitar still around his neck. Didn’t miss a beat. And it was above my head! He walked straight off the stage, didn’t land with a crunch or anything, just kept walking. It was quite extraordinary. Yeah, it was a high old time, for sure. That introduced me to the arcane art of counting money on LSD. It’s an interesting skill that one is forced to develop.
JESSE: So, Sam, any tips for counting money on LSD?
SAM CUTLER: Any tips… well, actually, funnily enough, they’re all different sizes. American bills are different sizes, for blind people. That’s how blind people can tell what the money is, by the size of it.
JESSE: Having mastered this new life skill, Sam soon had a new job. In part, he was in the right place at the right time. Or maybe the right place at the wrong time. In the spring of 1970, sometime during the Workingman’s Dead sessions, there was a sudden vacancy in Grateful Dead management.
That vacancy was caused by the band’s most recent manager, the Reverend Lenny Hart, who also happened to be the father of Dead drummer Mickey Hart. After an incident when Mountain Girl confronted the Reverend over non-payment for Garcia’s work on the Zabriskie Point soundtrack, recorded in LA en route to Hawaii, it was discovered that the Reverend was cooking the books, and he soon absconded with a large sum of the band’s money.
SAM CUTLER: Prior to Workingman’s Dead, it was a struggle, man. When I joined the band, Lenny had just run off with a shitload of money. They were in debt anyway. He took $350,000 off the band. The Grateful Dead, bless ‘em — they’re my brothers, and I love ‘em of course. But they’re not what you could call the shrewdest judge of character. I eventually found out that—Jonathan Riester told me, who left the Grateful Dead because of Lenny—that Lenny actually showed up at a meeting with a Bible in his hand. He introduced himself as the Reverend Lenny Hart, and swore on the Bible that he wouldn’t rip ‘em off!
It’s easy to take advantage of artists, and that’s why honest tour managers, honest managers, people that handle people honestly, are few and far between in the music business. Some of the greatest stars that you could possibly imagine in the music business are, on some level, lacking somewhat. They can be brilliant and bright, and everybody in the Grateful Dead had their moments of course, their great insights into the human condition — no question. But they also were lacking in some respects. Of course, you can’t be good at everything, can you? That’s why you need people around you as a musician in the music business. You need people around you that love you, genuinely love, and that are honest! It’s easy in this life to find people that love you; it’s not so easy in this life to find people that love you and are honest, believe it or not.
The band was very nice about it. The band was much more concerned about: “Okay, that’s happened — what’s the solution, what do we do next?” Jerry’s solution was — “Well, that one manager robbed us… so, we’ll have three.” There was a triumvirate of managers: Dave Parker, an old mate of his from school days, kind of an accountant who looked after the money; Jon McIntire looked after the bullshit; and I did the work.
JESSE: In a sense, the new management became like the Grateful Dead’s three branches of government. Dave Parker had been a member of Mother McCree’s Uptown Jug Champions, and contributed lyrics to the early Dead original, “The Only Time Is Now.” He and his wife Bonnie would be credited on the back of Workingman’s Dead as “Guardians of the Vault” — not the band’s tapes, but their actual finances.
Jon McIntire’s job was as band manager, interfacing with the record company and hassling with the real world at large. That spring, Dave Parker found a house at the corner of 5th and Lincoln in San Rafael, in Marin County. McIntire negotiated with the owners, and on April 1st, 1970, the management signed a lease. It remained the Grateful Dead’s office for the next several decades. As tour manager, Sam Cutler organized the Dead’s road life — which over the next few years would take up the vast majority of their actual lives. Eventually, his company, Out of Town Tours, would establish an office a few houses down. On Workingman’s Dead, Jon McIntire was credited as “Big Nurse” and Sam Cutler as “Executive Nanny.”
By every account, McIntire and Cutler were polar opposites in the Grateful Dead metaverse. McIntire came from the old school mindset of a serious psychedelic head. Not that Sam Cutler wasn’t a head, but he represented a turn towards the more ambitious. There’s plenty on the court politics of the early 1970s Grateful Dead in Dennis McNally’s book Long Strange Trip and David Gans’s and Blair Jackson’s This Is All A Dream We Dreamed if you’re hungry for more of that kind of stuff.
Jon McIntire would call Sam Cutler an “empire builder,” maybe intending it as a slur. But it was also accurate. During his four years with the Dead, Sam Cutler was perhaps the primary force in transforming the Grateful Dead from a small, beloved band into an enormous, beloved band. Like many stories in the Grateful Dead world, it began at Mickey Hart’s ranch.
SAM CUTLER: It was lovely in a psychedelic, vaguely Wild West kind of way. People wandered about, pretty stoned. Once in a while, they’d have band meetings out there in the barn. Kids, dogs, horses, chaos… I was never quite sure who the fuck was who. Various people would have their say. That was one of the things that Jerry and I talked about — you just can’t run a band where everybody can have a say. That came to a head. I earned the eternal hatred—I don’t know if hatred’s too strong of a word—but at least a dislike of all the old ladies in the band, because I told the band: “Listen, you’ve got to tell your old ladies that they can’t come to the meetings. I work for musicians, man, not for musicians’ wives.” So, that caused a bit of an eruption. Finally, the women all decided they didn’t want to be there, basically, under duress.
One time, we were having a meeting — shitloads of people there. I knew most of the people, but there were quite a few people I didn’t know. [This was] in the Grateful Dead’s old house on Lincoln, in San Rafael. I pointed to this guy: “Who’s this guy?! Who are you?” He was a hippie that had just walked in off the street and saw this group of people having a meeting and thought: “huh, this looks interesting, I’ll come and join in.” Nobody knew who he was! He’d just come in off the street! That was the straw that broke the camel’s back. I was like, “No, no, no. We can’t have this.”
The band decided that there had to be a bandleader, because they all became members of the Musicians’ Union, which they hadn’t been members of before. Somebody had to sign the contracts, and had to formally be the bandleader. Jerry immediately went, “Well, I’m not the bandleader.” He didn’t want to do it. Nobody wanted to do it. So then the band went off and had a meeting to decide who was going to do it, and then they came back and they made up their minds: Phil was gonna do it. I went, “Okay, why is Phil gonna do it?” Fine, I don’t care… I don’t give a fuck, really. But just out of curiosity, I say, “Why is Phil gonna do it?” They said, “Well, he’s the most difficult person to persuade that it’s a good idea to do it particular gig. So if you can persuade him to do a particular gig, we’re cool — we don’t give a fuck. So, as long as he agrees, everything’s cool.” The unique Grateful Dead way of organizing things is kind of organizing by default.
I used to say things to the Grateful Dead that I’m sure used to piss ‘em off. I used to say, “Anyone can attack Russia, but you’d better have a good plan.” What is the plan here? You go on stage, and you’re gonna play a song. Well, you all fuckin’ know that “Sugar Magnolia” is in the key of D. And you all play in the same key, otherwise it wouldn’t work. So you want to be in a band? What’s the plan?
You need a plan. For whatever you do in a band, you need a plan. So, how to plan without being Hitler or Mussolini, or Trump; how to lead with people not feeling like they’re being led is part of the conundrum of management and tour management. The tour manager has to be the last man standing. He has to be able to answer the questions: “Oh, when do we leave tomorrow?” “Where are we?” “What’s happening?” “How much money did we get?” “Can I have some money?” A million and one different things that a tour manager has to deal with. Planning is just core to the whole thing. That was something I tried to achieve with the band. “Okay, we’ve all got our own takes on stuff, and we’re all wildly different people. But this is a collaborative, cooperative endeavor: let’s all try and be on the same page, and let’s try and be efficient about it, given the parameters that we’re all stoned hippies and we don’t want to be too efficient.” If we wanted to be that efficient, we’d join the Army. We’re rock and rollers — we want to be inefficient.
What I was trying to do is take the Grateful Dead—which I achieved, I think, without trying to be big-headed about it—who were known in San Francisco and, vaguely, the West Coast, and were earning about $2,000 a night, to being a successful band in America. That was the same thing Warner Bros. were trying to do. To do that, you need the right record, as well as the right shows, as well as visiting New York 20 times a year. The Grateful Dead, bless ‘em, came up with Workingman’s Dead. Nobody was more fucking grateful and more thrilled than [Warner Bros. executive] Joe Smith. Finally, he’s got a record that Warner Bros. can get behind that everyone can understand — that everyone can go for. “Wow! It’s a record with songs on it! With words that people can relate to!” Hello…
We did 180-odd gigs in the first year I worked with them. In order to get out of debt, we toured relentlessly, man. That was the only way for the band to make money. But also, it was the way to become successful. It was in those days, at least. For example, we filled the Spectrum in Philadelphia — 17,000 people! How did that happen? That happened because, three times, I did tours of fucking colleges throughout Pennsylvania: the band on buses, going from college to college, playing in field houses. Playing for five or six hours, students just stoned off their faces, and they couldn’t believe it. Revolutionary. We played with Jimi Hendrix in Philly. You build these things. We played in and around New York all the time. We’d play the State University of New York — all over New York. And we played the Fillmore East, played all kinds of different gigs out on the East Coast, and built it up. Build it and build it, build it and build it.
Basically, through word-of-mouth, people would say, “Oh, I was at this concert with the Grateful Dead the other day… man, they played for six hours!” “Have you heard this new album?” It’s not just one thing with the band. You’ve got to have this band that’s cooking live, and you’ve got to have a band that’s got a hot album. All those things, coming together..
JESSE: Sam Cutler would pilot the band across the Atlantic for the Europe ‘72 tour, and was the primary driver behind the 1973 Summer Jam at Watkins Glen with The Band and the Allman Brothers, where an estimated 600,000 attended. For many years, it held the record for the biggest concert in history. For Sam Cutler, it was something of a post-Altamont redemption.
SAM CUTLER: We ended up doing huge fucking gigs that were amazing. They ended up with three bands — they said, “Well, let’s do it with three bands.” We did with the Grateful Dead, The Band, and the Allman Brothers, and 610,000 people bought a ticket at Watkins Glen. That wasn’t by accident — that was not an accident. That wasn’t planning by default. It took nine months to get that gig together properly, and plan it properly. That was a result of a conversation I had with Jerry where we wanted to do a big gig again, and show people that it was possible, that they didn’t have to have people being killed, violence. It could be done right: the sound could be done right, everybody could be looked after. Everyone could have an amazingly good time — which they did, I’m pleased to say.
JESSE: In Amir Bar-Lev’s documentary, Long Strange Trip, you may have heard Sam talk about how British people didn’t go out to “discover Britain.” Thanks to Sam, the Grateful Dead themselves became a way for people to find America.
SAM CUTLER: People go, “I'm gonna go and find America.” It’s a uniquely American thing, and it’s wonderful. I went to America myself because of On the Road and loving On the Road as a book. That desire to discover America—find out what American was, what it represented—was strong in me, for sure. It was a dream of every English rock and roller to go to America and be there for that dynamism, that amazing sense of space. I think the Grateful Dead, in Workingman’s Dead particularly, invented or reinvented their own view of what it constituted to be American. I think that Workingman’s Dead represented a huge, huge kind of quantum leap for the Grateful Dead, in terms of their cooperative and artistic endeavors. Amazing, amazing, wonderful, wonderful, wonderful album.
JESSE: I can tell by that Little Ben clock over there that it’s time to go, so here’s a last blast of “Cumberland Blues.” It was the first song from Workingman’s Dead to make it to an official Grateful Dead live album, becoming the opening track on Side A of Europe ‘72, a tour that was very much a Sam Cutler joint. Here’s the sound of the Workingman’s Dead descending on London, April 8th, 1972.
AUDIO: “Cumberland Blues” [Europe ‘72] (0:40-1:10) - [dead.net] [Spotify] [YouTube]