Good Ol’ Grateful Deadcast
Season 1, Episode 3
Workingman’s Dead 50: Dire Wolf
JESSE: Workingman’s Dead is organic and warm-sounding, a familiar and reassuring musical feeling that sustains itself with seeming effortlessness from the first drop of the needle to the final run-out groove. That apparent effortlessness perhaps blurs over not only the songs’ musical complexities and idiosyncrasies, but also how genuinely different the eight songs are from one another. Following the invocatory call-to-joy of “Uncle John’s Band,” with its stacked vocal harmonies, comes the hushed pleading of “High Time,” featuring Bob Weir’s spidery guitar counterpoint and Robert Hunter’s most naked lyrics to date. And then, “Dire Wolf.”
AUDIO: “Dire Wolf” [Workingman’s Dead] (0:00-0:20) - [dead.net] [Spotify] [YouTube]
JESSE: Grateful Dead archivist and legacy manager David Lemieux.
DAVID LEMIEUX: It is a very visual song and it's things that we can all… I'm not going to necessarily say “relate to,” but it's things that we can all envision. I find it such a vivid image. Again, it's one of the songs that when I first put the record on… the first time I heard it, and I heard “Uncle John’s Band” too, [I went], “Wow, this one is knocking me out”; and then we kind of dip things down with “High Time,” and you get this unbelievable, beautiful ballad; and then you get this incredibly bouncy, beautiful, incredibly happy song, but, then you dig into the lyrics and you realize: boy, there’s some danger happening here.
JESSE: Shakedown Stream co-host and lifer Dead Head, Gary Lambert.
GARY LAMBERT: “Dire Wolf” may be the peppiest murder ballad ever written. If you listen to the lyrics, this is scary, ominous stuff — but it’s delivered with such good cheer and such wit. That was a favorite of mine from the first times I heard it. I think I did get to hear one of those versions that Bobby sang; I'd have to look at the Deadbase to make sure of that. But it was a great vehicle for Jerry's pedal steel — and when he stopped playing pedal steel and just made it an electric guitar song, or worked it into the acoustic sets on acoustic, it worked just fine that way too. Yeah, I’m a big fan of that song.
JESSE: Guitarist and more recently minted Dead freak Billy Strings.
BILLY STRINGS: Recently, I got asked to do these liner notes for Jerry and John Kahn, one of their latest releases. That got me listening to all those tunes on the setlist. I listened to that live recording a bunch. The “Dire Wolf” on there, it’s just Jerry and John. It’s so cool, because you can really hear Jerry’s flatpicking guitar — you can hear the bluegrass influence in there. He’s playing some almost Doc Watson licks, it’s really cool. I've always heard this song as: “Yeah, love that song — ‘Dire Wolf,’ yeah, it’s a great tune.” But for some reason, when I was doing this project, it just took on a whole new weight for me. I think I was listening to the chorus all the time and not the verses. And, this time, I really dug into the verses and it's like: holy shit. This song has got layers and it's deep, man. It's really deep. First of all, Fennario — that’s just, like, this fictional place, and I just love that. I love the almost childish characteristics and the ancient folk wisdom that Robert Hunter had. It’s kind of weird that Jerry was into that kind of shit, too, like Frankenstein and The Wolf Man and The Mummy. When I was a little kid, my dad showed me those movies, and I loved them. The Wolf Man was my favorite one. I’ve got him tattooed on my side — I’ve got Creature from the Black Lagoon, too. I really loved those movies, and so the Wolf part already sticks out to me, because I’m such a freak for The Wolf Man. When I was little, he was real, you know? It was nuts. I wouldn’t even go out when it was a full moon. It’s just this amazing little tale. You’ve got that part where the wolf is outside his window, grinning, and he just says, “Come on in…” That’s such a huge image. Everything is so vague and it’s all up for personal interpretation — it’s up to you to decide what’s really going on. And this one, it could be a lot of different shit. What’s going on? Is the Wolf the devil? Is this guy who had invited him in to play cards, is he now part of the wolf pack? In the last verse, in the backwash, is he one of the wolves that are running around? Is he the one that is getting dues collected from him?
JESSE: Let’s let Jerry Garcia introduce it, February 1st, 1970 at the Warehouse in New Orleans, two days after getting busted down on Bourbon Street.
JERRY GARCIA [2/1/70]: It’s a simple little song, and I’m gonna teach you the chorus to it… this is a little song you sing when you’re walkin’ home alone and it’s dark and there’s phantom figures scurrying in the background...
BOB WEIR [2/1/70]: Things that go scrape in the night…
JESSE: And this is from Winterland in San Francisco, October 26, 1969.
JERRY GARCIA [10/26/69]: This song is dedicated to the Zodiac cat, and also to paranoid fantasies everywhere. And everybody can sing along if they feel up to it, it’s real easy to sing…
JESSE: The Zodiac cat in question was the still-unidentified Zodiac killer, then on the loose in San Francisco, who’d begun sending cryptic notes to local newspapers during the summer of ‘69. That’s some dark energy to affix to a song. But “Dire Wolf” was a timely song for a grisly era in American culture — and remains timely today. Its original impetus, though, came from a slightly more classical source: Sherlock Holmes. It all started one evening when Robert Hunter and Jerry Garcia were home watching television.
AUDIO: Sherlock Holmes: The Hound of the Baskervilles trailer [1959]
HOLMES [1959]: Some revolting sacrificial rite has been performed. What depths a human being can sink to.
WATSON [1959]: What human being could’ve done this?
HOLMES [1959]: That is precisely what I intend to find out.
NARRATOR [1959]: Take heed, and beware the moor in those dark hours when evil is exalted, else you will surely meet the hound of Hell, the Hound of the Baskervilles...
[character screams]
JESSE: Peter Cushing, later known for playing Grand Moff Tarkin in Star Wars, among many, many other roles, was Sherlock Holmes. Recalled Robert Hunter in his online journal in 1996, “We were speculating on what the ghostly hound might turn out to be.” Somebody, possibly Mountain Girl, suggested that it might be a dire wolf. Hunter wrote, “We thought Dire Wolves were great big beasts. Extinct now, it turns out they were quite small and ran in packs. But the idea of a great big wolf named Dire was enough to trigger a lyric.” Then Hunter dreamt the song.
The next morning, he told Steve Silberman, “I woke up and grabbed a pencil before I was entirely awake and wrote the whole song down. I think I managed to capture the quality of the dream by writing it down before I was wide awake.” He continued, “I remember giving Jerry the lyrics for ‘Dire Wolf’ while he was noodling on guitar, watching television. He took them and placed them aside without looking at them, continued watching TV. I said, ‘I don't live here because of your sweet temper, it's to write songs!’ Somewhat startled at the vehemence of the statement, he picked up the page and got right to work setting it. The old boy often needed jump-starting.”
The song was done by that afternoon, and debuted onstage by the Grateful Dead on June 7, 1969 at the Fillmore West. According to the San Francisco Examiner archives, The Hound of the Baskervilles aired on Bay Area television exactly twice in the spring of 1969, May 25th and May 31st. On the 31st, the Dead were in the Northwest, playing McArthur Court in Eugene, which means that it might well have been on Sunday evening May 25th, 1969, that Garcia, Hunter, and Mountain Girl found themselves watching the 9:30 showing of The Hound of Baskervilles on Channel 2 — and on Monday, May 26th, when Hunter woke up with words and Garcia wrote some music, and “Dire Wolf” came into existence.
AUDIO: “Dire Wolf” ((Complete Track with Vocals) - Not Slated) [Workingman’s Dead: The Angel’s Share] (0:00-0:32) - [dead.net] [Spotify] [YouTube]
JERRY GARCIA [1970]: We’ll do one more, then we’ll come and listen.
ENGINEER [1970]: Okay, guys, all the sounds on that one were really good.
BILL KREUTZMANN [1970]: The only thing I didn’t like about it is we didn’t, we started at one tempo and crept up –
Band starts playing.
JERRY GARCIA [1970]: Too much of my guitar!
AUDIO: “Pretty Peggy-O” [Bob Dylan, s/t] (0:15-0:30) - [Spotify]
JESSE: That’s Bob Dylan’s version of “Pretty Peggy-O” from his 1962 self-titled debut, making too many myths to unpack at once, and singing a Scottish ballad that migrated across the Atlantic to the southern Applaichans.
It first appeared in print in the United States in 1890. In that version, Peggy-O could be found down by the banks of the Ivy-O, most likely a mutation of the Bonnie Lass o’ Fyvie-O. Fennario itself seems to be an American invention, first appearing in a version sung by Mrs. Margaret Combs Green of Knott County, Kentucky and transcribed in 1908 by Katherine Jackson French, the pioneering song collector. Fennario is a place of the imagination. Not Robert Hunter’s imagination, or maybe even Margaret Green’s imagination, but perhaps some shared imagination in the Kentucky mountains, dreaming far and lonesome. Not that a listener needs or is expected to know any of that, nor to imply that Jerry Garcia and Robert Hunter were familiar with every nuance and variant of the Peggy-O ballad. But that’s not to say that they weren’t.
AUDIO: “Peggy-O” [5/22/77] (1:07-1:17)
JESSE: That version of “Peggy-O” was from May 22nd, 1977. On the Workingman’s Dead recording of “Dire Wolf,” alongside those cursed lyrics about the wolf at the door, is a voice that’s neither from the Appalaichans, nor even ancient at all — the pedal steel guitar.
AUDIO: “Dire Wolf” [Workingman’s Dead] (0:00-0:06) - [dead.net] [Spotify] [YouTube]
JESSE: Jerry Garcia owned a pedal steel when he lived in the Haight but divested of it, because he couldn’t figure out how to play it. But a few years later, after finding a Zane Beck Custom Double-10 set up and ready to go at a Denver music store, he took the plunge again. Here’s how Jerry put it onstage a few months later, on August 1st, 1969, his 27th birthday.This is from the amazing recent box set, Dawn of the New Riders of the Purple Sage, put out by our friends at the Owsley Stanley Foundation.
JERRY GARCIA [8/1/69]: Of course, sociologically, this all represents a big switch in the whole rock and roll trip. If you really want to get into it.
JESSE: The Grateful Dead’s embrace of country music in 1969 and 1970, first manifesting on Workingman’s Dead, was part of a larger shift in American music, and American culture at large, from the wilds of the first psychedelic era to whatever was to come. The pedal steel might have represented a sociological switch, but practically speaking, first Jerry Garcia had to learn how to play it.
The pedal steel is insanely complicated. It can bend notes in multiple directions at once. To play it requires both hands, both feet, and both knees. Many players practice for years before performing in public. Garcia was onstage within a matter of weeks, joining his old friend John “Marmaduke” Nelson at a hofbräu in Menlo Park. They soon drafted guitarist David Nelson, a partner of Garcia in numerous projects in the acoustic days before the Dead, and the three began to practice in Garcia and Hunter’s living room in Larkspur, joined soon by Bob Matthews on bass. David Nelson would contribute to both Workingman’s Dead and American Beauty, and join the Dead onstage virtually every night in 1970. Here’s what he remembered about Jerry and the pedal steel.
DAVID NELSON: The complicated thing about it was the way the pedal mechanisms work, just under the guitar. And so Garcia would get under there, and there would be 20 minutes of the practice with Garcia under that guitar going, “Motherfucker… ugh, this fuckin’ cocksucker…” And we’d sit there and be polite. I tried to help one time, and he said, “Nah, you really can’t, you’ve gotta have one guy do this. This is one of those things…” But those practices were held at Garcia’s house. I didn’t really have a place, I was still in Palo Alto. So I drive up there and say, “Do I have to drive back every day?” And they said, “No, you can stay here.” So I slept on the floor — they made a little palette for me on the floor.
Well, they were sharing the house. Mountain Girl was there and Hunter’s girlfriend, Christie, was there for a while. It was a nice place. It was just amazing, these songs coming out — we’d go, “Whoa, wow!” It was just one of those periods of time when it was just in the air, writing songs. John Dawson was coming out with all these incredible songs, just tons of them. Every week, there’d be five new songs, at least a couple or three. That was great. This just went on and on.
JESSE: Almost instantly, starting in the mid-1969, the New Riders became part of the Dead’s stage shows, with David Nelson and John Dawson appearing onstage to add harmonies and additional guitar.
DAVID NELSON: He had us on the Chet Helms gigs at The Family Dog, we would go sit in just for a song or two, and then a Bill Graham gig maybe at Winterland or something. We’d go sit in for a song or two, and we’d get to go backstage and hang out behind the amps. Those [gigs] were really fun — just playing one song or two, just singing harmony on a couple songs. At that time, we were still Jerry Garcia and Friends, and Garcia hated that. He just went, “No, no.” So some newspaper or somebody said, “Well, you got a name?” And he said, “How about the Murdering Punks?” That's really a bad idea because it happened to be ‘68 or ‘69 — that was the [time of the] Charles Manson murders and all that shit. So, that was not a good idea. We had this list—I probably still have it buried somewhere—of incredible names. Whenever a band starts to think of names, the first two or three are serious; the next are just laughable, having fun and everybody laughing at a name, like The Murdering Punks. One night—Hunter was living at that house also—Hunter comes down the stairs and says, “I think I’ve got a name idea for your band.” And we said, “What?” And he said, “The Riders of the Purple Sage.” And I said, “There already was Riders of the Purple Sage, Foy Willing and the Riders of the Purple Sage.” So, I said, “How about the New Riders of the Purple Sage?” And they said: “That’s it.”
JESSE: It’s true that Charles Manson and his followers went on their murder spree in August 1969, the same month the New Riders of the Purple Sage debuted under that name. But the New Riders actually came first, and—more likely—it was the Zodiac Killer that dissuaded the new country-rock band from calling themselves the Murdering Punks. The serial killer’s first letter to the press appeared on August 1st, 1969, just exactly as the band was looking for a name. They played their first official billing as the New Riders of the Purple Sage just a week later at the Matrix, which happened to be the first night that the Manson killings began. So, to add a footnote to a footnote: The Zodiac Killer might not have influenced the writing of “Dire Wolf,” but did have a hand in naming the New Riders of the Purple Sage.
Over the next year, as the New Riders of the Purple Sage solidified into a band, they would become a forum for both Jerry Garcia’s pedal steel as well as Bob Weir’s developing cowboy persona. This is also from the Dawn of the New Riders of the Purple Sage box.
AUDIO: “Seasons of My Heart” (feat. Bob Weir) [New Riders of the Purple Sage, Dawn of the New Riders of the Purple Sage, 8/28/69] (0:13-0:33) - [Spotify]
JESSE: That was “Seasons of My Heart,” recorded August 28th, 1969 at the Family Dog on the Great Highway in San Francisco. We’ll meet up with the New Riders again further down the trail.
Jerry Garcia’s pedal steel debuted with the Grateful Dead in June 1969, showing up on tape for the first time over the summer solstice at the Fillmore East. And one of the numbers that Garcia used it on was his and Hunter’s brand-new song about the Dire Wolf, written after watching The Hound of the Baskervilles. Except that Garcia was no longer singing it.
AUDIO: “Dire Wolf” [So Many Roads, 6/27/69] (0:00-0:26)
JESSE: That was an early version of “Dire Wolf,” recorded by Owsley Stanley on June 27th, 1969 in Santa Rosa, California, with vocals by Bobby “Ace” Weir and Jerry Garcia on pedal steel. The song had made it to the stage less than two weeks after Garcia and Hunter had written it, with Garcia playing acoustic guitar and singing lead and everybody else following behind. Besides being a live workshop for Jerry Garcia’s pedal steel chops and Bobby Ace’s singin’, the other way in which the New Riders of the Purple Sage are inseparable from Workingman’s Dead is that their first bassist co-produced the album. Here’s original New Riders bassist Bob Matthews.
BOB MATTHEWS: My participation with the New Riders started with the beginning of New Riders in May of 1969. I played with them all summer ‘69 up through the fall of 1969, when I had job opportunities in real recording studios to be a real recording engineer rather than just trying to present myself as a real recording engineer. I had to make a choice, and it was Marmaduke who put the choice to me. He said, “Bob, we’ve had a lot of fun playing. You like it, we like to have you play with us. But you’re also advancing your recording job and doing a good job at it. You have to make the choice; you have to do one or the other. They are two separate artistic endeavors.” And I never really made a choice — which, by default, made the choice that I stuck with the recording.
JESSE: But Bob Matthews gained invaluable experience with the New Riders, what he would come to call his “both sides of the glass perspective.”
BOB MATTHEWS: That's what it refers to — as an engineer-producer from the control room side, versus the performer who played in the band and understood what the music that the band was creating. I could use the tools from both sides, and it was a joy. It helped the music. The musicians liked it because I had good contacts and I could make things happen, realistically and economically.
JESSE: Along with Betty Cantor, Bob Matthews was a full creative partner with the musicians in the creation of Workingman’s Dead, and they would receive both producers’ credits and producers’ royalties on the album. They can be heard in every groove of the disc, literally in the case of mastering engineer Betty Cantor. First and foremost, they were the band’s collaborators, and figured out a sympathetic way to record them.
BOB MATTHEWS: It was pretty simple. A lot of the basic tracks had acoustic guitars. There was something that I put that Betty and I pulled out of our collective hat, and that was we would have them set up sort of in a semicircle — the acoustic guitars about six feet apart in a semi-arc, each with a microphone. We were not using directs on the acoustic; these were all Martin D21s, D28s. But on the outside of this arc, you would have one on stage right, one on stage left, and one stage center. The acoustic guitar on stage right needed to be heard by the acoustic guitar player all the way on stage left, without it leaking into the microphone on stage center. What I did was I took baffles, because they roll around the studio, and properly-made baffles have two sides. One is absorptive—which is what they're usually used for, just to suck up extra sound—and the other side is reflective. I used the reflective side of a baffle that was set between acoustic guitar stage right and acoustic guitar stage center such that the reflective side went behind stage center and then off to stage left — so that I was redirecting acoustic energy utilizing the reflective surfaces of the baffles. This is when we were just really starting to discover how important phase was. Leakage was phase.
JESSE: By the time “Dire Wolf” got to Pacific High in February 1970, it had changed again, with Garcia returning to lead vocals by early July 1969. Here’s what it sounded like on January 2nd, 1970 at the Fillmore East, from Dave’s Picks 30, with Tom Constanten on Hammond organ. Jerry introduced the song a lot as a singalong during this period.
JERRY GARCIA [1/2/70]: This is a song with an easy chorus, and you can even sing with it. It’s fun…
AUDIO: “Dire Wolf” [Dave’s Picks 30, 1/2/70] (0:39-1:17)
JESSE: Here’s David Lemieux.
DAVID LEMIEUX: Well, it's interesting — Jerry, when he was with the New Riders on pedal steel, he did not sing at all, no backgrounds or anything. I gather that it requires so much effort and concentration that singing’s not really on the menu there. The first half-dozen versions of “Dire Wolf,” Bob Weir sang lead vocal — that, to me, just blows my mind. I remember playing one of the versions for Bob with Bob on lead vocal, and he had no recollection of that. It was shortly after that that Jerry stopped playing pedal steel during “Dire Wolf” and then he started singing lead on it. That’s the version obviously that we have on the album, where everything lead is sung by Jerry with the exception of “Easy Wind.”
JESSE: Now let’s move over to Pacific High Recording and the big pile of Workingman’s Dead session tapes called The Angel’s Share. Jerry Garcia’s guitar is in the left channel, Bob Weir’s is in the right.
AUDIO: “Dire Wolf” ((Breakdown 1) - Not Slated) [Workingman’s Dead: The Angel’s Share] (0:00-1:25) - [dead.net] [Spotify] [YouTube]
JESSE: On that early run-through of “Dire Wolf,” we hear the band warming up the song with both of the guitarists playing acoustic, not too far from the basic track that’s on the final album. But that’s not all that’s on The Angel’s Share.
When the Dead, Bob Matthews, and Betty Cantor were at work on Workingman’s Dead, they went full speed ahead, in such a way that it sometimes leaves our in-house sonic archeologists—archivist Mike Johnson and engineer Brian Kehew—at a bit of a loss to explain how the tape got how it did. As they got deeper into the project, they started finding tape fragments everywhere. Here’s Brian Kehew to explain.
BRIAN KEHEW: “Dire Wolf” has quite a few takes to it, maybe spread across two reels or even three. And sometimes, when we find that they had a little piece of tape somehow leftover, they would splice it on the end of another roll, but actually splice it backwards. So sometimes what we heard was backwards music playing, because a tape can be actually inserted backwards and it just plays in reverse. Then, I have to copy it from the tape in one pass and reverse it in the computer. We’d have to have the whole pile put together and then start dissecting it. One day, they're working on the song “Black Peter,” and then they work on “Dire Wolf,” and then you have a piece of “New Speedway Boogie” as a demo. They may be from different days, they may be from the same day, we don’t really know. Part of it might have been that they recorded over something from the previous day because — ‘of course we don’t need those outtakes anymore for recording a new song, because tape is expensive.’
JESSE: For the Workingman’s Dead sessions, Betty Cantor and Bob Matthews were recording the band mostly on reels of Ampex 406 2-inch mastering tape, which could fit around 40 minutes of music on each 3,600-foot reel running at 15 inches per second. Though it would become a studio standard, 406 was brand-new in 1970, and sold for slightly cheaper than its competitors, perhaps between $60 and $70 per reel wholesale — adjusted for inflation, around $400 per reel.
MIKE JOHNSON: Brian is an expert at the Beatles and is an author and acknowledged professional at this. We're both giant fans of Beatle discographer Mark Lewisohn. In Lewisohn’s books on the Beatles, he went to Abbey Road EMI and had access to their files; they kept wonderful detailed information about every single tracking session.
JESSE: The Grateful Dead didn’t use tape quite like anybody else, even in the recording studio. And though Dead scholars have figured out where most of the sessions occurred, the Dead and their cohorts didn’t always leave behind the most detailed documentation.
MIKE JOHNSON: Lewisohn was able to put together these books. There's no such thing with the Grateful Dead — none whatsoever. We don't even know, in most cases, the recording dates. And this information just does not exist, which is a giant crime. It really should.
JESSE: Brian Kehew.
BRIAN KEHEW: There might be times they play a song, but they don't sing on it. Maybe they sing on two versions. We found some of that during this process, but the deeper dive, and the way to really satisfy people who are fans, is to be allowed into the situation where they're working. And that doesn't mean that the output is finished, or the output is polished. Sometimes, they're just literally talking and tuning, or learning the song. It’s funny to hear a song that we all know so well, and [one that] Dead fans have memorized to the finest detail, but the band doesn’t even know the chords yet. This is how new things were.
I love the discovery of seeing them learn their own songs, and come up with a better chord. On at least two of these songs, maybe Jerry starts it on guitar, and he says, “No, no, I can’t do this,” and then Bob becomes the main guitar player on the song. And that’s the way it’s been ever since then. But on that day, they weren’t really sure who was going to play this part, and so forth. It’s fascinating to hear that working process, so one of our key goals—and, I think a real highlight of the whole set—[is] for the audience to just feel like you’re between the amplifiers, just in front of the drumset.
We tried to make it a very natural sound without a lot of effects on it, without a lot of the reverb and compression and tricks that people use when mixing, so that it’s more documentarian and more literal. You get to hear when they stop and make a noise; you get to hear when they scuffle their feet; you get to hear them yell at each other or praise each other; and then we get to hear them progress as the song gets better and better. Sometimes they’re singing, sometimes they’re not. When they’re not singing, you can hear the players that much better.
You can hear their interaction, what they’re trying to do. You’ll hear a moment when a fragment of a song starts, maybe two seconds — a brief moment where they’re already playing and the tape starts, somebody realizes that they’re doing a take and: “We forgot to push ‘record.’” [makes tape machine sound] And the tape starts. Audio artifacts, but we haven’t filtered those out — we haven’t removed things just to make it pretty. We tried to keep it very real, because the band holds up to that scrutiny; they play well together, and they have their unique character. We’re not trying to make it polished or perfected. We’re trying to be as real and literal as possible about what was happening without interpretation.
JESSE: What The Angel’s Share reveals about “Dire Wolf” is that, despite intensive preparation with Bob Matthews and Betty Cantor, there was still some experimentation happening in the studio — more subtle fine-tuning than radical rewrites, but feeling the songs out as they went.
On The Angel’s Share, we can hear the band working through “Dire Wolf” exactly as the basic tracks appear on Workingman’s Dead. The pedal steel would come later. But also on The Angel’s Share are a number of takes featuring Jerry Garcia playing electric guitar and Weir on acoustic, including a full performance with scratch vocals. But it’s also missing the secret sauce, the pedal steel and the pedal steel solo. David Lemieux loves that solo, and rightly so.
DAVID LEMIEUX: It could be one of the best pedal steel solos that I've ever heard. Jerry would be the first to say he didn't feel he was quite an expert at the pedal steel, but I listen to this and, when I think of “Dire Wolf,” all I think of is the lead pedal steel throughout the entire song, how it’s driven by the pedal steel guitar. It really just blows my mind how good he’d become in essentially the less-than-a-year that he’d been playing at it. It’s a testament to Jerry’s talent as a musician that he could] learn an instrument this well within… it’s like what you were saying about “Teach Your Children.” Jerry was so proficient at it that he was sought after by Crosby, Stills and Nash to be on their album. Then you listen a year later when he recorded his solo record, on “The Wheel,” and you can hear it’s distinctly Jerry. It’s as distinct, listening to that, as when I listen to slide guitar players. To me, a lot of them blend into one another — but Bob Weir, say what you will about his slide playing, it is very distinct. Likewise, Jerry’s pedal steel playing is very distinct from all the other players.
JESSE: All of these things are true. In the same way that Jerry Garcia’s pedal steel represents a generational divide in rock and roll, Jerry Garcia himself represents something of a generational divide among pedal steel guitar players. Some serious old-schoolers disregard his playing as primitive, which Garcia would probably agree with. But younger players have also cited Garcia’s creativity and instinctual musicality as inspirations. In some ways, on Workingman’s Dead, Garcia plays the pedal steel equivalent of punk rock — all instinct and self-invented technique.
He’d learn more as he played more. One word for Garcia’s pedal steel playing on Workingman’s Dead is primal. Another would be beautiful. Let’s listen to that pedal steel solo from “Dire Wolf” which also features some sweet overdubbed oohs. Near the end, the pedal steel dances over towards the right channel for a moment and then back to the center of the mix. That’s Bob Matthews waving hello.
AUDIO: “Dire Wolf” [Workingman’s Dead] (1:50-2:15) - [dead.net] [Spotify] [YouTube]
BOB MATTHEWS: Usually it was whoever’s song it was who sang the lead would do the track. On the tunes that had backup, the backup would be recorded separately. The harmonies would be sung and recorded against the lead vocal. Listen to Crosby, Stills and Nash: there’s the epitome of harmony. They never… I don’t think you’ll ever find any demonstration that they did their harmony parts separately, to the best of my knowledge. If we were recording a tune, we were working on the tune. We’d play it back to make sure that not only it was played without any mistakes, but that it carried the intent, the vibe, the capital-M Magic.
JESSE: That capital-M magic was there with “Dire Wolf” all the way, from the moment it was written, and that magic would carry well into the future. As some listeners might know, “dire wolves” appear throughout George R. R. Martin’s Game of Thrones, both the original novels and the popular HBO series. But the connections between George R. R. Martin and the Grateful Dead run way deeper, and started more than a dozen years before the first Game of Thrones book was even published.
George R. R. Martin’s fourth book, published in 1983, was called The Armageddon Rag, about a pair of brutal murders connected to a fictional rock band formed in the ‘60s called The Nazgul. Along with other bands, the Dead played an influence on the novel. But it got even deeper the next year, when Phil DeGuere optioned the book for a movie. DeGuere was one of the filmmakers behind Sunshine Daydream, the now-beloved then-bootlegged concert film from 1972, and DeGuere hired a group of familiar musicians, including Robert Hunter, Merl Saunders and Quicksilver Messenger Service’s John Cipollina to write music for The Nazgul. The Armageddon Rag movie never got made, but the soundtrack did, and it circulates among tape collectors.
Martin called The Armageddon Rag “a total commercial disaster,” and subsequently took a break from writing novels. But people discover the Grateful Dead in many different ways—radio, tapes, their parents’ LPs—and, in the early ‘80s, one of those pathways to the Dead became the world of George R. R. Martin. To explain, we have Jeffrey Alexander, who leads a collective known as Dire Wolves (Just Exactly Perfect Sisters Band). Despite having two Dead references packed into their name, they’re not a Dead cover band. But they definitely jam. Here’s Jeffrey.
JEFFREY ALEXANDER: When I was like 15, I got a copy of Armageddon Rag, and I was so into it. I remember that one summer I read it like three times. I was a teenager, into fantasy novels and Dungeons and Dragons and all of that, and I thought this was the coolest thing. Looking back, it's not really the greatest book. It’s okay. I don’t know if it ages well. But there’s the fantasy elements of a rock band, with supernatural things and magic… it’s cool. So, I got into George R. R. Martin through that. I was already a really, really serious music head. I went to a lot of sci-fi conventions when I was growing up in Baltimore. I would go to these Dungeons and Dragons workshops with friends, and I’d talk about this book. They’d be like, “Oh yeah, you should check out the project with Robert Hunter and John Cipollina.” Then I was like, “ I don’t know what that is.” But I dove into that, and it kind of blew my mind. I was a bit of a punker then — I was heavily into hardcore and SST stuff. And then I just did some deep dives with Quicksilver [Messenger Service], started to get into the Dead. When I was a senior in high school, a friend of mine said, “Well, I’ve got tickets to go see the Dead.” I was like, “Okay.” I went to a show in ‘85, and it was like… oh, no. I was all in at that point. I ended up for, like, five years, just going on the road. I got to see Jerry 100-some times. I think that there’s just this fantasy / sci-fi Grateful Dead connection. It runs pretty deep in my psyche. It may be the magical kind of vibe. I think a lot of it is also just my interest in escapism — getting into some alternate head space, some magical reality. Fantasy books and improvisational music really run hand in hand. It’s kind of what I try to do with my band as well.
JESSE: Here’s what Jeffrey Alexander and the Dire Wolves (Just Exactly Perfect Sisters Band) sound like mid-jam. This is a little bit of “I Control The Weather” from their 2019 album Grow Towards the Light, available from the label Beyond Beyond is Beyond.
AUDIO: “I Control the Weather” [Dire Wolves (Just Exactly Perfect Sisters Band), Grow Towards the Light] (4:00-4:30) - [Bandcamp]
JESSE: In addition to entering American popular mythology, “Dire Wolf” was an important part of the Grateful Dead’s repertoire for almost their entire career from the moment it was introduced. It was shelved very briefly during and immediately following the band’s mid-’70s road hiatus, but returned to the stage in full-force by 1977 and never left. But “Dire Wolf” wasn’t a jam vehicle. In fact, it barely changed at all — an intro verse, two bridge verses, a solo, and an outro verse, never going over four minutes in length.
Because of that, it’s the perfect way to hear how the sound of the band changed radically over those years — Mickey Hart leaves and comes back, Donna Jean Godchaux arrives and departs, the tempo and guitar tones change, as does the band’s attack. Here’s a special supercut edit of “Dire Wolf” that begins with its first performance in 1969 and ends with its last in 1995, a few seconds taken from 26 different versions and arranged chronologically into one performance. Thanks to my co-host and super-editor Rich Mahan for making this behemoth a reality.
AUDIO: “Dire Wolf (Supercut, 1969-1995)]” - [YouTube]
JESSE: Here’s a full list of the versions of “Dire Wolf” in that supercut. It ended, though, with the very final version of “Dire Wolf,” recorded July 2nd, 1995 at Deer Creek in Indiana. It’s a perfect example of how the meaning of the song could change, and how those phantom scurrying figures might stick around. Here’s David Lemieux.
DAVID LEMIEUX: There was the famous show in the ‘90s when Jerry was essentially under police protection, because he received… I guess the FBI, the police, figured it was a credible death threat. At the concert that night, it was an outdoor show — they left the house lights on, because they wanted to make sure they could see everything. Jerry… you think of the later years, they didn’t talk very much from the stage. You didn’t know whether they were in a joking mood or not. They didn’t have to talk that night. But Jerry, on the night he received a credible death threat, he played “Dire Wolf” and sang to that crowd: “Don’t murder me.” It’s typical Grateful Dead that they’ve got this subtle, sly, nuanced sense of humor that only the Grateful Dead could do. They didn’t acknowledge it from the stage; they didn’t have to say anything. But the song kind of spoke for how Jerry was feeling, which was — yeah, this is a serious thing, but come on. I’m going to turn it into… not a joke, but that this is the reality: “don’t murder me.”
JESSE: Once in a while, everybody’s got a reason to sing “Dire Wolf.”