Good Ol’ Grateful Deadcast
Season 1, Episode 2
Workingman’s Dead 50: High Time
JESSE: As the glorious stacked harmonies of “Uncle John’s Band” end, “High Time” starts with no preamble. It seems like another simple song.
AUDIO: “High Time” [Workingman’s Dead] (0:00-0:30) - [dead.net] [Spotify] [YouTube]
JESSE: “High Time” conjures a feeling instantly. Here’s Grateful Dead archivist and legacy manager David Lemieux.
DAVID LEMIEUX: “High Time” is, to me, a song that just is… I'm a [canoeist], and it’s canoeing down a little creek, maybe watching beavers build their lodge. It’s just a song that’s [like] summer, drifting along in a canoe — it’s just a beautiful, ethereal song.
JESSE: Radio host and extra-hardcore longtime Dead Head Gary Lambert was there at the Fillmore East the first weekend the band played the song publicly in June of 1969.
GARY LAMBERT: That was the one that utterly stunned me when I first heard it, because nothing in their previous history could have prepared you for such a heartbreaking, beautiful, melodic ballad as that — so beautifully sung, so beautifully played, some of Hunter's most extraordinary lyrics. And that, to me, signaled the maturation of that songwriting duo as well as anything.
JESSE: The Grateful Dead were different from most other bands and, in perhaps the most quietly radical way, “High Time” is one of the first places where that difference became audible. 8-track and 16-track recording technology had transformed studios into instruments that could make whole new kinds of sounds, and—in turn—transformed popular music. And, on Anthem of the Sun and Aoxomoxoa, the Dead were right there along with the Beatles, the Beach Boys, and other bands in pushing the wondrous excesses and money-sucking possibilities of the studio. Here’s Sam Cutler, who became the band’s tour manager in 1970, during the same months they were making Workingman’s Dead.
SAM CUTLER: Before Workingman’s Dead, the Grateful Dead of course had spent an awful lot of money on making records. And I think, like virtually every other band in the world, the Grateful Dead suddenly realized that in this glorious place—where you could twiddle knobs and see what this did, see what that did, and get the sound of thick air, or whatever it was that you were trying to achieve—that, actually, you were paying for the privilege of being there, through the not-very-subtle reality that the record company was paying for you to record. But that was an advance: it was your money, actually, that was paying for recording. So it was all very well to spend months in the studio recording an album… but there's nothing that focuses a band’s minds, collectively, [more] than poverty. The band wanted to survive.
Jerry and I were having a conversation, I remember, and we were talking about this very thing: “Yeah, it's wonderful being in the studio, messing about, discovering all the wonderful things that you can do with the sounds… but actually you're paying for that.” So I think that the band entered into Workingman’s Dead with a completely other mindset, a completely [different] kind of consciousness going on. One [piece of it was] they didn't write anything in the studio — it was all written beforehand. Not only that, they played it before they went in the studio together. It wasn't necessarily completely and totally rehearsed, as it were, down to the last digit. But nonetheless, everybody knew where they were going; everybody was on the same page. Workingman’s Dead was a wonderful, classical example of the Grateful Dead getting their fingers out and getting down to it to remain radically focused, and it’s really quite amazing.
The album itself was recorded in double-quick time. I can't remember exactly, but like three weeks, which is pretty fast. We should remember that that was a magic year when they were recording that — that time period was a special time period in American music. So many great bands of that period went back, reexamined and reinterpreted their roots in American music and kind of reestablished what it was to be an American band.
JESSE: For the Grateful Dead, that meant leaning in hard to what they’d always been since virtually the moment they took up their first residency as the Warlocks: a working rock band. Even as they were racking up enormous studio bills, they remained, first and foremost, a live act with a repertoire that evolved on a nightly basis. And thanks to the keen work of generations of tape traders and Deadologists who’ve reconstructed the band’s history in massive projects like DeadBase, it’s possible to observe how the Grateful Dead’s reinvention happened almost in real time. Workingman’s Dead required… work.
The album began to take shape eight months, two albums, and one side project before the Dead entered San Francisco’s Pacific High Recording in February 1970. Here’s David Lemieux.
DAVID LEMIEUX: A lot was going on for the Grateful Dead in mid-1969 that would kind of be the definition of what the Dead would sound like in 1970. Really, in June of ‘69, you can almost pinpoint it where… if you listen to the Dead—well, obviously Live/Dead, in January, February and March of ‘69, we call that “Primal Dead,” which kept going through March, April, and May. Then, in June, a few things changed. One, they started bringing in the Workingman’s Dead songs: “Casey Jones,” “Dire Wolf” and “High Time.” Those songs started creeping into the setlist a full year before the album came out. In addition to that, Jerry started playing pedal steel.
I don’t know how long he’d been playing it for, but he practiced a lot — so much so that he could play it on stage with the Grateful Dead in June of ‘69, and then, shortly after that, when he started playing with Marmaduke [a.k.a. John Dawson], which would of course become the New Riders [of the Purple Sage]. In addition to that, Bob [Weir] started bringing in more country songs. Songs like “Mama Tried” and “Me and My Uncle” came in and became a big part of the repertoire. “[Ol’] Slewfoot” and “Silver Threads and Gold[en Needles]” — all these songs, they started showing up again. And so the Grateful Dead were really shifting from that Primal Dead. Now, what I’ve said before—and when I do, I don’t want anybody to take exception with it, thinking that it was a hard turn—[is] there were still some incredibly deep, psychedelic Primal Dead performances throughout the rest of 1969 into 1970.
AUDIO: “Feedback” [Dick’s Picks 4, 2/14/70] (0:00-0:30) - [Spotify] [YouTube]
JESSE: That was the Grateful Dead on February 14, 1970 at the Fillmore East in New York, from Dick’s Picks 4 — only days before hours before heading back to California to set up shop for Workingman’s Dead a little closer to home.
In downtown San Francisco, around the corner from the Fillmore West, there was a warehouse with a purple door, and behind that purple door was Pacific High Recorders, where the Grateful Dead demoed, and then made, Workingman’s Dead in the early part of 1970. Located at 60 Brady Street, just off Market, Pacific High was one of the first independent, head-owned and head-run studios in the Bay Area. During its roughly decade of existence under three different names, it would be home to sessions for numerous classics as well as live sessions on KSAN.
After relocating from downtown Sausalito in 1969, Pacific High quickly became a favorite of local artists. Richard Olsen, bassist for original San Francisco psychedelic band the Charlatans, and a familiar face to many local musicians, was studio manager. During its first year in operation, Sly and the Family Stone recorded Stand! There, and the Grateful Dead logged many, many hours working on Aoxomoxoa, mixing Live/Dead, and adding to their deep debt to Warner Bros..
A former plastics factory, Pacific High was a large warehouse subdivided into an enormous 50-by-60-foot live space, and a slightly less enormous control room. For the recording of Workingman’s Dead, the band took advantage of the acreage. Jerry Garcia and Bob Weir brought nearly every instrument they owned, spreading them out across the studio. Though many of the songs would feature acoustic guitars, more songs than not featured electric, too, with Garcia playing through his Stratocaster, SG, and Les Paul at various points.
Working on both sides of the glass, co-producers Bob Matthews and Betty Cantor were responsible for capturing the sounds from the band, run through the custom Pacific High console, designed by studio owner Peter Weston, and into the Ampex MM-1000 16-track recorder that Bob and Betty brought with them from Alembic, the Dead’s sound technology offshoot. Here’s Gary Lambert.
GARY LAMBERT: Bob and Betty were terrific recording engineers. They were really very good at catching the characteristics of any given instrument. They were pretty new at it — they were not old studio pros, who the Grateful Dead had worked with on their early albums. They recorded their first album in L.A., at RCA, with some of the best engineers in the business. But Bob and Betty really had an innate understanding of the sound of the Grateful Dead. That might not have served them well producing anyone else, but it worked with those guys. It was a kind of ongoing university — they were all getting better at what they did. The fact that people who had no experience as recording engineers were tasked with recording the band's live shows, and got incredible-sounding straight-into-the-board recordings—which we are being blessed with to this very day—is kind of miraculous in a way. There was no school for that stuff back then.
JESSE: The Dead and their engineers had spent Aoxomoxoa learning how to use the 16-track, and now were ready to put those skills to good use. “Produced by the Grateful Dead with Bob & Betty” is what the inset sticker on Live/Dead read in 1969, and they would be credited similarly this time. Here’s Bob Matthews.
BOB MATTHEWS: Betty took care of the fine placement of the input sources, i.e. the microphones. Betty was fantastic at mic-ing the drums. Aad this was not only in the studio, but it was one of the things that made our live recordings so crystal clear, in addition to the technical approaches that I’d been describing, the singularities of not combining things. That was her speciality [that] she delivered to me at the board, at the recorder: the quality. I was more of the technical engineer, suggesting how we went about making that happen. But it took both of us, and I have to say, she was pretty amazing. I have really good ears; she has fantastic ears.
JESSE: And here’s how tour manager Sam Cutler remembered the team of Bob Matthews and Betty Cantor.
SAM CUTLER: Matthews used to be their tour manager — he'd been around them a long time. They go back a long way, and he was a muso and all that. He knew them for many years. And he kind of morphed into soundman, recording engineer. There's a certain kind of flexibility about people around the Grateful Dead. Matthews may have had the brain, and he's a smart cookie, but Betty had the ears. And everybody loved Betty — she was very beautiful, a beautiful woman. And she was partners with Matthews. She was very special — she had the ears. And to this day, Betty's live recordings are easily way ahead of anybody else’s. A certain kind of magic. I’m not capable of talking about it technologically as to why things are so good, but they are. She somehow catches the live sound miraculously. In a way, she has a musician’s ears. Recording is technology, but it’s also aesthetics. She captured things wonderfully. I loved her, as a person.
JESSE: Cantor’s work was vital in the studio, helping to translate the Grateful Dead onto vinyl. Her first engineering credit appeared on Aoxomoxoa, released in June of 1969, the same month Workingman’s Dead began to publicly take shape. Fans seeing the Dead that June in New York were shocked to find Jerry Garcia playing a pedal steel guitar, to hear Bob Weir singing country songs, and to be the first audience for the original material that would become the Dead’s next studio album.
If Dead fans were surprised by “High Time,” arguably the Dead’s first original love song, it’s possible that lyricist Robert Hunter was equally surprised by it. After Aoxoxomoxoa and Live/Dead, Robert Hunter had his own plans. He’d penned an elaborate suite of lyrics called “The Eagle Mall.” It was a song cycle that—in Hunter’s words—”recounts the trials of a nomadic people and embraces the notion of eternal recurrence.” As the lyricist told it later, when he presented the pile of new song ideas to Garcia, the guitarist told him, “Look, Hunter — we're a goddamn dance band, for Christ's sake! At least write something with a beat!" Hunter admitted, “The direction we took with Workingman's Dead was more to the point.”
That wasn’t it for The Eagle Mall, though. Hunter would write his own music for the songs when he began his solo career later in the ‘70s. And in the ‘80s and ‘90s, he even wrote a complete novel that connected the world of the Eagle Mall to the expanded universe of Terrapin. He posted the whole novel online for free. It’s called “The Giant’s Harp.” It’s still out there.
We can only imagine what a 1970 Grateful Dead concept suite would sound like — almost certainly, nothing like the new songs they began to write. Another factor is that Jerry Garcia and Robert Hunter were housemates again. In the spring of ‘69, Hunter and his girlfriend moved in with Jerry Garcia, Mountain Girl, and their family in Larkspur, in Marin County. As Hunter told Steve Silberman in 2001, “tunes had been emerging and it seemed sensible to help the process along and incidentally feed me since I had no income source at all.”
In Larkspur, Garcia and Hunter began the most prolific period of their three-decade collaboration. Between mid-1969 and mid-1971, when the Garcias bought a home in Stinson Beach, the pair churned out some two-dozen songs that the Dead would play, nearly all becoming enduring parts of their repertoire. Here’s Gary Lambert.
GARY LAMBERT: Garcia had known Hunter for, I think, close to 10 years by the time of Workingman’s. They'd hung out a lot and had very deep conversations, they talked philosophy. They also had a lot of fun and smoked a lot of weed and all that. But they were real soulmates in terms of their commitment to the art, and their commitment to sort of that folkloric sensibility. So I think Hunter didn't really need a great headstart — once he had that opportunity to write, it just came out of him. And, obviously, he tapped that in Jerry as well.
JESSE: Also in Larkspur, Robert Hunter began a new writing routine that would result in some of his and Garcia’s most timeless work, drawing from a vast well of American musical and literary traditions. Here’s David Nelson of the New Riders of the Purple Sage, and an occasional couch dweller with his old friends.
DAVID NELSON: Hunter always had some odd instrument around. He would try stuff, back in the Palo Alto days. It seemed like he played bass or guitar. Not banjo, but mandolin. It just seemed like he was versatile. He would just try things a little bit: try a little bit of trumpet, a little bit of this and that. I always admired him for that.
AUDIO: [birds chirping]
JESSE: Picture a lush canyon in Marin County, the sun dappling the greenery, the air sweet with California spring, a creek burbling just past the backyard, and the poet going to work. It’s a quiet, beautiful day. Probably, there are some cute hippie babies crawling around somewhere. As Hunter told Blair Jackson about his time in Larkspur, “I remember I’d practice my trumpet out there in the shed all the time — blow my brains half-out until I got psychedelic, and then I’d go write. I finally had to quit it — I was afraid I’d blow a blood vessel in my brain if I didn’t give it up.”
As Mountain Girl remembered to Blair Jackson, “Hunter was up 24 hours a day, chain-smoking, and he’d come down in the morning and he’d have a stack of songs.” Sometime soon after Robert Hunter took up residence with the Garcias in Larkspur, the Grateful Dead debuted “High Time” in June of 1969, truly unlike any other song they’d written or performed up until then. But in their transition from psychedelia to songcraft, “High Time” found a surprisingly comfortable place in the band’s live sets. Not long after the song’s debut, “High Time” briefly served as the epilogue in an early alternate draft of one of the band’s most famous song-suites: “China Cat Sunflower” into “I Know You Rider” into... “High Time”? For much of 1969 and through the spring of 1970, even after the recording of Workingman’s Dead, that’s how the Dead most often presented “High Time.”
With more than a half-year’s performances under their collective belts before they got to the studio to record Workingman’s Dead in February 1970, “High Time” developed its own live arrangement with organist Tom Constanten, who performed with the band from late 1968 until a few weeks before the first Workingman’s sessions. The song had a slightly different set of dynamics with TC. Here’s how it sounded on January 3, 1970 at the Fillmore East, about five months after the song’s debut, a few weeks before Constanten’s departure, about a month-and-change before the Workingman’s Dead sessions.
AUDIO: “High Time” [Dave’s Picks 30, 1/3/70] (1:56-2:31)
JESSE: That’s from Dave’s Picks 30, where “High Time” featured a not-inelegant Hammond organ part, among other features that would be stripped back from the version released on Workingman’s Dead.
GARY LAMBERT: Jerry had this great quote about the studio and live, contrasting them. He said, “Making a studio record is like building a miniature ship in a bottle, and playing live is like being in a rowboat on the open ocean.” I’ve always loved [that]. My metaphor has always been that playing live is like making a cinéma vérité documentary, and recording in the studio is like making a fictional film, a scripted film. You resort to a certain amount of artifice, and when it really works, the audience doesn’t hear the artifice, just as they don’t see it in a film. That’s not really Eva Marie Saint hanging off a cliff in North By Northwest; it’s her lying on some fake rocks, with a beautiful matte painting of the valley below Mount Rushmore. But the way it works, with camerawork and the editing and all that, the illusion is just incredible and exhilarating. And that's true in the studio, too.
JESSE: What The Angel’s Share recordings make clear is that, while Workingman’s Dead might’ve sounded like a vérité recording of the Grateful Dead au naturale, there was a lot of very subtle miniature ship-building occurring. Here’s what the very beginning of “High Time” sounded like when the Dead were laying down basic tracks. They’ve removed the few bars of instrumental introduction played during all live versions of the song before and after. But that’s not the only difference.
JERRY GARCIA [1970]: …all of it, the whole thing. Okay, let’s try it again.
Drums count off quietly, and bass misses intro cue.
JERRY GARCIA [1970]: You’ve gotta count out loud, it’s not on the tape.
BILL KREUTZMANN [1970]: 1, 2, 3…
AUDIO: “High Time” ((Complete Track 2) – Not Slated) [Workingman’s Dead: The Angel’s Share] (0:00-0:30) - [dead.net] [Spotify] [YouTube]
JESSE: Not heard on the Workingman’s Dead version of “High Time” are the drums that Bill Kreutzmann is playing under the first verse during the basic takes, faded up not when the dramatic chorus hits, where at least I might expect, but entering even more surprisingly with the song’s second verse. And, for that matter, Jerry Garcia is playing an electric guitar on the basic take, later swapped for an acoustic, most likely during the overdub process, with the original guitar track scrubbed almost entirely. Here’s how the very beginning of “High Time” sounds on the album.
AUDIO: “High Time” [Workingman’s Dead] (0:00-0:30) - [dead.net] [Spotify] [YouTube]
JESSE: One of my very favorite parts of the Workingman’s Dead version of “High Time” is Jerry Garcia’s pedal steel, heard in extra-sparkling form on the new 50th anniversary remaster, playing much the same sonic role that Tom Constanten played in the earlier arrangement.
AUDIO: “High Time” [Workingman’s Dead] (1:47-2:15) - [dead.net] [Spotify] [YouTube]
JESSE: But, for me, one of the little surprises of the new stash of The Angel’s Share outtakes from Workingman’s Dead is that a part of “High Time” I always thought was pedal steel isn’t pedal steel at all. It’s Bob Weir, playing really beautiful quasi-lead figures on an electric six-string guitar played through a rotating Leslie speaker cabinet. It makes sense — Jerry Garcia was already holding down the rhythm. And as we learn from The Angel’s Share, it’s definitely a Leslie.
PHIL LESH [1970]: There’s no Leslie speaker in the headphones…
JESSE: It all makes sense now. Thanks for the clarification, Phil! There’s some grousing in the band about how complicated Weir’s part is, but it’s beautiful. It rings through loud and clear on this instrumental take.
JERRY GARCIA [1970]: Don’t start getting too elaborate, or we’ll never fuckin’ get it.
PIGPEN [1970]: Yeah, that was the mistake I was makin’ right off.
AUDIO: “High Time” ((Complete Track 1) – Not Slated) [Workingman’s Dead: The Angel’s Share] (00:00-00:30) - [dead.net] [Spotify] [YouTube]
JESSE: There was a little bit of conversation about the tempo.
BOB WEIR [1970]: Why don’t we do it a little slower?
JERRY GARCIA [1970]: Cause it’s already five and a half minutes long…
BOB WEIR [1970]: That’s true.
JESSE: But in the Grateful Dead, it was ever thus. As Bob Matthews explained in the last episode, the band had spent time earlier recording demos and making a game plan, and even Weir’s elaborate part for “High Time” was worked out in advance.
BOB MATTHEWS: That's where the two weeks that they went off and practiced—woodshedded, as we called it—that's where that came in. There’s where Jerry would’ve decided that, “Yeah, I want to put pedal steel on this.” And they would rehearse it. Not all the ideas were good, but that was the opportunity for them to try it out, rather than taking it into the studio and wasting artistic time to see if something to work through didn’t work.
JESSE: While the Beatles would inspire many bands to turn the studio into a forum for experimentation, Bob Matthews took a different lesson: to plan.
BOB MATTHEWS: Sgt. Pepper[‘s Lonely Hearts Club Band] was our generation’s masterpiece. Sgt. Pepper started… it had a Song One; it had a Song Two. It had different parts, it told different stories. There was a particular sequence, and there was a particular artistic evolution. To this day, we still have a feeling for what tunes came before and after “She's Leaving Home,” “When I’m Sixty-Four.” All of that has a sequence to it.
JESSE: Here’s David Lemieux.
DAVID LEMIEUX: I've seen other bands sequence things, and it's usually an after-the-recording process. [Workingman’s Dead] was all vision: this is a flawless album in terms of the songs, in terms of everything, but it certainly goes in terms of the sequence, too. There's other albums that, even though you've heard them 1000 times… there's a lot of albums you couldn't re- sequence, but a lot of albums… you couldn’t resequence this. It’s perfect the way it is, in terms of that sequence. It's amazing that that was part of their vision.
JESSE: The lessons of Aoxomoxoa would have an influence not just on the Grateful Dead and Bob Matthews, but the bands he worked with later.
BOB MATTHEWS: Now, this was not something I did with the Grateful Dead. The problem was you’re going, “Okay, you're spending $100 an hour.” And that was a trick I used when recording with a band that tended to just waste time. I started sessions with a pile of hundred dollar bills on the board, and, every hour that would go by, I would take a $100 off the pile. Within two or three days, their observation of those piles of hundred dollar bills going down to zero—and their realization of what they got done or didn't get done—seemed to have an impression upon them. We learned that one as a result of Aoxomoxoa. So when we went into Workingman’s Dead, we were already in that mode and used it well to our advantage. That whole thing of making two-track cassettes and then going and rehearsing exactly as Side 1 and Side 2 of that album, that’s how we were able to retain the true magic of the music.
JESSE: On Anthem of the Sun and Aoxomoxoa, the band and their engineers wrestled with grand sonic realizations and chomped through technical problems. As a result, Workingman’s Dead is a nearly flawless record. But there are two wee moments in “High Time” that I’ve noticed after many years of headphone listening. Here’s one.
AUDIO: “High Time” [Workingman’s Dead] (3:18-3:25) - [dead.net] [Spotify] [YouTube]
JESSE: And here’s the other.
AUDIO: “High Time” [Workingman’s Dead] (4:27-4:35) - [dead.net] [Spotify] [YouTube]
JESSE: And we had to ask Bob about them. I’d long assumed they were vocal punch-ins, a normal trick of the recording studio, with Jerry Garcia making a second attempt at hitting notes he’d missed on the first take, but Bob Matthews clarified the technique.
BOB MATTHEWS: Not a punch-in. It was a crossover track. There were two performances. And this was a tune that I mixed, but my good friend John Dawson—who I played with in the New Riders—came in one afternoon, and I had him be an extra hand on the board while we mixed. The two tracks for that line, that was the best we could do. Jerry tried to do it himself, when he came in and redid some of my mixes. It was not a punch-in — it was an attempt to do a track crossover from one performance to another. The line about “we’ll fix it in the mix” is tantamount to being an amateur who is not worthy of being in a professional studio. You do not fix it in the mix, because you don't allow it to need to be fixed. The examples that I've given you, the “High Time” crossover track, it was a unique solution to a problem that nobody had ever tried to approach before.
JESSE: Matthews’ crossover tracks and other in-the-moment solutions were as much a part of Workingman’s Dead as the music, and the tapes themselves leave behind their own clues and mysteries. When engineer Brian Kehew and archivist Mike Johnson examined the tape for “High Time,” they found something surprising. Here’s Brian.
BRIAN KEHEW: We have two master reels. And so those are the finished record, with all the overdubs and the percussion and the extra keyboards and so forth that were used to make the album. But on those tapes, which are clearly the masters, they actually—in between them or around them—had left on other material. And that's how we found some of this lost or unknown material, was: we have a session tape for “High Time,” but then there’s a master tape, and sometimes there’s snippets or even a pretty significant chunk right next to it, where they had been keeping that and they move that over to for no known reason. Usually you just move the one part you want but they might cut out a little more tape and bring it over so we found extra bits on the labels on the reels where you think they would just be working on one take we found an alternate take.
MIKE JOHNSON: So that's why the forensic guys keep going in and listening and listening, going in deeper — all the way to listening to it backwards in some places. We keep finding things.
JESSE: That was Mike Johnson, Warner Music archivist. And he’s not kidding about listening to tapes backwards. The bad news is that there were no hidden messages. But the good news was even better. Brian explains how the tape ended up backwards to begin with.
BRIAN KEHEW: It was an accident. When they were moving old tape around, and they had a piece they wanted to cut somewhere — let's say it's leftover on another tape: “Where do we put this?” “Splice it onto the end of that reel where we took a song off, there's some room there. We have five minutes of tape sticking on there.” Tape, when you look at it, has no visual orientation of this is forward, this is backward. If people remember cassette tape, you can't really tell just by looking at it. So they would splice it on because they really didn't intend to hear it or use it. They didn't care if it was forwards or backwards. If I'm in the studio and we have a tape like that, you can hear it. You can hear the backwards effect of things zipping backwards; you've heard it backwards record or backward recording. So the sound is there, and the obviousness of it—“Oh, something's playing backwards,” or, “Oh, I hear a mandolin” or “I hear an organ,” and you can guess what song it is. But you really have to deal with flipping the tape over… or in my case, we can just use it in the computer, flip all the digital files around and reverse it and say, “Oh, it's an outtake from this song, cool.”
MIKE JOHNSON: It took 50 years for us to discover that. I wish y'all could have been in the studio, because Brian’s amazing. Brian’s at the board and this is bug-out time [during the COVID-19 pandemic] — so we’ve both got masks on, and I’m sitting eight feet behind him on the sofa. I’ve got this beautiful vision of the back of his head all day long. It's just: “Huh, wonder what this is” — [makes the sound of tape reels whirring] and then he plays it. It's another section of something we've never heard before. Imagine any Dead Head being there. We were panning for gold and we came up with a giant strike. That’s why we’re so enthusiastic about sharing this.
JESSE: Those are just two small examples of the delicious things that Brian Kehew and Mike Johnson found hiding between tape splices in the literal cracks of the Workingman’s Dead tapes. But let’s take a step back, and take another step back.
David Lemieux is the Grateful Dead’s longtime archivist, but the tapes themselves live in a secure facility in California. For the past decade and change, Mike Johnson has tended to the tapes themselves, keeping them in good order, and retrieving master reels as needed for the Dead’s many live archival releases. But he’s also been an enormous Dead fan since the moment Workingman’s Dead was released in 1970, and it was his curiosity and enthusiasm that helped manifest the restoration of the session tapes, along with the help of expert engineer Brian Kehew, who some listeners may know from his work on the legendary 38-CD Grammy-nominated complete Woodstock box set that he and Andy Zax put together in 2019.
But finding session tracks hidden on the master reels, or pieces of backwards outtakes holding other tapes together, are only two smaller parts of an enormous question mark that hovers around the Workingman’s Dead recordings. Here’s Mike Johnson to explain why it’s such a compelling puzzle.
MIKE JOHNSON: This is where the mystery starts, and that is that they came to us on these carts from San Francisco, in the same sequence that they were stored at the Grateful Dead vault. We segregated a section of the tape vault — this section is actually fenced off with a chain link fence. Hence the term the Cage, as I refer to it, because you have to open this gate that we have padlocked. The Grateful Dead is interesting in that they’re primarily known by their core records and then by their live shows. I’ve put the live shows, as well as I can over these 13 years, in a chronological sequence — so that when David says, “I need February 1971, and it's going to be a 7-inch reel,” I pretty much can find that in about five minutes. But there are a great deal of tapes that have zero annotation: it's just a raw tape box, with nothing on it. And then there are tapes that have very little written on it. When it comes to these two records, Workingman’s and American Beauty, very, very few of these have any song titles written on them or tracking sheets inside. I would put together sections in the Cage; like, “These are potential [finds] — these could have tracks that we're looking for.” They gave us a budget, and we went up to Brian's, and he transferred the targeted reels. As it turns out, only about one-third of that stuff [that] we targeted turned out to be sessions for these two records. The rest were Riders of the Purple Sage or any number of other things than these two records. As a matter of fact, Brian and I had discovered that the Dead would reuse tape. If they found some session tapes from 1970—and in 1974, they’re in the studio and they needed some tape—they would just grab an old one and reuse it.
BRIAN KEHEW: What made you think that these tapes were 1970s Grateful Dead? The way we can tell is by the type of box. Some boxes are from the ‘80s, those don’t count; some boxes are from the later ‘70s. Some boxes are a different size, so they would be ‘60s tapes. So this is how, given that there's a number of tapes that are not labeled, these ones seem likely to be 1970s tapes.
MIKE JOHNSON: Here is the only clue: it says “GD #5.” that’s it. That’s absolutely all we know about this tape. Multitrack, 16-track, genius — there’s nothing on it. That says Reel 5 right there. It turned out to be a session reel for Workingman’s Dead. No one would know. I went through and assembled everything that looked like this that could possibly be.
JESSE: Brian especially loved the new perspective that The Angel’s Share brought to “High Time.”
BRIAN KEHEW: And oddly enough, one of the least busy ones is “High Time,” a piece that we have many, many takes of. I love hearing Bob's guitar. He's very elegant and doing these cool, beautiful pieces. They’re there on the record, but you get to hear him working it out and doing parts. He's doing all these beautiful guitar runs and things as they just play through the easy feeling, easy-listening track. It's not much going on, really, but you can actually hear what they're all doing, which is cool.
JESSE: “High Time” isn’t a busy song, nor is it a song packed with allusions to folk music and American culture, like many other tunes on Workingman’s Dead. In David Dodd’s amazing book, The Complete Annotated Grateful Dead Lyrics, “High Time” receives the unusual distinction of having no annotation whatsoever. Workingman’s Dead was different, and there was maybe no song more different than “High Time.” Here’s David Lemieux.
DAVID LEMIEUX: There was no “St. Stephen”, there was no “Cosmic Charlie,” there was no “China Cat Sunflower.” To me, those songs really lent themselves to the sonic experimentations that they used on Aoxomoxoa. Whereas Workingman’s Dead — I don’t want to say [they] were much more straightforward songs, but they were storytelling songs.
JESSE: But what kind of story was Robert Hunter telling with “High Time”? Here’s Gary Lambert.
GARY LAMBERT: Here was this guy with this amazingly deep mind who found this medium for his work. I think he would have tried to be a serious poet or novelist — but, suddenly, here was a rock band that was perfectly suited to his particular sensibility. And that lyric is so enigmatic. First, it seems to be about lovers at a crossroads, but there’s that whole — “the wheels are muddy / got a ton of hay.” It’s quintessential Hunter, in that he doesn’t explicitly tell you anything, he just conjures up this imagery for you. One critic—and I'm not sure if the critic meant it as a compliment or a bit of a jab—he called what Hunter wrote “blank check aphorisms.” It's a great phrase, because he would lay out these words that could mean vastly different things to different people.
JESSE: Buzz Poole is the author of an excellent book dedicated to Workingman’s Dead, part of the 33 ⅓ pocket-sized collection on classic albums. He has a broader view of the lyrics to “High Time.”
BUZZ POOLE: In the book, as I kind of define it, the “High Times” started in ‘65. By ‘69, they're coming to an end, and the Dead, and certainly Hunter, are becoming more and more self-aware that their commitment to ditching the straight life—having a good time, being completely committed to and servants to the music—is something that they have to start working a little harder to maintain. And the way they do that is by becoming even more interior. Because, by June of ‘69, when “High Time” is debuted in New York at the Fillmore East, by that time, the Dead are not living in San Francisco anymore. The Summer of Love is two years past, and it's become this kind of tourist trap thing. With “High Time,” the conditional nature of the song recognizes that they have had something, and now they don’t have it — or, it’s harder to maintain. We could have it, but that's the open-ended question. And that is true of any relationship: a romantic relationship, a professional relationship, a creative relationship. I hear all that, and read into the lyrics in that sense.
JESSE: It was a decidedly more mature usage of “high” than most probably expected from the one-time house band of the Acid Tests. The song disappeared from the Dead’s sets during the summer of 1970, barely a month after Workingman’s Dead came out. It would surface, on and off, for a few years at a time, all the way up through 1995. One arrangement that’s particularly lovely is when the song resurfaced later in the ‘70s, after the band returned from their 19-month hiatus from the road. This version, from May 17th, 1977, is from several lineup changes after Workingman’s Dead, with a new voice in the harmonies. On the vocals, Mrs. Donna Jean Godchaux.
AUDIO: “High Time” [May 1977, 5/17/77] (2:08-2:36)