Grateful Dead Scholars Caucus
Popular/American Culture Association
Albuquerque, NM – February 21, 2020
Workingman’s Dead?
Shaugn O’Donnell, CUNY
As we celebrate the 50th anniversary of Workingman’s Dead this spring, I decided to revisit the album and jot down some musical thoughts to share with the Caucus. In doing so, what’s immediately apparent—and this impression is well supported in the literature surrounding the band’s history—is that this record is a radical sonic departure from the Dead’s previous albums and a turning point in their original catalog and live repertoire. To use a recent quote from NPR’s eulogy for Robert Hunter last fall, they summed up this pivotal transition with the following sentence:
“The Dead was … beginning to roll out songs that would aid their transition from psychedelic volcano to Workingman's country-rock storytellers…” — Piotr Orlov, “Robert Hunter, Grateful Dead Songwriter, Dead At 78” (National Public Radio, September 25, 2019).
While I’ll start with that noticeable shift as a launching point, my goal today is really more of a reminder that despite the comfortable “country-rock” sound and tighter arrangements on Workingman’s Dead, the songs are far from typical. Instead, they hide an abundance of Grateful Dead weirdness just below their warm and fuzzy surfaces. I’ll be exploring some of the ways in which these songs are as “far out” as the band’s earlier catalog. My paper is in two parts: the first half establishes and contextualizes the consensus that Workingman’s Dead is just what it seems, what we’ve agreed it is, a redefined homey Grateful Dead. The second half digs into harmonic choices in three songs from the record to illustrate my counterpoint that while the band may sound and look like cowboys, their cattle ranch definitely remains off planet.
Let’s start with a few supporting examples to reinforce the idea that Workingman’s Dead, along with its companion 1970 studio release American Beauty, marks a watershed moment in Grateful Dead repertoire. I was tempted to use “What’s Become of the Baby” (Aoxomoxoa, 1969) as my first audio example here, but ultimately decided against it because there’s no need to stack the deck in that manner since nothing else in their catalog sounds quite like that track. Instead, since most of us listen to live recordings, I’ll use the pair of official live releases that bookend 1970 to illustrate the change. In 1969 we have the release of Live/Dead capturing the late 60s sound of the band with remarkable clarity: all the energy, chaos, and drive, of a particular musical moment. To refresh our ears for the comparison, here’s a brief excerpt of the second track, “Saint Stephen.”
The vitality of this performance is undeniable, and the simple three-chord harmonic structure underlying this passage isn’t the point of the music, the progression is just a vehicle for the delivery of their performative energy.
Now let’s contrast that with the live release on the other side of the Workingman’s /American Beauty divide, 1971’s “Skull and Roses.” Here’s an excerpt from the second track from that album, a cover of Merle Haggard’s “Mama Tried.”
In this case, what’s undeniable is the musical transformation from the album just two years earlier. This is a country song, not in the Nashville style, but rather in the geographically closer Bakersfield style of the mid 1960s. The band members specifically identify Workingman’s Dead, along with American Beauty, as the musical crossroads for this very conscious transformation, and they frequently reference the Bakersfield sound when describing taking this turn.
“Combined, these two albums represent the Grateful Dead’s ‘Bakersfield era,’ where we were playing music that reflected our lifestyles during a very specific period. We were good ole American boys living in the Wild West.” — Bill Kreutzmann (with Benjy Eisen), Deal: My Three Decades of Drumming, Dreams, and Drugs with the Grateful Dead (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2015), 137.
“Jerry was to call this period the ‘Bakersfield Era’”… — Phil Lesh, Searching for the Sound: My Life with the Grateful Dead (New York: Little, Brown and Company, 2005), 171.
As you see in these statements, three of the band members specifically label this moment the “Bakersfield era.” There are definitely other factors that contribute to this new 1970 Grateful Dead—most notably vocal harmonies inspired by Crosby, Stills, and Nash—but the descriptor Bakersfield is my focus today.
The most renowned artist in the Bakersfield style is probably Merle Haggard, and more so for deadheads because the Dead regularly covered a couple of his songs (“Sing Me Back Home” along with “Mama Tried”). But, even though the Dead played “Mama Tried,” Haggard’s style isn’t the Bakersfield sound referenced by the band on that tune, which one can easily hear when listening to Haggard’s original. Let’s make a quick comparison to his original single from 1968.
This is very different than the Dead version we heard a few moments ago. The tempo is slightly slower and there’s significantly less bounce in its step; the rhythm section isn’t shuffling as hard. There’s also a measure of restraint in the guitar parts; they’re prominent, but they’re locked in clearly defined roles. Instead of this style, the Bakersfield sound picked up by the Dead is much closer to Buck Owens’ music. Even when covering Haggard’s song, they sound more like Owen’s band the Buckaroos. Let’s listen to the Owen’s song “Love’s Gonna Live Here” (single, 1963) to get a taste of their group sound.
Once you hear the Buckaroos, the bright treble-heavy sound of Jerry’s guitar work, particularly in the low register, seems clearly modeled on the telecaster style of Buckaroos guitarist Don Rich. And the continuous rambling of the lead guitar in the Buckaroos, rather than being constrained to framing moments marking the song form, could be heard as an influence on Jerry’s similar work on “Mama Tried” and other country-inflected tunes like “Me and My Uncle” or “Big River.” Overall, Haggard’s band the Strangers have a very tight and polished sound, with the studio production and arrangement in the forefront—very present, very audible, that is, we hear it as a record—while the Buckaroos sound like a band playing live, as though the record just happened. We can listen to their Carnegie Hall performance from 1966 (Carnegie Hall Concert, 1966) and they still sound the same, not in a note-for-note way, but as a band.
And for immediate comparison, let’s revisit the Dead’s “Mama Tried” excerpt, keeping in mind the rambling telecaster work and the shuffling freight train rhythm section we just heard.
The audible influence of the Buckaroos on the Dead, and on Jerry in particular, is also fairly well documented in the historical record, and it’s perhaps best put in context along the larger continuum of their numerous folk influences by Rev Carr in one of Nick Meriwether’s edited collections. In his essay “Black Muddy River,” Rev includes this explicit and illuminating comment by Jerry about the Bakersfield influence in general and Don Rich in particular:
“We're part of that California-Bakersfield school of country & western rock & roll - Buck Owens, Merle Haggard. We used to go see those bands and think, 'Gee, those guys are great.' Don Rich was one of my favorites. I learned a lot from him. So we took kind of the Buck Owens approach on Workingman's Dead. Some of the songs in there are direct tributes to that style of music, although they're not real obvious.'” — Rev Carr, “Black Muddy River,” All Graceful Instruments, edited by Nicholas Meriwether (Cambridge Scholars Press, 2007), 131.
Okay, that should be sufficient evidence to support the familiar premise that Workingman’s Dead is a Bakersfield-influenced album that marks a redefining moment in the Dead’s catalog—something we might characterize as a more down-to-earth and comfortable musical world for them (and us) to inhabit. Now I’m going to shift gears to the counterpoint, my real point, and try to justify the question marks in my title. Despite the stylistic borrowing, these songs are fundamentally weird, and beautifully original, under that homey country-western surface. Kreutzmann sums it up well in this comment:
“During the ‘Bakersfield era,’ we tried tried be like a Bakersfield country band—but one that still sounded like we were form 300 miles north of that town, in the northern part of the state. Which, of course, we were. We held to our psychedelic roots but, in the studio, we wanted to try our hand at a more steady approach.” — Kreutzmann, Deal, 138.
Side 1
“Uncle John’s Band”
“High Time”
“Dire Wolf”
“New Speedway Boogie”
Side 2
“Cumberland Blues”
“Black Peter”
“Easy Wind”
“Casey Jones”
Seeing the full track list above is probably unnecessary, but I hope it will help the various musicians among us recall how quirky most of these songs are in one way or another, and if so, please chime in with your thoughts during the Q&A segment. Because of time limitations, and because the songs each have different degrees and types of weirdness, rather than grinding through all them in order for you, I’m only sampling a few truly out there moments on the three tracks in bold on the list. First up is the truly bizarre song “High Time.”
At first impression this is just a slow country waltz, with its acoustic and pedal steel guitars in triple meter, but just past that surface, the chord progression is absolutely bonkers; there’s simply no other way to put it. Luckily, music theorist Walt Everett already did the heavy lifting on this one in an essay published in the first volume to come out of this Caucus back in 1999. Here’s his statement on Grateful Dead harmony in general, before he goes on to use “High Time” as his quintessential example of their non-conformity:
All of this predictability from directed tonal motion among a closed set of pitches (useful metaphors for the social, political, and economic status quo) is not so characteristic of the ‘underground’ music of the times, particularly in the late 1960s and early 1970s, and no musicians surrounded by the tonal culture did more to ignore the norms established by that system or to explore the ambiguities present within that system, than did the Grateful Dead. — Walt Everett, “High Time,” Perspectives on the Grateful Dead, edited by Rob Weiner (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1999), 120.
Let me contextualize this comment for you. The “directed tonal motion” he’s referring to is the functional harmony of the entire corpus of popular music of the second half of the 20th century. Walt is one of a few experts worldwide on popular music pitch structures and he’s studied and published on an incredible number and stylistic range of tunes, so when he claims there’s nothing like Grateful Dead harmony, it’s from a position of extensive knowledge and experience.
From that generalization, Walt goes on to place the verse of “High Time” as harmonically inexplicable compared to anything he’s experienced throughout tonal music history. Here’s his example (above) trying to situate the chord progression within commonly accepted norms. I’ll unpack this diagram for you a bit. Barring any contradictory evidence, our ears hear the first chord, D, as home, but that possibility is so fleeting that the second chord, C#m, already destroys that as a plausible interpretation, generating the question mark you see in the row under the chord labels. Okay, then maybe we redefine the C#m as home, generating the next row, which makes the first chord bII in retrospect. That would already put the song out of popular song norms, but it’s a possible chord interpretation. Even allowing that unusual move, the second row also eventually breaks down. And so on, reaching for straws with rows centered on A and E, since parts of the progression make sense in those keys too. The chorus is more stable, with an E center, but his essay doesn’t even make it to the bridge which introduces its own complexities with a surprise F chord. (That’s where my audio example fades out.) Coming out of the chorus, the F further destabilizes the fleeting clarity of the E centricity. Ultimately, despite the warm cozy frame of a country waltz, the chords are flowing as freely and uninhibited as the modal roaming in any “Dark Star.”
Everett, “High Time,” Example 3, 124.
Next up is “Cumberland Blues.” Jerry explains this song as a merging of styles, Bakersfield and bluegrass, again confirming the influence of the Bakersfield sound, stating:
On ‘Cumberland Blues’ one part is modeled on the Bakersfield country and western bands—electric country and western bands like Buck Owens’ old Buckaroos and the Strangers. The first part of the tune is that style. And the last part is like bluegrass. That’s what I wanted to do: a marriage of those styles. — Blair Jackson, Garcia: An America Life (1999), 177.
Let’s start with the second half of that marriage, the bluegrass portion. The song is in the key of G, and the bluegrass passage is tonally directed in all the ways “High Time” wasn’t. It’s primarily the most familiar chords—I, IV, and V (Gs, Cs, and Ds in this case)—with a secondary dominant, V/V thrown in to emphasize the arrival on D.
This is Workingman’s Dead without my added question marks, nothing to see here, just a guy paying his union dues and maybe playing some banjo. Now let’s contrast that with the Bakersfield half of the marriage. I’m going to let the first two verses play so we get to hear the music twice before I start talking.
The introduction is like we’re listening to the Buckaroos, perhaps a little rowdier and looser, then we get into the Crosby-Stills-Nash-inspired vocal harmonies of the verse (also a little rowdier and looser), and for about 30 seconds this too is Workingman’s Dead: a song of the people in G. But then, like a parenthetical insertion from another planet, the Bakersfield freight train goes off the harmonic rails. When they have to “get down,” the progression drops down a half-step from G to F#, like a reverse truck-driver modulation. This move is right there with the verse of “High Time” in being a completely non-functional juxtaposition of harmonies. Immediately, word painting comes to mind as we step down harmonically to accompany the line “I gotta get down,” but even that glimmer of understanding disintegrates within seconds as the repeated line “I gotta get down” is supported by two similarly non-functional but ascending moves, up to Bb and even higher to B.
Here’s a summary this harmonically bizarre passage starting with the downward shift: || F# | Bb, B | Bb, A, Ab | G ||. (Vertical lines represent bars.) Among the chords you see there, the only one in the key of G is … G. If we wanted to dissect this further, we could explore the moment-to-moment possible relations as Walt did with “High Time,” but in this instance we’d find that not one pair of adjacent chords here is in any key. Not only was the initial move G-F# harmonically unrelated, but the same applies to F# to Bb, Bb to B, etc. For three bars we’re in a universe with absolutely no functional harmony; this is a landscape without tonal landmarks, not even enabling a diagram like Walt’s example. Other than its familiar Bakersfield sound, this might as well be “space.” Except it’s not an improvisatory interlude, it’s a composed, core part of the verse structure, that is, it’s how the song goes. The train leaves the station in Bakersfield, heading for Appalachia, but then makes a few interplanetary stops along the way.
To put this in perspective, the three-chord verse of “St. Stephen”—E, D, A —from the so-called “volcanic” era would be relatively normal in the Bakersfield harmonic language, while the harmonic motions within these two Workingman’s Dead songs from the alleged “Bakersfield era” bear no resemblance to their sonic inspiration. In fact, I might argue that, rather than dialing things back a notch for the common folk, these two songs are their most adventurous to this point, at least in terms of harmonic structure. By way of contrast, you can work your way through the entire greatest hits of the Buckaroos, and there were a lot of hits for them, and you’d be hard pressed to hear anything more the most common, fully functional, I, IV, and V chords (tonic, subdominant, dominant).
Continuing with adventurous passages, my third and last example is “Uncle John’s Band.” Like “Cumberland,” “Uncle John’s” is in a bright G major tonality that, at least musically, could come from Bakersfield. I specify “musically” because Hunter’s poetic lyrics are more intricate than most of the Bakersfield subject matter. Also like “Cumberland,” there’s a passage from somewhere beyond Bakersfield in “Uncle John’s Band.” This time it’s a modal interlude, rather than part of the verse, and it’s also further set off from the rest of the song by an irregular meter. This excerpt includes the previous chorus to let you easily hear the contrast from G major as we move into the D dorian interlude.
Now let’s recall all the times Buck Owens or Merle Haggard used the old-timey trick of incorporating a dorian mode interlude in 7 in their songs. (That was easy, never.) Even if we extend that recollection to popular music in general, the list would be relatively short.
To be fair, this interlude existed on its own before the song or album came to be, a jam of its own, so it’s a direct artifact from the “volcanic” period, but my point here is that in writing “Uncle John’s Band,” they integrated this unusual and adventurous passage into a “Bakersfield era” song without hesitation. They use mode mixture to bring us to this place, shifting the bright D major chord with its F# down to Dm with its F-natural, and then cleverly use a D with no third, an ambiguous chord, to get us back home to G major. The transition into and out of this uniquely Dead musical space is seamless. To my mind, this passage best represents what Billy means in his comment about trying “to be like a Bakersfield country band, but one that still sounded like [they] were from 300 miles north.”
There’s plenty more to say about the rest of the tracks off Workingman’s Dead, for example, “Black Peter” could easily have replaced any of my three chosen examples. It’s a slow country blues at its core, but then it takes a few atypical—for anyone but the Dead—harmonic detours along the way. If I have a conclusion, it’s that yes, this is a new sound for the band, and yes, it’s directly borrowed from Bakersfield with Don Rich style lead guitar work, freight train rhythms, and lush pedal steel. But, structurally, underneath that good old surface, these are some of the most unusual songs you’ll ever encounter, stranger and more adventurous than much of their earlier catalog.
Speaking of pedal steel guitar, it would be negligent of me to spend this much time on Bakersfield and the Buckaroos without mentioning Tom Brumley, who was a major influence on Jerry and his pedal steel playing. I’m going to close with a little taste of Brumley’s playing, the solo from “Together Again” (Together Again, 1964), which has specifically been cited as inspiring Jerry to learn the instrument.
Thanks for listening!