“Well the first days are the hardest days don’t you worry any more / ‘cause when life looks like Easy Street there is danger at your door…” Those are my favorite opening lines of any song I’ve ever heard. It’s the kind of lyric that can stop time with its undeniable simplicity. And when those voices came out of the stereo speakers in my tiny Austin garage apartment in the sweltering summer of 1970, it felt like a personal promise was being delivered. 1970 had been a hard year so far, and there was no guarantee it was going to get better. But after buying the new Grateful Dead album at Discount Records on the Drag and putting it on the turntable, it was like a visit from a best friend. There was such a bottomless affirmation in the music, though much of it touched on the struggle to find life even in the face of death. There was such a strength of the living woven into the songs, one that seemed to offer a way through imposing perils. I’d never felt so relieved in my life.
Four students had been shot and killed by National Guardsmen in a peaceful Vietnam War protest at Kent State University in Ohio, and President Nixon’s domestic assault on American freedoms was in full blossom. I was working as a typesetter at night and going to summer school during the day at the University of Texas, having almost completed my first year of probation on a five-year felony conviction for two marijuana joints. I’d grown scared of my own shadow as I spent that first summer in Austin. Freedom was starting to crack open all around me, but I could not be a part of it. The winds of change were ones I had to do my best to avoid. I was too scared of being arrested again and sent to prison. The Texas legal system did not much believe in second chances. Not by a long shot.
To hear the eight songs on WORKINGMAN’S DEAD that summer was like receiving a long letter from an old friend, one that graciously extended an offer to help. It carried with it the weight of those who had been through a lot more than me, and somehow came out the other side with their courage in full force. In America then, the Grateful Dead stood for a lot more than only music, whether they wanted to or not. Their genesis in the social revolution born in the Haight-Ashbury in the mid-1960s was well-documented, and of all the bands then the Dead felt like the one carrying the flag at the front of the hippie parade. There was something about their stance and songs that had a towering solidarity, and the media had picked them as the standard-bearers of the new youth culture. Likely the band did not see themselves as that at all, but welcome to the world of how press often writes its own reality
As a teenager in Texas when the Grateful Dead first entered national consciousness in early 1967, there couldn’t have been a more welcome arrival. So many new groups were appearing, most of them from the West Coast, and each one raised the ante on experimentation and excitement. But there was something about the Dead that made it feel like they walked on that edge of existence a little higher. They’d been the house band for the Acid Tests, and their songs would stretch well past the 10-minute mark regularly. Plus, radio mostly wouldn’t touch them, so they became the outlaws of the new frontier and made it a little more difficult to get a grasp on what they were all about. In pop music, that difference means a lot. And when Warner Bros. Records finally released the band’s first album in the Spring of ’67, even though it wasn’t a revelation it did sound, well, different.
The word from the West Coast was that the Grateful Dead was really a live band, and needed to be experienced onstage to truly grok what they were all about. And in the wonders never cease department, in December of 1968 the band scheduled a concert at the small Houston club the Catacombs. One night only, a few days after Christmas, in a place that did not allow anyone over 21 years old to attend. Welcome to Houston. Of course my brother Bob and I went, and grabbed a chair in the first row. The stage was only a foot high and barely held all the Dead’s equipment, which then included a Hammond organ, two full drum sets and a four-foot gong. Yes, a gong. Why not?
The seven-man band wandered onstage about nine that night, tore into the songs from their recent release the mind-bending ANTHEM OF THE SUN and two-hours later finally stopped without a break between any of the songs. The audience had had their brains expanded and their bodies exhausted. The Dead announced they were going to take a short intermission and would be back soon for a second set. No one in the crowd could move. But no one left, either, except the band’s sometimes-singer Pigpen, who found something else to do and wasn’t to be seen the rest of the evening.
When the Grateful Dead came back they started with the celestial sounds of a suite of songs they had not released yet: “Dark Star,” “The Eleven” and “Saint Stephen,” which after three hours finally wove back into “Dark Star.” The entire club was speechless, and when the group pulled out the gospel-bound closer “We Bid You Goodnight,” there was nothing left to say.
The mostly-teenagers scattered out into the cold star-filled Texas night reeling from the kind of rock & roll that had never been heard before in Houston, sort of like a group of songs injected with the sonic inspiration of John Coltrane crossed with the spiritual underpinnings of Mahatma Gandhi. The Dead’s music then felt birthed by interplanetary travel, and would really not be equaled when the 1960s ended. After WORKINGMAN’S DEAD arrived in the summer of 1970 it was time for a look at life from the earthbound side of the eternal equation.
The cover of WORKINGMAN’S DEAD was like a rotogravure photograph of six hard-living San Francisco men standing on the street, with one sitting down in front of a local tavern. Gone were the exploding colors and design of previous Dead albums. This new one harkened back to the early days of the city the band called home. It was also a clear signal that the LSD-soaked musical explorations had been put back in the medicine cabinet for now. This was going to be a whole other side of life. One that pulled heavy from the group’s folk and country blues roots, laced with vocal arrangements that no one, likely not even the band, knew they were capable of.
Soaring harmonies ruled the first song, “Uncle John’s Band,” and gave a signal what lay ahead. This was going to be a gathering of real-life tales filtered through Robert Hunter’s three-dimensional lyrics of imaginative story-telling. That opening song alone pointed to how the Dead were taking stock of their first half-decade, condensing what they learned on the outer reaches of human consciousness into songs not that far from classic American storytellers like Stephen Foster and Hudiie Ledbetter. In a way they were threading the needle back into normalcy, or somewhere near it. No other rock band had ever gone so far out and then returned to share what they’d learned out there. And the album was just getting started.
“High Time,” the second song on WORKINGMAN’S DEAD, has a beginning so heartbreaking with king tears it’s hard to repeat: “You told me goodbye how was I to know / you didn’t mean goodbye you meant please / don’t let me go…” In just the matter of a few lines human suffering is boiled down to its essence: please ask me to stay. The rhythm of the song is slowed down to a near dirge, and as it unfolds a reflection on inescapable death becomes so real it feels like it’s invaded the psyche. Life will eventually run out is one of the world’s certainties. Being able to live in the face of that is a challenge that all must face, and hopefully accept. It will not be conquered. As the band sang on “High Time”: “Tomorrow comes trouble tomorrow comes pain / now don’t think too hard babe ‘cause you know what I’m saying.” It’s obvious the Grateful Dead and lyricist Robert Hunter are ready for the Big Questions to be asked and assimilated with striking honesty. There are no lyrical tricks or fancy footwork on display. Maybe they all knew there was too much at stake in 1970. The counterculture experiment had run head-on into some hard truths–heroin, heartbreak and over the top hedonism–and the debt was being called. Glorious hallucinations and fanciful thinking were not going to pay that tab.
Listening now to those two opening songs and other all-timers like “Dire Wolf,” “Cumberland Blues,” “New Speedway Boogie” and “Black Peter” is to consider the circular nature of life, and how things a half-century ago that felt overwhelming and almost unanswerable could eventually move into memoryland, only to come back with the same impending fumes of desolation. Just as today when life feels like there is a darkness returning in an ominous questioning of the world’s resolve, in 1970 WORKINGMAN’S DEAD was confronting a similar world of doubt. The way it used a cosmic twist on down-to-earth ruminations shined a light right through the fearful fog. The Grateful Dead’s work of wisdom and wonder first heard in the summer of 1970 was filled with prophetic words and luminous music.The second half of the first verse of album opener “Uncle John’s Band” continued: “Think this through with me let me know your mind / whoa-oh what I want to know is are you kind?” In so many ways, that is the only question that really matters. That was 50 years ago, but still feels brand new. Songs can break through the barriers of time to become an extended hand of hope and friendship offered to everyone. Forever.
Bill Bentley
(A 50th Anniversary Deluxe Edition of WORKINGMAN’S DEAD is now available on Warner Records/Rhino Entertainment.)