The Grateful Dead have released the first episode of the band’s official podcast, The Good Ol’ Grateful Deadcast. In what has been pitched as the first season of the program, musician Rich Mahan and journalist/Dead historian Jesse Jarnow will dive into Workingman’s Dead in honor of the 50th anniversary of the landmark studio album this summer.
The podcast will also feature appearances from other noted historical Dead figures, including Workingman’s co-producer Bob Matthews, as well Dead archivist David Lemieux, tape detectives Brian Kehew and Mike Johnson, Basketball Hall of Famer and Deadhead extraordinaire Bill Walton, and many more.
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Each episode of The Good Ol’ Grateful Deadcast will examine one song from Workingman’s Dead, and use that as a springboard to explore other facets of the band and what they were up to during that particular era. The series kicks off with a discussion of “Uncle John’s Band” that also serves as an introduction to Workingman’s as a whole, as well as the state of mind the band was in as the 1960s moved into the ’70s.
Also of particular discussion in the first episode, and throughout the series, is the recently released collection of studio outtakes Workingman’s Dead: The Angel’s Share. This two-and-a-half-hour trove of session banter, early mixes, and isolated tracks shows the Dead hard at work crafting what would ultimately become Workingman’s Dead. Through a combination of interviews with people both in and around the band, as well as meticulous research, Jarnow and Mahan paint a portrait of a band that was beleaguered by painstaking studio sessions and the costs that go with them. In the first few minutes of the episode, we hear an archival interview with Jerry Garcia where he states,
We’d spent so much time and so much money working on our second two records and…we didn’t want to go through that experience again. So I thought what I’m gonna do is write songs that are so f*cking simple and so easy for everybody to understand and we’ll do them in the studio in about a minute. It’ll take no time and it’ll cost us hardly anything and we may be able to get out of this endless thing of spending more than we make on records, it seemed crazy to me. So that’s kinda the idea behind Workingman’s Dead, and also American Beauty, they’re both kind of one record really. And that worked out beautifully.
The entire first episode, and hopefully the remaining seven episodes, are full of nuggets of wisdom like that from over 50 years of the Good Ol’ Grateful Dead. Listen to the first episode of The Good Ol’ Grateful Deadcast below, and look for new episodes every Thursday.
The Good Ol’ Grateful Deadcast — Episode 1 “Uncle John’s Band”
[Video: Grateful Dead]