Workingman's Dead

Lyricist Robert Hunter (smoking on the left) appears as the seventh member

Jerry Garcia, Ron McKernan, Bob Weir, Bill Kreutzmann and Phil Lesh

Workingman's Dead released June 14, 1970.  The title of the album comes from a comment from Jerry Garcia to lyricist Robert Hunter about how this album was turning into the Workingman's Dead version of the band. Jerry Garcia has commented that much of the sound of the album comes both from his pairing with long time friend Robert Hunter to write the songs as well as the band's friendship with Crosby, Stills and Nash.  Songs such as Uncle John's Band, High Time, and Cumberland Blues were brought to life with soaring harmonies and layered vocal textures that had not been a part of the band's sound until then.  According to the 1992 Dead oral history, Aces Back To Back, in the summer of 1968, Stephen Stills vacationed at Mickey Hart's ranch in Novato:  Stills lived with me for three months around the time of CSN's first record, recalls Hart, and he and David Crosby really turned Jerry and Bobby onto the voice as the holy instrument.  You know, 'Hey, is this what a voice can do?'  That turned us away from pure improvisation and more toward songs. The album was voted by readers of Rolling Stone as the best album of 1970, in front of Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young's Déjà Vu and Van Morrison's Moondance.

Jerry's first solo album Garcia released January 20, 1972

Warner Bros. Records offered the Grateful Dead the opportunity to cut their own solo records, and Garcia was released during the same time as Bob Weir's Ace and Mickey Hart's Rolling Thunder.  Unlike Ace, which was practically a Grateful Dead album, Jerry's was more of a solo effort, as Jerry played all the music (acoustic guitar, electric guitar, pedal steel guitar, bass, piano, organ, and vocals) except the drums (played by Bill Kreutzmann).  Six tracks eventually became standards in the Grateful Dead concert repertoire. Jerry spoke about this album during an interview with Rolling Stone:  I'm doing it to be completely self-indulgent musically.  I'm just going on a trip.  I have curiosity to see what I can do, and I've a desire to get into sixteen track and go on trips that are too weird for me to want to put anybody else I know through.  And also I want to pay for this house.

The fine art of Darwin Leon

On August 9, 1995, at 4:23 am, eight days after his 53rd birthday, Jerry Garcia was found dead in his room at the Serenity Knolls treatment center in Forest Knolls, California.  The cause of death was a heart attack.  Jerry had long struggled with drug addiction, weight problems, sleep apnea, a long-standing cigarette habit, and diabetes—all of which contributed to his physical decline.  Phil Lesh remarked in his autobiography that, upon hearing of Garcia's death:  I was struck numb; I had lost my oldest surviving friend, my brother.  Jerry's funeral was held on August 12, at St. Stephen's Episcopal Church in Belvedere.  It was attended by his family, the remaining Grateful Dead members, and their friends (including former basketball player Bill Walton and musician Bob Dylan) and his widow Deborah Koons, who barred Jerry's's ex-wives from the ceremony.

Wanderin' Spirit
December, 2014
"Workingman's Dead"

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