Pre-Release
- MAY 30, 2025
- 27 Songs
- In the Dark · 1987
- American Beauty · 1970
- American Beauty · 1970
- American Beauty · 1970
- The Very Best of Grateful Dead · 1970
- Workingman's Dead · 1970
- American Beauty · 1970
- Shakedown Street · 1978
- Shakedown Street · 1978
- American Beauty · 1970
Essential Albums
- The Dead reached their peak of technical prowess and compositional sophistication on 1977's Terrapin Station. Their mid-’70s albums had been getting increasingly complex and ambitious, but the 16-minute title suite here finds the band moving through a dazzling array of moods and melodies in an almost prog manner. That behemoth of a track is offset by concise cuts like the hurtling rock revamp of the gospel-blues standard "Samson and Delilah" and the raw, grooving "Passenger," which features Donna Godchaux's vocal harmonies at their most powerful.
- The mid-'70s were a time of great creativity for the members of The Grateful Dead, both within the group and on solo ventures. They enjoyed a brief hiatus from the road as they assembled this fine album, which also benefitted from the return of second drummer Mickey Hart and his exotic rhythms and techniques. The break from touring meant the players were hungry to get their kicks playing together once again. The opening cuts—"Help On the Way/Slipknot," "Franklin's Tower," and "King Solomon's Marbles"—reflect that excitement with some of the group's finest studio play, as keyboardist Keith Godchaux indulges his interests in jazz to great effect. Bob Weir's "The Music Never Stopped" oddly enough comes closer to the slick '70s studio work of Steely Dan and The Doobie Brothers. "Crazy Fingers" dips the rhythms into reggae. Weir's "Sage & Spirit" captures the beauty of the band's bucolic, acoustic side, with Steven Schuster's flute adding the right touch.
- The Grateful Dead spent the late '60s establishing themselves as kings of psychedelic jamming, but they made a drastic detour starting with 1970's concise, rootsy <I>Workingman's Dead</I>. Later the same year, <I>American Beauty</I> proved the move was more than a one-off dalliance. Like its predecessor, it took the blues, folk, and country sounds that had always been part of the band's foundation and put them at the forefront. In the process, the album helped usher in the "back to the land" roots-rock movement that found America rebounding from the 1960s' psychedelic fireworks to something that felt simpler and steadier. <I>American Beauty</I> also birthed the band's biggest single to date (and the biggest until “Touch of Gray,” 16 years later): the streetwise boogie travelogue "Truckin'." In just 43 minutes, this compact and hugely influential LP brought to being some of the band's—and rock ‘n’ roll’s—most celebrated songs, tracks that would become classic-rock standards and mainstays of the Dead's repertoire. The band's (non-performing) lyricist Robert Hunter combined timeless, mythic imagery with a freak-flag-waving countercultural sensibility that found its ideal complement in the proto-Americana Jerry Garcia and company were turning out. The bluegrass-laden "Friend of the Devil," the sweetly rocking, sun-baked love song "Sugar Magnolia," the Zen-like ballad "Ripple," and the aforementioned hit connected with the hearts and heads of an audience fresh from seeing the hippie dream begin to crumble but still willing to pursue it into a new era with a more pastoral soundtrack.
- When the Grateful Dead convened to record <I>Workingman’s Dead</I> in February 1970, they were intent on change. They wanted something lighter, simpler; something closer to a folk or country record than a psychedelic one. Conveniently, they were also deep in debt to their record company and trying to extract themselves from a recent—and costly—drug bust. Their previous album, <I>Aoxomoxoa</I>, took nearly six months at the cost of more than a million dollars in today’s money; <I>Workingman’s Dead</I> was done in nine days. The band was spending more and more time on Mickey Hart’s ranch up north, shooting guns, riding horses, and generally communing with the land. They were cowboys now, singing cowboy songs: the card-game gamble of “Dire Wolf,” the rustic fever dream of “Black Peter.” Robert Hunter, the band’s lyricist, became a more prominent member and, in turn, enlarged the share of narrative in the band’s sound, creating a world that felt both contemporary and oddly ancient, in which American folk figures (the train conductor of “Casey Jones,” the miners of “Cumberland Blues”) commingled with archetypes from dreams and myths. The psychedelia of <I>Workingman’s Dead</I> didn’t lie in sound effects, but in the way it flattened time, blurring the line between 1870 and 1970, between the frontiers of the gold rush and of the counterculture, of a past that, as it turned out, could still be felt with the correct (ahem) kind of goggles. The album didn’t just chart a new course for the band, but for the counterculture in general. Tour buses had started running through Haight-Ashbury, turning hippies into a sideshow. Visionaries with the wherewithal were going back to the land, trying to hatch Utopia outside the glare of Nixon’s America. While the more experimental side of psychedelia branched into prog rock, <I>Workingman’s Dead</I>—alongside similar albums by The Flying Burrito Brothers and The Byrds—helped plant the seeds of what eventually became Americana, bridging the philosophical orientation of the hippies with folk and country, reclaiming old-fashioned music for a new generation. With <I>Workingman’s Dead</I>, they reached into the books and caught a glimpse of the future.
- 1987
- 1980
Artist Playlists
- From wild psychedelia to rootsy Americana, the Dead blazed the trail.
- Their folk roots come to the surface in these lesser-heard takes.
- Jam out to these extended grooves.
- Their psychedelic stage performances defined the jam-band experience.
- From American roots music to improvisatory genius.
Singles & EPs
More To Hear
- Bob Weir and Nathen Mazri join the Crisis Crew, plus a look at Eminem’s “Stan.”
- Truckin' all the way to Swedish Ghouls.
About Grateful Dead
The Grateful Dead expanded rock’s horizons with long jams and fierce improvisation, but they also turned their communal aesthetic into a way of life. The band—Jerry Garcia, Bob Weir, Ron McKernan, Phil Lesh, and Bill Kreutzmann—emerged from the same psychedelic San Francisco milieu that birthed Jefferson Airplane and Moby Grape, and the group’s shared house near the corner of Haight and Ashbury during 1967’s Summer of Love became a focal point for the scene. But the Dead would acquire a devoted cult all their own, one that transcended both the geography and the era. Indeed, the group’s relationship to that fanbase—their faithful were officially known as Deadheads by the early ’70s—is arguably their most significant legacy, fostering innovations like open tape-trading and the use of the internet to share information. From the beginning, they were renowned for their thick stew of influences—rock, jazz, bluegrass, country, experimental composition—and skill at in-the-moment creation. A gritty Merle Haggard cover might be followed by a dark and spacey interlude that would stretch on for half an hour. Their live prowess put them on the map first (1969’s Live/Dead was an instant classic), but the Dead revealed themselves as songwriters of the first order in their second decade. A pair of albums in 1970, Workingman’s Dead and American Beauty, focused on acoustic guitars and rustic Americana, and Europe ’72 beautifully extended those songwriting ideas into an expansive live setting. As the ’70s wore on, the Dead’s music grew jazzier and lighter, with albums like 1975’s Blues for Allah touching on the sound of jazz fusion; later in the decade, they’d experiment with progressive rock (1977’s Terrapin Station) and even disco (1978’s Shakedown Street). No matter their studio output, the Dead never lost their live alchemy, and shows as late as 1989 (which newcomers can sample on Without a Net) are highly regarded by Deadheads. Singer and lead guitarist Garcia’s death in 1995 brought a close to the initial iteration of the band, but the Dead’s seemingly bottomless vault of live music (and various post-Garcia offshoots) lives on.
- FROM
- Palo Alto, CA, United States
- FORMED
- 1965
- GENRE
- Rock