Blues For Allah 50: Help On the Way

Announcing Dogfish Head Grateful Dead Juicy Pale Ale. Collaborating for over a decade now, Dogfish Head and Grateful Dead have crafted a light-bodied pale ale brewed with sustainable curds of grains, granola, and heaps of good karma for a refreshing brew that's music to your taste buds. Check out dogfish.com for more details and to find some Grateful Dead Juicy Pale Ale in your neck of the woods. Dogfish Headcraft Brewery is located in Milton, Delaware. Please drink responsibly. The Good Old Grateful Dead Cast. The official podcast of The Grateful Dead. I'm Rich Mayhan with Jesse Jarno, exploring the music and legacy of The Grateful Dead for the committed and the curious. Ladies and gentlemen, fellow Dead Hads, welcome to season 12 of The Good Old Grateful Dead Cast. I'm your co-host Rich Mayhan. Thank you so much for tuning in. In this episode of The Good Old Grateful Dead Cast, we peel off the cellophane on The Grateful Dead's 1975 studio masterpiece, Blues for Allah. And we drop the needle on Side One, Track One, Help on the Way. Announcing The Grateful Dead Blues for Allah 50th anniversary, Double X edition. Arriving September 12th, this 3-CD set features the newly remastered album with unreleased soundcheck and concert recordings. Check this out. The set features almost two hours of unreleased recordings. Among the highlights are rehearsals from the band's August 12th, 1975 soundcheck at San Francisco's Great American Music Hall, including the album tracks, Sagan Spirit, Help on the Way, Slipknot, and Franklin's Tower. The collection continues with performances from the June 21st 1976 show at the Tower Theater in Pennsylvania, spotlighting five Blues for Allah songs alongside favorites like Eyes of the World. And rounding out the set are selections from Bill Graham's Snack Students Need Athletics, Culture, and Kicks benefit at Keys Art Stadium on March 23rd, 1975. There are also vinyl variants of the original album available, including a picture disc and a Midnight Fire Red vinyl edition and a 180-gram Black vinyl edition. Very cool looking Blues for Allah 50th anniversary merch is also now available. All of these can be checked out at dead.net. And over at rhino.com you can pre-order the Dolby Atmos mixes on Blu-ray disc. They were mixed by Stephen Wilson and are ready to blow your mind. All of these fine releases will be out on September 12th via dead.net and rhino.com. Head on over to dead.net slash deadcast. Check out all of our past episodes there, including the complete seasons one through eleven. You can link from there to your favorite podcasting platform so you can listen how you like to listen. Please help this podcast by subscribing, sharing us with your friends on social media, hit that like button, and leave us a review. Thank you very much. Do you have a great story about any of the songs on Blues for Allah? Were you lucky enough to catch the band at one of their two shows in San Francisco in 75? Then we need to hear from you. Head on over to stories.dead.net and record yourself telling us all about it. You may just hear yourself on a future episode of the Deadcast. And we do have transcripts for many of your favorite Deadcast episodes available for your reading and research pleasure. Head on over to dead.net slash deadcast-index and check them out. Friends, the 2025 Meetup at the Movies featuring the Grateful Dead movie is happening Thursday, August 14th in theaters across the country. There are extra dates before and after, so make sure to check out MeetupAtTheMovies.com to find us showing near you. This time it has been remastered in 4K and will be available at IMAX theaters for the first time. Make sure to grab your friends and grab tickets at MeetupAtTheMovies.com and make sure to stay until the very end to catch a special performance from those winterland shows that did not make the original movie. Help on the Way. Is there a better musical opening to a song in the Grateful Dead's catalog? Personally, I don't think so. Of course, that's subjective, but damn if it doesn't grab you by the boo-boo every time it hits. And it's unrelenting in its twists and turns along the way, the way the song develops. What a way to kick off the start of Blues for Allah, an album written and recorded differently than any Grateful Dead album before it or any after it, for that matter. You've come to the right place to hear all about it, and we've got the right guy to tell you all about it. Here's Jesse Giorno. The album The Grateful Dead have always had in them is out. Blues for Allah. Roll away. It's new. It's here now. It's the Grateful Dead on Grateful Dead Records and Tapes. This season on the Good All Grateful Dead cast, we reach a truly singular Grateful Dead album, 1975's Blues for Allah. Please welcome back Grateful Dead archivist and legacy manager David Lemieux. I love everything about this record. I cannot say enough good things about it. I love all the Dead's records. Start to finish from the first one to build to last and without a net, but this one is certainly up there as a top one for me. Like a child she is new, she is not to blame. The only Grateful Dead album to be built from the ground up in the recording studio, Blues for Allah was written and recorded over roughly seven months at Bob Weir's new home studio in Mill Valley and released in late August of 1975, beginning with the triptych of Help on the Way, Slipknot and Franklin's Tower. I find it almost like structured like a dead show and the interesting thing about it is I've kind of, side A and side B are sort of structured like a dead show. So you get Help Slipknot and Franklin's as an opener, which the Dead did quite often. The first set ends with Music Never Stopped, which I think is pretty cool. And then you get the second set where they get into some jamming music, some crazy fingers, some instrumentals, like Sage and Spirit. You get the going way out there drums and spacey blues for Allah, sand castles, glass candles. And then it ends with like the return, like the playing in the band reprise, you get the Blues for Allah return. As always, David has stocked the new reissue with goodies. Disc one is the album and disc two is the great American music called Rehearsal and Keys are the complete performance from the Jerry Garcia and Friends snack benefit set at Keys are stadium on March 23 1975, previously on the Beyond Description bonus disc, as well as excerpts from the extended sound check for their album release party at the great American music hall in August 1975, which you may know is one from the vault, the band's first ever complete show archival release. But the sound check rehearsal from the day before has never been heard. And disc three is an hour and change of live material from the June 76 comeback tour. Along with those recordings, we'll be telling the story of Blues for Allah with the albums multi tracks and many hours of raw session tapes. If you like the Beatles get back documentary, this season of the dead cast is about as close as we're going to get to recreating that vibe. Except instead of a band breaking up after a 10 year career, it's a band coming back together for the next 20. Plus, there's some guest appearances by Bob Weir's German Shepherd, Otis. Here's how Jerry Garcia described Blues for Allah to NBC in 1981, a half dozen years later. And please welcome back on the vocals Mrs. Donagene Gacho McKay. Just as a pronunciation note, everybody in the grateful dead world seems to have pronounced, and for that matter, sung the album's name as Blues for Allah instead of, you know, Blues for Allah. Perhaps we will, but that's probably how we're going to pronounce it too. And now over to Jerry Garcia, giving a progress report to photographer and journalist Peter Simon in late March 1975, after about a month and a half of writing sessions. It's not much of a stretch to call Blues for Allah the most ambitious grateful dead album since Anthem of the Sun and Oxam Oxoa in the late 1960s. Blues for Allah finds the grateful dead nearing the end of what kids these days call an imperial period, operating at the expansive peak of their powers, musical and otherwise. In 1973 and 1974, in addition to introducing a number of classic new songs and recording two albums, they'd thrown all in on forming their own record companies, grateful dead records and round records, and building their own distribution network, playing custom build instruments through their own groundbreaking self invented speaker system, now known as the wall of sound. But that was just the beginning. We were consciously guiding it through a certain stream of possibilities, mostly having to do with new and unusual harmonic relationships that may, well I don't know, of course quite frankly, some people might not like what would do, but it's another, it's another thing. And so in 1975, they would do everything up to and including a reconsideration of contemporary tonality in order to build a new musical language from the ground up, then write new songs in it. And in keeping with that theme, before they did so, they also built a new studio in which to record it all. But all that took a few long steps. So before we tell the story of Blues for Allah, we'll invoke the wisdom of the late cosmic superhero Carl Sagan. If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe. Let's step back before we leap forward. We've used this piece of rewind in tape before, but it comes from the Blues for Allah sessions. In October 1974, the band stepped back from touring, following five nights at Winterland in San Francisco, retiring the wall of sound and filming what became the Grateful Dead movie. Storylines we explored in our Ship of Fools episode at the end of our season about 1974 and from the Mars Hotel. Here's how Jerry Garcia described the reasons for the band's touring hiatus to Peter Simon in late March 1975. Bob Weir kept busy by joining Kingfish, recently founded by his old friend Matt Kelly, and new writers of the Purple Sage bassist Dave Torbert, playing his first gig with them a few weeks after the Dead's last show at Winterland. By the end of 1975, they'd record an album together. Here's how Weir described the hiatus in early 1976 to WMMR in Philadelphia. The band sent out a newsletter in February 1977. The next level is that we're interested in doing stuff that's joyful or that's fun, you know. But then how do we reconcile that with economic survival? How can we work and have a good time and also pay the bills? We don't have that together. We don't understand how to do that so far. And what we were doing was not it. As an ongoing creative organization, there are several things we should be doing. Number one, expand the quality in all areas in which we interface with our own means of expression. A. Films B. Records C. Musical performance D. Life Jerry Garcia had taken charge of the documentary film project. The idea of doing this film in the first place was we've been trying to develop alternatives to performing live because of the logistical difficulty and the economical difficulty involved in touring nowadays the way we do it. Really? Really a trip. So this represents one possibility, you know, the idea of filming a concert and seeing whether any of the feeling or the good moments or the highness or whatever is able to be translated to this medium. And please welcome back Ron Rakow, president of Grateful Lead Records and partners with Jerry Garcia in both Round Records and their newest venture, Round Reels. This is one of my favorite rack bits of wisdom. Nothing burns up money like movies. I mean, cocaine habits don't burn up money like movies. While every member of the dead had individual projects to keep them occupied, Rakow's job was to keep the bigger ship in the air. Everybody in the Grateful Dead had to get paid because they weren't let go. We were just not active. And the movie was being made. It's like having two holes in your bucket instead of just one hole in your bucket. It was, it was hairy. And I did a lot of dancing to come up with the money. There was only one person coming up with money during that time. That was me. And I had nothing to sell except clever bullshit. The band had their own record company and were self-sufficient up to a point. Being on the road solved the liquidity problem. Not being on the road, nothing changes. I mean, if there are 20 families or 25 families that draw sustenance from this thing, nothing changed. They still have rent to pay. They still have to feed their families. So there was a lot of pressure for money, not only having the record company and having, making two movies actually, and keeping that scene going, and then having no money coming, having this incredible earning resource not functioning. In later years, many of the band members would say they overextended themselves and trying to start a record company. And probably this is true. But what was the point of being the Grateful Dead if not to ambitiously overextend themselves? Here's Bob Weir, Phil Lesh, and Mickey Hart being interviewed together on the release of the Aristey Years in 1996. We were all carrying briefcases and, and... Come on, Bob, you never carried a briefcase? Yeah, I did. When? I started carrying a real briefcase, the real thing, it was leather and everything. Well, he certainly doesn't anymore, folks. Yeah, but what was inside of it? papers and stuff. Oh, that's the worst kind. Sorry, Weir, you totally walked smack into that one. Uh, my briefcase. In the briefcase? Uh, papers, just papers, you know, my papers, business papers. We didn't have the leverage it it takes to be a, a record company. If you're a record company, basically people don't pay you for the last record you sold until you come up with a new one. And we, uh, we make records, you know, at a, when we're really, when we're really punching them out at a good clip every couple, three years. And, and it was impossible for us to get paid for the records we made. That's true. Though in early 1975, as the band started Blues for Aula, they had a bunch of records racked up that would keep the round release schedule rolling, at least through 1976. Following Hot on the Keels of the February newsletter, was a dispatch from round records featuring a new series of seven inch samplers with bits of forthcoming releases. In early January, Garcia and friends had finished Robert Hunter's Tiger Rose, which we devoted an episode to earlier this year. Finally out in February was Olden in the Way, the self titled live debut by the Bluegrass Supergroup, recorded by Owsley Stanley. Dig in to our Garcia 73 episode for more on them. Also on the immediate schedule was the self titled debut by Keith and Donna. Donna Jean. If you notice on the Keith and Donna album, it was recorded at, let's see, what's it? Studio R. And Studio R, R was our living room. It had that grand nine foot Steinway in it and it had some big living room overlooking St. St. Beach. Oh my gosh. It was fantastic. Keith and I had written some of the songs even before we were in the Grapeville dead and so we just wanted to do an album of our own. That just was natural for us to do something while we weren't touring. Our living room became the studio, strictly a studio, and then Zion would sleep in the very, very back of our house while we recorded. So that worked out really well. I had the best of both worlds right there. Recorded in late 1974, their Stinson Beach neighbor, Jerry Garcia, contributed guitar and helped with the album art. I just remember having the photo there and Garcia leaning on our kitchen island there, you know, with doing those doodles. I remember it very clearly that watching him do that and the doodling to all the songs that were on the album. If you notice, what he drew was basically the lyrics to the songs. We got a bit more into the Keith and Donna LP and our Donna Jean episode a few years back. In 1975, they'd formed a live band that featured at various points, both Jerry Garcia and Billy Kreuzman. And beyond that, the newsletter reported, there were albums to follow by Ned Lajan with Phil Lesh and later in the year, a Jerry Garcia solo joint, though at the moment he was touring with Legion of Mary, his then new band with John Kahn, Merle Saunders and drummer Ron Tut. They'd never make it into the studio, but the Jerry Garcia estate is put at several discs of live material from late 1974 and the first half of 1975. In early 1975, work was beginning to ramp up on the Grateful Dead movie as well. It was probably in January or February that Round Reels rented a house in Mill Valley, a short drive from Bobby Weir's new studio. When he wasn't on tour with Legion of Mary, Garcia would often shuttle between Weir's and the film house. Here's a progress report to Peter Simon in March 1975. Well, we hope to have it done and maybe out by around October, but it could go longer than that. It's comparatively difficult to deal with it. There's a lot of film and it's going to take a long time. The big thing is it's going to take a long time making it be anything besides a 10-hour movie. We'll check back in on that projected date later this season. The idea of having four hours of just concert is going to be hopeless in a movie, so we have to make some concessions about that, but we might end up not doing that. It really has a lot to do with what we decide to do in terms of exhibiting it. Right now we're finding out about distribution and all the rest of that kind of stuff, which turns out to be just like in records, turns out to be the main bummer in film. Just like the delivery of the band's records and live performances, the Grateful Dead movie was intended to rethink the concept of content distribution from the ground up. Part of this is to develop a way to distribute it that makes us feel that we haven't been just building another brick in the wall. That's always part of it, but in this particular way, since it's a new field really for us to be involved in, and we're into sort of approaching it with whatever purity we can muster initially rather than having to do it later like we did with records. The beginning of 1975 found Jerry Garcia and Mickey Hart's barn studio in Nevada several times, finishing up Tiger Rose and working on other projects. Though Mickey Hart had joined the band on stage at their final retirement show at Winterland, he wasn't yet back in the Grateful Dead. Please welcome back from Grateful Dead and Round Records, Steve Brown. When Jerry wanted to do stuff and when Hunter wanted to do stuff, they would go up in there and use that because it was, you know, Mickey's place and it was easy to get into and do. The one thing that I still think was my favorite though of all the ones that were done at the barn was Jerry's little dream project, which was the pistol pack and mama at old boys. Yeah, that was like, you know, Jerry's just dream come true. To have Frank Wakefield and Chubby Wise and Anrino and all these guys that I'd heard of too, and had heard their music before, they're actually working with Jerry Garcia. It's like, how cool is this? Recorded in January 1975, but not released until 1976, pistol pack and mama would be Jerry Garcia's last real foray into acoustic music until the dead resumed acoustic sets in 1980. If you go back to the bluegrass realm of Jerry's life, see that he brought in these guys who were here as heroes and got to produce them. I mean, that was just really fun. Garcia even joined the good old boys playing banjo for a short tour in February, some of which has been released by Rockbeat Records as Drink Up and Go Home in 2018. Though Kingfish would keep Bobby, busy throughout the dead's road hiatus, it was another project that fed more directly into the dead's world. Grateful that archivist David Lemieux. Bobby's house had a little garage, a little outbuilding that they converted into the studio. Steve Barncard, I'm sure people are familiar with him. He produced American Beauty. He was around the dead scene for a lot of years, and he helped build Bobby's studio. Aces hasn't changed much. I first went there in 1999, went there a few times, and it's a tiny little place like the isolation booth. I think you have to duck down to get in there. Aces was named after its proprietor. This is his famous Bobby Ace. You've heard of him. Formerly of Bobby Ace and the cards off the bottom, of course. But there are several studio documents that list the name of the studio as Aces High, which really works on several levels. Gary Lambert had just relocated to the Bay Area in time to catch the band's retirement shows at Winterland. I got to visit with Bobby not that long after the final Winterland show as part of some interviews I was doing with him. I went to his home, and I'm thinking this must have been November or early December of 74. And he was already talking pretty optimistically about the band's future. The first plan being, first of all, Aces, his studio was in the early stages of construction. I didn't get to go inside. He sort of pointed up the hill and said, yeah, we're building the studio up there. There's some great pictures in the CD booklet that Steve Barnhart took that really show how small that studio space was. Please welcome back to the grateful bedcast, Stephen Barnhart. Before anybody else, he was the guy that had the really cool house in Mill Valley. And it was designed and built from the ground up as a designer airframe, incredible Marin County palace, basically. But it was kind of, it was truly A all the way down to the ground. It was point, you couldn't put furniture in places or you'd hit your head, you know, it was an incredibly strange and awkward and wonderful place. They had a paper machine model of the trucking guy, our crumb. That paper machine, Mr. Natural, did some time at Rainbow Arbor as well. The briefly lived dead family boutique in Mill Valley. Gary Lambert. It struck me as a singularly unpretentious successful guy's home. But it was also very casual. Like, like I remember there were there were like gold records that hadn't been hung up yet. They were just like on the floor propped up against a wall, that kind of thing. While I was in Bobby's home, he picked up his acoustic guitar from the couch and played a very rudimentary fragment of what turned out to be Sage and Spirit, you know, just jaw droppingly beautiful. And he said, something I'm working on. I can't play it, of course. Yes, that was the isolated guitar from Sage and Spirit. More from that in another few episodes. We're moved into his beautiful Mill Valley A-frame in late 1972 or early 1973, cohabitating with his partner. Though they weren't married, we still remember her as Frankie Weir, Stephen Barnhart. Frankie, uh, Sugar Magnolia. She's got everything we like, oh, she's got everything I need. Takes the wheel when I've seen double days, my jingling when I speak. Bob was building his very minimal studio. Bob was a very shy person and, uh, uh, at least we're discussing something like building a studio. Uh, and so Frankie had conversations with me and then, and then he put Bob and I together and then Bob had some ideas and he had already had the architect build the room before, uh, you know, is already under construction. So he had no idea and the architect had no idea about acoustical spaces or floating floors or anything and or what size of control room would need to be. So he had a triangular shaped control room space and it was not what I would have designed, but it was supposed to be a rehearsal place anyway. I arranged to get an eight track machine from, uh, Muscle Shoals. It actually had a pedigree. Percy Sledge recorded his hit, When a Man Loves a Woman on it. Which is to say, Donna Jean and the tape machine were already acquainted. I bought it from a studio there called Quinvy, another one of the Muscle Shoals studios, and a very hardy, wonderful machine. I love that scully. It was, uh, built like a tank. It was, very heavy. Quinvy was owned by Quinn Ivy, the studio where teenage Donna Thatcher got her start in the music business. We talked about that more in our Donna Jean episode a few years ago. Uh, piece by piece, we put this thing together and got it too. Like there's, we had 12, 10 inputs and, uh, you know, it would be useful for eight track demos. I had rotary faders. I needed a console cabinet that had to fit this room because you couldn't get anything. It was triangular shaped. It was crazy. So we get, we get to the stage and, uh, and he's ready to do demos and we're about to bring the eight track up there. And I think we did. And we didn't, I think we rolled, we rolled tape on on, uh, some band that Frankie was in. That'd be James and the Mercedes, founded by James Acroyd of James and the Good Brothers. There don't seem to be any circulating tapes, but we've posted a link at dead.net slash deadcast to Michael Parrish's scene report and photos from seeing them at the Chateau Liberté in the Santa Cruz mountains. It was really gorgeous. It was really tastefully appointed and carpet everywhere. And it sounded pretty good. I mean, it's very dead. It was more like the record plant than it was. Hiders, but it wasn't built with any kind of, um, sound isolation whatsoever. You know, no double walls, no isolated floor, no hanging chads, nothing, you know, just a room, an A frame, uh, and a two small control room and a lot of things. And I remember Phil coming in and looking at my console with these RCA, these big RCA knobs, which I basically was influenced by CBS. And they're cool. It's old school looking stuff. You see them on old limiter sometimes. And Phil walks in and says, you know, look kind of Buck Rogers. I've never forgot that. Buck Rogers in the 25th century. I don't remember who came in and talked to Bobby, but the next thing I know, suddenly it says, well, can you make this thing a 16 track console? Well, yeah, if I start over, okay, do it. And then he started getting more money. There was this guy that I had hired on the second phase, Robbie Taylor, who was a, uh, a jeweler. He was, uh, he worked with Silver and he, he, he turned out to be an excellent solderer. He had never worked in electronic. He knew nothing about electronics, but I would make him these diagrams and show him where to put stuff. And he made these beautiful. He was the best wiring guy I ever knew. He, he just made these beautiful assemblies and I could, I could then design conceptually things and build prototypes. And then he could go off and build multiples of the thing. And we got the thing done, just the two of us, uh, you know, as far as the electric as the wiring, it was, it was wonderful. He was great. And then he stayed on to be the assistant on the blues for Allah and eventually became road manager and everything else. Robbie Taylor would hit the road with a dead in 1976 and stage managed the grateful dead all the way to the end of their career in 1995, as well as various projects after Jerry Garcia's death. I got some input from Dan Healy. And Dan, Dan Healy took, turned me on to one important thing. He didn't really hang out much, but he came over and, uh, and he was very nice to me. And one thing he wanted to do is put in led the, uh, metering, um, vertical scale. And so he built all that. And then we just worked it into the design, but little did I know he was working his way into wanting to do the record, which, uh, I thought I was my entitlement for building the, being there for a year and a half building that are maybe longer than that. But I never had an agreement. I never brought it up. I just assumed almost that they'd want me to do another record. I thought I met a man. Barnhart had worked with them on American Beauty, as well as David Crosby's Aero defining, if I could only remember my name and stayed a part of their extended family, showing up for softball games and the occasional live show, not to mention briefly living in the house at Fifth and Lincoln and San Rafael during a brief window in the band and or record companies were in occupying it. So I build all this stuff and, and we get the Steven machine in there and, uh, and, and it's, and it's time to like, okay, uh, uh, I think I'm supposed to be doing this. And then they said, and then, and then he leaves, you know, thinking he's going to do it. And I said, and so I, I dressed the band directly. I already was standing there and I said, well, why am I not doing this? And so then he said, well, why don't you both do it? I went, oh no. In the Grateful Dead archives at UC Santa Cruz, there's a paper titled Production Plan for GD103. That is the third official release from Grateful Dead Records after 101, which was Wake of the Flood and Mars Hotel 102. 103 would become Blues for Aula. No part of this plan would prove to be accurate from the name of the studio to the five deadlines it listed. Originally, the band had been planning to track at his master's wheels in San Francisco, the familiar studio once known as Pacific High, where they'd made Working Man's Dead in 1970 and where they mixed Europe 72 and other projects after their comrades took over and renamed it Alembic. Originally, they were supposed to start recording on January 3rd, begin mixing on March 3rd and mastering on March 15th, releasing the album on April 30th. At least on the timeline that we and our current 1975 Grateful Dead Occupy, they wouldn't make their first proper multi-tracks for final album takes until June. The session started out very chill. They sure is good that band. I hear their latest record is A Killer. Their first one was Diamond. That was Billy Kreuzman, recommending the meters to his bandmates. You can hear him and Garcia messing around with the song Jungle Man on the February 28th session at Aces. Bobby Weir had some new responsibilities as a studio owner. I love this little interaction with Dan Healy, I think. With their studio in the trees and no road dates pressing, the Grateful Dead were very briefly suspended entirely in a special magical bubble of their own creation, keeping the outside world completely at bay in a way they never achieved while writing a recording music. And unlike the other studios they'd worked in, the proprietor didn't mind if they lit up the occasional or frequent herbal jazz cigarette. Steve Brown was in charge of coordinating the sessions. Billy Kreuzman and his family had moved a few hours north to Comchi in Mendocino County. The first four months of the Blues for A La sessions were devoted to the new songs. The assigned co-producing team of Stephen Barnhart and Dan Healy didn't quite gel. And Stephen Barnhart exited the Grateful Dead scene stage left. But while the Dead didn't start taping final takes until June, there are plenty of cassettes from the Blues for A La sessions to dig into. Steve Brown. The sound that came out of the soundboard and went all the way down almost kind of a bridge really into his living room. I had two machines. I ran the studio line out to where his living room and then had the one machine that I would give Jerry a copy from if he was the one that really wanted it to take home and play in his car and stuff when he went. And I'd keep one and from the other machine. And in the tiny triangular control room at Aces there was a chance that either Dan Healy or Robbie Taylor were making their own cassettes or even multi-tracks. A lot of tape sources out there. This is labeled as the show tune jam from February 28th. Can anybody identify it? Here's how Garcia described the vibe to Peter Simon in 1975. The studio in terms of just energy is it's more relaxed, quiet sort of scene. It's not like a concert and we're not into being artificially energetic. You know we're not into just getting ourselves excited in the studio and trying to perform live in the studio essentially. We have never tried to do that. So it's been appropriate in our case to do a lot of live records just because that's what we do. Blair Jackson spoke with Garcia about Blues for Ala in 1988 and Garcia told him we kind of made a ground rule for that record. Let's make a record where we get together every day and we don't bring anything in. The whole idea was to get back to that band thing where the band makes the main contribution to the evolution of the material. So we go into the studio, we jam for a while and then if something nice turned up we'd say well let's preserve this little hunk and work with it, see if we can't do something with it. And that's how we did most of that album. What became Crazy Fingers originally had a hard rock and roll feel. It was completely different. That was the track known as Distorto from pretty early in the sessions which would eventually morph into Crazy Fingers which we'll talk about in due time. We're developing those ideas en masse. You know we're not, I'm not for example doing like I normally do which is run off for a week or so and Hunter and I you know knock out nine or ten songs a year you know. Plan there they are and those are songs and we learn them and the arrangement grows depending on everybody's contribution. We're not doing that what we're doing instead is just developing ideas, musical ideas, everyone more or less participating. Keyboardist Ned Lajin was around for a number of the early sessions. All through the spring of 75 I was at Weir's studio every day that was a session. So we were jamming every day and Blues for Ola came out of that. Tunes evolved out of jams or very rough ideas or just a chord or a harmony or a feel. In a way our development has been to synthesize various kinds of forms and like playing jazz, playing country and western rhythm blues and all that sort of thing and then forming combinations of all these various genres and styles within what we're doing within our instrumentation and now we're we're sort of working on creating styles you know what I mean rather than just being eclectic or just synthesizing other styles. If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch you must first invent the universe. Please welcome back musicologist Sean O'Donnell, professor and deputy dean of the arts and humanities at the City College of New York. If working man is their Bakersfield album this is their fusion album. They've always been synthesizing styles but this kind of hits a the fusion along the lines to me of return to forever maybe with a report a kind of groove-based fusion rather than the sort of learned camp that I would probably put Frank's Appa in or Mahavishnu. I'm sure that we're listening to all of it but Aldi Miohler arrives in Return to Forever like in 74 and where have I known you before the album comes out. But then it's got the dead groove so it's still this groove-based fusion. Help on the Way was the first public product of the new language leading off Blues for Ala. Grateful to that archivist David Miohler. It's a bold opening of an album. It's like you know the dead have been away for a year away from studio recording since Mars Hotel. They haven't been on the road for a year and then they open with this. It's like I don't want to say a punch in the face that sounds violent. It's like a wake-up call. It's like hey we're back and we mean business. Paradise waits on the crest of a label angel's flame. She has no pain. Like a child she is new. I find it a powerful song. I find it a very quoteable song. It's one of those things where you know I think in day-to-day life we all in whatever circumstances we're in there's always a dead lyric for something for whatever situation you're in good or bad, happy or sad, stressful or not. It had taken the dead a few months to get to Help on the Way. Though the album sessions were undoubtedly collaborative, ultimately Help on the Way bore the familiar songwriting stamp of Jerry Garcia and Robert Hunter. But it first shows up on the tapes probably before Hunter heard it and it was pretty fully formed on some levels. That's from the April 2nd 1975 writing session at ACES, the one drummer Quintet dead. One thing is clear, the instrumental piece Slipknot was already in some amount of shape by then. In fact, Slipknot is probably the earliest seed of Blues for Ala as a whole, with the riff turning up a full year before the sessions, with some inklings even before that. As you may have noticed, we're like an hour into the episode and we're only just digging into Help on the Way itself. So we're going to save Slipknot for the next episode. But I'd suggest that Slipknot fed into the song that came before it, with Help on the Way perhaps even reverse engineered as a way to get to the Slipknot riff. It's perhaps a bit like if Jerry Garcia had written the great final rhyme to a verse but then needed to construct a series of couplets to set it up. As a reminder, here's what the Slipknot riff sounds like as recorded on the album. By the time the band hits Slipknot, the melody has already been foreshadowed. Please welcome musicologist Chadwick Jenkins, an assistant professor at the City College of New York. As a listener, it clearly comes from that riff in Help on the Way. It's that little riff that then they elaborate and it becomes longer. What I think is so interesting as a chronologically as a listener is that what you hear at first as is just a connector riff. It's not even the main riff at the beginning, right? Because the bass is really focused on the beginning. It's just a connector to get you into the singing. But then and then you're in and then it connects those things. So at first it's just this kind of functional thing but then it shows up in his guitar solo. If we're comfortable with the conclusion that Jerry Garcia had the Slipknot riff first and worked backwards, I think maybe the bulk of Help on the Way was written over the course of March, turning up in early April, just before the sessions took an extended pause for Jerry Garcia's East Coast tour with Legion of Mary. At least in terms of the tapes that survive, there's not much by way of its development. And by the June rehearsals, the song was done besides the words. The band debuted it as an instrumental during the June 17th Bob Freed Memorial Boogie at Winterland. A show we'll get into later this season. On July 3rd, the band recorded the basic instrumental track and one continuous performance of Help on the Way and Slipknot, choosing take five. To my mind, it might be some of Jerry's best rhythmic playing and I kind of mean that in a microtiming sense where the placement of everything is just so perfectly in the pocket. And so you get those blasting chords, the F minor chords that sort of announce in this very syncopated way, we're here and this is like the opening of the album and it's really attention grabbing. And then Jerry just plays this super hip in the pocket little arpeggio thing. It's clever. It's just an arpeggio of the chord you're playing and then he does another arpeggio. There'll be the whole step under to land back on the same chord. But then when he does the next time, that whole step under feeds right into the next chord, the C minor. It's almost like it's nothing but it's just perfect. The sort of composed riffing, the sort of Help on the Way riffs, they're not jazz, they're just sort of triadic arpeggios and the language he's been using in single chord jams like Dark Star or Bird Song for a long time but now it's written and they fall in a very specific pocket. And there's also a musical logic behind the riff that would recur in other places on the album, specifically tonal ambiguity. The Help on the Way little arpeggio riff, the one little riff has six notes of the key and leaves out the one that would define your actual musical space. So it's like F minor but it doesn't have the sixth note of the scale where you'd be like, oh this is natural minor or this is Dorian mode or whatever. And so he holds it until you get to the next bit of the verse and the vocal lines and then he nails the denatural, the chords hit it and the vocal line hits it and it's a thing even though it's by omission. The drama of it's created by like using a smaller set of notes and then reserving the last piece of information for a dramatic moment. So that would be like on Poison for Flight, that section and then suddenly it's okay. Unlike lots of dead songs, Help on the Way has a definitive answer to the question of which came first, the music or the words. In this case, the music and with the music done, it was time for the words. More than past dead albums, Grateful to Ed Learis's Robert Hunter was an elusive figure around the sessions. It seems like he showed up in early March, around the time they were originally supposed to have finished basic tracks. Here's how Hunter remembered his work on Blues for Owl at WLIR in 1978 and I'm pretty sure he's thinking of his contributions to the album's first and last songs here. It's not quite as cut and dry as that. Hunter was in and out of the sessions as the band worked on the music. Thanks to Steve Brown, we can see the progression of how Help on the Way evolved. At dead.net slash deadcast, we've posted images from a few different versions of the Help on the Way lyric drafts that Steve saved. In its earliest iteration, there were 10 different verses with only a few phrases that made it into the final song. The first verse originally went like this. Help on the Way. Will I know, yeah I know it's a foretold thing. Help on the Way. Will a bird who can fly is worth many that just sing. Do today, on a long shot, did you say, make a quick stop, love, love, love, maybe today? What can I say, without Love Day to Day, Insanity's King. I believe that my lyrics are overworked on this. It was not just that tendency. You start being a professional artist and you take a great deal of pride when you do and you sort of start slipping away from your inspiration in a way and you start getting bearing down too hard on it. Trying to perfect each line. Trying to make each one a jewel. Solomon says, life is short, make it sweet, get right back on your feet. It's all just a guess. Write a wrong you belong in your own driver's seat. You can steer, ain't much to it. Change the gear, double clutch it, drive, drive, drive, do retreat. What else is true, but your love in the blues that you learned on the street? I'm not for working that way or anything, because I don't think it's what it is that I can do with a lyric. It doesn't really come out as the best that I want it, because I can make something overworked. I can tool it until it's a glittering jewel that nobody can see in me. And if nobody likes it, then I don't like it over, because they are supposed to communicate. They are supposed to be moving far. Pause for flight, wings spread bright, spring from night into the sun. I think Hunter's thinking mainly of Help on the Way and the album's title track, as we'll get to. His other lyrical contributions to the album were written mostly in advance of the music. Don't stop to run. She can fly like a lie, she can't be outdone. We beg to differ, frankly. The second lyric sheet we have for Help on the Way has the lyrics almost in their final form, but then at the bottom, just for good measure apparently, is another set of lyrics, some of which seem to go with the Help on the Way rhyme scheme, and some don't, but really tie the room together, almost literally. Beautiful lie. You can pray you can pay till you're buried alive. Blackmail or blues. Everyone in the room around a part of the noose. Slipknot jig, slipknot jig, slipknot jig. Did someone say Help on the Way? Well I know yeah I do, that there's Help on the Way. I'm gonna guess that this bit of writing gave a name to the slipknot instrumental, which always did sound a bit like a musical slipknot to me. A tight riff that ends up where it starts once they pull on it. Though we'll get to that next time. Or maybe the music came first, and Hunter rationalized it the same way I just did. It also explains maybe the name of the song on the studio tracking sheet. Slip jig, one word, but it's hard to know for sure in which order things occurred. The vocals were recorded five days after the instrumental tracks on July 8th, meaning it was probably sometime between June 17th and July 8th that Robert Hunter finished off the lyrics. Maybe even after the basic track had been recorded, as he were called. It makes me think that Hunter was back and forth between the UK and the state several times through 1975, at least once in early March, returning by early July. Help on the Way. Well I know only this I got you today. Yeah. Don't fly away. Cause I love what I love and I want it that way. Well Hunter might not have been fond of the Help on the Way lyrics. I think they open his work into a new space. Well Wake of the Flood and from the Mars Hotel were filled with earthy imagery, like the lazy summer home of Eyes of the World, the Rio Grande of Mississippi Half-Step, the ship of fools on the cruel sea. The lyrics to Help on the Way are plenty celestial, but carry a harder edge, an angel in flames, flying like a lie, being trapped and pleading to be let go, hoping love is not lost. It's a song perched on the edge of darkness and light with a palpable tension at the border. Tell me the cost. I can pay, let me go, tell me love is not lost. Sell everything without love day to day, insanity's king. Robert Hunter, as always, was a specialist in ambiguity, as David the Mute pointed out. Matt Campbell left us this thought about the Help on the Way lyrics at stories.dead.net. If you ever want to feel like you are the main character in your own little movie or vignette, something like that, put that song on while you're on your way to work or boarding an airplane or something like that. You will feel as though you are on a mission that you will not come back from, like some super cool secret spy. It just invokes this sense of adventure and danger in such a cool, funky and eerie way. If you have thoughts or tales to tell about any of the songs on Blues for Allah, well, besides Help on the Way, please don't hesitate to record us a message at stories.dead.net. There aren't too many surprises on the Help on the Way studio tracks. What's perhaps more of a surprise is what's not on them. On the previous two Dead Studio albums in 1973 and 1974, as well as Robert Hunter's Tiger Rose, Jerry Garcia and Keith Godshaw had both added synth overdubs. But on Blues for Allah, the only keyboards are acoustic piano and Fender Rhodes. The roads here was recorded onto three tracks, through two microphones and a direct line, then bounced down to one. And the piano overdub the same day as the vocals. For the only place on the album, at least as listed on the tracking sheets, Phil Lesh is deploying the quad pickups on his bass. Here's one of the tracks. And the other. During the very particular window when these tracks were recorded, round records had just released its one and only quad LP, Ned Lajan Seastones. Blues for Allah did not make it to quad. Bob Weir's guitar was originally also recorded on three tracks. Here's the part direct into the console. Here he's playing what I think is like the start of his next phase style, where he's playing a lot more small chords, if you will, or or hinting at the chords would be adjacent to a more traditional rhythm guitar player, but not, you know, it's still Bob. But it was also recorded through a microphone, as well as through a Leslie rotating cabinet, and those two tracks were bounced down onto a single track to make room for the combined electric Rhodes track. So those three tracks could be used for additional overdubs. Efficient mixing. Here's Weir's entwined Leslie in clean guitar. With the room cleared by bouncing down the electric piano tracks, Weir and Donah Jean also had room for two different unison background vocal parts. On the master tracks, there's a cute moment of Weir warming up and Donah giggling quietly. But here's what the vocal part sounds like. There are some subtle answer vocals, and I can never figure out who is singing them. Here's what they sound like in the final mix. I will think, say, but dream, any way you want, won't it be? Turns out it was a team effort. Jerry Garcia takes up the least amount of track space here. Just one track of vocals and one track of guitar. Garcia is playing his Doug Irwin Wolf guitar on the whole album, by the way, only switching over to the Travis Bean guitars near the end of the summer. Matt Campbell left us this observation about the help on the way solo. It's like the first concrete example, in my opinion, that we have of what we now consider to be the Jerry tone. That very plinky, cutting, super direct guitar tone that has kind of defined Garcia as a guitarist for a lot of heads and keepers of the faith of that style of playing. When they wanted to, as on the album, the song had a definitive beginning. But live, it seems like Jerry Garcia liked to get everybody on the same groove page before committing. Most versions start with the distinctive prelude gallop, including the debut with vocals, August 13th, 1975 at the Great American Music Hall. A show we'll have much more to say about later this year. For now, we'll just note that it was a perfect framework for the band members to come in one by one. On rhythm guitar and vocals, Mr. Bob Weir. On the drums on stage, right, Mr. Bill Kreitzman. On the vocals, Mrs. Donna Jean Gaccio. On the guitar and vocals, Mr. Jerry Garcia. Are you welcome, please, to the great full head. It never happened like that again. And, like pretty much everything played that night. It may have been the tightest version of help on the way the dead would ever perform. They opened with it again in Golden Gate Park in September. You can hear Jerry Garcia set the tempo and then they all find the groove together. And, like the way they did it, they all start with the same tempo. And, like the way they did it, they all start with the same tempo. And, like the way they did it, they all start with the same tempo. And, like the way they did it, they all start with the same tempo. And, like the way they did it, they all start with the same tempo. And, like the way they did it, they all start with the same tempo. And, like the way they did it, they all start with the same tempo. And, like the way they did it, they all start with the same tempo. And, like the way they did it, they all start with the same tempo. And, like the way they did it, they all start with the same tempo. And, like the way they did it, they all start with the same tempo. Help on the Way in Slipknot had three different phases in the Dead's repertoire. It was a centerpiece when they returned to the road in 1976, opening sets about half the time. The June 1976 shows get a spotlight on the Blues for Olive 50th as well. Archivist David Lemieux. Disc three, what we've done, we went to the Tower Theater in Upper Darby in Philadelphia. And, we included well over an hour of material from the June 76 comeback tour, specifically focusing on... Plus some other stuff, but specifically focusing on songs that were on Blues for Olive that they were playing at the time. So, we've got from the June 21st show, Music Never Stopped and Help Slip Franklin's All Live Versions. Music Help on the Way itself wasn't a song that jam much. That's what Slipknot was for. And that's what the next episode is for. But there were some great solos. Music The song disappeared in the fall of 1977, returning around five years later in the spring of 1983. Here it is on the In and Out of the Garden box from October 12th, 1983, where it was greeted as a liberator whenever it was played. Pretty crest beginning. Music Music In the early 1980s, the whole song felt like a throwback to the dead's earlier selves. Not an error of many bass solos, nor a fusion-y guitar. It was in the repertoire 75 to 77, and then 83 to 85. And then it came back at Hampton in 89 through right to 95. It stuck around. The full Help on the Way Slipknot Franklin's Tower suite made a dramatic return in October 1989, alongside Dark Star and Addicts of My Life at the Hampton Coliseum. It's been released as a beautiful soundboard on formerly the Warlocks, but we're going to go with the audience tape of October 8th here for maximum spine tingling and hair-raising. The first edition of Dead Bass hit the lot in 1987, and by 1989 there was a more unified knowledge of what constituted a bust-out. I love the second wave of cheers when Garcia starts singing. Music I didn't see any shows on the fall of 89. It was the first tour, since the first time I saw the Dead two and a half years earlier, that I didn't see any shows on a given tour. I thought fall of 89, it's my last year of high school, I've got to focus. What a mistake that was. Always with a good advice, David. I got the call after the first night in Hampton that they had brought out Help Slipknot. And I couldn't believe it. That's something, amongst many others, that I never thought the Dead would play again. This is the soundboard version. The cheers keep going. Music When the band debuted or revived a song, the tapes didn't make it around instantaneously, so it sometimes took Deadhead's time to catch up, and gave fans something to chase. To channel this excitement, we're going to mix together two versions of a similar story, which I imagine happened for lots of heads in 1989 and 1990. Keith Eaton left us this story at stories.dead.net. Around 1977, maybe 1978, my brother was heading off to boarding school, and he said, don't touch my records. Of course, for me, as a 11 or 12 year old or whatever, I couldn't resist. Stones, tall, Zepp, and all that stuff. But one thing that really intrigued me was the album Blues for Allah. I could not wrap my head around it. But the one thing that stuck with me was that opening sequence of Help Slip Franklin's, I couldn't get it out of me. And it was something that, for me, as a young Deadhead in the 80s and 90s, I just thought, I'll never see that. That's not the kind of music that the Dead play anymore. It's not something that I'll ever experience. First night of the first-ever Dead show at the Knickerbocker on March 24th of 90, they opened the show with Let the Good Times Roll. And Let the Good Times Roll was an interesting opener because they always followed it up with a traditional opener. They would always follow it with Touch of Grey, Hell in a Bucket, Shake Down Street, Jack's Draw, it was Bertha, it was always followed by a proper show. But during Let the Good Times Roll, I'm thinking, what's it going to be? And they hadn't yet done a first set. I think they'd ended a first set with one, but they hadn't opened a first set yet since they brought it back with Help Slip Franklin. So that wasn't even on the bingo card. And I remember Let the Good Times Roll ended and I'm waiting, oh, what's the opener going to be? What are they going to do as the actual proper opener? And then you just heard Jerry Strummett, the kind of intro to it. And I was in the taper section losing my mind. I missed the first night of the Warlocks, saw the second night, and felt as though I'd missed something. And I got shut out of the third night of Nassau in spring 90, missed Help Slip. And it wasn't until Deer Creek that summer when I finally got it. And there it was live. And I can't explain how it felt when I heard that first blast into help on the way. Unbelievable. That thing Phil does on the intro to Help Slip Franklin is one of my favorite things in Grateful Dead music. That kind of chord progression he does. I just absolutely love it and he did that perfectly. Whenever Phil dropped those particular bombs, use your third ear to imagine them in their full quadrophonic glory. It's a story that repeated itself whenever they played the song, with new fans constantly getting on the bus, or old fans finally catching the right night. In opening blast, I will never ever get sick of. But let's return to 1975 before we depart for the day. Fans at Winterland and the Great American Music Hall might have been the first heads to hear the dead play Help on the Way live, but they might not have been the first to get a sneak preview. Our friend Steve Brown had a healthy commute each morning. When I was driving to Marin because I lived in Pacifica, and I would go up that one long ride before he'd get on the bridge. If you were hitching a ride north from Pacifica in the spring of 1975, you'd be psyched if Steve pulled over in his comfy van with a shag carpeting. And here's these kids, a galaga. And anyway, I would take them up to Marin County. As the person responsible for making safety tapes at the Dead album sessions in progress, Steve had some very fresh recordings at hand. I would be playing what I just got the night before, the day before. So let's imagine ourselves there until we return, cruising across the Golden Gate Bridge in the spring of 1975 with the windows down and the newest Grateful Dead blaring. This supercut of the studio tracks of Help on the Way isn't how any of Steve's hitchhikers heard the tapes, but who knows how time and space might have warped in the confines of Steve's Econoline. See you next time. ["Paradise Wates"] Paradise waits on the crest of a waiver, angels in flame ["Paradise Wates"] Ooh, don't stop to run, she can fly like a lie, she can't be outdone ["Paradise Wates"] I will pay hush, dia hush ["Paradise Wates"] Dia ["Paradise Wates"] ["Paradise Wates"] ["Paradise Wates"] Help on the way, well I know only this I got you today Don't fly away, cause I love what I love and I want it that way Thanks very much for tuning in to the Good Old Grateful Dead Cast, friends. We'd like to thank our special guests in this episode, David Lemieux, Donna Jean Gautsch-Chow McKay, Ron Rackow, Stephen Barncard, Ned Lajan, Steve Brown, Gary Lambert, Keith Eaton, Sean O'Donnell, Chadwick Jenkins, and Matt Campbell. Extra special thanks to friend of the Dead Cast, David Gans, for his ongoing contributions of audio from his interview archive. Executive producer for the Good Old Grateful Dead Cast, Mark Pinkas. Produced for Rhino Entertainment by Rich Mayhem Promotions and Jesse Jarno. Special thanks to David Lemieux, Brian Dodd, and Doran Tyson. All rights reserved.