![]() With Mickey Hart and Bill Kreutzmann in their ranks, the Dead were a two-drummer band. Tennessee Jed was a character from an old radio show in the 1940s, sponsored by Tip-Top Bread (hence “When you get back you better butter my bread”). It’s not merely a sonic impersonation either the lyric mines the same surrealistic old-timey South that Robbie Robertson’s Band songs inhabited (I’m thinking of tracks like Caledonia Mission). The group get so close to the spirit of The Band that may as well be The Band it was no surprise when half a lifetime later Levon Helm covered it on his Electric Dirt album, the last record he ever made. Recorded in Paris, this is the definitive version of one of the era’s defining Grateful Dead songs. The reading of China Cat Sunflower is likewise tremendous.īut the finest moment on the triple-album set is the version of Tennessee Jed that appears on side four of the triple album. ![]() The aching version of He’s Gone (written about Mickey Hart’s father Lenny, who took off with most of the band’s money) is one of my very favourites. The group is expansive while always sounding at ease with what they’re doing. The vocal harmonies that they’d begun to feature under the influence of CSNY*, so tentative on some of the Workingman’s Dead tracks, are now practised, even slick**. It’s the Dead at the very top of their considerable game, Garcia audibly fired up by having a new player to spar with in Godchaux. The triple album that was compiled from the tour starts with a tremendous version of Cumberland Blues and doesn’t let up from there. It was the only tour with Pigpen and Godchaux there in tandem. ![]() It was their last major tour with founding member Ron “Pigpen” McKernan (he died in 1973) and their first with pianist Keith Godchaux and his wife Donna (whose first-ever studio session had been as a backing singer on Percy Sledge’s When a Man Loves a Woman in Muscle Shoals). ![]() In 1972 the Grateful Dead embarked on their (at the time) biggest-ever tour of Europe. ![]()
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