By Caitlin Vaughn Carlos
In 1969, The Grateful Dead were at the top of their game. In November, Lenny Kaye declared in Fusion:
“The Grateful Dead are on the way up. But whether it be from a growing musical acumen on the part of their audience, a starring role in Tom Wolfe’s Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, or simply that they are one of the only living reminders of the Summer of Love, nobody can really say for sure. The only thing that does seem sure is that suddenly great gobs of people have turned on to the group, giving them a series of packed houses, screaming audiences and fans whose devotion borders on the mystical.”
And yet, in 1970, the Grateful Dead suddenly, and drastically, changed musical directions, abandoning the extended improvisation and psychedelic core that had solidified their importance as one of the founding musical groups of the San Francisco counterculture. Workingman’s Dead was, for all intents and purposes, a country album. At a time when country music was seen as the antithesis of the hippie counterculture, the Grateful Dead latched on to the west-coast version of genre, as found in music of Merle Haggard and the Bakersfield sound.
Heading to the Country
The Dead had spent the last years of the sixties in a constant state of touring and recording. Between 1966 and 1970, the band averaged 120 concerts a year – over 140 at the turn of the decade. When they hired The Rolling Stones’ tour manager Sam Cutler in the aftermath of the infamous Altamont festival, they were at a crossroad in their career. They were fascinated by how a band like the Rolling Stones could do these long tours while also maintaining the joy of music making. The commercial side of music seemed incompatible with the atmosphere of discovery that they so cherished. When Warner Brother’s had signed them in 1966, the band fell deep in debt exploring the recording studio and trying to learn how to use it themselves, rather than focus on creating commercially viable tracks. As the decade came to a close, the pressure to create a hit album (or at least a financially fruitful one) increased simultaneously with the changing landscape of their San Francisco haven. Cutler explained: “This was a period when business was looking at the hippie scene and working out different forms of how to commercialize it. The perfect, idyllic childhood of the Grateful Dead as a group of musicians was over. The Haight-Ashbury was destroyed by becoming popular. So the hippies left.”
This departure was both philosophical and physical. The Haight-Ashbury district was literally filled with crowds of fans and tourists alike, all trying to get a glimpse into the mythical psychedelic scene. Mickey Hart reflected almost fifty years later, that the Dead were overwhelmed by the massive influx of people that descended on the city: “We were living in the Haight and it was getting hot for us. There were buses coming by the house — you know, tourist buses. ‘This is the home of the Grateful Dead. The feared.‘ And, so we felt like, you know, it’s time to get out of town.” So they did.
Hart was the first to move out of the city, settling on a ranch in Novato CA where the band would visit him to escape the pressures of city and music industry life. Hart associates the physical relocation as an important influence on the musical changes we seen in the band at the turn of the decade:
“Everyone started coming out one by one. And, you know, within a short amount of time, everybody started becoming psychedelic cowboys. And we loved it in the country. Love the trees, loved the woods, loved nature. We were learning about everything that is wild. ‘Oh! These are wild sounds.’ And so, it started to affect the music. We were discovering what Grateful Dead music could be.”
In planning their next album, Jerry Garcia told his band mates: “Why don’t we approach this one as though it were, like, a country and western record, or like California country and western, you know like, Bakersfield.” While it comes off as a humorous quip, the Bakersfield reference is actually quite useful for our understanding of the Grateful Dead’s country explorations.
The Bakersfield Sound
In his journeys to the unknown and forgotten “crossroads of rock ‘n’ roll,” Randy McNutt described the Bakersfield phenomenon:
“The Bakersfield Sound is both fast and slow, thoughtful and playful, electric and acoustic, but mostly it’s music with a true hillbilly heart. From the 1950s to the 1970s, when it occupied a prominent place in Los Angeles recording studios and on the national charts, Bakersfield supplied an army of session musicians for Capital Records. [Buck] Owens, Red Simpson, Bill Woods, Jelly Sanders, and their friends piled into cars and drove one hundred miles south to Los Angeles to play on singles and albums for producer Ken Nelson. Because they were accomplished but not full-time session players, Bakersfield’s musicians brought a fresh approach that sounded uncluttered. After a session, they’d head north to the potato fields and factories and honky-tonks — to home.”
Labeling the Bakersfield Sound as a “crossroads” is fitting, geographically and sonically. Just over a hundred miles north of Los Angeles and a two-hundred and fifty miles south of San Francisco, Bakersfield is one of the largest cities between the two musical powerhouses of rock music of the late sixties. This certainly influenced the country music that came out of the region, epitomized by Buck Owens and Merle Haggard. Peter La Chapelle describes the emergence of Bakersfield, in 1967, as the “Country Music Capitol [sic] of the West,” replacing Los Angeles as “Nashville West.” Of the Bakersfield sound, he explains:
Rather than favoring the more polished adult-oriented country pop of their middle-Tennessee contemporaries, Bakersfield artists adhered to a grittier anti-Nashville aesthetic, presenting themselves as rougher-edged blue collar traditionalist who sang wistfully of hardscrabble lives and a simpler, rural past. In reality, Bakersfield country drew extensively from uban Angeleno rockabilly, honky-tonk and western swing traditions, heavily influenced by vocalists and guitarists who had lived or set up shop in the region, such as Lefty Frizzell, Jean Shepard, Merle Travis, and Speedy West. Despite nostalgic imagery and efforts to preserve older stylistic elements, the Bakersfield “sound” also flaunted tradition, especially in its use of the electric guitar.
Lines can be drawn from this rougher-edge celebration of hardened, rural living in the music of Haggard to the darker, folk-country-rock fusion of the Grateful Dead at the turn of the century. When the Dead moves away from predominantly improvisational performance and into songwriting and storytelling, they do so in this edgier realm.
Merle Haggard and Counterculture
On the surface, it seems unlikely that a San Francisco band like the Dead, so deeply rooted in the psychedelic counterculture would ever want to associate themselves with Bakersfield country music, especially at the turn of the decade, when Haggard’s hit, “Okie from Muskogee”, was the biggest thing to come out of the region at the time. Haggard’s song became a classic in conservative branches of country music ever since its release in 1969, with lyrics that criticize Vietnam War protests and the psychedelic movement (of which the Dead could be considered founding members). The irony of the song’s opening line “We don’t smoke marijuana in Muskogee,” written and sung by Bakersfield’s own pot-smoking, rebel musician (Haggard was arrested several times as a youth, spending time in San Quentin, before turning to music) captures some of the juxtapositions of sound and meaning that it is found in the fusion of rock and roll and country in Bakersfield.
“Okie From Muskogee” – despite getting taken up by many listeners and organizations as a pro-war, conservative anthem – has constantly negotiated the spaces between literal and ironic. Haggard once told a Michigan reporter, “Son, the only place I don’t smoke is in Muskogee.” In performance, he has often smiled wryly at his bandmates and guests like Johnny Paycheck or Willie Nelson, when singing the line “We don’t let our hair grow long and shaggy.” At the same time, the main premise of the song does resonate with Haggard’s personal history, through the inspiration of his father – an Oklahoman who came to CA during the Dust Bowl. As he explained: “My father worked hard on his farm, was proud of it, and got called white trash once he took to the road as an Okie. … there were a lot of other Okies from around there, proud people whose farms and homes were foreclosed…and who then got treated like dirt. Listen to that line: ‘I’m proud to be an Okie from Muskogee.’ Nobody has ever said that before in a song”. In this way, Haggard’s music, like much of the Bakersfield sound, seems to operate in a middle space between the conservative stereotypes of Nashville-styled, Country and Western music and the more progressive, counter-cultural side of the California rock scene – much as the Dead would do with their early seventies output.
While it may be impossible to know what Haggard’s intentions were when writing the song, it is perhaps more interesting to consider how the song was heard by a band like the Grateful Dead. An ironic reading of Haggard’s hit certainly helps us understand the Bakersfield influence on the Dead a little better. In fact, after Haggard’s death in Bob Weir told the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette:
When he came out with ‘Okie from Muskogee,’ I had a pretty strong suspicion that he was laughing all the way to the bank. I had a pretty strong suspicion that he was smoking pot on the back of his tour bus and he came up with a character, and as a writer, as a storyteller — and a singer is storyteller, any artist is a storyteller, first and foremost — he is painting a picture of a character and it resonated with a lot of folks. But that was not a statement of who he was, and I did not suspect it was.
This reading makes sense with characterizations of The Dead as a group of laid-back musicians who often embraced humor and irony. Phillip Jeffers described the band as “hippier and happier than most any group that comes to mind” in The Sun in 1967, and claimed that Garcia had been called “a cross between Wanda Landowska and the Three Stooges.” They were not likely to take the Hippie critique in Haggard’s song at face-value, or let it turn them away from any association with the Bakersfield sound. If anything, the dissonance between their lifestyle and the song likely made it all the more fun for them to take their turn at writing in the Bakersfield sound. Further, Weir’s comments frame the idea of songwriting around the telling of human stories, which matches the shift from extended jam sessions to song composition that the Dead acknowledge in their work of this time.
Songs of the Workingman
Recorded in February of 1970, Workingman’s Dead marks a sharp departure from the psychedelic, electric jam sessions of the band’s work in the previous decade, and a return to their more folk-oriented roots which had become overshadowed in the heat of the counterculture revolution. Garcia describes a more relaxed effort placed on the album, one less interested in progressive idealism and counter-culture values: “We weren’t feeling so much like an experimental music group but more like a good old band.” This was facilitated by the increased presence of lyricist Robert Hunter in the Dead’s work at the time.
Hunter and Garcia had met as teens in Palo Alto.. They had even played as a duo (“Bob and Jerry”) together for a short period of time in 1961. While Hunter had contributed lyrics to the Dead’s work before 1970, he became the primary lyricist for all the songs on Workingman’s Dead, crafting stories of myth and fantasy through the characters and stories found within the songs.
The final track of the album, for instance, takes on the myth of Casey Jones – a railroader who died in 1906, while trying to stop his passenger train from hitting a stalled freight on the track ahead. The history of the event is contested: “an inquiry blamed him for the wreck, while two popular ballads lauded him as a hero.” Before writing and recording “Casey Jones”, the Dead had often played one of these folksong versions, “The Ballad of Casey Jones”, in their live concerts. However, their 1970 new composition adds a psychedelic twist; in this version, the ill-fated engineer is about to crash while under the influence of cocaine: “Driving that train / high on cocaine / Casey Jones you better watch that speed”. Casey Jones is thus molded and reconstructed as “a hippie adventurer”. Having played with the myth for several years, and with Hunter’s help, they evolved it into a new creation for this album – an American legend, with a psychedelic twist.
Reflecting on his songwriting, Merle Haggard told the Boston Phoenix in 2005, “What I aimed to do was paint a portrait from the past, sometimes my immediate past, in words and music […] The canvas-covered cabins and things I sang about were things that existed in those days, when times were totally different from now. Each town had character, and there were highways instead of freeways with exit ramps that lead to the exact same things wherever you pull off.” Whether he was writing autobiographically (“Mama Tried”) or telling the stories of others (“Workingman’s Blues”), Haggard detailed storytelling and celebration of American’s working class.
While the Grateful Dead’s portraits of an American past on Workingman’s Dead may have captured, to quote Greil Marcus, “the old, weird America”, rather than the common-man tales of Merle Haggard, we can certainly see why the songwriting and country music that was coming out of Bakersfield in the late sixties provided the right type of edgy rock-influenced, country space for reimagining what the Grateful Dead could sound like.
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