Grateful Dead launch podcast that picks apart 1970's ‘Workingman’s Dead’

Grateful Dead have launched their first ever official podcast: The Good Ol’ Grateful Deadcast. Hosted by journalist Jesse Jarnow and Nashville musician Rich Mahan, Deadcast series one will provide a track-by-track analysis of the band’s classic 1970 album, Workingman’s Dead.

The podcast’s official copy describes it as a chance for “new fans to explore the band’s enormous mythology in digestible chunks” and also promises to “enlighten life-long Dead Heads about corners of the band’s history they never knew existed.”

Episode one is available now and it centres on the album’s opening track, ‘Uncle John’s Band’. The episode begins with audio from a contemporaneous Warner Bros promo. “America’s hardest working rock band now presents Workingman’s Dead. An album of country-flavoured tunes by the Grateful Dead. An album different from anything they’ve ever done before.”

Early in the episode, Jarnow plays a snippet from an archival interview with Dead guitarist and co-frontperson Jerry Garcia in which he explains the origins of Workingman’s Dead.

“We’d spent so much time and so much money working on our second two records and we didn’t want to go through that experience again,” he says. “So I thought, hey what I’m going to do is write some songs that are so fucking simple and so easy for everybody to understand that we’ll do ’em in the studio in about a minute.”

However, Jarnow contends that Workingman’s Dead isn’t quite as simple as Garcia tried to suggest. “The songs themselves were anything but unambitious,” he says. “And as we’ll see, it took a lot of weirdness to arrive back at the Grateful Dead’s version of the basics.”

Workingman’s Dead came out on June 14th, 1970, and the podcast launch coincides with the release of release its 50th Anniversary Deluxe Edition. The deluxe reissue includes a new vinyl pressing and a previously unreleased concert recording from 1971. The anniversary has also given rise to The Angel’s Share – a 64-track collection of demos and unreleased tracks from the Workingman’s Dead sessions.