#Grateful dead skull tv

We thought Dire Wolves were great big beasts. Maybe it was even suggested in the story, I don’t remember. We were speculating on what the ghostly hound might turn out to be, and somehow the idea that maybe it was a Dire Wolf came up.

#Grateful dead skull tv

Again, the lyrics hinted at something altogether darker, with the narrator facing a mythical beast, as lyricist Robert hunter revealed: “The song Dire Wolf was inspired, at least in name, by watching The Hound Of The Baskervilles on TV with Garcia. With it, their sound shifted to direct, accessible, harmony-strewn, acoustic-guitar-heavy Americana, as demonstrated by one of the first songs to emerge from the sessions, the breezy bluegrass swing of Dire Wolf. Their problems sharpened their focus, and the band returned to their folk-blues past, recording the album that would change their fortunes forever, Workingman’s Dead, in a matter of days. Not only that, they needed a hit record to repay the time and money that had been lavished upon them by their label. On 31 January, their New Orleans hotel was raided, and the entire band was arrested on drug charges. The Dead needed a fresh start at the beginning of 1970. It was my second chance, and I got serious.”ġ8: Dire Wolf (from ‘Workingman’s Dead’, 1970) That event was the slingshot for the rest of my life. Before that I had been living at less than capacity. For me it was crushing, but I had the feeling that my life had been spared to do something, to either go whole hog or not at all…That was when my life began. It was like losing the golden boy, the one who had the most to offer. I’d been thrown completely out of my shoes and through the windshield. “The car was crumpled like a cigarette pack… and inside it were my shoes. All I know is that I was sitting in the car and there was this… disturbance… and the next thing, I was in a field, far enough away from the car that I couldn’t see it. We hit these dividers and went flying, I guess. “I was in an automobile accident in 1960 with four other guys… 90-plus miles an hour on a back road. Still, this Jerry Garcia-Robert Hunter co-write has a keen sense of purpose and mortality, as Garcia explained when later discussing the lyric “I lost my boots in transit, babe/A pile of smoking leather”: On the surface, this 1973 track is an easygoing demonstration of the Dead’s musical versatility – able to turn on a sixpence from the jugband-type verses to the simmering pre-chorus that gives the song its name. Help Is On The Way begins as a relatively conventional jazzy boogie before segueing into Slipknot!, a high-wire act of a jam that bassist Phil Lesh called “one of our finest exploratory vehicles”.ġ9: Mississippi Half-Step Uptown Toodeloo (from ‘Wake Of The Flood’, 1973) Still, the opening medley featured a couple of tracks that had been around since June 1974. The resultant album, Blues For Allah, featured some of the best Grateful Dead songs of the 70s and saw the group experimenting more than ever before – not only with new instrumentation, but with non-Western time signatures. Their touring hiatus meant that when they reconvened in February 1975 at guitarist Bob Weir’s home studio in Mill Valley, California, they were, for the first time, embarking on recording sessions without having road-tested the material in advance. What a long, strange trip it is… Listen to the best of Grateful Dead here, and check out our best Grateful Dead songs, below.Ģ0: Help Is On The Way/Slipknot! (from ‘Blues For Allah’, 1975)Īfter a five-date residency at San Francisco’s Winterland Ballroom in October 1974, Grateful Dead decided to do something totally new for them – come off the road. We won’t try to pinpoint the definitive versions of each of the group’s songs here, but we can steer you in the direction of the best Grateful Dead songs. Performing from 1965 to 1995 with guitarist and songwriter Jerry Garcia at the helm, the group recorded a string of classic albums and left behind a mammoth legacy of live recordings on which they pushed the limits of their music, winning a devoted audience known affectionally as “Deadheads”. Grateful Dead may have been the figureheads for the 60s counterculture in the US, but their music continues to resonate.