this month marks the fiftieth anniversary of what could arguably be considered the grateful dead’s most important and popular studio album, ‘workingman’s dead’. of course, ‘american beauty’, also released later in 1970, was maybe as important and certainly as popular. but after listening to both all the way through back to back like i did yesterday, for the first time in a long time, i will make two points. the first is that you could almost consider them to be a double album that just happened to be released individually, the second being that the argument as to which is better is like asking me which one of my twin daughters is more beautiful. it is a question that does not need an answer.

but there is no question that ‘workingman’s dead’ is a demarcation point for the band both commercially and artistically. i also think that it is one of the albums that was at the forefront of the burgeoning movement to what gram parson’s called ‘cosmic american music’, and would lead to what we would eventually reference as ‘americana’. with neil young and bob dylan integrating country influences in their recordings, and the band going even further than that, the dead were also finding their calling in this regard. bob weir had been a huge student of the bakersfield sound and had been incorporating country classics into the set lists. but more importantly, the songwriting duo of garcia/hunter were becoming obsessively productive in this period and lent their own twist to the country influences.

to say that this is a departure from their previous studio offering, ‘aoxomoxoa’, would be an understatement. the psychedelic underpinnings of that session are now entirely absent, the focus now being on songwriting, craftsmanship, and stacked vocal harmonies. it has often been observed that it is not a coincidence that the detail paid to harmonies was happening at the same time they were doing some session work with david crosby. there is likely some truth to that, but crosby himself, not one who tends to be humble in his opinions, contends that they mostly took it upon themselves to add that element to their new sound. it was very much a mutual admiration thing. i follow crosby on twitter, and someone once asked him ‘of all the people who are gone, who do you miss the most?’. his one word answer was ‘garcia’.

of the eight songs, seven of them were in the set list rotation for the rest of their career, the exception being pigpen’s ‘easy wind’. a great song, but it was distinctively his own and when he left the band two years later, i don’t think they ever tried it again.

so what is special about the 50th anniversary edition? in regards to the original album, nothing substantial, in my opinion. they simply remastered the original tracks but there are no ‘alternate takes’ or unissued material. ‘mason’s children’ was recorded during these sessions, and they played it live quite a bit in this period, but we get nothing here.

what is of substantial interest is that they tacked on a complete show from 2/21/71 at the capitol theatre in port chester ny. as a few friends will know, when i first heard about this i had mixed emotions. i was happy as i wanted to hear more of this rather legendary six night run at this venue, but disappointed because i had been hoping for a few years now that they might release the whole run as a box set. most of the shows had been considered lost until they came back into the band’s archives with the return of the ‘betty boards’ about 4-5 years back. the second night (2/19/71) was released by the band in 2007 as ‘three from the vault’, but the rest of the tapes were missing. this run is significant for a number of reasons, most notably that mickey left the band abruptly after the first show, never to come back for years. you can hear bobby address this fact in his comments in the second set when someone in the crowd asks about his whereabouts. kreutzmann adjusts quite well, and really doesn’t miss a beat (pun partially intended). a great example of this is his work on the aforementioned ‘easy wind’. on the album version, the two drummers turn in quite possibly one of their best dual efforts in the studio, but here billy tackles it all on his own, and nails it.

the other significant aspect is that the show features favorites from both ‘workingman’s’ and ‘american beauty’, as well as new material from bobby and jerry’s new solo records. we also get ‘me and bobby mcgee’, just a few weeks after janis joplin’s cover of kris kristofferson’s classic had hit the airwaves. it was on her album ‘pearl’, which was released posthumously after her untimely death. they were all great friends, and i have always contended that this was one of the best duos that jerry and bobby ever did together (although this might not be the best version), and you can hear the ache in their voices. jerry also turns in a great ‘bird song’, which is robert hunter’s tribute to janis (‘all i know is that she sang a little while and then flew on’).

so, in a nutshell, get this only if you have an interest in the live show. i contend that it is worth the price for that. but you may not.  i will likely have more to say on this subject when they do the 50th package for ‘american beauty’, but until then, a little pig: