The Angel's Share

On that late winter 1970 day at Pacific High recording studio in San Francisco, Jerry Garcia wasn’t happy with what he was hearing. The Grateful Dead were trying to finish “New Speedway Boogie”, a song they’d played live only 3 times, and they were having trouble finding a groove.

“Keep it nice and fucking together, you fuckers”, Garcia said semi jokingly as they took another pass at it. They started again, but the tempo still wasn’t locking in. “It’s faltering”, he said, sounding more exasperated than before. “It’s weird, man, it isn’t grooving. It’s just not grooving at all”.

In the quarter century since Garcia’s death, the Grateful Dead industry has rolled out countless authorized live recordings of individual shows and entire tours. What’s never materialized to any extensive degree is the sort of material Bob Dylan, Beatles, and Elvis Presley have recently unveiled, studio rehearsal tapes of musicians honing songs on classic albums, sometimes take after laborious take.

That changes this month with the release of "Workingman’s Dead : The Angel’s Share". Pegged to the 50th anniversary of that momentous album, the Dead and their label, Rhino Records, are issuing 2 ½ hours of studio rehearsal tapes of each of its songs as a streaming only collection, a first in the history of authorized Dead archiving. Fans will finally be able to hear the Dead at work, finessing the 8 songs on "Workingman’s Dead", Garcia and Bob Weir practicing the chord changes for “Uncle John’s Band”, the late Pigpen McKernan leading the Dead through more than a half dozen takes of his showcase song, “Easy Wind”, and, yes, the band attempting, across 11 takes, to end up with a satisfactory version of “New Speedway Boogie”.

“The complete takes show the development”, says Dead legacy manager David Lemieux, who oversees the band’s archiving. “The Dead had been playing these songs for so long, in some cases 9 months, so they had them down. But this is where the nuances developed”.

"The Angel’s Share" is a digital only release, with no physical offering currently planned. The album title stems from a term in the whiskey industry. Thanks to the porous quality of wooden barrels used to make the drink, some of the alcohol is lost in the process. “Because the liquid would evaporate into the heavens”, according to The Whiskey Wash, “it was dubbed ‘the angel’s share'.” In a statement, Rhino Records added, “Much like the whiskey distillation process, there were also ingredients that were vital to the creation of 'Workingman’s Dead' that were lost and did not end up on the final album, the band’s own version of the ‘angel’s share’.”