In The Dark, the Grateful Dead’s penultimate studio album, is the record that thrust the group out of its insular, self-contained world of Deadheads, college stoners, audiophiles and aging hippies and landed them a spot at the cool-kids’ table. As Dead historian Oliver Trager wrote, “The Dead finally captured the imagination (and pocketbooks) of mainstream America.”
At the heart of this musical reawakening was the album’s iconic first track “Touch of Gray.” The song was the band’s highest charting single and first MTV video. It appealed to teens and baby boomers alike, and even produced a bit of a backlash among longtime Deadheads who were happy to hurl the inevitable insult at neophytes: “You’re not a real Deadhead, you only like ‘Touch of Grey.’” In his book, The Grateful Dead FAQ, Tony Sclafani explains long-time fan frustration, saying: “Few things were more discomfiting than seeing your mom or your little brother bopping around to the very same band they’d spent years telling you to turn down.”
The runaway success of the song and album created a natural tension between the Grateful Dead and its label. Arista impresario Clive Davis was perplexed that the band did not always play its surging hit: “I could not believe that they could have a set during the life of this single that did not include the single. I knew that’s the way it worked, but —”
Jerry Garcia, true to form, was equally baffled by the band’s chart run. He reportedly said, after hearing the song had cracked the Top Ten: “I am appalled. How low can the American record-buying public go.” No mention of whether he said it in jest or not. At the time, he also said about the band’s growing fame: “We’re sort of like the town whore that’s finally become an institution.” (When reading quotes from Jerry I can’t help but think of the old Yogi Berra adage, “I really didn’t say everything I said.”)
A look at the singles chart from Sept. 26, 1987 shows they were at least in comfortable territory. At #9, the Dead were wedged in between Los Lobos at #8 with a version of “La Bamba” from the Ritchie Valens biopic, and Prince at #10 with “U Got the Look.” At the top spot that week was Arista labelmate Whitney Houston with her hit, “Didn’t We Almost Have It All.” Unbeknownst to fans at the time, there was actually a connection between the R&B superstar and the Dead’s new-found chart success. To help the group get airplay for the song, label V.P. Don Ienner, would tell radio stations, “If you want me to give you the next Whitney Houston single before I give it to the [radio programmer] across the street, you’re gonna be dealing with this fucking Grateful Dead record.”
At this point, it seems silly that “Touch of Grey” produced such tension among the fanbase. Nearly 30 years after its initial run the song feels like an anthem for the Grateful Dead members dealing with getting older. Others suggest it’s about Jerry’s rebirth after his brush with death in the mid-1980s, even though it was written a few years prior. But one could also argue that the song is an anthem for the baby boom generation, whose members were hitting middle age at the time. It’s as if the generation born after World War II was screaming “we may be getting on in years, but we will not go quietly into the night,” a meme that gets echoed again and again in Ameriprise Financial commercials that show silver-haired 65-years-olds having the time of their lives.
Band members, who usually talk about the recording process as if it were punishment, are uncharacteristically positive about the album in their respective memoirs. Phil Lesh, wrote:
In the Dark represented the peak of our collective optimism following Jerry’s cleanup and recovery in the previous year. It was recorded while we played as an ensemble, and the joy of communal music-making shines through every track on the album (even those songs that couldn’t possibly be described as upbeat). Everyone felt connected — to each other and to the music — and as with our best music, this album nullifies all heaviness of spirit; at least that’s what it did for us when we made it.
The main reason for this appears to be that instead of holing up in a studio, the group recorded “live” in the empty Marin Veterans’ Memorial Auditorium in San Rafael, California. Bill Kreutzmann notes in his memoir, “It worked. It didn’t feel like a studio because when you looked out, you saw seats.”
The end result is one of the most consistent records in the group’s catalogue. The fact that the band was comfortable in its own skin is clear on all the songs that come after “Touch of Grey.”
The second track “Hell in a Bucket” is the closest thing the Dead have to an “it’s- tough-to-be-a-rock-star” song, along the lines of the Eagles’ “Life in the Fast Line.” The song, which also had an accompanying video, received a considerable amount of radio play. Dead publicist and biographer Dennis McNally called it, “Weir’s up-tempo celebration of mild misogyny and singleness in general.” Not the deepest song, for sure, but it seemed an ideal track for a band enjoying its burgeoning fame.
Following this is the not-so-double entendre, “When Push Comes to Shove,” an easy, upbeat boogie-woogie tune that probably would have been sung by Pigpen had it been written twenty years earlier.
Here’s where the album progression diverges a bit depending on the format. I bought it on cassette and that particular version included the extra track, “My Brother Esau,” which was omitted from the CD. (The fact that the CD had less music was an oddity at the time as bonus tracks were usually included to entice consumers to spend the extra five bucks. The song was released as a B-side on some versions of “Touch of Gray” and it can now be found on Spotify, YouTube and in the band’s Complete Studio Rarities Collection.)
First and foremost, “My Brother Esau” is a transitional song. When you hear the sound of the helicopters, followed by the machine-gun rattle of percussion, the mood of the album completely shifts away from the happy vibe of the first three tunes. This song jolts you out of your buzz and reminds you that the Dead had a serious side.
The lyrics are a reworking of the Book of Genesis story of Esau and Jacob, updated for what is most likely the Vietnam war era. Told from the perspective of Jacob, you can feel Bob Weir’s pain as he sings about his love for his lost soul of a brother. It makes you wonder if it was a parable for Weir as he watched Jerry Garcia’s long, slow decline or “Shadowboxing the apocalypse/ And wandering the land.” The John Barlow-penned lyrics are worth reading in full. There’s an interesting debate about whether the lyric “My brother Esau killed the hunter/Back In 1969” is a reference to the death of Meredith Hunter at the infamous Altamont Speedway concert. Whatever the meaning, I have always thought of the song as a musical equivalent of John Steinbeck’s “East of Eden.” Both are reworkings of Biblical narratives into modern stories that play out again and again, generation after generation.
The second half of the album is as consistent as the first half. On the cassette version, side two opened with keyboardist Brent Mydland’s train song, “Tons of Steel.” The album segueways into “West L.A. Fadeaway” an upbeat bluesy track about the perils of “hauling items for the mob.” (On the CD version, “West L.A.” comes first, then “Tons of Steel.”)
Following this, the album transitions into the concert favorite, “Throwing Stones.” A “message” song, Trager best describes it as a: “A finger-pointing, anti-fascist diatribe” adding that it “touches many bases: greed, gun-running, history, racism, cocaine trafficking, apathy, environmentalism, power-brokering, and most saliently, nuclear annihilation.”
Despite this, the song doesn’t feel heavy-handed. It’s easy to ignore the message as the words are paired with the band’s most danceable beats since “Shakedown Street” and an instantly singable chorus, which contains the bubonic-plague-inspired nursery rhyme “Ashes ashes all fall down.” If you close your eyes as Bob Weir sings, “the kids they dance, they shake their bones” you can almost picture 10,000 stoned hippie chicks in flower dresses spinning around in circles on the floor at Foxboro Stadium circa 1990. Thanks to the Internet you can relive it at about two hours, twenty-one minutes into this video. First introduced live in 1982, the group performed the song 266 times.
The album closes with the sad, wistful “Black Muddy River.” What’s striking is hearing Mydland and Jerry’s voices meld together, in a sad harmony about the passage of time. If “Touch of Grey” celebrated the band’s triumph of reaching its third decade, then this song is a reminder that the party wasn’t going to “roll on forever.” Fittingly, it was the second-to-last song the Dead ever played live before Jerry Garcia’s death in 1995.
Beyond the music, In the Dark’s real impact came in the form of cold, hard cash. It would be the band’s highest charting album, reaching #6 on the Billboard Charts and going platinum in September of 1987. Their touring receipts felt an immediate jolt. That year the Dead was the nation’s fourth largest-grossing touring act bringing in $26.8 million. By 1991 they were number one earning $34.7 million.
In the aftermath the group quickly signed a new record deal, which according to McNally, guaranteed the band $3.50 per CD. “Amazingly, the contract also permitted the Dead to release live recordings from their archival vault, an idea that would gather considerable momentum down the line.” Ya think? For a complete list of live albums click here and be prepared to scroll.
Whether you love or hate what the Grateful Dead became in the late 1980s as the group headed into the final stretch, In the Dark proves their fame was at least backed by great music.
Sources
Browne, David. So Many Roads: The Life and Times of the Grateful Dead. Da Capo Press, Boston MA. 2015
Kreutzmann, Bill and Eisen, Benjy. Deal: My Three Decades of Drumming, Dreams and Drugs with the Grateful Dead. St. Martin’s Press, New York. 2015.
Lesh, Phil. Searching for the Sound: My Life with the Grateful Dead. Little, Brown and Company, New York. 2005.
Richardson, Peter. No Simple Highway: A Cultural History of the Grateful Dead. St. Martin’s Press, New York. 2015
Sclafani, Tony. The Grateful Dead FAQ: All That’s Left To Know About The Greatest Jam Band In History. Backbeat Books, Milwaukee, WI. 2013.
Trager, Oliver. The American Book of the Dead: The Definitive Grateful Dead Encyclopedia. Fireside, New York. 1997.
McNally, Dennis. A Long Strange Trip: The Inside History of the Grateful Dead. Broadway Books, New York. 2002.
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