“Wind and Rain”: Death and Rebirth on Wake of the Flood

In 1973, when the Grateful Dead recorded its sixth studio album Wake of the Flood, music journalists were already writing the band’s obituary. In No Simple Highway, Peter Richardson, cites articles from The New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Washington Post and the Village Voice saying the group was cast as “symbols of a bygone era,” relics of the late 1960s. It was a refrain that would follow the Dead for the rest of its career. In 1987, when Arista Records promoted In the Dark to radio stations, D.J.s and programmers “were amazed that the Dead were still alive.”  

Sadly, the band experienced real tragedy that year when founding member and keyboardist Ron “Pigpen” McKernan died on March 8, 1973 at age of 27 from extensive alcohol abuse. The first in a long line of band members — not to mention keyboard players — to pass before their time.  

Despite this, when the band entered the studio in August 1973, they managed to craft a feel-good, laid-back album filled with countless images of physical, spiritual and sexual rebirth and reawakening. It also captured the vibe of their live shows, which is likely due to the fact that the band had been performing most of the tracks regularly in concert before hitting the studio. “We’d learned to break in the material at shows (under fire, as it were) rather than try to work it out at rehearsals, or in the studio at tremendous expense,” Phil Lesh said in his memoir.

The band members have fond memories of the location where they recorded the album, the Record Plant in Sausalito. Lesh notes that they band spent much time in the studio’s hot tub in between sessions. “Hopes were high,” he wrote. “We had what we thought was a bunch of great material, and the studio atmosphere was very congenial.” Bill Kreutzmann notes in his memoir that the studio was across the street from the U.S. Army Corp of Engineers Bay Model, a working, hydraulic, to-scale model of the San Francisco Bay and Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta System. “We’d walk around its cavernous insides which mimic the foothills around the Bay — again, the perfect playground for stoned musicians looking to get lost in another world.”  

Though panned by critics at the time, most notably Rolling Stone, the album has gone on to become one of the more well-regarded, if not slightly overlooked, in the group’s catalogue. Historians have been especially kind. Oliver Trager calls it the band’s “most underrated album” and Dennis McNally describes it as, “a lovely, pastoral album that came close to excellence.”

Wake of the Flood gets overlooked largely because of when and how it was released. The album is overshadowed by its two predecessors American Beauty and Workingman’s Dead simply because it did not produce album-oriented rock radio classics. Also, because it was released on the group’s own label shortly after they left Warner Bros., none of the songs ended up on the compilations released in the 1970s. As a result, they didn’t get circulated among casual listeners.

Much of the music continued to have a life of its own long after the album’s release, as many of the songs went on to become concert staples. When the group released its live album Without A Net in 1990 at the height of its stadium-filling popularity, the two-disc set contained three songs from Wake, including the album’s countrified, feel-good opener, “Mississippi Half-Step Uptown Toodeloo.”

A Jerry Garcia-led tune, the upbeat sing-along comes with an extended fiddle solo. Most notable on this opening track are the band’s much-improved harmonies, thanks in no small part to backing vocals of Donna Godchaux. She and her keyboard-playing husband Keith made their studio debut with the band on this album.

For me, the album holds the distinction of being the first Grateful Dead record I listened to on CD. Unlike the albums I owned on cassette, I view it as a singular work with a well-thought-out song progression.   

Following “Mississippi Half-Step,” the album stays on the upswing with “Let Me Sing Your Blues Away,” sung by Keith Godchaux.

The song would be his only contribution to the band’s catalogue as a lead singer or songwriter. His raspy, yet high-pitched voice, combined with his wife’s backing vocals and an extended sax solo, give this hopeful, upbeat tune a 70s-era Beach Boys feel, reminding me a little bit of “Sail On, Sailor.”

Comparing the two groups isn’t much of a stretch since the bands performed together at the Fillmore in 1971. The Grateful Dead only played “Let Me Sing Your Blues Away” live six times and then dropped it completely, a sad ending for an otherwise decent track.  

In the middle of the album, the band adopts a mellower tone with two songs that I wouldn’t recommend listening to while driving as you might just fall asleep, “Row Jimmy” and “Stella Blue.”   

“Row Jimmy ” is cited as a favorite by several band members. The song’s lyrics focus on a series of nursery rhyme-type situations, “Julie catch a rabbit by his hair /Come back steppin' like to walk on air,” punctuated by the chorus that echoes “Row, Row, Your Boat”:

I say row Jimmy row,

Gonna get there, I don't know
Seems a common way to go

Get out and row, row, row, row, row

In The American Book of the Dead, Trager calls the song “a minor masterpiece,” and quotes Garcia from a 1976 interview with Relix magazine saying,“That was one of my favorite songs that I’ve written. I loved it. Nobody else really liked it very much —  we always did it — but no one liked it very much, at least in the same way I did.”  Drummer Bill Kreutzmann echoed Garcia’s sentiments in his autobiography calling “Row Jimmy,” “the best track on that on that album” and “one of the best songs in our repertoire.”

Following “Row Jimmy,” the album continues its introspective mood with the even quieter “Stella Blue.” The song starts out on a somber note:

All the years combine
They melt into a dream
A broken angel sings
From a guitar
In the end there's just a song
Comes crying like the wind
Through all the broken dreams
And vanished years

Several minutes in the song breaks from this dark mood as it crescendos to a near thunderous call to emerge from the darkness, with a brief ode to the power of the music itself:   

I've stayed in every blue-light cheap hotel, can't win for trying.
Dust off those rusty strings just one more time,
Gonna make them shine, shine

“Stella Blue” then winds down again, pulling you back into a dreamlike state with the final chorus.  

Breaking the album out of this quiet haze is the high-pitched guitar intro on “Here Comes The Sunshine,” which comes in like a funky alarm clock. The song is the perfect transition into the next track, one of band’s signature tunes, “Eyes of the World.” It features Jerry’s signature warbled guitar sound that would encapsulate and define much of the the band’s music for its run. “Eyes of the World,” is easily the best and most well known track from the album and would go onto become a concert staple, played 380 times throughout the band’s career.

The track ends with an extended solo that fades out a minute or two early, leaving the listener wanting more. The free flowing jammy feel of the song made it one of the group’s most enduring and malleable tunes. When they played it live, the band often used it as a segue into “Drums” and “Space.” Over the years, the Dead would take “Eyes of the World” in a number of different directions, from the funky version they laid down at the Red Rocks on July 8, 1978, to the jazzy rendition on Without A Net, featuring saxophonist Branford Marsalis. Many band members would cite their performances with him as a high-water mark for the group.

The album then slows down again as it enters its final track, the 12-minute plus: “Weather Report Suite.”  The song is largely known for its final section “Part II:Let It Grow,” which the band often played on its own throughout its run (also on Without a Net). To me hearing the live version has always sounded strange without the “Prelude” and “Part I.” It’s like watching the final stretch of a mystery without seeing the murder.   

“Prelude” opens with a brief acoustic guitar intro, then slowly builds up into “Part I,” written by Bob Weir and folk singer Eric Andersen. The song touches on the changing of the seasons, sexual awakening, love and loss and is one of the band’s earthiest tracks.  

Winter rain, now tell me why

Summers fade, and roses die.
The answer came

The wind and rain.
Golden hills, now veiled in grey

Summer leaves have blown away
Now what remains?

The wind and rain.

Whenever I hear it, the words remind me of “When That I Was And a Little Tiny Boy” from William Shakespeare’s “Twelfth Night.” In that song, the second line of each stanza is “With hey, ho, the wind and the rain.”

Several minutes in, the song transitions into the harder edged, “Part II: Let It Grow,” with lyrics by John Barlow. The track slowly picks up momentum until the final segment, when Weir yells out:

We will not speak but stand inside the rain

And listen to the thunder shout

I am, I am, I am, I am.

With a steady hum of horns, the song takes on a decidedly symphonic feel, before bursting in another direction in its finale with a jazzy sax solo. The Suite, with its different movements and sections, serves as a compelling preamble to what the group would later attempt with the ambitious, long-form title tracks to Blues for Allah and Terrapin Station.

Wake of the Flood might never be considered an essential Dead recording, but it’s certainly one of their most consistent. It showed the band was capable of writing new chapters and going in new directions in the face of death, both real and metaphorical.     

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.