“Don’t Tell Me This Town Ain’t Got No Heart:” In Defense of Shakedown Street

On 1978’s year-end Billboard chart five of the top ten songs belonged to the Gibb family — three by the Bee Gees themselves and another two by their younger brother Andy. So far-reaching was the Gibb’s music that when the Grateful Dead travelled to Egypt for their legendary shows at the Pyramids in the fall of that year, Jerry Garcia experienced a very modern type of culture shock. “What you heard on every street corner was ‘Stayin’ Alive!’ Everywhere! In the darkest bazaars in the middle of Cairo, there’s the Bee Gees and ‘Stayin’ Alive’ blasting out of the bazaar.” In the midst of the great disco explosion, the Grateful Dead recorded and released their tenth and most divisive studio album, Shakedown Street, a record that is a product of its time.  

The album was panned by Rolling Stone upon its release. “With few exceptions, Shakedown Street, rife with blind intersections, comes across as an artistic dead end,” the magazine wrote. “Over the years, the Dead have shown a knack for turning even the most undistinguished material into something at least moderately interesting. No more.” To be fair, the magazine hated most of the Dead’s records that were not named Workingman’s Dead or American Beauty.

Like its predecessor Terrapin Station, the album sold modestly well upon its release, and eventually went gold in 1987 after “Touch of Gray” hit the pop charts. Clive Davis, the head of Arista Records, was disappointed by the album. He felt that the band was distracted by side projects. In his view, “Rubin and Cherise” from Garcia’s solo record Cats Under the Stars and Bob Weir’s “Bombs Away” from Heaven Help The Fool, both released that year, were stronger tracks than anything on Shakedown Street.     

Having first bought the album in 1985, I’ve always been a fan but I am not immune to its flaws. Listening to it now, I hear a record that is uneven, especially the second half, but still has some great tunes. And that seems to be how music historians tend to view it. Garcia biographer Blair Jackson said it was his “least favorite” Dead album, but conceded that there were “plenty of good songs” on the record. Allmusic.com calls the album, “a mess,” but with the caveat, “It falls short of flat-out disaster, partially because it's a fascinating listen due to the very things that make it a severely flawed record.”  

Most of the ire is reserved for the title track, which has often been dismissed as “Disco Dead.” To evoke former President Obama’s favorite phrase, “let me be clear:” “Shakedown Street” is a disco song, but it’s a great disco song. It has an instantly recognizable guitar riff and a groove that’s every bit as catchy as anything laid down by the Bee Gees or Chic in the late 1970s. Like “Stayin’ Alive,” it’s a song with an infectious groove that disguises its lyrics about inner-city decay.  

Nothin' shakin' on Shakedown Street

Used to be the heart of town
Don't tell me this town ain't got no heart

You just gotta poke around

Just as the album and its title track were a product of their time, so is some of the criticism. In 2017, rebuking a rock band for laying down disco beats in the 1970s seems especially dated given that most bands of the era were happy to hop on the boogie-fever bandwagon. (Kiss, “I Was Made For Lovin’ You”; Pink Floyd, “Another Brick in the Wall (Part II)”; The Rolling Stones, “Miss You,” Paul McCartney “Silly Love Songs,”etc.) The song is not much of a stylistic stretch from “Help on the Way” or “Franklin’s Tower” on Blues for Allah.

A slower-paced version of the song became a standard at their concerts as they played it live 163 times. “‘Shakedown Street’ developed far beyond its steady rhythmic pulse in concert,” Jackson wrote. “It gave the band a chance to explore the funky R&B side of their roots, which had been nearly dormant since Pigpen’s departure.” While purists may have been upset, if anything the Dead’s recording history shows they were never really rooted in any one style. So why not disco?  

The band recorded the album in the summer and fall of 1978 at its rehearsal studio on Front Street in San Rafael, California, where life outside often mirrored the bleak depiction of inner city life in the album’s title track. The studio was “surrounded by a gritty urban landscape of neon signs, shabby motels, and dilapidated storefronts,” Phil Lesh wrote. “We’d hang out in the front room where the big-screen TV was always on, although the view outdoors was frequently more interesting than any TV show, what with all the action involving the cops and the local prostitutes and winos.”

To produce the record, the band tapped Lowell George, the singer and guitarist from Little Feat.  On paper the match seemed ideal, as Jackson notes, “The Dead and Little Feat met on a polyrhythmic plane: No one played funky, syncopated N’awlins-style rock ‘n’ roll better than Little Feat, and they also had their share of quirky shuffles — a little like the Dead, but with a bluesier edge.” Weir had even covered Little Feat’s “Easy To Slip,” a song co-written by George, on Heaven Help the Fool.

But what seemed like a perfect fit musically did not play out quite as well in the studio. The recording sessions were marred by excessive drug use on the part of the band, the crew and George himself. “A lovely guy,” Mickey Hart said of George. “But he was screaming on coke the whole time. He was killing himself. And, again, it was a desperation move. Nobody in their right mind would want to be the producer of the Grateful Dead. It’s a death sentence. No one can handle that. They always crack up.” When members of the Grateful Dead think you’re doing too many drugs, there’s clearly a problem.

Despite his praise, Hart and George actually got into a fight in the studio after George made a derisive comment about one of Hart’s solo recordings. According to the band’s publicist and historian Dennis McNally, “Hart tackled him and began to choke him, at which point Lowell began to hyperventilate and have heart palpitations.” George would ultimately die from a heart attack in June 1979 at the age of 34.  

The other half of the Dead’s drum section took a warmer view of George’s contribution without the extra fireworks. Bill Kreutzmann called him “my favorite producer to work with.” In his memoir he said, “[George] had a wonderful way about him; he was always really relaxed, which is a great quality to have in the recording environment, and he was a real soulful guy.” Kreutzmann thought the problem with the record was the Front Street studio itself, as it was not well-equipped to record an album.  “It was a raw practice space. There wasn’t much in terms of sound isolation or separate booths or a control room or anything like that, so it ended up being more like a really awkward live recording.”      

George’s influence is clear on the opening track “Good Lovin’," a cover of a song originally recorded by the doo-wop group the Olympics in 1965 and remade into a number one hit by the Young Rascals in 1966. The tune had been a concert staple for the band during the Pigpen years. This version, sung by Weir, has a rollicking keyboard intro and multi-layered percussion in the background, with a decidedly good-time, southern-boogie feel, like a lost Little Feat song.

The second track, “France,” is one of the group’s more baffling songs. Co-written by Hart and Robert Hunter, the song was recorded as a duet between Weir and Donna Godchaux, though it sounds almost as if it could have been sung by Elton John and Kiki Dee. Just like “Shakedown Street” is a great disco track, “France” is a really catchy pop tune. Still whenever I hear it, I can’t help but think the band had its locales confused. The guitar tracks have a decidedly Spanish flavor and the outro is filled with Caribbean steel drumming.

On that note, the album also seems to answer the question asked by many Dead detractors, “Why does a band need two drummers?” By having two drummers, the band could go beyond the simple backbeat and add another layer to the album’s sonic complexity. One can hear this with “Good Lovin’,” the steel drums on “France,” the low-pitched tom toms on “Fire on the Mountain,” and their percussion-focused instrumental “Serengeti.” It just gives the whole album a fun, danceable feel, which may also explain why it’s the only Dead record I can workout to.    

Side A closes with “Fire on the Mountain,” another song penned by Hart and Hunter, and originally written for Terrapin Station. When performed live, it was often included in the second half of a jam with “Scarlet Begonias,” dubbed “Scarlet Fire.” Again, the real strength lies in the percussion, with low-tuned drums adding what sounds like a second baseline. The melodic outro riff on the song is reminiscent of a jam from “The Eleven” on 1969’s Live Dead.  

Side B (or the second half of the album) opens with the fiery, good-time-blues-boogie track “I Need A Miracle” — the Dead’s “it’s-tough-to-be-a-rock-star” song.   

It takes dynamite to get me up
Too much of everything is just enough
One more thing I just got to say
I need a miracle every day

It’s after this that the album begins to feel a bit stale, starting with Donna Godchaux’s, “From the Heart of Me.” The song was not as much of a departure from the Dead’s sound as her previous lead vocal effort “Sunrise,” but is not a particularly strong track. Then there’s the Dead’s version of “Stagger Lee,” a retelling of the American folk story that fits well into their canon of mythical scoundrels. The second-to-last track is “All New Minglewood Blues,” a reworking of their cover of “New, New Minglewood Blues,” which appeared on the group’s eponymous 1967 debut album. This version is closer to how the band played it live at the time and George’s production gives it a southern-rock vibe. The song holds the distinction of being the only song to appear on two different studio albums, but part of me can’t help wonder why they even bothered.

The album closes with “If I Had the World to Give,” a Beatlesque piece that Jackson called, “the most straightforward love ballad that Hunter and Garcia ever wrote together. On the surface it seemed almost like a traditional pop love song from the ‘40s or ‘50s.” The song quickly faded from view as it was only played live three times. Despite this, the track was covered on the 2016 tribute album Day of the Dead by Bonnie “Prince” Billy, demonstrating that the Dead’s lesser-appreciated recordings did make an impact on future generations of musicians.

When the Dead released Terrapin Station in 1977, Arista Records took out an ad in Rolling Stone proclaiming: “A NEW DEAD ERA IS UPON US,” but it was after the release of Shakedown Street that the band truly entered a new age. Keith and Donna Godchaux would depart in early 1979 — with Keith dying in a car crash in 1980. By the time the band began recording its eleventh studio album Go To Heaven, they would have a new keyboardist, a new producer and a new sound to divide fans and critics alike: Yacht Rock!

Sources

Browne, David. So Many Roads: The Life and Times of the Grateful Dead. Da Capo Press, Boston, MA. 2015.

Davis, Clive and DeCurtis, Anthony. The Soundtrack of My Life. Simon & Schuster, New York. 2013.

Gans, Davis. Conversations with the Grateful Dead: The Grateful Dead Interview Book. Da Capo Press, Cambridge, MA 2002.  

Jackson, Blair. Garcia: An American Life. Reissue. Penguin Books. 2000

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.

McNally, Dennis. A Long Strange Trip: The Inside History of the Grateful Dead. Broadway Books, New York. 2002.

Richardson, Peter. No Simple Highway: A Cultural History of the Grateful Dead. St. Martin’s Press, New York. 2015

Trager, Oliver. The American Book of the Dead: The Definitive Grateful Dead Encyclopedia. Fireside, New York. 1997.