In early 1973, just before the Grateful Dead performed on February 9, Jerry Garcia recorded demos of the new songs he and Robert Hunter had been creating. These demos featured Jerry doing the singing and playing, and he presumably shared them with the band members so they could start learning the new songs. Amongst these demos was this beautiful “Here Comes Sunshine,” which would almost immediately become a major jam vehicle upon joining the live repertoire on 2/9/73, usually clocking in at over 10 minutes. It would stick around the live sets for about a year, before being dropped for almost 20 years, and making its triumphant return in December 1992. – David Lemieux
Stream the track through the YouTube player below:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LfYP1BjkD6w&ab_channel=GratefulDead“Wake Of The Flood” was more than just an album—it was an artistic statement. Two years earlier, Garcia dismissed efforts to pigeonhole the band, noting that “we think of ourselves as musicians, who have lots of possibilities… I expect in the course of a lifetime of music, we’ll have thrown out lots of possibilities and that’s the way I see each record.” Wake was not only one of those possibilities, it was a statement of something far more profound. And that had to do with what the Dead were trying to build. Hank Harrison, an early scenester who published a book on the band the same year as the album, called the Dead “a model for other families seeking alternative life styles.” And while Harrison got much about the Dead’s history wrong, he was correct when he wrote that “more than [their] music, that uncompromising integrity is here… To give hope to the future.”
That sense of hope permeates “Wake Of The Flood,” which took its name from a line in “Here Comes Sunshine.” The Vanport Flood of 1948 made a deep impression on Hunter as a child, and he drew on that for the lyrics, though he confused the year, writing ’49. It was a revealing slip: ’49 invoked the Gold Rush of a century earlier, which transformed San Francisco and made California a state. The silt from gold mining prompted the construction of the Bay model, to study possible solutions. But even if Hunter conflated dates, his lyrics still got at a deeper set of truths, including the sense of promise that followed the great flood in the book of Genesis. God ended that cataclysm with a new covenant, and Rick Griffin drew on that story for the cover, not only the water on the front but the raven on the back, sent out by Noah to see if the flood was receding. The bird also evoked that context: it came from the old card game Rook, marketed as a Christian alternative to traditional playing cards.
– Nicholas G. Meriwether
Purchase “Wake Of The Flood” here: https://store.dead.net/en/grateful-dead/special-collections/wake-of-the-flood
