AR: Wake of the Flood

Grateful Dead - Wake of the Flood (1973)

Most notable for being a cherished member of the Nyet Jones CD-Amp Series*, the Grateful Dead's 6th studio album (and the fourth GD album I bought) is a first step in the jazzier direction that the mid-'70s Dead would take. These tunes, more than most GD songs, are cited as being better in their same-era live incantations than these studio versions, primarily because (predictably) the concert medium allowed for much spacier, exploratory takes. That's fairly undeniable, but this set of studio takes does reveal some of the controlled, full ensemble intricacy the band was capable of - they are less adventurous, but hardly sterile.

* - It was a pretty big deal when, as a teenaged youth, I saved up enough money to get a nice six CD magazine Pioneer CD player for my bedroom. Of course, I didn't have money for a tuner/ receiver or speakers, so unless I was listening to my CD Player on headphones - inconvenient for, when example, taking a post-football-practice-exhausted bath - I had to run a guitar patch cable from the CD player headphone jack to my guitar amp. (Have I mentioned this before? Probably. Oh, well). You may or may not know that while both the player and the guitar amp use a 1/4" plug, the CD player's is a stereo plug while the guitar amp's end is mono. So you can really only get one of the channels to play through a guitar amp with the set-up I was using. 90% of the time this doesn't matter a whole lot, as most stereo albums have a significant amount of bleed from left to right channels - i.e., the stereo divisions aren't strict - so the whole sound comes through a mono speaker anyways. But there are elements that only come across in one channel, and so a few albums in my formative youth were encoded as missing particular elements. Even today, when I hear them now, it's striking to hear this brand new melody line or what have you. For Wake, it was the opening sax line from "Let Me Sing Your Blues Away" - the sax was absent, so all I would hear were these odd, popping guitar vamp chords. The sax came in later in the song, which is really weird - why would you start in just the left channel and then move it later? - but I swear that's how it sounded. Other albums in the series were Led Zepellin III, Southern Harmony and Musical Companion, and DSOTM. There were more, I'm sure, but those are the ones I think of when I think of the complete absence of certain instruments. Please be aware that I will probably repeat this story when I get to those albums, too.

"Mississippi Half-Step Uptown Toodleoo" opens the album with a laid-back, fiddle-led groove backed by some excellent lead guitar lines and old time piano-tinkling. I love the lyrics of this one, too; "What's the point to calling shots? / This cue ain't straight in line..." and the opening Cain & Abel nods just beg for sing-alongs. At about the 4:00 mark, the song drops into a summer-breeze bridge that carries out to fade out. This opener is just SF cool, a marked departure from the folk-dominated tone of the previous albums. This vibe continues with the sax-led rocker "Let Me Sing Your Blues Away" (also featuring the signature back-up vocals of Donna Jean Godchaux) and the super slowed-down Garcia crooned cool classic ballad, "Row Jimmy." For lack of better adjectives, the opening tunes of WotF largely sound like 1970s California: electric smooth, cares-away cool, and very smooth.

"Stella Blue" follows; if you don't know, this is one of those slow, religious experience Jerry Garcia ballads that "real" Deadheads live for. I've always thought this tune functions in concert as a huge come down from gigantic jams, so placing it here on the album (after "Row Jimmy") seems like an odd choice. This version is quite lovely but probably exhibit 1a for arguments for the Dead's superiority in concert; this is plenty gripping and pretty, but for whatever reason it does not carry the same emotional depth as a solid in concert version. Dgmw, still a solid version and makes for a sit down and think section to the middle of the album; just doesn't have all the power I associate with the tune; the concert tapes have spoiled me.

Things pick up a little bit with the almost too-hippie "Here Come Sunshine," another mid tempo chill-tune with an adequately uplifting chorus. Really straightforward tune, actually - just VCVCVC with that nice, build-up chorus. This starts the segue into the jazzier side of the Dead; this whole album is removed in tone/genre from the Americana of Workingman's and American Beauty, but with "Eyes of the World" and (even moreso) "Weather Report Suite," things take an overt foray into more complex chords, intricate guitar runs, and odd time signature breakdowns. Something resembling jazz-rock. "EotW" maintains a certain pop sensibility / hookiness that would be *absolutely* perfected in the next album in "Franklin's Tower;" for now, you get another very good breezy number with some expert guitar runs and just enough sing-along / dance-along impetus to genuinely lilt. "WRS," on the other hand, is a 12:43 multi-passage opus. It opens with "Prelude," a classical guitar intro that gets backed by drums and an organ and slowly fades into the full band "Part 1", complete with an emotional, closed eye vocal that throughout the tune teeters on the overly dramatic. "Like a desert spring / My lover comes and spreads her wings" are typical, and I guess if you're in the mood for such romanticism it's fine. The vocals are well blended (kudos, again, to Donna); that is one advantage of this version over some concert flubs. "Part 2: Let it Grow" is a progressive accelerando that stays on the melodramatic but matches it with tense music; this eventually fades into a horns-tinged jam that runs to a final vocal section ("What shall we say / Shall we call it by a name?") that brings the extended composition to a fine close. It's probably easy to figure this out, but "Part 2" is the bit that often gets run out into the ether in concert, i.e. where Grateful Dead "magic" happens. So such an abbreviated segment in light of the other versions always sounds a bit odd.

So there are a couple of things working against this disc. One, as noted, there are better versions out there of a lot of these songs, so there's a pervasive sense that even though these tunes are not sterile per se, they are not as lively as one knows they can be. Two, it's a bit too clean / laid-back for its own good. I happen to love this disc as one of my nostalgic Dead collections, but I can definitely see how people might think some of these tunes are a little plain and/or steering in a smooth-jazz sort of direction. I'd be hesitant, for example, to introduce someone to the GD with this disc, unless I already knew they were really into jazz-rock (in which case, Blues for Allah would be a better choice besides).

Still, this disc is a personal love and well worth your time. The opening track is a killer, and the rest is great for a can't care sunset / beer combination. A qualified yes for this one, and that qualification is that you be in the appropriate low-energy mood for soul-soothing.

(Addendum: Dick's Picks Vol. 1 contains about half of this album in a show from December 1973, if you want to see what I mean about the vivacity of the live performances).

Status: Recommended (solid)
Nyet's Fave: "Mississippi Half-Step Uptown Toodleoo"