The Grateful Dead announced this week a new release of previously unreleased outtakes of their 1970 release, Workingman’s Dead, on it’s 50th Anniversary. They call it, The Angel’s Share, from distilled spirit makers term for the amount of whiskey that evaporates in the barrel/cask during fermentation.
“Keep it nice and f***ing together, you f***ers.”
Jerry Garcia
The official statement from Dead.net.
We told you we had an ace in our pocket and we’re calling this one THE ANGEL’S SHARE. No evaporation here though. While there may have been ingredients vital to the creation of WORKINGMAN’S DEAD that were lost and did not end up on the final album, they’ve come a-bubblin’ up and we’re more than pleased to pass the bottle around.
Compiled from dozens of 16-track reels that were recently discovered in unlabeled boxes, THE ANGEL’S SHARE includes outtakes for every song on the album, which have been unheard since they left the studio over 50 years ago. Under the supervision of David Lemieux, engineer Brian Kehew and archivist Mike Johnson spent countless hours compiling and piecing these reels together to create the final opus.
So let’s step into the studio, shall we? THE ANGEL’S SHARE transports us back to 1970 to the Pacific High Recordings Studio in San Francisco. Here we’ll sit in on over two-and-a-half hours of unreleased partial and complete studio outtakes and be fly-on-the wall privy to insider conversations from the WORKINGMAN’S DEAD recording sessions. We’ll hear discussions of pacing and arrangements, “talkback” from the studio to the control room with the album’s producers, Bob Matthews and Betty Cantor-Jackson, and even the shuffling of feet on the studio floor. We’ll witness stripped-back instrumental takes lending new beauty to “High Time,” and heightened joy to “Uncle John’s Band,” catch “New Speedway Boogie” settling into a steady groove, Pigpen prowling and howling his way through “Easy Wind,” and top it all off with a blazing “Casey Jones.” Hot damn, hot damn!
Compiled from dozens of 16-track reels that were recently discovered in unlabeled boxes, THE ANGEL’S SHARE includes outtakes for every song on WORKINGMAN’S DEAD, which have been unheard since they left the studio over 50 years ago. We’ll witness stripped-back instrumental takes lending new beauty to “High Time,” and heightened joy to “Uncle John’s Band,” catch “New Speedway Boogie” settling into a steady groove, Pigpen prowling and howling his way through “Easy Wind,” and top it all off with a blazing “Casey Jones.”
