Wake Of The Flood 50: Prelude/Tuesday Night Jam

Rich Mahan (0:05)

The Good Ol Grateful Deadcast, the official podcast of The Grateful Dead. I'm Rich Mahan with Jesse Jarnow, exploring the music and legacy of The Grateful Dead for The Committed And The Curious.

Ladies and gentlemen, fellow Deadheads, welcome to season eight of The Good Ol Grateful Deadcast. I'm your co-host Rich Mahan. Thank you very much for tuning in. We have a very special episode of The Good Ol Grateful Deadcast in store for you today. Make sure you fasten your seatbelt and align your living room floor with the tarp because we're pretty sure this episode is gonna blow your mind. We're taking a slight detour from covering the official Wake Of The Flood release and we're very excited to present a previously unheard recording. It is the 50th anniversary of The Grateful Dead's Wake Of The Flood and to celebrate this, Rhino has a grand 50th anniversary release which includes the original album Remastered, some really cool early demos of songs from the album and six songs from a live show at McGaugh Memorial Hall at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois from November 1st, 1973 There is special vinyl as well as standard black vinyl, a very cool Wake Of The Flood picture disc. CDs and digital versions are also available. More info and orders are happening now over at dead.net.

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During the recording of the Grateful Dead's 1973 studio album Wake Of The Flood, the band recorded a special session that was uncovered recently while going through the vault to put together the Wake Of The Flood 50 releases. I don't want to give too much away about this unheard recording before we formally sit down at the table. So instead, I'll just hand you off to maitre d, Jesse Jarnow.

Jesse Jarnow (3:20)

Well, friends, we've got a weird one today, as you may have sussed out already by the title of this episode and that little excerpt of music we just heard. And as such, we're going to structure things slightly differently than usual in this episode, because it looks like what we've got on our hands is a lost tape.

I'm going to set up a few details, then we're going to listen to it in full, and then double back and fill in as much of the story as we can fill in.

What we're about to hear is something that defies categorization, even in the extended and bizarre canon of tapes that exist around the Grateful Dead. We did find one very important participant in this session, who remembers it pretty vividly though. Welcome back, Donna Jean Godchaux-MacKay.

Donna Jean Godchaux-MacKay (4:01)

My son Zion said when he heard this tape, he said, Mom, this is pretty much like it might have been the acid test. And for me, it was very cool because I wasn't there during the acid test. This was before I left Alabama and came to San Francisco and got into the Grateful Dead. And so to me, it was just like, bring it on.

I loved it.

Jesse Jarnow (4:34)

I'm gonna start with a very brief description of how I first experienced it. Over the summer, we got the first transfers of the complete Angel Share session tapes from Wake Of The Flood and set to listening. I tried to pace myself and go through the sessions one by one.

But one day, I loaded the rest of them onto my phone and went for a long walk around the neighborhood. A lot of what I experienced was the sounds and the smells of a hard-working rock band in the studio.

Nicholas Meriwether (5:01)

Could I suggest that we do the...