Back when the world was young (or at least a fair bit younger than it is now) there was an acoustic ensemble called Mother McCree's Uptown Jug Champions who played a peculiar a type of folk music that uses traditional musical instruments such as guitar, mandolin and banjo combined with home-made instruments including washtub bass, washboard, kazoo and eponymously, a jug, played by blowing into it as if it were a brass instrument. They recorded one album in the summer of 1964 and a few years later mutated into the grand-daddy of all psychedelic bands, The Grateful Dead.
The Grateful Dead drew upon a wide range of stylistic influences from free jazz, to atonal avant-garde music from Europe, but in their hearts they were still good ol’ folkies from Frisco, and the country, bluegrass and folk music that had first inspired them (or most of them, at least) to play was never too far away from their hearts.
After five albums, during which they honed their not inconsiderable talents producing some of the most vibrantly experimental music of the sixties, they returned to their roots with two albums of what would these days be called Americana: Workingman’s Dead and American Beauty. This return to their cultural roots was part of a whole movement towards what Gram Parsons described as ‘Cosmik American Music’, but for three members of The Grateful Dead (Jerry Garcia, Phil Lesh and Mickey Hart) this wasn’t enough. Garcia had already been playing low-key acoustic shows with singer John Dawson, and it was eventually decided to start a fully fledged country rock band with guitarist David Nelson.
What happened next was a little complicated so I make no excuses for having lifted this next paragraph from Wikipedia:
'In addition to Nelson, Dawson (on acoustic guitar), and Garcia (continuing to play pedal steel), the original line-up of the band that came to be known as the New Riders of the Purple Sage (a nod to the Zane Grey classic and the western swing combo from the 1940s led by Foy Willing) consisted of Robert Hunter on electric bass and Grateful Dead drummer Mickey Hart. Hunter was soon replaced by Bob Matthews, before Phil Lesh of the Grateful Dead was named bassist. The most well-known version of the New Riders, referred to as the "core" by many, was Dawson, Nelson, Dave Torbert on bass, Spencer Dryden on drums, and Buddy Cage, who joined the band after about a year and a half and replaced Jerry Garcia on pedal steel.'
The band, in various incarnations, toured supporting The Grateful Dead in the early 1970s, but by 1971 the last of The Grateful Dead alumni had left and Spencer Dryden, late of Jefferson Airplane, had joined on drums. The songs on this DVD come from 29th May 1972, apart from the last version of Truck Driving Man, which is dated 29th June 1972.
Keep on trucking, brothers and sisters.
