They Came Home to Make It New

Ron McKernan died in March 1973 and left the Grateful Dead without their original center. He was the band's first frontman and the blues anchor who held them to their roots. His liver failed at twenty-seven, and the band started over from a place they didn't expect.

They had an answer waiting in Keith Godchaux, the pianist who had joined in 1971. Godchaux came from bebop and modal jazz, not the blues vocabulary that Pigpen had lived in. His wife Donna Jean came along and added her voice to the ensemble. The band had road-tested songs for eighteen months and needed a studio to hold them.

The Record Plant in Sausalito opened in late 1972 at 2200 Bridgeway, near the bay. Gary Kellgren had built studios in New York and Los Angeles before choosing this site. The Sausalito location had one thing the other branches didn't: proximity to the Bay Area bands Kellgren wanted. The Grateful Dead lived in San Rafael, fifteen minutes north by car. They had watched the New Riders of the Purple Sage record there earlier that year. They knew the room well, and they trusted what they heard coming out of it.

In August 1973, the band booked the Record Plant for twelve days. Staff engineer Tom Flye and assistant engineer Tom Anderson handled the technical work. Dead soundman Dan Healy, who knew the band's sound better than anyone outside the group, was there throughout. They recorded on 16-track, then brought the mixdown to Lacquer Channel in Sausalito for mastering. The whole process stayed within a few miles of home.

The Dead didn't come alone, and they brought a revolving door of Bay Area musicians into the sessions. Vassar Clements played fiddle on “Mississippi Half-Step,” adding the bluegrass sweetness Garcia had always loved. For the first time on a Grateful Dead studio record, the band wrote synthesizers into the arrangements. Doug Sahm brought his bajo sexto for the country-flavored tracks.

The sessions produced Wake of the Flood, the band's sixth studio album. It was the first record on Grateful Dead Records, their own independent label. Phil Lesh described the reasoning: the Dead already owned their sound system and handled booking in-house. They saw no good reason to give creative control away to a major label. Lesh put it plainly: “No one could see a downside.”

The songs from those August sessions showed a band thinking differently about texture. “Row Jimmy” moved at a slow half-time with a double-time bounce on top. Garcia brought it in admitting it had taken him time to find the right feel. Bill Kreutzmann described his own struggle to lock into its unusual rhythmic lengths. “Stella Blue” showed Garcia singing at an emotional depth the band hadn't captured before in a studio. Bob Weir's “Weather Report Suite” stretched across three connected sections drawing on jazz structures. Godchaux's harmonic language was the thread that ran through all of it. Kreutzmann called the album “Keith's coming out party,” and the description fit.

“Mississippi Half-Step Uptown Toodeloo” opened the record with a lazy, country-jazz strut. Garcia's guitar floated over Kreutzmann's shuffle while Clements's fiddle wove through the arrangement. Robert Hunter's lyrics painted a landscape of crossroads, longing, and the endless American highway. The song took sixteen takes before they found their version.

“Eyes of the World” became one of the Dead's most beloved compositions from these sessions. Hunter described the lyric as deeply mystical, calling it the right song for the times. The demo version showed a more laid-back approach they later sharpened into something extraordinary.

“Stella Blue” arrived wrapped in melancholy, a Garcia ballad about loss and the passage of time. Multiple takes at 2200 Bridgeway peeled back layers of vulnerability in Garcia's vocal delivery.

“Weather Report Suite” showcased Bob Weir's expanding compositional ambitions across three connected movements. The Prelude, Part I, and “Let It Grow” created a miniature symphony. Weir kept evolving the piece throughout the sessions, never settling until the very end.

Keith Godchaux contributed his only songwriting and vocal performance on a Dead studio record. “Let Me Sing Your Blues Away” featured the horn section swelling behind his piano.

Garcia was not entirely satisfied with what came out of those sessions. He spoke in interviews about feeling too comfortable with his pedal steel. Lesh shared that feeling and called the studio vibe “too comfortable.” But the album reached number 18 on the pop charts, higher than any previous Grateful Dead studio record. The comfort came through in the sound, whether or not the band intended it.

Rick Griffin designed the album's cover art and label for the new imprint. Griffin had been the Dead's visual collaborator since the Haight-Ashbury days. The cover showed a wheat field scene built around themes of renewal. The label featured a black raven rendered in fine line etching. Griffin's work tied the visuals to the death and rebirth threads running through the songs. The whole package signaled that Grateful Dead Records was making its own object.

The Record Plant was already part of the Dead's orbit before these sessions began. Jerry Garcia and keyboardist Merl Saunders broadcast from the Plant over KSAN in July 1973. Old & In The Way, Garcia's bluegrass side project, also broadcast from the building that summer. Tom Donahue's station had turned the Plant into a live venue on FM radio. The building served the Dead's extended community as a shared room, not just a commercial facility.

The band recorded Phil Lesh's “Unbroken Chain” across multiple takes on August 16 and held it back. The song wouldn't appear on a studio record until 1974's From the Mars Hotel. The Angel's Share collected outtakes from those sessions and came out in August 2023. It marked the album's 50th anniversary and opened the session logs to public view. The release showed how the band worked: many takes, slow refinement, nothing finalized until it was ready. What the Plant captured wasn't discovery but refinement, the process of finding what would last.

The 2023 release of The Angel's Share revealed something extraordinary buried in the session tapes. A 36-minute instrumental called “Prelude” had been sitting in the vault for fifty years. Donna Jean Godchaux-MacKay described the recording as completely improvised, with nobody knowing what would happen next. She was near delivering her son Zion during those sessions. The tracking sheet listed piano, synth, percussion, congas, and drums. A second sheet appeared to be in Robert Hunter's handwriting, scrawled while the tape rolled. Brian Kehew, who transferred all the Angel's Share tapes, called it the session's biggest discovery. The piece connected back to the Dead's tradition of Tuesday Night Jams at the Carousel Ballroom.

The album title comes from a lyric in “Here Comes Sunshine,” which opens the second side. Robert Hunter wrote it as a reference to the 1948 Vanport flood in Oregon. That disaster wiped out a wartime housing project north of Portland and killed hundreds. The Grateful Dead would play Vanport in 1995, more than twenty years after writing about it. The connection was there long before anyone thought to look.

The June 10 show at RFK Stadium in Washington stands as one of the Dead's greatest performances. They shared the bill with the Allman Brothers and delivered a 22-minute “Eyes of the World.” An hour-long encore with Allman Brothers members turned the show into something unprecedented. The May 26 show at Kezar Stadium in San Francisco captured the Dead at peak confidence. The November 1 show at Northwestern University showcased the Wake material in full bloom. It later appeared on the 50th anniversary release. The November 14 San Diego show featured a legendary “Eyes of the World” within a sprawling second-set journey. The Internet Archive's Grateful Dead collection preserves these concerts, freely available to anyone.