Check out Jerry Garcia’s dulcet-toned, falsetto vocals, on top of his one-man-band backing track demo. It’s tragic he didn’t add a lead guitar part to this recording.
Garcia struggled to sing this melody live, possibly to a greater degree than any other song he wrote for himself to sing. That’s reasonable, given the ask. The challenging portions of the vocals are just three short verses, but they are demanding. They each require a zero-to-correct, hard-hitting start, and all the lines end in melisma. When you get to the chorus, it’s nearly foolproof, but the verses…
Hard to do, when you’re singing loudly on top of cranking live Grateful Dead, and you can’t just adjust things to suit wherever your Jerry-voice happens to be this year or this tour. This demo gives Garcia all the repose he needs to execute a disco vocal to match his musical disco vision - in a more expressive way than on the highly-processed studio album recording.
He probably should have shopped the song out to the major disco acts of the era, who could have supercharged the vocals and made it a hit. It should have been a hit. It’s one of the great disco compositions, but there’s no single recording that backs up that assertion.
I have no issues with the way the Grateful Dead played the song – it’s one of my top five GD vehicles – but there aren’t many performances on which you’d give Garcia an “A” for his execution of the verses. Which is unfortunate, given the greatness of the song and its stature in the Dead canon.
Cover art: Detail of Gilbert Shelton watercolor, 1978
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