Bob Dylan & Grateful Dead rehearsals (Club Front 06/01/1987)

In the summer of 1987, Bob Dylan and the Grateful Dead toured together for a small run of six concerts. Each concert began with one or two lengthy sets by the Grateful Dead of their own material (sometimes broken into a first and second set, per the Dead's usual practice) followed by a roughly 90 minute set of the Dead acting as Dylan's backup band.

Bob Dylan and the Grateful Dead 1987 Tour

The band played big stadium shows on the run: Foxborough's Sullivan Stadium on the 4th of July, Philadelphia's JFK Stadium on July 10, Giants Stadium in East Rutherford, NJ on July 12, Autzen Stadium in Eugene, Oregon on July 19, then their homebase Oakland-Alameda County Coliseum and Anaheim Stadium in California on the 24th and 26th respectively. All of the shows racked in major league net gate receipts.

That tour is documented musically on the live album Dylan & the Dead which was released in 1989 by Columbia Records. The album was viewed poorly critically, a fair assessment, but sold well initially hitting no. 37 on the Billboard charts.  The review for AllMusic was particularly harsh, giving it one star out of a possible five, and calling it "quite possibly the worst album by either Bob Dylan or the Grateful Dead" and "a sad, disheartening document"

Two of the songs from the Grateful Dead's performances from the tour are documented on the album and video View from the Vault IV, and one of the tour-rehearsal songs is on the album Postcards of the Hanging. That release, from 2002, is a compilation album consisting of only Dylan covers from the live context . Another Dylan covers collection, Garcia Plays Dylan, includes performances by the Grateful Dead, but mostly by the Jerry Garcia Band and other Garcia side projects. 

In 1992, a bootleg of the first concert of the tour was released under the title "Orbiting Uvula". The video includes the first-ever live performance of "Queen Jane Approximately", which would go on to be played heavily by the Dead between 1987-1995, the first live performance of "John Brown" since 1963, and the first live performance of "Chimes of Freedom" since 1964.

When Dylan showed up in San Rafael to rehearse in June of 1987 he was anticipating playing songs he was comfortable with, the sort of songs he'd been playing on tour with Tom Petty the year prior. Dylan said as much in his book Chronicles:

"I needed to go rehearse with the band for these shows, so I went to San Rafael to meet with The Dead. I thought it would be as easy as jumping rope. After an hour or so, it became clear to me that the band wanted to rehearse more and different songs than I had been used to doing with [Tom] Petty. They wanted to run over all the songs, the ones they liked, the seldom seen ones. I found myself in a peculiar position and I could hear the brakes screeching. If I had known this to begin with, I might not have taken the dates. I had no feelings for any of those songs and didn’t know how I could sing them with any intent. A lot of them might have been only sung once anyway, the time that they’d been recorded. There were so many that I couldn’t tell which was which — I might even get the words to some mixed up with others. I needed sets of lyrics to understand what they were talking about, and when I saw the lyrics, especially to the older, more obscure songs, I couldn’t see how I could get this stuff off emotionally."

The band rehearsed where they always rehearsed for nearly two decades, a space in the Canal District, that was best known for nearly two decades as Club Front which functioned as a recording studio, tape vault, equipment storage facility and hang-out space for the Grateful Dead. The exterior of the 'club' was a bunch of repair shops and, fittingly, a VW dealership.

From 1975 to 1994, Club Front was one of the Grateful Dead's main hubs. Some of the band's best known output, including Shakedown Street, Go To Heaven, Dead Set, Reckoning, In The Dark, Built To Last, Without A Net, One and Two from the Vault, and Dick's Picks 1 was produced there.

A lot of the songs they ended up playing live were already in the Dead's repertoire, or soon would be, including "Just Like Tom Thumbs Blues" (also a live Dylan & The Band staple), "Ballad of A Thin Man" and "Stuck Inside of Mobile With The Blues Again". But Dylan was palpably uncomfortable with the song selections that the band members were bringing forward, like Ian & Sylvia Tyson's "The French Girl" which had only ever been recorded on Dylan & The Band's The Basement Tapes and only sung that one time in the basement. Similarly they were bringing forward material like "John Hardy" or "John Brown", "The Ballad of Ira Hayes" or the "The Ballad of Frankie Lee and Judas Priest"- fairly clearly songs Dylan hadn't anticipated and wasn't comfortable with playing live at the time.

Recall this wasn't necessarily a good period for Dylan live, in fact it most definitely wasn't, he was known for wearing a hoodie often up over his head even turning his back (literally) to the audience and bumbling through sets. If ever he needed a moment of redemption in the live setting this was it. But Dylan wanted to bolt, and at one point he actually did:

"I felt like a goon and didn’t want to stick around. The whole thing might have been a mistake. I’d have to go someplace for the mentally ill and think about it.After saying that I’d left something at the hotel, I stepped back outside onto Front Street and started walking, put my head down against the drizzling rain. I wasn’t planning on going back. If you have to lie, you should do it quickly and as well as you can. I started up the street — maybe four or five or six blocks went by and then I heard the sounds of a jazz combo playing up ahead. Walking past the door of a tiny bar, I looked in and saw that the musicians were playing at the opposite end of the room. It was raining and there were few people inside. One of them was laughing at something. It looked like the last stop on the train to nowhere and the air was filled with cigarette smoke. Something was calling to me to come in and I entered, walked along the long, narrow bar to where the jazz cats were playing in the back on a raised platform in front of a brick wall.

I got within four feet of the stage and just stood there against the bar, ordered a gin and tonic and faced the singer. An older man, he wore a mohair suit, flat cap with a little brim and shiny necktie. The dummer had a rancher’s Stetson on and the bassist and pianist were neatly dressed. They played jazz ballads, stuff like “Time on My Hands” and and “Gloomy Sunday.” The singer reminded me of Billy Eckstine. He wasn’t very forceful, but he didn’t have to be; he was relaxed, but sang with natural power. Suddenly and without warning, it was like the guy had an open window to my soul. It was like he was saying, “You should do it this way.” All of a sudden, I understood something faster than I ever did before. I could feel how he worked at getting his power, what he was doing to get at it. I knew where the power was coming from and it wasn’t his voice, though the voice brought me sharply back to myself. I used to do this thing, I’m thinking. It was a long time ago and it had been automatic. No one had ever taught me. This technique was so elemental, so simple and I’d forgotten it. It was like I’d forgotten how to button my own pants. I wondered if I could still do it. I wanted at least a chance to try. If I could in any way get close to handling this technique, I could get off this marathon stunt ride.

Returning to The Dead’s rehearsal hall as if nothing had happened, I picked it up where we had left off, couldn’t wait to get started — taking one of the songs that they wanted to do, seeing if I could sing it using the same method that the old singer used. I had a premonition something would happen. At first it was hard going, like drilling through a brick wall. All I did was taste the dust. But then miraculously something internal came unhinged. In the beginning all I could get out was a blood-choked coughing grunt and it blasted up from the bottom of my lower self, but it bypassed my brain. That had never happened before. It burned, but I was awake. The scheme wasn’t sewed up too tight, would need a lot of stitches, but I grasped the idea. I had to concentrate like mad because I was having to maneuver more than one stratagem at the same time, but now I knew I could perform any of these songs without them having to be restricted to the world of words. This was revelatory. I played these shows with The Dead and never had to think twice about it. Maybe they just dropped something in my drink, I can’t say, but anything they wanted to do was fine with me. I had that old jazz singer to thank."

 

Whatever the singer, who reminded him of Billy Ecktsine, imparted to him quixotically in that instant Dylan seems to have found his footing as reflected and captured magically in this artifact, a 6-CD set from the soundboard masters. The rehearsals have a bit of that fun clubhouse quality you hear on the Perro Sessions recordings. The rehearsals are also reminiscent of Dylan and the Band's Basement Tapes output insomuch as they're really just fumbling through material, much of which is traditional. During that magical period in West Saugerties, New York, The Band were actually largely unfamiliar with Folk music American, Canadian or otherwise. So Dylan was really teaching them, for instance playing their own countrymen Ian & Sylvia Tyson's "The French Girl" or other traditional ballads they were unfamiliar with.

You hear some of that shared tradition comraderie on this rehearsal, where Dylan & the Dead find some common ground in songs like Hank Williams "I'm So Lonesome I Could Cry", "Rollin' in My Sweet Baby's Arms" which most people know through Lester Flatt & Earl Scruggs version, Merle Haggard's "Blues Stay Away From Me" and Johnny Cash's "Folsom Prison Blues". Then there are traditional songs like "Stealin'", first recorded by the Memphis Jug Band, which went on to become associated with Jerry Garcia in other contexts namely his collaboration with David Grisman later released on the album Shady Grove in 1996. 

In the proud tradition of late-era Grateful Dead there was a good dose of fifties music, by way of Buddy Holly & The Crickets, here "Oh Boy" gets a run through ("Not Fade Away" was of course a stadium anthem and not infrequent show closer). Other selections are timely like their contemporaries Kris Kristofferson's "They Killed Him". Then there are just spirited throwaways like the Rolling Stones "I'm Free".  One of the best fly on the wall moments is when they make a semi-karaoke attempt at Paul Simon's "The Boy In The Bubble" from Graceland which was, of course, omnipresent in everyone's car stereo at the time. Bob Weir, Dylan and Garcia sing over one another mixing verses about "millionaires, billionaires and babies" with "lasers in the jungle". Just hearing Garcia sing the lyric "lasers in the jungle" is worth the price of admission even if it is a hot mess.

Some of the more obscure material of Dylan's which they worked up included "I'll Be Your Baby Tonight" from John Wesley Harding with Jerry on pedal steel, a version that could have handily made it onto a release elsewhere. "Tomorrow Is A Long Time", from Greatest Hits vol. II later released on Masterpieces, also features some tasteful pedal steel from Garcia. Clearly one song which Garcia himself seems to have advocated for was “Señor” (Tales of Yankee Power) from Street-Legal which came just before Dylan's conversion to Christianity. It's one of Dylan's darkest songs, and, like the album it's imbued with apocalyptic and religious meaning that would have appealed to Garcia in particular.

Elsewhere they made something of "Under Your Spell" which appears on Knocked Out Loaded released the year prior in 1986, a strange collaboration which Dylan wrote the music for then Carole Bayer Sager later helped him finish the lyrics to. Sager, bizarrely, is best known for her collaboration with Burt Bacharach, fittingly, on "That's What Friends Are For". In fact almost half of Knocked Out Loaded, suggesting his low ebb creatively, was written by others including Petty and Kristofferson. 

The Dead were clearly making Dylan reach, managing to give, for instance, "Heart of Mine" and a long forgotten track "Shot of Love", from the album of the same name, a shot in the arm. Considered to be the last in his trilogy of Christian albums that song makes thinly veiled references to substance abuse, darkly ironic given Garcia and keyboardist Brent Mydland's shared heroin addiction in full bloom at the time. Dylan said in a 1983 interview with NME:

"To those who care where Bob Dylan is at, they should listen to 'Shot of Love'. It's my most perfect song. It defines where I am spiritually, musically, romantically and whatever else. It shows where my sympathies lie. It's all there in that one song."

There's so much good stuff in these rehearsals it's hard to wade through for the real standouts. Certainly at least one of the takes of  “Señor” with Garcia on vocals deserves top billing. As does "All I Really Want To Do" and "Chimes of Freedom" from Dylan's Tom Wilson produced 1964 album Another Side of Bob Dylan (it's a miracle even that the Dead got him to play the latter for the first time in nearly 25 years). 

Out of the rehearsals "Slow Train Coming" from the 1979 album of the same name is clearly top of the pile (this multi-cam clip is from the July 12th show at Giants Stadium). As is a particularly funky version of "Tangled Up In Blue" which plays to the rhythm devils strengths. The presence of the dual drummers is a little baffling on some of these songs at times, particularly ones that would have benefited from spare treatments, albeit they were a monster band by that point preparing for an arena tour. 

"The French Girl", for our money is one of the most sublime songs amongst the rehearsal versions, first they take a stab with Dylan coaxing out the chords and Weir adding the vocal melody. Later they do a spotless version where Dylan's voice is truly in fine form begging the question from whence did this supposed lack of confidence flow? It's the second take, with Garcia now on pedal steel, that is particularly tasteful. As Dylan himself mentioned this was a song that was probably sung once, in the basement of Big Pink, and immortalized from bootlegs. "The French Girl" Take 2 is also a good version from The Basement Tapes Bootleg Series vol. 11 released in 2014.

"The Times They Are A Changin'", a song you probably never needed to hear again, gets a beautiful treatment with Garcia on banjo. "When I Paint My Masterpiece", a Dead and the Band staple, is a particularly greasy and muscular version. It's been suggested that a lot of the material from the rehearsals that didn't get live airings would have been better suited to smaller indoors venues, though songs like "John Brown" and "Man of Peace" made it into setlists as did "It's All Over Now Baby Blue". In the end it was the more anthemic predictable fair like "All Along The Watchtower" that played to the bleachers which ended up getting repeated live airings. Of course "Joey", the much beloved and much pilloried staple of the Dead's live show, a deep cut from Desire in 1976, which made it on the album, gets an extended version in rehearsal. 

In the end there really is just too much to choose from. Just pick a lane and enjoy.

Dylan & Grateful Dead July 17, 1987, Autzen Stadium, Eugene, Oregon

Dylan & Grateful Dead July 12, 1987, Giants Stadium, East Rutherford, New Jersey