What came easily to CSN was work for the Dead. Stills and Crosby encouraged Jerry Garcia, Bob Weir, and Phil Lesh to sing harmonies, a skill that would come in handy when it came to recording the new batch of songs Garcia was writing with his lyricist Robert Hunter. Stephen Stills and David Crosby traveled similar circles to the Dead, eventually wandering out to Mickey Hart’s ranch in Marin County, a place that doubled as the group’s unofficial headquarters. The zeitgeist shifted away from trippy excesses after the release of the Band’s Music From Big Pink in 1968 but the Grateful Dead found greater inspiration in the eponymous 1969 debut from Crosby, Stills & Nash, gravitating toward their harmony-laden homey folk-rock.
Often grouped together with its successor American Beauty-reasonably so, considering how Beauty is carved from the same rustic material and appeared just a matter of months later- Workingman’s Dead fit into the anti-psychedelia wave that swept through American rock’n’roll at the dawn of the 1970s. Operating with a focus they rarely possessed, the band returned to their folk-blues roots and knocked out their fourth album, Workingman’s Dead, in a matter of days, transforming the trajectory of their career in the process. Remarkably for a band who had a habit of making their own bad luck, the Dead didn’t miss this opportunity. Freshly busted in New Orleans and teetering upon the edge of financial ruin, the Grateful Dead began 1970 in dire need of a new beginning.
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