Set for release on July 10th will be the 50th anniversary reissue of the Grateful Dead's Workingman's Dead collection. The triple-disc CD set includes the original album with newly remastered sound, plus an unreleased concert recorded on February 21st, 1971 at Port Chester, New York's Capitol Theatre. The show was mixed from the 16-track analog master tapes by Jeffrey Norman at Bob Weir‘s Marin County TRI Studios and mastered by Grammy Award-winning engineer, David Glasser.
Workingman's Dead was deemed an instant classic upon release and featured such Dead standards as “Uncle John's Band,” “Casey Jones,” and “Dire Wolf.” A vinyl picture disc of the album will be released the same day as the CD set and limited to 1,000 copies.
One of the highlights on Workingman's Dead was the Jerry Garcia / Robert Hunter tune, “New Speedway Boogie,” which touched upon the events at the December 6th, 1969 Rolling Stones' free concert at Livermore, California's Altamont Speedway. Although the Dead was slated to play prior to the Stones, due to the violence around the stage exacerbated by the Hells Angels — the band begged off from performing. Later that night, an Angel murdered a concertgoer, who was seen brandishing a gun.
Shortly after the ill-fated show, Jerry Garcia spoke about the connection between the Dead and the infamous motorcycle gang: “Our relationship with the Angels is that we both exist in, essentially, the same area and we both know that each other exists, and we get along okay with them. Those guys are guys that we all know. We've known 'em for years, y'know? And there's. . . we don't have any fight with them. But we do know that they are Hell's Angels and they're capable of doing a lot of pretty amazing things, and we just stay out of their way.”
