'Dylan & The Dead' Revisited

1987-07-12, Giants Stadium, East Rutherford, NJ

Flagging Down the Double E’s is an email newsletter exploring Dylan shows of yesteryear. If you’ve found this article online or someone forwarded you the email, subscribe here to get a new entry delivered to your inbox every week:

“The spirit of the songs had been getting further and further away from me. Probably because I’d been playing these songs with a lot of different bands, and they might not have understood them so well, you know what I mean? And it influences you. I know it influenced me until I started playing with the Dead and I realized that they understood these songs better than I did at the time.” - Bob Dylan, 1997 interview

"Quite possibly the worst album by either Bob Dylan or the Grateful Dead," is how AllMusic's Tom Erlewine summed up 1989’s Dylan & The Dead. Robert Christgau, in the Village Voice when the album came out, wrote that Bob "makes of his catalogue here exactly what he's been making of it for years—money." Even the Dead's own drummer Mickey Hart didn't have anything good to say about it:

We were trying to back up a singer on songs that no one knew. It was not our finest hour, nor his. I don't know why it was even made into a record.

Few records in Dylan's cannon inspire as much derision as Dylan & The Dead. That scorn, though, often comes with an undercurrent of what-coulda-been. That six-show 1987 tour, some say, is far better than the album it spawned. Bob supposedly selected the worst possible performances, listening to the recordings on a crappy boombox and vetoing Garcia's more informed suggestions. "What am I going to do, pop him one?" Garcia said when questioned about Bob's ill-advised picks.

I've never spent much time listening to this tour, so I came into this East Rutherford show agnostic. I wanted to see if Bob Dylan and the Grateful Dead was, as its live album would indicate, two great tastes that taste terrible together - or whether Bob had unfairly doomed a strong tour to the garbage pile of cultural memory.

But first, the quick backstory of the two artists. There are many excellent articles about Bob Dylan's history with the Grateful Dead. Rob Mitchum wrote one here just a few days ago. After that, I recommend reading "The Ballad of Spike and Jerry." Then, if you want to go further, there’s an entire book on the subject. So I'll just give you a one-sentence summary to get you up to speed:

Dylan began being spotted attending Dead shows as early as 1971, at one point telling Levon Helm, perhaps in jest, that he was planning to join the band - he wasn't joking when he actually asked to join them, but that was years later - but their first musical collaboration didn't come until 1980, when Jerry Garcia sat in at one of Bob's San Francisco gospel shows, laying the seeds for a collaboration which began to take root in 1986, when Dylan, backed by Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, played some shows with the Grateful Dead as co-headliner, during which Bob sat in with the band twice, at some of the last shows before Garcia would fall into a diabetic coma, three days after the tour ended, no less, upon recovering from which Jerry promptly got back to work, meeting up with Dylan in January 1987 at their rehearsal space to hang out and jam - they supposedly played a great "Nowhere Man," which has to be better than the one time Bob performed it a few years later - and at which point Bob floated the idea of a joint tour later that same year.

Got all that?

Rehearsals for that ‘87 joint tour got underway in late spring and, as always seems to be the case when the Dead are involved, there are tapes. However, looking at the track listing is more exciting than actually listening to them.

Bob had spend the past decade largely sticking with the tried-and-true veteran act’s concert formula of new-songs-plus-hits (except when he dropped the "plus-hits" part on the gospel tours). He had shown limited interest in digging though his back catalog, even though he showed no such reluctance to rearrange the hits so dramatically they might as well have been deep cuts.

But the Dead got Dylan to try all sorts of songs he hadn't played in years - or ever.