Grateful Dead – Wake of the Flood Review

A break from live album releases was not just needed for Grateful Dead, but listeners at the time. A drought of fresh material was broken with the wonderful, career-high release, Wake of the Flood. These songs had been tested on stage, some of them for well over a year. Finding the time to balance tours and recording proved tricky and while being on the road for The Dead was a lucrative, exhaustive process, their neglect of studio work between American Beauty and Wake of the Flood was perhaps because of the double album process from their last studio experience. Both albums, American Beauty and the preceding Workingman’s Dead were excellent, cornerstone releases. Even if an artist releases a very best album, the hunger for more from an ever-enraged audience grows. Wake of the Flood is a response to that desire for more studio work.  

Cool, slick playing is what Wake of the Flood offers. A folksy tone, a lighter flourish which had been the best part of Workingman’s Dead appears on Wake of the Flood opener Mississippi Half-Step Uptown Toodleoo. Keith Godchaux is the difference maker for Wake of the Flood. His rhythm and blues style, the reliance on piano as a backing pop to those guitar riffs from Jerry Garcia and Bob Weir, is staggering. Garcia and Robert Hunter make for a tremendous as ever writing partnership, with Mississippi Half-Step Uptown Toodleoo adapting those tracks of lengthy greatness with a real flair, as genuine a moment as it gets for The Dead. Those longer running energies picked up from live show releases are felt for here, and it works rather nicely. There is a softer tone to Wake of the Flood though you can hear how their work has evolved from late 1960s efforts like Aoxomoxoa. A song like Row Jimmy features that feel for the decade just gone, the psychedelic comedown in full effect. 

Grateful Dead had a wonderful way of making the softness of a simple-sounding song like Row Jimmy an overwhelming instrumental process. It is this dedication, the constant strive for whatever they perceive as the next level, which makes Wake of the Flood such a powerful listen. Saying Hunter and Bill Kreutzmann play well here is an understatement. But it is in their consistency, the ability they have to fall in line behind sweet vocal work and obscure their dedication, that makes these songs work best of all. When everyone is the standout, nobody shines, but that is the point of Wake of the Flood, an album which reaches its very best moments in those moody but optimistic moments. Broken hearts and the aftereffects of romantic severance are beautifully adapted. Tranquillity, of all tones, is what reigns here. No wonder Bob Dylan covers Stella Blue so often. A masterstroke from Garcia and Hunter. 

B-side bits like Here Comes Sunshine are fine enough. Another blur of those instrumental highs and the depths of the work put on here by Godchaux is marvellous. It feels a bit unwilling to shift with the times, though. Wake of the Flood’s first half is a booming exploration of how Grateful Dead would fare in the roaring 1970s, whereas its B-side is a nod to fans who were not taken by their declining interest in psychedelic songs. Where Eyes of the World may pass a listener by on the first go, Weather Report Suite will no doubt convince of a second listen, maybe a third. A daring, lengthy piece of work which works the grooves of calmer seas, of softer flourishes, which Grateful Dead began relying on through the 1970s. A commercial peak, but also a cultural cornerstone which can be revisited time and again for a fix of The Dead at their very best.