Uncle John's Band
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"Uncle John's Band" is a song by the Grateful Dead, which first appeared on their 1970 album Workingman's Dead and is one of their most well-known. Written by guitarist Jerry Garcia and lyricist Robert Hunter, "Uncle John's Band" presents the Dead in an acoustic and musically concise mode, with close harmony singing.
The song is one of The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame's 500 Songs that Shaped Rock and Roll. In 2001 it was named 321st (of 365) in the Songs of the Century project list.
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[edit] Music and lyrics
"Uncle John's Band" has one of the Dead's most immediately accessible and memorable melodies, set against a bluegrass-inspired folk arrangement with acoustic guitars. The song's close harmony singing was inspired in part by Crosby, Stills and Nash. Both the music and the lyrics summon up the Dead's feel for Americana, with the song making allusions to both past - Irving Berlin's "Alexander's Ragtime Band" - and present - the fate of the American counterculture at the turn of the decade.[1]
[edit] Single and album history
Warner Bros. Records released "Uncle John's Band", backed with "New Speedway Boogie", as a single in 1970, but got limited airplay because of length issues. Garcia worked with Warners to cut it down, though he later called the mix "an atrocity."[2] "I gave them instructions on how to properly edit it and they garbled it so completely," Garcia commented. The original album version ended up getting more air play than the revised Warner Bros. version.[3]
In any case, the single reached only number 69 on the U.S. Pop Singles chart. Nevertheless it had a greater impact than its chart performance indicates, it did receive good airplay on progressive rock radio stations and others with looser playlists. At a time when the Grateful Dead were already an underground legend, "Uncle John's Band" (and to some degree its albummate "Casey Jones") was the first time many in the general rock audience actually heard the band's music.[4]
Moreover, the song had an impact on the mainstream because of first using the word "Goddamn" in the unedited single, which many radio stations played instead of the edited version; together with the reference to cocaine in "Casey Jones", the two songs made the band a "thorn in the side of Nixon that became a badge of honor to the masses."[5]
To this day, "Uncle John's Band" is one of the Grateful Dead's most frequently played tracks on classic rock radio.
It was covered (with lyrics intact) by Jimmy Buffett on his 1994 album Fruitcakes along with another classic rock cover, the Kinks' "Sunny Afternoon".
[edit] Chart history
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[edit] Performance history
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The song was performed by Phil Lesh and Friends at Bonnaroo 2006. It was the first song performed by the band and turned into an almost 20-minute long jam.
