Workingman's Dead: The Angel's Share

Wednesday brought a surprise from the Grateful Dead – the release of an album of studio outtakes from the Workingman's Dead sessions. Titled The Angel's Share, it comprises two-and-a-half hours of demos, partial takes, and alternate mixes of what is arguably the Dead's best album. 

Rolling Stone has an article that goes into the background of the release and the recording of Workingman's Dead. 

The discovery of what became The Angel’s Share was an unexpected, late-day surprise for the Dead archive crew. This spring, they had just finished work on a separate 50th-anniversary Workingman’s Dead reissue that will include a full live show from 1971. That bonus material was all finalized and firmed up when Lemieux heard from engineer Brian Kehew and archivist Mike Johnson that an unlabeled batch of tapes had been discovered in the Dead vaults in Los Angeles.

 Given that the only Workingman’s Dead leftovers that had surfaced before had been various takes of “Dire Wolf,” Lemieux wasn’t sure what to think. “We’ve been burned before,” he says. “We’ve designed an album cover for a great live show and then the tapes showed up and we couldn’t use them. But here Brian and Mike had a feeling it was something Workingman’s Dead–related.” Given that most of what Lemieux has overseen was live material, he “freaked out,” he says, when he realized what those tape boxes contained.

The reason that concert recordings have dominated in the post-Garcia world is simple: Studio outtakes of the Dead are as rare as Lesh lead vocals. In terms of other vault tape boxes, “some clearly say Shakedown Street and there are lot of unreleased takes of Go to Heaven,” says Lemieux. “There might be 15 or 20 multitrack reels, some with many takes of ‘Alabama Getaway.’”

But those discoveries are the exception. “For some albums, we have nothing,” Lemieux says. “There’s not much [leftover] from Wake of the Flood. Literally nothing from Terrapin Station. That’s always been a big mystery in the Dead world. We never found out what happened with the Terrapin tapes.” Some studio tapes exist for American Beauty, which will be celebrating its own 50th in November and will be given an in-progress deluxe release. But Lemieux cautions that those tapes are not “on the same level” and not as extensive as those found for Workingman’s Dead.

The album is a digital only release and you can hear it on the usual streaming sites like Spotify. It's not for casual listeners, but for fans like me, who have followed the band for most of their life, it's a real treat.