High Time

Jerry Garcia couldn't help being a weirdo even when he wrote a country ballad

The Grateful Dead's second and third albums were expensive, high-concept psychedelic odysseys that didn't sell, putting the band deep in debt to their label. This forced them to bang out a series of low-budget quickies: a live album and two back-to-basics roots records. Ironically, this constraint produced the band's best-loved and most iconic recordings: Live/Dead, Workingman's Dead, and American Beauty.

Workingman's Dead is easily the rootsiest Dead album. It's named in homage to "Workin' Man Blues" by Merle Haggard. (Bob Weir got his guitar part in "Cumberland Blues" from this song.) While the tunes on Workingman's Dead are not overtly spacy, some of them are still plenty weird. "High Time" is the weirdest one.

Helen De Cruz says it best: "What is happening with these chords???" What indeed. We will get to that below.