The Grateful Dead found their greatest commercial success with the remarkable late career comeback of this studio album recorded live in a darkened theatre. The band's longest running lineup of Jerry Garcia and Bob Weir on guitar and vocals; Brent Mydland on keyboards and vocals; Phil Lesh on bass; and Bill Kreutzmann and Mickey Hart on drums recorded the basic tracks for 'In the Dark' in just over a week at Marin County Veterans Auditorium. Most of the songs had been written years before; so they were very comfortable with them. Jerry Garcia co-produced the album with engineer John Cutler.
Micky Hart came up with the title: "I was thinking of sensory deprivation; and when you don't see, usually other senses are heightened - hearing perhaps. So I thought we should take all of the light away from the Grateful Dead. While we were recording at Marin Vets we took all the lights down including the exit lights and we played in the dark. I wanted to get blindfolds...another one of my foolish notions."
Jerry Garcia recalls: "Marin Vets turns out to be an incredibly nice room to record in. There's something about the formal atmosphere in there that makes us work. When we set up at Front Street to work, a lot of times we just sort of dissolve into hanging out. Going in without an audience and playing just to ourselves was in the nature of an experiment."
Bob Weir had taken up vocals after a long hiatus. He said at the time: "It's a delight to be singing again...My voice, I lost the high range - it fell apart...Most of the singing I used to do was the high part and I lost that. There were no nodes on my vocal chords or anything. I went to see an expert and he said, 'It's just your aging vocal chords'."
The year before they began recording, Garcia had slipped into a diabetic coma and had to re-learn the guitar to a certain extent. Garcia reflects: "It wasn't that weird for me; it didn't feel weird. I only know about it because that's what everybody told me later... It's like a non-experience...It felt like i was really tired."
'In the Dark' went to number six on the US album chart and has been certified double platinum. It was the highest charting album of their extensive catalogue.
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Garcia and Robert Hunter's 'Touch of Grey' became an unexpected smash hit. It was the only single of the Grateful Dead to break into the US top forty. It peaked at number six. Robert Hunter wrote the lyrics, except for one line from Garcia: "Light a candle, curse the glare."
'Hell in a Bucket' was written by Weir with John Perry Barlow.
Written with Barlow, Weir calls 'Throwing Stones' "an anarchist diatribe".
'In the Dark'
full album:
Side one
"Touch of Grey" (Garcia, Hunter) – 5:47 (lead singer: Jerry Garcia)
"Hell in a Bucket" (Barlow, Weir, Mydland)[8] – 5:35 (lead singer: Bob Weir)
"When Push Comes to Shove" (Garcia, Hunter) – 4:05 (lead singer: Jerry Garcia)
"West L.A. Fadeaway" (Garcia, Hunter) – 6:39 (lead singer: Jerry Garcia)
Side two
"Tons of Steel" (Mydland) – 5:15 (lead singer: Brent Mydland)
"Throwing Stones" (Barlow, Weir) – 7:18 (lead singer: Bob Weir)
"Black Muddy River" (Garcia, Hunter) – 5:58 (lead singer: Jerry Garcia)
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