Grateful Dead's "Workingman's Dead" w/ MC Taylor (Hiss Golden Messenger)

And the

timber's up and airy old The wolves are running round

All right, Jody, the past few weeks, I've been a little distracted.

I've actually had wolves on my mind.

And by wolves, I mostly mean the Minnesota Timberwolves.

It's the NBA playoffs, and my favorite basketball team sucked me in with their series victory over the Denver Nuggets before being pretty much manhandled by the San Antonio Spurs.

As I watched them lose by 30 points in their final game, I thought, man, these wolves.

This situation is pretty dire.

On the court, things were dark, things were cold.

And as the Timberwolves got murdered in the basketball sense, I thought I'm in this dire situation singing a song from the Grateful Dead's Working Man's Dad record.

song of course is dire wolf the first few lines of the song go in the timbers of fanario the wolves are running around the winter was so hard and cold froze 10 feet beneath the ground don't murder me i beg you don't murder me please don't murder me There it is.

One of my favorite Grateful Dead songs and irrefutable evidence that Working Man's Dead is a winter record.

These cold, dire wolves running on the hard frozen ground.

But really, these allusions to the winter are all over the place.

Jerry Garcia sings about the fire from the ice on the first song, Uncle John's

Band.

In Black Peter, he talks about the wind squalling through the door.

Just then the wind came squalling through the dome.

In a new Speedway Boogie, he mentions a man died of cold and also said that darkness has got to give.

Dark like winter.

One way or another.

One way or another.

And here's where I get even more convinced.

New Speedway Boogie is about the Rolling Stones show at Altamont Speedway.

The dead, of course, had been involved in the planning of the concert, which was billed as a potential Woodstock West, but they bailed before playing after witnessing increasing violence at the show.