(Credits: Far Out / Alamy)
Tue 13 January 2026 20:18, UK
It wasn’t uncommon for Jerry Garcia to look down on some of the earliest Grateful Dead songs. The guitarist and band leader had spent a large chunk of his career taking potshots at the work the band had done. It’s par for the course.
John Lennon would spend most of his life taking aim at The Beatles, Kurt Cobain complained about Nirvana and not a day goes by that doesn’t see Thom Yorke wince at Radiohead. Garcia was just another member of this creative fraternity.
While most fans agree that his collaborations with Robert Hunter represent the peak of the band’s material, Hunter didn’t sign on until 1967, two years after the Dead officially adopted their name. In the time between, the Dead largely relied on covers while attempting to figure out how to write songs on their own.
Across various interviews, Garcia wasn’t shy about his opinion when it came to the band’s early material. He called ‘Cream Puff War’ “totally embarrassing”, ‘Doin’ That Rag’ “unsuccessful”, and ‘New Speedway Boogie’ “a little bit dire”. The latter shows that Garcia was willing to bump songs from the band’s most critically and commercially successful period. Garcia was looking for constant evolution, so when certain songs from Workingman’s Dead came up, Garcia wasn’t always kind in his estimations.
A surprising knock came against that album’s lovely ballad, ‘High Time’. One of the only true love songs in the Grateful Dead canon, ‘High Time’ was a Garcia/Hunter classic that found its way into the band’s repertoire and then quickly disappeared. It hung around just long enough to be recorded for Workingman’s Dead, but Garcia was never happy with his final take on the song.
Jerry Garcia on stage with Grateful Dead. (Credits: Far Out / Carl Lender)
“The song that I think failed on [Workingman’s Dead] is ‘High Time.’ It’s a beautiful song, but I was just not able to sing it worth a shit,” Garcia claimed to Yale law professor Charles Reich in 1972. “And I really can’t do justice to that kind of song now. I’m not that good of a singer. But I wish someone who could really sing would do one of those songs sometime.”
“‘High Time’ is a beautiful song, but I don’t think our performance on the record was very good,” Garcia reiterated to BAM in 1977. “It’s a better song than we performed it.”
The first time the Grateful Dead ever performed ‘High Time’ was at the Fillmore East in New York City for their late show on June 20th, 1969. That was almost eight months before the sessions for Workingman’s Dead began. Garcia had a long time to perfect his vocal delivery, singing the song a grand total of 46 times in concert before the Workingman’s Dead sessions began on February 7th, 1970.
Between the start of the sessions and the album’s eventual (likely slightly off) official release date of June 14th, the Dead played ‘High Time’ an additional 16 times, with four extra performances after the album was available in record stores. And then… nothing for six years.
When Garcia decided to revive the song on June 9th, 1976, it had been 345 shows since the previous time the band played ‘High Time’. The song continued to float in and out of the band’s repertoire throughout the next two decades, amassing a grand total of 137 performances before its 138th and final play on March 24th, 1995.
Check out ‘High Time’ down below.
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