Songoftheday 8/3/15 - Must be gettin' early clocks are running late, paint-by-number morning sky looks so phony...

"Touch of Grey" - Grateful Dead
from the album In The Dark (1987)
Billboard Hot 100 peak: #9 (one week)
Weeks in the Top-40: 9

Today's SOTD comes from one of the most revered bands in rock and roll history, the jam-rock titans Grateful Dead, who came together in San Francisco with core members Jerry Garcia, Bob Weir, Phil Lesh, Bill Kreutzman, and "Pigpen" McKernan in the mid-70s. Mickey Hart joined in not long after, and this lineup, along with a few other members, remained solid throughout most of the next three decades. They released their self-titled debut album in 1967, and landed their first American pop hit in 1970 with "Uncle John's Band", from their top-40 album Workingman's Dead. That same year, their follow-up set American Beauty offered what would probably become their track most known to "non-Deadheads", "Truckin'", which topped out at #64. While five consecutive studio albums made the top-40 on Billboard's album chart, it was their concerts by far that furthered their fame and legacy. With extended jams where their songs (and others' as well) were deconstructed and reworked into suite-length experiments in front of thousands and thousands of "hippies", bikers, and tokers, the "Dead" live experience rivaled no other in the rock canon. At the same time, drugs and alcohol, driving forces and inspiration in much of their music, had taken a toll on the group, with Pigpen passing away in 1973 and Garcia going into a coma in the mid-80s. They hadn't released a studio set since 1980's Go To Heaven, but yet their image through constant touring and Garcia's successful recovery helped finally welcome them to the mainstream with the release of the rather restrained In The Dark album of 1987. The lead-off single, "Touch Of Grey" (written by Garcia with long-time band lyricist Robert Hunter), played on their age, while the production was a radio-friendly (almost Disney-fied in a sense) distillation of the "Dead sound", and they found a completely new audience waiting to lap it up...

"Touch Of Grey" climbed all the way into the American pop top-10 in September of 1987, while topping the Mainstream Rock radio chart in Billboard. The track also crossed over to their Adult Contemporary (or "easy listening") list at #15. Two other songs from the album, "Hell In A Bucket" and my personal fave "Throwing Stones" both also made the rock chart.

In 1989, a live album with Bob Dylan sent the band back to the Rock top-10 with "Slow Train". The Dead's studio follow-up, Built To Last, released that same year, didn't get the mainstream pop radio attention that In The Dark did, but they did score their last top-10 rock hit with "Foolish Heart" ( a second single "Just A Little Light" missed the top-40 there by a notch). While they continued on strong for a while, sadly Garcia's demons again caught up with him, sending him back to rehab in 1994, where his broken body finally gave up on him. Since then the rest of the band had carried on in different forms, but not as "Grateful Dead" until this year's 50th anniversary reunited the remaining core members for a series of concerts. Their musical legacy, though is undoubted, with archives of their live shows still being released and gobbled up by fans to land them on the album charts continuously since.

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"Touch Of Grey" was included in their live shows years before its release on In The Dark. Here's an early incarnation at a show in 1984...

...and again on tour in 1989...

Fast forward a couple years to a gig in 1991...

...and finally the Pop-Up Video treatment of the video...

Up tomorrow: A South African R&B artist encounters some fibs.