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Garcia’s shifting moods, but Hunter later deleted that line.) “Cumberland Blues,” the mining-story song, had a chugging-locomotive rhythm propelled by Lesh’s bobbing bass. “Dire Wolf” was itself ready to go. They’d been playing it live since the previous June, and Weir had even sung lead on one version. Garcia had taken up the pedal steel guitar with the Dead’s country offshoot band, theNew Riders of the Purple Sage, and the instrument pranced its way through the song.
    The other songs were equally filled with exquisite touches—the “oooh” harmonies in “Dire Wolf,” Pigpen’s warm organ in “Black Peter,” the modest rave-up in “Easy Wind.” But most emblematic of their heightened single-mindedness were their harmonies. The Dead were never known for them; Garcia, Lesh, and Weir each had a distinctive voice with unique creaks and crevices. But the new, folksier approach to their songs begged for vocal blends. Egged on by their friend in esoteric chords and hedonism, David Crosby (also living in a rented house in Novato, the backyard of which was seen on the cover of Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young’s Déjà vu ), the Dead began working harder than ever on their singing. “They were expected to sing all those parts, and it didn’t go well,” laughs Mountain Girl. “It sounded like cats howling.”
    In another sign of their focus, Garcia, Lesh, and Weir decided to have the last laugh and bore down on the singing. “We said, ‘You’re gonna have to sing this right!’” says Cantor (now Cantor-Jackson). “We worked on them until they weren’t flat or sharp and were hitting the notes.” The effort paid off; the mix of voices sounded natural, lending the songs a radiance and a sense of comforting teamwork. A slender brunette with a warm smile, long hair, and sharp ears that had earned her the nickname “Bettar” (as in, “She can make things sound better”), Cantor, then twenty-one, embodied another aspect of the Dead’s rule-breaking approach: she was well on her way to becoming possibly the first woman recording engineer in a largely male business (and in the predominantly male Dead crew). She adored and championed the band and its music—even if she viewed the nitrous tanks in the studio with great skepticism, as she recalls with a laugh years later: “I’m sitting there going, ‘I don’t like this.’ I’m catching the tank as it’s falling over so it doesn’t hit the tape machine. I’m like, ‘Jesus, guys!’”
    Everyone in the Dead camp had his or her spiky opinion about every aspect of their organization, but the sessions for Workingman’s Dead marked a rare moment of genuine, yes-we-can Grateful Dead consensus: people seemed happy with the results. Cutler recalls they were “never more focused and on the ball” than during those sessions. “I liked it right off the bat, as soon as I heard the basics,” says Bill “Kidd” Candelario, who had joined the Dead crew two years earlier. Few were more euphoric than Warner Brothers head Joe Smith. The Dead had driven Smith fairly crazy over the previous four years—from overspending to trying to dose him—but when he heard the finished record he was ecstatic. “I had been on their back,” Smith says. “They saw they weren’t getting any royalties. We were sticking with them, but we also said, ‘Please give us something we can sell.’ They wanted to prove they could do it.” According to Matthews, the final bill for the album was less than $15,000. Garcia would never be happy with his singing on “High Time,” thinking he hadn’t nailed it. But when Smith heard the record he gave Matthews a hug and gushed about how thrilled he was to hear the vocals. The feeling behind the album was so optimistic that