Morning Dew

Do you ever think about how there are several thousand nuclear missiles sitting in silos around the world, ready to launch at a moment’s notice? When I was a kid in the 1980s, that was the main macro-level anxiety lurking behind day-to-day life. Now we worry about different things: the climate, the pandemic, the impending collapse of American democracy. But those missiles are all still there! The Grateful Dead ended a lot of their sets with a tune about what it would be like the day after the missiles launched. That is not the expected way to close out a set of hedonistic hippie rock.

This t-shirt is funny, but the song itself is pretty extraordinarily horrifying. In a good way!

“Morning Dew” was written by Bonnie Dobson, inspired by the movie On The Beach.

You can hear her sing it over a much cooler arrangement in this duet with Robert Plant.

The Dead put “Morning Dew” on their first album, where they played it too fast and not too well. After a few years, they started slowing it down and stretching it out, until it turned into the epic ballad that we know and love. The version from The Grateful Dead Movie is probably the cleanest recording available, both in terms of performance and sound quality.

The version I grew up on is the one from 5/8/77, which is less crisp, but quite a bit heavier. It follows immediately on the heels of “St Stephen” in a nifty harmonic pivot. “St Stephen” is in E Mixolydian mode, but it unexpectedly ends on D, the bVII chord. That D then becomes the tonic in D Mixolydian, the key of “Morning Dew.”

My favorite part comes about eight minutes in when the band quiets down. Check out the arpeggio that Jerry hits way up on the neck at 8:45 – it gets me right in the feelings. The big build at the end of the song is exciting and all, but nothing compares to the quiet part.

Everything I love about Jerry Garcia can be heard in “Morning Dew”, but most versions also include one of his most annoying quirks: he hardly ever played the break before the first guitar solo correctly. It’s strange that he screwed it up so consistently; it’s not like it’s difficult to play or anything. My speculation is that Phil Lesh came up with that bit of counterpoint, and Jerry had some unconscious resentment toward him that got expressed through “unintentional” bad playing.

Anyway, aside from that one part, Jerry brought his entire heart and soul to the tune. The Weeping Willow Guitar Lessons channel on YouTube has a lovingly thorough analysis of his solo from the Europe ’72 version.

The harmony is mostly simple triads, and Jerry sticks close to the chord tones, embellished with pentatonics and the blues scale. But he approaches his notes with tons of guitaristic inflection, especially string bending. The Weeping Willow video demonstrates an extraordinary riff where Jerry does a deep string bend, plucks the string, and then pulls off while gradually releasing the bend. This takes a slow microtonal descent and adds a layer of faster meta-inflection on top of it. No one else plays like that! (Be warned that if you want to play along with the Europe ’72 version, you will need to tune sixty cents sharp.)

Here’s my chart of the intro, first verse and counterpoint break.

The main harmonic idea of “Morning Dew” is simple. It is mostly in D Mixolydian mode, a favorite scale for Jerry.

The D, C and G chords that are the backbone of the tune all come from D Mixolydian. But then on the ninth bar of each verse comes the big drama, the move to the F chord. I hear this as a shift into parallel D natural minor, which has the same pitches as F major.

The Weeping Willow guy says that the F implies D Dorian, but I disagree. In the big climax of the song, Jerry embellishes the F with Fsus4, and that B-flat is from natural minor. The B natural from Dorian has a creamier and jazzier sound to it. The Dead could be creamy and jazzy, but not in this kind of folk song. The combination of D Mixolydian and D minor is the same one the Dead used for their arrangement of “I Know You Rider“. The C chord following the F could belong to either D Mixo or D minor, and the Em chord puts us back in D Mixolydian.

There is no real functional harmony in “Morning Dew.” It is more like groove harmony, a series of places to be rather than a narrative of tension and resolution. The D, C and G chords are just highlighting different points in the D Mixolydian necklace. The move to F has a lifting quality to it, but the path back to D uses ambiguous and undemonstrative chords. Imagine how much an A7 to D cadence would disrupt the vibe.

As with a lot of Dead tunes, “Morning Dew” is easy to play, but not easy to play well. The extremely slow tempo and simple harmony give you plenty of space to embellish, but you need to exercise judgment and restraint in how you fill all that space. The Dead themselves did not always exercise that restraint. Sometimes you just want everybody to chill out and stop filling up the bar with notes so you can hear Jerry better. This is why I like the quiet parts of the song the best.

The Dead liked to pair “Dark Star” with “Morning Dew”, often connected by extremely long modal and atonal jams. If you like this kind of thing, you will probably enjoy this:

This one is good too:

There are lots of versions of “Morning Dew” by other people. This recording by Nazareth has got a nice groove to it.

For sheer weirdness, I want to shout out the rocking minor-key recording by DEVO.

It’s also worth hearing this berserk rendition by Einstürzende Neubauten.

For a very different take on “Morning Dew”, here’s my remix of the Europe ’72 version.

When I was a kid I always wanted to be in a band like the Dead, but now I’m feeling like it’s more satisfying to just make music out of those Dead recordings that inspired me in the first place. Unstructured jamming is fun, but I like a nice tight groove better.