Grateful Dead | Wake of the Flood pressing plate

Property of Strider Shurtliff

Grateful Dead

Pressing plate and label for Wake of the Flood album, Side B, ca. 1973

Pressing plate (31.5’’); scratches, scuffs. [With]: Green vinyl disc (4.3’’), with black and white printed labels featuring Grateful Dead logo and illustration of bird, Side A and B track lists, “GD-01 | A” and "GD-01 | B," and copyright “1973 Grateful Dead Records”.

The Dead’s sixth studio album and the first on their independent label, Grateful Dead Records. It had been three years since they’d recorded American Beauty, and Wake of the Flood would be a first for the band: recorded without founding member Ron “Pigpen” McKernan, it featured Keith Godchaux as his replacement on keys. Godchaux’s arrival brought new musical horizons for the band, as his playing drew less on the blues, and more on post-war jazz. 

The album was recorded at the newly opened Record Plant in Sausalito, just north of San Francisco. About the time in the studio, Bill Kreutzmann recalled, “The Record Plant was decked out in a classic seventies style, with an array of different-sized pieces of wood covering the walls, just for effect. … Also—and this is pretty cool—the studio was right across the street from the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers Bay Model, which is an actual, miniature hydraulic model of the entire San Francisco Bay and the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta. It accurately simulates the tides and was created to study environmental impacts. It turns out, that’s the perfect thing to be looking at when you’re getting high, while taking a smoke break with your friends. We’d walk around its cavernous insides, which mimic the foothills around the Bay—again, the perfect playground for stoned musicians looking to get lost in another world.”

REFERENCES:

Kreutzmann, Bill, and Benjy Eisen. Deal. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 190