New Riders Of The Purple Sage

The Best of FLOATING World

The Dead’s country cousins. The New Riders were the Grateful Dead’s support act for two years, twin Fillmore fixtures in a rigid hierarchy. They were even half a foot shorter than their revered compadres, literally looked down on as “that toy band that goes on before the Dead”, their steel guitarist Buddy Cage equably recalled.

This 2006 expansion of 1976’s best-of confirms the New Riders as amiable country-rocking also-rans in the counterculture’s last days. But they were more than a footnote in the Dead saga. Their singer-songwriter John ‘Marmaduke’ Dawson led Jerry Garcia to learn steel guitar, on which he was an early New Rider, with the Dead’s Mickey Hart and Phil Lesh also passing through. The breezy guitars and vocals on the self-titled 1971 debut which dominates here would recall Workingman’s Dead even without Garcia’s presence, but the influence was two-way.

The case for the New Riders’ own worth lies with Dawson. A mescaline trip inspired his early songs, giving a quietly alienated edge to the country ballad I Don’t Know You. His modest voice suits a personality that soon lost the drive to write, leaving behind unexceptional but evocative notes from the suburban hippie fringe his band called home.

The way they tidy up

Dylan’s ragged You Angel

You is symptomatic of their conservatism. And yet, when the Robert Hunter-written Kick In The Head attains electric momentum, like the Airplane at their most aggressive, their brief time in the counterculture sun makes more sense.

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nick Hasted