Somewhat of a rare entity is Mason’s Children. This song is simultaneously great and over-written. I’m not sure how that’s possible, but in my view it is. Clearly the band was working on their vocal harmonies when writing this song. As we all know so well, this could be a hit or miss proposition when trying to translate these arrangements to the live setting. Fortunately, this version of Mason’s Children is very strong in the vocal department. There’s not a lot of warbling or off-key singing. A cursory comparison of this version to some of the others in my collection made it a no-brainer for this pick.
There are at least 18 known performances of Mason’s Children and remarkably 9 of them have been released, if I’m counting correctly. That’s pretty remarkable. If nothing else I find this to be a really interesting song, but it’s certainly not one that jumps out at me. I will say that with this release there were three (!!!) versions of the song released (including the bonus disc) so that alone is unique for a release. I don’t think the Dead have ever released that many versions of an obscure song on a release before and I’d be shocked if it happened again.
But all told this is a really solid version of Mason’s Children. If they all could have been this tight vocally and raw musically I would think could have had a longer life in the repertoire. I’d be interested to hear this with a different vocal arrangement too, something more simplified. And wouldn’t it have been great to hear Donna on this one? Perhaps instead of Phil? I would have loved a version of this with the 76-79 incarnation of the band. But what was preserved on tape from this show is pretty good as far as this song goes.
Damn, it is good to hear this song emerging right out of the near-end of “St. Stephen”. Phil gets all over the high harmonies and Jerry leads the band through the wacky verses. This song did not quite fit into what the band was trying to do in early 1970, so I guess that is why the studio version did not make an album at the time. Here it acts as a nice bridge to the earlier incarnation of the band and I really love it in this context. This version is rough (as they all were) and that is perfectly okay, as you will hear if you get your ears around it. The ending jam is full of intense, early Garcia ripping. Phil decides the shape of the return groove and Jerry vetoes it loudly before the final chorus shuts it down. I do love this.