A Long Strange Trip (34 page)

3:45 P.M. In the audience, a fire marshal approves the setup of the folding chairs on the arena floor. Fire marshals are God; they can stop a show with impunity, although they have been known to be reasonable. In London Dan Healy once had to prove the safety and groundedness of a cable. He did so by grabbing both ends with his hands, putting his life on the line. The show went on. At other times, money might change hands. One night in Philadelphia, Scrib went out and discovered aisles two feet six inches wide, with nine inches between rows, and decided this could be one of those other times.

3:52 P.M. Steve is at work on Weir’s amp. The stage looks ready, with only a few boxes littering it. Harry creates feedback at Garcia’s vocal mike, then tech-speaks to the soundboard. “Sweep this till it goes away.” Howard replies, “A little edgy at one thousand but it’ll cut through and that’s what we want.”

3:58 P.M. Sitting on Brent’s piano bench, Harry mumbles, “Lots of low-end reflecting, so try some bass roll-off.” From Jerry’s microphone, he adds, “This sounds all jangly, kinda nasally and stuff.” As Danchik fools with the board, he adds, “A taste too much.”

4 P.M. The first band van arrives, bringing Healy and Lesh. Phil is jovial as he fiddles with his bass. He has a gifted abstract mind, and as a boy listened to a crystal radio set under the blankets. As an adult, his antidote to the blues is to watch a videotape of the final Apollo launch. His light reading is science fiction, and his more serious taste is for what Jung called geomancy, the science of earth magnetism and energy. Along with Lesh, the van brings the guest-list manager, Cassidy Law, the publicist, Scrib, and the tour coordinator from Metropolitan, Amy Clarke. Cassidy’s mother, Eileen, has been dealing with the Dead’s guest list at home for many years, and Cassidy seems born to the box office. The Dead’s list is without a doubt the largest in the history of rock and roll, which is why Cassidy is probably the only person ever to go out on a tour just to handle the guest list—and she does it impeccably. She settles to work in a corner of the production office. Meanwhile, in the management office, Amy Clarke, a frustrated interior designer, rearranges all the furniture, resulting in lots more space. Scrib goes out to the stage, gets white tape from Harry, and marks off where the photographers may stand in the “pit,” the area between the stage and the barricade.

4:15 P.M. A colossal hissing roar fills the arena as Healy “noises” the room. “White noise”—sound at all frequencies—is pumped through the system and then evaluated on the B&K harmonic analyzer. It reveals on the computer screen which frequencies bounce, which linger, which disperse. Ideally, the final result will be a flat, harmonically correct room that is an acoustic
tabula rasa
for the night’s show. Of course, the room’s profile will change dramatically once it is filled with eighteen thousand sweaty customers, but this is a start.

This schedule applies only to indoor shows. The ante is severely raised for outdoor shows, where the size and risks go up. Everyone in the crew remembers the 1973 concert in Iowa, where the stage roof had been designed by a company from St. Louis and involved wires staked down to create a framework upon which innumerable pieces of fiberglass were screwed together. It was elaborate and beautiful, and the designer was proud. At sunset of the day before the show, to the sound of a choir rehearsing next door, the Dead’s crew arrived on the scene to check things out. As they got there, so did a serious plains thunderstorm, and ten thousand pieces of half-pound fiberglass went whirling into the sky, giant plastic snowflakes that sent the choir and everyone else running for cover. The production people cobbled something together, it didn’t rain the next day, and the show came off.

4:45 P.M. Outside in the parking lot, in between the Dead Heads without tickets or money who have their fingers in the air hoping for a free “miracle” ticket, and the scalpers, who are balefully regarded but whom the flush will turn to at times of need, a bearded joker wanders about shouting, “Tibetan Army knives for sale, special mind opening blade.” Scrib smiles, recognizing the Gary Snyder poem being quoted.

The stage is set and the band is not sound-checking today, so the crew sits talking. Robbie Taylor rode in the truck last night and reports that it was “uncomfortable, but I dug it.” Parish smiles. “You gotta suffer a little pain.” Since he has just won $200 on lottery tickets, he feels none. Then he announces his “first poem.” “Everyone in the world but me is crazy / And I started to feel crazy today.” The air turns blue with smoke from the fattest joints in America. The Binky Boys bring coolers onto the stage, filled with beers, ginger ale, and water. Garcia gets two packs of Camel straights and a lighter. Everyone gets towels.

5:30 P.M. As usual, the show is sold out, and the energy around the backstage door has started to amplify toward frenzy. One night there was a woman who claimed to be Garcia’s long-deceased mother, and hers wasn’t even the most ridiculous of stories. Depending on his highly variable mood, Taylor may hand out a ticket or scream.

6 P.M. The rest of the band arrives in two vans. Phil sits down to his supper, while Garcia goes to his corner to stretch the new strings and commune with his setup. Afflicted by stage fright until the music starts, he is touchy, and doesn’t really want to talk with anyone except the band and Parish. Kreutzmann isn’t feeling great, and he and Weir go to see the local doctor; one is on call at every show.

Ram Rod leans over the stage railing and asks tour manager Jon McIntire where Healy is. “Lying down, he’s got stomach cramps.”

“Oh, he’s having his period,” Ram Rod responds.

“Yes, and I’ll bet you’re glad,” says McIntire.

6:30 P.M. By now, the security guards and ushers have taken their positions, someone at the soundboard has put on some house music, Cassidy has gone to the box office, and everything is ready. Taylor turns to Viola, who is standing in his usual position at the top of the stage stairs, and tells him to open the doors. He radios the local head of security, and the doors swing open. The process usually works well, even when it doesn’t work at all. The first time that the Dead played at the brand-new Knickerbocker Arena, in Albany, New York, they discovered what it would be like to have a show with no security. Though the house was managed by an experienced company, the building’s brand-new security guards took one look at the Dead Heads, gulped, and simply disappeared for the night. There wasn’t an aisle to be seen. Fortunately, the fire marshals weren’t around either, and nothing happened except a good time.

The band warms up quietly most times, although there was the Halloween night in South Carolina when Kreutzmann stopped Scrib and said, “Tell Garcia I won’t play tonight if he doesn’t open with [Warren Zevon’s] ‘Werewolves of London.’ ” Scrib went to Garcia’s dressing room and called the message through the closed door. Garcia chuckled. “Sure, but I don’t know the words.” Weir volunteered that he did, and with a little help, they wrote them down, went out, and performed a well-received if ragged version of the song. Much the same thing happened in Salt Lake City, when it occurred to the band fifteen minutes before showtime to play Weir’s song named after the city. One very brief rehearsal backstage later, they did it.

Most nights, though, the time passes, somehow, in the comfort of routine. Eventually, either shepherded by the road manager or more likely in an individual straggle, the musicians make their way to the stage.

20

Independence and Its Price (1/1/68–6/30/68)

Evading label pressure in order to make a record on their own terms was only one of the Dead’s ambitions. Though they had never actually toured, they decided to supplant the entire emerging structure of agents and promoters and organize a tour of their own. Even at home, they had played for Bill Graham only once since the Hollywood Bowl in September, and only once for the Family Dog since the previous March. Just as they were beginning to perceive their musical direction, they sought independent control of the music’s live presentation. Rock Scully, Brian Rohan, and Ron Rakow were deputized to organize a run north to be called the Tour of the Great Northwest. Rakow had been looking for a niche in the Dead’s scene, and it appeared that he’d found it. Rohan would feel that Rakow maneuvered him out, and certainly Brian’s presence with the band would start to diminish at this time. Rakow looked to Weir like the Batman character the Joker, and Bobby was certain that he had introduced the word “scam” into the Dead’s vocabulary.

Healy and Matthews were investigating the rental of a tape machine at a studio one day when they met a man who told them about the Carousel Ballroom, an Irish dance hall above an auto salesroom on the corner of Market and Van Ness in San Francisco. They rented it from the owner, Bill Fuller, for a show on January 17, Ben Franklin’s birthday, and it served as a successful prototype for their run to the Northwest, a self-contained package of the Dead, Quicksilver, and Jerry Abrams’s Head Lights. On January 20, the musicians flew to Eureka to begin the tour, exited the plane, and found what appeared to be half the cops in the county there to greet them. Eureka and San Francisco are both in California, but they most assuredly do not share the same state of mind. The Quick and the Dead proceeded to the hall, put on a show that blew minds, and headed on to Seattle. Unfortunately, their cleanup was not perfect, and after the gig, police found roaches and rolling papers, leading the local press to call the show a “pot orgy.” This news dogged their tracks through the next weeks. Still, the tour was mostly fun, financially at least modestly successful, and aesthetically a smash. In a significant victory for their self-esteem, they showed that they could go into a college gym and within a few hours create a scene quite as entertaining as the Fillmore, without any of the trappings of conventional show business.

The Dead and Quicksilver were well matched. Their two lead guitarists both wanted to get stoned and play, and their management enjoyed mutual respect and goals. The bands shared equipment, which pleased the two crews. The cowboy and Indians game of the summer of 1966 had now evolved into blank pistol shoot-’em-ups, which occasionally caused a stir. In Portland, Cipollina leaped out from behind a tree and shot Pigpen, who obediently lay down for a few seconds, as the rules demanded, then got back in the car with Rifkin and Scully and drove away. In the meantime, observant locals had called the police, and Cipollina was fortunate to escape arrest. Weir was quite taken by Cipollina, with whom, he said, he shared “the same sort of black, ghoulish sense of humor.” Of course, a sense of humor was a tour job requirement. One night eight giant bikers appeared at the door where Quicksilver’s manager, Ron Polte, was standing. When asked what he intended to do, he replied, “Move over.”

The tour was musically significant to the Dead because they were now performing their new material as a suite, and though they initially did so at extraordinarily fast tempi, it worked. They had found the material that would define their first persona. It began with “Dark Star” and continued with what would become side one of their new album (“Cryptical Envelopment” played into “The Other One” back into “Cryptical Envelopment” into “New Potato Caboose” into “Born Cross-Eyed”). Along with three old songs (“Alligator” into “Caution” or “Lovelight” as a show closer) and three new songs they would add in the course of the spring—“China Cat Sunflower,” “The Eleven,” and “St. Stephen”—their early repertoire was set. It had taken them three years, but the elements of talent and material had welded themselves into a powerful whole. Before, Garcia’s licks and Pigpen’s presence had carried them, but now they were a solid ensemble that could swing, playing material that in some cases would endure throughout their career.

Rock Scully was the tour’s front man, and no one could better fill the job of bullshittin’ nervous locals. “The Dead never played psychedelic music,” he told one paper. “We don’t take drugs anymore.” After Eureka they played Seattle, then Portland State College, where, despite a giant snowstorm, the students got a show their critic defined as “phenomenal.” “Flash after flash, skyrockets, bombs . . . I’ve never seen anything like the Grateful Dead and Jefferson Airplane lightshow.” The music “was loud, loud enough that we didn’t need ears. We could see and feel the music, it saturated the ballroom . . . [the Dead] kept hitting climaxes, bursting, sense-tearing climaxes, until on some magic cue they relaxed, dropped back to reality, stringing us along,” only to finish with “another chain reaction of exploding box cars full of nitroglycerin.” For Rohan, the proof of their effort came in Eugene, where a good crowd somehow plowed its way through a major snowstorm to get to the EMU Ballroom.

On a roll, the band returned to Portland to play two nights at the Crystal Ballroom, the local version of the Fillmore or Avalon. The Crystal was an old-time dance hall with a sprung floor built on ball bearings, and it, too, had been booked in the early sixties by the Fillmore’s Charles Sullivan with soul artists like James Brown and Marvin Gaye. Open as a “hippie” scene only from January 1967 to July 1968, the Crystal’s two Quick/Dead shows were among the high points in the room’s history. The Dead enjoyed themselves, too; Garcia left the box office lady a joint, which she thought was her best tip ever, even though she didn’t smoke. After a tour-ending show on February 4 in Ashland, Oregon, the musicians grabbed an early flight home. They were just in time. The police stopped the truck outside Ashland, forcing the crew to unload every piece of equipment. Finding nothing, the police then tried to reload the truck, which turned out to be the real joke.

Something very interesting happened to Weir toward the end of the tour. One night in Portland, he began to tinker once more with the lyrics to “The Other One.” He’d already settled on the first verse:

Spanish lady come to me
she lays on me this rose
It rainbow spirals round and round
It trembles and explodes
It left a smoking crater of my mind
I like to blow away
But the heat came round
and busted me
for smiling on a cloudy day
Comin’, comin’, comin’ around
Comin’ around in a circle

This was neither so romantic nor so psychedelic as one might think. The Spanish lady was in fact a Balinese dancer Weir had met in Seattle the previous year, a lovely who left him with a social disease sometimes called the Spanish sickness. He didn’t like his other verses, and now in Oregon, he thought of the Pranksters, and of course of Neal Cassady. Neal had spent some ten days that January sleeping in the attic of 710, generally hanging out with Weir, who slept on a couch on the second floor, most of his belongings in a paper bag. The room with the couch also had the stereo, and Weir would lie there, still silenced by the effects of his past use of LSD, as Neal gobbled speed, juggled his sledgehammer, and raved. John Barlow later speculated that Weir was somehow “dreaming” Cassady. In their polarities, there was a powerful bond. In Portland, Weir reviewed what he had written about meeting Neal:

Escaping through the lily fields
I came across an empty space
It trembled and exploded
Left a bus stop in its place
The bus came by and I got on
that’s when it all began
There was cowboy Neal at the wheel
of the bus to never-ever land
Comin’, comin’, comin’ around
Comin’ around in a circle

That works, he thought to himself as he finally went off to sleep. A couple of thousand miles south, Neal Cassady lay dying of exposure on railroad tracks near San Miguel de Allende, Mexico. Found and brought to the hospital, he died later that day, February 4, 1968. The band learned of his death when they got home to 710 from the tour.

As they returned to San Francisco, the mainstream news was focused on Vietnam, where the North Vietnamese had begun a gigantic offensive that coincided with the lunar holiday called Tet. It was a savage irony that, in military terms, the North lost. U.S. forces wiped out half of the Viet Cong and perhaps sixty thousand North Vietnamese, against losses of four thousand of their own and five thousand South Vietnamese. But the very fact that the enemy could think of such an offensive with more than half a million U.S. troops in the field shattered the American public’s perception of U.S. superiority. The U.S. war machine was suddenly a very naked emperor. A March 10 Gallup poll revealed that 49 percent of the population thought the war was a mistake. The next day Walter Cronkite, the CBS broadcaster widely viewed as the most trustworthy man in the country, announced his doubts about the war.

By this time an alternative press structure had blossomed across the country. The
New York Times
estimated that there were somewhere between 150 and 200 underground newspapers with a nationwide circulation of around 2 million, and while their journalistic standards sometimes took rumor for fact, their distrust of conventional authority was a healthy antidote to the old consensus. For the first time, an alternative point of view cost just fifty cents and could be found in every city and college town. Stoned humor, characterized by irreverent spontaneity, cartoon ideas, surreal wordplay, graffiti, and sexual looseness, reached the mass media in 1968 with the television debut of
Rowan and Martin’s Laugh-In.
Film, too, had changed, most brilliantly in that year’s
Bonnie and Clyde.
European filmmaking had invaded Hollywood, said one film historian, bringing a “disregard for time-honored pieties of plot, chronology, and motivation; a promiscuous jumbling together of comedy and tragedy; ditto heroes and villains; sexual boldness, and a new, ironic distance that withholds obvious moral judgments.”

The Dead stayed independent, playing again at the Carousel Ballroom on Valentine’s Day, this time with Country Joe and the Fish, broadcasting the show to those at home on both Tom Donahue’s KMPX and on the public station KPFA, which made it the first-ever live FM stereo broadcast. Then came one of their grandest capers ever. On Sunday, February 18, the rainy gray San Francisco winter parted for one balmy day, and the residents of the Haight-Ashbury thronged Haight Street. All was peaceful, but around 4:30 a car narrowly missed a dog, words were exchanged, the police were called, and what the
Examiner
described as six hundred bottle-tossing hippies faced tear gas and riot batons, leading to seventy-five arrests. In an effort to promote domestic tranquillity, the city announced that on March 3, Haight Street would be closed to traffic, and that “a number of musical events are planned.” Little did they know. Whatever the city had in mind would be forgotten, but the Dead decided to stage a coup.

The band loaded its gear on two flatbed trucks, one coming down Haight from Stanyan, the other down Cole, which dead-ended at Haight in front of the Straight Theater. As they approached the police blockades, Rock Scully leaned off the running board and saw Sergeant Sunshine, the legendarily pleasant cop on the beat. Rock said, “Hey, here we are, it’s okay, we’re the music for the afternoon.” “Oh, great,” the sergeant replied, and pushed aside the barricade. The two trucks met tail-to-tail in front of the Straight Theater, and with commando precision, cohorts tossed down power lines from the Straight, Hell’s Angels came in to guard them, and the Dead began to play, smack in the middle of the street. People came from everywhere within earshot, and before long, Haight Street was full as far as the eye could see, with every window, every rooftop, and every square inch of standing space holding an ecstatic crowd. John Warnecke threw joints into the audience, and Jim Marshall crawled around the band’s feet taking incredible pictures. For Lesh, it may have been the “highest performance—the highest relationship between us and the audience—but it wasn’t anything like an audience, man, it was like an outdoors acid test with more people.” Garcia agreed. At heart, this was a farewell, and over the ensuing months the band members would move out of a neighborhood now riddled with doomed speed freaks and lost heroin addicts. M.G. and Garcia had left 710 shortly after the bust, moving to an apartment near the ocean in the Richmond District. Toward summer they would all begin shifting to Marin County, Mickey impatiently first, to a home on Ridge Road in Novato that he would soon share with Weir.

Even as they began to move their homes, they committed to the city as their workplace. Under Rakow’s leadership, they formed Triad, which was an essentially fictitious partnership of the Dead, the Airplane, and Quicksilver, to run the Carousel Ballroom. Under it, each band was to play for free and receive 10 percent of the profits. Big Brother was managed by the dark god Albert Grossman and consequently wasn’t a formal partner, but in the end would participate as much as the other bands. That January, the Airplane had replaced Bill Graham as their manager with their friend and road manager Bill Thompson, and Thompson and Ron Polte of Quicksilver joined Rock in committing the bands to play often enough to keep the Carousel going. The Airplane’s participation was significant, since they were then the top draw in the country, earning $7,500 a night. But that summer the Airplane was to take its first European tour, so Thompson became too busy to have much to do with the Carousel. Because Danny Rifkin was traveling in Europe, Rock was now the sole manager, which meant that Rock, too, had little time for the Carousel. In the end it would be run by Ron Rakow.

The Carousel was not Rakow’s only operation at this time. Just for practice, or perhaps as a display of his talents, Rakow created the All Our Own Equipment Company, which purchased thirteen Ford Cortinas for the band members and associates, using as collateral what various people at various times claimed to be a very rubbery check for $5,000, or future music publishing rights. Or something. After a number of tries, Rakow found dupes at S&C Ford and the United California Bank on Haight Street. Using a check signed by Rock Scully from the fictitious Headstone Productions, their friend Jon McIntire walked in all blond charm, signed loan papers, and walked out owning thirteen cars. By the time the bank foreclosed on the individual owners, the vehicles were sufficiently dispersed to prove a major challenge to even the very best repo men. Rakow gave his to the Hell’s Angels (or was it the Black Panthers?), then told the bank where to find it. Weir totaled his by running it into a bus, and Bear’s fell victim to a red-light runner. Pigpen loved his, and kept up the payments. The rest were repossessed, mostly on the next New Year’s Eve when everyone was at work, or turned in, as Lesh’s was. Possibly due to karma, his had never worked well anyway.