A Long Strange Trip (36 page)

Much—but not all—of the mixdown was done at Columbus Recording in San Francisco, which had three two-tracks, a mono machine, a three-track, and the hot eight-track machine. First they had to convert what they had into the format appropriate to the studio where they were working, eventually getting it all in eight-track. Then, in a collage approach more commonly (and easily!) applied to
musique concrète,
where the music is arrhythmic and atonal, they began to assemble two-and three-bar chunks of music in bits and pieces to create what Garcia would call “an enhanced nonrealistic representation.” “How can we make it sound purple?” he once asked. All of this anticipated things that wouldn’t exist for years, variable-speed gizmos, uninvented electronic widgets. So Healy, who had a hot soldering iron on hand at all times, did it the hard way. He would put fiddler’s rosin on his thumb, rub it against the flywheel of the capstan motor of one tape deck, and, listening to two versions of the same song, slow one down until they synchronized. The hand-done result was something premodern and consequently unique. In the background the band would be cheering him on, rooting for him to find the moment. “Yeah, there it is, you got it, you got it.” By now, there was no one around except the band; the adults had all given up. Decades later physicists would describe in chaos theory what the Dead were living as they mixed; different versions would (sometimes) come out at the same musical place (though at different times). At the end “The Other One” dissolved into an ocean of sound, out of which came “New Potato Caboose,” so that, in effect, it never did end. (Perhaps it’s playing still.) Garcia would recall once being fascinated by phase distortion after hearing a stereo tape in which one side bled through to the other. As he said, “We really mixed [the album] for the hallucinations, you know?”

Phil’s friend Tom Constanten worked with them on prepared piano, in which he produced curious sounds by wedging coins (Dutch dimes were preferred), combs, or clothespins in the strings. They used colored noise he’d recorded with Pousseur in Belgium, and the ringing sound in the “We Leave the Castle” section of “The Other One” was from a tape that was cut. In Los Angeles he’d dropped a gyroscope on the piano’s sounding board and almost destroyed Hassinger’s hearing and sanity. Part of their inspiration was Charles Ives, who composed to reflect the way music would fade in and out as bands marched past each other in a park. And that winter, on a trip to New York, most of the band went to Carnegie Hall to see Ives’s Fourth Symphony—twice.

Borrowing heavily from Miles Davis’s
Sketches of Spain,
Lesh threw in a little trumpet on “Born Cross-Eyed.” Many of the editing techniques they used were, he thought, basically cinematic—jump cuts from the drummers to four Grateful Deads, cross-fades, and so forth. In the end, the album became a performance of mixes, or different performances of the same song. What was most important was not what they did, but the level they did it at. And it was great. Despite all the edits and copies, the sound of the album was superb. Garcia’s voice was mournful and in control, the songs sketched infinite possibilities, the cosmic coda after “Cryptical”—“He had to die”—echoed John Donne’s bell that tolls for us all, and Pigpen put down so much greasy funk in “Alligator” that it was a miracle the vinyl didn’t squirt off the turntable. They were on the edge, over the edge, beyond sight of the edge. They were reinventing themselves and their music on the fly, at a wonderful level of creativity.

On March 31, 1968, President Lyndon Johnson bowed to political reality and announced that he would not seek a second term. Two days later, Eugene McCarthy won the Wisconsin primary. Two days later, on April 4, Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated, triggering riots in 125 U.S. cities that left 46 dead and 20,000 arrested, and put 55,000 federal troops on the putatively civilian streets of America. Two days later, Eldridge Cleaver of the Black Panther Party was wounded in a gun battle with Oakland police that killed seventeen-year-old Panther Bobby Hutton.

Against a backdrop of social and political chaos and crisis, the Dead played on, in a fifty-fifty balance of benefits, paid gigs, and . . . other. On March 7, the Dead performed for the Diggers on a truck outside San Quentin prison. On March 11, they opened for Cream at an auditorium in Sacramento. After a brilliant Dead set, Cream came out to top them and attacked their instruments so hard they blew out their speakers; the Dead had to lend them equipment to get through the show. On April 3, the Dead played at a KMPX strike benefit. In mid-April they left for some paying gigs—their pay rate was by now up to a barely respectable $2,500—which began in Miami Beach, where they also worked on the album at Criteria Studios. Unfortunately, their work at Criteria was interrupted by half a pound of black African Daga pot, and they accomplished less than they might have.

After a stop in Philadelphia, they passed through New York in early May in a visit that would cover much ground and become an essential part of their legend. On April 30, police had entered the strikebound Columbia University campus, arresting dozens at the occupied administration building. The campus was shut down, each entrance guarded by a gaggle of New York’s finest. Enter Rock Scully, with a brilliant idea. He called the
Village Voice,
got connected with the student strikers, and offered them a treat, a Grateful Dead concert on the steps of the student union in the middle of the campus. The band had no political investment in the strike, but an adventure was an adventure, and facing the prospect of a caper pulled off by a desperado gang . . . it was like offering drugs to an addict. The strikers started salivating at the idea of a powerful P.A. system, and said sure, though they were told that the P.A. would be used only for music. Cramming themselves and their equipment into a Wonder bread truck, the Dead pulled up at the student union loading dock, swept in, and were playing before the police or administration could object. For Weir, who was intellectually a small
-c
communist, the strike leaders were dogmatic egotists, drawn to the microphones like “moths to lightbulbs— it felt so good to have your voice get biiiig.” Several times, leaders would cut off a song with the statement “Quiet down, we have an important announcement,” which would be followed by unfocused rant. At length, Weir booted one strike leader in the ass just to get enough room on the stage to see the other band members, and realized that his audience liked it. From then on, there was a wonderful feeling of generational, if not precisely political, solidarity, and everyone there knew it was an exceptionally cool moment.

Two days later the Dead played free in Central Park, this time with the Airplane and Butterfield Blues Band, and the
Village Voice
writer loved it. “No tricks, just music, hard, lyric, joyous—pure and together, dense and warm as a dark summer country night. There’s the Dead and then there’s everybody else . . . Then the audience not in rows, but en masse, was up, dancing, screaming frenzied . . .” For Don McNeill, the young critic who covered the emerging youth culture for the
Voice,
it felt as though Central Park had become the Panhandle. “The coasts linked . . . total release, surrender, exhilaration, a new ritual of energy spent that I’d only seen before at the first Easter Be-In.” The
New York Times
noted that the Dead “are extremely driving, amplified, and hirsute, even by San Francisco standards.” After their free show, the band played three nights at the Electric Circus. The visit ended, at least for Mickey, in a jam with Jack Casady, Steve Winwood, and Jimi Hendrix at Electric Ladyland studios.

On their return home, most of the band completed their moves to Marin County. Pigpen remained on Belvedere Street, but Phil found a cabin in Fairfax that had been a gatekeeper’s lodge for Golden Gate Park architect John McLaren and was reportedly still visited by the spirits of some of McLaren’s guests, like Jack London and Luther Burbank. Jerry and M.G. moved to a small home in the redwoods in Larkspur, Kreutzmann to Lucas Valley Road, with Weir and Hart in Novato. In addition to their individual homes, they still had a connection to Olompali, which had been taken over the previous December by their Ashbury Street neighbor, Don McCoy, who had inherited money and set up a commune at Olompali that taught children in the manner of the British experimental school Summerhill. Nicknamed by the students the Not School, it served eleven kids and included twenty-five people. Spiritual but not formally religious, it was a good place that summer, with the Dead visiting at times to play music by the pool. Mickey boarded a horse there and Lydia d’Fonsecca’s kids were residents, so it felt like an extension of the band’s scene. At the same time, the Airplane, rather more flush, purchased 2400 Fulton Street in San Francisco, a four-story mansion with mahogany paneling and crystal chandeliers. For a while, until 710 was completely shut down, the Airplane even shared the services of the Corsons and their friends Eddie and Suzie Washington, who’d formed GUSS (Grand Ultimate Steward Service) to clean and cater and so forth.

By May it was clear that the Carousel had increasingly hard times ahead. The assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. had hurt the music business everywhere, and even when the Dead or the Airplane played, only Friday and Saturday would sell out. Rakow’s booking policy was not particularly commercial. Having Thelonious Monk play was certifiably hip, but not profitable. The show with Johnny Cash was his only nonsellout in years, simply because it was at the wrong venue. On May 1, the Diggers threw the Free City Convention.

Philosophically, the Diggers had remained consistent. Among other things, they advocated

1. free identity, the ownership ethic of identity in terms of possession is a prison wall built by money, burn money and find your free identity, you are beautiful. . . . 3. free families, the ethic of ownership defines family responsibilities and the education of children. break out of prison / burn money / evolve free families. . . . 5. free myths, the myth of gold, while mystically interesting, is unsatisfying because it requires the ethic of identity in material possession to sustain its power, break out of prison, burn money, you are the myth.

When the Diggers put their philosophy into action at the Carousel, all hell broke loose. At one point someone started a fire in a giant seashell, and Rakow demonstrated his objections to the idea by pissing on it. No less dismayed, Kanegson contributed water. Led by Jefferson Poland, the founder of the Sexual Freedom League, the evening dissolved into a large-scale sexual encounter, or at least that was the way many remembered it. There was something more public in store. That night someone snuck up and changed the marquee to read “Free Cunt,” with predictable reactions from the city, local citizens, and the police.

On May 15 the Hell’s Angels presented, as the poster read, “In Tear-Ass Sound and Color,” Big Brother and the Holding Company, which left so much beer on the floor that it shorted out the lights of the car dealer below. Theoretically in charge of security, Bert Kanegson arrived, took one look at his cherished floor, realized he wasn’t in charge, and went home. Members of the SFPD’s Tactical Squad came to the top of the stairs, where Riester said, “If you come in here, you’re going to start a riot.” Agreeing, they left. Three weeks later the police were less cooperative, refusing to allow the Dead and the Airplane to play in Golden Gate Park for three thousand people as a wake for Senator Robert F. Kennedy, assassinated the night before after winning the California presidential primary.

As the Carousel teetered, so did the equilibrium of the Dead, who were experiencing great internal dissension even as they unknowingly found their second home, the place where their playing career would truly be launched. Their two engagements away from the Carousel during this period clearly defined their boundaries. Late in May, they flew to St. Louis for two nights, traveling two thousand miles to sell fewer than four hundred tickets. The promoter, of course, lost his shirt. Their salvation and their future came at the other gig.

In mid-June, the Dead went to New York City to make their first appearance at Bill Graham’s Fillmore East, the former Village Theater, on Second Avenue in the East Village. The hole in the roof that had been there in December was now fixed. In fact, the Fillmore East would come to be the premier rock venue in the United States, and no band would play there more often or more successfully than the Dead. Graham had finessed Albert Grossman and local promoter Ron Delsener for the site and spent large sums to make the room work. It was not a ballroom but an old movie palace, with ornate murals and a gilt chandelier, and it became a theater with style. As the house manager remarked, the audience “got up when I wanted them to get up, and they sat down when I wanted them to sit down.” Except that “the controlled environment thing always slipped at a Grateful Dead show. You just really couldn’t do anything with it, you know?”

At 2,600 seats, it was far larger than most of the other rooms in the country, and more important, it was a short cab ride from the head offices of most of the music business. The most important person in rock in 1968 was not Bill Graham or Clive Davis of Columbia Records, but a man named Frank Barsalona, who’d formed Premier Talent, the most influential booking agency in the business. The most important room in the business of rock was, however, Graham’s office at Fillmore East. Barsalona, Warner’s Mo Ostin and Joe Smith when they were in town, Atlantic’s Ahmet Ertegun—Bill’s outer room was their hangout, where they would talk with the ushers and the stagehands to see who was hot and who was not, and with each other, further developing a business. Around now, the Psychedelic Supermarket was replaced by the Boston Tea Party, and a young man named Don Law began to manage it. There was the Electric Factory in Philadelphia, the Aragon in Chicago, and so forth. A new rock vaudeville circuit opened, and the bands became part of a new network.

The Dead returned to San Francisco, where the Carousel was in deep financial trouble. One night the police chained the front doors shut. Rakow and Riester were the only ones with keys, and Ron called Jonathan and warned him. Riester went in the back door, got to the safe, and hid what money was left on the catwalk above the stage. Then he went out and talked with the police. Riester was not aware of it, but Rakow had slipped in after him. As Riester stood considering the situation with the police, he thought of what Rakow had said: “It’s real estate, a civil matter. They can’t do this, they won’t do this.” “Of course,” Riester added, “I was used to Rakow by this time.” His ruminations were interrupted when Rakow ran down the stairs from the inside, a heavy metal table in his hands, and threw it through the glass doors in an act of incredible theater. And at New York levels of rapid-fire delivery, he refused to come out. “I’m on my own property, you can’t make me. This is a civil matter and it’s in the Constitution.” And by all that is remarkable, the police unchained the door!