A Long Strange Trip (37 page)

The Carousel had become a community center as much as a ballroom—the Black Panthers had a room, the Chicanos had an office—and so, inevitably, there was a community meeting. One issue concerned Big Brother and the Holding Company, which had played three shows. John Cooke, the Big Brother road manager, worked for Albert Grossman, and no matter what the band felt, he couldn’t not take the money. On the street, this translated to “Janis just ripped off the Carousel.” At the community meeting Janis came in, so busy that she’d not been able to eat, and sat chomping on a baguette and sausage, before asking simply, “What do you want?” And no one, not Rakow, not the other managers, no one, had any idea of how to answer. “Do you want music or money? Do you want me to do a benefit or just give you some bread?” And since no one really had a long-range plan, they never did take her up on the offer. McIntire felt that “everyone just wanted to bellyache because we were losing the place.” As Airplane manager Bill Thompson recalled it, Garcia was “the one guy who was like a philosopher, a guy who was higher than everybody else mentally, and he could bring everybody into the same circle, all the fucking nutcakes who were around.” It had worked for a while, but the problems had come to outweigh the energy. Thompson had never bought Rakow’s act, and thought he was a “rotten manager.”

On June 24 the charges from the bust of 710 were resolved. Rock Scully and Bob Matthews were fined $200 and Pigpen and Weir, the nonsmokers, were fined $100. At the courthouse Rock used the opportunity to plug the new album, which would be released the following month. “It’s beautiful. Wow, it’s great.” The next day, Tuesday, June 25, the managers and musicians met once again to discuss the future of the Carousel. “Like every meeting anybody ever had like that,” said photographer Bob Seidemann, “we all went home and nothing really happened.” One of Bill Graham’s favorite stories for many years would recount his flight to Ireland, complete with a planeful of nuns, to meet with Bill Fuller, the owner of the Carousel, and arrange a deal to take it over. However, one of the people who worked with him claimed that he never left San Francisco. In any case, Graham’s Fillmore Auditorium closed on July 4, and on July 5, the ballroom at Market and Van Ness opened as the Fillmore West, with former “owners” Jerry Garcia and Jorma Kaukonen backstage as the Butterfield Blues Band played.

“It served its purpose,” said McIntire. “Four months of the greatest loosest thing that ever, to my knowledge, happened anywhere . . . I don’t know that anything that outrageous can really sustain itself.”

Or, as the marquee read on June 25: “Nothing Lasts.”

21

Interlude: The Promoters

The Dead ordinarily utilized a tour coordinator (John Scher’s Monarch and later Metropolitan Entertainment on the East Coast, Bill Graham Presents on the West Coast) and a local promoter to arrange the hall, deal with insurance and unions, supply the security, supervise the advertising, and make sure the house was ready. It could be maddening. By Grateful Dead standards, some promoters were barely awake. At one gig in the deep South late in the eighties, the audience entrance process congealed because there weren’t enough doors open. When a Dead staff person suggested to the local promoter that opening more doors would be nice, the promoter remarked that it was all the fault of the hall manager, who’d never dealt with a sold-out house before. The staff member diplomatically refrained from pointing out that supervising the house was how the promoter earned his share of the proceeds.

That minor mess was trivial compared to the worst sin in rock history, when the promoter and road manager were having dinner together while the Who was going through its sound check. The crowd outside the hall was not organized or properly supervised, and when the people heard the sound check and concluded that the show had started, they tried to force their way into the hall, trampling eleven people to death. By contrast, one night in 1973 before a Dead concert at Long Island’s Nassau Coliseum, thousands of kids started pushing and shoving toward the doors. Bill Graham grabbed a bullhorn and went out to face the crowd alone. A boy mockingly called out, “Hey capitalist,” and Graham went into one of his truly great performances. Enraged, he dug a twenty-dollar bill from his sock and threw it at the kid’s feet before shredding his ticket. It quieted the crowd at least for a while, and very possibly prevented major problems.

The distrust for promoters was epitomized in a 1973 incident between crew member Ben Haller and Philadelphia promoter Allen Spivak. Miffed because the crew had been served spaghetti—the Dead’s contract called for high-protein dishes like steak and lobster—Haller collected leftovers from his, Lesh’s, and Ram Rod’s plates, and proceeded to dump them on Spivak’s head. Larry Magid, Spivak’s partner, wrote to road manager Sam Cutler to complain:

We had the set-up you wanted perfect. There couldn’t have been a complaint. In fact, the crew commented that it was the best set-up to date and that we finally had it together. The crew was given as many extra considerations as we could muster. Yet when Ben the light man didn’t like his dinner, that wasn’t even specified in the contract or ever asked for (The crew didn’t even work that day), he threw it at Allen Spivak . . . I didn’t hear him thank anyone for the filet for Thursday lunch or for the prime rib dinner at night . . . Even though we knew we were losing a lot of money, we still did it. We’ve had quite a few problems with your crew in the past. You say that the band knows that they’re animals but that they can’t do anything about the situation. All well and good, but they do represent you.

Cutler replied,

In the years to come, no doubt, we’ll all be able to laugh about it, but until we can laugh together, then I guess it will be hard for the Dead to work with you and Allen . . . allow me to finish with the conclusion that the Dead make their own bed, and thereafter they lie in it.

That they did; for the next three years they worked with another Philadelphia promoter at a much smaller venue, costing themselves a considerable amount of money.

In the final analysis, the most important promoter in Dead—and rock—history was Bill Graham, a brilliant showman who knew that what the Dead did musically was something he adored and coveted, even as he felt in his heart of hearts that the show was his and that the acts were subordinate to that. Moreover, for the two minutes that he was Father Time each New Year’s Eve, it really was his show. It was no wonder that the fights over the midnight moment would go so deep—in a bizarre switch, the Dead would become the promoter, since it was their stage, and Bill the artist. The critical difference was, the Dead paid for the moment. Now, heaven for any Dead Head was a Bill Graham–produced Dead show. Instead of cold hot dogs, they got vegetarian goodies. The security was gentler, the ambience more pleasant. But Graham’s gnawing, neurotic need to do a better job included the need to prove he was better by pinching off not a pound but at least an ounce of flesh. In his autobiography he blamed the bands. “People forcing me to lie about what food cost for the act in order to make my two cents from the dollar. Being forced to not work straight. I always
wanted
to deal straight. Even though people would say, ‘Well, aren’t you one of the masters of the game?’ Defensively, yeah. I had to get real good at it or go down the drain as a businessman.” “It’s not the money,” went the eternal BGP catchphrase, “it’s the money.” Once, Scrib grumbled about Bill to a Dead Head visiting from New York, and she grew scandalized. She happened to be a stagecraft professional, and Scrib asked her what she would have charged to build the float that had carried Bill as Father Time on the previous night. “It would cost $3,000,” she said, “and I’d bid $5,000.” “Bill tried to charge us $30,000—and it was built by his own company.”

Early in the 1990s a federal grand jury indicted members of Philadelphia’s Electric Factory Concerts (EFC) for fraud in a scheme that involved kickbacks from the local stagehand union. The Dead were among the victimized, yet they continued to patronize EFC. Another promoter once asked Scrib why the Dead did so. “We assume that every promoter steals from us,” he answered. “What else can we do?” There are two ways to cheat a band. In a general admission show the promoter can sell tickets that are not accounted for. The other method is to pad the expenses. “I looked at the settlement,” said Danny Rifkin of an early-eighties Bill Graham Presents show at the Greek Theater at U.C. Berkeley, “and I noticed that the statement was in two typefaces. It was a Xerox of the bill from Cal for some expenses, but obviously [someone at Bill Graham Presents] had cut it in half and pasted in a new set of numbers, but the typeface was different than the first one. So I called Cal, I forget the guy’s name . . . And he couldn’t lie, you know. He didn’t want to implicate anybody, but the university—they’re so strict. He said, ‘Well, our rent is dahdahdahdah.’ And then I started really detectiving and checking out every expense, and calling people, looking at bills, and going back year after year after year. And that’s kind of it. Then I confronted . . . Bill, I guess. He actually paid us some of the money back, in twenty-dollar bills under the table. Like about $150,000 . . . Then I also found him cheating at Oakland Auditorium—also on the rent.”

The other promoters were a varied bunch, ranging from the patrician Bostonian Don Law, whose father had helped record Robert Johnson, to former football player Frank Russo in Providence, to Dave Williams, of Cellar Door Concerts in Washington, D.C. For all his many shows with the Dead, Williams spoke to Garcia exactly once. When the road manager told him that he couldn’t use a video screen at a show at the Capitol Centre he went to Garcia, who said, “You want to use it, use it, I don’t fuckin’ care. You can’t see anything. The stage is too dark.” Garcia was right, and Williams didn’t repeat the process. Too big to intimidate—a former bouncer, Dave rather preferred to give than to receive any intimidation—Williams found the Dead’s staff professional, noting that where other bands spent thousands on the finest wines and liquors, the Dead spent freely on toys, gadgets, stuff. For the Dead, the important thing was stability. Year after year they used the same promoters, valuing loyalty and responsible competence above all. Even as their status rose, their percentages did not.

The only promoter to become friendly with the band was John Scher. Lacking Graham’s genius and flair—and also his anxiety-producing
Sturm und Drang
—Scher was the reliable, trusted friend who took care of business. Younger than the band members, he was born in 1950 in New Jersey, booked the entertainment for his high school junior prom, and was a promoter ever after. In college at LIU Brooklyn in the late sixties, he became part of the network of agents and promoters who would enter the New York arena after Graham closed the Fillmore East in 1971, a group that included Jim Koplik and Shelley Finkel in Connecticut and Howard Stein at the Capital in Port Chester. Over the years he would advise the band in its dealings on many levels, from negotiations with the record company to touring Europe. Once, they even asked him to replace Bill Graham.

After years of frustration with Graham, Dead booker/manager Richard Loren threw in the towel and asked John Scher to act as the Dead’s agent in putting on the April 22, 1979, show at Spartan Stadium, in San Jose, California. But the rock world was divided into territories, and Scher, who worked in New Jersey, assumed Graham would object. John had always accepted Graham’s preeminence in the field, and would not get involved without his blessing. To John, Bill said, “It’s true, I can’t deal with those crazy people anymore. I welcome your participation.” With Phil Lesh’s words in his ears—“We’re not paying for the fucking set”—John went ahead, setting up basic parameters—ticket price, on-sale date, etc.—with Danny Scher (no relation to John), one of Bill’s associates, but not the expenses, which was the rub. What Lesh had referred to was that each different stadium show paid for the construction of a set, but since large parts of the set tended to be reused, it became a significant source of profit for Bill Graham Presents. About the third time a band paid for a set, the band members, if they were paying attention at all, began to complain to their management. (Of course, few bands had the clout to play three major outdoor shows.)

Weeks passed and tickets went on sale, but no list of expenses came to John. Finally, he called Bill. “Bill, I’m having a real problem. Your guy Danny Scher is just a liar. Three weeks now, he’s never sent me the expenses.” And Bill Graham went well and truly off. For John, “it was my first experience with a Bill roar. He was berserk. ‘I have to deal with fuckin’ Jersey? To book my band. You motherfucking ingrate scumbag . . .’ It was a nonstop lunatic binge for twenty minutes, and then a hang-up. I called Loren and said, ‘I quit.’ They did the gig, and they paid for the set, and from then on, my relationship with Bill was acrimonious.”

In the end, it was Bill they borrowed money from, Bill they relied on. In the 1970s, he was their bank, lending them the funds to get through dry spells. At a 1987 interview Graham spent several hours speaking of how painful he found the Dead’s refusal to let him get too close. It just
killed
Bill that these children would not embrace him fully, and he never ever let up trying to get them to do so. At the time of the interview, he was feeling good about the band, because they’d recently had a meeting with him and asked him to consider a Dead tour of China. At the same time, he’d brought up the idea of the Dead playing at the Golden Gate Bridge’s fiftieth anniversary. Graham chortled, “Jerry stood up and said ‘I like this idea, and I don’t want to get paid for it.’ ” Graham was sooo happy. “Trust at a very special level, that gives me hope.” The trust was that the band had met with him without management. “It was the first [one-to-one] meeting I’ve ever had with the Grateful Dead. Evah! Evah!”

And alongside the ongoing, eternally stalemated war between the Dead and Bill, there was a succession of endearing moments, from the time he tried to fix Garcia’s guitar at the Trips Festival to Bill’s theatrical introduction to the band’s first performance in San Francisco after a two-year break in the middle 1970s. As the lights went down, a Gregorian chant played over the sound system and a white organ rose from the orchestra pit played by a hooded figure who resembled the fiddling skeleton-monk on the cover of the recent album
Blues for Allah.
Three monks with candles walked down the aisle toward the stage. Each person with a seat on the aisle had been given a lighter, so that the monks walked through a wall of flame. The curtain rose and Bob Weir began to sing “The Music Never Stopped.”
That’s
showbiz.