A Long Strange Trip (38 page)

22

Forward into the Fog (7/68–2/15/69)

On July 18, 1968, Warner Bros. released the Dead’s second al-bum,
Anthem of the Sun,
and what should have been a triumph was effectively a disaster. Rolling Stone would call it “an extraordinary event,” comparing the blend of electronic and electric music to Edgard Varèse. England’s New Musical Express was quite accurate: “It’s so completely unlike anything you ever heard before that it’s practically a new concept in music. It’s haunting, it’s pretty, it’s infinite . . . a complete mindblower.” So much for the satisfaction of getting good reviews. The band was in catastrophic disarray. This was not an uncommon state of affairs, but a month after the release they would hold a meeting in which they would at least theoretically fire Weir and Pigpen, and that was unique. The new album was much too strange to be commercially viable, so Warner Bros. was less than enthused. None of the band members were all that thrilled with the final result, declaring that they had “lost it in the mix.” Weir was particularly dissatisfied with the version of his song, and the cold stream of criticism that he was getting from Lesh, and to a lesser extent Garcia, would shut down his compositional creativity for some years.

The album title had come from one of the strange books that always floated around 710, James Churchward’s
The Lost Continent of Mu,
a piece of automatic writing that traced the influence of the mythical Mu on, among other things, Egyptian musical instruments, about which no one actually knew anything. One instrument Churchward imagined, the dead throat, was made of a skull and was used to perform the mythical “Anthem of the Sun.”

The album cover’s origins were almost as esoteric as its name. On the previous New Year’s Eve, Phil’s friend Bill Walker had undergone a psychedelic experience in the Valley of Fire, an eerily beautiful patch of desert near Las Vegas, and from his visions he began a portrait of the Dead as a hydra-headed Buddha springing from the muse. Early in the spring, Walker stopped by the Potrero Theater to tell Lesh about his painting, walking in on a particularly acrimonious argument over money, management, or something else, and was greeted by Lesh, who came over and shrugged, “Well, I guess that’s it,” indicating to Walker that the band was breaking up. Perhaps not. Instead, a few weeks later Phil told Bill that the partially completed portrait, which had been painted on a window shade glued onto wood, would be the cover. Walker continued to work on it, using layer after layer of paint, creating images of the band members that were not portraits but ritual masks. Eventually, the Warner Bros. art director approved it, still unfinished.

Possibly the oddest thing about this most unusual of albums was the single. Released in May, two months before the album, it was “Dark Star,” backed with “Born Cross-Eyed.” Years later Paul Williams would cite it as a “perfect two-and-a-half-minute distillation,” with “originality, power, and enduring appeal,” but few people ever heard that version of the song. Of the sixteen hundred copies Warner Bros. shipped, only five hundred were sold.

Early in August the band went to Southern California for dates in San Diego and the Newport Pop Festival, at the Orange County fairgrounds. It was a crummy gig on a flat, dusty field, with insufficient facilities for the 100,000 who had gathered there, and the primary amusement of the day came when the Dead assaulted the Jefferson Airplane with cream pies. As the bands gathered just a few miles from his hometown, Richard Nixon was enjoying the convention that would lead four days later to his nomination for president. Every young American, however, knew that the real show would come three weeks later, at the Democratic convention in Chicago. In New York, Emmett Grogan and Peter Coyote had ensconced themselves in Albert Grossman’s office to work telephones in an effort to dissuade young Americans from going to Chicago, having correctly anticipated that a bloodbath was in store for protesters. In January, Jerry Rubin, Abbie Hoffman, and Paul Krassner had created the essentially mythical Youth International Party, the Yippies, and shortly afterward issued a call for a Festival of Life to take place in Chicago during the convention. The Yippie party had no members, but its leaders were certainly shrewd media manipulators, and their prime dupe was the old-school mayor of Chicago, Richard Daley, and his police department, which came to believe every Yippie fantasy.

As the election of 1968 approached, America had broken in half over the Vietnam War. On one side was the World War II generation, people in their forties and older, veterans for whom the pivot of their lives had been service to their country, and for whom opposition to the war was unthinkable. On the other side were the young, who had lost faith in the military and the war. Eighty percent of the votes in the Democratic primaries that year were antiwar. As the convention approached, Daley’s mind was captured by the Yippies, and he fell into rampant paranoia: LSD in the water supply, Yippie girls as hookers who would give LSD to delegates, Yippie studs to seduce delegates’ wives and daughters. The Yippies proclaimed in a press release, “We are dirty, smelly, grimy, foul . . . we will piss and shit and fuck in public . . . we will be constantly stoned or tripping on every drug known to man.”

In the days before the convention, the Soviet Union invaded Czechoslovakia, inducing further tension worldwide. Just three months before, an honest-to-God, in-the-streets revolution had seemed possible in France. As Americans huddled around their television sets, watching the war in Vietnam and the Chicago convention, the divisions grew ever deeper. Barbed wire surrounded the convention hall. Daley’s police goons beat reporters, packed the galleries to shout down opposition and roar support for his candidate, Hubert Humphrey, then cheered when Daley responded to Senator Abraham Ribicoff’s denunciation of the violence by calling him a “Jew son-of-a-bitch.” In the end, ten thousand people came to Chicago to demonstrate, of whom perhaps one-sixth were undercover police and army intelligence agents. On August 28, the demonstrators massed in front of the Hilton Hotel and chanted, “The whole world is watching,” as the Chicago police used rifle butts, clubs, tear gas, and Mace to beat them into the pavement. The world did watch, and a majority of Americans, terrified by the images the Yippies had promoted, supported the police.

The Dead spent the month playing music at home, and while their sympathies were with the demonstrators, they were too apolitical and also far too streetwise to ever dream of tangling with the Chicago Police Department. Apart from that, they were stumbling about in a mental fog, the aftermath of the closing of their home, the Carousel. Healy had left the band to work with Quicksilver in Hawaii, and Owsley had returned to his role as the Dead’s soundman. Jonathan Riester was now the road manager, and he’d brought with him Jon McIntire, who was given the job of creating some sort of order in the Dead’s business files. Jon began by going to the attic at 710, where he found shopping bags choked with nearly three years of receipts. Neither Rifkin nor Scully had cared about details like bookkeeping, and the band’s finances were a ludicrous mess. Rock remained as manager, but his strength was always longer on inspiration than organization. In August Jon found some office space above a liquor store on the corner of Union and Fillmore, and they moved in. At the same time, Rock, McIntire, Riester, and Kanegson rented what became known as the Manager’s House, on Hermit Lane, in Kentfield, Marin County. By now, their use of 710 was pretty well at an end, and their rehearsal time at the Potrero Theater was severely limited due to noise complaints. As working musicians, they were torn with dissension about who should be in the band, and they had no place to prepare for shows to come.

The August band meeting where Pigpen and Weir were fired was effective, if not in the way that it might at first have appeared. The catalyst for the event was far more in their personalities than in the specifics of performance. The band’s dynamics started from Garcia, whose presence was dominant, both emotionally and musically, but who refused to lead. Next came Lesh, because the two of them had bonded as musicians in a way that held primacy among all the other links. They were thunder and lightning, and though they needed the rest of the band quite as much as each other—and knew it—they were, realistically, musical leaders. Lesh was impatient and demanding, and the previous fall the band had “sat me down in a circle and asked me to back off a little, from being so intense during rehearsals.” That August it was again Lesh who tried to make things happen. Owsley recorded the meeting, and it was revealing. Weir’s obliviousness was simply too much. Two years after he’d quit taking LSD, he was still wide-eyed, and it showed in his music. Instead of nailing a solid chopping rhythm, he played what Hart called “little waterfalls” that were “all over the map.” Pigpen’s blues had little to do, musically, with what the rest of the band was doing, and his drinking kept him from effectively working to make a larger contribution.

In the meeting, Rock Scully took the lead: “. . . the situation as it exists right now, [as it] is musically, depends on four guys. The weight is on four cats in this band, not six as the band is now formed. It seems like the music is being carried to a certain level, then staying there. I notice it mostly from the way you guys respond to your own music, and you guys tire of music that has much more potential, many more possibilities, too soon . . . it never gets any better. Matter of fact, it begins to get worse. Very fast, too fast for the material, because the material is complex and groovy and much further out than most music is these days . . .”

Garcia agreed. “All you gotta do is listen to the tapes there and test them,” and Lesh chorused, “You can’t really get but two or three of them
on,
man, even those are with reservation; I mean I only like them with reservation . . . So after this weekend, we decided that’s the end of that. No more.”

And there was silence. Weir’s reaction to Phil’s criticism was a stubborn refusal to respond, and his quietude was typical. Rock continued, “[Bob] had no words then, and you see, it’s a week later and you still have no words. It doesn’t matter, that happens to be where you’re at.”

Garcia remarked, “Asking him for explanations is like not where it’s at . . . Just the whole conflict is not where it’s at under any circumstances.”

At last, Weir spoke. “The idea of faction is not where it’s at . . . I’m losing control of words here . . . they are falling apart in my mouth. I’ve said all I can say for now. That’s more or less why I say I have no words.”

Rock replied, “You’d never have to say a word if it were in your music,” and Weir riposted, obscurely, “I’d never have to say a word if it was in the way I tied my shoes.”

In the classic avoid-confrontation-at-all-costs Dead manner, Mickey hurriedly called for an adjournment. “I think it’s time for me to make a motion. Unless anybody else wants to talk about anything.”

“A motion? What’s that?” asked Weir.

“Split,” said Hart. “. . . not unless anybody wants to talk about anything. Not unless there is anything else on the agenda?”

Scully herded the conversation back on track. “Well, we haven’t talked about anything more immediate than an EP and this record, really, in terms of Bob and Pig and I think that you guys oughta make your intentions clear—you haven’t to them so far. You were planning to, Mickey, but you are now making a motion to adjourn something that was started and not finished.”

“I thought it was just all said.”

“No,” said Rock. “You can’t just think those things, man, you have to say them when it’s this kind of scene.”

Garcia once more tried to sum up. “Well, here’s where it’s at, man. You guys know that the gigs haven’t been any fun, it hasn’t been no good playing it, it’s because we’re at different levels of playing, we’re thinking different thoughts and we just aren’t playing together . . .”

Lesh again tried to push the issue. “I really don’t want to work in that form [six-man band], man. Really . . . All four of us don’t want to work that way.”

In a last attempt to focus, Rock pushed Garcia to respond. “Listen, man, why did you not correct him? Why did I have to correct him? . . . he’s speaking for all four musicians. Jerry . . .”

And the leader who wouldn’t lead murmured, “Oh, yeah, right.”

As Owsley later observed, “You can’t fire your left hand because it doesn’t write as nicely as your right.” Though Weir and Pigpen were theoretically fired, they continued to perform at gigs.

On the last day of August, Jon McIntire got a phone call from friends in the band It’s a Beautiful Day, telling him that the scene at the Sky River Rock Festival was a groove, and the Dead should come on up. Rural, local, and aesthetically hip, Sky River had a small audience of no more than twenty thousand, and acts that were far more diverse than just rock bands. The festival management made them welcome, so off they went the next day. It was a delightful jaunt, and the festival’s closing jam, which featured Big Mama Thornton, James Cotton, and, at various times, Mickey Hart, Pigpen, Kreutzmann, and Garcia, was proof of the upside of spontaneity. Nine days later a gig in San Jose with Frank Zappa was canceled due to poor ticket sales, even though such audience as there was had already entered.

Undaunted, they began recording their third album early in September at Pacific Recording, south of San Francisco in San Mateo, where Bob Matthews had landed a job. They began with “St. Stephen,” which they’d been playing for three months. Along with “China Cat” and “Alligator,” it had been written as a lyric but with Hunter’s own melody, and Hunter felt the “radiance” of it over the two nights it took him. The band had given it a magnificent setting, with Lesh creating the bridge. It was complex to sing and difficult to play, but absolutely gorgeous, a medieval vision set inside a psychedelic ambience. Shortly after, they began work on “Cosmic Charley,” which Garcia later dismissed as overdone and clumsy, but which Hunter argued was difficult to play because of its tuning. It was the first time Hunter and Garcia had actually written together, and it was not yet a smooth process—the effortless matchup of lyric and music in “Dark Star” was so far an anomaly. Garcia had a melody and changes for “Charley,” and he would play them to Hunter, who’d write something that Garcia, he recalled, would usually reject. Eventually, they settled on a song that Garcia always had reservations about.