A Long Strange Trip (40 page)

The circumstances varied dramatically. Texas, for instance, wasn’t ready for the San Francisco sound, and there was often trouble. One night Quicksilver opened, playing very well. This challenged the Dead, who responded with a fine set that was abbreviated when the police pulled the plug, a not-uncommon event in those days. Furious, Ron Polte shouted at the promoter, “Those guys earned that fucking encore,” and found himself being tackled by a police officer. The ever-volatile Mickey Hart grabbed a mallet and was about to give his gong a whack when he noticed two things in quick succession. One was that he’d get an inconveniently located cop on the backswing, which would further ignite an angry audience. The second thing he saw was that Garcia had managed to interpose himself between the officer and his percussionist. The gong went un-whacked, the cop’s skull remained intact, and after an
a cappella
“We Bid You Goodnight,” the Dead escaped the Lone Star State.

Sometimes the rub came from the other bands. The Dead once opened for Country Joe and the Fish at Fillmore East, where there were always two shows nightly. As Melton recalled it, his band went on first for the first show, and he went to Phil and insisted that the Dead open the second show so that Country Joe and the Fish could close. As Melton sleepily went onstage to plug in around 3 A.M., he concluded that there were about five people left in the audience. Another time, again in Texas, he was approached by Ram Rod, who announced that the police had been following them—there seemed to be some marijuana issues—over the past few shows, and could the Dead please open? “Are you foxing us? Are you gonna play another three-hour set?” Ram Rod didn’t know how to lie, so Barry and Joe agreed that “Hey, they’re our brothers, we gotta be nice.” The Dead went on, played forty minutes, packed, and split. Just as Country Joe and the Fish went on, police blanketed the entire backstage, thinking that C.J. and the Fish were the Dead. Eventually, Joe and Barry got the confusion cleared up, but they learned a lesson: Ram Rod was always truthful, but “never trust a Prankster” was always good advice.

Bands the Dead didn’t know were even more likely to catch it. Early in January 1969 the new band Led Zeppelin put out its first album and toured the United States. Zep guitarist Jimmy Page said, “It was the Fillmore West in San Francisco when we knew we’d really broken through. It was just
bang
!” In the long run, Zep would be known as the most decadent, demonic, and brutal band of all, satyrs whose arrival produced the sound of “garter belts sliding up young thighs all over [town],” as their chief groupie gushed before going on to enumerate the whips in Page’s suitcase. While in San Francisco for their Fillmore West show, Zep went over to Herb Greene’s studio on Laguna Street for a photo session. During the shoot, Greene heard from the Dead that they, too, needed a new picture. Zep said sure, let them come over, and lived to regret it. Pig came in wearing Mickey’s .22 Ruger pistol, and when the wait bored him, he began to fire it off. He was, Weir recalled, “using it as punctuation. A shot through the ceiling was a period on a sentence. He wasn’t particularly impassioned by it. He was just fuckin’ around. He wasn’t trying to get on anyone’s nerves, he wasn’t trying to scare anybody . . . He was quoting
Pogo
at the time, he was big on doing that, his favorite comic strip. I’m thinking, Herbie’s gotta be loving this. We didn’t even see [Led Zeppelin] leave. ‘Hey, what happened to those guys?’ ” Herb never did get paid for Zep’s session.

A week later the Dead found themselves in an even more bizarre place, on the set of the television show
Playboy After Dark,
joining Sid Caesar, astrologer Sidney Omarr, and Hugh Hefner. The Dead were not impressed. Even the set’s bookshelves were “filled with mindless books not even worth stealing,” thought T.C., and Garcia found Hefner “wooden.” The premise of the show was that the TV audience was invited to see a party at Hef’s house, complete with attractive male and female models standing around in the background while Hef chatted with the special guests. What no one at the show knew was that it was widely considered to be a poor idea to eat or drink anything around the Grateful Dead. There was a coffee urn, with cups lined up, and Hagen and Riester went by with eyedroppers, also making sure to acknowledge Hefner’s personal mug of Pepsi. The routine delays of any show combined on this one with the built-in time lag incurred by having Bear as soundman. Then the coffee kicked in. Gradually, it became obvious that there was a new glow in the air. Things began to get odder and odder. Technicians began to stare up into the lights. The male extras began to loosen their ties, and the women started to loosen their tops, their makeup melting along with their inhibitions. The Dead played “Mountains of the Moon” splendidly, and as Phil and Kreutzmann left, Hefner stopped them and said, eyes bright, “I want to thank you for your special gift.”

Not everyone found the Dead’s presence so amusing. Airline clerks, for example. “Ten minutes after takeoff time,” wrote journalist Michael Lydon, “and the passengers wait in two clumps. Clump one, the big one, is ordinary human beings . . . Clump two is the Dead, manic, dirty, hairy, noisy, a bunch of drunken Visigoths in cowboy hats . . . Pigpen has just lit Bob Weir’s paper on fire, and the cinders blow around their feet. Phil is at his twitchiest . . . Jerry discards cigarette butts as if the world was his ashtray . . . Over on the left in the cargo area, a huge rented truck pulls up with the Dead’s equipment, 90 pieces of extra luggage. Like clowns from a car, amp after amp after drum case is loaded onto dollies and wheeled to the jet’s belly. It dawns on Clump One all at once that it is those arrogant heathens with all their outrageous gear that are making the plane late . . . It dawns on the heathens too, but they dig it, shouting to the quippies to tote that amp, lift that organ.”

On another occasion, Dan Healy and his girlfriend could not sit together on a sold-out flight, and she cursed the stewardess. Lesh laughed. “I wonder how long it’ll take to get us off this plane,” he said. About two and a half seconds. A police officer arrived and said, “Grateful Dead. Up.” Danny Rifkin approached the cop and said, “Can I talk to you man-to-man?” “You stand over there,” came the reply, “and get away from me.” Poor Riester—road managing Visigoths was no joke. On the most benign level, he had Weir, the youngster, the prank-loving pain in the ass. “At LAX once,” Riester said, “I’m at the counter, Weir waltzed up and said, ‘You’re high on marijuana, aren’t you? Got any dope on you?’ I got rid of him and charmed the lady at the counter, but it was stuff like that. He had a very realistic Luger squirt gun that once got him surrounded by cops. Going down the jetway, he’d be mooing, then the rest of the band would pick it up.” There were countless on-board pillow fights, which Weir usually started, and he was also known, without provocation, to moan as the plane descended for landing, “We’re not gonna make it, we’re all gonna die.”

Phil, Riester thought, was demanding about food and accommodations, but usually legitimately so. “He could always understand that the onion skin, no matter how thin, had two sides.” Kreutzmann, depending on mood, might not, and he was always suspicious of outsiders trying to burn them. Garcia was easy, thought Riester, who felt “privileged to have known him.” Pig’s heavy Hammond organ caused Riester extra work, but “Garcia liked Pig, and that was enough for me.” T.C. he dismissed as too intellectual. What made Riester’s job possible was Ram Rod, “the sixth musician. The Dead would not have survived without him. He did the impossible all the time, twenty-four seven.” Hart had a toy cannon that fired a blank shotgun shell that at least once went off in Rod’s face, leaving him with singed hair and blackened cheeks. To Weir’s amazement, Ram Rod “never stopped working. It didn’t faze him at all.” When Hart realized that the injured Ram Rod had never stopped loading in order to be ready for the cue, he concluded, “No more cannons.”

Riester hung in there, too. He did have one major weakness, and that was what Weir would call a “bump of misdirection,” not a good thing when one left the airport in a rental car on a tight schedule. Of course, Weir found their explorations of the back alleys of American cities not only diverting, but “it sure taught us how to pull together to play a show with no time to spare.” And at airports, Riester was a champ. “I was allowed to take guitars directly to the plane for hand loading, and in the process figured out who was the guy who actually released the plane from the gate.” Once, the equipment truck had a flat tire and was terrifically late. “I got the guy who released the plane aside, gave him $100, plus promised him albums and such, to hold the plane. He called the gate and told them to let the truck drive directly to the plane. As a result, everyone on the plane missed their connections. We got kicked off the airlines for a minute.”

A letter from United Airlines to the band’s travel agent sometime after this incident noted that the Dead had “caused so much confusion arriving at the airport with all their equipment just a few minutes before flight departure, shouting obscenities at employees and passengers, drawn and fired a revolver (fortunately loaded only with blanks) at the check-in area” that United was no longer accepting reservations from the band. In January 1969, with Bill Graham booking them, and provided “that en route they conduct themselves in a manner that will not disturb other passengers,” United granted them another chance.

For this tour, Graham had an ace in the hole, and his name was Bill Belmont. Riester was honest, but he did not always return home with the money, having been shaken down either by the band, usually the drummers, or by Rock Scully. So Graham sent Belmont out to protect the cash. It was not an easy job, and Belmont’s efforts earned him Garcia’s label as “the most paranoid person” he’d ever met because of his acute sense of business propriety. The Dead had met Belmont two years before when they played at the Rendezvous Inn and Belmont had managed the opening act, the Wildflower. He’d been raised in Mexico and spoke three languages, and after passing through the U.S. Navy, he’d gone to San Francisco State. After working with the Youngbloods as a road manager, he’d become involved with Country Joe and the Fish.

Belmont’s winter 1969 tour with the Dead lasted two weeks and eleven shows, from Chicago to New York, and it was a vivid experience. For starters, he was stoned for the duration, and didn’t really like it. “It’s not possible to do efficient things,” he reported, “because there’s this committee, or rather a couple of committees—the drummers’ committee, the . . .” Though Phil and Jerry made a lot of decisions, Kreutzmann, he thought, “had a lot of say” due to a close, largely unspoken relationship with Garcia. Decisions were never exactly made, but only put off. “At some point, they had decided that if they were in enough debt, no one could really mess with them—they would have to let them work, or the creditors would never be paid.” By now in debt around $100,000 to Warner Bros., they got by on the road with an American Express card that Riester needed to pay in town A so he could get the band to town B. Belmont’s tour was primarily in the Midwest, and the band had little clout there. There were few FM stations at that place and time, and very few Dead Heads in Omaha. Audiences would frequently be bored by forty-five-minute jams, and promoters would futilely request “songs.” At every show there would be arguments with the promoter over the guest list, “a war council/game every night,” said Belmont.

Adopting conventional business attitudes would challenge their image of being unique, Belmont thought, so that “if they were to start worrying about nickels and dimes, it would become a business or a job.” The Grateful Dead at this point was, Belmont thought, “a cocoon of chaos and habit” that didn’t like change. For Garcia and the rest, chaos was far more comfortable than smooth efficiency. Just leaving a hotel was a bore. Instead, more than once, Jackson, Hagen, and Ram Rod rigged firecrackers in the elevator shaft just as Riester was checking the band out. They passed through the lobby, said, “See ya later, Riester,” and headed to the waiting van, just as all hell broke loose in the elevator. Knowing what he was hearing, Riester signed the credit card slip, mumbled, “Got an airplane to catch,” and vanished.

The band also had extra expenses that were hard to anticipate. At the first gig, in Chicago, Bear went off in a rental car and was stopped for weaving. When the police ran his name through the files, the telex machine reacted as though it were the cosmic bingo payoff, squirting out five feet of telex paper to describe his distinguished career. Belmont called their promoter, Aaron Russo, who was extremely sophisticated about Chicago politics. Late that night a limousine pulled up at their gig and a man in pajamas, slippers, a camel-hair overcoat, and a homburg, with an enormous cigar and accompanied by a bodyguard, got out. “I hear you have a problem. I think I’d like to take care of this.” Two thousand dollars later, Bear was on their doorstep. The gig went well enough to just about cover the cost of doing business, but they refused to let Bear drive anymore. Another tour expense in Belmont’s files was the tip money paid to various maids at a hotel in Omaha, where Weir and Pigpen were entertaining some rather young female Nebraskans. Thanks to the maids, Belmont and Riester had a few minutes’ warning when the parents arrived, and the Dead were able to record one more narrow escape. By contrast, Garcia usually went to bed after the show, got up early, and spent the morning in the road manager’s room, running scales and watching
Captain Kangaroo
with the sound turned down.

They ended the tour with shows in New York and Philadelphia. They’d headlined at the Fillmore East the previous year, and the reviewers had written that Jeff Beck had topped them. This time they opened for Janis Joplin and her new, post–Big Brother band. Riester had rented a truck, which turned out to be a great idea when Manhattan was smothered by a blizzard. They awoke to a silent city, eighteen inches of snow and no cars, just kids, dogs, and the subway. That night’s backstage guests included Mike Wallace and the crew of
60 Minutes,
and Janis was anxious. She later remarked, “Jerry Garcia told me that I made him cry . . . the Dead have been so good to me, man. They’re so warm and everything. I really needed that because of the pressure.” After the show, when she performed only adequately, she became too drunk to descend the steep spiral staircase from her dressing room, and it was Riester who carried her out to the truck, so both bands could return to the hotel.