A Long Strange Trip (42 page)

It’s wretchedly hot here in Sacramento, and Weir kicks into “Cassidy,” one of his best songs. Weir likes to write fairly complex stuff, and this one works brilliantly. It was one of the songs that led to his split from Hunter, since Weir didn’t like Hunter’s original lyrics, which concerned gambling. In the summer of 1970 Weir’s housemate, Eileen Law, was giving birth to her daughter. She had already chosen the name “Cassidy” for her child, from the film
Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid,
because it worked equally well for a boy or a girl. The homonym made Barlow think of Neal Cassady, gone two years, and the result was remarkable, “the
only
one that I am proud of,” said Barlow. He was not thinking of reincarnation, but rather the cycle of life. “I can tell by the mark he left you were in his dream / Ah, child of countless trees / Ah, child of boundless seas / What you are, what you’re meant to be / Speaks his name, though you were born to me / Born to me / Cassidy.” The royalties are dedicated to her education expenses.

Garcia snaps the lead ferociously behind the voices, the drums push, Lesh fills in, and the music accelerates. Harry pushes Brent’s voice up in Garcia’s monitor, and Jerry glances at Mydland, smiling. Kidd, with a pencil and a clipboard, comes to the back of Phil’s amp and begins taking notes, a fat roach in his mouth. Candace calls for an odd shade of green, and a union spotlight guy grumbles, “Lady, I’m not gonna argue, but I don’t wanna make that guy green.” There is an opening in the middle of “Cassidy” for a jam, and every time the path up the hill is new. There’s the same general curvature, but the details are always different. Anything that really works perfectly, Garcia will remind you, is immediately trite and therefore must be instantly discarded. And so the band thumbs through an infinite deck of cards, Lesh playing bass as though he invented it, Weir’s approach to rhythm guitar unique.

Behind them, Parish beams. After three days of trying to find an elusive hum in Weir’s stack, they’ve figured it out, a combination of a low battery, a particular sound effect, and a certain setting.

24

No Turn Left Unstoned (2/19/69–6/20/69)

Late in January 1969, Ram Rod and John Hagen and their new cohorts, Rex Jackson and Bill Candelario, loaded up Ampex’s Prototype #2 recording machine at Pacific Recording in San Mateo, drove to San Francisco, and hauled it up the stairs at the Avalon Ballroom, where the Dead would make the first live sixteen-track recordings in history. They did it again in late February at the Fillmore West, and in a total of seven nights, they caught lightning in the bottle. What would be called
Live Dead
was not only the first such recording, it would be among the great live albums in the history of popular music. Four years after they’d begun, and only months after being completely riven by musical and personal dissension, they had reached an apotheosis. Though
Anthem
had been a remarkable technical triumph, the inherently fussy, minutiae-oriented nature of studio recording was not the Dead’s métier. They had found their souls onstage, and
Live Dead
was the proof.

While at Pacific Recording, they had met an Ampex employee named Ron Wickersham, a brilliant problem-solving engineer who could help translate Bear’s ideas into reality. Wickersham’s philosophy of recording— “a minimum intrusion into the performance process”—was identical to Bear’s and the band’s, and derived from his radio broadcast background. Ron’s prime contribution to the making of
Live Dead
was a “mike splitter,” which sent one channel of sound into the P.A., the other into the recording setup. Supported by Bear and Wickersham, Bob Matthews and his assistant Betty Cantor captured the Fillmore West run and some subsequent shows on tape, and the Dead laid down their musical identity: “Dark Star” into “St. Stephen” into “The Eleven” into “Lovelight,” with “Death Don’t Have No Mercy” and “Feedback,” and the
a cappella
blessing “We Bid You Goodnight” for dessert. The breakneck gallop they’d employed when first playing “Dark Star” and the rest had been replaced by an elegant canter. Lesh would later say that playing fast was the habit of the young because it “felt so good.” Perhaps because of all the pain of the preceding year, by now they had tasted the wisdom of Mozart, who reflected that it is much more difficult to play slowly. It was certainly better for the material, which had become magnificent. “We were after,” Garcia said, “a serious, long composition, musically, and then a recording of it.” Done.

In effect, it was two bands. There was the elite jazz fusion ensemble that could play “Dark Star” for half an hour with hardly a vocal, bouncing off planets in space, dodging or causing cosmic storms in the heavenly spheres of “St. Stephen,” going back out past Pluto for a lengthy foray into eleven-beat vibrations in “The Eleven,” then gracefully bringing the gleaming titanium spaceship in for a landing. And out of the hatch would step Mr. Funk himself, Pigpen. Having pounded conga drums for an hour, Pig could now bring everyone onto solid ground with the Bobby “Blue” Bland hit, “(Turn on Your) Lovelight.” A sympathetic critic once remarked that it was generosity of spirit that made the Dead unable to throw him out, that the band was more ineffably magical without him. But this era of Grateful Dead music was at a profound peak in its evolution in part because Pigpen could close a show like nobody’s business. Soul is always in order. Pig, wrote Ralph Gleason one night, took “Lovelight” and “made it into a one-man blues project. He sang for almost twenty minutes, stabbing the phrases out into the crowd like a preacher, using the words to riff like a big band, building to climax after climax, coming down in a release and soaring up again.” He was “not a lesson but a course in outrage,” said Weir, and had been known to go into mid“Lovelight” raves so twisted, so insane, that he once sold the Brooklyn Bridge to a guy in the audience for $1.25. Show after show in 1969 closed that way, and a very high proportion of them were brilliant.

Which was more than one could say of the new, third studio album in progress. The possibilities opened by sixteen tracks had become something of a quagmire for a bunch of very stoned musicians. As Mickey recalled it, they spent much of their time loaded on a psychedelic drug called STP, using pinhead-size portions to produce an effect like speed. The musical result was “real fuzzy. You couldn’t find a real center,” he thought, and
then
they started sucking down nitrous oxide. Later, Mickey would speculate that their particular stonedness during this period was in fact an unconscious attempt to “camouflage” what was actually going on with the band, which was an essential musical transition. Even as they were playing the finest free-form ecstatic instrumental—psychedelic— music on the planet, they had turned a corner as musicians and were adding a new dimension to their repertoire: songs. Not just excuses to jam, but well-crafted songs meant to be sung.

More than a year after he’d written “Dark Star,” Robert Hunter would spend 1969 becoming a primary member of the Grateful Dead. Having pursued the experimental as deeply as any rock band ever would, they were now rather brilliantly expanding sideways into the more conventional. The transition was demanding and at times confusing. So they got stoned. “I don’t think it was an intellectual choice,” said Hart, “but I think there was a gray area that we were passing through. All those psychedelics clouded the lens in a certain kind of way. They’d give you great detail, but then you’d hear the most obscure aspect in the mix.” As they bogged down at the mixing board at Pacific Recording, their debt to Warner Bros. assumed truly impressive proportions, peaking at about $180,000. They had autonomy over the music and artwork, but they needed money for studio time, and finally even Joe Smith cracked. Early in 1969 Rock and Rohan went down to Los Angeles to hit Joe up for more money, and this time he literally chased them down the stairs, out the front door, and down the street, screaming that they were making him look bad.
Live Dead
was not only brilliant, it would save them at Warner Bros. Though it would not come out until the end of the year, the fact that it was in the can helped them finance the third studio album.

The burgeoning creative partnership between Hunter and Garcia was in part a matter of simple propinquity. At the beginning of the year, Hunter and his lover, Christie, moved in with Jerry, Mountain Girl, and Sunshine in a house on Madrone Canyon Road in Larkspur, a road that wriggles delightfully through a redwood grove—the builders shifted the road rather than cut trees. The atmosphere was a good one. Garcia sat downstairs, running scales up and down the guitar in front of the (usually silent) TV, while Hunter worked upstairs. One night during his first week there, Hunter stayed in when everyone else went out, got a little sloshed, turned on a tape recorder and laid down “Dupree’s Diamond Blues,” beginning the final cycle in his personal transition from novelist to poet to lyricist. (Interestingly, “Dupree’s” was the only song the band would ever use that he’d written while inebriated; once was enough.) The real-life Frank DuPre killed an Atlanta Pinkerton detective in 1921 after robbing a jewelry store, and the incident spawned many songs, including Josh White’s “Betty and Dupree.” Hunter adapted freely, changing the victim and the guilty party, while reflecting that “many a man’s done a terrible thing / Just to get baby her shiny diamond ring.” Garcia’s music had a friendly, almost cartoonish feel, and T.C.’s circus-style organ carried the album version beautifully. The band would be playing it within a few days, along with “Doin’ That Rag” and “Mountains of the Moon.” “Doin’ That Rag” had a good-timey bounce that communicated a certain similarity to “Dupree’s,” but from a much less literal point of view: “Sitting in Mangrove Valley chasing lightbeams / Everything wanders from baby to Z.” But this baby is no ring-seeking puppet. She is a player, and the aces “are crawling up and down [her] sleeve . . . Come back here, Baby Louise / and tell me the name / of the game that you play.”

Each song showed Hunter growing, and the third one, “Mountains of the Moon,” was a masterwork. “Jerry,” he remarked later, “had written a minuet.” And Hunter responded to the stately, elegant tune with a labyrinthine tale of romance peopled by the fragments of a thousand dreams. He began with a first-line nod to Gary Snyder’s “Cold Mountain Poems”:

Cold Mountain water
the Jade merchant’s daughter
Mountains of the Moon, Electra
Bow and bend to me

Hi Ho the Carrion Crow
Folderolderiddle
Hi Ho the Carrion Crow
Bow and bend to me

Hey Tom Banjo
Hey a laurel
More than laurel
You may sow . . .

It is a symbolic tale set in a magical land. Tom Banjo is a suitor who pursues the jade merchant’s daughter, jade being the symbol of long life. Electra is one of the eighty-seven daughters of Atlas, who was pursued by Orion, and saved only by being changed into a star, the dark, so-called lost star of the Pleiades. Laurel, or the laurel tree, is another symbol of long life and of success, the laurel crown or wreath. The carrion crows suggest heroes, who feed the crows by killing their enemies in Celtic and Nordic poetry. Having touched on sources from much of Western mythology, Hunter saluted his hero: “Hey Tom Banjo / It’s time to matter / The Earth will see you / on through this time.” At the song’s bridge, Hunter introduced a toad demon, the Marsh King’s Daughter, from Hans Christian Andersen, and the listener is left to ponder the result, which is quite properly left wildly open to question. Utterly distinctive, “Mountains of the Moon” was an incredible mix of mystery, intellectual content, gentle musical swing, and chivalrous romance. It had nothing at all to do with rock and roll, but everything to do with the development of a great songwriting relationship, a partnership that was about to create a postmodern dreamworld based on its own terms and vision. T.C.’s exquisite harpsichord locked it perfectly into vinyl.

Stoned, stoned . . . on top of everything else, they brought nitrous oxide tanks into the studio, and
truly
lost themselves in the mix. Nitrous triggers an “ ‘I’m dying’ mechanism,” said Garcia, and creates a fast, synchronous, “telepathic thing that’s fantastic,” as when Huey, Dewey, and Louie finish one another’s sentences. They were still new to production in general, and sixteen-track in particular, so while much of the material on this album was purest gold—“St. Stephen,” “China Cat Sunflower,” “Mountains of the Moon”—much was also confusing and not successful, such as “What’s Become of the Baby.” In “Baby,” Garcia wanted the sound of the entire band to come out of one voice, which required voltage-controlled amplifiers, filters, and pitch followers, which had not yet been invented. Once again, their ambitions had overshot their skill. And the descent into total lunacy initiated by mixing while inhaling nitrous oxide majestically confused everything. By April they were mixing it by committee, always a bad idea. The one firm thing they had was a title. The album had begun as
Earthquake Country,
but Rick Griffin, their cover artist, had a better idea. Fascinated with palindromes, he suggested
Aoxomoxoa,
which has no literal meaning, and it was accepted. Not only did it have a pseudo-Egyptian, “vaguely cabalistic ring” to it, thought Rock, but the palindrome also had a geometric symmetry, so that it could stack vertically as a/oxo/moxoa.

As the
Aoxomoxoa
sessions wobbled their way to a conclusion, they were punctuated by live gigs. In the course of one week in March, the Dead played a benefit for striking San Francisco State students at Fillmore West, and three days later for the beautiful people of San Francisco high society at the Black and White Ball, the San Francisco Symphony’s social event of the season. The job had, of course, come through Weir’s mother, chair of the entertainment committee, and it was an imposing gig. They were playing at the Hilton Hotel’s Grand Ballroom, and admission was $17.50 at a time that $4 was rock’s absolute maximum. The situation being what it was, they naturally screwed it up royally, and it became one of their very finest professional disasters. The band and equipment arrived on time, but Bear announced that he needed a missing item back in Novato, and vanished. While the musicians prepared themselves in a room upstairs, Bear actually went to sleep in an equipment case under the stage. When the lateness of the hour dawned on the band, they rousted him from his refuge, scourged him into setting up the stage, and at long last began to play. McIntire had induced them to echo the evening’s theme and wear black and white costumes: Pigpen and Jerry were pirates, Mickey was Zorro, T.C. was an eighteenth-century bell ringer, Kreutzmann a French sailor, and McIntire himself came in a clown costume of white satin with black buttons. Rock’s girlfriend, Suzie Gottlieb, was there as a belly dancer, Rakow’s wife, Lydia, and their friends the Jensen girls from Marin were angels, and their friend Ken Goldfinger, hook hand and all, came as a bishop.

The Dead played for an hour, and McIntire told them to stay put while he pinned down the night’s schedule. It took him quite a while to find the right person, too long in fact, and when Mayor Joe Alioto arrived around midnight for the grand ceremonial, there was no band left. McIntire and Weir’s sister, Wendy, were standing at the door as the mayor entered, and Jon coped by telling Bear to put on some recorded music, then taking Wendy for a spin around the floor. The
Chronicle
’s social columnist, Frances Moffat, referred to them as the “Ungrateful Dead,” although Herb Caen was much nicer, calling M.G. “the most beautiful girl” at the ball. Caen continued, “As Garcia walked away, a society matron followed him with her eyes and said, ‘Oh, it talks, does it?’ Yeah, it talks. ‘What in the world do you find to SAY to people like that?’ she asked. I couldn’t find anything to say to her, so I left.” Perhaps not solely because of the Grateful Dead, this would be the last Black and White Ball for nearly twenty years.

The society lady’s hostile attitude bespoke the era. On March 18, the Dead were informed that their upcoming show in Miami had been canceled, because earlier in the month Jim Morrison had been accused of exposing himself onstage there. That there was little reliable evidence that he had actually done so was irrelevant to the building management. They were also blind to the cultural chasm between the Dead and what Morrison called the “erotic politicians” of the Doors. “They’re the same type people and the same type music as the Doors,” said the man who ran the auditorium. “It’s this underground pop music.” A confidential newsletter put out for the use of the Concert Hall Managers’ Association created a highly effective blacklist that blocked Morrison’s performing career and with it that of the Doors for the better part of a year. The Doors and the Dead were not alone in sensing a repressive new atmosphere. Richard Nixon had been inaugurated two months before, and a grand jury that had met since the previous fall on the subject of the Chicago Democratic convention riots, now under the guidance of his attorney general, John Mitchell, had swiftly returned indictments on Abbie Hoffman, Jerry Rubin, Tom Hayden, and five others—the Chicago Eight. The White House had already proposed two frightening pieces of legislation, one of which would effectively eliminate the Fourth Amendment, the “no knock” bill, and “preventive detention,” which potentially eliminated bail. CBS-TV canceled the Smothers Brothers program over censorship issues. Rock and roll felt the same cold totalitarian breeze. Columbia Records stopped advertising in the underground press that April; there was reputable evidence that it did so in part because it was pressured by the FBI.