A Long Strange Trip (44 page)

That sort of philosophical overview would confer on him a mantle of sage wisdom that would eventually be crippling, but for the present it got him through strange times—and the times kept getting stranger. Early in June they played three nights at the Fillmore West with Junior Walker, and someone, as usual, dosed the apple juice. This was not just any dose, it was the biggest dose ever. Most say it was several people, but one informed source argued that only the big-time smuggler/dealer Ken Goldfinger, a friend of the band’s, could have had such a quantity at hand, for there was probably a full gram of crystal LSD in the juice, worth perhaps $50,000. In Hart’s memory, “the bottle was
glowing.”
Lesh said later that one could taste the LSD in the juice. When it came time to play, he was so ecstatically zonked that he politely declined when Mickey told him it was time to go to work. “I don’t really care to play right now, thank you.” Hart was, as Lesh put it, “so sweet about it. He didn’t guilt-trip me.” Mickey helped him up, walked him to the stage, propped him against an amp, draped his bass over his shoulders, plugged it in, and turned the amp to maximum volume. To Lesh, “It felt like some sort of fabulous artifact that I’d never seen before. The strings were all snaky, but beautiful colors, kind of fish or reptile scales.” They began to play, and it was, Lesh continued, “the strangest polyphonic blues ever, literally in that sense, many-voiced,” because there was no first chord, no downbeat, just utterly strange music utterly in flux. And in the middle, they invited poor Elvin Bishop, who’d just walked in, to join them. Lesh played a thirteen-bar blues, someone else a sixteen, and Elvin had a look of “Where am I? What universe is this?” Lesh called it “snake music,” and he was right.

Not everyone had such a good time. Snooky Flowers, who was in Janis Joplin’s band, was severely dosed, and Janis went ballistic, verbally assaulting Bear, whom she accused of the deed. Hunter’s lady friend, Christie, ended up walking down Market Street, where she was picked up by a sleazeball with bad ideas. His worst notions weren’t consummated, but he did dump her out somewhere in Daly City. Distraught over the disappearance of his friend, Hunter hallucinated blood spurting from Janis’s mouth, then mentally experienced every assassination he knew of, dying with JFK and with Lincoln, among many other deaths. At one point he was lying on the sidewalk near the Fillmore West stage door seeing giant lobsters from the ninth dimension devour Market Street. When Bear approached him, he swung from the ground, socking him and uttering one word: “Owsleystein.” Bear absorbed the punch, and they set off for Goldfinger’s, since Bear wanted to ask Ken what, precisely, was in the apple juice. Goldfinger was elsewhere, and they were taken in by Ken’s lover, Nicki. Eventually, they sent for Garcia, who would play calming guitar to Hunter until dawn.

Goldfinger got his reward, in any case. Jon McIntire was too high to drive, and Ken and his friend Peter Monk bundled him behind the gearshift in Ken’s Porsche to give him a ride home. When Ken hit the defrost button, the resulting blast of hot air had a negative effect on Jon’s digestive tract, and he tossed his cookies all over Ken, Peter, and the Porsche. It took Ken two days with a toothbrush to get his car clean again. Frankie Azzara had just returned from working for George Harrison and moved in with Bobby, and would be his live-in companion for the next several years. As people melted down into various puddles, she caught Phil’s eyes, and he muttered, “Nero burning Rome.” “It was really flames,” she said, meaning psychic flames. “There were people screwing on the floor, people being sick.” The game was truly thick that night, good and evil manifesting as fully as even Garcia could ever want.

25

Interlude: “When the Music Plays the Band” (THE DEAD TALK ABOUT PLAYING MUSIC)

It is highly unlikely that Tony Bennett ever played a show after “I Left My Heart in San Francisco” be-came a hit without singing it. Contrarily, observed San Francisco musician David Freiberg, “I like the idea of jumping off a cliff whenever you feel like it just to see what’s there. If it works, it’s wonderful. If it doesn’t, so what? At least you tried. That’s what I like about the Grateful Dead.” Out in the breezes above the abyss, there is still form, still the opportunity for communication, symmetry, and beauty; “deep form” as Jack Kerouac put it. It is a desperate struggle. Said B. B. King, “But I know this, I’ve never made it. I’ve never played what I hear inside. I get close but not there. If I did, I’d play the melody so you’d know what it was saying even if you didn’t know the words. You wouldn’t know when Lucille stopped and my voice began.”

These moments take place in quiet times, too. One night, Scrib stood behind Garcia’s amp during a Garcia Band sound check. Parish was fussing with John Kahn’s amp, and a relaxed Garcia began to noodle on “If I Only Had a Heart,” from
The Wizard of Oz.
It was a perfect jewel, tossed off for his ears and his fingers and no audience at all. Scrib listened raptly. At length, Garcia looked up and caught his eyes, smiled, chirped, “Great song, man,” and continued. It was a perfect moment.

WEIR:
“Every night when we walk onstage, our first solemn duty is to abandon reason. We do that with remarkable aplomb and from there unexpected stuff is easier to discover.”

GARCIA:
“[Playing is] like being strapped to the back of a horse in the middle of a stampede . . . like being on the brink of collapse . . . I like to be as close to the brink as possible.”

WEIR:
“The jams are an exercise in group direction. There isn’t a whole lot of leading or being led done. Actually, the least flexible guy at a given moment is the leader.”

GARCIA:
“For me, a real important model is Golden Gate Park . . . you can go from one kind of reality to another . . . prehistoric looking, giant ferns, everything is weird . . . a little further, all of a sudden you’re in this little pasture—sheep . . .

“Eventually, if I have a place to go, I can make it and make it pretty seamless. Because, for me, the [musical] relationship between one thing and another is always obvious . . . I like that invisible thing, that sort of sleight-of-hand approach, but I’m learning to be able to appreciate the thing of just clumsily blundering into it . . . the existential reality . . . is note to note.

“For me, that idea is not one note; an idea is like a sentence, or a paragraph sometimes. Know what I mean? The nature of it is rubbery . . . I’m doing this thing and it has a certain kind of curvature . . . and it’s going to last four bars, say. I tend to think in even number of bars generally . . . So there’ll be a sentence, it’ll be X long, like four bars, and then there’ll be like the answer to that, four bars long, then there’ll be like a summing-up of it that’ll be like eight bars, and then there’ll be an argument from the other direction, that’ll be eight bars, it’s kind of like that.

“But, as it’s going along, there’s also things coming in from the other band members, which sometimes say, like on bar three, ‘No no no,
this
is now number one’ . . . Then I say, okay, so my sentence went that way, so what I’m going to do, to make it syntactically correct, to make it so it goes four bars to include the third bar beginning, then it’s only going to go two more bars for a three-bar sentence but it’ll still maintain the symmetry that I want it to have because it overlaps . . .

“It’s kind of like that. These things are not so conscious, but they are conversational like that. They tend to be sentences. That part of it has to do with just melody . . . for me, melodies have the kind of sense that poetry has, they have meter . . . So a melody will start composing itself while I’m playing. We start off with a simple A melody. I’ll say, that’s working, that’s something that has a certain gesture to it that’s nice at this moment, so I’ll say, ‘Here’s expression A.’ Okay, A again. Now here’s B. And B again. Then another A to bring us back to that moment, and now C, and it’s like a new discussion . . . Really, there are hunks of stuff like that, like language . . . I don’t really have that much control over it . . . it’s not me being logical on purpose by any means.”

In speaking with Phil Lesh, radio host David Gans once remarked that “[The Dead is] America’s longest-running musical argument.”

LESH:
“A musical argument makes the two sides one thing, like counterpoint . . . that’s really a good description, in sort of an abstract verbal sense.”

“So I like to play it more in the sense of the continuo bass of the baroque period . . . polyphonic counterpoint.”

GARCIA:
“I’ve gone through so many [things], all the way up to and including perversely trying to make it be as miserable as I can. But I wouldn’t want it to have less range than that. [I want it to have its] full capacity as an experience.”

WEIR:
“Intimacy, by the way, is a musical dynamic.”

KREUZTMANN:
“They don’t have a note value for the endless whole note.”

GARCIA:
“[A transcendent moment in playing] occurs in a mediumistic way, something involuntary. I trust it because I know it’s
not
me. If it was me, I wouldn’t trust it because . . . I know myself too well.”

LESH:
“We used to believe that every place we played was church. But the core of followers is not the reason it feels like church; it’s that other thing, ‘it’ [inspiration, grace, transcendence].”

GARCIA:
“We’ve chosen to go with the thing of we don’t care whether they have expectations or not. We do what we want to do anyway, because that’s—what’s in it for us otherwise? We don’t want to be entertainers. We want to play music.”

26

If My Words Were Gold (6/20/69–8/15/69)

Aoxomoxoa
hit the stores on June 20, accompanied by Warner Bros.’—specifically Stan Cornyn’s—best ad campaign ever, a spoof of teen magazines called the “Pigpen Look Alike Contest.” Reviews were generally befuddled, but they scarcely mattered, because the band was climbing an arc of change that would consume it for the next year and a half. Late in the spring, Robert Hunter had brought three new songs downstairs to Garcia, who was, as usual, running scales in front of the TV. Jerry said he’d look at them later. “Garcia,” Hunter snorted, “if you think I’m living here for the pleasure of your mythical sunny personality—I’m here to write songs. Do you want to write songs or not?” “Oh!” Garcia picked up the songs, and had the first of them, “Dire Wolf,” worked out soon after.

One night Hunter and M.G. had sat up and watched
The Hound of
the Baskervilles,
and she’d remarked that the hound was “a dire wolf.” It made for a picturesque night in Hunter’s personal dream theater, and in the morning he transcribed his visions, unaltered. Later, Hunter would acknowledge, “I can touch that dreamspace. The stuff you dream is kind of close to consciousness for me, which is a bit of a talent and in normal life it’s a bit of a disability. I’ve got a little tunnel into my subconscious.” In part because Garcia gave it a countryish lilt, the song was clearly a benchmark in the trail they would follow over the next several years.

In the timbers of Fennario
the wolves are running round
The winter was so hard and cold
froze ten feet neath the ground

Don’t murder me
I beg of you don’t murder me
Please
don’t murder me

“Dire Wolf” begins in a stripped, barren white setting, spiritually and intellectually related to Melville’s white whale, the wolf coming out of the white void. Fennario is no place in particular; it is the no-place, where humans confront their doom. It is about fear. The narrator in “Dire Wolf” is what would eventually come to be perceived as the fundamental Grateful Dead character, a workingman, an underdog without pretense or slick-ness, part of the old gritty America. And the narrator is Garcia himself, exposed and vulnerable onstage, and even in the street. Just at this time, the San Francisco area was beset by a random serial murderer, the Zodiac Killer. Driving around late at night, Garcia’s adrenaline would flash as another car pulled up next to his at a traffic light.

The wolf came in, I got my cards
We sat down for a game
I cut my deck to the Queen of Spades
but the cards were all the same

Our character is brave, even if that seems futile. The wolf comes, he’s invited in for a game, but our man gets the death card, the queen—the game is stacked. In fact, our narrator is
really
a member of the Grateful Dead; he is a ghost, and this card game is like Bergman’s chess game in
The Seventh
Seal.
The Dead’s music had gone far beyond pop. Yet there’s much more. The wolf, “600 pounds of sin,” is also the devil, and the fact that our guy invites him in speaks volumes. By and large, the Dead stood for moral goodness, but later they would also write a song called “Friend of the Devil.” The pivotal moment in American blues history had taken place some forty years before, when, as Son House told the story, Robert Johnson made a Faustian compact and sold his soul to the devil for the ability to play his guitar, leaving the church and setting out on the blues road. The Dead’s postmodern, post-Christian cosmology didn’t demand that choice. They made a friend of the devil. They didn’t fight the wolf; they invited him in for a game, stuck a joint in his mouth, and had as good a time as they could manage. Intellectually, they embraced black as well as white, and death was part of their game from the beginning. Rather than be impaled on the dichotomy, they celebrated it and embraced it. Like Walt Whitman, Hunter and the Dead’s new literary world contained multitudes. A friend of the devil, sure—after all, you should never trust a prankster, even junior ones. And like Whitman, their constructed musical universe became a road, a “road for wandering souls,” a road that contains everything and everybody; the American road.

The primary reason that Garcia had given “Dire Wolf” a country feel was that he had recently taken up the pedal steel guitar. Someone had given him one in 1966, but it wasn’t tuned and he couldn’t play it. In April he’d visited a music store in Boulder, sat down at a pedal steel, and “played with the pedals a little bit. I dug the tuning, and I said, ‘Oh, I see!’ Suddenly, I finally started to understand a little of the sense of it . . . I said I want to buy this fucking thing, but can you send it to me in tune? I’ll never remember this tuning.” As always, it was the experiential and not the abstract that inspired him. Remarkably, the partially strung instrument made it to Marin County in tune, and he began to practice it fiercely.

In May, he reconnected with an old Palo Alto friend, John “Marmaduke” Dawson, who had been writing some country songs. For a few Wednesday nights beginning in mid-May, Garcia began to drive his midget school bus down to a tiny coffeehouse in Menlo Park called the Underground. There he’d back up Marmaduke, more commonly called McDuke, on such tunes as “Wildwood Flower,” “Six Days on the Road,” “Lay Lady Lay,” “Long Black Veil,” “Tiger by the Tail,” and McDuke’s own “Last Lonely Eagle.” It was fun, and in the way of the Grateful Dead, it evolved into a group activity. Their rehearsal space progressed from Weir’s living room (where Frankie was, as she later put it, gently displacing Weir’s “little honeys and Mama was setting up house”) to the barn at Mickey’s ranch, where Garcia and McDuke began to concoct a bar band. Before long, they would mutate a page from Zane Grey and call the band the New Riders of the Purple Sage.

There were many reasons that the Dead expanded their approach to include acoustic and country music. Not the least of them was that the Dead’s hour-long space jams were, in Lesh’s words, “too explosive. It took too much out of us, for one thing.” They had gone far, far out on an edge, and the pendulum was swinging back. In Rock Scully’s words, “After all these years of mind-gumming psychedelics we are all actually beginning to
crave
the normal. We need something to ground us—our hair is talking to us, our shoes have just presented a set of demands, the walls are alive with the sound of intergalactic static. Please remind us whereof we come? Our home planet is what?” As well, the Hunter-Garcia material was the most ripely creative thing happening with the band. “I remember how warm and fuzzy it made me feel,” said Mickey. “The electric side was so fun and so stimulating and so rewarding and so energetic, and then all of a sudden we were starting to explore the soft side of the G.D. And I thought, what a beautiful thing—acoustic guitars. It was cold out there in the feedback, electric G.D. world. It was a great cold, a wonderful freeze, full of exploratory moments and great vision, but here we were exploring the soft side . . . I thought it was really cool.” This was especially true for Mickey, because he played in the New Riders, in a new-for-him straight-ahead way that included brushes.

Having gone through acid and war and the upheavals of the 1960s, the Dead had turned to their musical roots to see what was left of the American dream and what of those roots might still be viable. They did not simply replace psychedelia with country; they added new dimensions to an established oeuvre. They did not particularly want to pursue the American dream of financial success; rather, they wanted to invent a new dream, and a new mythology. The original American dream—that anything is possible, and that the frontier must be sought and then left behind—remained real for them. After psychedelics, everything
is
new, is possible; the frontier is shown to be within. And so the Dead took traditional song stylings and mixed them with a postmodern self-created mythology to create a new American frontier. Only one band influenced them, and not in any explicit stylistic way, but only as an inspiration. David Crosby from the Byrds, Stephen Stills from Buffalo Springfield, and Graham Nash from the Hollies had formed Crosby, Stills and Nash in late 1968, recording their eponymous first album in February 1969 and releasing it in June. Stephen Stills liked horses, and that summer he fell into the low company of Mickey Hart, living at the ranch for several months, learning to ride by going out with Mickey for jaunts in the hills, telling intricate tales of Civil War battles as they trotted along. Stephen’s presence there brought Crosby and Nash around as well, and as they hung out at the barn, their magical vocal blend made singing seem the most natural possible thing. Crosby, of course, had been a friend since the earliest part of the decade, and had spent time at 710. As big an acidhead as anyone in the Dead, he also shared a caustic iconoclasm with Lesh and Garcia that made them close.

Horses and good weed made the days at the ranch seem sunnier, and in the process the Dead’s singers, thought Hart, discovered the voice as “the holy instrument.” “Hey,” said the Dead’s vocalists, “is that what a voice can do?” Naturally, the Dead’s singers did it their own way. CS&N sang in systematic parallels, while, typically, the Dead were idiosyncratic, all over the place, with harmonies that worked but often made no sense. In other words, they sang as they played. As they worked out the harmonies to the song, they might well agree that a note had to be hit. “Well, you do it.” “But I’m on top,” Phil might protest. “So what,” replied Weir. “If you want that note, sing it.” “We weren’t methodical,” noted Weir. “Well, we were methodical, but it was our own method.”

Later comparisons of the Dead’s work in this era to that of the Band seem off the mark, except for a nearness in time, because the ethos of the Band’s material was explicitly southern and Appalachian. However similar the Dead’s material might have sounded, it was thematically much, much weirder, and appropriately so. After all, the Dead were from San Francisco, while Levon Helm, the Band’s drummer and lead vocalist, had grown up on a cotton farm in Turkey Scratch, Arkansas, listening to Sonny Boy Williamson’s
King Biscuit Flour Hour
while sitting in a corner of the studio of origin, only a few miles from his home. He and his bandmates, Canadians Robbie Robertson, Richard Manuel, Rick Danko, and Garth Hudson, played rockabilly with Ronnie Hawkins, went out on their own, and eventually became Bob Dylan’s backup band from 1965 to 1966. In the summer of 1967 Dylan and the Band jammed on a variety of traditional and new songs, making what would eventually be called the Basement Tapes. “We didn’t know if he wrote them or if he remembered them,” said Robbie Robertson. “When he sang them, you couldn’t tell.” Their own album
Music from Big Pink,
released in the summer of 1968, along with Dylan’s
Nashville Skyline,
the countrified Flying Burrito Brothers, and the Dead’s next album, made music journalists quick to spot a trend. Whatever the new material was, the Dead’s use of it was not trendy. Nor even always easy. Tapes of shows at this time reveal an audience struggling to assimilate the new material, with assurances coming from the band: “We’ll get into all that heavy stuff [like “Dark Star”] eventually,” said Garcia.

Shortly after Garcia completed the music to “Dire Wolf,” Hunter had another dream. In it, Bobby Petersen was writing a song, and Hunter was able to look over his shoulder and read the lyrics. He awoke, wrote them down, and handed them to Garcia, who proceeded immediately to pick up a guitar and have a tune fall out. It was called “Casey Jones,” a modern take on the legend of John Luther Jones, from Cayce, Kentucky, who did indeed leave Memphis’s Central Station at a quarter to nine, ignored a signal to stop, and died. This “Casey Jones” was different, however, because it also dipped into the folk tradition of cocaine songs, making it a warning to Casey and the world to “watch your speed.” As Garcia said, it was a “pretty good musical picture of what cocaine is like. A little bit evil. And hard-edged. That singsongy thing.” “Casey Jones” was an immediate hit with the audience. At the same time, Hunter wrote what he thought of as a straightforwardly romantic country-western song, “High Time,” so Jerry had something on which to play pedal steel.

The country bar band, the New Riders of the Purple Sage to be, began to grow up. Garcia on pedal steel, Marmaduke on guitar and vocals, Mickey on drums, Phil on bass. There was at least one embryonic concert at the Peninsula School, where Bob and Jerry had played in 1961, and then on June 11, Bobby Ace and the Cards from the Bottom of the Deck played at California Hall. It was a quasi-benefit for Scientology, because Weir had listened to T.C. over the winter and studied L. Ron Hubbard’s ideas as a way of strengthening his position in the band. After a few months he decided that he neither felt nor played better, and was tired of paying money for nothing, so he quit. The benefit was actually his good-bye to Scientology, and featured Garcia, McDuke, David Nelson, Phil, Mickey, Peter Grant on banjo, and T.C. on piano.

Late in June the Dead returned to the road, going first to their home away from home, Fillmore East, and then to Central Park, where they played for free, “with a spirit,” wrote the
Voice,
“that can only be likened to missionary or religious zeal . . . Ask no favors of the crowd; rather let the[ir] musical, physical, and spiritual presence . . . fill the atmosphere.” Even
Variety
thought they had “proceeded to turn New York into a Dionysian festival of love. Orgy might be a better word.” They went home, returned to New York, and this time played at the old world’s fair site in Flushing, where a couple of interesting things happened. The promoter, Howard Stein, employed a young lady to give pieces of candy to the audience. As legend had it, she spent the night with a member of the Grateful Dead’s scene, and while she slept, someone went through the candy and dosed each piece. The audience atmosphere at the second show in Flushing was a winner. And the crew found a new friend, a tall young man from Queens named Steve Parish, who worked the show as a security guard. They’d see him again.