A Long Strange Trip (55 page)

In the past year the Dead had given Warner Bros. two classic, commercially viable studio albums, so now it was time to give Joe Smith a hotfoot. During a so-called band meeting, which was in fact an all-employee meeting, Phil Lesh suggested calling the album
Skullfuck.
Lesh didn’t particularly like Warner Bros. “I didn’t like anybody who told us we couldn’t put
Anthem
out and sell two million copies,” he said with a laugh.
“Skullfuck
was an attitude.” Rex Jackson and Sonny Heard became vociferous proponents of the title. They were, Weir recalled, “adamant about it. And to the extent that all decisions were made in general meetings, and they were loud . . . basically, the meetings were shout-outs.” But Jackson and Heard had also tapped a common vein.

The Dead had artistic control, and Jon McIntire duly informed Joe Smith that the album would be called
Skullfuck.
“You can’t do this to me!” “It’s not me, Joe,” said Jon. “It’s
all
of us. We’re
all
doing this to you.” At first Joe thought Jon was joking, and then he spoke with Jerry, who assured Joe that he’d settle for very small sales to keep the name. At length, Joe asked for a meeting, which became a Grateful Dead classic. “But any decision that concerned them had to involve everybody,” Joe said, “and their families were involved . . . and the other people . . . it was necessary to hold a meeting with all of them.”

Fifty-five people flew from San Francisco to Los Angeles, too many for the Warner Bros. conference room, so the meeting was moved to the Continental Hyatt House. “We’ve set up the tables,” wrote Rock Scully, “with the Warner people on one side and us on the other. It’s the North and South Korea Unilateral Treaty Conference. Release all prisoners!” Poor Joe Smith. He had polyps on his vocal cords and could barely speak at all, and certainly not loudly. In Stan Cornyn’s opinion, Joe handled the situation masterfully, making the chain-store buyers the bad guys rather than himself. “Do you want to sell ten thousand copies?” In the end the band gave in and agreed to change the name to the dull and accurate
Grateful Dead.
To Stan, this was evidence of nascent careerism, proof that the Dead really did have a commercial sense. The fact that the Dead were, after all, Merry Pranksters—and you never trust a Prankster—did not seem to have occurred to anybody. “Oh, we wanted to use it so badly,” Garcia said, chuckling. “We had a big meeting with Warners. They were horrified! They were shocked! They sat there so seriously . . . They fully believed we were going to do something awful if they didn’t . . . it was more a joke on our part.”

For Dead Heads,
Skullfuck
it was and
Skullfuck
it remained. Kelley did the cover, the familiar skeleton crowned in roses from the Avalon poster and
The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám,
and on the inside there was a lovely picture of the band taken by Bob Seidemann in the yard at 5th and Lincoln. Far more significantly for the future, the back cover invited fans of the Grateful Dead to write in: “Dead Freaks Unite (Who are you? Where are you? How are you? Send us your name and address and we’ll keep you informed.)” A second piece of fallout from the meeting at the Hyatt House was a hefty promotional budget for the album, including about $100,000 for radio broadcasts of fourteen shows that fall, which would help make
Skullfuck
the Dead’s first gold album. The broadcasts were direct and effective, which was fortunate, because their other efforts would be less useful. The members of the band were supposed to go out on radio promotion visits in an event that involved seven people going seven different places with seven plane tickets. According to Joe, not one person made his flight. “I think that was a Rock Scully production.”

The tight, mobile sound also got them some interesting reviews. Lester Bangs, not normally a fan, wrote that it was “not only great American music but a total personification of the American west both as musical genre and, more importantly, state of mind . . . And even if I still think they’re Tom Hippies and probably never will learn to love them for their own smug selves, I’ve at least stopped worrying because now I know at last that they can and do when, great galloping gogamooga, the Karmic Vibes are Right, play some mighty rock and roll. In spite of everything, and I can hardly believe it myself, I’m a Grateful Dead fan.”

The Dead played few shows in the summer of 1971, and it served as something of an interlude. Mid-September brought a harsh reality check. On September 17 Pigpen went into Novato General Hospital with a perforated ulcer and hepatitis. Ironically, his drinking had already slackened considerably, after he had reached the point of sweats, faintness, and incipient D.T.’s. He had lost an enormous amount of weight, and the
Skullfuck
portrait revealed the small, gentle bluesman who lived behind the biker persona. The band lined up to give blood, and Pig started to heal. Around that time, they finally confronted their need for a new keyboard player. They auditioned Howard Wales, but as Weir said, “we spurred him towards new heights of weirdness and he spurred us towards new heights of weirdness . . . much too weird much too quick . . . everybody backed off, scratched their head and said, ‘Well, maybe, uh, next incarnation.’ ”

Which was where the issue remained until early September, when a beautiful woman named Donna Jean Godchaux grabbed Garcia by the arm as he was walking to the dressing room at the Keystone Korner and said, “My husband and I have something very important to talk to you about.” “Okay,” Garcia said. “Come on backstage.” But the Godchaux were both extremely shy, especially Donna’s husband, Keith, and they couldn’t force themselves to go back. Garcia returned and sat down at their table, but Keith avoided his gaze. “Honey,” Donna said, “I think Garcia’s hinting he wants to talk to you.” Keith put his head on the table and said, “You’ll have to talk to my old lady, I can’t talk to you right now.” Donna Jean was sweetly blunt: “Well, Keith is your new piano player, so I’m gonna need your home number so we can keep in touch.” Since the Godchaux were not aware that Pigpen was sick, it was a particularly exquisite bit of synchronicity. Jerry smiled, and gave Donna Jean his number and the number at 5th and Lincoln. She called the office and left several messages, but was ignored. Finally, she got him at home, and he said to come to a rehearsal, which at that time was in a warehouse off Francisco Boulevard in San Rafael. It was a Sunday afternoon, and it developed that no one had mentioned to Jerry that the rehearsal had been canceled. Jerry and Keith began to jam, and then Keith and Donna played Garcia a song they’d written, “Every Song I Sing.” Eventually, Garcia picked up the phone and called Kreutzmann. “Why don’t you come down? There’s this guy . . .” They played and played and played some more, and on Monday the whole band joined them. Even though he’d never practiced Dead tunes, Keith was instantly right. They’d throw him musical curves, Kreutzmann said, and he never missed—he was just a great jazz and free music player. By Monday night Keith Godchaux was on the payroll. They invited Donna Jean to sing as well, but she wanted to give her husband pride of position, and she waited.

The notion that things are meant to be is frequently hard to shake around the Grateful Dead. Just when the Dead needed to enrich their sound, a perfect contributor showed up. “It had to happen,” said Keith. “I knew it had to happen because I had a vision.” Donna Jean added, “I had a dream that it was supposed to happen. It was the direction our lives had to go in. The only direction.” Unfortunately, it was a direction that would eventually kill Keith Godchaux.

He was born in 1948 and grew up in suburban Concord, California. He had classical training and played in a country club band, then cocktail jazz in piano bar trios. He was small, gentle, spaced-out, depressive, and extremely vulnerable. Given some stimulation, he was happy to stay up all night discussing Heidegger, Nietzsche, and dualism, but he read little, and his personal presence was so modest that Lesh would think of him as a “cipher,” although he greatly admired him as a player. He was definitely graced with what Jon McIntire would call “psychic knowledge.” Jon recalled Keith telling him, “You have gone up to the gates of heaven many times and have refused to walk through because you think that heaven is not big enough to contain your individuality. And I would like to tell you that it is. And the next time those gates open for you, walk through.” Once he had joined the Dead tour, Keith made it an absolute policy never to get on a small plane unless Jon was on it, too. When asked why, he said, “You have that air of permanence about you.”

Donna Jean had been born and raised in Muscle Shoals, Alabama, where at age fifteen she was already a regular harmony singer at Fame Studios, the renowned home of the Muscle Shoals sound, on tunes like Percy Sledge’s “When a Man Loves a Woman” and Elvis Presley’s “Suspicious Minds.” After a while, it seemed a one-dimensional life to her, and she moved to San Francisco, going to work at Union Oil processing credit cards. Many of her friends at Union Oil were Dead Heads, and she went along with them one night in October 1970 to Winterland. The New Riders she recalled as “a little different” to her, Quicksilver was “really different,” Jefferson Airplane was
“realllly
different,” and after the Dead finished, she went home and sat in her apartment saying, “ ‘How did they do that, how did they do that? That’s what I want’ . . . it was spiritual.”

Keith was part of her social circle, and although she had her eyes on him, they’d never really spoken. One night he came over, they listened to the Grateful Dead, and, still not having really spoken, they looked at each other. They began walking toward each other, and he said, “I love you.” She responded in kind, and they sat down and began figuring out when they were going to get married. It was only on the following weekend that she discovered Keith played piano in a bar band. Later a friend suggested listening to the Dead on the record player, and Keith replied, “I don’t want to listen to it, I want to play it.” And Donna Jean knew. Spotting an ad for a Saunders-Garcia gig at the Keystone Korner, she took their destiny in her hands and Garcia by the arm.

After a few weeks of rehearsal, the Dead took off for Minneapolis, where they would open the tour with a first show that introduced the new band member and six new songs on a live radio broadcast. It was typical of the Dead that the process of integrating both the songs and the player would take place not only onstage but on the air, because one result of Keith’s joining the band was that they would fail to record a new studio album with the new material—they were simply too busy absorbing Keith to make time for the studio. Hunter was bitterly disappointed, but that was the way of it. His new work included Garcia songs “Tennessee Jed,” “Ramble on Rose,” “Brown Eyed Women,” and “Comes a Time,” along with his last Weir song, “Jack Straw.” Weir also introduced “Mexicali Blues,” his first song with Barlow.

“Jed” was the result of a vinous night in Barcelona. Hunter and his lady, Christie, were on their way back to their hotel and found themselves in a little alley with high church buildings on each side. Into this resonant space came the sound of a man playing Jew’s harp, an odd thing in the Spanish night, and when they got back to their room, he began to jot down verses. “Jed” is the musical equivalent of a tall tale, the legend of an eternally resilient displaced wanderer so buffeted by outrageous slings and arrows that even his dog tells him, “Let’s get back to Tennessee, Jed.” “Ramble on Rose” was inspired, so whimsical that it was at times hard to distinguish the mythical from the literal, which was, of course, just the way Hunter liked it. The song’s “Crazy Otto,” for instance, was a real piano player who had cut six honky-tonk albums, including a song about a crazy giraffe, “Oodley Oom Bah.”

“Brown Eyed Women” was a nostalgic look at rural America, an anthem of generations and the passing of fathers. “Sound of the thunder with the rain pourin’ down / and it looks like the old man’s gettin’ on.” “Jack Straw” was dogged by feminist objections to the opening line, “We can share the women / we can share the wine.” As Hunter would plaintively remind the critics, it was this very sexism that would generate the tale of betrayal and murder, but few seemed to take notice. It was a terrific cowboy song: “Leaving Texas / fourth day of July / Sun so hot, clouds so low / The eagles filled the sky / Catch the Detroit Lightning out of Santa Fe / Great Northern out of Cheyenne / From sea to shining sea.” It is mythic America, superbly rendered. “Bertha,” “Sugaree,” and “Wharf Rat,” a haunting depiction of a waterfront alcoholic who dreams of redemption, had already been introduced earlier in the year. It was an extraordinary collection of songs, and any other band would have gotten a studio album out of it.

The fall’s tour went remarkably well, given the presence of a new player. In November Garcia gave up his seat with the New Riders of the Purple Sage to Buddy Cage, and after that month the Riders were on their own. In early December Pigpen returned to the band, although he was wobbly and frail, and for a little while they had two keyboard players. For his review of shows that month at New York City’s Felt Forum, Robert Christgau became one of the first of hundreds of writers to write primarily about the audience. Though Dead Heads were swarming over the front rows, he noted the ease with each he claimed his seats, and how when his date lost her wallet it was swiftly returned to her. “Regulars greeted other regulars, remembered from previous boogies, and compared this event with a downer in Boston or a fabulous night in Arizona.” The sixties were gone, the seventies were less than inspiring, and none of it mattered to the Dead. They were on the planet to play music, and they were in it for the long haul. The band ended the year at Winterland as usual, with Donna Jean coming out to sing on “One More Saturday Night,” Weir commenting, “I know you’re not used to seeing a girl up here, but . . .” They earned $8,000 for the two nights. For the new year 1972, they planned their first real no-fooling vacation, with no shows scheduled until March. Of course, this would be followed by three continuous months of work.