A Long Strange Trip (58 page)

Armed with a philosophy, they pushed on. Copenhagen—a gig at the Tivoli and then a ferry to a castle in Sweden. Aarhus University in Denmark, where the show was in a low-ceilinged cafeteria, people hanging off wooden trusses all over the place. Back to Copenhagen to play a one-hour television show,
TV from the Tivoli,
which was surprisingly good. The fact that everyone in the audience was openly smoking hashish might have added to the grace of the gig. In Amsterdam, however, they also had an encounter with authority. Dan Healy, who was possessed of a mercurial nature and a volcanic temper, got into an altercation with a conductor on the train, and the entourage went into action, shielding him from arrest. “We were the underground,” said Wizard, “saving someone from the Gestapo.” The police came, three stolid Dutchmen who seemed to the family members like something out of
The Third Man.
It was almost disappointing when an interpreter arrived and everything was smoothed over.

And so to Germany, through a border, where “clouds of hash would go up as everybody scarfed down what they had on them before the check,” recalled Dave Parker. “We’d pull up, windows wide open, we had Ozium air fresheners for a while till we ran out, customs guys would hardly get on the bus, or just walk in and out—we were too weird for them.” Germany would always be problematic for the Dead. As M.G. put it, “Germans really hated us. Course it was the baseball in the hotel lobby . . . Kidd and Ram Rod and Johnny [Hagen] and Parish were on big baseball kicks . . . Sonny Heard was priceless with the ball and bat . . . practice swings in the lobby, samurai stuff, like Toshiro Mifune walking out and slicing flies in the lobby when his room service was late, not saying a word, just a few swings of the bat. The point got across that they really loathed us. Ice cream kid. Such Americans. We were bad. We were ugly, too.” For some reason, Kreutzmann always reacted badly to Germany, and an incident involving smashed antiques required Cutler’s financial attention.

Bremen, Dusseldorf, Frankfurt. Every morning they would get their road money from Sam Cutler. Jim Furman would testify in amazement that this arrangement covered even his wife, Mary, who was along as his guest—the Furmans only had to pay for her plane ticket. A Phi Beta Kappa graduate student in oriental art history, she did not exactly fit in with the crew’s sense of humor, especially because she was fluent in French and German and was not afraid of the surroundings. The tour as a whole was “something like an invasion,” Furman thought, “because there were so many of us, we could just take over a hotel or a restaurant. Most of the people had never been to Europe before, and it was also the longest Dead tour ever, so a group consciousness developed that tended to exclude the surroundings . . . We were the All-American Kid in Europe, in a sense a little spastic about relating to people.” Instead of being touched by European culture, they all too often became a “self-contained bubble,” mused Wizard, and “turned it into our trip.” Which was not to say that Donna Jean would not recall for the rest of her life the “heavenly” bus ride looking up at Mad King Ludwig’s castle on the Rhine.

The Nazis had built Frankfurt’s Jahrhundert Halle entirely of plastic, though it looked like wood and velvet and sounded good. There were the usual clashes—Wizard went up on the roof to take pictures, and “some Nazi bastard wanted me dealt with by the authorities because I was in the wrong place . . . we put him in his place.” Hamburg was
really
Germany, on two counts. Wizard went to find the local crew to get the snake (main power cable) in, and in the basement of the Musikhalle discovered that someone in the local crew had been in the Luftwaffe, with the battle flags, photographs, and crossed swords to prove it. “Wow,” he thought to himself. “These guys would have thrown me right in the oven, Dennis Leonard from the Bronx.” But when he asked them for help, “they were totally cool.”

The day before the gig, Lesh had a somewhat different experience. He’d gone down to the hall to check it out, looking at busts of famous composers in the foyer, and a symphony orchestra was rehearsing. Someone with him said, “You’ve got to see this, man.” From the balcony, they looked down on the orchestra, which was rehearsing an excerpt from
Car-men.
“See anything unusual down there?” “No.” “Look at the solo cellist.” And Lesh realized, “The solo cellist is my double. He has my same hair, he has my build, my eyes, my movements. He looks like a clone of me. I went and looked for him, couldn’t—I’m in Pendleton, jeans, all but the hat—and they’re all looking at me like I’m . . . it turns out that in every German city there’s fifty Leshes in the phone book.”

A month on the road, a month to go, and on May Day they ended a long bus ride in Paris, at the Grand Hotel. M.G. was delighted. “Our room looked out on the gilded angels, with their big trumpets, that graced the top of this place. We had this little balcony, you open the thing and there is this beautiful gilt angel.” The Paris Opera House, home of the Phantom, was visible half a block down the street. The next night Warner Bros. sponsored a dinner at La Grande Cascade in the Bois de Boulogne, and after three hours of food, wine, champagne, liqueurs, and a little hashish, it was the waiters who ended up with the happiest, stonedest grins. “Here ya are,
mon-sore,
do yer head some good.”

Their visit came only four years after Paris’s youth-led near-revolution, and clumps of machine-gun-toting
flics
still covered the Left Bank in those days, including the area around their gigs. Walking through lines of police, thought Kreutzmann, “was the coldest feeling ever,” although the 180 cops on the first night shrank to 30 on the second. Keith and Donna were not handling the tour all that well, either, having been “thrown into this huge, monumental, exorbitant scene, you know, and I think that we were both a little freaked-out,” said Donna. “I stayed in my room. In Paris, stoned on acid, I found myself lying under the piano, digging the Grateful Dead—and then realized, ‘Oh, no. I sing with this band! How am I possibly going to be able to get it together to do that?’ ” Ice cream kid or no, she managed.

It was during their second and last night in Paris that the most hilarious adventure of the tour began. A young Frenchman approached the band at the theater and began arguing about their lack of political consciousness. To Kreutzmann, it seemed “obvious he wanted free tickets.” They put him off, and he moved his harangue to Cutler and Rex Jackson, getting no satisfaction. When everyone returned to the hotel, he took up a position in front, bracing every member of the tour party as they came in or out. He was wearing a velvet jacket, which caught their eye, and when they eventually concluded he’d become a bore, Rex dumped ice cream on the jacket he was so proud of, and the Dead all had a good laugh and went to bed. While they slept, Monsieur la Politique had his revenge, introducing a foreign substance into the equipment truck’s gas tank.

The next day they were scheduled to play Lille, a very political college town. The buses and one truck arrived, their equipment truck did not. No amps, no show. The promoter was not able to offer instant refunds—according to some memories, he was unable to offer refunds at all. Sensing trouble, the streetwise Garcia decided that honor did not require going to the hall, and along with Kreutzmann, elected to stay at the hotel. “You guys are nuts” was his analysis. Phil and Bobby went out on the stage and talked to the audience, but
“Pas de musique”
was about the best they could muster, even after Weir’s five years of high school French. “It quickly became my job to explain to a crowd of irate Frenchmen just exactly this— no show tonight, sorry about that. I got three or four sentences off before the crowd became very surly.”

Ushered offstage into the dressing room, Lesh, Weir, Rosie, and a few others suddenly realized they were in deep shit. The audience was furious, convinced of American perfidy, and though no one was thinking in terms of death, Weir thought “they woulda thumped us good and proper.” The door to the dressing room had a window, and they covered it with newspapers and considered their options. Other than being thumped, there was only one: climb down the drainpipe to the top of the truck, jump down on the hood, then to the ground, and run run run for the bus, which was waiting with the engine idling. The furious Frenchmen began to pound on the door, and as the hinges started to creak, Dead family members began going out the window. A gentleman to the end, Weir’s main worry, as he thought about it later, was getting the interpreter, Rosie McGee, and photographer, Mary Ann Mayer, down the drainpipe. That accomplished, he turned to the promoter, promised they’d make up the show, dropped a rose on the sill, and scooted down the pipe like the part monkey he was. He was on the roof of the truck when he heard the door give way, and he hit the ground running for “what physicists called the absolute elsewhere, in a big hurry.” A couple of hours later, after wrapping themselves around some good Bordeaux, it was all pretty funny, but it had been a near thing.

The time it took to replace the damaged truck complicated travel to the
next
gig, the Bickershaw Festival, near Manchester, which they absolutely could not afford to miss, since it was one of their largest paydays on the entire tour. The truckers changed trucks and hauled ass for Manchester, driving like demented bats to make the last possible ferry. Winslow and Wizard were in the recording truck, behind a professional driver who had the main equipment truck. Time was flying, and so was the front truck driver, who began to take insane chances to beat the clock, running cars off the road in the process. They made the ferry, got through London, and then went really nuts, scraping off the side of at least one car before arriving in Manchester with aplomb.

Not surprisingly, in the wake of the Lille debacle no one felt like separating, and the band and family bused back to Paris and then flew to Manchester and the cold gray ooze of northern England. This was no Woodstock-warm shower puddle. This was nasty, primordial stuff that felt as though bones were going to rise to the surface, with a horrific wind to boot. It was sufficiently frigid that the crew put a space heater on the stage to keep the band’s fingers from turning blue. Once again the Dead worked magic. They came on around 7 P.M., and the skies lightened, then cleared. First “Truckin’,” then “Mr. Charlie,” got the audience up. The crowd had built bonfires around the perimeter of the field to keep warm, but now they piled on the fuel and Bickershaw became a pagan festival, dancers circling the flames, and, in the words of a local writer, the “Dead had offered safe passage through weird terrain.”

Amsterdam, where the Concertgebouw was a jewel of a theater, the cocaine was far too good—Rock and Jerry were particularly self-indulgent, and the spouses were not pleased—and the draft Heineken tasted fabulous. Having visited Amsterdam before with the Medicine Ball Caravan, Kidd Candelario knew the ropes, and took Lesh to a pub, where Phil discovered the difference between mere beer and draft Heineken. Lesh had never been a big drinker before, but the combination of cocaine and Heineken would become a big favorite of his, leading to what he would later call “the Heineken years.”

Rotterdam, and then back through Belgium to France, with a middle-of-the-night delay. The customs inspectors were in bed and wouldn’t get up to let the truck in, and Pig, who’d ridden the truck thinking he’d get some extra snooze time—“Ol’ sly Pig, you know,” chortled Kreutzmann, “ ‘Figure I’m gonna get me some extra z’s,’ you know?”—spent the night in the cab. Winslow, too, was totally wiped out with pneumonia, but he insisted on doing his job, upholding the crew tradition.

Once in France, they returned to Lille to keep their word to the promoter and the students. Stunned by their honesty, the promoter was in tears as they set up in the town’s fairgrounds, which was a little park, “an old fort, with gun emplacements and every age of stonework and masonry,” said M.G. There they played for workers eating their sausages and baguettes, mothers with children in prams, and some of the students. It was a cold day, and threatened to rain, and at one point it did rain, so they took cover for a while. It stopped, the sun came out, they returned to the stage, and Lille looked like an impressionist painting, cows in the distance, poplar trees in rows; with a little LSD, it wasn’t hard to see why Monet and company liked the light in their native country. For Phil especially, it was one of the truly spectacular experiences of a lifetime, as though for an hour or two he lived inside a Seurat or a Cézanne. They finished as the sun was setting and the rain was starting up again, and Cutler drove up in a car and handed the keys to Kreutzmann and Lesh and said, “Hey, you guys, you said you wanted to go to the Monaco Grand Prix. Here’s the tickets, here’s the car. All you guys got to do is get to Orly Airport.” “B.K. got us there, man,” cackled Lesh. “I was the navigator from the backseat, Susila rode shotgun. He drove, and he got us through Paris in record time. You can’t believe what he did to those Frenchmen— he left them laying in the road. You can imagine the Gang of One hits Paris in a little Fiat rental car!”

The Dead played on Radio Luxembourg, which was enlivened when the queen spoke and the show cut to the announcer, who was standing on a garbage can onstage. Just as he began to speak, he was knocked off the can by Parish, standing on things onstage being a no-no. The bonus of the performance was getting to see the actual broadcast station, where three or four diesel locomotive engines were on standby in case of a power failure. Healy, Furman, and Wizard were in technical hog heaven, and everyone else was merely fascinated. “Those things run? You keep them running?” Their host walked over, hit a button, and one of the diesels started up. They had vacuum tubes the size of small garbage cans behind inches-thick glass walls.

Then to Heidelberg, where switchblades were legal and everyone stocked up. Since the crew already looked rowdy and tough, and since they would stand around and play with their blades—why else have one?—they got a bad rap, looking even more sinister than they really were. Munich. Hal Kant, their attorney, had joined them at the Munich Hilton, and one morning he got a call from Bonnie Parker. “Hal, we have a problem. We have fifty people checking out of the hotel, and they won’t take my credit card.” “One of the most valuable things I’ve had in my life,” remarked Hal later, “is a Hilton Preferential Card. In Germany, heels clicked when I handed them that card. Then they forgot to bill me, and a year later I got the bill for $15,000.”