A Long Strange Trip (59 page)

On their way from Munich back to London they looped through Switzerland, where Cutler performed a prank on the management of the Grand Hotel in Lucerne. The hotel was a five-star, triple-fancy, utterly formal establishment, and Sam paid cash in advance so that the reservations were airtight. Expecting an appropriately garbed orchestra, the hotel’s management took one look at Dan Healy’s neon shirt and the tie-dyes lounging in the lobby and gulped. Garcia matched Cutler with another joke. On the way into Switzerland the safety valve on the bus stove’s propane bottle blew off because of the altitude. “All of a sudden
whooosssssh
and the whole bus starts filling with propane,” said M.G. “ ‘Stop the bus, stop the bus.’ We whip the bus over to the side of the road. We’ve got those little gray flannel airplane blankets, you know, and everybody is coming out from underneath [them] . . . Jerry says, ‘I’ll strike a match and see where it is’ and he lights a match. I was out the front door as soon as he said ‘light a match.’ Think, Jerry? He doesn’t think. He acts. I was mad at him for a week. It was like ‘I dare you.’ ” “Kidd was my main henchman on that,” snickered Garcia. “I knew it wasn’t really going to blow, it was a small flame, and we took it out and smothered it—a dumb thing to do, but an opportunity. I can’t resist a setup like that.”

And so to London to end the tour with four nights at a small place called the Lyceum with the New Riders opening. The Visine bottles came out, and the levels of LSD consumption went up; they were heading home. On one night, Candace could barely see the stage and thought everyone there was wearing an animal mask. And then there was Wizard’s tale. Wizard was an enthusiastic psychedelicist, but on the final night, May 26, he realized that while he’d taken LSD on the tour, his commitment to work had been such that he had never let go his self-control and gotten really high. He dropped, and before the show he went to the lobby to see the booths set up by Warner Bros. and the New Riders’ record company, Columbia. They seemed rather lame, and he split. Betty had added some Punch and Judy masks to the costume stash, and Wizard wore Punch, with the ringlets of his hair around the edges of the mask so that the edges were invisible. When he returned to the lobby, he inspected the booths a second time and discovered that the staff had been dosed and were considerably startled over his mask. “No no no, it’s only a mask,” and he pulled it off—and they freaked harder.

The Dead began to play, and this time Wizard was feeling his LSD. The VU meters were melting, and seeing them clearly was difficult. Still, he managed. Since it was the last night, Betty was a little anxious and asked Wizard if it sounded okay. He soloed up each channel and said, “Yeah, it sounds great.” Forlorn, she asked for reassurance. Falling back on the basic checklist, she asked, “Are we recording?” Just to be a psychedelic wiseass, Wizard replied, “In fact, everything we’re hearing now happened a few milliseconds ago, because we’re listening off the playback head.” Betty had come to the end of her tour. She looked at him, eyes pinwheeling, and said, “Wowwwwwww.” Wizard smiled. “ ‘Betty, go inside and have a good time.’ Now I’m alone. The truck is sitting there vibrating. All is great. Late in ‘Truckin’,’ I had put a fresh pack of tape on, so that’s smooth. And then I hear a microphone fucking up and realize I have to leave—which you never, ever do. Close and lock the truck, go inside, fix the mike, and then I let go [of control]—and they went into ‘Morning Dew,’ and I can’t leave. J.G. looks up and sees me and realizes the truck is empty. I nod, and he smiles! He’s playing with his back to the audience, tears streaming down his face, the music playing the band, and the music recording itself. Ecstasy on every level.”

During the production of the album, Garcia ran into Wizard and said, “Hey, man, guess what? ‘Morning Dew’ is definitely on.” Lowering his voice, “And no one was in the truck!” “We all took a step over the cliff,” said Wizard. “We were all being guided by the muse.”

Going in the opposite direction in every way—geographically, socially, psychologically, aesthetically—were the Rolling Stones. Shortly after the Dead got home, the Stones began their 1972 tour of the United States on June 3. Anxious to dispel the memories of Altamont, they mounted a businesslike invasion, “trying to pass themselves off,” wrote one critic, “as a bunch of middle-class Balzacian businessmen, possibly even with ties to the
ancien régime.”
Their tour included about sixty stagehands and other crew, a traveling sideshow with a cast that included Truman Capote, Terry Southern, Princess Lee Radziwill, bodyguards, and a security chief. And there were orgies—the unofficial tour theme song was “Cocksucker Blues.” Both the Stones and the Dead tours were connected to great albums
(Exile on Main Street, Europe ’72)
and lots of cocaine. The Stones, unlike the Dead, made lots of money. The Dead, unlike the Stones, performed a free concert. It was a juggernaut versus the Toonerville Trolley with Bozo masks, yet both tours delivered highly professional rock.

The Rolling Stones’ former and the Grateful Dead’s current road manager was busy upon his return from Europe. Sam Cutler’s natural inclinations made him an empire builder, and he wanted to be more than a road manager. In May he founded Out of Town Tours (OOT), a booking agency that would handle the Dead and several other bands, bringing in Gail Turner as office manager and Chesley Millikin as vice president. Chesley was an interesting character in the Dead’s scene. A little older than the band members, he’d fled his native Ireland to become a martiniguzzling businessman in Berkeley before going to a 1966 Dead concert on campus, where he fell in with Danny, Rock, and Pigpen. After taking LSD for his alcoholism, he dropped out, eventually becoming the manager of a band called Kaleidoscope (which featured David Lindley), then the in-house hippie at CBS in 1968, and then Epic Records’ European manager in 1969. He’d tour-managed the New Riders for a spell, and now he and OOT began to book Doug Sahm, the Sons of Champlin, Big Brother, and the New Riders, as well as the Dead. Chesley was fond of Rock, but felt that Scully’s lack of a work ethic made him hard to take seriously. “The people who were supposed to be in charge,” thought Chesley, “were not in charge.” Garcia, in fact, spent more time at the office than Rock, out of sheer curiosity. Sam was “megalomaniacal,” smart, and hardworking, and in Chesley’s opinion, wanted the band to be more successful but only in a righteous sense. For Chesley, McIntire was “too smooth,” the “flimflam man.” Sam’s creation of an alternative power base to the band itself would, in the end, spell disaster for him. Yet his aggressive improvement of their moneymaking ability over the previous two and next two years would make some dreams possible.

May saw the release of two solo albums on Warner Bros., Mickey Hart’s
Rolling Thunder
and Weir’s
Ace.
Building a studio and coming to ground had been beneficial for Hart. His then lover, Nancy Getz-Evans, recalled him as a wonderful teacher and a compulsively generous man, giving away what money he had to the point of shorting himself. He shared everything, including his studio. One day a guy showed up who’d walked over the hills to the ranch—he looked to Nancy “as though he’d been in the hills forever”—and asked Mickey if he could record. Sure. “One of the most creative, far-out people I’ve ever met,” Nancy said of Hart. “A patient, slow teacher.” She would become a distinguished studio professional in her own right.

Rolling Thunder
was a very good album that comprised, wrote a dubious Robert Christgau, “Alla Rakha, Shoshone chants, a water pump, big-band jazz, and electronic music, not to mention Paul and Gracie and Jerry,” but it was actually a great deal more conventional than such a combination might suggest. Mickey had gotten a three-record deal from Joe Smith, and
Rolling Thunder
gave him the means to improve the barn’s equipment. Warner Bros. even released a single, “Blind John,” backed with “Pump Song,” the earliest version of “Greatest Story Ever Told.” This gave Mickey a chance to step much, much further out on the edge. His next album,
Fire on the Mountain,
began with the song of that name, and then moved into Hartian (as in Martian) percussion/electronica space. One piece, “Marshmallow Road,” was written by Mickey and Barry Melton in Hart’s mother’s home in Sunrise City, Florida. Their means of inspiration was to take lots of acid and lock themselves in a room with eight or ten cartons of marshmallows. After two days the LSD, the Florida heat, and the marshmallows combined into a nasty goo, and they fled the room and jumped into the nearest swimming pool. In Joe Smith’s opinion the album was as gooey as the Marshmallow Road, and he rejected it.

Mickey responded by making a sound track to a martial arts film script called
The Silent Flute,
written by, among others, Bruce Lee. Martial arts was a Hartian specialty and brought out his greatest intensity. For two weeks he did not change his clothing and had his food left at the barn door. Since he did not even have a copy of the script, he relied solely on his memory of one reading. “Piano. Low frequencies. It was my best work.” This, too, was rejected. “They actually walked out on me while I was playing it for them.”

Ace
found an only slightly better response than
Rolling Thunder.
Rolling Stone,
by now into its seventies dish-the-Dead policy, dismissed the album as “half good.” Weir did get one bonus, however. Shortly after returning from Europe, he was sent out with Warner’s head of promo, former Beatles publicist Derek Taylor, to visit radio stations around the country. “Derek was wonderful,” Weir recalled. “He was civilized, but he was also incredibly funny. Like, you know, this old lady would get on the airplane—[wobbly old-lady voice] ‘What will I do with my umbrella?’ and Derek, in this impenetrable English accent, ‘May I suggest you stuff it up your bum, miss?’ ‘Oh, thank you very much.’ She couldn’t understand it, of course, the way he said it [and she’d reply] ‘Oh thank you, but I think I’ll just put it here.’ ”

The Dead returned to work, but very quickly lost Pigpen, who played a little at a Hollywood Bowl concert on June 17, but sang only one song, “Rockin’ Pneumonia.” They sent him home and pressed on. At two that morning, a security guard at the Watergate apartment complex in Washington, D.C., Frank Wills, caught four men working for the Committee to Re-Elect the President in the act of burglarizing the headquarters of the Democratic Party. The ensuing scandal would have a considerable impact. For the Dead, the specific day was memorable for a song, one of the finest ballads Garcia and Hunter would ever produce. Hunter had written the lyrics years before at the Chelsea—“a blue-light cheap hotel”—and in the spring, in Germany, Garcia had picked up a guitar and the melody had fallen out. It was called “Stella Blue,” and it was lovely. “All the years combine / they melt into a dream / A broken angel sings / from a guitar . . .”

As the summer progressed, the Dead toured the East Coast, and the shows continued to grow in size, ranging now from four-thousand-seat theaters to small stadiums. In the wake of the closing of the Fillmore East, a number of young men had emerged as New York City area promoters, including Jim Koplik and Shelley Finkel in suburban Connecticut and John Scher, who was still a college student, in New Jersey. Ron Rainey, the Dead’s booking agent, had discovered Roosevelt Stadium, a minor-league ballpark in a rat-hole neighborhood of Jersey City, and suggested it as a site to Scher. The fall before, the Dead had played at Gaelic Park in the Bronx for Koplik and Finkel, selling out twenty thousand tickets. The July 18 Roosevelt Stadium deal of $20,000 against 60 percent of the gate—whichever was higher—would mean (20,000 $5 tickets = $100,000 gross × 60% = $60,000 pay) a very fat payday for a band that was not yet averaging $5,000 per show. The Dead had become a stable, economically functioning band at Fillmore East. With John Scher as their promoter, they would become a giant band at Roosevelt Stadium.

Back home in August, they passed one particularly odd interlude, working a recording session as a backup band for folksinger David Bromberg. Garcia had met his manager, Al Aronowitz, and they’d become good friends. In the late 1950s Aronowitz had been a
New York Post
feature writer who’d drawn the assignment of skewering the Beat Generation, because the
Post’
s editor’s son was smoking pot and falling under its influence. What the editor got, however, was the best journalistic coverage of the Beats ever. Aronowitz had gone to the extent of interviewing Neal Cassady in prison, and that alone would explain his attractiveness to Garcia. Now Al managed Bromberg, among other things an extraordinary acoustic guitarist, and one day in August he asked Garcia for help. “Hey, Keith,” Garcia said, turning to Godchaux, “d’ya feel like playing some rock and roll?” The result of their day at Wally Heider’s was side one of
Wanted: Dead or Alive,
a good album that would have been better if Bromberg had been more comfortable with the Dead or the Dead had spent more time with Bromberg.

A few days later the Dead played at Berkeley Community Theater, with a new/old face at the mixing board. After serving two years in federal prison for manufacturing LSD, Bear had been released, to begin two years of what proved to be intense frustration in his relationship with the Dead. In his absence the social structure of the touring Dead had changed dramatically. To Bear’s mind, tasks—except for mixing—had been shared in his day, but since then Matthews had defined “compartmentalized” roles. Worse still, from Bear’s point of view, was the addition of cocaine and beer to the social mix. Foul language offended him, and at one point he gathered the crew together to say, “I’m used to working with my friends. I don’t want to work with people who use language like you guys do.” That fall there was a college gig at which Matthews disappeared and Bear grabbed some local kids to lift and carry. In the process the mixing board ended up in a college dormitory room. When the crew arrived at the next gig and discovered the loss, they blamed Bear. During the self-criticism session that followed, Sparky Raizene picked up Bear and threw him across the room. Simply put, the crew did not acknowledge Bear’s self-perceived status as a core member of the scene, a near-member of the band. He went to the musicians and said, “Put me in charge of the crew. Let me have the power over the crew, tell them they’re working for me, that I have the hire/fire, whatever.” The band declined to challenge the status quo, leaving Bear in a limbo he described as “Here’s a piece of your job back, just a taste—and stand over there.”