A Long Strange Trip (60 page)

Toward Labor Day the band reached out to other old friends. Just as Garcia had settled into a home the previous year, some of their Eugene, Oregon, friends like Ken Kesey’s brother Chuck and his wife, Sue, were doing the same. In a nod to the past, the Dead chose to do a benefit for the Kesey scene, a show often called Kesey’s Farm, but actually the Springfield Creamery Benefit at a field outside Eugene in Veneta. Oregon shows still had a touch of the old acid test flavor. The first of the band’s visits to Oregon that year, in June at the Paramount Theater in Portland, was remembered by the promoter, David Leiken, as the craziest of his life. The show was insanely sold out, “and then Kesey showed up with two buses full of guests . . . The fire marshal tried to close us down—with guests, we had three thousand people easily. A guy fell out of the balcony, rolled to the orchestra wall with a bang, got up, and returned to his seat. They were screwing in the balcony.” The Creamery Benefit would be dominated by one fact: it was, Weir recalled, the hottest day in Oregon’s history, and since the stage faced the setting sun, they were unable to keep their instruments in tune. For all of that, the band played wonderfully.

The day was also a major episode in one of the subplots in the band’s history, its relationship with film. Phil DeGuere was an apprentice filmmaker and Stanford film school graduate—one of his fellow students was Jerry’s first wife, Sara—who in 1972 had hooked up with a man named Sam Field and the Merry Pranksters’ movie team, FWAPS (Far West Action Picture Services). Early that year he approached Garcia, who was standing outside the Keystone waiting for Freddie the owner to get there and open up, and asked him about filming the band. “Why?” Garcia replied. “We just stand there. We don’t do anything.” After a further pitch, Garcia shrugged, “Well, I guess somebody’s going to do it sooner or later.” In the mysterious, informal way of the Dead, Field and DeGuere’s group became the band’s film team, at least to the extent that they were used to run interference with Charlotte Zwerin, representing the Maysles Brothers, who also approached the Dead at this time. Her New York manner put off the band, so Field and DeGuere seemed to have an opportunity. DeGuere had settled in Eugene, and the Veneta show seemed the right time, so they shot it without a deal, “on spec.” As loaded on LSD as everyone else, they managed a decent amateur job of documentary shooting, staying generally in focus, although they unintentionally excluded Keith from the shoot, except for one song. Then they settled down to edit, a process that would take them a considerable time.

The Dead began their fall tour after Eugene with an outdoor show in Boulder, Colorado, where their ability to alter the weather was at least apocryphally established. As a dealer threw hundreds of free baggies of pot into the crowd, the Dead played magnificently. After hours of rain, one shaft of light appeared from the black clouds, and within a few moments the entire cloud cover peeled back like magic. Down the road, they had another show at Roosevelt Stadium. Another sellout, more rain.

Late in October the Dead arrived in Milwaukee, where they shared their hotel with the Democratic presidential candidate, George McGovern. It was a hilarious conjunction in the middle of a terrifying election. Richard Nixon was seeking a second term, and he was doing it by blaming the previous four years’ social change on the Democrats. “Amnesty [for draft resisters], Abortion, and Marijuana,” wrote Hunter Thompson. “Not just four more years of Nixon, but Nixon’s
last four years in politics—
completely unshackled, for the first time in his life, from any need to worry about who might or might not vote for him the next time around.” Even to the apolitical Dead, it was a scary thought. Not that they were in love with McGovern. Earlier in the year the Dead had met him on an airplane flight. When he said, “I’ll get elected and you guys can come play the White House,” they replied, “We won’t play till you legalize marijuana.” There was a silence. So when Garcia got a call in October from the McGovern campaign asking for him to help, he was not excited. “To hear that somebody who might be president even knew my name—I put the phone under the pillow for the rest of the weekend.”

In Milwaukee the strangeness began on the first of two nights with a postshow argument between Weir and Kreutzmann on the profound question “Which freezes first, cement or metal?” Kreutzmann held for the latter, in a debate that started on the ride home, then spilled out onto the sidewalk in front of the hotel. They began to wrestle, to the point of fury. The burly Kreutzmann had Weir’s head and was about to bring it down on the sidewalk when Ram Rod inserted the toe of his shoe where Weir’s head would land, catching Kreutzmann’s attention in a way no other action would have. Very subtle, very Ram Rod. They stopped wrestling, and much later Weir would concede intellectually as well as physically.

On the next night, their last in Milwaukee, Weir was in the final van load back from the gig to the hotel. Some of the local union stagehands had sold a considerable stack of fireworks, legal in Wisconsin, to the always enthusiastic crew. Just as Weir was halfway across the lobby, the first fusillade went off. All the men with sunglasses, tiny radios in their ears, and bulges in their armpits dove to the floor, guns out. Weir kept moving. Upstairs, he got on the phone, found out where the fireworks were stashed and got his share. The hotel was horseshoe-shaped, and so with a little care and the rooming list it was possible to figure out who was where and take aim. At first everyone fired at everyone else, but when the incoming got too thick, the procedure was to go to another room, make an alliance, and start firing at someone else. Coalitions emerged, then defectors. Garcia picked up his phone to hear “terribly distorted popping sounds,” which turned out to be Kreutzmann playing with fireworks in the bathtub. Events assumed their own momentum.

Candace Brightman had been something of a teenage vandal and was an enthusiastic participant in the proceedings. Now Ben Haller, who had the room above hers, upped the ante. He slit a pillow and had someone knock on her door. Opening it created a draft that sucked in the feathers, leaving her cohort Weir to emerge looking like the abominable snowman. Eventually, the warriors turned their attention to the Ramada Inn across the parking lot, and slowly their ammunition ran low. By now, of course, local police and the Secret Service were furiously trying to find the source of the artillery. Weir had landed in Keith’s room, and fortunately, all that was left of their armory was blue smoke. When the police entered and demanded identification, Keith, who looked to Weir like the archetypal wavy-lipped cartoon drunk, snarled and slurred, “Fuck you, pig, I’m not showing you no fucking ID.” Remarkably, he was the only person arrested that night, although Kreutzmann was ejected from the hotel after getting rude at the front desk. Weir got Keith bailed out and stashed him at the Ramada, along with Kreutzmann, who in typically cyclical fashion had achieved a temporary nirvana. Once in his new room, he had turned on the radio and gotten a jazz station that was the best he’d ever heard. He lay down, blissed out, and listened to music for hours.

In November they released
Europe ’72.
For a number of reasons, it was an exceptional live album. One reason was the elegant overdubbing, which polished their harmonies and allowed Merl to drop in some B-3 organ. Their work was so meticulous that they re-created the stage setup of the instruments in the studio to approximate the original ambience. Willy Legate’s liner notes were also superb, and quite unlike anything else in rock:

Anguish and despair are only the sugar-coating on the bitter pill of understanding. And what is self and what is not are only learned learnings who stand without the gate while imaginations glance off the innocent one.

Silence speaks to silence when one who has consciously renounced the interior dialog of wishful astrological gossip and the exterior array of false stimuli which engineer it, continues to experience the music of the Grateful Dead across wider bands of life . . . You know that anything you seek, you’ve known already. Find = recognize . . . Why are the dead grateful? Because their presence is invoked. Acknowledgment of the dead is new life. All the living who have entered the mystery of the name of the Dead have begun to die. The gratitude of the dead is music.

The album received an especially accurate review from Patrick Carr in the
New York Times:

In the realms of hip legend, astral pleasure, rock and roll and business as usual, the Grateful Dead stand higher than any other veteran American rock band . . . a music which often induced something closely akin to the psychedelic experience . . . It sounds pseudomystical . . . but the fact is that it happens, and it is intentional . . . [the album] demonstrates a widening of perspective—or perhaps an addition of several narrower perspectives . . . perhaps the most technically proficient and musically integrated band in the world . . . They will still be playing together when their contemporaries have long gone their separate ways . . .

Another important aspect of
Europe ’72
was that it was de facto their last Warner Bros. album. (They would actually complete their contract by having Bear compile an album,
Bear’s Choice,
from old tapes.) On July 4, 1972, Ron Rakow had presented to them a plan for their own record company, and they’d gone for the challenge. Late in 1972 they’d met with Clive Davis, the head of Columbia Records, who had tried to sign them. Accompanying Clive was his head of FM promo, a serious Dead Head named Michael Klenfner, who’d been a security guard at Fillmore East only two years before. A joint came out and went around the table—Clive declined—and someone asked, “Clive, are you sure that you’re going to make sure that our pressings are right?” Klenfner interjected, “If he doesn’t, I’ll be there because I want to hear it right.” “It was an incredible cross-examination, exhausting and exhilarating at the same time,” wrote Davis. As impressed as they were with Clive, the band would say, “Thanks, but no thanks,” to his offer; they were going out on their own.

One other aspect of
Europe ’72,
something that also came from Willy, would leave a special mark. It was a slogan in the liner notes, and it would spread via bumper-sticker through the next couple of decades, as truthful and self-evident as anything in rock:

“There is nothing like a Grateful Dead concert.”

38

Megadead (1973)

After a busy January of songwriting and rehearsal, the Grateful Dead began its 1973 tour year early in February at Maples Pavilion, the Stanford University basketball facility, introducing seven new songs and a special sound system. Healy, Bear, and Matthews had taken Electro-Voice tweeters, rebuilt them, “pinked” the room—pink noise is the sound of a specific frequency, generated to equalize the sound in the room so that no one frequency dominates—and spent perhaps $20,000 on amplifiers and other new equipment. In the first two seconds of the first song, the band wiped out every brand-new tweeter. The sound crew managed to fake its way through that little disaster, but it was an aptly dramatic beginning.

Over the next two years the sound system would be the overwhelming focus of the band’s attention, and Dan Healy would be the motivating force. After years away, Healy had come to a show in New York late in 1971 and declared that the sound was only average. This outraged him, and after the show he went backstage to see the band and said so. “I want back in. We’ll talk when you guys get home.” The band agreed, and though Matthews would mix through much of 1972, and Bear would have a major role after his release from prison that August, Healy began to exert a significant influence. Unlike Bear, who did not have the crew’s confidence, and Matthews, who was easily distracted, Healy was an effective leader, able to take some of Bear’s inspirations, as run through the design minds at Alembic, and make them work on the road. His passion for quality extended to the very buildings the band was now working in. He and Ron Wickersham rendered architectural drawings and plots of room acoustics, then offered them to the halls, which in the case of the Springfield, Massachusetts, Civic Center, resulted in vastly improved acoustics.

The new songs at Maples Pavilion, all of them by Hunter and Garcia, withstood the test of time considerably better than the tweeters. “Loose Lucy” celebrated a ribald and tempestuous romp—“Singing thank you / for a real good time.” Another up-tempo rock shuffle, an early version of a song that would become “U.S. Blues,” mixed pop icons, cynicism, and patriotism: “I’m Uncle Sam, that’s who I am / been hidin’ out / in a rock ’n’ roll band / Shake the hand / that shook the hand / Of P. T. Barnum / and Charlie Chan . . . I’ll drink your health / share your wealth / run your life / steal your wife.” “China Doll,” originally known as “The Suicide Song,” was a fascinating writer’s exercise in that it was sung by a person who has committed suicide, a ghost. It would be one of Garcia’s great ballads. But the new song that would be played over and over was “Eyes of the World.” Its Whitmanesque, mystical celebration of compassion and the organic— “There comes a redeemer / and he slowly too fades away / There follows a wagon behind him / that’s loaded with clay / and the seeds that were silent / all burst into bloom and decay / The night comes so quiet / and it’s close on the heels of the day”—was to some ears a hippie song of enlightenment that dated itself quickly. But the tune, an incredibly seductive rhythm when done correctly, was entrancing, and the band would come back to it again and again.

Early in March they were rehearsing at the Stinson Beach Community Center when an old friend, photographer Bob Seidemann, stopped by with Pigpen. Pig was extremely sick with a damaged liver, and he had asked Bob for a ride so that he could have his picture taken with the band. In Seidemann’s view, “They coldly put him down, turned him away. They pecked him and pecked him and pecked him.” As far as Weir knew, Pig wasn’t going to be able to play with them for a while, but he had stopped drinking and was working on a solo album. They all expected him to recover. Garcia had asked McIntire to investigate any possible help for Pigpen, and Jon had found someone at the U.C. Medical Center, but it was too late. In any case, on the day of Pig and Seidemann’s visit, the band didn’t want to be distracted, and Pig went on home. He was living alone, because in November he had sent Vee away, telling her, “I don’t want you around when I die.” Their relationship had even degenerated into a horrible squabble over the division of furniture that required the intervention of Hal Kant and another attorney.

After a couple months of recuperation with his family in Palo Alto, Pig had returned to Marin in January. He was lonely, and a number of times he called Girl Freiberg, who had moved into his and Weir’s old Novato home, and invited her over to his place to play chess. His solo album included the following lyrics:

Seems like there’s no tomorrow
Seems like all my yesterdays were filled with pain
There’s nothing but darkness tomorrow
If you gonna do like you say you do
If you gonna change your mind and walk away . . .
Don’t make me live in this pain no longer
You know I’m gettin’ weaker, not stronger

On March 7, a friend of Healy’s named Monterey Mabel called Dan with a premonition of trouble, but he was unaware of any bad news and their call ended inconsequentially. The next morning Dave Parker got a call from Pig’s landlady, who said that she hadn’t seen him around lately. Parker went over, and through the window he could see Pig lying on the floor. He had died of internal bleeding from the esophageal vein, a result of prolonged drinking, the same thing that had taken Jack Kerouac four years before. Ron was twenty-seven.

Two days later, Hunter and Weir turned to each other. There had been only one possible response to Pig’s death, and that was a righteous wake, to be held at Weir’s new digs, a lovely glass-and-wood hillside home in Mill Valley. As the gathering was about to begin, Hunter said, “If there’s one thing I learned from Pigpen, I think I’m going to get drunk and have a real good time.” They did so, with enthusiasm. There was, said Weir, “substantial collateral damage.” It was raining to beat hell, and there were five hundred—someone actually counted—people there, which meant there were hundreds on the hillside next to the house, which could not possibly accommodate more than a few dozen. Inside, there was an “informal wake/riot,” said Weir. “Outside, it was an orgy.” People no one had ever seen before had wound up on the hillside, there being no fence or yard, and they’d responded to death by trying to create life—or something like that. There was another response. Alana Wyn-Ellis was a friend of Julie Christie’s who’d met Marmaduke Dawson at the Bickershaw Festival the year before and shortly after had married him. She found herself standing at the wake with a cream pie in her hand, but no one was eating, and “I didn’t know what to do with it till [Sam Cutler] turned the corner.” Sam struck her as a pretentious fraud, and without thought, the pie left her hand and intersected with Sam’s face with perfect timing. For one-tenth of a horrible second, she realized that she was relatively new to the scene and this was rather unlikely behavior for her—and then the crew roared, and so did everyone else.

The traditional Roman Catholic funeral was attended by the band, Kesey and Babbs, Hell’s Angel Sandy Alexander, KSAN disc jockey Dusty Street, and Jason McGee, the boy who’d been informally adopted and raised at 710. At the wake Pigpen was dressed in a leather jacket and a brown shirt, his cowboy hat on a pillow beside him. He was buried at Alta Mesa Memorial Park in Palo Alto under a stone that read, “Once and forever a member of the Grateful Dead.” His books—Kerouac, Ginsberg, science fiction, Pogo—and his records—Sam and Dave, Little Richard, Jimmy Reed, Lonnie Mack, Flip Wilson, Sonny Boy Williamson, Lightnin’ Hopkins, the Four Tops, Bessie Smith, Ray Charles—went to his sister, Carol. The loss left Garcia despondent, and he considered folding the band. Finally, he and Hunter wrote some tunes “so weird,” recalled M.G., that he was able to recover his balance. But in his heart, the Grateful Dead would never be quite the same again.

In the course of the preceding winter, Garcia had spent considerable time playing music and hanging out with David Grisman in Stinson Beach. Born in Passaic, New Jersey, Grisman shared with Garcia the loss of a musician father at an early age. First from the radio and then from a Mike Seeger album, he’d developed an interest in bluegrass. His tenth-grade English teacher, Elsie Rinzler, sent him to her cousin Ralph, a member of the Greenbriar Boys, who introduced him to the music of the New Lost City Ramblers and to the regular Sunday afternoon Washington Square Park folk jam sessions. A natural-born nonconformist, David chose the mandolin instead of the more popular guitar. Then he saw Bill Monroe, and his interest in bluegrass was set in concrete. He spent four years at NYU, but got his real education while working for Israel Young at the Folklore Center. His first recording credit was an album with the Even Dozen Jug Band, with John Sebastian and Maria D’Amato (later Maria Muldaur). He met Garcia during the summer of 1964, and they stayed in touch, with Grisman visiting the Warlocks in 1965 in Palo Alto and then seeing the Dead at the Cafe au Go Go in 1967 on their first New York visit.

Once David settled in Stinson Beach, the inevitable happened. One day he brought Peter Rowan, who’d played guitar for Bill Monroe, up to Sans Souci, and the instruments came out. “We need a bass player,” said Garcia, and they went to John Kahn’s house; the music started, and kept on rolling. Jerry had come a long way since 1964. His obsessive need to be great on banjo had diminished with the satisfaction derived from other music forms, so he could enjoy playing bluegrass once again. Grisman was far and away the best mandolin player he’d ever known, and Kahn played a satisfactorily spritely bass. Rowan was erratic, thought Grisman, as when he “tends to forget that he’s a rhythm guitar player in becoming the Mick Jagger of bluegrass,” but he contributed plenty. Before they had even played outside Kahn’s home, they were a band. “Jerry directed it,” said Grisman, “but he never wanted to be the leader. Nobody did. Maybe Pete, but we wouldn’t let him.” As usual, other egos tended to defer, pleasantly and for the best musical reasons, to Garcia. They hung out, played, and gave each other nicknames. Rowan had written “Panama Red,” so he was “Red.” Garcia dubbed Grisman “Dawg,” for no particular reason. Kahn was “Mule,” and Garcia, again for no good reason, became “Spud.”

And while playing at home is fun, an audience adds adrenaline to the enjoyment. “Shit,” said Garcia, “why don’t we play a few bars and see what happens?” In March they played the first of their eighteen club dates, which, along with four concerts, three school performances, a radio show, and a bluegrass festival, constituted the complete history of their new band, Old and in the Way (OAIW). It was a tightly knit group. There were the musicians, but no roadies, since acoustic instruments required none. Garcia’s manager, Richard Loren, booked the gigs and became road manager. Bear was looking for something to do, and eventually, despite Garcia’s complete lack of enthusiasm, he and his girlfriend, Victoria, became part of the scene, setting up recording gear at each show. The Lion’s Share, a club in San Anselmo, was tiny, which made it a fine place for the band to make its debut.

At his first show Garcia had to remember that he wasn’t plugged in, and remarked afterward, “I’d forgot how physical it is. But it sure is fun.” Later he would concede, “At this point, I’m like super primitive . . . This is the group I wanted to play with when I was first real deep into bluegrass, but they weren’t around then.” Garcia was approaching musical saturation—which for him was merely full satisfaction. In one week he could play with the Dead, with Merl Saunders, and with OAIW. Bluegrass was especially fine, because there was no pressure at all. They’d begin by warming up for three or four hours, play three hours onstage, and very possibly cool down for another two. Life was good. In fact, it was so good that Garcia reached out to share it. One of his favorite bands was the then-unknown group from Ireland, the Chieftains. Hearing that they were in San Francisco on a promotional tour, he arranged for them to open for Old and in the Way, set up an interview for them at KSAN, got them a limo, and then went with Chieftains front man Paddy Moloney to the station, where he joined Tom Donahue as co-interviewer. Never having heard of the Grateful Dead, Moloney was at first bemused by Jerry’s enthusiasm, though he found him utterly charming and knowledgeable. “A few jars [drinks]” later, said Paddy, they were pals, and would stay that way for life.

Back on the road with the Dead, Garcia found himself one day in March in Baltimore with a day off, the next show in Springfield, Massachusetts, and Robert Hunter at his side. Hunter suggested a walk, and most uncharacteristically, Garcia accepted. Back at the hotel, they didn’t want their good mood to end, and they decided to avoid the airplane scene, rent a car, and drive to Springfield. A couple of hours into their jaunt, New Jersey State Trooper Richard Procachino pulled Garcia over for doing 71 in a 60-mph zone in Mount Holly, and Garcia went to the trunk to get his driver’s license out of his attaché case. Alas, there was a highly visible bag of pot in the case. “You know I can’t let you get away with this,” said Procachino. “Yeah,” shrugged Garcia.

They went to the local lockup, and after a while Hunter followed Garcia into the bathroom. There on the toilet seat were the scattered remains of the other drug, cocaine, that Garcia had been carrying—fortunately, he had never been searched. Hunter called Sam Cutler, who called John Scher. Later, Scher would muse that if Cutler had been a little more cognizant of American geography, he’d have called the Philadelphia promoter, who was many miles closer. But as it was, New Jersey meant Scher. John raided his safe at the Capitol Theater in Passaic for the $1,000 bail, got to Mount Holly, and rescued Garcia. Ten minutes out of town, Garcia relaxed, and for the next couple of hours he and Scher would rave and bond on the ride to New York City. The primary result of Garcia’s misadventure—in the end, he received probation, and briefly had to visit a psychiatrist—would be the close relationship he’d enjoy with Scher for the rest of his career.

The Dead returned home and got on with the real business of the day, creating their own record company. Wrote Hunter years later in a blank-verse memoir, “tired of working for Bugs Bunny anyway, / put together a record company of our own / and d-d-do it the way we want it d-d-done / and have only ourselves to answer to? / It might work. It should work. It
will
work.”