A Long Strange Trip (61 page)

On March 18, 1972, Ron Rakow had been driving between Bolinas and Olema when he conceived an idea for a Dead record company. He researched the notion in SEC files, copying the financial statements of the big record companies, and that Fourth of July he submitted to the band a ninety-three-page report with supporting bibliography called the So What Papers. Whether or not anyone in the band ever really read the So What Papers is unclear. Rakow had Garcia’s ear. It was not hard in any case to convince Garcia to look for an alternative to conventional record companies, so Jerry was, as Rakow later expressed it, “maximally enthused. That was something I could do to him at any time.” “To him” was the relevant phrase. Rakow fulfilled Garcia’s need to travel the dark side, where lived the hustlers and weasels. Through him, Garcia could vicariously enjoy a con game. Intellectually, Garcia really was an outlaw. If they could somehow subvert the entire American music industry, terrific. Rakow’s machinations with the All Our Own car company and his inept management of the Carousel had damaged no one whom Garcia knew, and generated a huge amount of good trips, high times, and a marvelous challenge to the status quo. It seemed that it could happen again, shaking the Dead out of the torpor of their success. “Jerry was my ally in this,” said Rakow. “Every morning I would go to Jerry’s house in Stinson Beach. He liked my desire to have a lot of random events going on.”

The plan Rakow initially presented had two aspects that were memorably foolish. One involved bypassing the entire world of music distribution to sell records from ice cream trucks. Another involved financing the deal through the federal government’s Minority Enterprise Small Business Investment Company (MESBIC). Somehow, they would get themselves declared a minority, and $1,350 would become $300,000. Rakow had an impressive chart on an easel set up in front of everyone, and it all seemed real. When Bonnie Parker remarked that she’d worked in a job that dealt with the Small Business Administration and that the feds were unlikely to lay down dead, Rakow merely took out a sharp Puma knife and sliced the MESBIC section out of the chart. The main person who might have been expected to challenge Rakow, band attorney Hal Kant, did not take him terribly seriously. “I’d listen to their crazy raves; it meant nothing to me because first of all I wasn’t involved in the music business except for them at the time, and second of all, it was hobby time, it wasn’t a major thing. It was amusing, that was all . . . Rakow is supposed to be a serious businessman? He doesn’t have a clue.”

Later, Rakow would create a second company to produce side projects called Round Records, which was co-owned by him and Garcia. This Kant took seriously, pointing out that it was a major conflict of interest, since it commingled the band’s finances with a side project. Garcia blew up, telling Hal that he represented the band, not the record company, and replaced him at the record company with a San Rafael attorney named David Hellman, who also represented Rakow personally. This conflict of interest escaped criticism at the time, but it would have major long-term side effects. A week later, Hal recalled, Garcia apologized to him for his outburst. “Ron is such a weak guy,” Garcia said. “If we confronted him with this, he’d fall apart. I knew you could handle it but I didn’t think he could.” “Garcia,” Kant said, “just wanted people who would do what he wanted them to do, but frequently he had trouble deciding what that was.” And in fact, when it came time for the ultimate meeting to decide on the project, Donna Jean would remember that Garcia was a no-show, since he didn’t really want to deal with business anyway. Lesh was no big fan of Rakow’s, but his attitude was the one that held sway: “I thought it was worth trying.”

In the end, they compromised. No ice cream trucks. Rakow came up with financing derived from two sources: a revolving line of credit from the Bank of Boston and a lump-sum advance from Atlantic Records for foreign rights to their releases. With that in hand, they had their own company. “It’s the most exciting option to me,” said Garcia, “just in terms of ‘What are we gonna do now that we’re enjoying this amazing success?’ The nice thing would be not to sell out at this point and instead come up with something far out and different which would be sort of traditional with us.”

The Grateful Dead was now a megabusiness. Fifth and Lincoln remained headquarters, home to manager McIntire and also record company president Rakow. One of the first new people to join Grateful Dead Records was Steve Brown, a fan who’d coincidentally submitted a proposal for a record company to the Dead in January. Brown’s proposal was a book that included a picture of Garcia walking to work at the Haight Street show in March 1968, a show Brown had also taped. His job interview ended up being a raving conversation with Garcia about growing up in San Francisco and working for Don Sherwood, a well-known local disc jockey. Brown was hired to be the album production coordinator, but he would also man a booth at Dead shows for the next two years, giving away postcards, signing up Heads to the mailing list, and so forth. Emily Craig, the Boston waitress Rakow had inveigled into the scene, knew a photographer in Massachusetts named Andy Leonard, who was put in charge of manufacturing and advertising. Bob Seidemann, who’d been one of the band’s photographers off and on forever, was made the art director. He got the job, a desk, and a phone, but for him the trouble started immediately, because he had nothing to do. “Essentially, Ron wanted all the power, that’s it. He didn’t want anyone around who had any influence other than himself.” There were two other obvious candidates for employment at the record company, Rock Scully and Chesley Millikin, but despite their qualifications, they were never hired.

About three blocks down Lincoln Street, there was a small modern office building at 1333. There, the tie-dyed second floor was the fiefdom of Out of Town Tours, Cutler’s booking agency. It had expanded mightily, adding clients and employees, including Mustang Sally Dryden, wife of Spencer; Cutler’s lover, Frances Carr (sister of Loose Bruce Baxter); Frances’s sister Libby; Gail Turner; and Rita Gentry, who later became a fixture working for Bill Graham. Rita would remember OOT as a place where Peter “Craze” Sheridan and Bear would come on to her and Hell’s Angels would stop by to see Sam and pop wheelies in the parking lot. It was a scene tinged by an aura of madness, and she loved it. Sam had style. That Christmas, OOT employees received solid-gold skull necklaces. Sam was equally skillful in making sure the crew responded to him. Danny Rifkin had returned from his travels and by now had joined the stage crew. He once had an accident, and Sam took him to the hospital. When the nurse said wait, Sam waxed eloquent: “Don’t you understand, we’re touring. This man has to be onstage.” “McIntire never got in the truck with the crew,” said Danny. “McIntire never got drunk with the crew. Cutler would fight promoters, and McIntire would have them take him to an expensive dinner and schmooze them.”

Downstairs from OOT was the office of Fly by Night Travel, a travel agency run by “Melon in Charge” Frankie Weir, with Rosie McGee booking travel for the bands. It was probably the only travel agency in the world where the decor failed to include a single travel poster. With the Dead, the New Riders, Jerry and Merl, and many other bands as clients, they had plenty of business. The Fan Club had rebegun with the “Dead Freaks Unite” note on
Skullfuck,
and Mary Ann Mayer had kept a list of names, starting with the initial group of 350 respondents. Eileen Law had succeeded her in early 1972, and she would stick with it for many years. By September 1973 the number stood at 25,731 and rising. Thanks to the record company, there was now a budget for regular mailings, and two or three times a year they’d go out. The newsletters were low-key and astonishingly intimate. A stoned Hunter would spin a hypnocracy yarn, Alan Trist would add some tour information, and Garcia might be persuaded to contribute a little sketch. After a year, there was a postcard from Rakow that Hunter deemed too commercial, and Bob stopped participating.

There were even more spin-off enterprises. Susila Kreutzmann and Christine Bennett started a store in San Anselmo called Kumquat Mae, which sold Dead T-shirts (made by Kelley and Mouse’s Monster Company), records, tie-dyes, crochet work, and so forth. It was both store and hangout. Next door, Rex Jackson had a garage where he would work on his candy-apple-red ’55 Chevy. Later, Kumquat Mae would move to Mill Valley and become Rainbow Arbor, and soon after, Susila began selling T-shirts at Winterland, the genesis of a mighty business.

June brought Old and in the Way’s first and only tour, hitting theaters and a bluegrass festival back East. On the day before the tour began they added the legendary fiddler Vassar Clements—one night’s rehearsal was entirely adequate—and with that further ingredient of consummate bluegrass professionalism, they went out smokin’. To Kahn at least, the festival turned out to be a disappointment. “It was kind of rough, and kind of a letdown, really, to see how tacky the whole thing was. It was like
Hee
Haw . . .
Not esoteric at all . . . all the bands played ten or fifteen minutes; they had a comedian as emcee, a terrible sound system, we couldn’t hear . . . We were the only band like us; every other band was straight bluegrass. I remember that we were real nervous about playing and only got to play about three songs and the mikes didn’t work and things kept breaking . . . The coolest things were stuff that didn’t have to do with the actual show itself. Jamming. There was this fiddle player that became tight with us and we did a couple of fiddle songs with Vassar, real fast, I could barely keep up—Tex something or other [Logan]—he was a physics prof in college and played bluegrass on vacation . . . bluegrass people play all the time in hotel rooms. During Old and in the Way, we always played. Every second. We’d get up in the morning and go in somebody’s room and start playing. All the instruments are portable . . . the best tapes were dressing room tapes. It was one band that was never late, except when Bear recorded—that was always late. We’d get there early and we all needed to warm up, because playing acoustic instruments is hard work.”

The Dead’s summer of ’73 was dominated by two things: the Watergate hearings on television, which fascinated everyone but especially Garcia, who would spend mornings at Stinson watching Senate Judiciary Chairman Sam Ervin and a colorful cast of characters, and dealing with technical/sound system/equipment matters. A May letter from Ron Wickersham of Alembic to David Parker, the Dead’s moneyman, detailed seven different current projects, including a new type of microphone, a preamp for such a microphone, a new P.A. array, and new instruments.

By now, Garcia was playing a reworked Fender Stratocaster guitar, using a Fender Twin Reverb amp as a preamp and McIntosh 2300s as his amp, powering three Alembic B-12 speaker cabinets stacked eight feet high. Weir had a Les Paul, and Phil . . . Phil was in tech heaven. He had a quadraphonic bass, the first ever made; each string had a separate access to the sound system. On the first fret two lightning bolts leaped out of a block of lapis lazuli; on the third fret, a cosmic serpent ate its tail. A crescent moon perched on the fifth fret, on the twelfth there was a salamander and an infinity symbol in mother-of-pearl, and on the back of the neck was Osiris, Judge of the Dead, pointing his divine flail at whoever held the instrument.

Intended or not, all of the technical developments, especially as they applied to the P.A., were making it possible for them to put on the prime gig of the summer, an extravaganza that would turn out to be the largest gathering of people in the history of rock and roll. Multiday festivals were generally out. Towns didn’t want them, and state laws that set rigorous logistic requirements for gatherings were now on the books. Promoters turned to one-day events as an alternative, sacrificing ambience for practicality. The one big show in 1972, the one-day Mount Pocono Festival, sold 125,000 tickets, although 50,000 people crashed the gates. That summer, when the Dead had played at Dillon Stadium in Hartford, Connecticut, the Allman Brothers Band’s Berry Oakley, Dickey Betts, and Jai Johanny Johanson had sat in, inspiring promoter Jim Koplik to conceive a one-day concert uniting the Dead and the Allman Brothers. When he came upon the Grand Prix racetrack at Watkins Glen, New York, he knew that it was the perfect location. He brought the idea to the Dead, and Sam Cutler loved it. McIntire thought a show so large—surely at least 100,000 would come—was “playing with fire.” Its size lent it a grand potential for disaster, and guaranteed that instead of being a good opportunity to hear music, it would only be a party. But
what
a party.

In 1973, Jim Koplik was a twenty-three-year-old Westchester kid who’d turned to rock promotion to fill his time after the devastating assassination of Robert Kennedy. Financing his first show with his bar mitzvah money, he’d wound up in Connecticut with a partner named Shelley Finkel, and at one of his first Dead shows, at the Waterbury Palace Theater, he sat down next to Kidd Candelario, who handed him a Pepsi. Soon finding himself on a “down elevator moving a hundred miles an hour,” he appealed to agent Ron Rainey, sitting next to him, to “Stop the elevator, it’s going too fast.” “You’ve been dosed,” said Ron. “Don’t worry about it, we’ll run the show. I’ve got a good way for you to enjoy this. Go onstage, lean on Jerry’s amp, put your chin on your hand, and watch his fingers.” “I had the best time in the world,” Jim said. “The next time they played the Palace, Sparky brings a Visine bottle for me. ‘Hold out your finger.’ This was no dose, it was welcome.”

Koplik and Finkel were kids, but they were in the right place at the right time. They offered the Dead and the Allmans $110,000 each, and at the insistence of Sam Cutler, brought in Bill Graham to do the staging and set up the backstage area. Since neither band wanted to open, they needed a third band. At first they considered Leon Russell, but at the last second, the Dead suggested the Band. In the end the promoters had to pay Leon not to play. With a solid lineup, they figured on between 100,000 and 150,000 people, and the combination of heavy advertising and a clever poster, which combined the Dead’s skull, the Allmans’ mushroom, and the Band’s pipe, ensured that sales were brisk. Logistically, they were ready; New York State’s Mass Gathering Law required that. They had dug twelve wells, they had one thousand portable toilets, two hundred acres of parking, five hundred state cops, three choppers, $30,000 worth of fencing, 135 drug abuse control people, food for 150,000, and 100,000 gallons of water. Two weeks before the show, they had sold 100,000 tickets at ten dollars each.