A Long Strange Trip (62 page)

The audience began to gather a week before the show, and by Wednesday there were already 50,000 people on-site. On Thursday, P.A. crew member Jim Furman was sent on the “best errand I ever ran.” Healy decided they needed six or eight more McIntosh 2300 power amps, and it just so happened that they were built in Binghamton, New York, about fifty miles away. Sam peeled $8,000 from his roll and handed the wad to Furman, who couldn’t fit it in the pockets of his shorts and ended up rolling it in his T-shirt. The roads had already turned to sludge, so Jim hopped onto a chopper and flew to Binghamton. The factory was closed for summer vacation, but the local dealer had pulled strings for them. Jim landed at Binghamton airport and took a cab to the dealer’s store. The president of McIntosh pulled up with his wife and three children in their loaded station wagon, on their way out of town for vacation. They went to the factory and pulled six amps off the line, forever identifiable because they lacked the number plate, which was the last step in assembly. They took them back to the store and Jim paid the local store owner, who then topped himself. “I know the chief of police,” he said, and arranged for the chopper to land in a park across the street from the store. Jim persuaded the pilot—“Are you
sure
you’ve got permission?”—and the police swarmed in and blocked traffic. By now, downtown Binghamton was enjoying itself. Reporters were interviewing Jim, and the streets were buzzing. However briefly, the circus had come to town. The chopper landed, they loaded the Macs and Jim, and slooowwwly—McIntosh amps weigh 125 pounds each—lifted off, barely clearing one building, before returning to Watkins Glen and a hero’s welcome.

By Friday afternoon there were at least 200,000 people on-site, and Koplik experienced his worst moment of the weekend when he got a call from the New York State Thruway Authority telling him that the highway had closed. This meant that he’d have to refund everybody’s money, because people wouldn’t be able to get in. He turned to his partner. “It’s been fun, Shell, but we’re about to go broke.” An hour later the highway reopened. Because of the number of people already there, there was no alternative but to make the sound check a public affair. The Band came on and did about forty minutes, and the Allmans followed with an hour and forty. Cocaine had lent a competitive edge to the scene, from trailer sizes to backstage amenities, and so the Dead one-upped them and did an entire show.

Early that day, Koplik found out what a Dead concert could be like. He went onstage to introduce himself.

Parish growled, “Who are you?”

“I’m the promoter.”

“You’re not the promoter. Shelley Finkel’s the promoter.”

“I’m his partner.”

“He never told me he had a partner.”

With that, Parish picked up all five foot six of Koplik, walked to the edge of the stage, and dropped him fourteen feet to the ground. On his way down, Koplik wondered, “Is this what it’s going to be like to work with the Grateful Dead?” There was more to come.

Saturday, July 27, was stinkin’ hot. An audience of about 600,000 stretched for two miles from the stage, but the county sheriff said, “We have four or five times as many people here as we have at our [auto] races, and we are getting less than half the trouble. These kids are great.” Two sets of sound delay towers made it an experience that most could hear. Graham’s FM Productions had built the stage, which had been a full-time job for two people for six months. The Dead, who had had to walk the last mile back to their beds the night before after the sound check, awoke on Saturday in a modest 1950s bungalow motel that lacked phones and sufficient hot water, got up, stepped out of their rooms, and got into a helicopter to go to work. Rifkin shrugged, “It was just a big business deal, a promotion—not a gathering.”

As the Dead went on, Koplik said, Sam Cutler shook him down for another $25,000 (the Dead earned either $100,000, $110,000, or $117,500—memories vary) in view of the large audience (though it was largely nonpaying—the ticket-taking system had been overwhelmed), and Jim had to send a chopper to another one of his venues to get the cash. The one dangerous moment of the day came when thousands began to press on the fence surrounding the backstage compound. As McIntire stood there, momentarily uncertain of what to do, Bill Graham zoomed past, got a water truck, and began to hose down the audience, quite literally cooling the fans out. The Dead opened the show and played listlessly in the heat, perhaps fearing what might happen if they encouraged the crowd to do more than sway. As Weir saw it, they were “rattled” by the sheer size of everything. Joe Winslow had done his fair share of LSD that day, and he felt trapped, as though the stage was “our only reality.” Behind the stage was a huge mass of trees, and there were people in all the trees and everywhere else. Too damn many people. The Band, already enervated by heroin and internal politics, had not played together in a year. The Allmans were superb, and the night ended with a jam that Butch Trucks recalled as edgy. “I remember that Jerry Garcia came out onstage with us and took over. There was no
doubt
he was going to dominate. He’d step right on top of Dickey’s playing. Then he made the mistake of playing ‘Johnny B. Goode,’ and Dickey just
fried
his ass, and we left.”

Watkins Glen would prove to be the largest rock concert ever, and the last of its era. Twenty-five years later, John Scher would try twice to revive Woodstock, with less than joyous results. The risks of bringing such a large group of people together overwhelmed the potential for fun—or even profit.

Back home, the Dead returned to the studio for the first time in three years, putting in 289 working hours at the Record Plant in Sausalito to create
Wake of the Flood.
It was to be the first album on their own label, the first that was truly
theirs,
and they worked very hard. In the end they didn’t quite pull it off. The material was largely first-rate and interestingly consonant. The organic cycle in “Eyes of the World” extended throughout the album, from Weir’s “Weather Report Suite” to Rick Griffin’s cover. Rick had taken his theme from the Book of Revelation, the next line after the one used in
Europe ’72,
about the dead being judged. “And the sea gave up the dead which were in it; and death and hell delivered up the dead which were in them: and they were judged every man according to their works.” That gave them the flood, and thus the ocean that is part of the cover, while the prime visual is a smiling reaper and a sheaf of wheat. Weir’s major contribution, “Weather Report Suite,” began with an instrumental solo, which he’d worked out with Eric Andersen, a Guthriesque folksinger he’d met on the Great Train Ride who had settled in Mill Valley. “Part II,” Weir said, amalgamated licks copped from Villa Lobos and Miles Davis, with a little mariachi seasoning. However much Weir later deprecated it, it was fine work, as were the lyrics. Weir and Barlow—who was not even sure he was still Weir’s lyricist—had met in John’s mother Mim’s apartment in Salt Lake City in the spring. The other 363 days of the year, Barlow was a rancher, but the Dead were passing through Salt Lake City, so he was taking a very short vacation. The result of their work was beautiful, and as organically authentic as one could ever hope:

Round and round,
the cut of the plow in the furrowed field
Seasons round,
the bushels of corn in the barley meal
Broken ground,
open and beckoning
To the spring,
Black dirt live again!

For the first time, the band recorded without a record company to blame, so they were organized, efficient—and perhaps just a little lacking in fire. The result was a lovely, pastoral album that came close to excellence. Released October 15, it would sell 400,000 copies, and with their vastly increased profits, it would contribute to the ongoing task of paying for their 1972 European vacation. Their business was accelerating wildly upward; Cutler was having an impact. Their September 1973 operating statement, in rounded figures, placed income from eleven gigs at $250,000, with travel expenses of $55,000, equipment costs of $20,000, office expenses around $6,000, salaries of $18,000, legal $9,000, and payroll taxes $3,000. Profit before partner draws, $110,000. The partners drew $33,000, leaving $77,000. Their positive bank balance wouldn’t last terribly long.

They were a very large act by now, but still capable of whims. On September 11, they played at the College of William and Mary in Virginia, and at the end of the show they announced a second show the next day for three dollars. Five thousand fans came. Garcia told
Rolling Stone
at the time, “Right now, somehow, we’ve ended up successes. But this ain’t exactly what we had in mind, 12,000-seat halls and big bucks. We’re trying to redefine. We’ve played every conceivable venue, and it hasn’t been it. What can we do that’s more fun, more interesting?” That October a writer visited their show in Oklahoma City and noted that there were 163 speakers on each side of the stage, plus 133 for monitor purposes. They were powered by a military surplus ship’s connector designed to plug ships into shore power. It conducted six hundred amperes of electricity in three phases, an amount sufficient to serve ten modern homes. They had started, Healy remarked to a reporter, with two extension cords.

Two moments defined the end of 1973. One was the phone call they placed to the FBI, asking for help in fighting the counterfeiting of
Wake of
the Flood.
They also sent a message to Dead Heads:

Our record is being counterfeited, the authorities move too slowly not recognizing that our survival is at stake. We need your diligent efforts. The counterfeit has square (not round) corners on the stickers and a white (not orange) 0598 on the spine. Check all stores and immediately report phonies to us. Thanks, GDR.

Even with the FBI’s help, the culprits remained uncaught.

The second moment came backstage at UCLA in November, when Bob Matthews, now working as an advance man for the tours, addressed the band. He’d just evaluated the Boston Music Hall stage, and at the trainer’s room blackboard he showed them that the Boston stage was fifty-seven feet wide, and their present setup was eighty-five feet wide. Their amp line—the minimum for their instruments and stage amps— was only fifty-four feet wide, but that left out sound towers. But that fall they had installed phase-canceling vocal microphones, which permitted a solution. Such microphones come in pairs; the singer sings into the top one, and the sounds that hit both microphones (from other amps or speakers onstage) cancel each other out, leaving only the vocal. With this equipment, they could move the towers behind the amp line and put the sound behind the band, like an enormous wall.

Like a wall.

39

Interlude: Into the Zone (SECOND SET BEGINS)

September, Madison Square Garden

Garcia is back onstage twenty minutes before the end of the break, infected by the sheer nervous energy that is the Grateful Dead at the corner of 7th Avenue and 33rd Street, the innermost circle of performance rock and roll, the Dead’s home away from home even though it is an antipodal mirror for this bunch of San Franciscans. It is a Monday night in late September, and Ram Rod has a TV perched on his road case with the 49ers game on. Garcia stops to watch. He’s not really a sports fan, and once said that he’s serious about the 49ers only when they’re winning because “I don’t need the additional heartache, you know what I mean?” The band gathers attentively as Joe Montana takes the team down the field until a bomb to Jerry Rice seals the game. This is the city Garcia fled immediately on his first visit, the place where Weir was mugged on
his,
where the animal energy of youth is most obvious, and where the band responds.

It is the place where Garcia has preserved his sanity by locking himself in his room for twenty years of visits, and it is where Scrib, along with everyone else who works for the band, goes craziest. As in the fall of 1987, when the Dead had a Top Ten single, “Touch of Grey,” and a hit album,
In the Dark,
and were premiering an hour-long video,
So Far,
that would also be a hit. Much later, Scrib realized that for those few days he was at the vibrating center of the American myth machine, and he’d been so busy that he’d been unable to exploit it personally or professionally; he’d just tried to stay upright. New York is media central for every entertainment group, the electronic cortex of the nation, where the Dead, like every band, performs the bulk of its media activities. “What’s the dumbest question you’ve been asked?” queried New York disc jockey Alex Bennett of Bob Weir in 1970. “That.” The band’s best efforts, of course, are collaborative. In 1982 Weir and Garcia treated David Letterman to a latter-day Abbott and Costello routine that Weir finished by comparing the Dead playing experience to “gestalt linkage.” Garcia added, “Yeah, a Jungian might say that.”

Media and comedy routines be damned, it is time to do a show. Lights down and the crowd’s visceral roar snaps everything into focus as the band launches into “Cold Rain and Snow,” the tune Ken Frankel had taught Garcia in 1962, plaintive banjo picking transformed into powerful rock chords. Out front at the sound mixer Healy is bopping; the Garden rings like chimes as Garcia mournfully declaims, “Well I married me a wife, she’s been trouble all my life, run me out in the cold rain and snow.” The music is thick, rich. “Cold Rain” ends with a satisfying final chord that falls gently into a transition, something akin to watching a ten-ton truck turn on a dime.

September, Richfield Coliseum, Cleveland, Ohio

Cars roll into Richfield, with bumper stickers that read “The Fat Man Rocks,” “Question Reality,” “You’ve Been Selected for Jerry Duty,” “Who Are the GD and Why Do They Keep Following Me Around?,” “Fukengruven.” A sign on the front window of a VW: “If you ask us for drugs, you owe us a nickel. P.S. We don’t have any drugs.”

The first song is not yet over as a new up-tempo rhythm is established, and Garcia begins to sing Hunter’s lullaby to the child in all of us, “Franklin’s Tower.” “In another time’s forgotten space / your eyes looked through your mother’s face.” They dig in, reach deep. Garcia and Weir knit gentle riffs together while Lesh plays a counterlead over the quiet moments. Garcia’s lead picks up the stage and shakes it, kicking the moment from 70 to 120 decibels, then goes berserk, playing the melody backward, down in descending scale, strumming it up and then strumming it down, till all six musicians fuse in perfect proportion, all responsive and individual. It is still the melody and yet so much more, molten creation, conversation and dance. The tune levels off to a quiet shuffle, the cymbals whisper
dippity dippity shush shush shush,
the twelve-armed being picks gently into the sweet refrain yet again, slowly, exploring the figures to the point of hypnosis. The pulse is so right that it almost seems the music is perpetual, always out there somewhere, wanting only the right catalyst to be audible.

“When I’m really getting off,” said Garcia once, the music “has the effect of surprising me with a flow of its own.” It’s not me, each musician will say, but the muse. Parish leans over to Scrib at his perch and says, “Man, sometimes [the music]’s like being on a bike dropping into third and cruising.” At its prime level it is something very like a state of grace, when one is not playing but being played. Lesh goes ape, his face contorted, almost duckwalking across the stage toward Garcia, then backing up, his head bobbing. Weir gets a particularly dopey ecstatic grin, and inspiration moves brightly across the stage. The drums burst into double time, the band erupts as one in a focused line that reaches crescendo one more time, then focuses down into the
boingboingboing
thrum of Lesh’s bass line; Weir plays thick slide chords that smear a background for Garcia, who picks a mountain high. Lesh holds it to one note, they build a final peak—“In Franklin’s Tower the four winds sleep . . . May the four winds blow you home again”—and they explode out in solid chords and chorused harmony, thick and crunching, “Roll away the dew, roll away . . .”

September, Boston Garden

Down the road a week to Boston, and it is celebrity time. As the band prepares to cast into the improvisational void, the essential purpose of the second set, the stage holds the tallest Dead Head, former NBA star Bill Walton, and his friends from the Boston Celtics, Larry Bird and Kevin McHale, Vic Firth, the first tympanist of the Boston Symphony Orchestra, and Richard Alpert, aka Baba Ram Dass. It is an interesting range of fans.

Even as the band settles out of the preceding tune, Weir flashes ten fingers (the song is in 10/4 time) at the drummers and strums down the scale while Garcia picks the melody and Mydland’s Hammond B-3 organ wails the beautiful chords of “Playing in the Band.” Candace whispers into her headset, “Stand by, everybody, for—oh, never mind.” Lesh beats out a march-hard tempo and Kreutzmann’s rhythm floats, liquid yet crisp at the same time, a subtle wrist-flip that generates an utterly relentless polyrhythm perfectly captured in the images of the video
So Far,
where dancers boogie six ways at once. Lesh touches his hand to his mouth and then lowers a flattened palm at Popick, requesting lower vocals in his monitor mix. As Weir steps to his microphone, Candace hits him with a stunning crisscrossed array of white lights. On the charter flight the night before, she and Garcia had talked about the lights, and though he recalled days when they had actually burned his skin, he’d also said, “It doesn’t bother me anymore. If you have any residual reluctance [to crank up], erase it from your mind.”

Weir sings.

Some folks trust to reason
Others trust to might
I don’t trust to nothin’
But I know it come out right . . .
When it’s done and over
Lord, a man is just a man . . .
Some folks look for answers
Others look for fights
Some folks up in treetops
Just to look to see the sights . . .

The second verse ends and they go into their first instrumental break. Gracefully focused, Mydland shifts ninety degrees on his bench and elegantly reaches to the synthesizer. He is such an addition to the band, in so difficult a role, still the new kid after nine years, and sometimes it hurts. Once Scrib had remarked to him on a flight between gigs, “Pretty moon,” and he replied, “It looks nicer at home.” Now Garcia focuses on Mydland, stroking him with his eyes, and the music lifts. Lesh’s face vibrates in different planes of joy.

Garcia reaches down and twice fiddles with a pedal as lights wrap the band in purple haze with green pools all over the stage behind them. The melody line wanders, builds, becomes thunder, an atonal storm diversion, then pulses faster, thicker, a musical Möbius strip, a line that twists, shimmers, dances around six separate lines within it, musical DNA chains with color and texture, chains that harmonize and clash, unite and scatter. Images, ideas, entire worlds appear, collapse, return to a fused, perfect unity. This is the very definition of an ensemble sound. The room is full of music to the point of absolute density, a Jackson Pollock painting in notes. “When the Dead are playing their best,” wrote Hunter, “blood drips from the ceiling in great, rich drops. Together we do a kind of suicide in music which requires from each of us just enough information short of dropping the body to inquire into those spaces from which come our questions . . . about how living might occur in the shadow of certain death; and that death is satisfactory or unsatisfactory according to how we’ve lived and what we yield . . . Satisfaction in itself is nothing to be sought, it’s simply an excretion of the acceptance of responsibility.” Swept by the trance state of free improvisation over a never-lost pulse, one actually thinks in those terms. The future is here.

“Suddenly the music is not notes or a tune,” wrote Michael Lydon in 1969, “but what those seven people are exactly: . . . an aural holograph of the GD. All their fibres, nuances, histories, desires, beings are clear.” It is, in T. S. Eliot’s words, “Music heard so deeply / That it is not heard at all, but you are / the music / While the music lasts.” This is Dionysus in the late twentieth century, kin to William Blake, a transcendental art better experienced than described. Bent notes are scattered and tossed, all seems aimless, drums crash, Lesh sinks into lower and lower rumbling chords, the music slows, becomes giant boulders, high on the arid arm of a mountain . . .

October, the Spectrum, Philadelphia

Playing to audiences means the road, means a peculiar combination of motion and boredom. On the bus coming up, Parish had looked out and smiled. “Hey, there goes a ’59 . . . nothing.” The road is a stream of jokes, sexism, sarcastic testing, the improbable, and the obscene. Even when it is focused comfortably in four three-and-a-half-week bouts over the course of the year, the isolation of touring and the resultant group identity of the odyssey is inescapable. The road is a way of life. Ram Rod: “Did you ever kick over an anthill and feel bad about it?” Parish: “Yeah.” Ram Rod: “Thanks. I needed that.”

. . . and Garcia hits two notes; a beat, and a musical spring erupts from the mountain rocks, the lyric anthem that is “Uncle John’s Band.” All is sweetness, the audience clapping in perfect rhythm. Garcia, Weir, and Mydland lean to the mikes and the cautionary first verse proceeds, the band astonishingly direct to its audience, “When life looks like Easy Street / there is danger at your door.” Each verse ends with a question, a test: “Are you kind?” The second verse speaks of life as a “buckdancer’s choice,” an adventurer’s chance, because in the end life offers you motion, risk, and death, to embrace as you will. The verse ends with hope, with an invitation: “Will you come with me?” The third verse grounds itself in the intelligent, conscious Americanness that is this group: “Their walls are built of cannonballs / their motto is Don’t Tread on Me / Come hear Uncle John’s Band.” This is the American voice as Whitman and Kerouac and Ginsberg and William Carlos Williams dreamed it, but wrapped in dance trance. It is their invocation, an authentic American folk tune that began as a hard-edged electric jam. When Hunter heard their rehearsal tape, he turned it into a masterpiece of reflection, an account of evanescent lives striving for authenticity, pondering the third question: “Where does the time go?”

Scrib has gone up behind the drums and stands talking with Ram Rod, who has his back to Hart. Scrib vaguely notices a sound that is not quite right, but by the time he opens his mouth to remark on it, Ram Rod has turned, checked, and gone to recover a stick Hart has dropped—an exquisite awareness, normal for the crew. As Ram Rod goes around him on the way back, Scrib murmurs, “Sorry.” “Why?” “ ’Cause I’m in the way.” Smirking, Rod replies, “That might be your opinion.” It is one of the good nights. Kidd goes up and takes over the monitor board from Harry, and the elevated group mood is clear.

Comes the fourth verse, where a silver mine becomes a beggar’s tomb, and the musicians can only wonder, self-deprecatory to the last, “How does the song go?” And off the precipice, the drums tap fast on high hats and Lesh, Weir, and Mydland take a three-note riff out of the main chord and begin to repeat it endlessly, each instrument’s notes varying yet blending flawlessly into the main melody line, while Garcia’s lead races up and down mountains, the driving woof against a luxuriant warp. Deep in the last break his guitar makes an ancient, hollow sound, somehow medieval . . . then broadens to rock and roll strums. Scowling in concentration, Garcia peers over his glasses at a point approximately six inches in front of his nose. “He looks like an Old Testament prophet,” says Scrib to Mountain Girl. “More like Geppetto to me,” she responds.

“Wo-oah what I want to know, how does the song go? / Come hear Uncle John’s Band / by the riverside . . . Come hear Uncle John’s Band / playing to the tide / Come on along or go alone / he’s come to take his children home.” And Garcia’s guitar simply
weeps
out the final chorus, and at each note, each phrase, the balances change, each testing, feeding, mocking, and finally driving each other on, further and further on. As Lydon wrote, first quoting Lucretius, “ ‘The barriers on the world / Dissolve before me, and I see things happen / All thru the void in empty space . . . I feel a more than mortal pleasure in all this’ . . . the whole goddamn place begins to scream. And Jerry, melodies flowing from him in endless arabesques, leads it away again, the crowd and himself ecstatic rats to some Pied Piper.”