A Long Strange Trip (64 page)

Consequently, Lesh did not want to try out the Seastones—Mickey Hart had also dubbed it “Warp 10”—music live. However, on the first night in Miami he underwent various private adventures that rendered him somewhat malleable, and on the second night he and Ned filled the intermission with something radically new. Later, Lesh would dismiss the Seastones interludes as jive improvisation which only occasionally hit a height. Interestingly, the set that followed the first Seastones set was truly remarkable, a sample of group mind in which the band elegantly played two or three different songs simultaneously and then sequentially, and yet made perfect sense, which was not always the case that year. As Weir conceded, the Dead were “so musically inbred that we were playing some fairly amazing stuff, but almost nobody could hear it or relate to it except for us.”

By August they’d run out of creative gas. Coincidentally, so had Richard Nixon. His efforts to block Congress’s various investigations had gone for naught, and it was clear that he was about to be impeached. On August 9, he resigned the presidency. The Dead weren’t in much better shape. On the full-moon night of August 2, they had endured one of the worst moments of their history. They were at Roosevelt Stadium, and in front of them were thirty thousand rabid New York fans who wanted a show, and who had in their pockets tickets that read “rain or shine.” The band would insist that they were not aware of this, but in any case, after a sunny day, storm clouds rolled in just as the gig was about to start. The heavens opened, and going on was impossible. When Weir stepped out to explain that they would have to postpone the concert, he was hit by a bottle thrown from the crowd. Rifkin, then a crew member, would recall hiding behind equipment while waiting for the assault to die down. It was the only time he was ever afraid of a Dead audience. They looped back a few days later to play the show and end the tour, but it left a bitter taste.

On the band’s return home, there was yet another company meeting. Rifkin stood up and said, “I’m not having any fun anymore. I’m thinking I’d like to take some time off and give it a rest, and see what it feels like.” As Weir saw it, their main problems at this point were (a) cocaine and (b) the crew, which seemed to him to be “drowning in mountains of blow.” “We had a crew that was being paid like executives for doing blue-collar work, and they were abusing our generosity.” The crew chimed in with Rifkin, and the band made plans to take time off. To Weir, the hiatus was never meant to be permanent, but the decision was phrased so that certain crew members would be forced to find other jobs and not hang around waiting for work. Late in August a
Chronicle
headline read, “Is the Dead Going to Die?”

It was in this frame of mind that the band arrived in London in September for a short European tour. It was a very different scene from 1972, without family or any sense of adventure or vacation, and the run began with Rex Jackson briefly quitting as they arrived at Heathrow. What it did have was drugs. The London gigs were at the Alexandra Palace (“AllyPally”) with a promoter named Tom Salter, who was better known as a man about Carnaby Street. It was Rock Scully’s gig, said Richard Loren. “I fought it. Rock was always trying to get in with promoters who weren’t promoters, who had money and drugs. I wanted to work with Harvey Goldsmith, of course. Salter had the drugs.” Rock didn’t dispute Loren, and later wrote of that time, “I am as coked up as a Taiwan freighter, and the vibes are getting just as quaky. When your brain crackles and your eyeballs burst out of their sockets, it’s usually a sign that you’re overdoing it just a wee bit. I have to do something, but what?” He certainly didn’t figure it out on this tour. Things were so bad that near the end of their stay in London, Ram Rod dared the band members to destroy their drug stashes, and they met his challenge. Unfortunately, stashes can be replenished. As a matter of business, the London run was a fiasco. Salter could not account for a large part of the ticket stock, the shows lacked security, and getting paid required the band’s attorney, Hal Kant, to sit “in [Salter’s] house three days after the tour was over . . . I eventually got about 40 or 50 percent of the money we were due. Chesley was there most of the time with me. But I just wouldn’t go. Otherwise, we never would have seen any of it.”

Garcia’s interviews with
Melody Maker
and other English music magazines made his mood quite clear. “The most rewarding experience for me these days is to play in bars and not be Jerry Garcia of the Grateful Dead. I enjoy playing to fifty people. The bigger the audience gets the harder it is to be light and spontaneous.” Thoughtful as always, he went on to consider the realities of owning a record company, from the environmental consequences of vinyl—“Records are such an ecological disaster . . . It’s time somebody considered other ways of storing music that don’t involve the use of polyvinyl chloride”—to the Dickensian nature of work in a record pressing plant. Having visited one, Garcia thought, “Do we really want to be putting these people through this?” He might well have been thinking of himself and his band at the time. Even though some of the music at the AllyPally was superb, it was coming at a profound cost.

From London they went to Munich, and things grew even darker. They hadn’t been in Europe in two years, and now they had a sound system that required successful gigs to feed it. Plus, Germany had an odd effect on some people on the tour. As Chesley Millikin recalled it, “the attitude of people changes, almost like—some people become like fascists.” One night in Munich there was a confrontation between Lesh and Kreutzmann on the one hand and the management—McIntire, Loren, and Scully—on the other, “a knock-down-drag-out,” as Millikin put it. Kreutzmann was at this time part of what John Barlow called the “neo-cocaine cowboy aesthetic” that characterized one chunk of the crew, and this aesthetic had no affinity for an intellectual like McIntire. After plenty of abuse, McIntire had had enough and quit.

The next morning Chesley met Hal Kant in the hotel lobby and asked him, “What are you looking so forlorn for?”

“Don’t you know? Didn’t you hear?”

“No, what?” said Chesley.

“The band fired their management last night.”

“No kidding. Who’s management now?” asked Chesley.

“You are,” said Hal.

With only three shows to go, one in Dijon and two in Paris, Chesley and Hal took over the tour. “I’m in the lobby,” said Chesley, “thinking I’ve got to get them all together, buses out in front, we’re all riding together, if ever we need to ride together, this is it, right. Oh, wrong.” Hal came out of the hotel and said, “By the way, Chesley, Phil and Bobby and Garcia and Kreutzmann are [each] driving cars. Mercedes-Benzes.” Hal had been driving a car, which had generated complaints within the crew although he was paying for it himself, and so he gave it to Parish and Ram Rod. Hal and Chesley went to the train station. “There was a bench between the tracks,” said Hal, “and who’s sitting there but Keith and Donna. ‘What are you doing there, guys?’ ‘We thought someone was going to pick us up. We thought this was where we were supposed to be.’ Everyone else had long gone, by different methods of transportation, and they’re sitting there not knowing where they’re going or how they’re supposed to get there.”

Everyone made it to Dijon, where the arrangements continued to be rough. At the Dijon gig, Chesley went to the box office to settle with the promoter, who started to renege on the deal. Joined after the show by Ram Rod and Kreutzmann, Chesley explained to the promoter how inadvisable changing the deal after the fact would be, though in truth the gig had been a total flop, with only a few hundred in attendance. The promoter was the proud owner of a lovely leather attaché case. Having just come from Germany, almost everyone in the Dead had a shiny new knife. Without saying a word, Kreutzmann began to strop his blade on the fine leather, and their payment was forthcoming.

Paris was only marginally better. Someone dosed the backstage catering, and the lobsters for dinner grew psychedelic claws, but the group continued to experience social problems. One night, twisted on wine and LSD, Kreutzmann found himself deserted by his hosts because he was, he confessed, acting like a “problem child.” Barely able to stand up, he took to the street and began gulping fresh air. He sobered up enough to realize that he couldn’t remember the name of his hotel, and then further realized that he had no idea how to find the speakeasy/disco he’d just left. Freaking, he tried to hot-wire a moped and failed. Finally, he threw it through a window just to get a reaction—nothing. A Mercedes passed by, and Kreutzmann kicked it. When the driver emerged, he proved even larger than Kreutzmann, who seized a car antenna and persuaded the giant to leave a crazed drummer alone. At long, long last, Bill flagged down a car and somehow got back to his hotel. The next day, students rioted all over the Left Bank, and he theorized that the absence of police in that neighborhood that night had been part of the preparations—the fix had been in. Phil went to the impressionist centenary at the Louvre.

When the band returned home, the esteemed
Chronicle
columnist Herb Caen confirmed that the Dead were about to retire, “to rest, recuperate, rethink, and one hopes, regroup,” he wrote. That might happen eventually, but first the members of the Dead would have to endure among the hardest five nights of their lives, October 16 to 20, 1974. Since the future was so uncertain, one planned benefit of the run was to secure house down payments for some members of the family, including Ram Rod, Kreutzmann, and Rock. Then, just to make sure that things were revved up enough, Rakow and Garcia added a twist. Who knew? Since these might actually be the band’s final performances, Rakow and Garcia decided that they should be documented, although they lacked the money to do so. Garcia’s secret dream was to be an auteur filmmaker, and he was going to get his chance, although it would exact a terrible price. There had been talk about a movie since spring, but it was only late in September that Rakow asked Eddie Washington, their old friend from Palo Alto and a Stanford film school student, to prepare a budget. Hal Kant, who knew something about the costs associated with a movie, had resisted the idea and thought it had gone away. Then he walked into Winterland, where four different crews were shooting for four days. The movie was by no means a unanimously popular idea. “The kids [audience] are walking into a film studio,” roared Bill Graham. “And never leaving a film studio! And that’s wrong! Five fuckin’ nights in a row! . . . And the kids are bugged by it! One night, two nights, five fuckin’ nights,
no!
Of all the groups, the
Grateful Dead!
Of all the groups!”

On the last night, the missing band member finally showed up, three and a half years after he’d retired from the road. Early in the week, the crew had begun to call Mickey Hart. As far as anyone could be certain, October 20 might be, as the ticket read, “The Last One.” Mickey demurred. “I’m recording,” he said. Gently harassed, first by Rex Jackson, then by Jim McPherson, the man he was recording, and finally by his lover, Jerilyn, Hart finally cracked on the afternoon of the twentieth. After all, as Hart later put it, with the Dead, “you don’t sign up and you don’t sign out.” If the band was truly over, it required a proper burial—and that required Mickey. “Well,” Hart mumbled, “we’ll put some drums in the car, but they have to ask me. Don’t tell anyone I have them.” They arrived at Winterland at the break, and met Rex and Kreutzmann, who were standing at the top of the stairs. Kreutzmann was ambivalent. “I don’t know if he can,” said Bill. “He doesn’t know our arrangements.” Hart was about to storm off, with Kreutzmann following, when Jackson grabbed them both, jammed their heads together, and said, “You guys are gonna play together, you got that?” It was settled.

No one was allowed onstage without taking psychedelic communion from Father Rex Jackson or one of his associates, and it showed in the playing. Hart didn’t play particularly well, nor did the rest of the band, but it didn’t matter; in some peculiar way, the night was a new beginning. Afterward Keith told him, “This is the first time I heard the Grateful Dead.” It was the first time they’d met. Then Keith and Donna went home to do an interview with the film crew. Since it largely consisted of them staring at the coffee table, it would not be used. Lesh went up into the space behind the center cluster, smoked some DMT, and spaced out. As he left the stage, Garcia ruffled Rifkin’s halo of curls in a genuine gesture of affection.

The
Village Voice
quoted Ron Rakow: “Listen, if there’s one thing we learned in ten years on the road, it’s that celebration is a valid form of revolution.”The paper replied, “He’s wrong. There are any number of reasons why the Dead are going into hibernation, and one of them is that they tried to run their revolution as though it were a celebration. It didn’t work.” In May, Hunter had written, “We falter and fall away, nothing holds. Political action is impossible. All we are left with are our arts . . . It is time to retreat. It is time to advance backwards. No longer are there any choices. What a relief.”

41

The Hiatus (10/21/74–6/76)

After a quick dash to Vancouver with Hal Kant to resolve a pot bust from earlier in the year, Garcia found himself back onstage just five days after the “last show,” this time with Merl Saunders, John Kahn, Martín Fierro, and Paul Humphrey. As the rest of the Dead gladly embraced some downtime, Garcia & Saunders, later called Legion of Mary, would work steadily throughout the hiatus. At a much less concentrated level, Weir would dabble with the band Kingfish.

The first effect of the hiatus was the consolidation of the Dead office. The record company retained the premises at 5th and Lincoln, and since their booker/manager, Richard Loren, maintained a separate setup, this boiled down to having Bonnie and David Parker move into the lobby of the band’s new rehearsal hall and storage space. Formally called Le Club Fronte and more commonly Front Street, the new space was located at 20 Front Street in the Canal District of San Rafael, perhaps a mile away from 5th and Lincoln. It was a small, soon-to-be-congested warehouse that looked on the rear windows of the town’s magnificently sleazy Bermuda Palms Motel, and the raffish atmosphere seemed entirely suitable.

The newly unemployed members of the crew went in a variety of directions. Danny Rifkin, joined by Sue Swanson, Alan Trist, and the movie producer Eddie Washington, went to live at Slide Ranch, a natural-history field trip site for children near Stinson Beach. Crew member Joe Winslow, his wife, Sandy, and some other former crew members began Hard Truckers, which manufactured speaker and instrument cases and cabinets. Their work was excellent and they prospered, at least until they overexpanded. Jim Furman, who’d run the errand at Watkins Glen, had better luck. He invented a preamp equalizer, which was basically a studio-level tone control for stage equipment. Jim built twenty himself, sold them to friends, and eventually developed a thriving business. But he did not forget where he had started, and his first “sale” was actually a gift to Garcia.

Over the course of the hiatus, there were other adjustments. While he had never been the most faithful of husbands, Garcia was patently drifting away from Mountain Girl by 1974, first with a young woman named Deborah Jahnke, but primarily with a young woman from Ohio named Deborah Koons. It was a very old paradigm. M.G. was at home in Stinson Beach with what was now three children—Sunshine Kesey, Annabelle, and Theresa (“Trixie”), born in 1974. Day after day, Garcia would go over the hill, and although he came home almost every night, it wasn’t always gigs or rehearsals that kept him late. Also in this era, in 1975, Weir’s longtime romance with Frankie collapsed, the victim of too many years on the road for Weir and insufficient rewards for Frankie. Always dramatic, she would in the end shoot herself—not fatally—during a particularly tempestuous scene, and shortly afterward they separated. Weir’s scars ran deep. For the next twenty years he would live out what one of his lyrics described as “this tomcat heart with which I’m blessed.” On the road he would require a suite, and the living room became a party room, the “hospitality suite,” commonly referred to as the “hostility suite.” Weir was also known to have young women friends in three or four different rooms at once, circulating like a honeybee among flowers, before settling on a winner for the night.

The record company generated sufficient income to give the band time off the road, but there was naturally a price: they owed an album to United Artists, which Rakow had brought in to save the Grateful Dead Record Company from bankruptcy. Coincidentally, Weir was in the process of building a studio, Ace’s, over the garage of his Mill Valley home. Having the Dead help him finance construction appealed to him, and early in 1975 the Dead began to move in to Ace’s to record. One of the new guys around was Robbie Taylor, a jeweler who’d met Frankie and been recruited for the construction project. Taylor was still on his back wiring things under the console when they began to roll tape for the first time, on a stormy full-moon shakedown night with a local band called Heroes. The studio still lacked alternating current, but Healy had a converter in his car, and they were able to run in an extension cord to power the board, tape machine, and amps. The lighting may have come from candles, but Ace’s was off to a good start.

For the first time, the Grateful Dead went into a studio with no material and no notion of the next gig, a creative tabula rasa that would be unique in their recording history. Rock Scully later theorized that Garcia set it up that way to end the Garcia-Hunter domination of songwriting by ensuring that the whole band participated in the creative process from the beginning. Without economic pressure, at least for the first five months of their sojourn, they laughed, got crazy, and thoroughly enjoyed themselves. Every day they would convene in midafternoon, their cars choking the tiny amount of hillside space, and begin to rattle the canyon with their playing. Garcia made a point of inviting Mickey to join them, and Hart made a point of not bringing a full drum set—“I knew I had to come back the right way,” which was to say gradually and modestly. They were making music just for themselves, and a slowed, contemplative, almost monastic feel emerged, a cool, blue-green tranquillity. Bit by bit, songs seeped out and evolved, and they were generally first-rate. Garcia said that he “wasn’t listening to things” at the time. “I was really in an internal, interior kind of space, and I was really involved with a certain level of theoretical relationships. My point at that time was constructing scales and creating scales that generated their own harmony in ways that weren’t symmetrical in regular, classical major-minor relationships. A whole different sensibility.” And the different sensibility was exactly expressed in Hunter’s lyrics, even though he was in England for a considerable part of the recording. His spare, reflective words could not have been further removed stylistically from the tall tales of earlier days, and they were just right.

The album began with “Help on the Way,” a cosmic love song—

Paradise waits
on the crest of a wave
her angels in flame
She has no pain
Like a child, she is pure
She is not to blame

Poised for flight
Wings spread bright
Spring from night
into sun

—and then fell into a rhythm riff, “Slipknot,” that Robbie Taylor would hear so many times in rehearsal he would feel it engraving itself on his DNA: it was, after all, his first time in a recording studio. “Franklin’s Tower” followed, a bouncy rocker that would become a tour de force for Garcia over the years. Lyrically, it is fascinating, a lullabye birthday wish from Hunter for both his one-year-old son, Leroy, and the United States, then approaching its bicentennial. For it is Benjamin Franklin’s tower and the bell of liberty that he addresses. “Wildflower seed on the sand and stone / may the four winds blow you safely home / Roll away . . . the dew.” And it is the atomic morning dew of modern America that he would like to see roll away, like the stone at Gethsemane. Later, Hunter would say that the lyrics were labored over and then rushed when the recording frenzy came upon them. It did not sound that way.

“Crazy Fingers,” which began side two of the album, was unusual in that Garcia wrote the tune after seeing a series of haiku in Hunter’s notebook. The song had started out, he said, as a “power-rock raver,” but the loveliness of the haiku called for a more graceful sprung rhythm. “Midnight on a carousel ride / Reaching for the gold ring down inside / Never could reach / It just slips away but I try.”

A theme began to emerge from their deliberative state of mind and creativity. Their manager, Richard Loren, had visited Egypt the year before, as had Ken Kesey. Since his visit to Stonehenge in 1972, Phil Lesh had pursued an interest in geomancy, the study of power spots on the globe—and what more powerful spot could there be than the Great Pyramid? The previous two years had seen a major Israeli-Arab war and a gasoline crisis within the United States, which kept the desert fresh in their consciousness. And so they began to consider naming the album after the current leader of Saudi Arabia, Prince Faisal. They had a feeling, Lesh recalled, that perhaps Faisal was a bit “more of a humanist than any of his predecessors,” that he was “trapped by history, by religion,” by fate. His death by assassination on March 25 changed things, and the album title became
Blues for Allah.
The title song occupied most of the second side, and it was among the Dead’s most remarkable compositions, with a structure that created openness by definition. Each player could play a note or an interval for as long as he wanted, until at a certain harmonic structure, they would have to change. Three-chord rock and roll it wasn’t—it wasn’t in a given key, or even in a particular time signature. And Hunter’s lyrics were majestic, a cultural transfer that was respectful, nonexploitative, and apt.

Arabian wind
The Needle’s Eye is thin
The Ships of State sail on mirage
but drown in sand
in No-Man’s Land
where ALLAH does command

What good is spilling
blood? It will not
grow a thing

One of Hunter’s best friends and drinking buddies in this period was Barry Melton. One day Hunter showed Melton the lyrics to “Blues for Allah” and said to his highly left-wing friend, “Look, I’m political now. Are you happy?” “That doesn’t sound political to me, Bob. That sounds abstruse.” “Let’s meet as friends / The flower of Islam / The fruit of Abraham”—perhaps not overt, but clearly political. Beneath the Middle Eastern drone of instruments and oblique lyrics, “Blues for Allah” also featured some remarkable sound sculpting, including the chirping of crickets—naturally, some escaped their cage and were just at hand when the engineer reached for something on the mixing board—and Garcia’s voice, highly manipulated through a voltage-controlled amplifier. “He’d be saying ‘Allah,’ ” recalled Mickey, “it’s the envelope, and within the envelope is his voice, and delicate sounds like the paintbrushed glass, chimes, wood, and metal I was playing, and the crickets, which were slowed down three times and played backwards at half-speed, the sounds of the desert.”

As usual, the Dead managed to shoot themselves in their collective foot. They’d put together a wonderful set of material under ideal and relaxed circumstances. Now Rakow and United Artists were screeching for product, so they slammed through the final recording process in two or three weeks. In the middle of this, Weir called Barlow. “Listen, I need a song tomorrow.” He then played some riffs over the phone, and Barlow set to work. Fortunately, the melody that he imagined turned out to approximate the one Weir had in mind, and over the course of a day’s ranching, he came up with words. At sunset he called Weir and dictated the lyrics to “The Music Never Stopped,” which went essentially unchanged. Weir’s other contribution, a Bach-inspired étude, “Sage and Spirit,” came harder. Weir had worked himself into a complete corner in the studio, and nothing seemed to work. It was time, in the words of Monty Python, for something completely different. Down the road in Lagunitas lived a well-known flute player named Steve Schuster, and one night at midnight he got a phone call. He arrived at Ace’s at 1 A.M., and by daylight they had a version of “Sage and Spirit” that made Bobby and the band happy.

The
Blues for Allah
sessions were briefly interrupted by one of the Dead’s oddest live performances, the genesis of which was Bill Graham’s fury. Graham had read in the newspaper that the City of San Francisco had reacted to a fiscal crisis by eliminating all extracurricular activities from its school budget, including all music and sports. He’d gone ballistic, and put on the SNACK (Students Need Athletics, Culture and Kicks) benefit concert at Kezar Stadium on March 23, 1975. In one of his finest moments, Bill assembled the Doobie Brothers, Graham Central Station, the Jefferson Starship, Joan Baez, Santana, Neil Young, Bob Dylan, and Marlon Brando among others to raise $250,000 for the school board. Since their old buddy David Crosby was around and interested, the Dead created “David and the Dorks” and worked up “Blues for Allah.” But on the morning of the show, David’s son was born, and the Dead went on without him, although with Ned Lagin and Merl Saunders. In front of an audience of fifty thousand that wasn’t their own, and a radio audience of much more and ditto, and after being off the scene for six months, they chose, as always, to play what they liked—forty minutes of atonal majesty, followed by an encore of “Johnny B. Goode.” What a sense of humor.

It was a year for goofiness. In late January Grateful Dead Records sent out the following letter:

Dear Guerrilla:

You, along with the Dead Heads, will be getting within a few weeks a major communication from us. Since you are our advance guard, a little advance word . . . We want you to organize and communicate with each other so that you can help us take this trip to a dramatically higher level . . . but further it’s a possibility, if remote, that the Dead may play in spots with advance notice to you guys as the only announcement (organization is, therefore, essential). “Big Steve” Parrish
[sic],
one of our most energetic brothers, has volunteered to be the main guerrilla contact point. He can be reached at Box 548 Stinson Beach, California 94970. We realize that this message is vague but this is heavy water we’re treading in strange times and we’ve learned “loose lips sink ships.” God Love Ya!—Grateful Dead Records.

More directly, the mailer also mentioned the impending release of Robert Hunter’s new solo album,
Tiger Rose;
Keith and Donna’s eponymous solo album;
Pistol Packin’ Mama,
a Garcia bluegrass production adventure at Mickey’s barn with Chubby Wise, Don Reno, and Frank Wakefield;
Old
and in the Way,
a live album recorded by Bear; and Phil Lesh and Ned Lagin’s
Seastones.
Each would have its moments, but
Old and in the Way
would document the good and the bad of Grateful Dead Records. Round Records paid David Grisman $1,000 to assemble the album, and despite significant sales, he never saw another dime. Garcia was aware of the sloppiness of the business, but hid rather than confront the situation. As a result, although Jerry and David would play a number of gigs in 1974 and 1975 with a varying cast of people, including Taj Mahal and Richard Greene (the Great American String Band), their relationship lapsed into nothingness after a final jam session at David’s house, and they did not speak for the next fifteen years. On the other hand, the album itself had a phenomenal impact on bluegrass, and in David’s opinion “kind of turned bluegrass around,” turning on thousands of people to the music form and kick-starting a new and larger audience. “It’s one of the pillars that’s holding up bluegrass now,” he said in the nineties.