A Long Strange Trip (65 page)

Seastones
would also have a depressing economic history. Lesh would call it “a horrible bummer for Ned both aesthetically and financially—it was a rip-off. It was the lowest priority project for Round Records.” Musicians rarely respect their record company, even (or especially) when it’s their own record company.

One other bit of their past resolved itself that winter. On February 12, 1975, Lenny Hart died of natural causes. Since his release from jail, he’d been teaching music in Mill Valley. Mickey went to the funeral home, cleared the room, took out the snakewood sticks that had been his inheritance, played a traditional rudimental drum piece, “The Downfall of Paris,” on Lenny’s coffin, and split.

The Dead’s suspension of touring had its intended effect, and every band member found something of interest to pursue. Kreutzmann retreated to Mendocino County, where he began developing a horse ranch. Mickey joined up with the young tabla master Zakir Hussain and created the Diga Rhythm Band, a percussion group—he called it a “twenty-firstcentury rhythm machine”—which opened for the Jefferson Starship in May at Winterland. Keith and Donna put together a band under their own name and began to gig around the Bay Area. Weir fell in with Kingfish. And Lesh joined with Ned Lagin to perform a couple of live versions of
Seastones,
the first in June at a small college in San Rafael, a few blocks from 5th and Lincoln. It included Hart, Garcia, and David Crosby, who had a ball. “[Garcia] and I talked back and forth,” said Crosby. “Garcia with his guitar, me with my voice. It sounded like a couple of Martians talking. Very weird, but great, man.”

The Dead celebrated the August release of
Blues for Allah
with a private party at the Great American Music Hall in San Francisco, inviting members of the Billboard Radio Programmers Forum to hear the new music. They used McCune Audio’s P.A., and Mort Feld, an industry pro who’d been setting up P.A.s since well before Monterey Pop, found himself challenged. He’d never worked with crickets before—they were caged and miked in the basement—but once convinced, he enjoyed himself thoroughly. Fortunately for cricketmaster Hart, this bunch did not escape. Always a fount of ideas, Mickey was coming back strong. As they set up at the Great American, he told Ram Rod to go to the beach and get a truckload of sand so that everyone entering the hall could feel like they were at the desert. The building management was not thrilled, and the idea went away. They played splendidly, and the show was taped for radio broadcast.

Philip Garris’s album cover of a skeleton fiddler was brilliant, reminiscent of Mahler’s Fourth Symphony, subtitled “Death Takes a Fiddle,” wherein the metaphorical boatman on the Styx plays a violin. No one liked the painting at first, because the skeleton had green-lensed sunglasses and looked repulsively insectoid. Then the record company’s Steve Brown suggested to Garris that he change the lenses to red, and that made all the difference. With the release came another missive from the band.

Dear Dead Heads:

After going collectively insane about two years ago from pressures of traveling and devastating internal and external intrigue . . . What was known as “The Grateful Dead” was dismantled and the parts sent off for repairs . . . This is an operation a monster can sustain, which distinguishes him from an individual body . . . If this seems a fanciful account, I remind you that no two stories agree, only that something happened and it was kind of like that . . . A new kind of tour “hit and run” consisting of unannounced concerts is being considered.

There were two such gigs in 1975. In June, the members of the Dead came together onstage—the evening’s bill was listed as the Jerry Garcia and Friends, Kingfish, Keith and Donna Band, and The Mirrors—in a benefit for the family of the late Bob Fried, a much-loved poster artist. Although no one mentioned or probably even thought very much of it, it was the Dead’s tenth anniversary as a band. In September they joined the Starship—then on top of the world with the no. 1 album,
Red Octopus—
at Lindley Meadow in Golden Gate Park.

But they were in no hurry to hit the road. In August, Garcia’s bar band made a major shift. His projects the past three years had always had Merl as a covocalist, mostly doing covers or standards, with Garcia as a partner. Now the band’s keyboard player was the brilliant, though sadly alcoholic, Nicky Hopkins, and the band became Garcia’s own, playing originals like the Hunter-Garcia song “Mission in the Rain.” Hopkins’s disability made him a player who couldn’t last, and early in 1976 Garcia recruited Keith and Donna to replace him. Friends speculated that part of Garcia’s motivation in recruiting Keith was as a therapeutic gesture for the troubled pianist. But Godchaux was a game player who could follow Garcia up—or down—any musical avenue, and their rehearsals were as much fun as shows. What they called the Front Street Sheiks might spend a day doing all Dylan tunes or all Beatles tunes, most of which were never performed. They spent weeks on gospel material, or piano jazz, the Swan Silvertones or Art Tatum, drenching themselves in music for no reason other than personal pleasure.

Early in 1976, the future of the Dead was revealed. A Dead Head mailing that announced several releases, including
Diga,
and included animation stills from the movie that Garcia was slowly pulling together from the October 1974 Winterland shows, also said, “and a decision that vacationing is too exhausting to continue, meaning the Grateful Dead has decided to get back into touring.” Lesh added, “We’re all horny to play . . . If you’re as hot to hear us as we are to do it, we can get the mother rollin’ one more time, for sure.” Late in January Garcia visited Bonnie Simmons at KSAN and opined that the movie
—The Grateful Dead Movie
was as clever a title as they could come up with—might be out in July, “if we get lucky.” He was only a year off. And in April he told an interviewer that the most important thing to him is “the survival of the Grateful Dead. I think that’s my main trip now . . . Well, I feel like I’ve had both trips [the Dead and his individual efforts] . . . And, really, I’m not that taken with my own ideas. I don’t really have that much to say, and I’m more interested in being involved in something that’s larger than me. And I really can’t talk to anybody else either,” he said, laughing.

As spring wore on, the shaky economics of the record company, exacerbated by the financial drain of the movie, ran up against reality. It had been financed by a line of credit from the Bank of Boston, and from all accounts one of the reasons for the bank’s interest was the Dead Headedness of the chairman’s daughter. As Rakow later related it, he brought Garcia to Boston to meet the board, where after some light schmooze— “Should my daughter study clarinet or violin?” “What she wants, man.” “Are EPI speakers any good?” “Yeah, we like them”—Garcia leaned over to Rakow and snickered, “We’re gonna own this place. This is fuckin’ backstage, man.” The thrill of marching into the Bank of Boston in blue jeans, of being treated like somebody by stuffy bankers, tickled the pirate in Garcia, even as he knew that it was a mirage. He owned little—in fact, in November 1975 he had signed away the Stinson Beach house to M.G. in settlement of their separation—and yet here he was swashbuckling. It was fun for a while, although he could hardly take it seriously, and didn’t. That Christmas, Rakow asked him to put together a musical Christmas card for the chairman’s daughter. Nothing loath, he and Mickey went into the studio, goofed around like crazy, and produced a mess, screeching carols like soused reindeer, complete with sonic effects. Shortly afterward in early 1976, the Bank of Boston began to call in the Dead’s debt. No doubt Mickey and Jerry’s cavalier attitude didn’t help, although it was surely the record company’s hopeless finances that caused the bank’s change in position.

Years before, on their first visit to New York City, Rakow had turned to Laird Grant and said, “I’ll show you New York.” He bought two ice creams from a cart and then began screaming that they weren’t worth the price. A crowd gathered, and eventually he walked away without paying. “See, if you look up, everybody looks up.” On a grander scale, he was still stealing ice cream. Rakow later claimed that he’d gone to United Artists and demanded another million dollars to finish the movie, in return for delivering four Dead albums and solo albums from Garcia and Weir. Since UA already had a contract for the Dead albums, they inquired as to their motivation. Rakow responded that if they didn’t come up with the money, he would deliberately bankrupt the Grateful Dead and then make a deal with Warner Bros., since bankruptcy trustees would nullify existing contracts. Rakow recalled Garcia’s response as “he fucking loved it. He was jumping up and down.” Perhaps, for Rakow’s benefit, that was so. But while Garcia cared nothing for his own finances, he had respect for his brothers and the Grateful Dead as a separate entity. As Rakow was fond of saying, “I was the family barracuda. You don’t ever want to fuck with your barracuda because the barracuda will do what barracudas do. He will fucking eat you. What happened was that the Grateful Dead became convinced that it was in their best interests to fuck me. Garcia and I had a meeting on it and Garcia looked me right in the eye and said, ‘It’s clear that this is going to happen.’ Because I went across a really entrenched interest in the Grateful Dead and that was Hal Kant.” True, Kant was an entrenched interest socially, but not economically—he was a retained attorney giving legal advice, but he had no financial interest. Bob Seidemann’s thought was that Rakow “would drive this economic train into the wall just to watch the parts fly all over the room.”

Two other events crashed down on Rakow and the record company late that spring. One of the items promised to United Artists was a live album from the final week at Winterland in 1974. Lesh and Owsley were given the tapes and told to have it mixed in nine days. But the tapes were disastrously bad. “We had sixteen tracks,” said Lesh, “and the bass drum was reading over at +3 in the red on the VU meter and everything else was reading -20, down into tape noise.” Donna’s tracks were entirely missing, Ned Lagin hadn’t been recorded, and there were weird noises all over. Rakow dismissed Lesh’s complaints as “ethereal bullshit.” Lesh replied, “Rakow wouldn’t know good material if it came up and pissed on his shoes.” After eighteen days of work, using delays, filters, and tricks, they had what was still the worst Grateful Dead album to date,
Steal Your
Face.

It was not possible to mortally offend Phil Lesh and continue to work with the Grateful Dead, but there was more. At the same time, Mickey Hart was in the throes of mixing
Diga.
Rakow was on Mickey’s back demanding the album, and in fact, he would blame Hart’s endless remixing and delays for crippling the company. Hart had finally gone to work at Wally Heider’s studio, sharing time with Maria Muldaur. He only had five or six days available, and it took his crew a full day to set up his highly elaborate gear. As he left on the first night, he warned everyone to leave his stuff alone, but when he returned, the cables had been disconnected to make way for another job. And so unto the second day. On the third day he melted down. “We are taking this studio in the name of the people,” he announced, and called (a) Rakow and (b) Sweet William, his old Hell’s Angel buddy. Rakow wouldn’t respond to the call, which was a demand for defense. Sweet William, carrying a sword cane and with some compatriots, soon arrived and took up a position at the top of the stairs in front of the door. Grace Slick was recording downstairs and became confused when she had to ask permission to come in. She asked her old friend Mickey what was happening. “What’s going on,” Mickey replied, “is that we’re trying to make a record. It’s okay—you’re the safest now you’ve ever been.” When Heider threatened to cut off some equipment from outside the room, Hart counterthreatened, “For every missing line, I’ll throw a piece of equipment out the window.” Heider decided not to call the police, Maria Muldaur took some time off, and Mickey and his engineer, who was by now demanding $500 an hour hazardous duty pay—Hart agreed, then reneged—settled down to work. About four days later they stumbled out, tapes in hand, and Heider and his employees shook Mickey’s hand in tribute to genuine rock and roll madness.

A couple of weeks later, in Los Angeles in June, Mickey saw Rakow for the first time and began to berate him for desertion. When Rakow responded by telling him to wait in the car, Mickey jumped up and choked him. “He wouldn’t say uncle,” recalled Hart, “so I put him out. He walked with a cane for a year behind that.” A day or two later Rakow got a call from the Grateful Dead Record Company attorney, David Hellman, who told him that he’d been fired. He considered the possibility of just going away, but that wasn’t his style. “Or do I make sure everyone feels as fucked as I do?” He wrote himself checks for $225,000, effectively disemboweling Grateful Dead Records. He went to visit his ex-wife, Lydia, then living in Bolinas, and told her that “he had done something with the Grateful Dead, that they were going to be looking for him, and I should beware or something.” He also told Lydia that the real reason he wanted to fuck the Dead was that he’d been subjected to racist jokes about being a “New York Jew.” He had a final meeting with Lesh and Garcia, where he said, “I’m cutting out. I already cut the check. So, fuck you.” Lesh got up and walked out, “because I wanted to strangle Jerry,” since Rakow had always been Garcia’s protégé within the Dead.

Rakow, and a few others, argued that the money was due him based on separate negotiations, although taking it at that time was clearly a vindictive act. It was Hal Kant’s professional opinion that the $225,000 was out-and-out embezzlement, but that Garcia did not want Rakow prosecuted. In the end they negotiated a settlement in which he kept the money but retained no interest in the record company. Steve Brown and others tried to keep the company going, but without Rakow’s tap dance— and the money he’d taken—their efforts were futile. As the summer came in, the company folded.

Other than Mickey, who’d poured his soul into
Diga,
the last of the Round Records releases, and watched it go unnoticed in the wreckage of the record company, the most disappointed person in the whole mess was possibly Chesley Millikin, who’d had actual record company experience and who was a true believer in the Dead. He felt that Rakow “seriously took advantage of the mojo that was the Grateful Dead, that was Jerry Garcia, that was this whole thing that we all were . . . There was one brief shining moment when a truly independent record company could be a ‘Camelot,’ could have the same feeling as 1967—and that sonofabitch killed it.”